Trying to sink a fleet of goblin refugees “to eliminate witnesses” wasn’t exactly a White Hat moment.
The Defias were an Alliance group, sure they were manipulated by Onyxia, but she only used their own desires and hatreds to steer them to what they wanted to do.
Last words: Arthas and Garithos.
It’s silly to say you can never see the Alliance becoming evil. Any sufficiently creative storyteller could concoct a scenario where this happens.
And much like they did with the post-Thrall Horde (twice…) you’ll be evil for a patch or two and then what should be a faction war turns out to be a civil war in the Alliance.
As much as Blizzard loves call backs and mirroring, any Alliance fan that is not predicting this future story direction is just in denial in my humble opinion.
EDIT: I will also say for the record that they absolutely should write an Alliance-is-evil storyline akin to the two Horde-is-evil storylines they have written (in the “evil” but not really because obviously not but we’ll pretend they are for a patch or two) kind of way because it’s to the game and the narrative’s future long-term benefit. We need to get the factions back to parity so that they can continue to write interesting storylines that do not see both factions turning into the Carebears and the Carebear Friends vs. Generic Evil Bad Guy With a Low Voice this week.
The playerbase in no way decides the Avenue Anduin/ any Alliance leader takes the faction. Both sides are supposed to be grey, and the there is nothing in the game implying one side or the other is a sterling white. It’s not the Alliance playerbase touring the clown act of ‘Garrosh did nothing wrong’. Garrosh, advocate of killing children, did a lot wrong.
What you’re saying is about as ridiculous as Horde players claiming they didn’t love getting to burn down Teldrassil, and commit increasingly gross acts to the Alliance.
How ridiculous.
One of my many great gripes about the story was how unexplained this was. Or how it was so out of left field and Alliance players never hear about this.
then again, Cataclysm was founded on the idea players would be playing a Horde AND Alliance character to get the full story. Though the consequences of these events would never be felt on either side. Worgen were given the boot while Undead got to see the finale.
Yeah, you wanna talk about someone rejecting the reality of the situation, and claim it’s the Alliance. The Horde overreact to what the Alliance does or doesn’t do to themselves. The Horde have rejected the reality of BOTH of their failed Warchiefs, because it’s to problematic for half of them, and too annoying for the other half to listen too. This is proof enough, that the Horde playerbase enjoy being made the villain, and relish only the stories they can confound, and pretend to cry over their ‘mischaracterized’ faction, or racial ideals.
If the Alliance were going to be villains, they should have been brought to equal footing with the actual villainous faction. Expecting them to be made evil from thin air is ridiculous, and further proves to me one side cares much less about the story, and more about some air headed personal headcanon, and weaseling out from under their cherished evil Warchiefs. Pathetic.
I definitely could. Frankly there’s so many things going for them right now that should have caused schisms it’s Blizzard holding them together.
Justification for an evil action doesn’t make it any less evil; it just lets those with flexible morals sleep more soundly at night.
The Void Elves waged psychological warfare on the Zandalari and sent Horde Ambassadors into the Void never to return. It was justified by saying killing the will of the Horde to fight, and denying the Zandalari valuable intelligence, would save more lives in the long run. That does not make these actions any less evil.
Alliance has plenty of reasons to hate the Horde so let them act on that hate.
Let the Horde act on their hatred.
Give both sides something to fight for and everyone will be happy. The end.
Nobody enjoys “You are bad and should feel bad” regardless of which color they play.
Just because he believes the Forsaken aren’t inherently evil, he doesn’t necessarily want Lordaeron to be outside of Alliance/human control.
Then again, it’s been a thousand years since he was in the Alliance of Lordaeron, from his perspective…I dunno. I do remember being annoyed by that scene because there are just no important Alliance characters who actually forsake the Forsaken.
Also it’s not as if Blizzard treats a blip of dialogue in a side novel as canon. They absolutely will retcon it at a moments notice without a seconds hesitation.
Sylvanas said she was proud to be the first female Warchief in her own thoughts in the same book.
Evil?! Blizzard can’t even do a morally grey Alliance. They’ve gone out of their way to snuff out and surpress past cases of Alliance moral greyness.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/633333989427380237/814343671663165440/Alliance_writing.jpg
As long as the “Alliance” is mostly composed of Anduin and Jaina, don’t count on anything but lawful stupid overdrive and more MHP pandering. The Alliance exists to react to the Horde storyline, nothing more.
Except in Legion which was 100% an Alliance storyline from beginning to end to the point that Blizzard gave the Horde both allied races just to try to bring balance.
But this is an example of why the Alliance fans should cheer such a story of the Alliance showing shades of gray amidst a sea of moral purity. Instead most of the blue background posters in this thread and every other thread like it go out of their way to say how much the Alliance cannot possibly go down this road all the while decrying how much the story focuses on Horde.
It’s exhausting.
This basically, Warcraft 2/3 had the Alliance having a bit more nuance. However they would need to remove Anduin from the faction to make it work. He simply wields to much power and is to “good” for them to make it work with him anywhere near it.
Hopefully he stays in shadowlands for a time so we can see the Alliance without his overbearing presence.
I would like to see the Dwarves doing something perhaps they start taking control of Titan sites along side the Gnomes to fix them Driving off other races around them.
I like how you went out of your way to ignore the first half of my post because it conflicted with your rant about how Blizzard uses external threats to cherry pick characters they want to write about in an expansion that used Alliance NPCs too much.
The Horde and Alliance as factions stopped mattering the second Broken Shore ended outside of Anduin coming to grips with the fact that children normally outlive their parents.
I didn’t ignore it, I just think it conflicts with your overall point. The reason Blizzard is too afraid to write the Alliance interestingly is because whenever they threaten to do so threads like this full of people saying “the Alliance is not allowed to be evil!!!” crop up.
As an aside from the thread itself, I think that whether or not this statement is true is like 25% of all WoW lore debate, if you boil the arguments down. Maybe true, maybe false, but it’s definitely a hefty statement to make.
I can’t see the Alliance being anything less than sterile, blindingly white and pure going forward. That’s not to say that there aren’t some opportunities for a shade of grey or two, but Blizz has always been hyper noncommittal when it comes to pulling the trigger on such options. They’ll half commit, get uncomfortable, then reel it back with a billion justifications to clean things back to a spotless shine.
I think the problem is there is a lot of nuance between someone doing something evil, with or without justification, and that person themselves being evil. Good people can do bad things. Bad people can do good things. It feels like we struggle so hard on these forums (at times) to ignore nuance.
Let’s look at Garrosh Hellscream. Objectively, Garrosh was not a good person. He was a racial supremacist who started a war and ostracized his allies. That said, he did accomplish some good things. In Ashenvale and Stonetalon questing he drew lines between honorable and unacceptable behavior. He ended Orgrimmar’s hunger and resource crisis. These are objectively good things done by an otherwise evil character.
On the flipside, take Turalyon and Alleria in Shadow’s Rising. Alleria tortured an Orc mother and Smuggler father while Turalyon bound them with the light in order to acquire crucial information regarding an extremely time-sensitive mission. Neither enjoyed this, they attempted every avenue to avoid it, and afterwards both felt remorse. Here we see two objectively good people doing something absolutely evil.
I’d argue that as a result of faction conflict being pushed, players on both sides are too eager to single out either a motivation/thought or an action and then determine if an entire faction is evil based on that alone. In reality things are a lot deeper than that, but we’re so desperate to win in this game of morality that we ignore it.
No. I am commenting about the faction’s role in the story. The factions outside of the opening of Legion didn’t didn’t have a story. The characters did, and their story wasn’t as members of the Alliance. It is no different than Alliance-stan’s whining about Thrall in Cataclysm, they can’t see past the faction.
My first point is all about Blizzard not having the spine to write a Alliance story that isn’t a Lawful Stupid overdrive story that pleasures white knights. But because you saw a blue background you fixated on that and brought up Legion because it is still a raw wound. You do realize there are people who play the Alliance who were disappointed with the lack of moral greyness in the faction soryline?
I think you and I agree the Alliance can be and should be written more interestingly. My point though is that a large part of why they are not written more interesting is that whenever Blizzard tries to do so (Jaina in MOP etc.) Alliance fans lose their minds and Blizzard immediately walks it back.
The Alliance are reactive because Alliance fans demand they be just that.