Jaina doesn't actually kill civilians in the Purge/Teleport them the Violet Hold

Lore Story Forum
550

There isn’t a lack of evil Alliance people. It’s just that the vast majority of them are either semi-redeemed by being humbled, like Genn Greymane, or they’ve been defeated with no-names as their chain of succession which isn’t satisfying when they make a dramatic return.

Staghelm was technically a villain born of the Night Elves’ sin and hubris, but he was defeated when it was appropriate. His legacy literally showed back up to burn the new Tree. It just didn’t have a worthy face we remembered. The Prophet of Flame literally came out of nowhere instead of being another central Night Elf character who could hinted at his feelings and sentiments for a narrative payoff when he would eventually take his cult to support Fyrakk.

Garithos got his comeuppance in Warcraft III, because if he had survived into World of Warcraft, he could have easily caused a major rift in the Alliance with how eager he was to abuse his own dwarven and gnomish allies in exchange for taking back a crumbling city, and slaughter elves. Imagine Garithos being given control over a bunch of Night Elf Platoons. He’d have hurled them as living ammunition at the Horde just as Garrosh spent Forsaken against Gilneas.

And I’m gonna say it: Jaina should never have been forced to confront the fact she helped her friends against her father. Thrall should have taken Garrosh’s head from his shoulders and drop kicked it into the Harbor when he even got a wiff of a plan to attack Theramore, or threatening Jaina. I remember the Horde player sentiment on these very forums when we watched the Zeppelin drop the bomb on Theramore. We were livid. Jaina was literally allowed to just pop into the throne room in Orgrimmar as she pleased in Wrath of the Lich King. The guards didn’t even go into a hostile or battle stance when she did so. That’s how much the Horde trusted her and she had never abused that trust.

Basically, I see Jaina’s entire arc from Cataclysm to Shadowlands as being nothing more than horrific collateral damage from Blizzard’s decision to make sure Garrosh was a villain.

So in my opinion, not only does the Alliance have villains, the worst thing about it is that they tried to make Horde players hate Alliance members who we actually liked and wanted to keep our bonds with.

That was the problem. We didn’t get as many Alliance minor characters going rogue and causing problems out of sight of the main Alliance cast. That happened all the freaking time with the Horde, it was Garrosh and his lackey’s whole shtick to pick a fight when the reasonable Horde Leaders weren’t looking. Heck, Sylvanas was anti-war and told him to knock it off during Cataclysm after Varimathras was removed and before she became the object of a writer tug-o-war.

I guess, again you could say that the only reason Genn got away with it was the meta-justification that Sylvanas was doing badwrong stuff.

Narratively he’s cashed those chips, and if he sucker-punched the Forsaken again not only would he likely end up in a coffin, but he would be depriving the Worgen player race of one of their central—nay, only viable characters. I don’t want the Worgen going through the same loss as the Forsaken did when they took our characters away and gave us a pair of watered-down vanilla-wafer stand ins who can’t fill the enormous void left by their predecessors.

Is it fair that things are lopsided like this? Not at all. Do I think Zerde will get his wish, and the Alliance will stay squeaky clean for the remainder that World of Warcraft’s narrative continues?

Maybe.

But that doesn’t mean you won’t get to fight bad humans and elves. I mean, Blizzard just pulled an entire second Alliance out of its butt. And I’m certain that we’re going to be fighting them for some reason or another. Then we’ll be able to bash and break all the human-elf skulls we want without feeling bad.

And that’ll be a great feeling.

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551

I’m pretty sure the whole point of the High King concept-and why they went with it anyway even after scrapping the leadup quests to it-was simplicity. They wanted a big figurehead to act as the central Alliance character, even if didn’t make sense. Someone to just embody the faction so they wouldn’t have to spend a bunch of writing time on complicated politics.

The thing with Staghelm is the thing with a lot of the early Vanilla Alliance villains. Some of them just became good guys or irrelevant, but the ones that didn’t went off the deep-end in a way that didn’t implicate them as Alliance. Staghelm was just now working with the Old Gods, and implied to have always been working for the Old Gods for as long as he was doing shady stuff. I also think on Archbishop Benedictus, who gave the Alterac Valley kill quest for Undead because he was granting them “the mercy of a quick death”. That’s perfectly set up to be an Alliance antagonist for a Horde, but he does nothing and then gets thrown on the Old God pile. Alliance characters become villains, sure, but never really as Alliance characters like Garrosh or Sylv did.

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552

I don’t disagree with you. But Garrosh was literally rubbing an Old God’s juice all over his body like it was his new skin-care routine.

And Sylvanas fell into the dumbest logical error of all time, fed to her by a Death God.

Basically, the only difference is that for some reason, because they were both Warchief at the time of their villainy, they got to stay gripped to the steering wheel of the entire Horde the whole time and force the Horde to be their accomplices.

Meanwhile Staghelm and Benedictus were both only able to take a group or a handful of loyalists with them when they went evil, and barely anyone noticed because their groups were seen as outcasts or radicals.

I mean, what if the entire church of the Holy Light followed Benedictus and tried to sack Stormwind for the Old Gods, and then wage a war on both the Alliance and the Horde? That would’ve been on par with Garrosh and Sylvanas. Would’ve humbled and hurt the heck out of Stormwind fans just the same as we were.

Alas, there’s that small difference. Alliance villains jump ship just as their villainous reveal, while Horde villains just try to pretend they’re still doing their villainy for the Horde.

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553

Maybe i’m reading it wrong but its more like it happens and thats it. Its brought up later sort of. But Jaina isn’t sorry it happened, the Silver Cov doesn’t regret there actions. They weren’t just following the baddie and sorry an xpack later and became good guys again.

I do hope its brought up more in Midnight ofcourse.

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554

It’s no more odd than them leaving the frog farm in and allowing a chunk of players to reach the fun part of Remix shortly before pulling up the ladder and nerfing every subsequent farm that cropped up.
Though I supposed it would be hard to see that through a victim complex.

555

As I’m running a timerunner through the Purge questline, I think Jaina’s lines in ‘the Fate of Dalaran’ give a bit more insight for why she snapped.

It’s a quest where the Alliance player tries to convince Jaina to pull Dalaran into the Alliance, and she flatly refuses because she believes Dalaran can be a beacon of neutrality in those war-torn times: “If we can trust one another here, then there’s hope for the rest of the world.” (said while looking at a scene of Silver Covenant and Sunreaver NPCs chatting with each other in Dalaran streets, implying they weren’t always hostile towards each other).

(She also does mention her ‘drown Orgrimmar, orphans and all’ episode, but as a passing reference - leaving Anduin aghast, of course - and comments how she talked with Kalecgos at length to get over it. So at least the event got some mention in-game, though I feel there’s so much more drama that should be wrung from it.)

This is a detail I forgot over the years since the event first occurred. I think it gives some more dramatic build to why she snapped after the Divine Bell incident, and why she snapped to such an extreme: she had locked her anger away, put it in the past, determined to make sure Dalaran was kept safe and neutral away from the war no matter her personal feelings (acting only to bottle up evil power, not use it*), a beacon of trust - and that trust gets violated in the worst personal way for her, shattering her belief that the Sunreavers was truly willing to stay out of the war as part of her dreamed neutral paragon city, and calling up the memories of the same enemy and similar dark power that had destroyed Theramore.

*Though I think it’s perfectly valid for the Horde not to trust the Alliance with that. I think ‘keep this new power away from the other faction’ is one of the better faction conflict plots.

None of that is to say that what Jaina did was good, or only worth a slap on the wrist, but I appreciate the details that went into that storyline and all the tragic irony they built up.

https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/The_Fate_of_Dalaran

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556

I wish the game had more quests like this. It’s a great examination of Jaina’s character and lets you shape your own to a degree. Her disappointment in a faction-brained monkey who disregards all nuance and declares they’d purge the city of its oldest and loyalist contributors just for their tabards will never not amuse me. I also like your interpretation of Jaina’s drastic realignment to that way of thinking.

Reading the text again really highlights the obscenity of Aethas’s contrition arc, however. She committed such a disproportionate act of violence against this faction she regarded so highly and, intentionally or not, facilitated such a bloody mess that the least she could do is meet its victims halfway. Her usage as a world hero would sit better with me if the writers made any effort to resolve the issue on her side.

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557

The fact that there was not really a resolution to the arc other than Jaina deciding to forgive herself was bad, I feel like making her victims apologize to her in DF really re-opened that plot wound and really reinforced how bad dev favoritism has damaged the setting.

Just makes you wonder if there’s going to be a fourth incident of Jaina brutalizing a group and then pulling the “only god can judge me” card. oh wait, Golden’s gone, we’re probably in the clear.

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558

It’s honestly a huge wasted opportunity to not have the Alliance be on better terms with the Scarlet Crusade. Maybe not in direct partnership but I imagine especially given all the spicey stuff Sylvanas was up to, there were at least some in the Alliance who thought maybe the Scarlet Crusade had a point. And given that they seem to completely fill their ranks and come back significantly stronger than before every time we kill them, it would lend some kind of believability to how they manage to always be at full strength despite apparently being the last living humans in Lordaeron which has either been in control of the Scourge or the Forsaken for like…20 years now.

I’m not even going to begin to touch on how stupid it was to make them the bad guys in the Gilneas questline despite being utterly crushed the previous patch in the Forsaken Heritage quest, and yeah I am aware that there is one singular NPC from the Scarlet Crusade in the Stormwind Cathedral whose just always kinda been there. A few small lines of flavor text would go a long way in explaining why.

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559

I mean, they were. THey were openly funding them even after finding out the Forsaken were sentient and free from the scourge.

Burning alliance civilians on pyres does tend to strain relations however.

560

What’s that even from? The openly funding and burning alliance civilians on pyres? It’s been a hot minute since doing the Dragonblight zone in WotLK but I…kinda seem to remember there was some clear reason why the Alliance was fighting them there? But the open funding, was that a quest or was it in a story or…?

561

As far as I recall, the Alliance/Scarlet history was:

Vanilla:

  • Scarlet NPC in the Cathedral catacombs gave the player a breadcrumb quest to go to Desolace to slay undead there.
  • NPC in Desolace gives the quote “We of the Scarlet Crusade have sworn to fight the Scourge with body and soul.” and sends the player to slay undead (not Forsaken undead, but generic undead) to prove they’re worthy of joining the Crusade.
  • Having slain some undead ravagers, the player is sent with a letter of recommendation to meet a Crusader in Southshore who will take them to Lordaeron to fight “the real threat” there.
  • Upon reaching Southshore, the player meets their contact who tells them ‘forget about joining, the Scarlet Crusade went insane and now kills every non-Scarlet instead of just undead. You should go kill them instead of signing up, for all the evil things they’ve done’ and the player does so. (It doesn’t mention killing Alliance civilians specifically, just living civilians, as a reason the Scarlets should be KOS, but the civilians in question are likely Lordaeronian and thus the Alliance could consider them Alliance.)

So, the Alliance didn’t seem to have a problem with the Scarlets talking about purging the Scourge (and lumping the Forsaken in with the Scourge while doing so), or with fighting the Forsaken. At least presumably, because all these quests are one-on-one with the player, so there’s no hard evidence of whether this is widespread Alliance support, partial Alliance support, or if the Alliance just ignores them and lets them hire individual mercenaries (the PC).

Since then, the only Alliance-friendly Scarlets have been defectors - mainly, the revamped Scarlet dungeons has the same NPC from the quest above give the Alliance quests to kill the Scarlet leaders (…again?), and I think he has 2 nameless Scarlet Renegade NPCs with him who are also friendly. But the Alliance is hostile to every other Scarlet member encountered in-game or in the story that I know of - there might be some plots from books that go into more detail.

I do think it’d be a cool plot for some of the more aggressive, revanchist, or ‘Lordaeron for the living’-minded Alliance characters to be secretly funding/propping up the Scarlets as a proxy to fight the Forsaken, but as it is there’s just nothing more than this one failed recruitment effort.

The referenced quest chain starts here: https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Brother_Anton_(quest)

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562

Thanks for clearing that up! But as far as the Scarlet Crusade…ffs let them stay dead this time, please. Ironically they come back as the villain more often than the Scourge ever did.

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563

Not for a lack of trying:
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Disturbing_Connections

Garrosh himself contacted the Shatterspear to spur their offensive towards Lor’danel, and it seems clear that he fully intends to push from the south as well.

So the Shatterspear was outright planning on attacking Lor’danel, you know an entire town of civilians.

https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Troll_Compendium/Ice_Troll_Tribes

Even so, the Frostmane trolls have been launching increasingly frequent and aggressive attacks against the dwarves living in Dun Morogh. The dwarves currently consider the Frostmane tribe little more than a nuisance, and have not made a concerted effort to vanquish them.

So yeah, the dwarves attack the trolls to prevent them from attacking their cities. It isn’t some attempt at genocide but rather protection.

The dwarves certainly killed them and drove them out. This is certainly not “good” but this is not genocide. Genocide require “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,”

Bael Modan was not trying to wipe them out. Chase them out of their home and kill them sure. But this is not genocide.

Megs Dreadshredder says: The paperwork’s ready for you to sign, Marin. My people are just waiting on your decision.
[Kelsey Steelspark says: Gosh, Mr. Noggenfogger, I know you wouldn’t want to damage your reputation as a neutral trade entity by forming closer ties to the Horde
Megs Dreadshredder says: This is laughable. You know what it’s like trying to do business with gnomes.
Kelsey Steelspark says: Oh, oh, I know this one! It’s better than doing business with failed goblins that had to beg others for help!
Megs Dreadshredder says: Why you little irradiated…
Marin Noggenfogger yells: AGH! Enough! You two are driving me INSANE! Start getting some freakin’ work done around here or get the heck out of my town!

If the Alliance was willing to do all that to make sure Gagetzan would remain neutral. What more for Zandalar.

This is only after they learned she was planning on making deals with the Horde. If she invited both and got them do her dirty work with the explicit goal of made joining the Horde/remaining neutral as a reward both factions would leap to the chance to help them.

Did you forget the Alliance helped the Zandalari with both the Gurabashi tribe and with the Frost trolls? Also, the Alliance never went near Zandalar. The other troll tribes, yes, but not them.

The Zandalari, with the exception of Zul, never particularly cared about the tribes. Rastakhan was certainly isolationist not to mention we again helped them with other troll tribes before.

I am going to add as a final note that the Bronzebeard literally just visited the Zandalari base in Zal’drak and they were quite friendly with the inhabitants.

564

Jaina’s one of Golden’s pet characters, so of course Jaina could do nothing wrong.

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565

Often over looked but the first think the forsaken did when getting their free will was massacre the living in Lordaeron. Thats why the Alliance didn’t trust them. Then the Forsaken created The Defliers, tasked with killed every living human in Lordaeron.

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566

So the Alliance up until WOTLK had an alliance with the Scarlet Crusade, the questline sending the Alliance into the Monastery isn’t canon so you’d assume that the quest never happened.

Infact Gilneas is the first time we see a faction in the Alliance fight the scarlets, so 'd guess the alliance is officially over.

Its the point is there is no lore update about it, thats the problem. Its just ‘Theres an alliance in vanilla with them’ then no update until Cata, where the Alliance allies with Scarlet Renegades…its a whole thing, probably not the best place to type it all XD

567

I might be reading too much into this but I think they’re an example of a lack of communication with the people who do the quests and the people that make the narrative. I don’t pretend to know the inner goings-on of how Blizzard does these types of things but I have a hunch that there’s at least some people there who do or did think they were awesome and some people whose dad made them go to church on easter when they were a kid and are still salty about it lol.

Don’t get me wrong, as a Forsaken player I liked having them as a foil up to a point. I think I was always sorta expecting there to be more instead of “sigh…somehow the Scarlet Crusade has returned”. But then again I never considered my dude to be the good guy or have much in the way of reason for doing things other than being an evil undead pirate warlock.

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568

I used to enjoy scarlets, but it feels like in Return to Gilneas, they were mainly brought back to be the foe both factions could fight sadly. But I think it is a lack of communication honestly.

but damn Pirate undead warlock, that sounds cool!

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569

This is why they send Laborers on the frontline. If that was their tactic then Nelves had plenty of time to evacuate them. The fact is that Shatterspears were not targeting civilians in their strikes, but sentinels and the only civilian that got there was a result of her own decision to go there against a warning.

In response Night elves fully intended to completely wipe them out.

Go ahead and take the company of one of the Vengeful Protectors there and see to it that every last building is destroyed and every last troll killed.

So no exceptions, they didn’t intend to spare non combatants or kids. Everyone.

And let me repeat myself. Personally I’d rather if Shatterspear tribe would be left alone as one of WoW’s mystery. But Blizzard wanted to use them as a punching bag for night elves to make night elves feel good about themselves so here you go.

You got it wrong, it’s the Frostmane Trolls that were pushed out of their homeland (because Dun’Morgoth was originally inhabitated by them in entieriety) So it’s the Dwarves who over the years continously pushed them out of their own homes, took more lands, razed their settlements, stole their vegetation for beer ingredients and pushed them to the corner of the map.

If you’re purposefully targeting kids you’re preventing the future generation to grow and eventually completely die out. That is one of the genocidal tactics. And I am baffled that you’d try to defend one of the most if not the most vile quest in game. And mind you, cataclysm made it worse. As you have to go and spy on them and overhear Soothsayer trying to calm these kids. Devs could’ve change these whelps to adults, or make Dwarves just smack them down like orcs did with peons, or put them in cages - anything. But Dwarves were killing children for a starting quest - for years.

And success in actually doing so. Entire Tauren tribe bar one member, is gone. And can you really tell that dwarves didn’t intend to do that? What makes you believe that? They’re certainly not above killing kids as was shown above.

Where is Zandalar and where is Kalimdor. Alliance captured her outside of their own waters. So they were acting like a world police and immediately threw her to prison among murderers and thieves. Truly royal treatment.
The moment Alliance tried to kill her on her way back home was already declaration of War.
And last but least, why would she want to be allied with the faction that has Trollbane among them?

Alliance or Alliance players? I don’t recall for Alliance getting unique questline like it was for Onyxia or for rescuing Moira. Ofc Alliance players had to go there becuase it was a raid, and it would be stupid to prevent them from game content. But it was Zandalari who led the charge and out of them all only one of them (Molthor) name dropped Vol’Jin. While none mentioned contacting Alliance.

I think it’s similar with Vol’Jin in Cataclysm he was looking for adventurers who would’ve come and help him, but he never personally reached out to Alliance.

Oh and I saw how “Alliance helped Frost trolls”. Thank you very much for such a help.
And do you know that frost trolls also include Frostmane, right? Not just Drakkari who according to one NPC are extinct (which I don’t believe, as we saw plenty of them in MoP).

Rastakhan was the one who reached out to other troll tribes to gather and speak about their matters. Zul actually was successful in uniting them.
Zandalari went to stop the Gurubashi in Vanilla, Zandalari participated in Troll Wars to assist Amani. And Zul in Cataclysm was working to recover troll territories (Only to be turned to insane blood slug worshipper in BfA).

I’m saing as a whole, it’s cool that there is at least one NPC in entire Alliance that was friendly toward them. But that is exception that confirms the rule.

Anyway to make it short. Bottomline is that Alliance is not really that innocent, they also have blood of innocents on their hands, it’s that the game never really put a real limelight on it, it’s always swept under the rug and pretended to be not a thing. It’s World of Warcraft, you should expect artrocities to happen, and honestly the only quest that I really wish was changed was the one about killing kids.

And I don’t think that Zandalari ever reaching to Alliance was an option.

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