I have no issue with Orcs. What ever gave you that idea? You seem to try to allocate people to some divide that many people don’t have. I just feel that, particularly since we are discussing this on a story forum, more than just the superficial appearance they have should be the basis of if they qualify as Horde. Case in point, my issues with Baine and Saurfang have never been their race or aesthetic. Both have fantastic models and I loved Saurfang prior to his latest treatment.
I personally just don’t think that having tusks and/or horns and a hunch is necessary to be horde. Horde, at least to me, is more defined by how you deal with the world and what you and your people have been through. Many Horde races have in their history hit rock bottom, not just in their fate but culturally. Even the Tauren were divided, scattered and hunted by the Centaur. The Horde was a home for these groups to rebuild and recreate themselves. At it’s core it is a group that will shelf idealism for pragmatism when it sees it as necessary but recognises that there is a thin line that crossing leads to bad places.
This is probably why BfA annoys me so much. It feels to me that more than locations or even characters, that core identity of the Horde has been thrown away by repeated evil warchiefs. Yeah I know Saurfang and Baine are supposed to suggest differently but in context it feels very hypocritical to me and frankly even the presence of Alliance influence on this takes away from the Horde’s own core being what makes the difference.
This is why I find your fixation on appearance strange. You often seem define if something is Alliance or Horde simply by its appearance.
I think appearance has a lot to do with what people choose. That’s why most who play the Horde 33% of them are Blood Elves at 120. And to me that’s because they look the most like an Alliance race but playable on the Horde. This is evident because Alliance was the most played faction in Vanilla WoW before Blood Elves were added to the Horde. And you will see when Classic WoW is released a lot of the Blood Elf mains will either play Alliance or they’ll roll Undead.
Being at rock bottom is nothing unique to the Horde. Humans have been at rock bottom with nearly every human kingdom destroyed at some point. Gilneas is at rock bottom because of the Forsaken. The Night Elves are at rock bottom now. The Draenei were at rock bottom and forced to flee their home planet. The Gnomes have hit rock bottom with no capital city. What you ascribe to being “Horde” is no more grounded in anything than me saying something looks Horde or looks Alliance. It’s just word play.
BFA and expansions before has made Horde the bad guys and invaders and not survivors because at the core of this game is racial colonial tropes. Horde represents the tribal blood thirsty savages who invade the “merciful” Europeanized Alliance who end up deciding not to eradicate the “savage” Horde entirely. It’s a form of propaganda our society is built upon and not just merely a badly written narrative.
But that’s a no-no territory so we can just chalk it up to merely a badly written narrative in a game which is entirely built on “races” who have their own “racial” traits that can somehow be fixed if Blizzard fires their current batch of writers.
Not without the proper motivation to spur on that growth, and in Sylvie’s case … not without a strong enough motivation to circumvent her existential fear of her own afterlife (a plot-thread and motivation she’s been hinged on since “Edge of Night”).
Stapling a WARCHIEF title on to the front of her name does not automatically suggest that she’s going to do a total 180 on the character that she’s been portrayed as. I admit, her presence on the Broken Shore at the beginning of Legion did give me pause … but for her to go from making a public speech about getting Vengeance for Vol’jin … to go straight into a personal chore in Stormheim (that actually could have threatened our war against the Legion) … proved to me that her prioritize had not changed and that we Hordies were in for a really rough ride.
On a functional writing level you don’t replace someone like Vol’jin for someone like Sylvanas if you don’t expect her to become a point of antagonism between the two factions (and re-escalate the faction conflict). Bluntly, this war (Sylvie’s War) would not exist with Warchief Vol’jin sitting on that Throne of Hides and Bones.
Which the writers could have given her if they’d wanted to.
Actually, it was her existential fear of her own afterlife that led me to believe she would not be the one to throw the first punch. I thought she’d hunker down and not get into a “hot war” unless someone forced her into it.
Okay–? I don’t recall implying that it would. Positive character development can happen with or without a promotion. Also, I still say the opening of Legion and the scene where she was named warchief implied positive development, or at least, didn’t give a hint of what was actually to come.
Which one you view as the “whiplash moment” kind of boils down to how cynical you were about Sylvanas beforehand. Personally, I was never very shaken up by Stormheim, especially because it seemed likely that it was written before they decided to make her warchief.
Her becoming a “point of antagonism” is not necessarily a bad thing if you are planning a faction war expansion. But there are other ways to use that besides what happened in the game. For instance, you could give the character positive development on the Horde side while playing up distrust of her on the Alliance side, leading to the Alliance getting extra-jumpy and maybe making the decision that they have to push the Horde out of the Eastern Kingdoms before they can develop Azerite weapons; cue the Battle of Lordaeron, without the need for Teldrassil to provoke it. Just as one example out of many for how they could have handled it.
Not exactly the way it happened in the game, no. We might have a better faction conflict in that case–one that didn’t upset everyone, where both sides still had some faction pride. Unless they wrote Vol’jin massively OOC, anyway (which could have happened).
Unfortunately it doesn’t if Gen would have been successful with his attack the horde and alliance would have went to war During a legion invasion ensuring the world would have ended. Jaina attacked an ally by surprise murdering countless Innocents that were never even involved in anything the horde was doing. They aren’t heroes as they have a long track record of either attacking during peace time or attacking people that weren’t even involved in the war. How can you justify these actions when every horde war criminal has been brought to justice yet not one alliance war criminal has been even covicted of their crimes,?
Appearance has a definite impact in why people pick a race. However a lot of people don’t really care that much about the depth of story involved. We however are talking on a Story forum so it is pretty relevant. I certainly didn’t pick my character just for appearance. Honestly I wasn’t a big fan of the BE animations. However I found the background story for the BEs interesting and intriguing.
There is a fundamental difference. No matter how badly they had been mauled, massacred or driven from their homes, the Alliance races, generally speaking, have never lost that identity of who they were. They had to rebuild yes, but they only had to really rebuild their homes and lives, not their identities.
The Horde races on the other hand. In many ways lost that. The orcs had their culture practically burned out of them by the madness of the Blood curse and their use by the legion. The Darkspears took a very unorthodox path in the way they chose to take their tribe compared to the other tribes. The BEs were completely shattered and made slaves to their mana addiction. The Undead were literally an entire population, cursed to undeath and had their will stolen from them, only to regain their will one day to discover that everything they knew or believed in had been destroyed or saw them as abominations. The Tauren are probably the most odd ones out, as they were supposed to be the touchstone race that grounded the horde in reminding them were to far was too far.
Horde races haven’t only had to rebuild physical things. They have had to rebuild what and who they are. That is why this whole treatment they have gotten in MoP and BfA frustrates me because it undermines the growth the horde should have achieved.
not sure if you weren’t paying attention but sylvanas is trying to destroy the world so basically genn saved the world from sylvanas and what countless innocents? she didn’t flood orgrimmar like she should have done.
in fact, she saved the alliance that is currently fighting the horde who is indeed trying to destroy the world and soon will release the old gods.
so is easy for me to see why they are the heroes of the story.
What you are basically saying is " Garrosh is a bad guy I’m going to go beat up his nephew" for your jaina example and for your Gen example " hey I know the Germans are on the brink of ending the free world as we know it so now is the perfect time to sucker punch the Soviet union I failed so why are they attacking me 6 months later?"
isn’t the horde their warchief?
also,wasn’t that horde trying to conquer the world?
is a war that they started, while the alliance was only defending themselves. and even with all that the alliance almost lost.
so is not like the alliance had much of a choice.
oh, i don’t know, maybe because she was trying to enslave the queen valkyr and then end the world anyway with her zombie apocalipsis?
or maybe is because she attacked genn’s city literally unprovoked?
So during a legion invasion is the best time to settle the score? And the best way to do it was with a flying gunship instead of dispatching SI7 to warn her target? Gen didn’t care what her plans were it was his petty attempt at revenge. There were also plenty of horde fighting Garrosh encase you forgot it’s kinda the reason the alliance still exists because Garrosh had the alliance dead to rights before the darkspear rebellion. Attacking the sun reavers after everything they did to aid dalaran and killing them in the streets without any warning didn’t do anything to help tilt the war back to the alliance’s favor in fact it ensured that the blood elves would never defect to the alliance. All these two have done is make sure that wars would last longer or start later. Just face the facts man they’re war criminals hell they even got the zandalari to join the horde outright, is this your idea of heroic?
Garrosh attacked his country unprovoked and Sylvanas took charge so her people didn’t get meat grindered as per his plan, then still had to follow the Warchiefs command to take the place*
I picked mine for the class. Belves were the only Horde paladin race in TBC, which is when I decided to give Horde a proper try and get a Horde too to mx level.
No, but in the end they destroyed the divine bell that garrosh was going to use to conquer the world.
because you know, the divine bell stolen by a sunreaver agent is what started everything in the first place.
a war criminal you say? i would accept it if orgrimmar was destroyed by the tidal wave.
Pro tip:i didn’t and she regretted it (honestly, she should have done it)
the zandalari attacked the horde and the alliance twice and then attacked kultiras before the raid even started. i would say that they joined the horde because they wanted.
and yet as per chronicles sylvanas always wanted to attack gilneas anyway, and it really doesn’t make a difference, gilneas was truly neutral.
Want and act are very different. Alot of us want to do alot of things, but we don’t. Her wanting it doens’t change the fact that it was Garrosh that attacked it, not her.
so if i understand correctly, you are saying that sylvanas is innocent because she was just “following orders” even when those orders were exactly what she wanted to do?
Can you quote me saying she’s innocent? I don’t think I’ve ever said that. She isn’t.
But that doesn’t change that it was Warchief Garrosh Hellscream that ordered and was actively invading Gilneas before Sylvanas showed up.
…Yes, cause she didn’t. Garrosh attacked it unprovoked, and she took command afterwards to see it finished without having her people thrown away. Gilnean’s have plenty of reasons to hate her without putting the “unprovoked attack” badge on her, that was Garrosh. She still blighted their land and tried to kill their King, and ended up killing their Prince, but she was not the one that invaded, that’s my only point.
maybe that is true… but still in their perspective it was sylvanas.
so i don’t see the difference.
And? why does that matters? she could… you know, refused.
Why, she can’t? then i guess that is easy to be horde, you can just blame 1 person at the end, and act as if everyone else isn’t responsible. fair, i guess.