But we love spicy hot MochaElf!
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Personally, I think that moving past the hatreds of the past and moving towards a better peaceful future is the way that the story for WoW should be heading.
Yes, there can be resentment and so on. But the relations between the Horde and the Alliance should continually become more friendly as the expansions go on because there’s really no reason to continually fight anymore (the reasons we fought in the first place are still pretty fuzzy to begin with beyond x bad actor wants war because x reason and they’re also craaazy and influenced by somekind of big bad).
It’s not that they want us to forget about it.
It’s that the character within the story have learned that holding onto those hatreds and continually fighting isn’t a path towards a better future.
That’s like… the narrative theme of pretty much every quest in the Amirdrassil campaign…
Like, blatantly.
They weren’t elusive about that at all, in Shandris’ storyline in particular.
It’s also just entirely realistic reaction for people to have coming off of a major conflict which had many people die.
Largely, the reaction to that is going to be trying to avoid that kind of confrontation at all costs.
The narrative theme here being renewal and rebirth, there’s a reason Blizzard centered the telling of this story around a tree in particular.
It’s incredibly blatant symbolism which WoW has always done lol.
Earned like…
The entire Tyrande story through SL?
Or doing an entire raid and campaign centered around this?
They’re clearly building up to relations beginning to turn towards more friendly between the Horde and Alliance.
We’re just seeing the seeds of it now.
I don’t get why there’s this perception that this came out of nowhere…
Like, this has been being built up in the background since the latter-parts of BfA.
The only thing that’s changed is it’s now in the foreground with the Amirdrassil storyline because it’s incredibly relevant to that story.
My only guess as to why people find this as coming out of nowhere is largely due to how scatter-brained the SL storyline was. With its entire narrative feeling incredibly rushed and pieced together… and at times incredibly ignorable and uninteresting, which made people less willing to engage on anything more than a ‘play through it and leave it’ level.
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I absolutely agree with you tho. Absolutely we should discuss it, critique it, question it and dissect it!! I do not think you will find many who would disagree with this.
But none of that is the same as saying “this is all I see today, therefore this is all there shall ever be”.
Don’t you all have phones?
Wait, that isn’t it…
We can always pull the ripcord!!
Hmm. Nope, not it either.
Wait, I remember it now!!
Ahem. You think you do, but you don’t.
He has a daughter? That suprised me more then them being in Bel’ameth.
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Don’t blame you lol.
She’s an incredibly minor character who only ever really shows up for the occasional cameo.
Been a character since vanilla though, which is something I never knew lol.
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Ok that is even more suprising that she is a character that has been in the game since Vanilla!
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It’s not realistic because they just swept everything the horde did under the rug and said We’re now friends, please forget that this new tree only happened because the horde burnt the last one down. But they’re really sad about it so all is forgiven
I don’t want to be friends with the people who drove the gilneans from their homes and eagerly participated in the genocide of the night elves and I’m not apologizing for feeling that way.
But that’s me and how I feel. I don’t mind both sides being cordial, but I don’t want them near gilneas or the new night elf capital for obvious reasons
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What it comes down to is Blizzard wrote a check they cannot afford cashed with their actions before now with the Horde. The WoT was a line that once crossed cannot be uncrossed. So… they are hoping you will accept they are declaring story bankruptcy and trying to soft reboot to a degree.
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But, like…
They didn’t?
We’re still actively talking about what happened in the story.
I mean, taking Shandris’ quest line as an example, her moving past the horrors she went through and opting towards a path of healing rather than hatred for what happened… was the quest line.
All of that hinged on the knowledge that the events of BfA happened.
Also, not every member of the Horde is responsable for the actions of their leaders (leaders whom they never elected as representatives btw).
We’re also looking at this storyline largely from the perspective of the victims, not the perpetrators.
Meaning we’re getting their side of the story.
Well yeah, you can feel that way.
And there’s nothing wrong with feeling that way.
I’m not arguing that you should feel differently about it, I’m arguing that it’s sensible for this to happen within the story.
But it isn’t unfathomable to see how an actual person living in this universe would opt for peaceful coexistence rather than more senseless conflict that brings more destruction and pain.
Like I previously said, not all members of the Horde condoned or even had any support for the things that happened to the Gilneans or the Nelves.
I mean, Saurfang clearly didn’t.
As I keep saying, the lesson here isn’t ‘forget and forgive,’ as much as it is ‘letting go of past hatred and moving forward.’
Classically, the response wherein people expect ‘eye for an eye’ type transactions for this kind of stuff is circular and doesn’t solve or do right by anything.
That was Tyrande’s storyline in SL (one which was copied off of Jaina btw lol).
One of the points here is that painting a massive umbrella over the entirety of the Horde and the people living under that faction is wrong.
Now, granted, Blizzard does this terribly, I admit.
The fact that Blizzard can’t create or write Horde characters beyond a handful leaves us with the awkward scenario wherein some of the individuals we work with in the Amirdrassil story chain were active participants in the genocide…
But how well this is done or not, the theme is still there and present as an important facet of the story in the Emerald Dream.
If Blizz came out and retconned the Burning, or heck, just soft-retconned its severity so that the civilian population made it off safely before it burned, then I’d be perfectly happy with the current story. At this point, I really want them to just go ahead and do that.
But unless they do that, they’re still in the red.
I like stories of enemies banding together - I want to reach that point. But Blizzard was the one who invoked the specific word “genocide” for what they made one playable faction inflict on the other playable faction, and that needs to be walked back rather than forgotten.
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See, this is something I largely understand and agree with.
Blizzard’s writing during BfA in this regard dealt less with actual storytelling and more to do with shallow shock value and drumming up Horde vs. Alliance sentiment for marketing.
The War of Thorns was senselessly cruel in ways that didn’t benefit the story, and it looks like Blizzard realizes that and decided to opt to ignore the actual severity of it.
Like, the actions of the Horde here were just unchecked evil with no real reasoning behind it. Made worse by the fact Blizz had no real desire to write any other Horde characters during BfA.
Largely, the only reason Teldrassil burned in the first place was for shock value and to create an ‘iconic picturesque’ moment for WoW… Which, largely unsuccessful.
It’s clear that the actual story writing and character writing for BfA (surrounding the war campaign) was garbage and some of the worst they’ve ever done.
See, Blizz enjoys these picturesque and shocking images of violence but they don’t actually care to show what this violence means to a population. Because of that, they now struggle to deal with it going forward.
Invoking the idea of genocide in particular was their worst writing mistake, Blizz has never done that well at all.
All that in-mind, I’d be entirely fine with them soft-retconning these particulars about the War of Thorns to better fit with the story they’re attempting to tell.
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Being fair the people who orchestrated the WoT are not at blizzard anymore, and even back then it split the team as a lot of people did not like the idea… so I am imagining the present team feels sort of unhappy they are saddled with other people’s screw ups.
They need a metzen Draenei retcon type statement, though, for sure.
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The entirety of it reads to me like:
‘Oh! We need to go back to the aesthetic of war in Warcraft! Yeah, yeah, that’ll make people interested in this game again… that’ll be good for marketing!’
Without really caring all too much about actual story writing and characters.
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I do.
I did.
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Yeah. Saurfang had a BSOD when the catapults started firing, tried unsuccessfully to stop them, and then tried to get the Alliance to kill him and resigned himself to jail when they didn’t.
At the same time, Blizz decided to not have any other Horde character do anything - they just kept obeying Sylvanas.
Months and months later (over a year later?), Blizz decided to let Lor’themar say 'yeah, that stuff was kinda bad. Anyways…" and tried to move on. But a single teeny band-aid won’t cover the gaping wound they opened.
Was this all on Blizzard’s head rather than the Horde’s or the Horde player’s? Yes. Does that make it non-canon? No, unfortunately.
They keep slapping band-aids on this wound and trying to move on, but what it needs is careful surgery. And I don’t blame them for not wanting to dive back into all the awfulness of that original plot - Which is why I think the best course is to de-canonize the worst of the awfulness.
This was a great plot in Vanilla. But these aren’t past hatreds like “I hate orcs in general because of what the past orc generation did to my past generation, but I shouldn’t hold the current orc generation responsible because they broke free from the demons who caused the first conflict”. This is “I hate these particular orcs/undead/etc because several of them personally and willfully murdered my family in painful ways and the rest kept supporting the genocide even afterwards, but they stopped following their genocidal leader eventually when she insulted them and abandoned them, and a third party says they might be sorry so really it’s illogical to not forgive them.”
If they retcon the worst of the Burning, then sure, I’m happy to move on based on the light amounts of patching up between the factions which Blizz had added since. But without retconning the worst of the Burning, their anemic follow-up is in no way enough to put that abysmally severe “genocide” plot to rest.
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This, unironically this. unless the worgen are stupid enough to make the same mistake the dumbass humans did (which lead to the forsaken joining the horde in the first place) this at minimum needs to be a thing
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What mistake is that?
It truly would not surprise me if in the future all capitals became unfriendly-to-neutral sanctuary zones like Bel’ameth is. I think it needs more complex logic rules than it has right now, though, to make things feel more realistic.
murdering the forsaken ambassadors when they tried to join the alliance. thats why sylvanas went to thrall in the first place, the alliance was her first choice
Where did that happen?
I wouldn’t call it dumb given the majority of the other kingdoms just got destroyed by undead and plague. Then to get approached by undead.
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