The Horde has always suffered from infighting. Like, from it’s inception.
And? Writers don’t always write the same story. They show that different characters can let these feelings consume them, and others can pull away. I am sorry that the Horde has recieved the short end of the stick on this, but that doesn’t mean it makes any sense- at all - to continue with it.
Man…
I tried so hard, and included qualifiers, to make it so my point wouldn’t be boiled down to that. Because it isn’t that simple, and I agree. Seeing you do it, and base your post on it, legitimately, bums me out.
I sincerely don’t know what else I could have said.
Did you forget Magatha once tried to take Thundebluff and while the Horde in general didnt give him aid(it was volunteers who decided to help him) while both Jaina and Anduin decided to help him retake his city!
It is not an exclusive theme to the Horde, was my point, and never to such a disastrous effect (barring grand scale events, such as Gul’dan v Doomhammer and, later, Garrosh v… everyone? Which sort of is what this all revolves around to begin with). Confrontation is huge in the orcish horde. They solve disputes physically as much as they do with words.
Humanity, on the other hand, has done much of the same thing, with dueling and war waging.
But they do. Even Metzen said as much, with events in Warcraft occurring repeatedly in circles.
Including
made it a point of contest.
Magatha was a bad actor that had a vested interest in Thunderbluff for nefarious purposes. Not because she was a good faith actor who was going to call him out for basically squandering peoples’ lives as the result of shrugging his shoulders and saying “Tarajo is a valid military strategy”. Him dying in Mak’gora would be a better consequence for his inaction than Magatha trying to whip up a situation where she could finish off the Bloodhoves all together.
And, that just brings me to another point: these same representatives of Northwatch that just burned Tarajo to the ground coming to Baine’s defense should have irreparably sunk him as a leader, by basically inviting them into their capitol. But, again, it had zero consequence, while somehow vindicating his poor decision to forgive and forget a literal military attack because Jaina and Anduin were somehow on the cool kids list.
How many human kingdoms of the Alliance fell to backstabbing evil?
How many human kingdoms still exist?
There’s evil in the Alliance, Stormwind just isn’t allowed to suffer recompense for any they portray.
As I see it, right now, with all pieces on the table, that dog will never be left to lie, because the damage is beyond done and nothing will ever make up for what’s transpired. That’s intentional by design, I’d wager. I’d even go as far to say that it truly ‘ending’ and not just a pause in conflict due to weariness from constant, un-ending war, a hope for peace or war fatigue from all assets spent and being unable to really fight, would be a finale point for the World of Warcraft story.
I did want to touch specifically on
as one event,
as a renegade event, not a deliberate betrayal by the whole of an entity,
was one event as I previously mentioned with Garrosh v everyone, and
a tired re-tread of a story that prompted the reasoning of “it happens in circles.” and one of the many reasons that brought up this whole conversation to begin with, where characters on the other side of the story suffer no consequence for their shortcomings as a character, whereas Horde characters reap the whirlwind, despite it being a construct that is by no means organic and constantly re-visited.
Forgive me when I say that it gave me a very doubtful impression on your detachment to the subject the moment I see an offered point being that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ has a bias leaning one way, by any measured margin.
Wow, you paint a grim outlook for your expectation of the story while asking for consistency.
Can you honestly look at the story of warcraft, on paper, and tell me, that, at least somewhat, the Alliance has not more often(Not always! more often) been more sympathetic in its goals than the Horde?
If you can, again… We’re gonna have to agree to disagree.
It is so perplexing to me that you demand consequences for individual characters, but have carefully sidestepped the Horde’s complicity in genocide. And that you believe in cycles, but can explain away instance after instance of Horde factions splitting away to do extreme things as “outliers, renegade events, and re-treads”
My expectation is, if hatred is self-defeating and has consistently been so, as it has been for Daelin and Garrosh, it should be applicable for Jaina, Tyrande and Danath, who all express the same qualities as Garrosh and Daelin but have yet to have it really impact them.
At no point have I side-stepped the Horde’s complicity in genocide. I literally made it a point in my above post, with:
To which a consequence came as a result of what transpired. A full out war happened that brought the armies of the Alliance and Horde to almost a full-on collapse, and it’s about to get so much worse with the Scourge coming back to fight these paper-thin armies that have little left to muster.
I am talking specifically about individuals, because they are the engines in which the story carries on. It all revolves around them.
EDIT: I know that Tyrande is still up in the air, given that Shadowlands has yet to conclude, but I want to touch on this with: it isn’t going to impact her. It would cause a nuclear-grade meltdown with the fanbase and be catastrophic to the franchise. Nobody is going to take such a risk with the product.
Maybe later, we can revisit this and you can tell me “I told you so” and I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but, Tyrande is a beloved star of the Warcraft story and after everything that happened in MOP 2.0 people would be beyond livid to have that story make sense. Yes, her hatred makes sense, as does Daelin’s, Jaina’s (which sort of just flipped off after Drazal’alor, and before that, after the Cataclysm? She’s very inconsistently written), Garrosh’s and Danath’s, but the message that they had been telling with the story was “hatred is self-defeating”.
First things first- You didn’t answer my question.
Moving on from that, though, It’s also interesting to me that you bring up Daelin, but earlier said;
So a consequence for genocide that the Alliance also suffers for doing the only reasonable thing- fighting back- is something you’d consider consistent?
I don’t think we’re going to really be revisiting the scourge. Sad as I am about it, I think the pre-patch is all we’re gonna get of the Scourge running loose on Azeroth.
It is, again, perplexing to me that you can list a bunch of characters whose their hatred didn’t consume them, while insisting that it should always do that to be consistent. Varian’s hatred didn’t consume him. Again, if you feel like it hurts the Horde characters more than Alliance characters, that’s valid, and I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make it an immutable cycle.
Jaina? No, she’s a pretty strong character. If you want me to break it down to a cycle, it’s- She extends her hand in friendship towards the Horde- The Horde spits in her eye- she gets mad-she’s forced to calm down-the horde spits in her eye again.
“These guys are bad and must be all exterminated” involves moral value judgments but is extremely shallow writing that doesn’t reflect the real world at all. It becomes really really bad the moment you start conceiving of the orcs as a different kind of people instead of mere monsters. At best their culture has led them to become omnicidal maniacs no less than four times in 60 years and the Horde becomes something… unfun to contemplate and identify with. At worst, everyone is some degree of genocidal maniac or deeply complicit in some way.
Part of the consequence of trying to turn the orcs into more than that without doing a complete reboot is that characters like Danath usually only have two paths:
‘I’m doing better now and I’m sorry for being racist’
‘I must die for my racism’
I mostly try to take WoW at surface value because so many of these narratives don’t hold up if you try to remember more than about 30 minutes of lore at any given time, and I’d really rather not seriously contemplate the horrors of war and putting up with genocide, etc. in my timekill game. The flipside is that characters like Danath take the brunt of the mood shifting necessary to actually enjoy most of WoW.
That’s valid, but i think characters who have more legitimate grievances usually have a better chance than those who don’t. My point’s been that Danath’s are. Maybe now that old uncle thoras is buddies with Nazgrim, something can come of that. A family reunion’s been long overdue anyway.
(Speaking of Thoras, it’s kinda nuts that we didn’t get his opinion on the Arathi warfront at all in that recent short story. Was a bit disappointed in that aspect.)
I was almost certain I did, but, I could have missed it, if you could redirect me to which question you had, I’m more than willing to answer it.
A genocide for an act of war brought about a war between the world’s two greatest superpowers. I’m not very surprised that it ended so catastrophically for all participants involved. It still ended with losing two of the Horde’s longer lived characters (for reasons that I hold a massive gripe over for an entirely different subject) the singlemost important character in the entire Troll storyline, and not a single consequence for Jaina (where she suffered even less than Mekkatorque and wasn’t either maimed, crippled or killed in her battle and her injuries were superficial, despite her wanton bloodlust where she turned around and said ‘yeah, dad, you were right all along’.) or Tyrande (who had a sip of some eldritch koolaid for super powers like Grommash, who’s story will not end like Grommash because the alternative is a career suicide and nobody would ever betray their product like that.)
The individual characters that were the driver of the BFA story basically received no consequence. The only one is Sylvanas, who’s going to be a loot pinata in about three patches from now, and Saurfang, who’s character was minced to fit a character role he never was.
I forgot Grommash. All told, it is 3 for 3. Incidentally, these people I can name on the latter end are all post-Garrosh. But I don’t believe Metzen was talking out of his hinequarters. He offered that very sentiment because he made the story and laid the ground rules. He even said it to try and protect BFA and why we were re-visiting an exhausting story.
He even wrote the opening cinematic (not how the expansion actually happened, they flipped the script on that) and was very on the nose with “ours is a cycle of hatred”.
Doesn’t really seem like much compared something that we were told is a genocide of a playable race, and the canonical annihilation of a place where many players first experienced Azeroth.
…Rastakhan?
Consequence for what? Being absolutely right about what the Horde would do? She called the burning of Teldrassil back in Tides of War
You can’t really get mad at someone for assuming the worst out of others. Not when they end up being right, at least.
Powers from a goddess she has faithfully worshipped for thousands of years instead of demon blood from some rando in a cloak he just met?
Jesus Christ, Gladwell is clearly speaking to Blizzard’s writing of World of Warcraft. Yes, the writers of Warcraft 3 were willing to paint the Alliance in a much less vibrant light. Not so for Nu-Blizz.