How can we redeem/rebuild the Horde?

Lore Story Forum
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I followed your logic and walked you through right to the end of what your logic yields.

You believe that the Horde needs to make reparations to try to redeem themselves for their prior actions. You also believe that in terms of the narrative, the Alliance can retain their moral high ground and not be muddied by any sort of conflict or strife, but that through seeking redemption the Horde now and going forward that the Horde will rebuild into an equal and proud faction in the narrative.

Unfortunately, to do that, you have to have the Horde spend “now” repairing damages of the past. That’s a heavy burden to put on an entire faction. But it’s not just “now” - it’s going forward as well, until some point in time when they have shown sufficient change. Until that point is reached, the Horde is basically subservient, trying to “earn” their way back to legitimacy.

Then what? No matter where you go, if the writing continues to portray the Alliance as consistently maintaining the moral high ground, then at some point either the Horde is in complete lockstep with them or they are bad. That starts your cycle of requiring the Horde to atone for their sins once more.

The portrayal of the Horde has to change. That’s clear. But if the Alliance is portrayed, consistently and continually (as it has been for the last
 ~decade) as virtuous, righteousness, always justified, and never taking any wrong actions, then no matter what the Horde will be vilified somewhere along the path unless the Horde is in complete lockstep with the Alliance, at which point we might as well dissolve the factions entirely.

It’s abhorrent to think of what you’re presenting - the Horde perpetually licking Alliance boots, begging for forgiveness, but still never able to quite line up with the paragon of goodness that the Alliance is.

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:point_up: Especially because we literally have an image to go along with it—we’ve quite literally seen this movie (game/novel) before.

In the Durnholde Keep Internment Camps run by one Adelas Blackmoore.

This, right here, is the inherent threat of, and why it is so dangerous for, the current writing team to look at humanity and think, “Virtuous,” and for them to look at the orcs and think, “Monsters.”

It was literally the setup for the very first generation of the overall story, the original Warcraft II - Warcraft III era featuring the Alliance of Lordaeron.

Except this time, it doesn’t feel like the writing team is doing it deliberately/purposefully like Chris Metzen did (i.e. setting up humanity as supposedly-virtuous Camelot-style, in order to reveal how morally-corrupt they really were).

No, if anything, the team behind events like Theramore and Teldrassil seems to actually believe it.

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I suspect it’s a sign that few of us believe that it’s even POSSIBLE to bring the Horde up from the depths they’ve been sunk, so the only realistic way to bring about closer moral parity with the Alliance is to knock the Alliance down a few levels.

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Yeeeeah. If we’re talking about bringing the Alliance into close parity with genocide that’s not a “few levels”.

I mean I get it, misery loves company and all that. But the response to being stuck in mud and s*** up to your ears is not to try and drag someone else down into that hole.

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I dunno, after the fourth time time in so many decades that the Horde has launched a completely unprovoked war of extermination against the Alliance, there’s got to a significant fraction of its people that now fully follow Daelin Proudmoore’s ‘Peace is impossible, their actions prove it. We will only be safe if we exterminate them all, ever last man, woman, and child’ philosophy.

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Maybe. But it still doesn’t solve the actual problem with the story. Which is that the story’s focus shouldn’t be “how can we justify genocide” so much as “how can we avoid ever mentioning or implying genocide or anything like it in this video game where the application of force and violence is supposed to be about cathartic enjoyment and not gut-wrenching horror.”

The answer is not to spread the genocide around, it’s to never go there in the first place. Or, given where we are presently, to distance themselves from this abysmal plot point as hard and as fast as possible.

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No one said or expects to that extent. But so long as the Alliance embodies morality and virtue itself, the only way the Horde can prove they are capable of being moral and having virtue is through their relationship with the Alliance. Which the current state of the Horde has rendered us. We can only be good so long as we are convenient and submissive to the Alliance.

In a two faction game, no faction should have Moral Absolutism. Both factions (and all PC races) should be allowed Virtues and Flaws. Strengths and weaknesses. And that is not where we find ourselves in current WoW. Where the Alliance is an untouchable, pristine mass of virtues (with few, if any, tangible flaws) 
 while the Horde is a festering miasma of flaws (allowed very few, if any, virtues).

So 
 no one wants the Alliance to be “genociding” things. What we want is for them to not be these peerless beings that all concepts of virtue and morality must be compared to.

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I’d like to ask a question of the Horde posters participating in this thread.

I’ve noticed a general theme that you believe that, morally, the Alliance needs to lose its moral veneer - this being now one of two threads where that is a major theme. How do you intend to accomplish that? - and to assist in that, let me offer a few alternatives, which I’d like to lay out in something of a grid consisting of the following rows and columns.

Row A: Anduin still advocates for peace, but Genn and Tyrande push war in their respective parts of the world. Their reasons are couched in what they feel the Horde has done to their people - neither break away from the Alliance.

Row B: Anduin still advocates for peace, but the Western Alliance all but breaks off from the Eastern one under Tyrande’s leadership. The respective ‘sides’ of the factional split begin to turn on each other. Tyrande’s reasons for pursuing war with the Horde have to do with the harm they have caused her people. It remains a limited campaign.

Row C: Anduin is deposed by Grand Marshall Budd, who has decided that baby steps won’t work with the Horde anymore and that death therapy is required. This kicks off a massive, worldwide campaign with immense stakes and consequences. Tyrande and Genn go along with him, he goes along with them.

Row D: Anduin is deposed by Grand Marshall Budd, who has decided that baby steps won’t work with the Horde anymore and that death therapy is required. This kicks off a massive, worldwide campaign with immense stakes and consequences. The Western Alliance has split from the Eastern Alliance over Anduin’s previous failures, and the continued distance causes tensions.

Column A: The content gives the Alliance player the choice between committing moral, but difficult actions, or immoral and easy actions - presenting moral dilemmas as those being between difficult, principled behaviors and easy, damaging ones. The game doesn’t comment on which decision was “correct”, although it does make you face the consequences of what you chose and not in some ‘morality gauge’ system. If you do something bad, the game frames the consequences of your actions starkly. If you do something good, the quest could be much more difficult and you stand the risk of losing out on some of the quest rewards.

Column B: The Alliance player is not given a choice in committing morally suspect acts. These are justified by the characters as being necessary, but they are nevertheless presented as horrific.

Column C: Take column A, but remove the nuance. Instead of immoral actions being presented as the quick and easy path, they come paired with those actions also leading to characters doing immorally gratuitous things. Racial slurs turn up here, characters commit outright sadistic acts on defeated opponents, even when they put themselves at a key disadvantage in order to do so.

Column D: Take the lack of agency from B, and combine it with the escalation from C.

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251

Alternative theory: The Alliance is presented as actual people most of the time (early years Anduin notwithstanding) with reasonable complexity. The issue is less that they’re “perfect” and more that the Horde is never allowed to keep any standards of their own and thus fall into being “peerless”, fantasy evil.

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 the Alliance is about exactly where you’d want a player faction to be for a game like this. Not “perfect” but “good”, naturally good, inherently good. Something that can exist in the back ground as “that thing that’s worth protecting” as we sail off into the next distant horizon or jump through the latest inter-dimensional portal for reasons that ultimately are all about protecting where we came from and the people left there.

If the Hordes lost that for it’s players, if it no longer feels like something worth caring about, that’s what needs to be fixed in the story. And that has nothing to do with making the Alliance worse.

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I honestly believe that is impossible.

And I don’t know if I’m in a proper emotional state over it to right now elaborate without saying words that would violate terms and conditions.

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Maybe it is. Maybe it can’t be fixed with the pieces that the writers have now. Maybe they would need a WC3’esc time-skip to create distance between the mistakes of the past and a new generation that can be allowed to be hopeful and optimistic again. Or at least not have to carry quite so much baggage.

But again, and I stress this, none of that requires tarnishing other things. That could be part of it but it’s not the essential part that actually changes how you and others are feeling.

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The Alliance are never allowed to make mistakes. Never allowed to act on their aggression. Never allowed to be antagonistic. In the few instances they have been allowed “grey” since Cata, those actions are either buried under so many justifications that they’re proven right in them by default; or handwaved away 
 even by their victims. This is a tangible effort to keep this faction pure, and righteous, and virtuous. They do not, and are not, allowed any tangible flaws that allow for consequences. Everything bad that happens to them, is an external force acting on them. Its never an internal act or decision.

The Alliance aren’t “actual people”. They’re more like concepts. Infallible and pristine. The image of which must be maintained at all costs. The races of the Horde in contrast aren’t even allowed motives or justifications for the evil crap we do half the time; and the half we do get those motives are never validated. Its why a particular interview with Ion around 8.2.5 stands out to me, where he said the equivalent of “The Alliance hates the Horde for Genocide, the Horde has issues with the Alliance”. My god is that a perfect representation of how the Alliance and Horde are written. The lead dev who’s team forced the Horde to be the antagonist in BfA could not think of a single reason why the Horde would be antagonistic to the Alliance in BfA. But, just like the Gobs in Silithus 
 “Its what we do, no more reason needed”.

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But the narrative is often presented on the Alliance PoV and we both narrative and in game characters saying “geez why aren’t we more like the alliance”

The Alliance actually being real people with flaws and having to deal with consequences of their acts with people actually calling them out(like attacking Zandalar while it was neutral or someone recognising their past history with other civilizations wasn’t good) is not making the faction worse but actually it humanizes them.

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how many millennia would need to pass before every night elf who lost a friend or loved one, or merely their home and possessions would be dead of old age and their culture came to be ruled by a completely new generation to whom the horror of the War of Thorns would just be an abstraction?..

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Do you disagree?

You have 2 playable factions, 1 has its moral integrity intact, the other is written as morally bankrupt with the history to prove it.

How do you sell the factions as equal? Blizzard’s campaign of “it matters!” is huge here. Because 1 choice is the objectively wrong choice.

:pancakes:

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I dunno if I made it clear that I don’t actually WANT to Alliance to try commit genocide against the Horde, but at this point I think it’s screamingly unrealistic for a big chunk of them to NOT to keep putting the idea forth in complete seriousness.


and if Anduin doesn’t like it, TOO BAD; he can hold them back from actually going through with it, but if he doesn’t try to keep the Horde cowed with sufficient shows of force his political opponents have enough clout to set him up with a one night stand with Madame Guillotine and they’ll ‘Find a King willing to put the safety and security of his people above his own self-righteous need for moral purity’

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Again, no. I get it’ll feel that way when the Horde cranked up to 11, racing down to rock bottom. But no, that’s just a collection of pity party lines, mostly as it relates to you feeling the Alliance doesn’t go far enough. Which doesn’t actual refute anything I’ve said; that the Horde is the faction that out of balance with the expectations of the series and its players, not the Alliance.

Okay
 ? Ion isn’t one of the writers? What does that prove aside from he probably doesn’t know the difference between an Old God and a Sha unless someone pointed it out to him?

Yup. They’re the baseline, written at the level the factions should probably be at generally. Comparing them favorably to the Hordes Lowest Common Denominator roller coaster ride works out.

In general? Probably not too many. Probably not even a millennia. The elves are mortal now, if Tyrande and Malf are any indication their older population is aging at an enhanced rate, and they just lost a lot of people and they still maintain large and relatively stable lands for their people. A night elven baby boom in the near future would not be surprising.

Maybe stretch that hypothetical time gap up to 50+ years if you must but sure.

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Entirely off topic but I feel kind of funny sitting here reading some of these replies when every time I contemplate what I would have to do in order to play Retail again I always come to the conclusion that I would end up re-rolling to a Goblin.

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is it ironic that the Goblin Racial Fantasy never lied to you about what it was and what you’d get playing one?

EDIT: sudden mental image of the developers deciding that it would be good for the game to change goblins into a race of honest socialist philanthropists with a relaxed and nature-loving culture.

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Name a single mistake or “grey” act by the Alliance in the last 10 years that wasn’t validated through a mountain of justifications or handwaved away by even its victims in the last 10 years? Taurajo? More effort was put into absolving and excusing Hawthorne than was actually placed on Taurajo itself. The Purge? To date the only person to even apologize (and beg for forgiveness) in that event is the leader of the victims, Aethas. Genn’s and Rogers’ attempted assassination of the Horde’s Warchief? Validated though stopping what Sylvie was doing, consequences free. Even from the Horde.

Then you get into “fun” things like Varian declaring war on the Horde in WotLK, only for Garrosh to “start it” in Cata. Thanks to a conveniently created peace treaty in an in between expansion book, just in time for Garrosh to break it. How about the build up to the 4th war. Loved how the Bilgewater randomly attacked the Explorers League for no other reason than “they’re Goblins”; to ensure the Alliance slaughering Goblin civilians wasn’t an act of War. Since, it HAD to be the Horde to start it. That’s why Stormheim also wasn’t allowed to count with even the Horde themselves. Alliance actions never count.

You want to revel in a Faction with Moral Absolutism? At least be honest about it.

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