If you could retcon the Burning of Teldrassil, would you?

Lore Story Forum
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See, I see it more as “I’m going to exploit money from Joe by identity theft” and then getting frustrated by not being able to get his information that the would-be exploiter gets obsessed with stealing Joe’s identity and forgets that they were after the money in the first place.

See, but that’s where my main issue is. The plan is “drive a wedge between the Alliance,” that I agree with. What I take issue with is that - even if she was wrong - Sylvanas had a thought process out for how “capture Teldrassil” would accomplish this. There is no such thought process in how “burn Teldrassil” would accomplish that, and she changed her entire goal to instead “make the Alliance lash out in anger” and completely fumbled the “drive a wedge between the Alliance” goal.

So to me it’s not semantics of what we consider the plan, but her throwing the whole plan away.

Yeah, but her hopelessness isn’t spreading to the rest of the Alliance. Delaryn doesn’t even do anything of notice after being raised.

Thank you for your understanding.

I agree with you at least that he shouldn’t have agreed to the war or had any part of it. But he can atone for that, even if he likely can’t ever actually make up for it.

Well I hope he does, because martyrdom isn’t a healthy mindset, either.

That is what I’m trying to address, though. Your case has been “that was her plan” when I don’t see her connecting any dots to make that fit her plan at all.

The lack of a thought process from her is what I’m seeing, though.

Well, if you can think of any more, I always welcome them.

Well, I mean, I’m not right now. That’s why I’m not playing on the Horde right now, because it wouldn’t be fun. And I won’t play the Horde again until I consider it potentially fun again.

Like I said, Youtube has covered the means for lore purposes, and gameplay, well, I don’t really play WoW for gameplay any more. Mostly play it for my story’s characters. And I wouldn’t expose my Horde alts to BfA’s story. I like them too much for that.

I don’t disagree with you. But if anything, Saurfang could atone for the War of the Thorns by changing the Horde to not be this any more. That was Thrall’s biggest failing, not actually being able to reform the Horde (his whole excuse back in The Shattering being that the Horde would consider him weak for trying, so he didn’t even try). If Saurfang could actually pull it off, that would be atonement. Now, I don’t think Blizzard can pull it off. But, still, there are hypothetical ways.

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Being a rebel is fun. Zandalar is fun. My fav zone is Vol’dun I think. Being a psychotic war criminal? Not so much fun. I thought there was some messed up stuff the allies do though too - like killing the Zandalari exiles seemed kind of unnecessary. Still not really comparable though.

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When it came time to choosing what city in Japan to target for nuking, one of the criteria was that it would be a city that had been untouched by any previous bombing… in order to show what kind of destruction this single bomb would make.

The first city chosen was Kyoto. It was spared only because Admiral Stimson who had been an ambassador to Japan in the old days pointing out that burning the spiritual heart of Japan would go against their plans to recruit them as a post war ally against their long-standing enemy, Russia.

There are a variety of reasons Japan became allies with the United States, but don’t forget the mutual enemy part of the picture. There are still disputed territory issues between the two countries over land the Soviets grabbed and are still holding onto.

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Yes, as Allerya pointed out, the two situations aren’t actually that much of a parallel. I still fully expect Blizzard to just have the Night Elves be accept peace with the Horde again, though.

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After the final 8.3 raid it reveals this has all been a tabletop game with Sylvanas, Jaina, Anduin, and the others playing with Nathanos GMing.

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I’d accept. In fact, even if they tell that everything was a dream from a random inkeeper in Orgrimmar I’d accept it too.

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Everything is semantics, and semantics matter. Genocide has a particular meaning sensitive to history. You can’t bandy it about carelessly. That’s precisely what the alt-right racists do with their “White Genocide” nonsense. Again, if Teldrassil is a genocide, so are attacks like Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and thousands of significantly less egregious military actions, such as carpet bombing, or air strikes on Aleppo, because the word isn’t based on a degree but a principle) - that’s the implication. In my view, those are egregious acts of terror and terribly unjust warfare, but they don’t constitute genocides. I’m talking about consistency. Words aren’t feelings or sentiments. They’re particular, and they convey particular meaning: genocide isn’t just a vague sentiment about a “really, really bad thing that kills lots of innocent people.” The word isn’t the feeling of disgust it’s intended to invoke, it’s the particular historical definition.

This isn’t the kind of systematic execution I’m talking about, and it’s disingenuous to say otherwise. This is targeted assassinations of military garrisons. The simultaneous strikes, as I recall, are against sentinels and druids (we have several POV characters iirc). It doesn’t constitute a genocide if Canada takes out key governmental figures and military bases of the United States en route to Washington DC (even razing cities in the way tbh), and then airstrikes the capitol to smithereens. They aren’t targeted for being Night Elves or worshiping Elune, they’re targeted for being a military superpower (and key economic player with strategic positioning) in the Alliance.

I’m open to the argument that this is a genocide, but the case needs to be made, and the implications need to be followed through on. If Teldrassil is a genocide, so is Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Dresden, Fallujah, Hamburg, Tokyo, Saigon… It makes the US the most frequent perpetrator and supporter of genocide in history, with repeated, unrepentant usage since the nation’s conception, starting with the Abenaki and the Cherokee. If that’s how we want the consistency to play out, I’m fine with that conclusion. Are you?

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Except thats not how genocide is defined.
Your entire post is fundementally false.

But we have debated this before and despite being given literal definitions of what the UN and the red cross considers genocide you still persist with your false equivalencies.

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With Sylvanas’ goal being to more or less end the night elves as a power on Kalimdor, it’s feelin’ pretty genocidey.

Edit: It’s also referred to, in lore, as genocide. So there’s that.
Edit 2: Also to clarify, the goal in mind in WW2 wasn’t extermination, cultural or otherwise, so there’s that separation.

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Not only that but also she was not seeking to cripple the Night Elf Military by targeting some strategic ports or holding some area.

She legit wanted to exterminate them so there were not enough of them to pose a threat. Imagine if the US wanted to deploy that strategy.

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You yourself are showing profound hypocrisy by throwing the word around and comparing those who have used it here to racial supremacists.

The attacks are not comparable. Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be worse, because they were real, and connected to the amount of history and people’s lives that can not actually be comprehended in any single person’s lifetime. But Teldrassil, being fictional that it is and easily written to be whatever Blizzard wants it to be, was a burning of an entire island of indeterminate size. The atomic bombing destroyed an estimate of around two thirds of their targets, and unimaginable fallout beyond that. But Blizzard could handwave the entirety of Teldrassil and not just Darnassus but it and all of the other settlements on Teldrassil burning away because of some catapults like it was just a note to be glossed over.

If the burning of Teldrassil was real, which thank all goodness it is not, it would have been worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I doubt any of us can actually even comprehend what the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was like or even imagine what anyone who lived through it experienced.

Here’s some semantics for you:

From Sylvanas’ inner monologue in A Good War:

    This battle was not about a piece of land. Even Saurfang knew that. Taking the World Tree was a way to inflict a wound that could never heal. Losing their homes and their leaders would have ended the kaldorei as a nation, if not a people.

I think you might have missed the entirety of the history of language, as the meanings of words have consistently changed from each generation to generation, and sometimes even in between. You should look up the concept of language as a living thing sometime.

I would make that conclusion. The U.S. is not a saintly nation that has never done wrong or believed wrong, and perhaps something actually to be thankful to Justice Neil Gorsuch for is his upholding of what little promises the U.S. made to native people.

Nonetheless, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny#Native_Americans:

Americans increasingly believed that Native American ways of life would “fade away” as the United States expanded. As an example, this idea was reflected in the work of one of America’s first great historians, Francis Parkman, whose landmark book The Conspiracy of Pontiac was published in 1851. Parkman wrote that after the British conquest of Canada in 1760, Indians were “destined to melt and vanish before the advancing waves of Anglo-American power, which now rolled westward unchecked and unopposed”.[79]

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Sylvanas being a slave to her emotions and impulsively deciding to burn the tree was a bit of bad writing. If I could change anything about it, I would have made the catapults suddenly start firing against her orders. Make the burning the result of the actions of some mysterious third party who wants to provoke the faction war until only one faction remains. A mysterious third party who previously wanted one faction to dominate Azeroth. Someone like Wrathion.

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I mean yeah bro, they kind of are, so I am fine with that conclusion.

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I literally gave what the guy who coined the term said.

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That was considered “the solution to the Indian problem”. The whole point of the buffalo hunts was resource deprivation.

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The Greeks coined a term once, phakelos, meaning “bundle”. The word worked its way through Italian, then French, then English, where it came to mean “a bundle of small sticks used for kindling”. From there, it came to be an informal name for cigarettes. Add in a cultural connotation that smoking cigars was masculine, while smoking cigarettes was effeminate, and the word is now a gay slur. As one genocidal warmonger once said, “Times change.”

Now, genocide is any attempt to render a group of people defunct. You can even do so with abstract concepts, like culture or religion.

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id retcon the whole expansion

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