"Do you know why the Horde destroys?"

Lore Story Forum
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Do you know why the Horde destroys? The Horde destroys because they cannot comprehend beauty. They fear it and that which they fear they must destroy.

This line’s been bugging me apart from my somewhat flip response in the Suramar warfront thread last night. Because if handled just slightly differently, it could have added layers to the presentation of the last Alliance-Horde faction war (and Stonetalon was already one of the more nuanced zones from that last conflict).

Master Thal’darah is understandably emotional at seeing his life’s work demolished before his eyes. But in that moment, he makes a really quite horrifically racist statement, if you think about it. He’s lumping all the races of the Horde together and characterizing every member of every one of them as incapable of understanding beauty, only of smashing it. Even if you think he meant beauty in the sense of noble endeavours, he says here that no member of the Horde can even comprehend (let alone enact) a noble endeavour.

This is particularly bad when you remember that Thal’darah Academy was a neutral druid school. He must have trained many young tauren over the years, and presumably loved and bonded with some of them. He must have felt that they were capable of understanding beauty without fearing or destroying it, or else he never would have accepted them as students to begin with. Yet, in that moment, he lumps his former pupils in with the orcish general who dropped a bomb on his school.

Again, as I said above, it’s completely understandable that he’d feel like lashing out in such an emotional situation. But what he says isn’t treated like a racist statement made in a moment of great stress, or as something he wouldn’t say under normal circumstances. It’s presented as some kind of “great truth” about the Horde and never challenged.

It’s a scene meant for the Alliance player’s eyes only, and in that sense, it makes sense for it to end there, I suppose. But I wish the situation had been set up in such a way that someone on the Horde side could learn of what he said and respond to it, getting the alternate perspective into the game. Ideally, I’d like it to be a tauren druid, one of his former students, who is saddened to hear what the master said about him/her (but perhaps understands enough to make allowances for the circumstances).

ETA: If there are multiple views in the game, that’s for the benefit of the players, who are standing outside the whole world and looking in. Not the characters who exist within the world, or for the times when the players are identifying with their PCs, who also exist within the world. For the sake of the “outside view,” it would be nice to present opinions on both sides.

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It’s just a biased statement of his opinion. An insult. A comment. A musing. What have you.

I get the impression that there are not monolithic attitudes in the neutral organizations.

It makes sense to me that there could be members who work together when the need arises and keep their mouths shut. But all the while, they harbor such feelings.

I imagine there are some bigoted teachers who keep their mouths shut about it while teaching. He could have been bigoted towards the Horde and professional as a teacher and follower of Malfurion’s word.

That’s up to you.

I see such statements as the character’s view, not always a statement of narrative truth. He thinks the Horde does ______ because of ______ . Thrall or Liadrin would disagree - but they aren’t there.

It reminds me of what Liadrin says to Thalyssra about Tyrande and the Kaldorei: “The Sindorei are also scorned by Tyrande and her prideful lot”.

Liadrin would point to this Kaldorei Druid and say: “That’s what I was tellin’ you befo’!”

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Im sure the Horde has done a consistent job on not owning credibility to that statement, in their long tenure as avid peacekeepers of Azeroth.

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Not every character should speak objective truths all the time. The daughter of the sea song isnt the truth but makes full sense from the perspective of a kul tiran citizen.

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well considering what the horde did right before he says that, it makes sense that he would be angry and speak out of anger

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Know what else is horrifically racist? Genocide.

I’ll let you decide if using harsh words or the butchering of countless people is more or less racist than the other. I know the Story Forums loves to entertain such moral quandaries.

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The Alliance used to have a policy enacted by Archbishop Benedictus where they would hunt down and kill any Forsaken they find, ripping out their hearts to ritualistically burn in a holy alter in the Church of the Holy Light. I’m not terribly bothered by what the Alliance does, or does not think in universe to be frank.

The navel gazing of their characters mostly just fills me with exhaustion, not pity or sympathy for their plight, every once in awhile it just elicits a response of pure contempt. There are exceptions: Anduin and Jaina occasionally say or do something that I can empathize with, but again they are exceptions rather then rules. I don’t really need someone to make a response to everything they have to say in universe because as mentioned before, their perspective is flawed enough that the player should be able to infer it’s wrong easily enough.

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S’funny. I have same reaction (well, nausea included) with the Forsaken (and their player base when they say they can empathize with them easier than Alliance races, really). Whine and moan about never being accepted while they blight and torture dogs for fun.

The narrative clearly needs more cases of explicit condemnation of condemnable actions if threads like these are actually being made unironically.

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I mean you’re free to feel that way, I hardly care that you don’t really find them interesting as is your right. But what do you want me to tell you? ‘The horde can’t comprehend beauty’ is some deep philosophical statement that deserves rebuttal?

It’s…not, like skimming the thought process of any character in Before the Storm is more likely to actually get something worth talking about. I can’t even get sickened, because the statement is so one dimensional it’s barely worth mustering any emotion at all.

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Night elves have even less room to preach than orcs do. It took removing the power of their immortality by means of a giant demon destroying their world tree to get them to stop killing people purely and only because they weren’t night elves.

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No… kidding its not. Its a statement made by someone bereaved by the Horde’s non stop warmongering. It doesn’t need to be profound - as nothing else in this game is beholden to that standard either. It needs to be condemnation of horrible acts of racist violence with the faintest twinge of irony as it has now bred a racist belief in the speaker.

The Horde are sympathetic to Horde players and really that should be about it. They are violent, racist, hypocritical, amoral, awful people. The Alliance isn’t much better but the narrative does two pretty key things for them that are often bemoaned around here, but its relevant: They rarely start crap and they try to be better. The Horde is all too happy to lower themselves to get what they want. They are the embodiment of the Id and Ego unchecked. The Forsaken want revenge? Time to melt some kids! After all, they deserve to get back at Arthas and there’s no amount of spilling the blood of the innocent they won’t do to achieve it! The orcs need wood? Time to MANIFEST THAT DESTINY BABY.

The Horde does bad things. Aggressively. And they love excuses to do it. “They don’t trust me so its their fault I kill them and take their land!” only takes you so far.

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See, I fundamentally disagree, in fact i’d argue the reason why the Horde wind up doing so many awful things is because the entire narrative REVOLVES around them trying to be better people. Often to the annoyance of the actual Horde fanbase, every expansion, every other book, is about finding ourselves. On one hand it’s considerably more interesting then the Alliance whose characters often have the depth of a driveway puddle, but on the other it also subjects us to constant villain batting.

The Alliance doesn’t try to get better because the narrative works under the assumption you already think it’s better, there’s no reason for them to have some wide sweeping change like the overthrow of Garrosh Hellscream or the coup in Undercity because the writers are often uninterested in writing the Alliances flaws. Heck, the Church of the Holy Light has been a front for the Old Gods for over half a decade now and no one in the Alliance has even ADDRESSED it!

So in place of actual character conflict we get this: Someone in the Horde knocked over my sandcastle and i’m really, really, really upset about it you gaiz.

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Consider: If the narrative keeps having to insist a group of people are actually good fellas because they’re always soul searching amidst the blood and gore of all the innocents they burned and gutted, maybe they’re just bad people who sometimes feel sad about it.

Also, I am very aware Alliance plot threads get dropped like they’re hot the moment Blizz can’t figure out a way to get the Horde narrative involved. Its annoying.

Legion must have been super convenient for them. Got to tell Alliance stories like all of Darkshire being a cult so we’d shut up, AND got to tell it through Garona and let Horde players do it. Much better than Cata where they just gave up on finishing our story altogether.

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BfA everyone.

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The problem is the narrative doesn’t paint us as good fellas, quite the opposite actually many of our internal rebellions and personal strife revolves around someone being objectively evil within the Horde and us working to stop it. Which isn’t bad per say, because soul searching amidst the blood and gore of all the innocents you’ve killed for some kind of meaning to war is actually very reminiscent of the trauma that war veterans(Like Saurfang.) experience in real life. The problem is this actually somewhat realistic depiction of war is superimposed next to an Allaince that is either pure and untainted like virgin snow, or laughably evil like the Despoiler Squads but altered so their C.Os are absolved of all responsibility.

Because the responsibility of command apparently doesn’t exist in the Alliance, so long as you try to be a good person, how sweet.

As for Legion, doesn’t really matter to me when Stormwind isn’t actually harmed by any of this stuff. Renegade cults, demonic invasions, your entire religion being an old god propagated lie, WHO CARES! because Stormwind will somehow, unfallingly, still manage to be the largest army in the Alliance cause…I don’t know, the Wrynn hosts impregnation orgies in the town square so they have endless troops.

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I don’t think Thal’Darah is supposed to be interpreted as speaking some objective truth about the Horde. He’s trying to comprehend and express the incredible horror that was just perpetrated on his school. His reaction is emotional, and fair from his perspective.

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I agree. Its why the Horde have been suxh consistent humanitarians to look up. If we take a look at the serene fields of Draenor we can see the love and care the Horde displayed for the land they loved. More importantly their immensely diplomatic relationship with the Draenei and how eager they were to establish peace.

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Which Dreanor? cause there’s two now, and apparently they were annihilated by different instigators of the same chain of events.

So I can only assume the planet was destined to fail.

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I don’t agree. The Horde destroys because they keep putting warmongering dicks in their leadership/war leader position. I know people hate the idea of them being a red Alliance but they could really use a council of leaders as the warchief idea has repeatedly now not worked out for them.

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What about genocide out of pragmatism due to limited resources? If there’s only enough for 1 tribe, why not make the hard choice and let it be your tribe?

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