Now, let’s establish some basic knowledge about Geya’rah:
She actively helped commit genocide against the Night Elves and has never expressed an ounce of remorse for her actions unlike most of the other leaders.
She sided with Sylvanas with Gallywix against the other Horde leaders, despite knowing what she was doing was morally wrong, because she believed her oath to her warchief was above her own morals.
The Mag’har Orcs from Draenor, which she leads, despise the Light as they were tormented and some were forcibly enslaved by the Light. There is zero chance in hell her people would ever aid the Arathi Humans, which are full of Paladins.
So why on Earth was she chosen to be the Horde leader for this story? You needed an Orc, yes, but you literally already used Eitrigg in the story, that’s who should have been the focus.
She doesn’t even express regret for what she did in BFA/Shadowlands. I could understand if she had a “Stay a while and listen” where she actively told us that she’s trying to make amends for aiding Sylvanas, but there isn’t one. (I don’t know if Horde have one, but if they do, then it should also be visible to Alliance doing the questline)
She’s just there, fighting for peace… except apparently for the witherbark trolls, for whom she demands we kill a bunch of cause apparently screw peace with non-human enemies? The fact she gets told the Horde were framed to make the Witherbark attack and she STILL tells you to kill them is doubly confusing. They’re innocent in the situation they’re being punished for, and she knows this.
I’m all for making peace between existing factions, but there are ways to do that without completely disregarding established things in the lore. People will hate on me for it cause most people didn’t like that questline, but a good example is the reclaiming Gilneas story - despite the animosity between Worgen and Forsaken, the story was written in a believable way that didn’t violate established lore, just built on it, and used characters that realistically would make sense to be open to friendship to be the first spark of friendship between the two (Lilian and Tess).
Whereas this Arathi storyline just ignores established lore and decides “This is the lore now,” and somehow wants us to suspend disbelief that despite not being mentioned a single time prior to this, the Humans and Orcs of Arathi that have been at each other’s throats for decades, have apparently been buddy buddy for the past 3 years.
You gotta understand the people writing these stories don’t care about stuff like that.
She was the orc lady they wanted to use and so they just wrote her to fit the moment instead of picking a different npc or writing her in a more in character believable way.
The Arathi storyline came across to me as Horde pandering to the blowhards here and more publicly cry about how Blizzard narratively favors the Alliance…but the way they went about it was pretty terrible still.
I don’t take issue with she hulk being less Zug Zug and be willing to at least Hug Hug until it is axe time again. I don’t agree there was a better alternative other than Baine but he’s practically KOS for “true Horde” for the crime of actually standing up and upholding Horde values and not just zugging maximum bloodshed and being seen as soft by edgelords who only want to Loktar Ogar and think the game should be in perma warmode.
All in all the entire thing felt surface deep. Like they want to still try and pretend that deep down faction war is always on the table even when it’s so tired and stupid a narrative but didn’t want Horde fanbois/gurls crying YET AGAIN that mean old Horde were bullying the noble good Alliance innocent lambs…but they also didn’t want to have “real Alliance” people doing naughty things so instead they’ll just pull from the dumpster bin all the pathetic and reject loser throwaway “factions” into some avengers of losers group which canonically use races that otherwise would be “Alliance” on the surface and prop them up as the real bad guy in this throwaway nonsense story.
And honestly letting a literal basic of basic soldier knock ME out? Like hellz naw Blizzard. You don’t get to have us taking on, trading blows, and being on the level of actual gods and entities capable of rewriting the very laws of reality itself and then pretend some random nobody can deck us…we were even in battle mode too so you can’t even argue it was a completely out of nowhere cheap shot.
I haven’t done the story yet but I imagine someone like Kiro would have been a worse choice simply because I don’t know how Vulpera would play into the story line at all. It would be like how the cut scenes show your character sometimes and you are wearing TBC clown-fiesta gear or a murloc onsie.
I’d argue more Blizzard doesn’t even have a roster of compelling NPCs with fleshed out backstories and narrative weight worthy of even being brought out in the first place because they just keep reusing their handful of central ones and BRINGING DEAD ONES BACK.
Like they can’t just let Illidan have stayed dead and let a protégé be built up just like they can’t just let Sylvanas stay in hell/the Maw and serve out her sentence for effectively forever. Need a powerful mage? Better get Jaina an updated model and make sure Laura Bailey is available for some lines.
If I was a betting man, I would bet I could probably be put into a coma for 10 years and assuming the world hasn’t burnt up in nuclear fire and/or WW3, and/or global warming and/or Skynet + terminators coming online and/or ET and his alien friends deciding humanity is a universal future nightmare and should just take us out now…and of course MS doesn’t kill the game off to push COD + Minecraft or whatever…if WoW is still around I’d bet I could jump online and most, if not all, the same NPCs I know and quite familiar with today will STILL be here doing NPC things and largely the focal points driving the narrative.
Geya’rah and the Mag’har literally live there. As far as I’m aware Eitrigg does not. Could be mistaken on the last part, but it makes sense for her to be in command anyway since she’s the leader of the Mag’har Orcs.
She admitted she made a mistake following Sylvanas almost immediately after Sylvanas left the Horde.
I don’t see what amends she could make.
Nobody likes the Witherbark. The Witherbark don’t like us either. Literally kill on sight. I’m surprised they haven’t been exterminated or something.
its really hard to wipe out trolls, you know how it is one person misses a toe during corpse clean up and a week later you got a whole tribe of them back causing problems.
And yet the storyline paints a picture that all 3 groups had become non-hostile to each other in the past 3-5 Years since Shadowlands.
But Horde being framed as attacking them made them retaliate and Geyarah KNEW they were framed, meaning the Witherbark were justified to retaliate and she still sent you to kill some of them. (Key word, some, she doesnt tell you to wipe them out, just send a message).
Keep in mind, they INJURED outriders in retaliation, they didn’t kill them, according to the quest text.
The alternative is approaching peacefully and asking for the prisoners.
I see no reason to believe either faction would do so, regardless of whether the local Witherbark happened to be guilty. Just because they didn’t cause the most recent problem doesn’t make us not enemies.
Also negotiation wasn’t really in the cards regardless. the Humans we saved were actively being sacrificed and cooked alive.
We’ve had 4 major wars, a billion of allies/enemies and many end of world changing events in 40 years (ingame). We kill 4 old gods and the heart of another.
7 ingame years since the Alliance and Horde were viciously fighting the battle for Azeroth.
The best way to find peace is to realise none of it makes sense. No one is easy to forgive IRL for stuff that happened decades ago.
It’s because for some reason, despite having Thrall on the key art, they haven’t wanted to use him for more than 5 minutes. No idea why. But I’d have rathered they use him than give Geya’rah a complete personality transplant.
I’m honestly quite tired of it.
It made no sense. We give back territory because a newcomer into the Horde that came over from the Alliance side tells us to do it. It has the Scarlet Crusade who have been beaten back to the last of them so many times that it makes no sense to ever use them again that have taken over Gilneas. And doesn’t even have the good sense to just allow the Gilneans fight to reclaim their land themselves. They need even our help. The Horde that burned and blighted their city and gave way for Sylvanas to kill Prince Liam.
There is no reason for Gilneans to ever trust us, like us or even tolerate us.
The Gilneas situation does as well. Because it hand waves what happened before to have Gilneans trust the Horde to help them get back their city.
I don’t think we should be at major war, or at least genocidal war. But we should not be friends.
