Is Turalyon set to reclaim Undercity for (with) the Light?

Lore Story Forum
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And that’s really the problem: this only works if Blizzard is willing to portray the Alliance as anything other than “perpetually morally-superior.”

That being said there is something to

I feel like the most plausible thing that could happen with this is that AU Yrel shows up while we’re off in the Shadowlands and the following scenario occurs:

Yrel: We followed the Mag’har orcs here to Azeroth. They’re evil and destroyed Draenor!

Turalyon: I knew it! The orcs allied with the Legion once, they must’ve done so again! The Light is never wrong!

Meanwhile, over on the Horde side…

Eitrigg: Please don’t trust them! I saw first-hand that Yrel and the Army of the Light were enslaving innocent orcs!

Turalyon: No orc is innocent! Besides, why should we believe anything you say after Teldrassil?

Horde as a whole: We’re screwed, aren’t we?

Not to mention that the “Light Mother” is more than likely an Alternate Xe’ra, who could have plausibly sensed her own destruction at Illidan’s hand, and now wants not only revenge on, say, Velen for letting it happen, but also wants to reclaim Turalyon as her puppet.

It would at least allow the Alliance as a whole to be cast in the role of “misled faction,” where only a select few individuals (Turalyon, Yrel) are the “bad actors” who are truly irredeemable.

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Hardly.

It was the last resort. Alleria was willing to make it their first option because time was of the essence, but Turalyon insisted on doing everything beforehand to try and get the information they needed. As the process of extracting information happened, he used the Light to restrain those being questioned so they would not hurt themselves while thrashing. The fact their loves ones watched was, again, a result of the press for time; no one was holding the families of those being mind-read so they’d have to watch.

Just because Turalyon is willing to do what is necessary doesn’t mean he’s into it. Even Alleria was disgusted by the methods they’d used.

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The problem with this is that we do see for ourselves that Turalyon’s and Alleria’s standards of what’s “acceptable” aren’t necessarily the same moral standards of the current Alliance, and a lot of that goes back to the fact that they’re literally veterans of the original Alliance of Lordaeron.

Which considered measures like the orc internment camps to be perfectly-acceptable, by the way.

Not to accuse you personally of this, but I feel like there is something of a double standard here; if Orgrim Doomhammer or Grom Hellscream were still hanging out with Thrall’s Horde in WoW, for example, I guarantee a lot of people would be screaming, “These guys represent the Horde at its worst!”

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To clarify, I’m not saying what Alleria and Turalyon did was acceptable. In fact it was downright evil. All I’m saying is, it’s not something they were, “totally game for,” or anything. It was quite literally their last resort, and happened largely due to the limited time they had.

I mean, it was that or genocide so… Not sure what to say on that one. Lesser of two evils?

WoD doesn’t really help that impression in the slightest, especially as Ogrim Doomhammer’s content was practically cut from it, and the expansion was cut short so the last we had from Grom was, “Draenor’s Free!”

I think the bigger issue is that Blizzard hasn’t been willing to put in the time and effort to redeem older names like Grom and Doomhammer. Had they been in Thrall’s Horde in WoW, and been given proper redemption arcs, they’d more likely represent the Orcs at their best, as people manipulated by the Burning Legion into doing horrible things, things they’d never do on their own.

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You make it sound like shackling them with the Light so they don’t agony writhe their skulls into a rock is like a solid.

I’m just saying the guy’s knee jerk reaction to Faol is “Die monster, you don’t belong in this world” until Alonsos pulls a ‘Search your feelings’. Then a book later he’s all “Sure honey I’ll let you split the minds of civilians open with ravenous whispers from beyond the furthest stars”. I’m not getting a picture of a particularly good person here.

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I suppose he should’ve just stood there and let them thrash until they killed or crippled themselves and Alleria was forced to move on to someone else?

Maybe you don’t want a picture of a particularly good person? Your summary of those events is skipping over the details pretty heavily.

When Turalyon met Alonsus, he didn’t see Faol. He saw a monster in Faol’s flesh. To him it was a desecration of the person he had loved and respected. It wasn’t until Faol revealed to him that he wasn’t some demon inhabiting Faol’s remains, but was actually Faol, that Turalyon realized he had been mistaken. For some reason you see this as a bad thing? I see it as character growth. It changed Turalyon’s entire perspective on the Forsaken.

And that is something people never give Turalyon credit for; he’s willing to change his views based on new information. People like to claim he’s a zealot waiting for the slightest heresy to go full Deus Vult but never accept the fact that he isn’t. He’s even said straight up to Anduin, “The Light can guide us, but we must never allow it to control us.”

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I mean, yes and no.

Yes, Turalyon and Terenas were showing mercy to the orcs when they decided to incarcerate them, and it should be noted that long before the camps, they had actually held Doomhammer captive in the Undercity, of all places.

But at the same time, you’d think Terenas would have known something of Blackmoore’s character, enough to know that giving him total control over the entire system of internment camps was one of the worst things he could have done.

Even allowing Antonidas and the Kirin Tor to run them as research facilities rather than prisons/gladiator rings would have been a far better decision.

Oh, it definitely is, and here we see again the unbalanced “moral scaling” between the two factions:

The Alliance will take in a leader who literally seceded American Confederacy-style because his fellow rulers wouldn’t execute the orcs en masse (Greymane).

Meanwhile, over on the Horde side, an orc who has fought tooth and nail over time to redeem himself of his past sins with the Path of Glory and the First and Second Wars (Saurfang)?

Yeah, we have to keep guilt-tripping him.

To be fair, this is also the guy who, in Tides of Darkness, literally comes to the conclusion that, “well, the orcs are enemies of life, so the Light doesn’t support them. It only supports humanity. So I can kill as many orcs as I want, and it’s all good.”

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Yes, thank you, turalyon is actually pretty good and reasonable which is one of the things that impressed me since on this setting NOBODY talks about anything and crap happens.

if we use anduin as a scale of good hes a peg down but above anyone else, define good first then so we can have an understanding of what you mean.

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He thought that on the heat of the moment but on the next page it says he didnt had the heart to go trough it.

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I’m just saying his knee jerk reaction to something he doesn’t immediately understand being “PURGE IT IN HOLY FLAME” probably isn’t meant to be a good sign.

Also Alleria’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ was a bad idea. How do I know it’s a bad idea? Because it doesn’t accomplish anything. Mercy on behalf of the Forsaken Apothecary and Jania Proudmore, as well as good ole fashion spycraft by Shaw, is what actually yields valuable Intel.

All they managed to do was create an orc and human kid who’re definitely going to grow up really side eyeing these heroes Stormwind built statues to.

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Unfortunately, Terenas was also King, and trying to hold together the Alliance. It seems the cost of that would’ve surpassed what nations would’ve been willing to pay. I don’t disagree that allowing Antonidas and the Kirin Tor to research the lethargy in the hopes of rehabilitating the Orcs would’ve been the ideal choice, but the steep taxes levied just to keep the camps running as prisons was already pushing the peasantry to nearing revolt.

Saurfang guilt tripped himself more than anyone on the Alliance ever did. The story the developers were telling was of the kind of horrors veterans can suffer through. Did they tell it well? I think it was hyperbolic at times, but not being a veteran who suffered through the horrors of war, I really can’t say.

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Somebody who doesn’t completely abandon their moral compass when things start to get messy.

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Since when has that been his knee jerk reaction to something he doesn’t understand? During the Second War, Turalyon struggled to understand the Orcs, how they could exist with such evil and malevolence. His first reaction was not to purge them in Holy Flame. He questioned over and over, and even when he came to the answer of them not being of the Light, his decision still wasn’t to purge them in Holy Flame.

She did receive information from her victims though. All Jaina did was prove the value of having a, ‘good cop,’ to bounce off of her, ‘bad cop.’

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Or when things don’t go their way.

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Since he met Alonsos and, again, first thought is “Better murder him in church”. And F’s sake Turs you just worked with Illidan. I think you’d get not everything with scary features is a bad guy.

And yeah Faol managed to talk him out of it but that’s Alonsos Faol. If it was just some Forsaken mushroom farmer who took a wrong turn the guy probably would’ve been vaporized long before he had a chance to explain he’s just hustling fungi here

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Well turalyon was a soldier first and a paladin second, he is a more pragmatic person since his days on the first war so i dont see whats this all about of “abandoning his morals”.

You presume of knowing his moral compass, do elaborate more then since all ive read of turalyon demonstrates he has been quite constant.

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Again, you’re missing the context.

It wasn’t, “Oh, scary looking monster thing, must kill.”

It was, “This monster is using the flesh of my mentor, the man who taught me about the light, a man as close to me as a father! He’s parading about in his flesh with impunity! I will NOT let my Mentor be desecrated like this, not his remains, not his memory!”

Except, no, because as I explained here, Turalyon didn’t nearly attack Foal because he was Forsaken, he nearly attacked him because he thought some dark force was using the remains of his mentor, desecrating him.

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Exhibit A:

The orcs were not of this world.

They were foreign to this planet, to this very plane of existence. They came from elsewhere, and were powered by demons from even farther beyond.

The Holy Light did unite all life, everyone in this world. But not the orcs, who did not belong here.

And that meant his task was clear. He was charged with upholding the Holy Light and using its blazing glory to scour this world clean of all threats from without, and to maintain the purity within.

The orcs did not belong here. And that meant he could strike them down with impunity.
World of Warcraft: Tides of Darkness, by: Aaron Rosenberg, page 354

I love how you keep bringing up this “heat of the moment” stuff as if it’s a blanket justification for everything Turalyon does.

It’s not.

And there is no “oh, he didn’t have the heart to go through with it,” that’s an oversimplification, at best. Here’s what actually happened, Exhibits B and C:

To Orgrim Doomhammer, he says (p. 356):

“You will stand trial for your crimes. You will stand in Capital City, in chains as the leaders of the Alliance decide your fate, and there you will acknowledge your full defeat.”

To the rest of the orcs (also p. 356):

“But you will not be so lucky. You will die here, with the rest of your kind, and this world will be rid of your taint forever!”

This is the guy who Anduin—and consequently, the Alliance as a whole—has as his commanding officer. Turalyon is a veteran of the original Alliance of Lordaeron who has traditionally behaved and been portrayed as a human supremacist (read: racist) and a Light-blinded zealot, who is more than willing to employ the level of violence against anyone he thinks is “tainted” or “corrupt” (read: non-Light) that we’ve seen from, say, the Scarlet Crusade.

And given what we’ve seen of him in Legion, Before the Storm, and Shadows Rising, “a thousand years of war” has only exacerbated that bigotry.

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Also it’s not like Jania turning up was part of a good cop bad cop strategy. She surprised them and was pretty horrified. Had she not arrived it would’ve yielded nothing of value.

And are we just ignoring how he’s married to a Windrunner infused with dark power who’s said she’s one dead son, who’s model hasn’t been updated in a long time I might note, from going full on Cthulu fhtagn?

Just saying if there’s any Alliance characters being set up to be raid bosses down the line I’d bet on them.

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That was the man Turalyon was 1,000 years ago.

Here’s the Turalyon of today.

https://www.wowhead.com/news=311486/new-excerpt-from-shadows-rising-shadowlands-prequel-novel

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