I can see qualifying it as dangerous. I don’t think one should go so far as to call it ‘morally wrong’ or evil if something lacks a moral sense.
3 Likes
No it doesn’t. Amoral != evil, this is not convention at all. Lacking the sense of what’s conventionally right or wrong doesn’t mean you are automatically one side or the other.
The film, A Beautiful Mind, is excellent proof of this concept of amorality in depicting paranoid schizophrenia with an aforementioned victim committing troubling acts due to the mental condition but depicted genuine of heart. No one who watched this film, critic or casual viewer, came out saying that the protagonist was evil.
I understand this, but WoW didn’t go live with WC1 orcs. The Horde in WoW has never been portrayed as “these are the bad guys”. You had to bring that into the game with your own preconceptions and/or elect to ignore the lore being given to you with WoW.
Regarding Garrosh - in Cata he hadn’t gone completely racist bonkers yet, so it didn’t exactly go against the grain of what WoW set the Horde up to be. And when he went off the deep end in MoP, we got rid of him.
Yeah I think this is, unfortunately, a fair assessment. I wouldn’t say Horde virtues are completely being ignored, but it seems they are only getting scant lip service among a small number of NPCs, and even then mostly just through Saurfang.
Not seeing more members of the Horde being really effing upset about what Sylvanas is doing makes me (at least, maybe others) feel kind of like “oh so the Horde have always just been itching to be villains and were waiting for someone with the right mentality to be in charge to give them the excuse”. And honestly, that does not track with any of the groundwork and lore given to us to date with regard to the Horde.
It’s jarring and, for lack of a better term, disenfranchising.
5 Likes
Garrosh in Cata was the result of blizzard having no idea what they wanted to do with him other then make him more warlike. I highly doubt mist was planned.
1 Like
It’s morally “wrong” in the sense that being amoral is not preferable or beneficial to society at large.
On the spectrum of morality (moral, immoral, or amoral) the morally “right” one is of course - being moral.
Garrosh in Cata was fine.
Garrosh in MoP is where everything went downhill.
I would have preferred that Garrosh overcame his hatred and issues to be a better character in the end.
But the Alliance side would have been really been shafted after losing so many locations to the Horde.
Whether we went to alternative Dreanor (I find the storyline of saving Draenei from their genocide really cool) this Horde vs Alliance war should have continued.
In Legion we temporarily put things onhold then we begin again in BFA but this time rather than Teldrassil burning we will see an all out assault by the Alliance doing significant damage to the Horde as payback for the events in Cataclysm and MoP.
That in my opinion would make things more interesting narrative wise.
1 Like
Here we go again…
Preferable? Arguable.
Beneficial? Arguable as well.
I prefer an apathetic associate…
When compared to one who insists his view of “beneficial and preferable” means more than a pigeon’s spit.
A pigeon’s spit makes more sense than these moral jurists on the Story Forum.
I kinda agree with that?
If the faction conflict was handled better, then i could see it be an actually engaging story. But it was not. Cata i think they were trying to make it actually morally grey, though i don’t know how to feel about them removing alliance hubs from horde zones like that. I get they were trying to make it so the factions had an equal number of zones, but i think they just should have added horde towns to some alliance only zones.
Except Bael modan, those dwarves got what they deserved.
Anyway, Mist, while i love pandaria as a continent and it cemented vol’jin as one of my favorite characters, was when the faction conflict started really going downhill (well more accurately Wolfheart was when it all began going to crap, and tides of war just finished cementing it). It was the first actually important town the alliance lost, and was when blizzard stopped trying to even pretend to be grey.
Warlords i liked, though i think it portrayed the orcs to negatively, more clans needed to be either blackmailed into joining the iron horde, have an actual reason to, or just not join up. Shattered Hand, Warsong and Blackrock i think are fine the way they are but the others are not. I loved the continent though.
The faction conflict would be fine if it was, one, in smaller doses and not the central narrative. I sill much prefer the idea of an exploratory expansion, but if done well, i can see the appeal.
It’s just it hasn’t even been mediocre in a long time
1 Like
Except we wouldn’t call that ‘morally wrong’. Cancer isn’t preferable or beneficial to society at large. Doesn’t make it a moral wrong.
2 Likes
“In the sense of” is not convention if you have to preface it in the first place. Stop insisting things are convention when they aren’t. Amorality holds no conventional declaration of one being automatically evil or automatically good. Again, I refer to the film A Beautiful Mind which depicts the struggles of forced amorality due to mental illness.
2 Likes
I don’t see the relationship between the two things. Anyway, the Alliance still feels shafted, so if turning Garry evil was supposed to make up for losing territory, it didn’t work.
No I think Blizzard wanted the Siege to be the payback but it fell flat on its face unfortunately.
Cancer isn’t sentient.
I’ve never watched A Beautiful Mind so I can’t say your analysis is correct or see how it relates to the topic.
Being amoral is conventionally considered morally wrong for sentient, high-intelligence beings. Obviously virtually no one considers natural disasters, animals, or diseases “evil” just because they can be harmful.
On the flip side, when referring to sentient, high-intelligence beings like Humans, most people are going to prefer that they have some notion of right and wrong. Most people would not consider someone who is just as likely to have a pleasant conversation with you as they are to stab you in the face to be a “good” person.
To relate this to WoW - consider certain Void entities. They are amoral, not immoral. They don’t have a sense of right or wrong to transgress. They aren’t willfully breaking their perception of ethical conduct. They’re just driven by some primordial force of entropy, hunger, or decay.
Yet, we’d still call them evil because of their highly malevolent and destructive behavior that manifests from having no morality.
No its not, stop insisting on convention when that’s not a case. A Beautiful Mind is the simple story of the struggles of mental illness, while I highly recommend you watch it, its not required to understand the point I’m trying to make. Amorality, as is the case of people afflicted with mental illness to varying degrees, is not cause for calling someone automatically good or automatically evil.
Have you read/watched Of Mice and Men? When you consider the character of Lenny to be evil even though he committed murder unintentionally?
The very existence of these works depicting amorality regarding mental illness in our modern media, proves that this convention of your’s is not actually convention by mere fact its being debated/explored in both literature, film, and contemporary science.
Cancer also lacks moral sense, which was the point. Sentience only matters for applying morality if something can meaningfully judge their actions. Mentally insane people that inflict violence aren’t morally evil, hence why insanity is a defense (among other reasons).
You probably wouldn’t say a fire is evil, it can’t judge right or wrong. An amoral person also lacks that sense.
As a whole, the Horde isn’t evil. But certain elements like the Forsaken in particular absolutely are.
Don’t give me the ‘Alliance hates undead and always wanted to kill us’ schtick, that excuse has been beaten to death and is just that, an excuse. Under Sylvanas, they’ve stopped being morally grey at this point and have become fully evil.
I will say the rest of the Horde have a bad habit of both selectively reinterpreting what is ‘honorable’ when it suits them and of quickly jumping on the villain train because of one bad leader and dancing around standing up to them until the damage has become nigh world ending.
I feel like the Horde’s greatest weakness is that there is no system of checks and balances when a psychopath sneaks into power (which, given how many times this has happened in their history is really saying something) and are too bound by their outdated concept of honor to question poor leadership when it is staring them in the face.
In a way, they’re like the Klingon Empire in Star Trek. They espouse honor above all else, but in actual practice they often selectively reinterpret it or ignore it when it’s inconvenient. I won’t say that makes the Horde flat out evil as a whole, but their willingness to accept this clearly broken system and turn a blind eye to abuses thereof doesn’t exactly make them necessarily good.
As it’s been said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I think some in the horde lack empathy…or are just more hardened, world-weary, jaded in a sense, tired of believing in peace and willing to embrace war and dominion at all costs