Bare minimum, that was the base plan, even if some Horde leaders didn’t know it or infer it at the time.
And then not one of them spoke out after it happened until the Alliance was somehow just at Undercity.
Then even after that no one acted on it until this Baine treason thing.
This is not actually correct. The original plan, and the one the whole Horde agreed to, was sending reinforcements to Magni. That’s canon, and stated in the quest where you go to redirect the army. The entire army was apparently fine with the atrocities, but there wasn’t a town hall meeting where the whole Horde voted in favor of destroying a world tree.
So no, Baine wasn’t aware. Now some people will say he was fine with it after. Some will say he wasn’t. Neither can be factually correct or incorrect because that lore literally does not exist either way.
Edit/Addition: Now what I don’t get is her keeping it secret even within the Horde, when even after it was discovered she lied, nothing really happened. She covered up something that apparently was a non-issue.
Every opportunity for good storytelling in BfA gets thrown out.
I didn’t catch this before but pretty much, yeah. I corrected Ursuola on a minor thing, but that statement is still true. They didn’t know about it beforehand but then when they found out, nothing happened. Again you can call that complicity, or have the headcanon many were opposed to it. They haven’t bothered writing much story for BfA. That’s the worst part. What they do write is bad. But they’ve written very little. We have no idea about HUGE chunks of story, because they simply don’t bother creating it.
How does the average member of the Horde feel about Sylvanas? Farmers, merchants and the like? No idea. How did they move an army across so much terrain when night elves are expert scouts? No idea. Why didn’t they use their nuclear spaceship to blast the Horde out of existence? No idea.
They simply don’t seem to care about the story much atm.
So Baine is either complicit by silence in the events at Darkshore or so incredibly dumb that he has not figured out that a city full of innocents on his own home continent was incinerated and just thinks the Alliance at Undercity are pissed off for no real reason.
The writing is truly incredible.
Even still, then there must have been at least a moment, where there was a conversation of:
“Suit up, Grunt Bloodface. You’re shipping out.”
“Oh, boy! Silithus is a long way away, I’d better tell my family goodbye first.”
“Actually, no, we’re going to go invade Ashenvale.”
“…wait, why?”
“Jus’ because, baybey.”
Like, I’m usually not a huge fan of “this thing logically must’ve happened” because the statement usually isn’t that logical, but it’s either “Horde soldiers were told the plan every step of the way and agreed,” “Horde soldiers weren’t told the plan but are all sociopaths and went with it for the lulz,” or “Horde soldiers are so oblivious as to their orders that it’s comedic.”
I think that is, honestly, the heart of Baine criticism; it’s not Baine’s fault that he didn’t say anything, Blizzard forgetting to write him being horrified makes it seem like he tacitly agreed.
WoW doesn’t even have a third the cast of some larger works, yet they routinely forget to include characters when it would make sense to.
There was an abundance of “wait and see” and “you won’t expect this” early on, which has burned most lore-enthusiastic folks pretty hard multiple times now. Story details were withheld or left shrouded because the current team seems kind of obsessed with surprising us with twists and Big Reveals, but nothing’s really had a satisfying payoff yet and we’re nearly two major patches deep into the xpac.
Yeah, basically my problem. They think that if a character doesn’t have screen time, they phase out of existence.
I mean guys, he still was doing SOMETHING. He can’t have no opinion on the matter. That’s not writing. That’s not what writing is.
It’s what makes the sudden heel-turn against Sylvanas by Baine and Lor’themar so jarring; they spent two patches sitting next to her going “boy this is kinda messed up, but I am really comfortable right now so maybe I’ll get up and do something later.”
(It’s this one, by the way. 
)
YES. That is also a great point. I’m glad something is happening finally in 8.2 but the way they wrote it, it seems like they suddenly, for no reason, became horrified and could sit silent no longer. Idk if in the writer’s head they were both agonizing over what to do, and feel sick that this is happening, but it doesn’t matter much because they didn’t show it. Or anything.
It seems like they just came out of comas or something.
I think the common excuse is that Baine, Lor’themar, et all are “too scared” to do anything, just like they were with Garrosh.
Which seems odd, since they already know that being “ooooh i wanna help against mean ol Sywvanas but I’m so scawwed uwu” still ends with their people getting massacred.
Again, truly spectacular writing.
Now I’m imagining a big room where NPCs go when not talking where they stand like mannequins with dead eyes and wait for something to happen.
Westworld!Azeroth would be simultaneously the best and worst possible twist.
The only character for whom this all remotely works is Ji Firepaw.
If you told me that Ji Firepaw was totally oblivious to 90% of what was going on in the Horde because he was having a barbecue, I would totally believe that.
This games story cant be taken seriously, lest we forget the reasoning the devs give for the Alliance not using their spaceship was “we dont want them to”.
If I had to grade Blizz’s writing, I’d give it a C. It’s passable, but it’s not good or exceptional. There are numerous issues with things like character continuity, repetitive tropes, character inability to identify the obvious, and predictability - not to mention the storyline being one that doesn’t appeal to players due to forcing roles and quests onto them that they don’t identify with.
If it was a novel, I’d probably have stopped reading by now.
He was too busy meditating on a ship’s prow and being forgotten about in major cutscenes to notice
You say “forgotten,” I say he finally learned from Aysa and wisely has attempted to stay the hell out of this story.
If we’ll all recall that the last time the story remembered Ji Firepaw existed it was to nearly murder him on the grounds of being Pandaren.
Frankly, the fact he even gets mentioned in A Good War feels like a slap in the face.
That
is a fair assessment.