I didn’t think you had any sources.
Thank you for confirming.
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I think what you seem to be missing in all of this is that what you are proposing is that the Horde be handed a story which the vast majority of the players have said would not land with them. Furthermore, that they should accept this story because… the writers chose to betray Horde players’ expectations, so they should now also have to swallow a bitter pill to get back to the Horde that they signed up for in the first place?
Let’s be abundantly clear (because I can hear the rebuttal coming); the Horde was never, ever, in any media for release WoW, framed as a villainous faction. Even during its darkest, lowest depths in BfA, it was never described as a villainous faction in the official material. It has always been rough around the edges. In the beginning, the Alliance was too. But WoW was never described as a good vs. evil faction game. Games like that exist - if you play SWTOR, you know that choosing to be a Sith is not choosing to be a good guy, and they are up front about that.
It doesn’t matter how much anyone claims “but the Horde was always evil” or “the Horde was meant to be evil early on” because, as we often say here, things that didn’t make it to live aren’t canon. The vast majority of Horde players did not sign up to play it with the expectation of being unrepentant bad guys. Therefore, the swing to wholesale evil in BfA was a betrayal of Horde players’ expectations, one which I feel many Alliance players do not fully comprehend. Ask any Horde player about the BfA intro cinematic and the response will effectively be “I wish that’s what we had gotten”. What we were sold and what we got were not at all the same thing.
That’s why you see this resistance to “atonement” stories. We did not choose to be dragged down this path. We feel no joy in trying to regain heroism we were never expecting to lose in the first place. We are, by and large, not interested in trying to justify ourselves to the Alliance - rather, we want both factions to have ample motivations and justification to oppose each other. Blizzard has stolen almost all of this from the Horde faction.
Anymore, it feels like Horde players are fighting against Alliance players and Blizzard both when trying to find reasons to feel pride in their faction. It is almost akin to being in a debate with someone, but when you try to raise a point, the judges tell you that your point is not only no longer valid, but then advise the other side on how to counter the argument you were making. It is a place of deep, enormous frustration with the narrative direction and breeds a great degree of jaded cynicism.
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If I as an Alliance fan could come to terms with Warcraft 3 and with Cataclysm I think that Horde players can come to terms with BfA to be perfectly honest.
The Horde is ruined forever as anything but evil. It CANNOT be good, ever again, no matter how ‘hard it works’. It CANNOT BE REDEEMED, IT IS A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME. So, why even bother? It will NEVER be ‘enough’. Never, ever. My wanting it to be ‘good’ again is an unattainable fantasy. Though, to be fair, I don’t think that the Horde were EVER good by Alliance standards.
Nor were they meant to be. Nor should they ever be. Why not just be the Alliance? Why have factions if they aren’t different enough? The Alliance morality is closer to the Arthurian Chivalric Ideal, and the Horde morality is closer to Conan the Barbarian.
I was ALWAYS fine with the Horde being the ‘more evil’ of the two factions, though both were ‘heroic’, it was by their own standards of heroic, and the Horde’s were decidedly looser. The Horde’s morals were always overall more ruthlessly pragmatic than the Alliance’s . There was Thrall and the Tauren on one end and the Forsaken and darker members of the orcs and trolls on the other. All were Horde. you mention Thrall sending men out to help recuse the dwarf princess, and that is fine for the Horde. A considerable part of the horde questing in Stonetalon was all about slaughtering Night Elves back in Vanilla before Garrosh was a thing and that is also fine for the Horde.
This problem has been creeping up for awhile and getting worse over time. Cata marked a turning point. But BFA rammed things completely over-the-top.
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The point of redemption isn’t to make your victims forgive you, the point is that it’s the right thing to do regardless of whether or not you’re forgiven. Shifting this to be about the Alliance forgiving the Horde is just shifting the moral burden for the Horde’s actions onto their victims, because it paints their victims as being the guilty party for not forgiving them.
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Given how often they’re complained about? I don’t think they have been “come to terms” with.
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What’s the point of redemption if no matter how much we say we don’t like these stories over and over and over again they are the only ones they bother to write for us?
We don’t get nuance or the benefit of the doubt. We don’t get to even have mistaken evidence that the Alliance is backstabbing us. Was there a horde version of the Alliance going all stupid in Legion and deciding because reasons that the Horde betrayed them on the Broken Shore?
We keep getting beat with the stupid bat in the story and go and be evil mooks for a baddy, and what do we get for it? Mostly ignored when we aren’t needed to be evil for the alliance story.
So why should we have to pay for what the writers have forced on us when there’s never any payoff for us, it’s just be evil, get humiliated, go back in the box until we need you to be evil again.
Maybe redemption would be something if there was any expectation that we’d actually get to share the spotlight on the threats from outside, that we’d see stories that we want to see, and get to quest with familiar faces for us.
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This is a really weird statement. What’s the point of being the good guys?
That’s a really convenient way to ignore the point.
I see you added a bit since I reacted.
What’s the point in redemption if it never leads to us being good guys. It’s too much of a cycle of ignored, be evil, get humiliated, ignored again, and repeat. Why should we trust that it won’t just turn into ignored, be evil, get humiliated, genuflect to the alliance, get ignored again, repeat cycle.
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I’m not remotely interested in a redemption arc for the horde. The only thing that interests me is rolling back the the gaslighting, lying and retconning that put the horde where it is. This is all on the writers, and if the alliance has to shoulder some of the burden, I’ll be for that as well.
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Thank you for being the first person honest enough to straight up say so.
The horde did nothing wrong. Period.
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I mean…it did. At various times. The Horde is what it’s written to be; it isn’t whatever idealized concept any of us have bouncing around in our heads.
The problem is they fundamentally and absolutely refuse to let the Horde stare at the stuff it’s done wrong and commit itself to not doing it again. That’s infinitely more important than any hypothetical “apologies” or reparations it might make. Grand opportunities were ignored (like WoD especially; witnessing firsthand the old Horde’s mistakes repeated should have been a perfect chance for the MU orcs to come to terms with the path Garrosh was leading them down, but despite the Garrisons they and the player factions at large were basically non-entities insofar as actually driving the story on AU Draenor.)
As long as the writers insist upon keeping the rampaging, conquest-driven Horde in their back pocket as a cheap antagonist fix, that will remain what the Horde is. And that isn’t a good thing.
Honestly I feel like the best thing they could do for either faction would be to pit them against a common foe the way WotLK initially did, but with no bipartisan united front or neutral armies of both sides’ races to take up the torch due to more faction conflict garbage interrupting them. Have some enemy attack them both, plant it on a new continent and have both factions retaliate by landing on opposite shores of the landmass, each fighting the new antagonist inland in their own ways and being heroes on both fronts instead of every other thing they do being tainted by some underlying subversive “but we’re really here to poke the other faction in the eye and set the stage for another BfA while we steamroll these other guys” nonsense.
Let them both emerge from a major conflict as the respective victors, so at the very least the next time the story decides to cram an empty faction war down our throats, neither side is going into it fresh off a series of struggles in which they seemed to only begrudgingly do the right thing.
And make it a functionally mortal common enemy too. Make it what Zul seemingly wanted the trolls to become before he turned out to be G’huun’s patsy. Make it a force that’s not trying to destroy the universe, but rather someone who’s trying to conquer and replace the Horde and Alliance as the dominant world power on Azeroth.
While a different sort of problem, the threat escalation isn’t entirely divorced from problems with the factions by preventing them from organically being part of the larger meta story. Why must everything that isn’t HvA be the end of the universe? Just because there’s stuff trying to exterminate all life out there shouldn’t mean we wouldn’t be expected to care if someone else comes along with the means and desire to burn our towns, steal our lands and subjugate our peoples. Such temporal threats should every bit as relevant to the Alliance and Horde as they were before things like the Scourge, Legion and Old Gods started coming to call every other year.
The closest we had to that was the mogu united under Lei Shen (and their Zandalari allies), and that was a high point of MoP, tainted by the ridiculous faction sniping that felt almost like a conscious effort to distract from it and the fact that - like Garrosh in SoO really - ultimately the mogu didn’t really stand a realistic chance of conquering the world with the Alliance and Horde controlling so much of it. (That was even part of the premise of Vol’jin opposing them in Shadows of the Horde; he knew they were trying to do something that wouldn’t work, but had to be stopped lest they cause a ton of pointless death and suffering by trying anyway. Like Garrosh, ultimately.)
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Gotta love alliance whitewashing people. So if i get it strait, it is ok to try to kill the other faction leader because you only assumed that she betrayed you, because of you own spy mistake.
But it is not ok to kill a diplomat who was also working with spy because you accuse them of, well being a spy…
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I take Raselle’s side with the diplomat stuff. It was still a dwarven diplomat. I imagine it’s par for the course that you have to assume they’re possible spies who will report anything they see back to their government, because that’s part of the reason you willingly invite them anyway. You keep a tight leash on their movements, you don’t let them see what you don’t want them to see, but they’re also your only safe line of communication with an opposing country. Sever that, and you remove one of the only ways you can deescalate conflict during wartime.
I believe it was also supposed to play into the idea that, at the time they were introduced, part of them being the horde’s inversion race meant they were the ACTUAL monsters of the horde; say what you want about the forsaken, but at least they weren’t brainwashing their own people (back then) and torturing an angel in their basement. They didn’t fit in with the horde for more than just their appearance, but because they were too haughty to be honest about what kind of people they were becoming, looking down at the other races for not being good enough or “savage” even though they were suffering from similar magical behavioral flaws as both the orcs and forsaken. They were ugly on the inside, and I think TBC was supposed to be about confronting that and redeeming them. It just sucked that that involved draenei reigniting the Sunwell for them, instead of it being the result of more internal growth.
I actually liked that quest concept a lot too, and I remember even trying to go out of my way to do it while leveling (despite it being TBC and hardly anybody wanting to do BRD anymore, me and 4 other randos eventually managed to bleed our way to the throne room).
I just think this sort of thing would hit way differently now, because of the two (narratively pushed) horde-instigated faction wars that both involved opening up with atrocities with no way for the horde player to actually continue with that original ideal with stuff like trying to save Moira. Before them, it was just “monster races trying to prove they’re not monsters.” Now, it’s “war criminals and genocide supporters trying to placate and appease.”
It sucks.
6 Likes
The night Elves were also spying on the blood elves, encroaching into thier territory when they were vulnurable and in no position to fight back.
You are absolutely correct, Prospector Anvilmar was a spy and an infiltrator. The night elves have never been innocent against the blood elves, they have been openly hostile.
To everyone else, blood elves intercept a night elf spy with documents to prove Anvilmar wasn’t a diplomat. This is lore that can be easily found if you bothered to level a blood elf to level 10, the quest is called “The Dwarven Spy” not the Dwarven diplomat. He was a spy.
This whole “the Alliance never did anything wrong ever” arguement needs to stop. It would be nice if Alliance players took accountability for the acts of aggression thier faction makes, regardless of how small.
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M? What nonsense I wanted to say …
Why did you think the dwarf knew about the night elves?
And this … Admit your guilt for the betrayal of Garithos (* 3), for the two wars against the human, for the refusal of an internal investigation after skinning the night elves … What else … Oh, come on, I will not strain my brain … Admit that you have offended everyone, and not they hurt you.
Imagine after the Burning of Teldrassil when the Night Elves are trying to rebuild. You are vulnerable, yes?
Now imagine Blood elves just set up camps around Darkshore with scrying orbs to spy on the night elves with the intention to attack the night elves when they are vulnerable… would you think it’s okay for the night elves to get a bit defensive and kill any spies?
That’s exactly what the night elves did to the blood elves in TBC.
Sometimes the Alliance doesn’t have good intentions, sometimes they just want to attack thier enemies when they are vulnurable.
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M …
No, not that situation. The blood elves directly participated in the Burning, they can be killed indiscriminately, unless the blood elves have not raised a white flag in advance and do not go naked, shackled.
Is there a generally accepted sign of “surrender” in Azeroth?
But OK. Why kill the dwarf?
Because the dwarf was a spy. He was smuggling information about the Blood Elves to the Night Elves who had a whole set up of scrying orbs tapped into the ley line nexus in the Ghostlands.
The Night Elves wanted to destroy the Sunwell because they thought it was dangerous. The Sunwell is dangerous, we learned that the hard way but without it the blood elves would become wretched like the Nightborne, they would have died. I don’t think the Night Elves condeming whole peoples to die over mana addiction is okay. It’s another more discrete form of genocide.
4 Likes