Been thinking about the lore lately and how the scourge, my favorite faction since I joined WoW, and how their identity has effectively been wiped clean off the face of Azeroth. Their artifacts, their lore, their champions, all have been wiped out and now they’ve been reduced to a feral lot of undead.
Don’t know how to put it into words but it feels like a lot of the unique perspectives and groups are being homogenized into either morally correct or big screaming blowhard who is about to be sent to the shadowlands. Any signs of morally grey is swept under the rug.
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but the scourge has always been pure evil?
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Okay? And? People are allowed to like evil factions
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There was a reason why Warcraft 3 and WotLK were as popular as they were, and the scourge had probably the best villain arc from beginning to fall. What blizzard did with the remaining bits of it in Shadowlands was a complete disservice.
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Arthas. Not the Scourge. The Scourge were only ever his mooks.
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Congrats. This has always been Warcraft even in Warcraft 3. Its not like Arthas was somehow treated with much nuance. His actions in Stratholme was always considered “bad” even if one could understand where he might be coming from. Same with say Daelin trying to start a new faction war or Grom from drinking demon blood.
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Maybe Kel’thuzad could return if we get a necromancer class. 
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Yeah, that’s been happening for decades at this point. Blizzard is allergic to letting different cultures be different in meaningful ways.
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On paper there should be a ton of petty warlord scourge forces squabbling or plotting now that Bolvar can’t bring them to heel with a thought, but we’ll have to wait until TWW to see if that’s covered, or if they’re even enough of a “threat” to be anything but a speedbump to that expansion’s antagonist.
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Nothing grey about the scourge. They were always evil.
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This is definitely one of the more bizarre positions I’ve ever seen put forward.
Like, I totally agree with most of your broader point about homogenization, but the Scourge is not a valid participant in that discussion.
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When you mentioned scourge factions squabbling, I had first read that as the Forsaken fragmenting into various groups. This got me thinking.
Blizzard seems to always have to the factions unified. The only time this isn’t true is when they are villain-batting a Horde leader, where they have a faction form against the leader because they seems to think that it makes “OK” for the players. You have the occasional splinter groups (ie to small to be a real split) such as the Defias Brotherhood and Genn going off on his own. But that never rises to the level of splitting the factions.
I think this is because they want plots that cover everyone. Faction conflict isn’t the factions united, but the plot does cover them both. Splinter groups can only represent a source of antagonists, or “complications” to the main plot.
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Sorry if it came across as if I was saying the scourge was morally grey, that wasn’t my intention, I drifted into another point with that last sentence.
Morally grey is easy to screw up and hard to do well.
The Primal Incarnates are treated as morally grey. And I get that vibe about the Nerubians and Earthen in The War Within (I’d get the same vibe about Hallowfall, but Blizzard has been on a bender of “bad is good and good is bad” with almost anything considered “holy” lately).
I feel that they kinda nail morally grey when it is not the main focus of an expansion.
The conflict between the 3 dwarven clans is an example of morally grey.
The purge of Dalaran and everything around it is also another example of morally grey.
It works when the subject is not the main villain.
It is also really difficult to have morally grey when you also want to push a certain POV or narrative, or a lesson.
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Blizzard portrays the PC as morally pure. They work for NPCs without qualms. Of course they have trouble with morally grey.
Kel’Thuzad even wrote a memorable in-game treatise on the folly of culture and creativity, about how the Scourge assimilates and inverts conquered cultures but has no desire to generate its own, and how “individuality” is punishable under Scourge law.
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If you consider torture of assumed criminals to not be in the wing of ‘evil’ sure.
To not re-litigate a topic that has multiple threads that were recently active dedicated to it, I think “they had a legitimate reason to be mad” is the worst ethical defense of anything and one I see used all the time for the purge.
Everyone has reason to be mad at someone else in this setting. Doesn’t inherently justify doing anything about it.
The purge is morally black.
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The scourge right now is supposed to be rival higher level undead turned self styled Scourge Warlords who have seized control over large numbers of lesser undead and are now duking it out for control of ICC and command of the larger army of the damned itself. I honestly think that is ripe with potential, as the scourge warlords are all individuals and can have very different ideas of what they want the scourge to be.
Some can just want power for its own sake, some can see the scourge as a tool to defend the living, etc.
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