I think Blizzard is just pretending MoP didn’t happen for this one.
Similar to how they pretended WoD didn’t happen for Legion.
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Amen. They seem to make him inconsistent with how judicial he is. His short story As Our Fathers Before Us is his best moment. He is willing to fight and defend but he also sees the problem behind the problem, the way to solve the situation is by fixing things and making peace before a slaughter.
Major spoilers ahead
In Dazar’alor he tries to open negotiations with the invading Alliance despite the fact they have not won. Yet when fighting Horde as he frees Derek he kills them without hesitation. It’s as if they can’t write a peace maker that isn’t so obscenely pro-alliance it looks bizarre. It makes peacemaking look stupid when the only peacemakers are treasonous.
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This is something written by a Wyrmrest Accord player playing through the Legion Death Knight storyline. He touches upon this very thing.
Also, you laugh you lose.
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I’m not a big orc lore nut but I’ll take a shot at defending what their “honor” means for them, because I don’t think it is THAT nebulous.
We see that, for orcs, being honorable means
Being strong and brave enough to be victorious in personal combat
They view personal, “fair” combat as really important, so much so that they’ll do it at sort of stupid times (e.g. Garry and Thrall duking it out on the eve of the Lich King’s invasion). Sullying personal combat in any way is consistently portrayed as deeply dishonorable: Garrosh is tormented when his duel with Cairne is made less honorable due to poison, and Saurfang is tormented when he interrupts Sylvanas fighting Malfurion one-on-one.
Now, it is sort of weird how they have mak’gora, a highly formalized form of personal combat for choosing warchiefs, but also seem to sort of assume mak’gora-like rules for personal combat between leaders in general (Sylvanas vs. Malfurion, and Lothar vs. Blackhand, are both portrayed as fights which would be highly dishonorable to interrupt even though they’re not between orcs following formal mak’gora rules). Obviously Orcs don’t exclusively fight one-on-one on the battlefield, but there seems to be an unspoken understanding that if two leaders engage each other, you step back, and you don’t gank the winner afterward even if he is your enemy, because victory in personal combat is highly honorable even if it is disadvantageous for your side.
Do not massacre innocents
Orcs are not pacifists, even when they’re not hopped up on demon juice. Conquest and victory in warfare is A-OK most of the time. But once you’ve won, it is widely regarded as an uncool move to just kill everyone.
Exhibit A: Burning Teldrassil. Saurfang wasn’t a peacenik saying the Horde needed to be friends with the elves: he planned the invasion himself. But that was under the impression that they would conquer Darnassus and the forests, not wipe out all the elves. If Varok got a bit upset that he interrupted the duel between Archdruid and Warchief, he got really upset when she then proceeded to set a city of civilians up in flames.
Exhibit B: Gul’dan. The main reason mannoroth kool-aid is considered bad by orc culture is because it sent them into such a bloodlust that they killed indiscriminately, which was seen as dishonorable.
Exhibit C: The Tauren. Orcs arrive in Kalimdor and find two sides they could take: the Tauren, who are being massacred, and Centaur, who are doing the slaughtering. (ok there are also some pig people but who cares).
As macho as Orcs are they don’t just side with the best fighters, who are obviously the centaurs. They pick the somewhat weaker fighters who are being slaughtered, because even by orcish standards the centaur are brutal.
Now, this is probably a new concept for orcs, and a somewhat controversial one, introduced post-demonic corruption. Prior to being tainted by fel they probably never achieved victories so absolute that they COULD massacre everyone, but once their warrior culture was equipped with the tools to do so they had to reckon with that and decide “ok this makes me sad lets maybe just kill the ones in armor”.
VICTORY, CONQUEST!
The confounding factor for a lot of Orcish honor is that victory and conquest are seen as honorable. So unlike Humans or other light-worshipers they don’t fundamentally prefer peace to war, and arguably that makes them a bit more on the evil side. It is a product of their roots: Draenor was a world of eternal war with slaver Ogres, scary plant people, weird bird people, etc.
Some orcs prefer the glory of victory so much that they ignore the “don’t slaughter innocents” suggestion… though the “don’t interrupt personal combat rule” seems pretty ironclad even for orcs with a penchant for massacres (Garrosh was OK with bombing Theramore but still down for mak’gora). Only the wholly honorless like Gul’dan will be OK with calling in friends for a duel.
Don’t be a sneaky weaselly weird magic person
Orcs fight with axes. Shirtless. While screaming. Non-shamanic magic is dishonorable, except maybe arcane magic. So is sneaking, lurking, saying “looking behind you!” during a fight, etc. Everyone who isn’t a warrior or a shaman is on the outs in Orc society. Garona, Gul’dan… they’re no good. AU Ner’zhul invoked the ire of honor-loving orcs when he delved into Void magic, hence the breakaway shadowmoon orcs we see. And everyone gets upset when Sylvanas makes them raise the dead.
Also, the Light might count as weird magic. Anything that involves surrendering yourself to a higher power–whether that power is the Legion, the Void, or the Naaru–seems suspect, and they strongly reject the proselytizing of AU Draenei.
Biggest divergences between being “good” and being "honorable"
Orcs tolerate lots of “bad” things. They are a warrior culture, and generally very violent compared to other races. They are unlikely to ever be a totally peaceful race in the way that humans or Draenei might be.
They are also more or less OK with slavery, one of their darkest aspects. Even Thrall’s horde had gladiatorial slaves duking it out, and stamping that out wasn’t a huge priority. Varian’s owner was one of Thrall’s buddies, no less. The Iron Horde, arguably an honorable group by pre-Thrall Orc standards, enslaved Draenei (but did not massacre them on the scale that Gul’dan’s Horde did) and allied with a very slave-based Ogre empire. Being honorable has a lot to do with personal strength, and if you fight and lose, well… you probably deserve whatever happens to you, right?
So who is honorable? Who is dishonorable?
Definitely honorable camp:
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Saurfang, tries to adhere to most aspects of Orc Honor. He feels bad for interrupting duels, doesn’t like massacres but is happy pursuing victory for the Horde.
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Thrall, despite being a humanish nerd, is willing to duel, never massacres, but also achieves victories for the Horde and carves out a new homeland for them
Maybe honorable camp:
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Garrosh. Sometimes massacres, winds up using weird magic, but feels bound by dueling traditions and achieves some victories for the Horde. Vol’jin’s uprising was mainly led by the Darkspear and the Tauren, not so much by honor-aggrieved orcs. You can be a huge jerk but as long as you will mak’gora everyone and win lots of Orcs will follow you. He was always brutal, but brutal at a socially-acceptable threshold for most orcs (even Thrall) right up until the Pandaria campaign.
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The Iron Horde. Sort of a tricky one. We see some of their leaders are more or less honorable in accordance with Orc traditions: Grom and Doomhammer. Blackhand and the Shattered Hand clan seem entirely cynical. But at its core the Iron Horde is motivated by Orcy principles. Macho shirtless dudes conquering and dueling each other over disagreements, but cringing somewhat at wholesale fel slaughters. They’re Orc culture at a pre-Thrall point, bound by some notions of honor but far more violent.
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Doomhammer. Killed lots of humans, but served as a sort of proto-Thrall by rejecting evil magic and a bloodthirsty warchief.
Definitely not honorable camp:
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Gul’dan, duh
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Ner’zhul, duh
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Blackhand, both AU and MU, has his honor called into question by his subordinates for being too bloodthirsty (and hanging out with warlocks in one incarnation).
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Kargath, kills whoever, tortures whoever, has no scruples about fel, eventually leads the Fel Orcs. If he was smarter he’d be Gul’dan, but he is dumb. His clan obviously does not think about honor at all.
Anyway there’s my giant screed on what puts the zug in the orc, speaking as someone who doesn’t even have an orc character
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Basically what I’m getting out of this is that the only real difference between Warcraft orcs and standard generic fantasy pillage-and-burn orcs is that the ones with eyebrows feel bad about it four to six months out of the year.
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Yeah that and they really like duels and are weird about which magics are ok
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They do this all the time, though
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It consistently makes them moody though.
Just because Orcs do something a lot doesn’t mean its honorable. There are apparently lots of Orcs who just want to get their lok’tar on and don’t care about honor. Presumably those are the Orcs who were loyal to Blackhand and Gul’dan, and they’re the Orcs who were slaughtering civilians in Stormsong to let Sylvanas make zombies.
Orcs struggle with how to be honorable warrior dudes, and not all of them succeed. Some don’t care, some do care and worry about it a lot when they fail. They’re fundamentally violent people who try to direct that violence in ways that makes them feel good, and sometimes they wind up being violent in ways that makes them feel bad. Because glorifying violence is sorta evil, and no matter how many Saurfangs or Worfs you have its still a dodgy thing to base your culture on.
Rising from my grave just to say that Baine “I’m okay with burning children alive, but I draw the line at brainwashing” Bloodhoof is a big dumb baby and I’m gonna punch him.
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I feel like the current writing of Lor’themar is rather bad, and that the writing of his buddies in the spire doesn’t even exist. I can’t really see it as controversial, just bad.
So Sylvans has basically become the Lich Queen. She just razed Teldrassil, burning the tree and a ton of civilians alive. Him above all else should be seeing the parallels and be at the very least uncomfortable and fortifying the homeland. Not only has he been totally complicit, but in the belf heritage armor he outright praises her with no indication that he’s even a wee bit uncomfortable, or that he doesn’t like what’s going on but biding his time or something.
Seems they forgot to rig his spine into his new foxy grandpadorei model.
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See, this right here is the key problem with Saurfang’s writing. It was very explicitly not a duel. It was an ambush. Sylvanas went out not to best Malfurion in glorious combat, but to kill him, and she didn’t do so alone- there are nearly a dozen Horde corpses and a broken demolisher around them when the player arrives to find Malfurion about to finish her off.
Unless Orcish honor forbids the very concept of reinforcements, his moping about a “dishonorable blow” is pretty nonsensical.
And this is a little more subjective opinion on my part than an objective critique, but even if it did make sense… It still wouldn’t reflect very well on him as a character, because as you said, he planned the invasion. And based it on the assumption that killing Malfurion would demoralize the Night Elves enough to make a prolonged occupation possible.
By not killing Malfurion, he prioritizes his own personal contentment over the fact that he just had (presumably) hundreds of Horde soldiers die for nothing, purely to make himself feel slightly better about hitting one guy in the back.
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“I didn’t want to kill the night elves. I just wanted to conquer and then brutally oppress them, and only kill them if the Alliance tries to fight back, which my own actions created the circumstances for them to do.”
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I just wasn’t bothered by the whole “ooh this was a dishonorable blow” thing as much as some people I guess… to me, yeah, I can just assume Orcs dig letting their rulers do cool battles alone, even if it isn’t formalized mak’gora or a duel or whatever. It is silly, but they’re big angry green men who like that kinda thing.
There was one really lore-breaking, nonsensical, dumb thing in that scene though:
hearthstones are canon, and tyrande sets hers to stormwind
what the heck
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How else is she going to get over there to smooch Jaina?
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she’s gotta set it to kul tiras now
Even worse: she pawns off the responsibility of protecting her people from what she assumes to be an imminent Horde occupation onto Alliance players… so that she can go be Malfurion’s nurse. ![:tired_face:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/tired_face.png?v=6" ":tired_face:")
Hearthstones have been canon for years, Anduin used one in the Shattering novel. I think this is the first lore appearance of one in the game, though.
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Occupying forces are funny like that. ![:tea:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/tea.png?v=6" ":tea:")
Yeah, I still hate that scenario too. Especially since it seems like like 90% of all Mag’har Rpers I see are all covered in horns and Draenei bones and sharpening their axes for wholesale slaughter and just …Eugh.
Mag’har feel like they should be a -hell- of a lot more complicated as characters than just ‘Eh screw it,I’ll just murder everyone even if they aren’t involved or have any knowledge of what happene back home, they wear blue tso they deserve to die or be enslaved hHAHAHAHAHA’. My own Mag’har Shaman has been dealing with the confusion of everything since he stumbled through the portal.
My OTHER Mag’har was a scout for the Iron Horde originally, got to witness and take part in some atrocities, and has spent the years since she defected to the Horde trying t make up for it …only to witness the Horde turn into something -all too alike- the Iron Horde. And now she’s hearing about what’s happened back home, and seen a friend aged thirty years and she’s probably going to be drinking heavily for the rest of the expansion.
Sigh. I will grant that my experiences are entirely anecdotal but ffs why can’t there be Mag’har that actually feel like they could be relatable, instead of edgyangery? Then again, it doesn’t help that I’ve had a few more encounters genuine article edgelords that a lot of the edge and grimness I do see in peope’s profiles these days makes me immediately tentative in approaching them.
I hate it so much. ![:frowning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
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Yeah I’m not a fan of the Yrel stuff. I would prefer that story to go to the MU Lightforged that we have. Maybe not to the degree that Yrel is, but I want the Alliance to be slightly darker. Anduin is an awesome character and having him have to check the darker impulses of his allies while keeping the Alliance intact would make for a very compelling story.
On the one side, you have Anduin, Velen, Muradin, Falstad, and even Genn (I like softer Genn) as the Alliance of old, righteous and merciful in victory. And then on the other you have Jaina, Turalyon, Fareeya, Enaara, Moira, Rogers, Tyrande, and Malfurion who are more vindictive, more prone to imperialism and brutality.
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