We’ve never been shown the Horde members that burned Teldrassil. There also hasn’t been any Horde NPCs mention the War of the Thorns as a victory.
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Yeah it’s nameless Orc catapult operators. Or at least the nameless silhouettes of presumably Orcish catapult operators.
It’s pretty obvious to me what a stapled on idea it was because nobody but the God of War reference Orcs have any thoughts on the Burning, outside Saurfang at least.
Which is odd considering literally every Horde race knows precisely what its like to watch helplessly as the only home you’ve ever known is destroyed.
Ya think they’d feel some type of way about it. But nah never really comes up. Almost like it was a ridiculous marketing stunt produced by a probable sociopath or something.
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Yeah but it’s not like the writing team had years to work out a salvageable plot line. I’m sure you have a role play story or ten about it.
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Alright but if I can hammer out a story about the complete numbness a healer might feel upon being indirectly complicit in a genocide and watching his home get bulldozed by an invading army in the span of about a week, why can’t they?
Not exactly difficult to find the time to do that if you’re invested in the world and are interested in how major events might effect the societies and citizens therein.
So my only conclusion is the current team aren’t.
They like the hero characters. Or at least their weird superhero fanfic versions. And not much else.
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Genocide from the standpoint of troops on the ground isnt a unique kind of killing. You slay them all once, you slay them all a thousand times. Death to the living isnt particularly more or less emotionally jarring just because it involves razing a city. “Kill all the prisoners and put them in a mass grave” isn’t typically thought of as an act of genocide, by the actual trigger men, until they are confronted about it at the trial. And then, only if they lose.
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They firebombed a city specifically noted to be bereft of military targets that were actively surrendering.
My CG Priest, for whom fighting side by side with Priestesses of Elune in the Conclave is so recent an experience that it scarcely qualifies as a memory, might feel some type of way about that.
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to Sylvanas
To the catapault engineer, they won. They won a battle in a war over territory that had been raging for a very long time.
Considering they’re non characters you’re allowed to imagine whatever feelings you want. But I’ve a hard time imagining only Saurfang and a GoW reference Orc were the only ones with any emotions on the subject.
Also just historically you’re wildly off base. There are quite a lot of instances of soldiers intervening to prevent a mass murder. Including threatening to open fire on their own men as was Major Hugh Thompson Jr’s response to the Mai Lai Massacre.
So I’m genuinely baffled what you’re on about.
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Golden wrote the novella’s covering WoT.
Just like the bombing of Theramore the Horde soldiers were very… happy with all the events unfolding before them.
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Mass murder in war is exceedingly common, and even moreso with artillery. The fact that we hear stories about the men who said “Hold on, this is messed up” and remember them, with specifics, is kind of telling how rare those instances are. “Shell that building” is generally not the kind of order that evokes feelings of righteous disobedience.
Mawthorne isn’t talking lore, just headcanon.
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Cool doomer view of history. Even if I agreed with it I might point out;
This is fantasy
So. Ya know ya do have characters intervening to stop massacares. Quite regularly. As in the case in both Stonetalon and Hillsbrad.
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History is full of human atrocities but nobody considered them “normal”, nobody passes by a massacre whistling like it’s another Tuesday.
That is psycho behavior and any normal human recognizes it as such 
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Even in fairly brutal time periods, while it might’ve been the minority opinion, you still had plenty of people going “WTF”.
Thats why we have any primary sources on pretty much any pre 19th century war crime.
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The British rejected US precision bombing technology, preferring the collateral damage of the british carpet bombing strategy. Artillery and Naval barrages on population centers are not things that only exist in fantasy. The US didnt drop just one nuclear bomb, they dropped 2, and everyone wanted to get their hands on one.
We constantly pass by massacres whistling. We require artists and poets and musicians to interpret these things for us before we even recognize them for the massacres they are. The feds wanted to lock up Billie Holiday, in part to silence Strange Fruit lest everyone stop whistling for a moment.
From AGW-
In a few minutes, the ship lurched north. It was not smooth sailing. The night elves were
reluctant help. Through the spyglass, Morka saw that the siege engines were on the move toward
Darkshore, traveling faster than the ship.
She didn’t care. Morka held the ship’s helm and steered with a grin on her face. She could
get used to this.
And soon, she would have a front-row seat to the Horde’s greatest victory.
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It has been well documented men, even trained in war preferred to aim their guns away from the enemy rather than actually shoot at them.
Most armies back in the day mostly did marching and stayed in formation, it was only really in special circumstances that we actually saw battles like Cannae. Its been over two thousand years and we still talk about it.
Making a decision behind a desk and asking others to do your butcher’s works is much different than to be given a knife and pushed into a building to kill in the name of a king you never seen before.
That’s why in Ukraine right now you have russians torturing and then russian soldiers putting a stop to it… at least the really, really dark ones. Or writing apologies before running/retreating as ordered. What you think is normal isn’t. It simply isn’t.
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So, thats kind of the difference between the engineers launching a barrage on a tree, and Saurfang being asked to kill Malfurion.
Yes.
Even though the current Horde is guilty of the horrible crime of wiping out a whole island that surrendered to them.
What they did, is much different than Saurfang and the old Horde did.
They did their butcher’s work personally. House by house. Person to person.
Saurfang personally went into a Draenei school/nursery and starting killing kids. By hand.
Much more unimaginable than operating some intercontinental catapults.
Not to mention the British kinda had a reason to be indifferent about bombing German cities after, ya know, London was terror bombed repeatedly.