Yes to everything you said but despite being an elf Sylvanas did keep all of Lordaeron customs for the Forsaken, right down to the cultural importance of the wickerman festival, and also creating a grave for Terenas, and with the exception of gutterspeak being part Thalassian (mostly to explain why Forsaken can’t understand common in gameplay mechanics) she never expected the Forsaken to convert to even culture.
Her being an elf is a pretty minor annoyance. The Forsaken have the most Lordaeron culture in the game.
Sure, but that history still dates back to the resettlement of Stormwind following the Second War. There were also slaves kept by the orcs who were freed, so the sole survivors of Stormwind were not in fact the refugees who ended up in Lordaeron.
Even with all that said, we’ve never been given statistics on to what extent the people of Stormwind are a refugee population. I’d be fascinated to see them, but we’ve never been given those statistics. There’s definitely mixed ethnicities there, but I do not believe that this intra-humanity-multiculturalism means that the Kingdom of Stormwind has a claim to all Lordaeronian characters ever, especially undead ones, when the Forsaken have long been deprived of their own Lordaeronian heritage, at least in terms of in-game representation.
Playable humans start in Stormwind. It does not mean that they were born and raised in Stormwind, especially since that would actually be impossible given that not long before WoW, Stormwind didn’t even exist. In fact, what evidence we have in light of Stormwind’s destruction in the First War and its status in the leadup to the Third suggests that playable humans in WoW are predominently from Lordaeron. Because if they weren’t, they would be literal children like Anduin was at the start of WoW.
That’s just how the timeline works.
The Forsaken stripped themselves of that heritage. They deliberately and wilfully rejected it in Warcraft 3, when they betrayed and destroyed what remained of Lordaeron’s leadership in the name of Sylvanas, a Thalassian Elf. And then in Vanilla, their questing largely revolved around purging what remants of Lordaeron’s society that they could find, particularly in places like Hillsbrad, where the Forsaken embarked on a deliberate extermination campaign targeting Lordaeron humans.
This is all a matter of public record.
A) Gavinrad was from Stormwind. He’s like the only notable Stormwind character to appear in Warcraft 3, come on man.
B) Because Uther wouldn’t want anything to do with the Forsaken. Because only a complete and utter imbecile would look at the Forsaken and not see that they are no longer the people that they once were.
Huh? Why shouldn’t something count just because it was prior to WoW? Why does the fact that the Forsaken were killed and raised from Alliance bodies suddenly erase the Alliance’s role in the narrative? Did Arthas’ Alliance history cease to be relevant just because he was turned into the Alliance’s enemy? Does Anduin’s Alliance history cease to be relevant for the same reason? Given how Blizzard wrote WotLK and how they’re writing Shadowlands, that certainly doesn’t appear to be the case.
This is the core of my objection here. What you’re proposing isn’t just sidelining the Alliance, it’s tantamount to Alliance erasure, and it’s an inevitable byproduct of the thing that I mentioned earlier, which is the incredibly toxic “rule” that the moment anyone becomes undead, they go Horde. That is a straight up parasitic relationship that benefits the Horde exclusively.
What you don’t realize is that them building up a stronger sense of human identity will inevitably result in their identity growing closer to an Alliance identity and growning more distant from a Horde identity.
This is in fact the typical complaint from Horde players (and Forsaken players) regarding Calia. They don’t WANT a human identity, they want an undead identity. Giving them a human identity is taking something that the Alliance wants to keep away from the Alliance and giving it to the Horde even though the Horde doesn’t want it. It makes literally nobody happy.
Personally, I thought the whole zombie drama aspect of them was way more important than their nationality. And since Sylvanas was basically the poster child for that suffering, I didn’t mind that she was an elf leading them (though I’m weird and would have preferred she actually look more zombie-like. But y’know; marketing).
I thought them losing Lordaeron sucked not because of what it represented in their life, but because of what it was after their death. To me, it “re-became” theirs as it changed with them. It’s why Calia as a character fails to land in every way to me. And honestly I don’t like Derek either, but for different reasons; his dynamic is that the forsaken are his scourge analogue, and to me it’d be just as insane for him to join them as a forsaken would willingly go with LK Arthas.
No she didn’t. In BtS we see that she was actively suppressing it.
She had warped that into being an element of her own cult of personality actually.
That was the Alliance as per Exploring Azeroth.
You don’t know what Lordaeron culture is.
Warcraft Chronicles explicitly states that the only survivors of the First War fled to Lordaeron, and that the vast majority of them stayed in Lordaeron even after Stormwind was reclaimed.
Yeah they only checks notes controlled Lordaeron since Vanilla. Oh those poor Forsaken, being denied Lordaeron stuff.
Parqual Finitas’s recollection of smuggling books and having them confescated doesn’t match with any Forsaken lore. The history of the living doesn’t matter when the Forsaken are longer lived. It wasn’t mean to be taken as a cult.
The Forsaken have never been portrayed like that, in fact even Sylvanas has been very outspoken that the Forsaken retain thier Lordaeron rights and identity. I think that was written not only to set up Parqual’s mistrust of Sylvanas and also his death. It was meant to create a divide between the dead and the living. The dead have no need to worry themselves over the past, BtS was pushing this in preperation for The Gathering.
You dismiss Golden’s writing as bad, unless it suits you Ain.
They destroyed Garithos, who constantly called them monsters and claimed Lordaeron for himself, making very clear he would never have accepted or welcomed them in any form. No self-respecting person would just say “oh fair enough yeah all yours Mr Racist” when faced with Garithos. He was a means to an end who was then expunged.
Because prior to WoW Lordaeron was an Alliance faction. In WoW, the largest amount of Lordaeron’s land and people have always belonged to the Horde.
Acknowledge the Alliance history, sure. I certainly do - as I said above, the Forsaken were all Alliance at some point. That doesn’t mean they need to be, or should be, now.
Makes me happy Forsaken should acknowledge their human history while also leaning in to their darker themes, such as the Cult of the Forgotten Shadow.
You yourself acknowledge the Forsaken were once Alliance lmao, acknowledge their history if I’m expected to acknowledge the history of the lame living ones.
You just straight up ignored everything else I posted huh.
To say nothing of the fact that you don’t actually seem to understand what exactly happened with Garithos. He didn’t “claim Lordaeron for himself.” Sylvanas said that it was his as part of their deal to jointly attack Balnazzar.
Ignoring your presumption regarding the Forsaken’s demographics, so? Warcraft 3 set up a lot of stuff for WoW, do we not count it because it was all pre-WoW? The Forsaken themselves owe their existence to “pre-WoW” lore.
I actually have a lot of nuanced opinion on Human-Forsaken relations and how they really should be explored, and part of that nuance involves acknowledging that the Forsaken aren’t what they once were anymore. Nobody with eyes should be disputing that. The Forsaken themselves don’t dispute that.
It’s hard to keep track day in and out who likes what. I’m sorry.
It’s just a hinge conclusion you came up with over one sentence in BtS. I feel like we’ve had this disagreement multiple times. I don’t want to rehash it.
I’m not going to presume to comment on the racial lore of Alliance races that I don’t have as much knowledge of, but for how humans are organized in the Alliance, here is what I would propose:
The Alliance at large is reorganized into the Grand Alliance of Azeroth. Within the Grand Alliance of Azeroth, each race has its own internal governing structure ranging from unitary states to federations to empires.
Humans, specifically the Seven Kingdoms, are collectively represented by the original Alliance of Lordaeron (Yes, so we have an Alliance within an Alliance) so as to retain humanity’s historical continuity stretching back to WC2 without putting every Alliance race into the same human-dominated political structure.
The Alliance of Lordaeron consists of:
The Kingdom of Stormwind (Represented by King Anduin Wrynn)
The Kingdom of Stromgarde (Represented by Danath Trollbane)
The Kingdom of Gilneas (Represented by Genn Greymane)
The Admiralty of Kul’Tiras (Represented by Jaina Proudmoore)
The Magocracy of Dalaran (Represented by the Council of Six)
The Holy Republic of Lordaeron (jointly led by Alonsus Faol, Eligor Dawnbringer, and High Priestess Laurena)
The Dominion of Alterac (nominally led by Jorad Ravenholdt, in practice a colony jointly administered by representatives from Stromgarde, Gilneas, and Lordaeron.)
Much like how the Alliance is currently organized, the Alliance of Lordaeron would be jointly represented and coordinated by a High King, who would serve to represent the Humans in the Grand Alliance of Azeroth.
This way humanity gets to keep its coherent legacy, without simultaneously smothering all the other members of the Alliance with their dominance.
Why would they bother with Alterac Valley and that frigid region in general?The Frostwolf Clan just keeps to itself and basically left the Horde during Cataclysm because of Forsaken tactics and Garrosh’s leadership.
Alterac as a human kingdom is as dead as it can get. How many times have we put down its bandit survivors?
Overall I like it but I want Alonsus Faol to be a major leading figure in the Forsaken, personally. I’m really vibing with the idea of the Forsaken, as a faction, leaning heavily into “balance”, with both Light and Dark elements to their racial themes.
The way I see it, if the purpose of Calia leading the Forsaken is to help mend bridges between humanity and the Forsaken then Alonsus Faol doing the same for the humans makes sense.
Not only is Alonsus Faol a Holy Priest so he wouldn’t contribute much to it, I doubt that Blizzard is going to make the two Prime Cosmic Forces a Forsaken thing, especially given that their nature predisposes them to be more closely aligned to death and void.
IMO if humans and Forsaken are going to drift closer together thematically it needs to be reciprocal. What kind of undead thematics would humans get in exchange for this?
Forsaken should acknowledge their human history while also leaning in to their darker themes, such as the Cult of the Forgotten Shadow.