Basically as a framing of the events of the third war, it feels like a historian’s fiction, an attempt to condensate things that doesn’t really convey how it went down all that well
If we take the events of the scourge, the first stage is basically entirely internal police actions in Lordaeron with some alliance backing, and the crown prince going rogue. So are they the war when they’re barely a war to begin with?
The first half of the scourge is more or less a civil war, with cults deeply infiltrated even at the top of Lordaeronian society, until the invasion of the rest of the EKs, it’s hard to say it isn’t primarily, again, an internal Lordaeron thing, even with some alliance backing, so is that the war, then?
The invasion of Quel’thalas and Dalaran is basically the first part where it becomes an international conflict, but at this point Lordaeron’s internal collapse means we’re well into the so-called third war, to a point where it feels like a conflation of the civil war in Lordaeron and the invasions into one war.
Finally, the invasion of Kalimdor, now we have a full war, it involves surviving remnants of the horde and alliance and eventually the initially (understably) hostile kaldorei. But it’s a third war only from one perspective there.
For the tl;dr, it basically seems weird that there’s that much conflation into a third war when it seems relatively tenuous as a continuation of the first and second, or even initially as anything but a Lordaeronian civil war where the alliance wouldn’t have been much help even at its height during the second war, except on a meta level
The problem you are bumping into is that actual third war isn’t between the Alliance and the Horde, or the Scourge/Night Elves and everyone else, or anything like that. The actual third war is the fight between everyone on Azeroth and the returning Burning Legion.
Everything with the factions squabbling against each other is just leading up to that. That’s why Warcraft 3 ends with the defeat of Archimonde by the combined Alliance/Horde/Night Elf forces.
The expansion of the Frozen Throne is just fallout form the actual third war and setting up future conflicts.
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What I’m more confused over is why the First, Second, and Fourth Wars were about Alliance and Horde conflicts, while the Third War was about them fighting the Legion.
Historically, like… they could probably be retitled. What is now the Third War could easily be retitled to the Second Invasion, and the ramping conflicts from the Bombing of Theramore to the Siege of Orgrimmar could be better considered as the proper Third War.
Granted, I’m probably overthinking it, since the thought process for naming it was “this war occurred in the third Warcraft game, so Third War.”
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Even the “First/Second Horde War” would make more sense at this point, at least for the first two, since it would amount to the humans/Alliance marking the first contact and major conflict with the Horde. “First War” by itself carries this implication that everyone - including races and entire hemispheres of the world unaffected by either conflict - have arrived at some arbitrary global consensus that Azeroth’s long history of massive regional and continent-spanning warfare was all irrelevant and the world’s history only really started when human first fought orc.
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I’m honestly of the belief the Third War started with the liberation of the Interment Camps. So the Third War began as a Alliance vs Horde conflict, but got overshadowed by the far larger Scourge/Legion threat.
The Warcraft III manual talks about rumours of a new war not with the cults, but due to Thrall liberating the camps. Thrall’s uprising involved sacking fortresses, including a raid into Stratholme itself to free Eitrigg, and killing officers of the Alliance such as Blackmoore. Uther and the Silver Hand are also involved in this conflict, however Uther was never able to catch up to them, Thrall proved craftier.
Even look at the first couple of Warcraft III missions, the first four Exodus of the Horde and first two Path of Damnation missions. They aren’t about the Scourge or Legion, they are largely Humans and Orcs fighting one another. And it’s not just Lordaeron, but Kul Tiras was also involved in the early fighting, and it’s Stromgarde’s represenative pushing for action during the meeting in Path’s intro cutscene.
Before Andorhal, before Hearthglen and Stratholme showed the true threat of Scourge/Legion, the Alliance and Horde were already waging battles against one another and killing each other in droves.
Heck, let’s get symbolic, the intro cutsceen of Reign of Chaos is literally an human and orc fighting one another, and the battle getting interrupted by an Inferno. It’s symbolic of the Third War, first waged between those races but something worse came along.
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