To be fair, I wasn’t suggesting the game ACTUALLY do it. It was just something that popped in my mind when you said that the alliance had to do something to hurt other alliance members, since at this point you’ve got people like Morghel who say there’s nothing the alliance can do to the horde to make him feel bad.
So the only theoretical option left is to make him hurt the alliance.
I’m not sure this hits the nail on the head, but I applaud the effort at the very least. It does avoid the trope of immediately villain batting the Alliance by having an Alliance commander bring in another, external force, that the Alliance might not even want there (or at the very least be uneasy with their arrival). Maybe Turalyon calls upon the Light to bring justice … and he does it so hard their armies just appear. I’m not really sure how it works with the Light.
There’s a level of believability in that we’ve seen the Yrel’s AU faction of Light/the MU Naaru try to impose their beliefs forcibly on the Mag’har and Illidan (Lord Illidan knows the way) respectively. Though I hate to have the Night Elves have more setbacks, Velen and Tyrande have had some discussions about Elune and the Naaru which were a bit strained. It could lead to some inter- and intra-faction conflict (both with Druidism and Shamanism).
Maybe instead of capturing Orgrimmar/TB, they’re just waging war (honestly, it’s mostly fatigue about cross-faction moments at a Horde city, let alone Orgrimmar itself) and at some point both sides combine to root out Turalyon from Stormwind (or maybe some other Alliance city, so we don’t just repeat the capital trope), return Anduin to power, and across the whole time we have some commentary about extremism on both sides still being evil and a need to maintain balance.
As Morghel pointed out, there would be a need to find a way to achieve this while still conveying the Horde doesn’t “deserve” it (I’d rather avoid the trope of throwing in a bunch of child victims for gratuity) and ultimately that’s similar to Gantrithor’s point - how does this bring the Horde up in morality? Some commentary about letting extremism ferment might convey that somewhat but it’s still a bit of a stretch.
Therein lies the rub though. I’m not sure I trust the writers to fix this situation, I don’t know if this actually solves it, and I’m not really a writer so I can’t really flesh something like this out (I have no idea if you are, so I won’t presume to judge). To be perfectly honest, I really don’t know if it’s possible to write a plausible narrative that somehow escapes the corner BFA put us into and lets us reverse some of the tide of the last decade with respect to the way factions have been portrayed.
/By the way, one cool thing it could set up is afterward (IN THE EXPANSION FOLLOWING TURALYON NOT CRAMMED AT THE VERY END IN ONE PATCH) we can have the Void utilize the MacGuffin the Light used to invade and send their Lovecraftian army into all of Azeroth. Then have a faction team-up because we all hate the Void.
Do you feel that this happened with the Nightborne?
I mained Alliance in BfA. I can say with authority that the Alliance PC was not lectured and shamed as much as the Horde PC was in that expansion.
Except for Void Elves …?
I would point you back to Cataclysm and MOP.
I remember how people like me were on these boards in Cataclysm in particular - asking why the druids didn’t seem to care about what was going on in Ashenvale, and pointing out that it looked like Blizzard was presenting the conflict as though the Night Elves were losing (despite the canon being the opposite). Our complaints were represented in a character called Leyara, who was given a backstory where she lost her family in Ashenvale, and decided that the rational course of action was to lash out at Hamuul for being a Tauren, and attempt to destroy the world.
That was how Blizzard portrayed us.
Did you miss the part where I said “in BfA”?
Pellex: 1
Zarrin: 0
=(
Oh, it absolutely happened with the Nightborne—I have no problem admitting that.
Prior to BfA, they were a neutral faction in the middle of a civil war who (obviously) were taking all the help they could get…from both factions, which is why we see High Elves, Night Elves, and Blood Elves camped out at the Suramar gates.
Now, let’s look at the differing dialogue for the World Quest, “Help on the Way”:
Liadrin: The shal’dorei must be shown that there is a future beyond this chaos. We must reach as many as we can!
Tyrande: The more shal’dorei that take up the fight, the fewer of my people who will be lost in the liberation of Suramar.
Not to mention Tyrande’s actual dialogue to Thalyssra:
I remember where your order stood in the War of the Ancients. How do we know you won’t betray us and become the next Elisande…the next Azshara?
Um, maybe she’s literally leading a rebellion against Elisande? Which is literally what Tyrande herself did against Azshara 1,000 years ago? You’d think Tyrande would have been able to find some common ground here.
Instead, what happened was that an Alliance leader allowed her own personal biases alienate a potential ally, something that—if this were to happen in, say, the United Nations, European Union, etc.—would see her kicked out of the Alliance faster than you can cast a vote at the ballot office.
Also, for the record: if I had the option to have my background be “Illidari Green” instead of “Alliance Blue,” I totally would.
I did not, nor did I attempt to contest that statement.
And I did not attempt to comment on the Cata/MoP situation, because I didn’t main Alliance for those expansions.
However, I added extra clarification to my earlier post to make clear that I was taking issue with the characterization of BfA only.
Take into account that to achieve this, it´s is NOT necessary to get portrayal of the Horde as being “redeemed” from an Alliance PoV; quite the contrary.
And excuse me, but it could be an actual interesting “social experiment” to make the Alliance players stubborn enough to suggest Horde got the “better deal” in BfA understand a little better the bitterness some of us have in regards to villain batting itself.
Not because the Nightborne were NOT Alliance when we met them in-game… Belves at that particular point of the story had recently become so (Kael´thas after all pledged himself to Garithos and the Alliance in WC3)
Not at the scope that is possible gameplay wise, no. I would feel bad if the Horde and every race that is part of it were killed in some terrible revenge genocide, but that is very far from what can actually happen.
Then i’d just be annoyed that Blizzard would write such a thing as a distraction to make me forget about bfa. It wouldn’t work in either case.
I think the best option blizzard has is a mass ress of everyone who died during bfa at the end of shadowlands Not just the Night elves, but the Horde and the Alliance as well. The consequnces of bfa are then wiped from existance. Lame, but solves all the issues that I don’t have the faintest hope that blizzard can or will resolve.
I would faction to change to join the Illidari. I have a Demon Hunter already but my Warlock has been my main since I started (end of Vanilla/beginning of BC); would you all allow me to join?
//I actually kinda wish the Warlock class was just combined into Demon Hunters as a spec.
The reason I did is because these problems didn’t start in BFA. BFA was just the most vigorous expression to date of the writing team’s preferences in the post-wrath era. Essentially - I don’t think this discussion should be restricted to BFA.
@ Ariel
I don’t understand why the Nightborne not being part of the Alliance at the time matters, ultimately. I feel like that’s a sort of formality that doesn’t impact the nature of the issue - that of betraying one’s allies and driving them into the arms of their enemy. What am I missing? Why is that a necessary element?
Which is what I’ve said is gonna happen for months now
Nah, still not enough, because it can’t change the fact that the horde officially started another war to cause all that death in the first place. The faction’s still technically supported genocide, and having a mass rez doesn’t actually take away from that.
I don’t think this solution undoes how the audience feels about any of this though. A mass rez doesn’t equate to a Men-in-Black style memory wipe.
But even if Cata and MoP condemned and lectured PCs of both sides equally, BfA does not. Therefore, it’s not a continuation of the same trend.
No but it’s what they’re probably going to do given the Lay of the Narrative Land.
In that case, I am going to offer the trend of Anduin morally condemning Tyrande for being “consumed by vengeance”, as well as how she is framed with the Night Warrior. That appears to be heading for Leyaraization.
Edit: I am also going to say - the narrative has never lectured us equally - but I do want to push back when I see people saying that the narrative is all one thing or all another. It’s almost always a mixed bag.