They weren’t tricked into war. They didn’t even drink the blood until the Siege of Shattrath. Come on, these are the Story Forums. Can we at least get the story right? They were convinced into war. And it didn’t take much.
They were tricked. Kil’jaden the Deceiver a genius eredar lord of the burning legion tricked the orcs into attack the space goats.
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Okay. I get it now. You’re conflating Ner’zhul’s personal arc with the orcs in their entirety.
By the time they were butchering all of Shattrath, that ruse was long, LOOOONG dead. And by WC1, which is what you initially posted about, it was in the ground. They willingly took demonic blood because they were having such a great time scouring their homeworld.
The orcs have no mitigating leg to stand on in WC1. I don’t even know why you’d want to even begin to try to excuse them. They had forced breeding camps for the few prisoners of war they took, paved a continent with people’s bones. This stuff was done before Shattrath and the only brows raised were the ones temporarily lofted by a few Frostwolves.
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I agree to a point. I agree that drastically changing the Forsaken will not satisfy anyone who plays a Forsaken for the same reason why drastically changing any of the playable factions will not satisfy anyone who plays as their faction. However, I was speaking to how the Horde’s general narrative theme has been affected in BFA not looking to appease fans or gain fans. If that was my goal I would have taken a different approach.
In order to address the OP’s question, of why the Horde’s narrative often comes across as evil I wanted to present how the parts of the Horde influence the whole. Another possibility for changing that narative, that does not regard the Forsaken directly, would be to present the Horde as doing something selfless for the sake of Azeroth. To clarify, I do not mean being tacked onto a neutral group whose themes are Alliance in origin but the Horde as part of their story going out of their way to help. This may improve how the Horde’s narrative could be portrayed going forward with the story.
According to Blizzard this is wrong, “There was more nuance than that.”
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I don’t know why you think I am trying to excuse them.
They were corrupted by demon blood. Manipulated by a demi-god. Controlled by a super evil warlock. And most of all were tribal backwater superstitious monster people who spent their entire history fighting other monster people.
Big shocker that the cavemen were turned into a barbarian horde. It’s suprising that doomhammer turned them from the bloodrage frenzied orcs into an organized force that valued honor. It’s more of a statement that thrall turned them into a proper society.
But this is all because of demon corruption and underhanded schemes by guldan and his shadow council. Orcs like grom and deadeye were too crazed with bloodlust to sitdown and lament their actions until after the horde lost in WC2. And the entire race spiraled into depression. It’s almost like they didn’t want to do the awful things they did.
It does not excuse it, but they are not pure evil.
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I like this idea a lot. Certainly it’s better than having a holy undead leading the Forsaken
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The problem I think is Blizzard has a different perspective on the Horde and Warchief positions as you and many others.
Blizzard seems to view them as separate entities. That the Horde is not comiting evil acts, but Sylvanas and her underlings are.
A lot of players view it as Sylvanas (or whatever Warchief) = the Horde.
So to Blizzard, the Horde isn’t being villain batted most likely. (Relatedly, this sentiment seems to be shared by the Alliance who seem convinced the war will end once Sylvanas is gone)
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I think this is right. We have multiple cases present in lore to show this. I also think that as Darethy has remarked in another thread that’s blizzard seems to care more about intent than action. See Their statements that WC1 was more nuanced than humans good guys and orcs bad guys.
Edit: Incase it wasn’t clear I am agreeing with Niing
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Also, I highly, highly, doubt Calia would EVER be involved with the Horde Forsaken for the simple reason she’d bring them back to the Alliance and that’s impossible.
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See… I can’t help but feel there is more to this that I’m not remembering. Especially because you are out of the blue bringing on a WotLK event, when before even that event at the Warsong Camp in Northrend, you have Horde going KILL ALLIANCE KILL ALLIANCE!
As for the attack in Ashenvale, do you even think the the Twilights ruse would have even worked if the Horde had pulled out of NE lands when they discovered they were… Night Elf lands ? Splitertree Post, the Warsong Lumbar and Labor camps where all there at the beginning of WoW, and it’s even established that the Labor Camp was part of Hellscreams setup back in WC3.
Ah see, was that so hard? You DO have the heart of an Invader! You’re just trying to justify invading other peoples house and stealing their stuff cause you need it to make you feel better about it is all. ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
Pssst, it’s more fun if you just run with it happily.
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The problem with Blizzard’s line of thinking is that. For everyone playing this game. The Warchief is the face of the Horde.
So if we have a crazy, evil as hell warchief, the Horde will be evil, either because we are working for this evil warchief’s plans or because we are being complacent to it.
And most people never signed up for being the villain, and badly writen one at that.
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Without Sylvanas controlling the Forsaken, I’m sure this is in fact very possible.
It will be Nathanos. He’s been signaled as disapproving of Sylvanas several times, and in the Darkshore cinematic even said “For the Horde” rather than “For the Dark Lady” or “For the Banshee Queen”.
And as far as replacements go, he’s the best possible candidate. He still has that Forsaken edge to him without going to Sylvanas levels of it.
As far as I can tell the earliest faction war event in Northrend was actually an Alliance fleet ambushing the Forsaken just off Northrend. Later, the Wrathgate happened and Varian declared war in the Undercity.
As far as the Night Elven lands, the treaty established following the Lich King’s fall basically allowed them to be there. Garrosh had a lot of harsh rhetoric, but ultimately it was the Alliance which attacked first. Even if you think Gilneas happened a bit earlier, it was a third party state and the Alliance really had no right to go to war over it’s defense at the time.
Idk, I could see them just saying she is choosing to stay with the horde because it’s more convenient or something like that. I mean, if they wanted to end the horde alliance war, then that’d be a good way to open negotiations with the forsaken side of the horde. Although I would personally hate it.
I mean horde and alliance have had skirmishes since vanilla, open warfare is another thing.
But the NE-Orc conflict is hardly one sides fault alone. Orcs needed lumber, NE said stay out of our forest, orcs don’t scare easily, NE start turning orcs into pincushions, things get out of hand and the next thing you know orcs are drinking demonblood so they can murder a demigod that greeted them with, “Demon spawned Wretches, you will all die!”
I must be watching different stuff with nathanos, because I have seen nothing but devout blind obedience.
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He regretted what happened with his cousin, he doubted her actions in BtS, he was shocked at how she handled Teldrassil, and there’s been an undercurrent of him disagreeing with her in a number of quests since Legion.
He’s still harsh and ruthless, but not to Sylvanas’ extent. And he is loyal to her, but there has been enough hints already that this could change if she actually turned on the Horde.
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I have not seen him disagree with her at all. Shocked, surprised, question even, but it all looked like he drank the coolaid and is totally on board.
Every RPG element of this game that’s gone by the wayside has been sacrificed at the altar of the Raid Tier.
Raiding is a cancer on the RPG in MMORPG.
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Especially when you have 4 different tiers. I don’t know anything about balancing obviously, but I feel like that must take forever.
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