As we adventure across Azeroth, we’re generally portrayed as the heroic figures. We’re fighting for Truth, Justice, and the Horde/Alliance Way. Everyone we kill is portrayed as insidiously bad and certainly in many cases that’s true. The Legion was objectively bad, same as the Old Gods, Scourge, etc…
But then there’s stuff like the Troll dungeons. How many times have we literally gone in and just carried out a campaign of genocide against the various Troll tribes whose only crimes are defending their ancestral lands? We literally eradicate the Sandfury Trolls to get a magic sword. They weren’t even doing anything nefarious–just existing in the desert they’ve held for thousands of years until these Goblins showed up and said “Lol, it’s ours now bois.”
Blizzard portrayed Zul’jin as a bad guy for wanting to wipe out the Blood Elves, but the Blood Elves straight up built Silvermoon on a holy site and just claimed Amani territory as their own. Then they act like the victims when the Amani keep trying to take their land back.
For all the good our player characters do on Azeroth, we’re legitimately just a bunch of Columbuses rampaging our way through other peoples’ lands just for phat lewtz and riches. Forces like the Scourge and Legion are portrayed as bad because they carry out campaigns of genocide against everyone, but we’re literally just doing video game Lebensraum for a large portion of the game. We’re just portrayed as the “good guys” when we do mass murder because “Trolls/Gnolls/Quillboar bad” even though we’re generally the ones invading them. It’s like kicking a bear in its cave and then getting mad when the bear attacks you.
Hans – are we the baddies?
1 Like
The “heroes” are definitely murder hobos - at best, anti-heroes… but since we will happily kill a village for two copper and a banana… I’m going with murder hobos.
https://giphy.com/gifs/11CNLlmNAQXIli
1 Like
Yeah, murder hobos is a good way to put it, but we’re just Columbusing Azeroth something awful.
… I mean gnolls literally make tents out of human flesh. Trolls happily kidnap people and sacrifice them for their own rituals. Centaurs are and always have been a rampaging barbaric horde that if it wasn’t for the assistance of Thrall would have likely wiped out the tauren entirely. Quillboar are the fallen scions of a boar Wild God, who kept him outside the cycle of rebirth for who knows how long.
I don’t think we’re “the baddies” in a situation where a decent chunk of what we take on jobs to kill or save the world from isn’t interested in diplomacy for a variety of reasons, and in many cases our actions prevented a much larger threat.
3 Likes
Well, in terms of the Trolls, you might’ve missed the part where you’re typically the one invading their lands. Quel’Thalas is literally a colonial state on Amani holy lands, so yeah, the Amani are gonna take exception to that and maybe do nasty things to the Elves.
That’s not to say there is never a time where Trolls aren’t the jerks, but the vast majority of the time we sort of roll into their turf and demand they play by our rules or get slaughtered en masse.
Like, if I rolled into your house, kicked my feet up on your couch, and refused to leave, you’d probably react poorly too. You’re not going to negotiate with me on my ability to just chill out in your house uninvited.
idk man, those amani kinda deserved it, they tried to do some weird loa murdering stuff and absorb their stuff and prolly woulda marched south if they weren’t stopped, might as well take initiative.
Well I mean if we just ignore how the Highborne just decided to settle themselves on Amani land despite the Amani clearly not wanting them to be there and then the resulting thousands of years of conflict and war as a result of that which resulted in the Amani basically losing all of their land to a bunch of invaders, then yeah sure go off I guess
i mean if u wanna get technical all land was troll land then the trolls went to war with each other after the highborne evolved from dark trolls and whatever then the queldorei came from the night elves/highborne and then there was the arathian human v troll wars so I’d say if they didn’t get pushed back to zul’aman they would’ve prolly amassed an army or whatever type of army and actually been a threat so I think it was required, so no i don’t think we’re bad guys, those amani were hostile to even the horde
We’re arguably the bad guys in Westfall. While yes, the Defias are terrorists, at the end of the day they exist because Stormwind (as of Cataclysm, maybe even to this day) never payed the craftsmen who rebuilt Stormwind even after Onyxia was ousted.
Rather than do anything to help, we run in, kill the only people who care about the poverty-stricken citizens of Westfall, and then leave them as unaided and destitute as we found them.
2 Likes
That is a Bikram Yoga stretch, my dude.
History of the World Part Deux
cuz i guess old gods vs titans who were the first columbuses or is that columbusi