Ironically, I actually agree with this…but then, as a demon hunter, I’m not strictly “Alliance” to begin with.
More importantly, the era of Warcraft II - Warcraft III showcasing how the original Alliance of Lordaeron, the supposed “good guys,” was largely made up of human supremacist bureaucrats (including one Genn Greymane) was actually very well-done, especially with the implication that characters like Jaina and Tirion, while being noteworthy exceptions to this rule, were exceptions nonetheless. Daelin Proudmoore being cast as the villain in Old Hatreds was the narrative icing on that cake.
The Void Elves exemplify the other problem where the more sinister stuff the Alliance does is either glossed over or simply always pales in comparison to the drama given to what Evil Warchief did. Anything questionable the Alliance did was only allowed to matter enough as long it could barely explain the dangerously deep hatred Sylvanas supposedly had the Horde embrace.
Yeah, considering Genn Greymane actually referred to the Quel’dorei as “demi-humans” back in the original Alliance of Lordaeron days, he really should have been written as far less willing to accept the aid of the Kaldorei, not to mention the Rendorei, the Dark Iron Dwarves, the Mechagnomes…
Which just a good heaping of racism would fix that. Get humans hating elves, get dwarves hating trolls, get nelves hating humans (living or undead) and other leves, get worgen hating undead, get kul tirans hating orcs and elves, etc.
Perhaps a way to make the Horde plight sympathetic is to indeed make the Alliance antagonize the Horde. This would also do something to alleviate the issue of “Horde acts, Alliance reacts” that has also been plaguing the narrative.
But I’d rather not see another war that leaves more areas devastated. Something else should be done, such as perhaps the use of Internment Camps. It would be fitting for Turalyon to implement the same kind of system he initially had a hand of setting up, and gives the Horde a plight that isn’t based on blood-shedding and conquest.
An idea would have the Alliance under Turalyon forcibly “enlist” members of the Horde and place them in areas to re-build damage. This could spiral into other abuses and wrongdoings as had happened before with the Internment system. The Horde could then have a narrative based on freeing their people and restoring faction pride, just like in Warcraft 3.
But the question of course is if Blizzard has the capacity to pull such a thing off with the needed nuance?
Blizzard wrote Alliance as racist for almost 20 years, and a lot of the franchise was aggressively based on racist stereotypes.
It’s only in the past ten years that the White-People metaphor faction is unable to do anything bad while the Non-white-people metaphor faction is repeatedly villain batted.
Honestly? I’d say it would be a welcome change of pace. It is about as interesting to be absolutely good as it is to be absolutely bad. The same kind of narrative poison, really. The problem is that it feels almost corporately mandated, how the factions are written. And that’s honestly a shame, as you can do a lot with an Imperialist Alliance and a Sympathetic Horde.
Nail, meet head. I think a large part of the problem comes down to:
Blizzard Then =/= Blizzard Now
If BfA proved anything, it’s that whoever’s on the current writing truly has little to no frame of reference for the lore that got this game up and running to begin with.
Agreed. This is one reason I like the WH40K universe so much. You can sympathize with every faction, even the Tyranids. There’s really no answer to who is right and who is wrong and each faction, save, perhaps, the Tyranids, has so much depth that internal conflicts have their own internal conflicts.
I think, more simply, the writers, being all white people now as far as leadership goes, see themselves more in the Alliance characters (which they confirm on Twitter), and thus are unable/unwilling to write them as racist, because they feel that means they like the racist white people metaphor.
It’s about as likely as us ever getting an orc in a durag ever again; you know saurfang by necessity puts his dreads in a pineapple before bed with a thalassian silk wrap to keep them nice and tight. lmao
Another thing about the “Racist Alliance” back in the day:
It wasn’t even just that they were racist, it’s that they were nuanced. We were given real, believable explanations for why the Alliance was filled with racists.
Take Daelin Proudmoore, for example. Was he racist? Absolutely. But let’s look at his backstory:
He, like many other leaders, had never encountered orcs prior to the Second War. Literally the first thing someone asks Anduin Lothar in Tides of Darkness upon hearing of the Horde is, “what kind of men are these?”
He lost his son to the Horde during the Second War. He’s a grieving father. He’s unable to see past his pain, and wrongly equates Thrall’s Horde with Doomhammer’s/Gul’dan’s Horde.
That level of nuance and depth has pretty much been lost with the last couple of expansions, as sad as it is for me to admit.
An excellent question I wish I still cared about enough to answer. “Horde goes bad and redeems itself” was redundant even before Garrosh, and this is two evil warchiefs, two world wars, and a genocide later. I love so many of the Horde’s individual races, but as a faction Blizzard has failed it in every conceivable way. Whatever answer they come up with will likely not be good enough to redeem the creative bankruptcy that brought us to this miserable, stained, embarrassing juncture in the first place.
