Actually it does not have to be complicated. Even something like that, buring lil fox people alive cause, well, they thought it would be funny to see them running around in flames or something. The Alliance CAN have some bad apples.
But no. By virtue of being Alliance you are also morally pristine. Everything you do is just good. Nothing but good is acceptable. That is what makes the Alliance boring and predictable and when or if we have another conflict they’ll come here and complain about the Horde having a better story and declaring Horde bias.
In the current angelic Alliance? Not seeing a pertinent motive. Like I said, the Alliance CAN have some bad apples, but sadly they are not tolerated. So how can you create a motive for an act of cruelty when the ones supposed to perform it are quite literally immune to being evil?
Nitpick: they did kill a civilian just for being in the region they took over - the night elf quest chain has a quest to find her where she had been tortured to death. She’s explicitly named as a civilian in the region, and not associated with the Sentinels or their efforts in the area. There’s no reasons given as to why she was targeted other than ‘this is your zone’s badguy faction doing badguy things’, though.
and one of the major thing is Talanji’s greatest mistake is not trying to appeal to both factions. If she played the part of something like Nogenfogger she would have both faction fawning to make sure she does/does not get involved in the faction war.
I recall that from the video I once saw, but when I did the questing on my nelf I didn’t get that quest. I’ll try to scout around once more.
But then again nelves also targeted the Shatterspear laborers who were simply digging around the ruins.
Edit: I found that torturer and he was still surrounded by sentinels, and you rescue the sentinel. I didn’t get the quest to rescue the civilian.
Although Personally I’d rather if these trolls would remain as one of WoW’s mysteries and not be involved in anything.
Because I wonder how come Garrosh was able to find them? How? It’s never established. And later I learned that these guys came from STV, which imo is a huge lorelol. I always thought that these are Dark Trolls.
True, there were complaints around Cataclysm that Horde is favoured and has more interesting stories, but it’s becuase the changes in leadership. We had Garrosh who was escalating conflicts and he was at odds with Vol’Jin. We had “You’ll serve the Horde or be crushed beneth it” against “Horde is a family” approach.
Meanwhile Alliance continued to be the same and was stagnating becuase there was nobody who would act in similar manner. It felt like no leader had any agency, maybe besides Genn, but he only really started to act on his own in Legion.
Alliance could use some actual tenshion, some political drama. Something on the local scale to ruffle things up. But it should require taking some creative risks. I already wrote what my ideal scenario would be.
And also, they had planned more story for Varian, but it was scrapped due to player resistance. It might have sucked anyway, but there’s a chance it might not have.
I wonder what that be about. And interesting that they scrappped changes to Varian due to player resistance, but didn’t do the same for Vol’Jin in Legion.
It was supposed to be called “The Trials of the High King.” Alliance players were saying it made Varian into a “blue warchief.” To be fair, though, I don’t know for sure if that was the reason it was scrapped. Maybe there was infighting among the devs.
From what we know from day one there has been infighting about the creative vision people want for WoW, which is why some characters can seem oddly bipolar. What annoyed me more than blue warchief was they made it hereditary, which effectively made the alliance into a human empire with non-human vassal states.
It wasn’t fully scrapped, we still got A Little Patience and Blood in the Snow. We can only imagine what humiliation that gnomes, draenei, and worgen would have seen in their scenarios if they were ever made.
And of course Varian was still made High King despite player protests. Then Anduin later down the line inherited the High King position for no reason whatsoever, which just proved the initial arguments against High King right.
That was one of the biggest BS they pulled. Like why would entire Alliance even allow for this to happen? Why would you put fate of entire faction in the hands of a man who barely reached adulthood and has no real experience in commanding armies?
This where Turalyon should’ve usurp him, or Muradin or Tyrande. But it looked like entire Alliance had to humour him instead “let the boy prove himself”. Yeah, but maybe on something smaller for a start?!
It’s also important to note that up until MoP Varian was a very divisive figure in the Alliance and was seen as the Alliance’s version of Garrosh. It was only in MoP that Blizzard drastically changed Varian’s character and personality.
I don’t mind there being pure and noble people in Warcraft. But if you want to keep your Blue heroes absolutely pure, white as artic snow, without blemish… well there’s no story there. There’s nothing. Put yourself in a bright white room with nothing else in it for a week and you’ll find the light just as oppressive to your senses and sanity as darkness.
So if you want your Alliance Leadership to be perfect, then bench them. Every one of them can go sit on their thrones, rule fairly and basically no longer exist within the frame of a narrative that requires pain, misery, sweat, and tears. King Terenas was a fair and just king. But his only major role in the story was to be slaughtered by his own son as a sign that Arthas had truly abandoned goodness in exchange for the exhilarating rush of defeating a braggart demon… which turned out to be for nothing, because the demon survived.
If you refuse to bench these perfect living gods, then they need to start making mistakes, and hurting people they didn’t intend to hurt. Even heroes in TV-Y7 cartoons have to learn a lesson and make mistakes before they’re allowed to beat back the villain, because otherwise your game and narrative has less depth than my nephew’s stories he creates when he bashes his action figures together.
I mean, theres also the problem that the Alliance has never been the perfect shining beacon, at least not since WC2 where several leaders were either traitorous or self interested.
The Alliance is the good parts, but its also the bad parts, the Garrithoses, Twinbraids, and Proudmoores.
No matter what Zerde and Christie golden think (have anyone seen the two in the same room together?) The Allaince is flawed, and will continue to be.
A designated Alliance main character was always going to be a hard sell, but there probably would’ve been less resistance to the idea if he’d just laid out a plan to inherit Lothar/Turalyon’s Lord Commander rank for wartime powers. Their bizarre, specific attachment to the High King title, which inherently put him above his contemporaries in the Alliance, soured the concept even before the shoddiness of its execution. And scrapping the trials a third of the way through only rendered them superfluous; he declared himself High King anyway and even passed the rank on to Anduin, somehow.