Sentiments of your preferred faction feeling impotent is not quite comparable to forcing a player to commit fantasy genocide, the story telling you it’s “morally grey” somehow, but also that you’re personally partially responsible for the mass death of hundreds of people including children, especially when the majority of the races on the faction therein are based on POC
Your character being framed as impotent can be altered with moments of heroism or agency in the future.
My character being responsible for genocide cannot be walked back in the narrative, and renders all future interactions ridiculous.
Burning Teldrassil was like the third fantasy genocide that the Forsaken had attempted. The real problem IMO is that the Horde never actually nipped that problem in the bud, because all the Forsaken’s genocides were happening in the Eastern Kingdoms, out of sight and out of mind in such a way that the Horde as a whole couldn’t really be implicated, and the Alliance, the faction that should have been consistently outraged at all these naked acts of war and crimes against humanity being committed by a member of the Horde, just kind of ignored it and never forced the issue, either by diplomatic force or by force of arms.
So I’d say that it has more to do with the fact that by the time of BfA it was clear to people signing up for the Forsaken that you were a-ok doing fantasy genocides, but the rest of the Horde didn’t sign up for that yet got dragged along for the ride regardless. It’s like if leveling through Silverpine and Hillsbrad was mandatory for everyone even if they played a Tauren.
That isn’t really a new problem. The Forsaken’s presence in the Horde and their conduct as part of the Horde has been a fundamental, crippling structural weakness for the faction ever since Vanilla and unless you propose retconning as far back as TFT, the Horde reconciling this part of itself is going to have to be part of the narrative going forward.
Although IIRC, the Horde player doesn’t actually personally fire the catapults or anything. They only came to Darkshore to do glorious conquest and all that traditional Horde stuff. Sylvanas surprised everyone by actually ordering Teldrassil burned.
Maybe the retcon here should be that the catapults that fired on Teldrassil were all operated by Forsaken, because what’s one more genocide to them?
Author That Shall Not Be Named wrote in their story that Shaman were somehow making it worse via elements fanning the flames lmao (Horde Shaman = Orc, Tauren, Trolls)
This wasn’t just an internal Forsaken fantasy on some bum random Human town nobody actually cares about because it’s not a major capital of the playable race.
This was the player being forced by the narrative to commit a large-scale genocide on an entire playable race by nuking their capital city.
Even if my theories that the Winter Queen is gonna mass rez the Night Elves and restore Teldrassil come to pass, that doesn’t do anything for the Horde player character having done the act.
Again, this renders all current and future interactions ridiculous.
Forsaken doing wild stuff on their own turf is part of their Frankenstein Victorian Penny Dreadful Southern Gothic Horror Fantasy. It’s par for the course. That’s their racial fantasy. It’s inherent to the game.
Teldrassil was not that under any circumstances.
And Calia is attempting to Disney-fy the Forsaken a la Stormwind in response via her Lightforged nonsense and Sylvanas ooga booga killing the entire Desolate Council.
Which hey would you look at that, it’s the same author as Genocidal Shaman Lore Info!
Lots of people care about the places and people the Forsaken have genocided, FYI.
Their racial fantasy ruins other people’s racial fantasies. In fact, nowhere is this more pronounced than the Forsaken. Human’s “Chivalric Romance” racial fantasy is ruined. Night Elves “Amazonian Nature Protector” racial fantasy is ruined. Orcs “Honorable Warrior Guys” racial fantasy is ruined. Tauren’s “Empathetic Wardens of Life” racial fantasy is ruined.
A race whose racial fantasy is “Being an edgelord that spreads fear and negativity” is not a good addition to the world if that racial fantasy is going to dominate everyone elses like it did in Cataclysm and BfA. It’s actively toxic and an excellent example of “not all racial fantasies are equally valid and equally worth indulging.”
This is why the Horde burning Teldrassil was not a shock to me. Sylvanas was in charge and the Forsaken controlled the keys to the faction. Of course that’s something that they would do. I personally have always read the Burning of Teldrassil and BfA as a whole as less of “the Horde/the Horde player character is inherently genocidal/guilty of genocide” so much as the inevitable crescendo of the Faustian pact that the Horde made with Sylvanas all the way back in Vanilla and then allowed to fester.
The conclusion of BfA is finally an opportunity for the Horde to excise that part of itself. Specifically, the “edgelord troll bully” part of itself that was exemplified by people like Garrosh but always most acutely by the Forsaken.
So I guess that what if fundamentally comes down to is if you think that the Forsaken’s “Gothic Horror” fantasy is something that should be kept and indulged when that fantasy, by its very nature, requires that the Forsaken have victims.
Especially given that the tone and tenor of the Forsaken was a byproduct of Blizzard’s “metalhead” old guard that Blizzard can and should (and is) trying to move away from, as the sorts of things that the old guard wanted in the game are now being re-examined in a new light.
Ainhin I don’t care about your personal beef with the Forsaken and how you don’t own and will never own Lordaeron City because that’s entirely non sequitur.
It’s their racial fantasy. It’s what players were sold and given since 2004. Cope. People like gore and horror and Penny Dreadful and Southern Gothic and Zombies. It’s fun. Get over it.
However back on topic:
This ^ is why the three things that need to be retcon’d to get the Night Elves and Forsaken out of their narrative corner are:
Ah, so being sold things in 2004 is a valid reason for them staying around forever? That sounds like what someone over in GD whining about “censorship” would say.
Racial fantasies that boil down to “victimizing people” are not racial fantasies that should be protected or indulged, no matter how cool you find the horror genre.
I find the horror genre cool as well. But it needs to stick to where it belongs, and that’s with groups like the Scourge or the Mawsworn.
If you insist that the Forsaken’s racial fantasy as you deem it remain intact, then you need to also accept that there need to be consequences for them indulging in it, up to and including them being subjected to the racial fantasies of others.
And if you insist on keeping factions then you need to accept that it means that the Forsaken indulging in toxic racial fantasies will reflect on the rest of the Horde as well as them, at the expense of the rest of the Horde’s racial fantasies. You can’t have your cake and eat it too Baal.
Again, simply retcon it so that all the folks that fired on Teldrassil were Forsaken. Burning Teldrassil is 110% in character for them and this absolves the Horde player of personal responsibility (unless they rolled Forsaken, in which case it’s what they signed up for.)
And then remove all factions because factions suck and damage the game.
I think you’ve worded this perfectly and it’s probably why I dislike undead so much. They seem to take away from nearly everyone else’s racial fantasy, which is unprecedented compared to anyone else. When it comes to solving the undead problem, someone has to lose. It’s why I think having Undead in the Warcraft setting is a mistake. They’re cannibals both literally and thematically.
I’m saying that because they can’t be gotten rid of there’s no way to solve the problem which will have both sides frustrated at not being able to have a solution, and having a solution would only please one side either way.
No actually if you retcon the Narrative-Breaking lore and focus internally on the races and internally on the factions stuff would be fine.
Southern Gothic Penny Dreadful Zombie Horror Race is cool, actually, and touches on cool themes like monstrosity, downward mobility, despair, trauma, and more.
Ainhin just wants Capital City which he will never have or get.
The Forsaken could be a place to explore how the Blood Elves feel about some unknown percentage of their 90% dead people being perfectly fine in Undercity. Why didn’t Lorthemar reach out to Sylvanas once he learned she was undead? How does Rommath feel about the undead and necromancy as Grand Magister? Do the Dark Rangers go to Silvermoon to tell new Rangers of past wars they participated in?
So much cool stuff to explore by focusing inwardly toward the factions and races rather than insisting on faction war or even faction interaction nonsense.
And again:
What needs to be retcon’d, if anything gets retcon’d, is:
You don’t have to remove the Forsaken from the game to recognize that a racial fantasy that requires the Forsaken victimize people is bad for the world and is going to make a lot of people upset.
As you pointed out, the Forsaken are horror themed. Horror is about fear, discomfort, negativity, and the satisfaction and catharsis that comes from exploring the dark side of our psyches. It is about bad things happening to people.
So unless you are suggesting that the Forsaken racial fantasy is about Forsaken being on the receiving end of horror scenarios, their racial fantasy requires an external victim. In essence, you can’t have spooky scary skeletons without someone for them to spook.
And that’s the problem. Nobody wants to have their favored racial fantasy compromised so that the Forsaken can indulge in theirs. They are the only race that has a racial fantasy that is actively parasitic and that’s a huge freaking problem.
Yes. It requires people to be turned into monsters, people to be forced downward. People to have despair and trauma inflicted on them. You can say that the Forsaken themselves are the victims of these various ailments, but the Forsaken themselves are also a vestige of the human narrative. Their existence requires that humans be turned into monsters, to be forced downward, to have despair and trauma inflicted on them.
And the events in BfA with Teldrassil and Dark Rangers and whatnot, we can see that it’s not just humans now. They need to inflict trauma and despair and negativity on the Night Elves so that they can get Dark Wardens in the Forsaken as a new source of horror thematics for them.
The Horde needs to ignore it when they do this or be complicit because that’s how the Forsaken racial fantasy is sustained. Inflicting pain and suffering and then consuming it. Then when the Horde finally notices them, they can place Kor’kron in the Undercity or look down on Forsaken in Orgrimmar, thus making the Horde look worse in order to add to Forsaken angst.
It’s incredibly toxic and hurts literally everyone but the Forsaken. It’s why we end up with some of the most jaw-droppingly stupid developments in the game, like people like Derek Proudmoore being raised and tortured by the Forsaken only to escape but decide to willingly join them for absolutely no reason other than now he’s traumatized and suffering, and the Forsaken need his trauma and suffering to sustain their own racial fantasy. It’s the same reason that it keeps happening too. The Forsaken kill and raise someone only for that person to end up willingly joining the Forsaken because the Forsaken need to feed off of the pain and suffering that they themselves inflicted.
We’re rapidly approaching the point where the majority of the Forsaken’s trauma and despair is going to be the result of them being victimized by the Forsaken and that is so insane that it’s actually really funny, were it not for the corrosive affect it had on all of the races that they draw their victims from.
For the love of God as of right now, Forsaken have:
Baseline Lordaeron Humans
Any Humans from any other Kingdom that HAPPENED to be in this metropolis when Arthas went darkmode (SO MUCH TO EXPLORE, maybe there was a visiting Tidesage that helped Natalie Seline learn the void? Maybe some of the Anti-Worgen Gilneans that went Undead survived? Maybe some Alteraci Undead left the Forsaken to join the Syndicate? Maybe some Forsaken hated the nobles and decided to join the Defias?!)
Dead Blood Elves (so much to explore here too!)
At least one (1) Undead Leper Gnome
and more!
The entire point of Southern Gothic and and a large point of Penny Dreadfuls are internal social crisis.
I literally do not care about your personal SEVENTEEN YEAR FRUSTRATION that Forsaken are a playable race. This is ridiculous. It’s incoherent. Go to therapy.
Then maybe your assessment of Forsaken thematics is incorrect, because there is nothing “internal” about the way that they act and the way in which their racial fantasy is executed. You seem eager to simply ignore the fact that the Forsaken have actively traveled outside their core territories in search of victims to turn into Forsaken. That was their entire schtick in Cataclysm. In BfA they even went to the other side of the planet to do it.
I guess that the assessment can be considered correct in that the Forsaken go around causing crises for everyone else.
You also neglected to read most of my post it seems, because I said that even if you frame the Forsaken’s horror thematics as being entirely inwardly focused on themselves, their existence still requires that other races suffer and die to contribute to them, because the Forsaken themselves are drawn from other playable races, all of which have their own racial fantasies that “dying to feed the Forsaken some more angst” infringes on.
Heck, it even robs from those that the Forsaken pull from more directly by denying other races pathos. When bad things happen to Night Elves or Humans, the despair and suffering and pathos that results should enrich the Night Elf or Human narrative. It should introduce stories about how the humans or night elves or whoever deal with these sorts of things.
Instead, it gets siphoned off to the Forsaken. The Forsaken don’t even allow other races to properly come to terms with their own trauma at the hands of the Forsaken because anyone that the Forsaken traumatize ends up in the Forsaken anyway.
There is only one problem here and that is “ALLIANCE BLINKERS”. I never heard an outcry when orcs and ogres were being slaughtered in their thousands from the back of a giant fire breathing dragon, but kill a few obnoxious humans, and its the end of the world. Breaking news. Humans can be quest mobs just like anybody else.
