I speak up when I see incorrect information. Speaking on a matter of expertise is just that.
Any publicity is good publicity: The Kingdom of Alterac
My information wasn’t incorrect. 
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Barf on Garithos.
Also, if we wanted a more unique set I would have preferred this:
Something along these lines would have been cool too. Can even add different color tints for the different human kingdoms as the actual armor is generic enough
We need the flail from the WC1 knight Didier drew and the cowboy boots from the WC2 paladin Metzen drew.
That’s it?
The fact that you included books on “how” to handle information shows you’re less interested in teaching than indoctrinating. As for the other types of books;
No The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans or The Face of the Third Reich by Joachim Fest?
No The New Class by Milovan Djilas or Red Famine by Anne Applebaum?
No The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land by Thomas Ashbury or God’s War: A New History of the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman?
People like the Scarlet Crusade but what about Argent Crusade? They defeated the Lich King, united all races, and yet I feel they are put left aside. Besides, all this “muh Scarlet Crusade” is getting boring, they’ve been ground into the dirt so many times it’s getting boring. Seems less about helping the narrative and more like fans wanting to use them as punching bags for their self-insert PCs. Why can’t we get racial-supremacist groups from other races? Racism isn’t limited to humans and orcs.
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To me, it’s what the SC represents both in an in-game level and meta one. They’re the closest thing the horde has to a villainous alliance group to fight (visually only) since the alliance itself is basically never going to feel good to fight at this point. Them being made up of humans is a big part of that, since humans are the aesthetic centerpiece of the alliance, so the SC works as an extremist stand-in for that.
And on a meta level, it plays into the theme inversion that’s supposed to make the current horde work in the franchise, where you have monster races that are actually supposed to be heroic, VS your stereotypical holy knights-in-shining-armor that makes its theme ugly instead. Not only do other organizations of equivalent alliance races don’t exist, but I feel they’d be less effective even if they did.
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I’d say the Syndicate is closer to being an “evil Alliance for the Horde to fight,” and even then it’s pretty loose. But they do have Aliden wearing a Stormwind tabard and position his operation as “Blackmoore’s Legacy,” whereas Scarlets have essentially been brainwashed by a demon into being paranoid of all outsiders, even humans.
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Its call historiography - ya know, the whole academic study of history, how we study history, how we develop it, how we engage with it. Unless your saying the whole historical profession is indoctrination, which would surprise me, thats a swing and a miss bud.
Evans is a fine historian, his Coming of the 3rd Reich, as well as the whole trilogy is fine work. Fest’s Faces is fine, but not what I was looking for here. Sure the people he focuses are important but that doesnt speak to the every day person.
A New Class is a 57 relic, a disillusioned first hand account. Applebaum isnt even a historian and still uses the incorrect data suggesting it was 5+ mil and deliberate, both of which have been seriously called into question as increased archival data is released.
← Not a medieval historian as admitted, but did offer a differing perspective from other sources.
But cool, now read more.
The other races of the Alliance are also capable of producing extremists. It does the narrative a disservice to not address that. In fact, with all the uncovered knowledge of the Titans and everything the Night Elves went through, it makes even more sense for them to produce equivalent organizations. Why do you feel it’d be less effective for it come from non-humans?
They don’t work at the meta-level either. Whether or not demonic corruption counts, which played a role with both the Horde and the Scarlet Crusade, the Scarlet Crusade caused less harm. Even with the narrative bending over backwards to try and make people hate the Scarlet Crusade, they don’t even come close to matching the Horde’s laundry list of atrocities (the reigns of Garrosh or Sylvanas alone surpass anything and everything the Scarlet Crusade has done).
So this “bad is good and good is bad” inversion of “monster races that are actually supposed to be heroic, VS your stereotypical holy knights-in-shining-armor who are actually ugly” STILL doesn’t work. What atrocities do the Scarlet Crusade have that can match the destruction of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, the Burning of Teldrassil, the Battle for Lorderaen or the Bombing of Theramore?
Even the racism angle isn’t unique to the Scarlet Crusade, because we had Garrosh and his SS… ahem, triple-K… I mean Kor’kron, get more concerned with racial purity of the Orcs than the Scarlet Crusade ever were with that of humans. In fact it was Orcs under Garrosh, not the Scarlet Crusade, who went the route of skin-color-based discrimination route with the scorn for those with green skin.
Historiography isn’t as effective when, unlike what I do, you only read from one-sided sources.
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The reason why I think they’d be less effective is because humans are a backbone race of almost the entire fantasy genre, not night elves. It also just plain sucks to go against an antagonist whose sole motivation for hating you is “you genocided us”. But the forsaken were a victim of the scourge just as much as living humans were.
I’m aware of how the two faction wars have played out. It was stupid for them to be written as the alliance just being good and the horde evil who needs to fight against themselves, because it undercut the advertised appeal that the horde was supposed to have in the first place. So I think you lining out horde atrocities doesn’t matter when what I’m talking about is what Blizzard says should be, rather than what currently is. It’s why my post there is speaking from a theoretical PoV. The reason why the trope inversions aren’t working is because WoW’s been junk at actually portraying them, but the intent has been there since WC3. It’s what made the franchise help take off and stand out among other games in its time.
If you want good, classic depictions of paladins, the game already has the Argent Dawn and the Silver Hand for that.
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And it also has Alexandros Mograine the Scarlet Highlord. The Scarlet Crusade has never been the Alliance and the point of playing Alliance has never been to be “actually ugly” or some other such Rian Johnson subversion of the “backbone of fantasy.” The point of playing Alliance, as Metzen has said in Making of WoW interviews, is that people naturally connect to the Tolkien races and have an intuitive familiarity with them.
When this game’s writing was at its peak (Vanilla) both factions were capable of self-interested dirty deeds, war crimes, and so forth, but that isn’t the same thing as shaming people for rolling humans and asspatting anyone who plays a “monster.”
And even as far as the actual Scarlet Crusade goes, they get less interesting the more the modern writers reduce them to punching bags. What made them such a good foil for the Forsaken wasn’t “Wow! Humans dislike violent monsters actively ruining the world!” It was the fact Sylvanas’ forces and the Crusade were both tools of dreadlords who were working together against her.
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I wasn’t trying to say the alliance itself was meant to be evil, because both sides were meant to be heroic. And I don’t think I’ve ever tried to shame anybody for wanting to play a heroic alliance character. I was saying the Scarlet Crusade makes a stand-in to safely bop around.
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Even so, I don’t think watering down the Scarlet Crusade even more will prove to be a satisfying substitute for fixing the faction dynamic.
The Scarlets as we know and fight them were Sylvanas’ comeuppance for choosing to humiliate and deracinate Varimathras. She wanted a loyalty test and she got it.
Paladins who just lived in the area and weren’t fans of the undead expansionism tended to be Alliance who’d lived there just as long as the Forsaken had - or the Scarlets as they began, i.e. Alexandros, Fairbanks, and unpossessed Dathrohan.
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I think I understand why you find it more effective with humans now. It does make sense given their spotlight in the story and familiarity of the audience.
I think Blizzard’s intent that you speak of was part of the subversiveness fad that took off in the 90’s. The two big media trends of the 90’s were “EX-TREME!” and “cool people rebel”.
That’s why we have the 90’s anti-hero trope; the violent, ruthless character with a gritty design and an aggressive and/or rough personality with a rebellious streak a mile wide. And more than just the characters. “Disobedient stories” that were few-and-far-between before became dime-a-dozen in the 90’s. Spawn, Deadpool, Witchblade, Ren and Stimpy, the Simpsons, Family Guy and more got their start in the 90’s. To me,
it sounds like Blizzard’s intentions with the “disobedient story” are heading towards “bad is good and good is bad”, am I right.?
Nowadays, heroic paladins are becoming rarer while villainous ones are becoming more common.
A stand-in for what? Or who?
I’ve been thinking. While we might have different views and most of your sources were one-sided, you did cite sources on both sides so perhaps I was a bit too hard on you.
The alliance itself, in an intentional strawman sort of way. Kinda like how there was a second, villainous horde still allied with black dragons when they were holed up in Blackrock Mountain. As a nonplayable enemy faction, they’re free to be full-on villains (instead of just being antagonists) that can embody the whole WC1-2ish horde that both sides could bop on, which we saw again mostly as its own expansion in WoD. But the actions of those BRD orcs have no bearing on how the playable horde operates, nor would they reflect badly on a horde PC.
I see the Scarlet Crusade the same way, being able to exaggerate surface-level alliance themes in a villainous way without trying to implicate an alliance PC.
I may have worded my previous posts badly when I said that Blizzard turning the faction wars into good alliance / bad horde was a bad thing, because I didn’t mean to imply that the opposite would be good.
I think specifically it is (or at least should be) that something isn’t bad just because it looks that way, and vice-versa. Good is still good and bad is still bad, but that should be judged by actions and intent instead of aesthetic coding.
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The Scarlet Crusade is defunct. Only the Scarlet Renegades still exist now. The symbol for the Scarlet Crusade was the Lordaeron symbol but in red, the Scarlet Renegade symbol is a red flame on a white standard. They are not an evil faction. they want to reform the Crusade under the Alliance, without the zealotry.
It was nice to see that new transmog options are available to Alliance players who want to RP as Scarlet Renegades.
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I appreciate that, cause I wouldnt say Edward Carr is similar to Hayden White, and neither are similar to Michael Parenti. Neither is studying positive youth movements and women’s liberation similar to court cases of NKVD agents.
Now I have a personal and academic frustration against ‘both sides-ing’ things but I understand where that comes from here.
The Scarlets have gotten less and less reflective of the Alliance over time, though. Between pre-Vanilla and Vanilla they’d already lost all their known dwarves and high elves, and by Wrath/Cata they had been fully revealed as the tools of the dreadlords’ vengeance, with death knights and raven priests openly bearing their colors.
If anything you could argue the method of the dreadlords was to prey on humanity’s most destructive instincts, but to do so would be to admit Alexandros’ multi-racial, non-demonic Scarlet Crusade constituted something to destroy.
The Syndicate in my opinion are much more the Alliance counterpart of the Dark Horde. They are the ashes of the kingdom that betrayed the Alliance to save itself, and now they ally in the short term with orcs they fully intend to put to slavery in the long term. Their intentions are called “Blackmoore’s Legacy.”
The Scarlet Crusade could have explored Dathrohan and Tirion’s differences over Eitrigg, but it sort of just didn’t. Tirion got exiled and by the time we caught up with either of them Dathrohan had been possessed. They never meet ingame, and the only guy who vaguely insults Tirion along what might be construed as an “orc lover” basis is lunatic sadist Isilien.
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There’s always a large amount of people who want to be the fanatical xenophobe humans who have a fascist bent. Its usually the same people who miss the satire tag on settings like Warhammer.
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