It is one those arguments that has kept popping up over the years. The subtle explanation being that if Jaina was neutral/her city was neutral then it deserved to be mana bombed because it suddenly decided to help the Alliance. When in fact it was always Alliance and that the reason they got involved in the war was because their allies, the night elves, were being threatened and that they had to act(the inverse scenario being that if say Jaina attacked Thunderbluff, Thrall would be forced to help them regardless of whatever agreement he had with Jaina)
After all these years, I actually found unequivocal proof that Jaina remained Alliance and what the true nature of the agreement was with Ogrimmar. and apperently all I would have needed was to read the damn manual:
Chapter 11
Horde Versus Alliance
The war between the Horde and Alliance has been at the core of
the Warcraft mythos for years. Recently, a ceasefire was agreed
upon by the Horde chief Thrall and the Alliance leader Jaina
Proudmoore, but the fact remains that animosity is still high
between the two factions. In some places, this undercurrent of
hostility has erupted into open warfare.
Jaina Proudmoore - Jaina Proudmoore is the most powerful
human sorceress alive. A one-time ally of Prince Arthas, Jaina saw
the fall of Lordaeron firsthand. Traveling to Kalimdor, Jaina swore
to defeat the Burning Legion and its sinister agents any way she
could. Joining forces with the night elves and even the orcish
Horde, Jaina helped defeat the demon Archimonde and banish
the Legion forever. She then gathered the human survivors in
Kalimdor and founded the port city of Theramore. There she rules over the tattered remnants of the Alliance and hopes to reunite the distant human kingdoms once more.
There you go, Jaina is/was an Alliance leader and Theramore is not neutral and at best just had a ceasefire with Thrall.
Side note, her hope got realized, the old human kingdoms have for the most part rejoined the Alliance.
Pretty sure the general feel was that the city was an acceptable target because it wasnât neutral, not that betraying neutrality means your city gets exploded.
Iâm not saying people didnt feel that was well. But I am saying people also thought she was neutral. and that betraying said neutrality somehow meant she was hypocritical and deserving of being attacked when in fact, the only reason she had to allow a road to the Barrens was because her allies were being attacked.
Nobody said Jaina was neutral. The whole point of her friendship with Thrall was:
A leader of the Alliance and a leader of the Horde who tried to achieve peace and end the war(s). Of course she wasnât neutral - but she was one of the voices in the Alliance that tried to soothe Warmongers like Varian.
I am wondering why Zerde made this thread. I mean, I guess many folks make silly threads for little reasonâŚ
Seems like an old and irrelevant subject that isnât involved much in the current events. Might as well make a thread titled âBeef : Itâs whatâs for dinner.â
If it was neutral, that was practically a fig leaf of a disguise as it was used by Alliance forces and Horde forces were treated with hostility.
If it was Alliance, then it was at the mercy of the Horde. And the Horde offered no mercy. Garrosh seemed to dislike it being on Kalimdor, period. I donât think he was debating its neutrality as he considered destroying it.
I really am not sure what the purpose of this thread is? To discuss⌠what, exactly?
So Garrosh was bad ? I thought we mostly figured that out by now. I guess there are some who say âhe did nothing wrong.â He said he would do it all over again, in SoD. So, I donât think there is an argument that would have changed his mind. He was Warchief = Theramore is toast. Neutral or not.
Eh, wouldnât be so bad if Cata didnât introduce him as a fairly nice guy making MoP/WoD feel like villain batting. He kills a lieutenant for accidentally bombing an innocent Druid barrow but nukes a city with a manabomb? Just more of WoW character inconsistency I guess⌠n0w we have a whole expansion of nothing but (Thanks Shadowlands!)âŚ
(Not to mention his role in the invasion of Gilneas where he disses Sylvanas twice over her methods of warfare)
What, he was all but screaming âfuture bad guyâ in Wrath. Attacking Thrall, sending the Horde player on suicide missions and generally planning to attack the Alliance while it was busy trying to deal with the Scourge.
Because as I mentioned this topic kept popping up every so often. For literal years people kept saying I was wrong(certain people anyway) and afterall this time I finally found proof that my position was always correct.
Again, I am talking more on a meta reasoning her. There were people who claimed Jaina was neutral and by extension whatever she did means she was a hypocrite. Which is just false and yet was a narrative perpetrated for almost a decade now.
It was a part of some long bickering match a week or two ago. The key points were whether or not Theramore was neutral, and whether or not Theramore was itâs own nation. And these are arguments that have gone back and forth for years, as Zerde said.
I and many others always assumed that Jaina was alliance, but that she largely kept the city itself neutral, never overtly supporting the alliance until Cata.
I think thatâs where most of us were coming from
Story and Gameplay Segregation. In-Universe Theramore is part of the Alliance but not hostile to the Horde. In-game itâs mechanically an Alliance city and thus npcs are auto-hostile to members of the opposite faction.
In a thread I made telling everyone Jaina is not neutral, there are still people saying she is neutral! And using it as some additional/or more precisely, incorrect justification for Garrosh.
I said this cause every Alliance player I argued with over the years have said Theramore was neutral, innocent, poor unarmed citizens blah blah etc. Dont be mad at me, be mad at your brethren.
Actually alot have of people Horde side have said Theramore was neutral as well. If anything a good chunk if people, of ALL faction preference, misunderstood Jaina!
Ehhh⌠how to put this. Jaina was about as neutral as Malfurion Stormrage?
Blizzard has unfortunately always relied on neutral factions to cut costs in developing content, but players have always been able to go, âbut wait, thatâs an Alliance character/order.â
To say that Jaina was, âNeutral,â isnât wrong in that, Theramore acted as a diplomatic location for the Horde and Alliance to interact, and that Jaina was always attempting to facilitate these meetings. At the same time, she was unarguably Alliance, and Theramore was an Alliance city.
Itâs become increasingly prevalent during the course of WoWâs lifespan that neutrality isnât a permanent state. Characters, nations, and organizations switch from neutral to faction-bound as the writers find convenient. One need look no further than Dalaran for an example of this flip-flopping between Neutrality and Horde/Alliance.
By that metric, Jaina and Theramore were neutral at some points. They may have been brief windows that existed solely to attempt to foster peace between the factions, but those windows still existed. This is why bombing Theramore was such a big deal; Garrosh destroyed the one place the Horde and Alliance had any track record of negotiations and diplomacy with, and at the same time turned the one solid voice speaking out in the Hordeâs favor within the Alliance, against the Horde.
Thatâs my two coppers on it. Itâs not wrong to say Jaina/Theramore were neutral, no more than itâs wrong to say they were Alliance.
You could say this of Stormwind near the end of BfA, that would not make Anduin or Stormwind neutral.
Baine was in Stormwind at one point to talk about the treaty. That does not make it a neutral city. https://youtu.be/D2RH-5Vdtzo?t=71
Sigh, they were not neutral. At best the city had a ceasefire and Jaina clearly wanted peace but she always saw herself as an Alliance partisan. Sure she didnât want war but she was not going to just let her friends and allies like the night elves be trampled on by the Horde.
Cata Theramore is the general problem ofneutrality in wowâs writing.Youâd have to be insane to believe that cobelligerents in a conflict are neutral irl, neutral support is generally trade and stuff, but wowâs writers have been wanting to have their cake and eat it too with pvp-as-lore nonsense for years
Theramore was a port of war was it not? I swear there were siege tanks laying around with troops marching day and night / through the swamps. If the alliance noticed the horde building up gromgol basecamp (stv) theyâd probably act due to its vicinity on stormwind, regardless of if any direct act of war was made.
In every thread rehashing the bombing of Theramore (and itâs one of those topics that comes up regularly), there are always one or two posters who say the bombing was particularly awful because it was a neutral city.
Jainaâs personal neutrality (or lack of it) is also often brought up when weâre rehashing the Purge of Dalaran, which is an even more regular topic.
