We haven’t seen much of the Scarlet Crusade recently. It made me think, where would be a good location for them to show up?
Silverpine Forest and Gilneas would be excellent choices! With the recent downplaying of the faction war, it would be nice to see how the Scarlet Crusade could advance their agenda in these locations. I’m certain they would view Worgen as abominations in addition to the Forsaken.
Any other location ideas?
Why should they be anything other than dead and gone?
I like them as a recurring villain and wouldn’t want to see them gone forever.
We haven’t seen much because aren’t they defunct? What was left of them after Wrath were killed and raised as undead by Balnazzar. A few remain in Dragonblight, but not enough to continue their crusade
The only sensible place for them to show up at the moment is Stormwind as part of a recruitment drive.
I’ve some thoughts on it;
Any appearance of the Scarlet Crusade beyond Wrath just felt odd, to me. I know we had little splinter groups even as far as Legion for the Discipline Priest artifact chain, but the Scarlets proved time and again that not only are they evil, they’re also basically useless and not even close to the strongest Light order.
I get that they’re a fairly iconic villain faction from Classic, but they essentially have nothing going for them post-Wrath. Even the zealot angle barely works now because any Light zealot would have seen how much favour the Light clearly gives literally everyone else and changed sides.
So I started reading about the Scarlet Crusade as it seems they are probably going to be doing stuff with them in this expac or the next and I have…a lot of questions.
Why exactly did the Scarlet Crusade turn on the Alliance as well? Was it really because of dreadlord Balnazzar influencing them? I cant find anything on this.
If all the Dreadlords were secretly working with the Jailer, why would Balnazzar have the Crusade still attacking Scourge? which were a subset of Legion which was…also working for the Jailer.
I get their whole thing is they want to eradicate ALL Undead, but similar to my first question, why did they start attacking other races as well?
After Balnazzar was defeated as well as most of the former leadership, wouldn’t the entire organization no longer be corrupted? I guess thats where the reformed Scarlet Brotherhood comes in but why do they still have the same ideologies?
If Varimathras was also influencing the Forsaken, why did these two Dreadlords have the Crusade and Forsaken fighting each other? Also, wasn’t Sylvanas also apparently in the loop with the Jailer as well?
The Scarlet Crusade, in Classic, had technically not turned on the Alliance fully, which is why you still have the poor forgotten Scarlet ambassador in the Cathedral basement. Much like all dungeons and raids, only one version of the Scarlet Monastery dungeons being taken down is canon, and can be assumed to have been slain in most part by the Horde. By the time we get to Wrath and the Scarlet Onslaught, they were fully pushed over the edge and were willing to attack both.
Shadowlands lore is nearly impossible to reconcile with old stories and lore no matter how desperately the writers want to say otherwise.
Guilt by association, mostly. The other Horde races associated with the Forsaken, and were therefore corrupted by the evils of the undead.
Balnazzar might have helped speed things along and keep them on that path, but even with him dead, by and large the sane and zealous but competent members of the Scarlet Crusade had been driven out and formed the Argent Dawn. In Classic, the Scarlets were in fact more amenable to working with others once Balnazzar was killed, shown in the Naxx patch. They were, however, still self-serving zealots and in exchange for their help were given a huge swathe of land to govern as they saw fit.
Balnazzar was loyal to the Burning Legion, whom the Lich king had betrayed, and by proxy the Forsaken were basically rogue assets that needed to be destroyed. Varimathras, up until Wrath, was loyal to Sylvanas and thus totally fine with fighting the Scarlets. It’s unknown when he managed to get out from under her boot. Dreadlords were also portrayed back then as more conniving and backstabbing with each other. And again, Jailer lore is not compatible with any pre-BfA lore and barely any of the BfA lore. Reconciling them doesn’t work.
In retrospect, I should have searched for past posts on the topic. Your post was quite thorough!
I kinda think that a schism in stormwind’s church and silver hand chapter will lead to a resurgence in the scarlet crusade.
Although I do hope this is less focused on the undead and more racism in general
I do not think Sylvanas was even aware of the Jailer’s existence until after she took a dive at the end of Wrath. During Vanilla - Wrath, she was the Undead Banshee Queen trying to get revenge against Arthas, and keep her war machine going. So fighting the crusade at her borders would make sense enough, imo.
Alterac could always be a good spot too. Really under utilized zone and you’ve ever looked into its story a bit more, combined with some modern game mechanics, it could be a really fun mountainous snow covered zone with little hamlets and large mountain estates that could be running all over.
Whim of the writers badly justified; presumably using the logic of “the Alliance doesn’t want to genocide the Forsaken, ergo other races bad”
Lets be serious and recognize this story is badly written, the Jailer wasn’t even vaguely a thing at the time of Wrath let alone Vanilla, the Jailer was likely invented at the start of BFA and even more probably formally solidified at some point in the last half or last quarter of BFA, and this is all just bad.
Anywho
As always I’d like the morality of the factions to be balanced, and the Human Nobles forcing the inclusion of the Scarlet Crusade into the Church of Light and the Alliance would be good narratively.
Gives us Anduin vs His People, Non Human Alliance vs Humans, Nobility vs Alliance Leaders, etc
Lots of intra and inter conflict.
This was all super informative thank you. I guess trying to fit in the lore of shadowlands with this and other older parts of the story really just not going to work and we’re going to have to head can something. Other than that everything you said made sense.
I really don’t like how pretty much everything after Cataclysm the Scarlet Crusade was kind of right about the Forsaken and by proxy Horde. However I one can easily say that the Forsaken became that way because of how the Scarlet Crusade was towards them, kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think it was a failure of storytelling to ever put the forsaken and the horde into a situation where groups like the Scarlet Crusade, which are a racial supremacist organization, can ever be considered “right” in the first place, especially when the premise of the game is about how the two factions weren’t supposed to be split along good/evil lines.
It’s cool to see I’m not the only one with that idea.
I think the Scarlets are one of the all time great WoW villain groups, and I think they would be a fantastic mutual threat to give the Worgen and Forsaken.
There’s also the 2nd Scourge. One thing I really loved about Cata Plaguelands was how even with Arthas dead tons of his lieutenants like Gandling and Rivendare took control of huge swaths of mindless undead. And with the Scourge unleashed I figure there’s gotta be whole armies controlled by this or that faction of the Cult of the Damned.
Add to that how badly regions like Quel’Thalas needs to be upgraded and how we’ve still never seen Northern Lordaeron and there’s tons of stuff you could do with the northern EK. Both with revisiting old foes and seeing new territories.
Exactly, just feels…weird.
That’s why I kind of want them to just let sleeping dogs lie and not write anything more about this. It was already weird enough that they gave them German accents for some reason >.>
Well the one guy had a German accent. The others had more of a Russian one. And several had accents that couldn’t decide if they were German or Russian. Because I’m pretty sure the director’s note was “Sound like an evil European”. Which to American audiences means anything east of the Rhine.
And I will die on the hill that German accents come from Alterac. Because they have Swiss cheese. Which - extremely weird because somehow the denizens of Alterac are aware of the existence of Switzerland.
Seriously why not alpine cheese? That’d still be a bit weird as alpine denotes something as being, specifically, from the alps. But it’d be a lot better than name dropping an IRL country in your fantasy world.
Also Jandice Barov and Krastinov seem to have Russian accents which given their surnames would track. So I guess some Lordaeronians sound like Boris & Natasha.
Cataclysm is… weird, honestly. Especially when handling the faction war stuff, I can think of only one singular zone story that actually did the faction war well, the rest was very strange and especially with the Forsaken. This was by and large because of a changing of the guard at the time, coupled with the entire purpose of the Forsaken originally being accomplished.