WoD completely killed Orc lore after the rebellion against Garrosh.
Everything we gained, we lost.
We only have Eitrigg and Thrall left.
The Iron Horde doesn’t culturally belong with the greenskins. They’re the fake universe for a reason.
No why though? If there is one race that took a huge hit, it’s the Orcs. Once the backbone of the Horde, reduced to comedic value.
I get that times change, but give the GREENSKINS some love.
Saurfang was the finishing cherry on the cake to finally say goodbye to whatever the last remnants of the green Orcs had.
My problem with Orcs right now:
Thrall seems to hate the Horde and his own people even more. He wants nothing more to do than distance himself from his people. Remember the comraderie he had with Drek’thar and Nazgrel? It’s all gone
speaking of Nazgrel. We have way too many Orc heroes and generals stuck in time. Nazgrel, Overlord Agmar and the freacking son if the main universe Kill Rogg to name a few.
Orcs didn’t gain anything. The Dwarves got all their clans united, yet the Orcs actually lost the the Blackrock clan and the Warsong clan alongside the Dragonmaw clan is in non existance mode.
It’s not easy being green. Especially when Blizzard is actively trying to kill off whatever heroes you have left and brings in another kind that you don’t share a culture with.
a bit of a personal rant here
It seems that Orc males are not allowed to be this “blood, kill, conquer” type of character.
Eitrigg nearly soiled himself from seeing spiders in Drustvar.
Saurfang behaved more like a whiny, emotionally depressed character.
Thrall is experiencing his midife crisis.
We had Orcs like this but they all sided with Hellscream
The female counterparts however don’t seem to be cursed with Golden’s curse and are free to be a psychotic killer. If you hear Usha Eyegouge iisten how much she loves slaughtering the Alliance, Overlord Gey’arah being so pro war and soon Thrall’s mom who has received a wide focus.
Also the Exile’s reach intro where the Orc make was a wimpering peon while the Overlord and her daughter… yeah.
I’m sorry but I love the types of Kargath and Grom and Garrosh and Saurfang before he turbed into a wimp. Thrall was amazing pre cataclysm. But I feel like there is someone who finds this behavior “TOXIC” if they’re of male gender.
Not to point out the obvious but this mentality has never served the Orcs well. Like, truly, ZugZug has sort of led their entire race and planet to near extinction. Even Doomhammer died a man riddled with regret and shame for what his war resulted in for his people; and that doesn’t even get into what the First War and the genocide of the Draenei cost them.
Never, in the entire history of the Orcs of Warcraft (not now during your hate rant of “Golden Years”, not in WC1) have the Orcs ever not suffered immeasurably for their wars. They always lose, there are always consequences. Even the AU Mag’har weren’t immune to this rule.
Ga’nar stopped the Iron Horde saving his clan from them in Frostfire Ridge. That’s a good example of victory or death.
I don’t know about the other parts. There are races that had their numbers drastically reduced more so than the Orcs and they came out fine. Even Humans lost the majority of their kingdoms and now Stormwind is one of the biggest bastions on Azeroth.
I guess Blizzard lost their audience with Orc players? I loved the barbarian aesthetic mix of Conan the Barbarian and other “barbarian tropes” but Blizzard doesn’t seem to care much!
I always like Orcs but they do not speak to me anymore. They aren’t interesting, although Saurfang started off good, the moment he went for help to the Alliance is the point I gave up and sat this one out.
Notice how even then for an Orc Warrior to be relevant it has to be with a noble death. Which results in always a net-negative on character roster and development. The WC1 and WC2 Orcs were not a sustainable people, and were almost exclusively defined by constant Warfare. Which they always lost in the end, because they were villains.
Them mellowing out, especially with their current allies and reconnection to their more shamanistic traditional roots prior to the Fel was expected.
I’m going to be off topic but would it be embarrassing or endearing if Magrok continues to reach for the warchief mantle? Such as commanding the player to slay a dangerous goat and bring him it’s ‘tusks’.
Orc lore’s been wrecked, yeah, but that started in Cataclysm, WoD was just a more serious blow to the older lore. Orcs were much more interesting when they weren’t the kill and conquer types, but were instead the opposite of the typical Orc fantasy tropes. That’s what got Warcraft more traction in the first place, making monsters from fantasy into something more relatable. Garrosh’s Horde damaged that, and then WoD outright wrecked it. The best Orc moment, in my opinion, is Draenosh leading the Kor’kron into battle on wolves with a united rumble of “For the Horde” to go back up the 7th Legion.
Hard disagree on it being anything to do with a ‘toxic male’ thing in terms of which Orc characters get punished though. There are plenty of female Orc bosses that get killed in WoD, and of course we have Zaela who was a warmongering Orc woman that was a boss not once, but twice. Draka isn’t a good example of the same tropes, and without her you have two… and one, Geyarah, is part of the mess that is the Mag’har intro scenario so it’s hard to even reconcile that.
I do agree with Thrall, though, he was far better pre-Cata, though I find that at odds with the rest of your post because he wasn’t in keeping with the kill or conquer Orc archetypes at all. The most he got was getting ready to throw down with Varian in Undercity.
Thrall as a character suffered because of how intertwined he was with Metzen. Metzen has said that much of the Thrall stuff in Cata was him working out issues in his own life at the time through his writing. And while that seems short-sighted now, at the time I don’t think they really had any idea WoW would… still be around, so they were trying to reasonable find a way to close out the stories of a lot of characters, like Thrall.
I have always found the whole “I’m tired of leading” thing from Thrall to be weird, because with the squished WoW timeline he only led the Orcs and the Horde itself for like… eight years?
That I agree with. They were meant to be invading Azeroth in WoD and instead we invaded them to the fact they were: A complete. Utter.
Pushover
Like, it made you wonder how the Alliance had so many problems dealing with them the first time - even with the Felblood & demons. Don’t even get me started with the Shadowmoon Clan, they were pitifully weak.
Draenor became a comedy skip, of how embarrassingly weak & pathetic - the Orc race was.
It’s kind of a Horde theme to have big characters or other parts of your race killed off for content. It happened to the Orcs, Blood Elves, and now the Forsaken.
Although that may be true, even without that factor they still fell rather pitifully & disgracefully. That being said, there was a lot of stuff missing in Alternate Draenor, so I simple state it as different landscape to the original along with much less orcs to settle my anger at how it was portrayed.
Yes WoD butchered a lot of the Orc lore (Hence why we simply dumb it down to ‘Alternate universe was much weaker / more boring than the original’) but I think the correct term for this thread is:
Male characters in this expansion in general I noticed took a back seat to females. It’s not really something you’ll notice if you’re not looking for it, but it’s there.
It is not that male characters took a backseat. It is that more female characters have gotten the spotlight. If anything I say we have about a 50-50 split between male/female getting spotlights.
Genn, Anduin, Shaw, Flynn, Gelbin etc had their own archs/spotlights!
I don’t think it was the length of time so much as it was the realisation that his people hadn’t changed since the First and Second Wars. They didn’t want the life of simple survivalism and shamanism he thought they did, they wanted war and Garrosh.
That realisation leading to him not knowing what to do with himself was a decent enough story premise, but it had no chance of being good MMO story content imo.
