oh please, not only do the alliance get away with stuff without consequence, they often go back and make the questionable alliance actions 100% justified.
Alliance could burn an orphanage to the ground and blizzard will bend space and time to show how it was the most heroic action ever in the history of warcraft.
As a minor aside - and this is more a rant about faction morality arguments in general than aimed specifically at your debate in particular - I think many people conflate the terms ‘justified’ and ‘right’ or ‘moral’ when they really shouldn’t be used interchangeably.
As I see it:
Right = morally correct; the thing a good person -should- do in that situation.
Justified = has solid supporting arguments for why it was done; even if one disagrees with the action, they can see the logic behind why the person did it.
For example, to dive into one of the most contentious debates: I think the Purge of Dalaran was justified but not right. The reasons for why she did what she did were laid out, they had a certain amount of logic to them (though with the story’s inconsistencies, it’s difficult to know for sure which alternatives were feasible or which were impossible) - but it was definitely not a heroic choice.
Too many times, I see players argue about this topic and storm away, saying that the Alliance is ‘justifying’ everything and won’t admit Jaina did wrong - and I think that’s conflating two different arguments, where the players could have agreed on several points if they separated the two meanings.
I think that this all-or-nothing mentality is what is making Blizzard go back and whitewash the whole faction, though.
Whenever a character or group on either faction does something bad, the other side tends to use them to paint the entire faction in the same light - such as using Sylvanas to paint the whole Horde, or the Purge Squad (did they get renamed?) to paint the whole Alliance.
Ideally, I’d prefer a setting where the factions aren’t monolithic and aren’t talked about like monoliths: One where the Horde can have their aggressive Warsong Clan and the like invading land without the whole Horde getting portrayed as blood-happy warmongers, and where the Alliance can have more Garithoses and Ambassador Gainses without the whole faction having to be a bunch of racists or willing enablers - they’re both large enough institutions that plenty of unsavory individuals could appear, without the (heroic) main cast or majority population having to know of and approve of their personality/behavior.
(And in-faction quests to weed out your own bad actors would be fun, and if its not done publicly, then it can still leave the other faction realistically feeling that they condoned that bad character’s actions.)
I can appreciate where you are going with this. Context is key. That said, there is quite a bit of a loose area with your definitions. For one, everybody does something for a reason. “justified” in your definition sounds more like “reasonable”…or “somewhat reasonable.”
Let us take the Purge of Dalaran. Right off the bat, it was a can of worms. Jaina, fresh off a devastating loss due to the horde, is now in charge of a city that is essentially half horde. Bad idea right out of the gate as any person would look for any excuse to take their frustration on a group that she believes wrongs them. It is not right to do so, but it is understandable and unfortunately very human. In her rage over the divine bell incident, she lost control over the forces in her town (silver covenant) who decided to take matters into their own hands and begin slaughtering the blood elves. It was a perfect storm situation that spiraled way out of control.
Now her actions were neither moral nor was it really built upon logic. Rather, it was built upon emotion, which in her situation is 100% understandable.
My problem is compare Daelin Proudmoore to say Saurfang. Saurfang did something wrong, and had it constantly beaten into him that what he did was wrong. In the end he had to redeem himself.
Daelin, on the other hand, ALSO did something wrong, but now in bfa his actions are retroactively redeemed as being right. And this is what seems to happen all the freakin time for the alliance. They do something morally wrong, and are lauded as heroes for doing so. Horde does something wrong, and blizzard shoves our faces into the dirt reminding us.
I’d disagree with the second half - this explanation is missing the steps where she finds the portal used in the Darnassus heist and learns that someone with Kirin Tor access routed it through Dalaran, and then confronted Aethas who happened to say something that sounded completely normal in his own context but completely damning in Jaina’s post-betrayal context. It was an emotion-fuelled decision, but it had enough logical steps to make it plausible for her to decide to lock them all up.
Of course, since the whole plot around the Sunreavers who were detained in the Violet Hold seems to have been dropped - I don’t remember hearing anything about them being rescued, released, or anything - this plot lost its potential punch. Was Jaina trying to question the detained Sunreavers to figure out who was guilty and who was not, or did she just ignore them and leave them to rot? Did she disagree with Vereesa’s method, or did she disagree, and much like the Horde in the immediate aftermath of the Burning, just never had anything written to show her disagreeing and therefore appears to have given tacit approval? What did the other council members think? Were the Kirin Tor jailers better and fairer than the Silver Covenant cowboy cops? What do the imprisoned Sunreavers think of Silverthorn and the agents who helped Garrosh? Was the full story learned by everyone involved in the end, and how do the Silver Covenant react to learning that the Dalaran-based Sunreavers they attacked weren’t involved after all? There’s a lot of potential drama, but it’s just a big question mark.
I think that’s largely confined to the forums. The Kul Tiran populace were angry with Jaina for her betrayal - but that’s mostly for getting all of -their- friends and family killed, not just angry about Daelin dying. Even Daelin’s own wife said he was the one who caused his own death because of the sort of person he was.
And while there’s a broad spectrum of posters, most of the original “Daelin was right” usages I’ve seen were them complaining how Blizzard chose to villain bat the Horde, rather than thinking Daelin was a good person who made the right decision.
You keep insisting on the ‘‘revenge’’ but the horde never had revenge either. Every time we destroyed a city, blizzard make it sure that we feel bad about it.
So if you want balance so much, like i said you should get to destroy a city that the horde will have and that you wont and most important, it must be done in a way that you wont feel good about it. As soon as the alliance feel good or justify, it would be unfair because the horde never get to feel good about it.
I just told you that we did pay the price. We lost many leader in both Bfa and Mop along with also loosing a city.
What do you want a in-game payment? Fine blizzard should just say that the horde paid one billion to the alliance thanks to the goblin. It will never be feel in the game but at least the horde will pay for that i guess…
Revenge for what? For what would the Horde seek revenge, what the Alliance has done to them in recent years that you would say: I really want revenge for that.
In the end, all the Horde lorewise has ever done is put their own deed on their feet.
You say that. But I know you believe deep down that Blizzard would never be able to make you feel bad about destroying the Horde, so you think you’re going to have your cake and eat it too.
Horde players tell you over and over (and over and over and over) that it doesn’t work like that, and you just. don’t. listen. It’s like you don’t believe that we’re real human beings with feelings and opinions. 
Amusingly, the in-game dialogue suggests Vereesa is supposed to be the more reasonable of the two.
I do find it strange that the Horde PC never hears about how bad he was. You’d think it would be a major part of the incentive for fighting the Kul Tirans. Instead, you go to this island because your evil warchief tells you to, where the inhabitants angrily accuse you of killing their beloved leader, and you never know how or why that happened. Unless you happen to have played WC3, you don’t even know who he was. That strikes me as a major omission, and it gives the impression that the Kul Tirans are right.
One of the things about BfA I can’t stand the most is how Daelin was handled. They turned him into a martyr, and Jaina spends the first half of the expansion regretting not siding with her dad like not joining her father in a genocidal campaign against a (then) peaceful Horde was the biggest mistake of her life. He wasn’t even portrayed as a controversial figure. At least on the Horde side he should have been demonized to motivate us to fight the Kul Tirans, but instead we go about our wicked ways to reanimate his dead son to use against his grieving family.
I’m not interested in responding to Alliance posters who want to claim Daelin was justified all along because “the Horde proved themselves to be every bit as evil as he said they were.” I’ve heard it all before, and it’s nonsense.
That’s a really good point.
Daelin would have been a really easy figure to use to stir up Horde sympathy in-story - and Rexxar, the guy who personally fought him, is leading the charge in Stormsong. Who better to tell the story? To reminisce “the last time I fought Kul Tiran troops…” or “these are the same people who…”
Between his lack of Daelin references and his “Jaina killed too many” quote, I wonder if there was an initial story pitch where Jaina went and did something Daelin-worthy in the pre-patch, so Rexxar/the Horde substituted Jaina for Daelin in all their Kul Tiran complaints… but then the story got scrapped and not all the pointers were taken out.
If this plot was really meant to end the faction war, I’d have liked to see Rexxar face off against a recurring Kul Tiran nemesis, one who was a relative of someone who died in Daelin’s campaign and keeps throwing that fact in Rexxar’s face while clearly not knowing what Daelin’s full goals were. Let them clash for a few scenes over a few patches, with this nemesis slowly learning what Daelin was actually planning, the true extent of what Daelin thought of orcs down to the last child, and end up perhaps not liking the orcs, but no longer wishing to fulfill Daelin’s dream of wiping them all out entirely. (Perhaps he could have been present in the Siege of Dazar’alor, attempting to prevent civilian casualties from some overzealous troops?)
Even in his Alliance presentation, respect for Daelin was treated somewhat like, say, the dwarves who sent support for Garithos - he was respected because he was the leadership figure who fought and died on their behalf (or so it would look from a distant view), not because they knew him and his personality. Everyone who did know the real Daelin comments negatively on him. I wish that plot point went further.
As a side note…
While double-checking some of the NPCs related to Taurajo’s sacking, I found out that, after the quest where the Alliance player learns he’s been assassinated, there’s a bit of phasing which adds his body in the keep with his widow sobbing and giving an emotional “John said we were going to settle down after this war” gossip text. I hadn’t noticed this before, because it’s not tied to any quest, it’s not in line-of-sight from where the player turns in the quest - it’s entirely optional for the Alliance player to encounter this scene, but it was written and specifically phased in anyway.
And I realized… I don’t think I’ve ever seen the equivalent in Horde questing. There’s a few quests where the Horde player reports news of an NPCs death to their significant other who performs the cry emote, and maybe their quest text is sad afterwards (though it’s more often mostly vengeful), but there are few scenarios where a Horde character is shown lingering in grief with a lot of non-quest-necessary text about it. I guess there’s Mankrik, who responds to grief by killing as many things as possible.
(I’ve probably missed or forgotten a lot of quests, though - if you know of any that contradict this conclusion, I’d love to hear about them.)
It makes me wonder - do the devs/writers think that the Horde’s ‘tough’, ‘#savage’, ‘metal’ races don’t (or worse, shouldn’t) show grief (without then needing to respond with violence)? Or - and I think this one is much more colored by my own bias about what I think are the company’s biases - do the devs/writers think that Horde players don’t care about sorrow, aren’t motivated by it, don’t like seeing it, and prefer the ‘metal’ ‘don’t got time to cry’ ‘react with aggression with maybe one or two lines at most referencing the dead person they’re doing this for’ responses instead - creating a vicious cycle.
There are plenty of past wrongs the Horde could reference - though as you said with Kul Tiras, they rarely seem to be explicitly mentioned as the impetus for an aggressive action. It’s one reason the start of the faction war bugged me - A Good War set up a fairly okay set of reasonings… in private. But Saurfang didn’t repeat that speech to the troops when he took them invading a neighbor’s homelands, and they cheered all the same. I’d like for him to at least have had to give that same speech to get them riled up…
(For reference, here’s the scene I referenced in the beginning: )
Part of the Daelin issue for BfA is that we experience him, quite often, through the lens of the Kul’tirans, or through the experiences, memory and regrets of his daughter.
In the case of the former, it is entirely logical, but not accurate. To the Kul’tirans, their king set off to save his daughter, who escape the Scourge to Kalimdor. In their minds, Daelin gets killed by barbaric monsters from the second war because Jaina didn’t support him. Eventually the reality of the new horde would become apparent, but the narrative would be heavily entrenched. Daelin was a noble, fallen hero.
Jaina knows the full truth of what happened and why, but she’s been jerked around so much by this point she’s taking the actions of a guy who, at the time of her father’s death, was moping around Nagrand, as evidence that her father’s actions were just. It probably doesn’t help that she walks full faced into a national level guilt trip.
Though I’ve only played through it once, so my memory may be faulty, when we rescue Jaina and she’s coming to peace with her grief, she remembers the choices her father made, and chances to change direction he ignored, and the consequences that resulted from his own choices far more than her own.
So Daelin isn’t redeemed, except in the eyes of the viewers who probably were in the “did nuffin’ wrong” camp to begin with and want to see that. He IS walked back from an (intentionally for the narrative) idealized image to the reality, even recognized by Kathrine. Naturally, as this is all Alliance exclusive content, it isn’t really critical for it to show what the horde feels.
In terms of the Horde’s motivations, would it have been nice to give a nod to the pre-cata occupation of Tirigarde keep by Kul’tiran forces? Yup. Would it have been useful for (given both factions were really after boats initially) proponents of the war to remind the Horde that Daelin tried to destroy the Horde in its infancy, and that Kul’tiras still has statues of the guy? Yup.
On the other hand, in both cases, they made Zandalar about Zandalar, and Kul’tiras about Kul’tiras. We got to focus on the internal aspects of our new buddies, rather than finding a reason why they hate that other island. So, there’s that.
But they did find a reason for Kul Tiras to hate Zandalar. They made sure to give the Alliance a motivation to attack Zandalar by including some Zandalari in some incident in Boralus (I guess–I haven’t noticed it even on my Alliance character). But there is no equivalent in Zandalar for the Horde.
Hell, I don’t remember the Zandalari doing crap in Boralus, and I’ve leveled an unhealthy amount of alts through there, so it either is entirely unmemorable, or my memory is just that bad, or both.
Motivations other than “Sylvanas is a cool edgelord and you want to kill things for her” were in short supply, granted. But Blizz being off kilter with what Horde fans want is nothing new either. Don’t take that as a justification, mind you. Just… a predictable outcome. Having something like, having a returning Pandaria ship be loyalist, then sunk by Kul’tirans, rather than be crewed by Zul rebels, would have been a nice touch.
It was a cameo during the War Campaign - so long after levelling - and just a few scenarios before the Siege itself. The player has to drive Horde invaders out from northern Tiragarde, and Anglepoint Wharf is full of Zandalari units. It really did feel like they were put there just so the Alliance could say they attacked first. I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets explained/retconned as “big bad Sylvanas put them there to drive a bigger wedge between the Alliance and the Zandalari”.
As far as Daelin goes I feel it was a really big missed opportunity for Horde side grievances.
I’ve said before that my justification for my Darkspear druid to get involved in the war was Kul Tiras. The Darkspear have suffered greatly at the hands of Daelin and his men and it is kind of mind boggling that with all the Darkspear stuff in Zandalar, Vol’jin’s personal quests that take us back to the Echo Isles, and the prominence of both Rexxar and Rokhan, heroes who were there at the time and personally fought Daelin’s forces, absolutely nobody actually stops to tell the PC what happened.
The Kul Tirans should be seen in the same light as the sea witch that destroyed Darkspear Island. In their eyes the Kul Tirans were fully the aggressors. Even before the Horde met the Darkspear there was a Kul Tiras outpost on Darkspear Isle who’s forces were getting into skirmishes with the land’s natives.
Then Daelin comes by years later with his whole fleet, surrounds the Echo Isles, and begins to unload his cannons into a village. A population center that would’ve been full of children who’d only recently escaped their last home sinking.
Kul Tirans are to the Darkspear what the Old Horde was to the Kul Tirans and this fact is entirely forgotten. Rokhan doesn’t mention it. Rexxar doesn’t mention it. But it would have been a strong rallying point to get the Horde invested in the conflict.
I wish so much that we’d worked more with Rokhan during the war campaign than with Nathanos. Especially now that we know Nathanos was going to bail on us by the end of the expansion. All his screentime could’ve been used to expand on the new troll leader and flesh out the Darkspear’s stakes in this war and why they are fighting.
Plus it would’ve meant Rokhan fighting alongside Lilian Voss and I’ve personally always liked the idea of trolls and Forsaken teaming up. Shadow magic and voodoo go together like blight and venom. It could be great.
In many places the war seems to me to have been rather neglected, as if one had intended to go further, but then dropped it again afterwards.
I mean, Daelin Proudmoore is seen in many lights.
The Darkspears as the one who tried to kill them all
The Kul’Tirans as beloved leaders
Diehard Alliance members as “prophets” who had an extreme foresight and were always right in their attitude towards the Horde.
moderate Allianzler as a deterrent example of a man who has lost himself in revenge.
But, and I have to say this, Daelin is dead, even if he had been named, even now that he’s dead, still demanding revenge on those who are dead?
The Horde citing a dead one as a legitimate reason…to feel good about oneself would be even more of a headache for the Horde than it already is, in my eyes.
A dead man who is still held up as a hero of his people who idolize him. Who also lead an army composed of Kul Tirans across the sea and of which none of them seemed to disagree with his methods of bombarding the Echo Isles and plan to exterminate every last living orc. Why should the Alliance be allowed to act on revenge but not the Horde?
Beyond that, it is also in defense against future attacks from Kul Tirans who may want to pick up where Daelin left off. Their culture still celebrates him so it doesn’t seem like they’d have moral qualms if ordered to bombard the Echo Isles again. Maybe this time they’ll succeed in wiping out the trolls.
That is what motivates people to get involved. Revenge and a desire to prevent acts of aggression against their friends and family. Pointing out how Daelin operated and what he did to the Horde would give Horde characters good reasons to get invested in fighting against the Kul Tirans.
Because Daelin is DEAD, the Horde has also been known to turn war criminals and murderers into war heroes, and it ultimately ensured that they served as role models, driving a spiral of violence.
I don’t think you understand my criticism. Daelin died more than 20 years ago, the young generation knows his terror only from stories, the old ones are mostly dead and the few survivors after all these wars and fights will know him as the devil.
If this is all because Kul’Tiras celebrates him, the Alliance should wipe out the Horde, because the Horde - and especially the orcs - emulate and celebrate the heroes who have been known to bring death to thousands and have participated in several genocides. I would not be judged by the standard you are trying to set.
Because once again, DAELIN is dead. Revenge on Kul’Tiras for…the murderer who killed your family, if that murderer has already been brought to justice by your faction, would only lead to another cycle of hatred.
Revenge, revenge, of course, everyone wants to take revenge for the injustice that has been done. But Daelin would be a straw, in my eyes not a candidate that could be used as legitimation for the fourth war, and I still wouldn’t consider it a pride to fight with this motivation after Teldrassil.
in the end, this story will not be able to save by a dead human being to give the Horde motivation after all.
I do understand your criticism. You’re not understanding my point.
We’re already at war with the Kul Tirans. This isn’t a case of starting a new conflict to get revenge for something that happened 20 years ago. It is remembering the events of 20 years ago and what Daelin and his Kul Tirans tried to do and feeling justified in fighting them on the basis that you are defending your own against a similar event happening in this war.
Beyond that it adds a personal beef which just makes the story more engaging for the Horde side of the faction. Personal conflicts are almost always more fun to engage with than impersonal conflicts in storytelling.