I don’t want HvA to be a black and white narrative. But I think that is completely separate from the cosmic forces. In fact, I believe we had the most nuance in the HvA story back in the days when the cosmic forces were less neutral.
I don’t believe the two things are linked at all.
I feel like you’re missing what I’m trying to say for a more literalistic view of my post.
Everything else was framed around that very simple statement, putting into perspective why some players might be more inclined to want to see the writers delve into more grey-area topics in the hopes that the experience from that would be applied to the next time they want to pit the playerbase against each other.
I do not think that literally a more morally grey cosmic forces thing means a more morally grey Horde vs Alliance narrative.
Perhaps you speak for some, but there are certainly players out there who don’t have to just “kill Bad Guys” and call it a day.
Sometimes we have to pick between “Bad Guys” as the lesser of two evils… for the moment. Sometimes we have to barter with “bad guys.” Sometimes those guys aren’t so bad - or sometimes, we find aspects of the bad that can be used for good.
You can have a closed off perspective, but I disagree. I think learning about different facets of our old enemies highlights what little we understood, as far as Mortals in a Cosmic Game.
Outright making them Jabronis to stomp on is pacifying them.
We can learn about new facets of the Fel and the Void to work with, just as we can learn about new facets of the Light and Life to face off against.
I don’t disagree with you, I just think Warcraft is at it’s strongest when the mortal races like the Alliance and Horde are the more nuanced and complicated ones. And the Cosmic forces like Death, the Void, and Chaos are nearly pure evil.
Some of the most iconic moments in Warcraft are Grom and Thrall fighting Mannoroth, Archimonde climbing Nordrassil, the Lich King waking up, Deathwing causing the Cataclysm, the Broken Shore, etc.
None of them are very complicated concepts, there’s some lore behind each of them but all of the antagonists in these moments are basically pure evil, and imo it’s fine that way.
Important context for everyone: basically everything we’ve ever seen or heard about Fel/Disorder is through the lens of the Burning Legion, which isn’t really a force of Disorder at all, but an ironically odered one molded by Sargeras. And the Legion consists of a relatively small number of demons compared to the whole that exist, as Sargeras barely even dipped his toes into the Nether to recruit his army; he dared not venture too far in, lest he encounter things he really didn’t want to dance with.
Which is just to say: we don’t know anything about Fel. I’m not saying Sargeras has biased or tainted the information we have, but more saying that what we’ve seen of Fel is like, 1% of what may exist out there in the Nether, and the Legion could conceivably be some kind of outlier. Who knows, maybe most demons are pretty nice dudes. Almost every demon or agent of Disorder we have ever met was a Legion member. That’s not a trustworthy dataset.
We don’t know jack squat about Fel. Making Fel more grey isn’t a matter of retconning, but painting on a canvas that’s basically empty right now.
To be fair, everything before the burning legion, is just demons rampaging around the universe without a super-being controlling every demons via power-cliff. And it’s worth noting that fel seems fundamental to them because it’s in their literal blood in tremendous quantities. Every single space it seems to touch in the physical world is objectively worse for it. So it’s not like Demons are just regular guys using it, and not a good example of the nature of fel. It is part of their nature and it seems to just passively be bad in a way pretty much only void and death also are.
I don’t know, do we really know this? We have a secondhand account of what Sargeras saw on some demon-infested planets on the outskirts of the Dark Beyond, but not much else. It’s even stated that he barely skirted the fringes of the Nether, and never went too deep into it, out of fear of (presumably) running afoul of the “Fel pantheon” demons.
I also want to tear this apart a bit, because you’re implicitly assuming that all or most demons joined the Legion, and that isn’t the case. Sargeras didn’t tap that much of demonkind. The majority of demons and Fel-entities have never had anything to do with the Legion.
The Legion could easily be some tiny faction, such that most demons are like “oh, the Legion? Almost forgot, that’s the little fringe group of demons that got suckered or abducted into joining some weird cause because they wandered around the mortal realm a bit too much, right?”
The Nether probably has an entire society akin to the Shadowlands, such that the Legion is a fart in the wind as far as they care. We’ve learned that the Shadowlands and Garden of Life are massive, massive realms who’s functions are vital to the running of the universe, and basically couldn’t care less about the mortal realm. The Nether is probably no different.
What were the sources for
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Beyond that, just making the point that the majority of my argument actually had nothin to do with the Nether itself, it was how Fel naturally appears in the cosmos and how the demons who appear through it are depicted as having acted even when Sargeras was their enemy inside this reality. And even beyond the fact that they were ravaging reality to the point that Sargeras was needed to combat them, we simply have known, even before Chronicles, that demons outright thirst for life and magic by their very nature.
The existing lore shows that the beings closest to it have their personalities impacted and turned violent, and that they’re innately pushed towards sustaining their needs through consumption of life energy, which is how fel itself even propagates.
Basically, all existing lore, much of which is from word of god encyclopedia pages from the writers, not even Chronicles, made it pretty clear that being a demon is a fundamentally bad thing and that fel is a fundamentally bad energy. I’d argue it kind of ruins the theme of Demon Hunters to pull the rug out of ‘using dark powers for a good end with bad motivations’ if “actually it’s good magic too now” was revealed.