Did I miss something or is the Warchief position cursed?

Wyrmrest Accord
1

I’m a bit confused at this point to why the Warchiefs are acting like they are.
Lets start with Sylvanas:
People have already talked about how her motives make no sense. However, what doesn’t make sense to me is this:

She says over there that she serves the Horde. Then later she’s talking about how it’s nothing and worthless??

Sure, you can say Sylvanas was lying. Thats reasonable enough. But what about this?

Garrosh mana bombed Theramore, and later gave into an old god. He’s generally considered a warmonger.

This-makes no sense to me. It contradicts-everything that I know has been established about Garrosh. So what happened? How did he go from ruthless but honorable to an extent to literally the opposite of that in every way? Did I miss some traumatic event somewhere in the story? I can accept Sylvanas doing dumb stuff and thinking its for the greater good for the Jailor-since Sylvanas’s mind was tampered with when she became a banshee- and as an undead-the Jailor could probably manipulate her reallllly easily with helm of domination powers-but Garrosh still doesn’t fit

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2

Wibbledy-wobbldy timey-wimey.

3

cause blizzard writing is awful

nothing more to it

but since im aiming for council

Garrosh was being sorta mentored/tested by Thrall and against the Scourge, he was an allstar. Then Thrall kinda canceled classes and got married, power went to Garroshes head (and probably some image of Grom) and that got us Pandaria and WoD.

Vol’jin was next for his role in dethroning Garrosh and all was well until the Legion showed up and shanked him. Meh’zuela told Voljin to promote Sylvanas, who was already aligned with the Jailor.

and we’re here. So its not cursed, but its not a position that you’re likely to retire from

4

The running story is that the people who added this quest to Stonetalon were on a completely different page than the other individuals involved in Garrosh’s story at the time. That is to say, it seems to have been an accidental fluke.

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…Maybe it was the Sha tampering with his ego/bloodlust? I dont know that seems like the most plausible theory I can think of

6

His plan was to use the Sha to empower his Orcish Horde Army, and that was even before he got his hands on the Heart, it probably didnt help once he did get it

7

Literally it’s just because the people who write quests for stuff are not the same people who write the story.

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Well maybe they should be.

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9

You should apply for the council and get rejected with the rest of us.

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10

It seems strange to me that Sylvanas would rebel against Garrosh if she’d been working for the Jailer this entire time and her mission was to empower the Jailer by causing as much death and war as possible.

Garrosh was causing a great deal of death and destruction on both sides, with his willingness to use devastating weapons and tactics. Yes, he seemed willing to send horde members he disliked on suicide missions and that certainly included most forsaken, but it turned out that Sylvanas was willing to betray even the forsaken if it forwarded the Jailer’s plan so that wouldn’t have made her turn against Garrosh either!

What exactly was it about Garrosh that made her join the Darkspear rebellion against him? Maybe she just somehow knew he would lose in the end?

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11

I’m reasonably confident the Stonetalon quest has officially been declared a fluke and writing mixup. Garrosh was always meant to be evil, per Blizzard mandate.

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I think cataclysm had two writing teams, one for the alliance and one for the horde, which would explain a lot as it pertains to the portrayal of the horde via horde questing vs alliance questing

13

Thats disappointing. I liked Stonetalon Garrosh. It made him more 3-dimensional. And since he was stilll plannig on killing your character if Cliffwalker hadn’t stopped him, it wasn’t completely out of character, especially since he had been a hero in northrend mentored by Saurfang.

14

Yeah… I miss those days when I thought Saurfang was going to mentor Garrosh into having some honor…

and I really miss those days when I thought Saurfang was going to do what he claimed in Northrend:

High Overlord Saurfang says: I won’t let you take us down that dark path again, young Hellscream. I’ll kill you myself before that day comes…

He did fight against Garrosh, but I was hoping this threat applied to any warchief that would take the horde down a dark path.

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15

In fairness, he did fight a warchief that took the Horde down a dark path. Just uh… You know, after he paved the path and held her hand while walking it.

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The role of Warchief is cursed in World of Warcraft because Blizzard has decided that only the Horde can be active, and since they believe that evil is active and good is passive, pretty much every Horde character is doomed to eventually do a genocide.

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17

the weird part for me atleast is ‘how did no one catch how this absolutely broke the narrative of what they want from garrosh?’ Did no one play the area and splurge out that very story to everyone and there mothers both private WoW testers and normal beta testers? no one at blizz hq didn’t bother to read any of it and go ‘oh geeze oh man, wait no we need to fix this ASAP, m-maybe add afew more lines to clear it up?!’ since crunched for time? I feel like the answer to all of this is 'yes, they haven’t read a single thing and went full speed as you do for bliz.

18

I’ve posted this a bunch of times but I’m gonna say it again, who knows maybe new people will see it or maybe even a dev haha.

But I think in a lot of ways, making Garrosh a villain was when the story really took a nosedive. I know a lot of people liked him as a villain and racist dictator is a popular villain trope, but I think it was wrong to use him and the Orcs.

Warcraft 3 has a lot of excellent stories but the one that effected me most emotionally (albeit as a kid) was the orcs’ story. These monsters from Warcraft 1 and 2 were once people and they seek to redeem themselves and their noble past. And so they begin to in earnest. They heed the Prophet’s call, embark on a grand adventure to Kalimdor, save two peoples from extinction and oppression. Some of them slip along the way, in the form of Grom drinking more demon blood, but even then they are turned back. Grom and Thrall, the fallen man and the new man, literally face down their demons. The orcs fight alongside their old enemies, the free people of the world, and help save Azeroth from the Legion.

It’s an incredible story. Later in his life, Tolkien admitted he struggled with the concept of orcs. For him, the idea of a totally depraved people didn’t sit right with his personal beliefs, but he wasn’t sure how to retcon his own lore to fit them in. He toyed with the idea of them being corrupted elves, but never settled on anything concrete before he died.

In a way, Blizzard did what he could not and redeemed the orcs. I’m sure they weren’t the first and I’m sure they havent done it better than everyone else, but they took the mindless drones that you get to kill for fun, guilt-free, and made them into PEOPLE.

Now, I’m not saying that means there can never ever be an evil orc ever again. As mortal beings they should be capable of great good and great evil, just like humans and elves and everyone else. But to take the son of Grom and turn him evil, to turn the Orcs into a bloodthirsty war-machine (THREE TIMES; MoP, WoD with the Iron Horde and then BfA) is just a huge narrative misfire and a huge mistake that we are still recovering from.

Garrosh deserved better and Stonetalon Garrosh will always be canon in my head.

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19

ok, update: It seems like the most likely explanation is he was corrupted by the Sha of pride. We’ve seen how even characters like Ysera can just turn instantly evil from the right source, so this isn’t unbelievable. The bad news is the incredibly wasted potential. The good news is that means Stonetalon was actually canon.

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Can Sha Corruption follow people into the afterlife? Because (spoiler) Garrosh in Shadowlands seems exactly the same, and says he’d do it all again.

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