I gave you a like, but what you said needs repeating.
I have deep enmity towards Blizzard for what they did to the Night Elves. What Blizzard did to the Horde player base is much, much worse.
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Neither position is good, but Night Elves at least don’t have to scrounge for reasons to like themselves or their faction other than the Alliance not crushing the Horde fast enough.
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Blizzard has a fantasy racism problem and is too in love with “cool” stories to see what they’re accidentally saying about “”“primitive”"" cultures and the “”“civilized”"" who have to “”“teach”"" them
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You, it was Cataclysm, and Garrosh after he was concussed by the villain bat, that started us down this dark road.
Before then, things between the factions were as they should be. We didn’t like each other. We even despised each other. There was a lot of distrust and buried hostility and resentment. There were even incidences where those low key hostilities would boil over into bloodshed. It never escalated to World War levels.
Back in Wrath, in the introductory Horde quests for Borean Tundra, there’s a quest they give you. It involves a holding area filled with Alliance deserters who fled in fear of the Lich King’s forces. You have to escort one of these prisoners to a crossroad where you meet with an Alliance rep to hand them over.
The quest giver has no respect for this Alliance deserter. He spits and calls them a coward, he leaves them in the pig pen until you come by to escort them back to the Alliance.
But there’s no torture. No magical interrogation like the Kirin Tor has you do in the same zone. They aren’t kept for leverage or information. There’s an understanding there between the two factions that manages to both be cooperative and cold at the same time.
The whole reason it worked during Wrath and not today is because by Wrath, any major event of conflict between the Horde and the Alliance was near a decade past by that point. They’d kept things low key between the Horde and Alliance since Warcraft 3. The factions didn’t have to be buddies to cooperate like Baine and Anduin seem to think they do. The Horde absolutely CAN despise the Alliance while still adhering to certain courtesies.
This pretty much disappeared as a concept once Garrosh went downhill.
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The most important element.
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That’s because the same people who broke away from Azshara are for the most point STILL ALIVE TODAY.
There’s not a long line of generations of Night Elves who don’t remember the War of the Ancients and the events that led up to the Night Elves being made immortal.
It’s not as if Tyrande established a dynasty of successors… it’s always been her from the beginning. Likewise the people she rules over are for the most part, her contemporaries from the same age and haven’t been pressing to take over her job.
I disagree whole heartedly with Steve’s quote. The Horde knows what it stands for, it doesn’t need a direction in any way other than ‘forward’ and we certainly did not need a retread of MOP.
That said, to the main question; is the Horde fascists?
I don’t know! I don’t think anyone knows, because they keep changing the identity of the Horde every other expansion! Are we the baddies? Are we the monstrous exile collective that shelters both the good and bad of society? Are we something else, for better or worse? Who knows! The script is as solid as a hot soup! Continuity is a needle skipping on a vinyl when it comes to Warcraft.
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There is so much stuff in this story, not all of it coherent, which makes it really easy to cherrypick evidence for any argument you want to make. But overall, I don’t think the Horde really looks like a fascist state, and in fact the basic make-up of the Horde is almost the opposite of what you would expect in a fascist state. Specifically, the Horde is radically heterogeneous, where a fascist state would be radically homogenous. In fact, from the outside the Horde looks positively liberal.
But that said, some of the Horde races certainly tend in a fascist direction, as with the Forsaken’s devotion to their Dark Lady, and the Orc fascination with militarism and obedience to the Warchief. And there is no doubt that the Horde seems to keep winding up with quasi-fascistic leaders, which is obviously problematic.
So, no , the Horde isn’t fascist. But it is severely dysfunctional in a way that has allowed fascist-leaning types to take advantage of it.
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The American standard of Liberal? which is pretty conservative by Euro and Brit standards.
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okay, let’s begin debunking. First of all, Taurajo was a legitimate military target. Stated by baine, and this fact
Taurajo was admittedly what you might call a ‘soft target,’ primarily a hunters’ camp. Still, it had been used to recruit, equip, and train Horde infantry for many years.
Second, there was bad intel that said that the camp was about to attack the Alliance.
Third, unlike Southshore, where troops were ordered to slay fleeing farmers and civilians. The Alliance made efforts to ensure the civilians survived by leaving gaps in their lines in which civilians could flee.
Source: ~https://wow.gamepedia.com/The_Battle_for_Hillsbrad
I am not touching the other stuff, as I don’t want to derail this thread.
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Honestly agreed. The civilized Horde with their industrial era orcs, space age goblins, Blood Elves with their magitech, the Nightborne and their vast vineyards with accompanying wine mom aristocracy, and Zandalari paving their cities with gold constantly punching down on the wild savages living in the forests is getting old.
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I’m Canadian, but I meant liberal in the more traditional sense of the word.
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I knew you was too lovely to not be Canadian.
But on topic, I can already feel the High Elf main that we all know revolting himself on his bed while we talk about an authoritarian and totalitarian political system having similarities with the Horde.
Well, I don’t think the Horde is fascist on itself. Sylvanas flirts with it, for sure, but I don’t see the Horde as a whole going on that path.
Wohooo!! Ontario here!
Btw I want to move to Canada. Any tips?
Short answer: yes, the Horde is fascist, but only because Blizz decided they were. I would argue that even going into MOP, the Horde was still on track to deliver on the narrative fantasy of the uneasy alliance of the marginalized and demonized peoples of the world, coming together to fight for a place in the world. The Horde was anything but xenophobic, having accepted far more disparate and different cultures into it than the Alliance ever has. Rather than both the orcs and the forsaken portrayed as death-cult police states, the Horde was the faction of strong individualism; my interpretation of Thrall’s ‘Warchief’ title back then was not that the leader of the Horde must always lead to war, but that war is the only thing the Horde needs a chief for, and that when they’re not coming together to fight they’re all free to live in peace as they choose; Thrall couldn’t have, for example, ordered Sylvanas to build him a big statue in the Undercity, he just had the right to tell her when and where her troops had to fight, which was a portrayal that weakened in Cataclysm but still could have been saved. Even Garrosh’s war could have been rendered as justified if a little more attention to the whole ‘orcish children starving in the streets and the Night Elves are being douches about trade’ thing that we’ve just sort of been told was the case. Had we gotten to see a touch more of Garrosh’s empathetic, charismatic side, and had he gotten the chance to mellow out and come to understand the orcish past, the nature of the Horde, and the complexities of the Horde’s situation, then I think we’d be in a very different place right now; the Horde’s story could have been the story of oppressed peoples fighting against Alliance hegemony for a place in the world, instead of being as dark and obviously fascy as it is now.
Basically, around the Cata-Mists area, Blizzard just started applying really problematic tropes to WoW entirely uncritically. It’s gross that the faction that was, in Warcraft 3, representative of all of the oppressed and underprivileged (and later, Forsaken by their loved ones) peoples that fantasy tends to portray as monsters, has become largely portrayed as standard monsters through really problematic lenses. Orcs get mocked for their stupidity and solve all their problems with violence, the Forsaken people aren’t to be trusted, their cruel treatment has made them rabid dogs that need to be put down, trolls get mocked for their bad hygiene and hilarious accents and are wholly ineffectual, barely able to govern themselves, Baine is 100% a savagely racist Crying Indian stereotype… ugh.
Meanwhile the one race in the game that is portrayed by now as universally orderly, capable, and morally just, who must help all the other races, their enemies and allies alike to govern themselves and overcome the failures of their inferior cultures, who must turn the other cheek to those savages and take up the burden of teaching them peace and civilization… are the universally white, european-cultured humans. Remember back in Warcraft 3, when the ultimate villain was Arthas, a white Ubermensch portrayed as ultimately weak and unfit to rule? And remember how now the main character of the franchise is Anduin, who’s the same white Ubermensch played completely straight and who must singlehandedly save all of the not-white people, I mean, other races of Azeroth from themselves?
It’s gross, gross… ah, what’s the point. Blizz isn’t listening.
/10char
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Sylvanas/Voljins horde became fascist. No more free thought, have any bad thoughts boom you get sent away never seen again. Don’t want to participate in a pointless war, boom you are imprisoned or executed. Don’t want to kill your fellow trolls in a genocide in zul aman because our new allies demanded it. too bad your opinion dosen’t matter.
How was Vol’Jins Horde fascist? He was always an open minded one, wasnt a warmonger, stood for the honorable horde…and tbh he was warchief during WoD, he didn’t do much to be filed as fascist lol
Good grief you guys like the G word don’t you.
Vol’jin didn’t really do any of that.
Sylvanas didn’t either, until Before the Storm. The thought police was never apart of the Forsaken identity, nor was the ‘we are ONLY forsaken and you MUST think this way!!!’ bull(profanity). It was only by Christie Golden’s introduced book that they started adopting more nazl-like qualities.
This was a creation of BFA and only BFA. If it is fascism, it’s only one face to an increasingly problematic case of identity crisis, where they don’t know what they want the Horde to be, even though everyone pretty much knew what the Horde was, including the introduction text at the top right of the screen during character creation.
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Isn’t ally led by a monarchy?