Let’s freeze-frame right here, class!
So this is a fallacy known as a ‘Motte and Bailey’ in which, in order to push a contentious claim, the fallacious debater substitutes a more secure claim and then switches between them, positing the ‘bailey’ (the hard-to-defend position) but then defending the ‘Motte’ (the easy-to-defend position).
Because Pheandra’s Bailey is that the Horde were never good, that the Horde has always been written as villains and monsters that deserve to be exterminated and that liking the Horde makes you a bad person. Pheandra’s Motte is that, in BFA, the Horde’s actions, especially Teldrassil, have been evil. The latter is an easy-to-defend position; burning Teldrassil was an evil thing to do. That’s why, as a person who liked when the Horde were good guys, I didn’t like that it happened, as I’m sure we can all agree, right, class?
In this specific quote, the claim being argued is, to paraphrase Akaachi, ‘it is wrong to believe that the Alliance has always been in the moral right, and that the story of Warcraft is a simple story of good vs. evil’. This claim is an attack on Pheandra’s Bailey, and so to defend it, they fall back to the Motte, by demanding that their opponent justify one specific unjustifiable thing.
Now, my fellow Logic-Reason-Explordinaires will have already noticed that this is not an attack on Akaachi’s actual position - in order to attack Akaachi’s position, they would need to make a case not that the Horde was wrong once, but that the Horde had never been right. However, it seems to the uninformed viewer to be an effective counterattack. In the following posts, we see Akaachi take the appropriate response to someone attempting such an obviously intellectually dishonest and bad faith approach to debate, by refusing to engage in the conversation.
Why am I not doing that, you ask? Because bad arguments are catnip to me and I am thrice-cursed to debate with this image of a glowing goat-lady until rising sea levels finally, mercifully swallow the earth.
Remember, class: when you see someone replacing a contentious claim with an easy-to-defend position when faced with criticism, that’s a Motte and Bailey!
This brief lesson in Critical Thinking has been brought to you by Arcand’Os. Arcand’Os: twice the mana, half the carbs!