Agreed, which is even more insulting when you compare it to the lore that literally started the Warcraft series to begin with.
Thatâs when Metzen and Co were running things. When blizz actually cared to have some sort of consistency with their lore.
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The ideal goal here is a world with two realistic but very different factions whose goodness level is equal to each other and reflects the level of grey that the whole setting has. This is the appeal that made Warcraft explode as a franchise, but the faction conflict has slowly turned into good-guys-vs-bad-guys. If weâre going to get back to the original vision, we canât have bad guys OR good guys anymore. So yes, the Allianceâs virtue level is relevant.
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You mean atonement.
Redemption on the secular meaning is given by the offended party, you can atone without ever being redeemed.
Yea⌠i agree on your take of atonement however i disagree the horde can ever be redeemed, feels kind of sick when they try to help after genociding the night elves, even offensive i dont even want to see them close to our territories or npcs of my faction.
Now let me take my blue hat off, i do not think doing stuff like atoning would sit well with the horde playerbase that didnt wanted to do the WoT on the first place, maybe some of them but how many? In fact i wouldnt even like to be on either side of the fence, this fence sucks on the first place. On one hand you have to atone for someting you never agreed to, on the other hand those guys that burnt your lawn are there again doing something while you rather have them move AWAY from your lawn.
Also i do not think your fence analogy holds when dealing with irreversible acts like death not even if its âone of a kindâ fence.
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I donât know, I donât mind the Horde being more morally grey than the Alliance. But theyâre more willing to do questionable things because theyâre merely trying to survive in a harsh world. The Alliance, meanwhile, being older more established and settled, can care more about âhigher idealsâ, but also have older more established power blocks that have had time to secretly get decayed and backstabby against each other.
âŚ#### I just realized I just described how things were back in Vanilla/Classic.
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As well as during the original Warcraft II - Warcraft III era before that.
Yes it is.
The âmoralityâ of a faction is not held in a vacuum. If youâre saying the Horde needs to make reparations for Teldrassil (plus whatever else you deem to be sufficient) and then everything will be even between the factions, then you are completely ignoring the larger context of the narrative and hoping to fix some singular event.
Until there are changes made in the narrative as a whole, the Horde will continue to be the âbad guysâ because comparatively theyâre being portrayed as such.
Following your logic forward (where the Alliance gets to maintain their moral high ground perpetually) the Horde will need to constantly be in a subservient position, continually forced to atone for their mistakes in every encounter. If the Alliance isnât taken down from perpetually being the faction of âgoodâ and ârightâ then the Horde will always require âredemptionâ that needs to meet the arbitrary needs of the âgoodâ faction.
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I was going to say⌠this just isnât the case anymore. It might be for some of the Alliance, but at this point I think that the Kaldorei are far closer to people who at this point are merely trying to survive in a harsh world - and that shift has consequences as far as this question is concerned.
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Whatâs interesting about your comment is that this was exactly the case between Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (Second War) and Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (Third War) with the original Alliance of Lordaeron and the orc internment camps.
We saw how all that worked out, and itâs an excellent example of why the Alliance canât/shouldnât be seen as this âmorally-pureâ race of virtuous defenders, while the Horde canât/shouldnât be considered to be no more than a tribe of brutish animal-men trudging through the mud trying to forever seek an atonement theyâll never gain.
Itâs even more true now that we shouldnât go back to those stereotypesâsave for the purpose of refuting them/showing why theyâre wrongâbecause thatâs literally how the story as we know it began in the first place.
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I tried liking this twice. It made me like it three times. I didnât mind one bit.
I feel like we could be the new Marius and Tehd.
An excellent adventure awaits us?
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Oh boy careful there you two, blizz may sue you for copyright infringement jk.
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Yea, and not to distract from the Nelf story going forward, but I think this just helps emphasize that there is no way forward for the Horde. The writers have proven that they cannot have an identity of their own that does not revert to âBloodthirsty Morons who will try to destroy the Alliance for for no reason, threatening their own safety by weakening all possible defender against other things like the Legion or Old Godsâ. So either they totally purge their darker elements become the Red Alliance or⌠what? Can they go back to being what they were before? Without being villain-batted again? I donât think thatâs possible. Become a straight-up villain faction? could that even be a PC faction? There are certainly players who will happily play a bad guy. Hell, choosing to play as Horde in WC1 and 2 was choosing to play as the bad guy. But back then both sides were pretty 2D, and things have been built up and developed far further.
âŚI just donât see a believable path forward, let alone one the majority of players could actually LIKE.
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I again disagree with this kind of determinism, but I will admit that it complicates the issue, significantly.
One observation I will make, given this, is that Thrall appeared to want the Orcs to set up a civilization, and he was largely unsuccessful in doing this. He didnât set up the required infrastructure, resource issues caused it to backslide into its old ways, and Sylvanas took advantage of its pre-existing ideology. So what would a second attempt at this look like? Given that theyâd likely have to do that while fending off constant attacks from their north?
I mean, (now Trade Prince) Gazlowe pays life insurance to his peoplesâ families, so at least the Hordeâs economy is becoming somewhat stabilizedâŚ?
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Sadly, thatâs not even scratching the surface of what makes up economic stability. 
The only issue with horde infrastructure is the fact that durotar lacks resources at this point, and theyâre heavily reliant on trade especially with ashenvales night elves so thatâs going to mess up trade relations and end up like Garroshâs original motivations for invading, the orcs will probably be looking at another famine.
Why does it remind me of Elesana? âEverything will be bad, we have always suffered, we are misspelled âŚâ
Someone should have written about this before me, right? They definitely did.
You know, itâs funnyâŚI donât recall Jaina ever making mention of the fact that Durotarâs lack of resources was caused by her father in the first place.
If sheâs really so committed to peace, youâd think Kul Tiras would write a big, blank check for lumber by gathering up a dozen Thornspeakers or so to grow a new forest right outside Orgrimmar.
Ah, rightâŚhuman Alliance does no wrong.
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