Personally, what I felt made the horde appealing as a concept was that 3/4ths of it WASN’T responsible for the events of the previous RTS games. It certainly inherited a bad legacy to try to overcome, but your character didn’t necessarily have to be someone who was involved in creating that bad situation in the first place. Since there wasn’t really any hard canon set at character creation, your orc didn’t have to actually be a former demon blooded maniac, although you could headcanon yourself as part of it if you wished to. And if your character was a troll, tauren or undead, then you simply couldn’t have been.
Monster in appearance, not in actions. The traditionally “good” races might fear you, whether justified or not, but it was something to overcome to prove that you weren’t bad just because you looked scary.
I feel that Cataclysm and MoP sorely bruised this idea by making the horde aggressive because you’re giving the alliance fresh and obviously justifiable reasons to want to push back. This comes after a base game and two expansions where the factions should have had time to start acclimating to each other’s existence so a lot of that “ew spooky monster get it away” vibe would gradually be fading. And this time, there’s less of a sympathetic angle because you don’t have the demon blood retcon excuse to explain away why they were antagonistic this time around.
BFA utterly atomized it, though. With the game’s story opening up with the horde starting another war (and Sylvanas basically convincing Saurfang with The Fourteen Words for crying out loud) with the associated story material explicitly using the term “genocide,” the game has irrevocably tied the faction, every associated race and NPC that showed up in BFA, and the horde player character itself with a tragic real world event that will now stick with the franchise forever. The whole “misunderstood monster” bit does not work anymore because there is nothing left to misunderstand, and I feel that nothing short of expunging BFA from the setting canon would even begin to fix the premise I enjoyed about it.
tl;dr, I wanted to play a fantasy monster. Not a real one.
Yeah, as soon as the pre patch came around I was like “Wait? We’re going to war? After defeating the legion? I can’t Lok’tar to this.” But there was also the fact that for me at least if I liked narratively at my orc, the orcs of orgrimmar and the other races of the horde after Teld where held hostage at that point. Cause even though “logically” Anduin wouldn’t kill the entire horde, we where operating under the assumption of “oh dang we committed genocide, the alliance will definitely be trying to kill us now.”
I am interested to see peeples hot takes on redeeming the horde though.
They had us cheer Sylvanas yelling “For the Horde.” Without a single hint of irony when she said “The Horde is NOTHING” after killing Memelord Saurfang.
They obviously went through story changes after that one cinematic, it gave a entirely different impression then any other content in bfa. It was something that stood out as odd note that I look at it, especially with Saurfang seemingly rallied by Syl shouting that phrase yet going into a depression mid siege.
The problem with that is it would’ve been the perfect time for Saurfang to grow a pair, do what he swore he would do after Garrosh, and lop off Sylvanas’ head to send to Tyrande with the handwritten note, “We didn’t know, but we took care of it.”
Instead the Horde, again, supported Sylvanas all throughout BfAafter Teldrassil because some executive thought we needed to restart the faction war.
Oh, that? Yeah, what the writers don’t want you to know is that the actual order of events is as follows:
Battle for Azeroth cinematic showcasing the Battle for Lordaeron - this was the initial announcement cinematic, the one where Saurfang gladly rallies to Sylvanas. It was literally Chris Metzen’s final project for the company—when questioned later, Metzen notably claimed he was “as surprised as anyone” by what happened at Teldrassil.
The War of the Thorns in-game
The Siege of Lordaeron in-game
No, I’m not kidding; they literally came up with the War of the Thorns storyline after releasing the initial cinematic, even though said cinematic takes place after the War of the Thorns. o___O’
If your mind is currently tearing itself apart trying to make sense of this, don’t worry—you’re not alone.
Attempts at divining Blizzard’s motives aside, the 4th war ended in an uneasy armistice. The Horde as a whole was not won over through recognizing their wrong doing, as you note. Fighting has ceased, and territory has been ceded. Thrall apologized and swore to do his best to make amends for Teldrassil.
But that does not erase the Blood Elven rage about the purge of Dalaran that is expressed In Game. Or the Tauren who expressed fury about Taurajo In Game. Or the general antipathy of most Trolls that fielded Mages who lit the catapults and Shaman who expedited the Burning. As well as Talanji’s and the Zandalari’s rage concerning the events of BfA.
The Horde has plenty enough reason to exist. Among the reasons is to defend themselves from the Alliance. It is precisely the fact that many in the Alliance question the Horde’s right to exist that makes the Alliance an existential threat to the Horde.
I mean it can’t be a lost cause can it? looks back to our previous warchiefs blizzard. . . Really need to figure out something, only way I can see the scales returning to balance is restoring night elf souls to life, or at least a good number to show that the horde wanted to make amends.
Noble Savage is a racist trope, not a narrative to aspire to
Horde needs to be written as antiheroes, but Blizz is both unwilling and unable to do this
Everything that is Horde-race-centric is always either belittled in the narrative in favor of an Alliance race, or outright plagiarized for an Alliance race. Example of the former is Tauren were told “Actually your Musha stuff is false and dumb, Night Elves were right”, which is extremely problematic given Tauren are the in-game metaphor of North American Natives. Example of the latter is “Void Elves” being a faction of Blood Elves that are into tentacles being given to the Alliance and throughout BFA, extremely more useful to the Alliance than Blood Elves (who are the True Highborne diaspora).
The Alliance should just be written as more racist like they used to be, since they are by and large the White Westerner in-game metaphor. A lot of BFA would’ve been largely improved by all the Alliance being racist against the Horde except Anduin, since that would justify things.
"Re-Education Camps" are racist, so they should actually be suggested in-game to contribute to building up “Make Alliance Racist Again” efforts, so they share in villain bat.
Read the OP. They torched all of it to the ground.
Look at Saurfang, his arc. Look how demoralized he was by the entire thing. He realized there was nothing left, literally wanted to die in battle.
I don’t trust them. Frankly. Us going to Shadowlands is a good thing. It means the whole thing goes on hiatus and they can’t “advance” whatever ridiculous contrivance they would otherwise have to plan to give us a new baddie on Azeroth.
Which, that’s all they do. They dream up raid bosses. There is nothing they’ve made for either faction that anyone has actually thought, gee, I’m glad that happened. Literally nothing in the entire course of World of Warcraft.
No, because they’ll take us to the realm of the void, or whatever else. They’ve exhausted every conceivable contrivance to make Azeroth make more content for expan$ion pack villains and they realize the player base is tired of this.
It’s typically Alliance who are most opinionated about what the Horde is and what the Horde should be. But they almost never stop and think,
“Hey, perhaps the Horde looks so monstrous because next to our (the Aliiance’s) gleaming white morality trophy everything looks monstrous. Perhaps if we the Alliance were taken down a peg or 2 the gap wouldn’t be so huge.”
