Of course you are, it’s absurd to suggest otherwise.
But, what I am noticing lately is there seems to be a lot of posts, both here and in the “Forsaken lore” thread, where Alliance posters seem to be rather free with their “suggestions” as to what will improve Horde races and themes. Frankly, what you are suggesting sounds like marking the Horde as second-class citizens within the story permanently, always laboring with the millstone of Blizzard’s poor shock decision hanging around their necks.
Let me re-iterate that. The Horde has zero agency of its own. It does only what Blizzard writes it to do. To then suggest that the faction being permanently shamed - that the players of the faction should have shame embedded into their faction narrative - is, in my opinion, an absurd suggestion.
This is the case for both. Yes, it may seem like that’s what I’m saying, but you’re also only hearing my thoughts on the Horde. If we were talking about the Purge of Dalaran -my thoughts are just the same. You cannot undo terrible decisions; people need to live with them.
My beef isn’t with the Horde, it’s with Blizzard’s approach to writing the Horde (and the Alliance for that matter). This thread is about Horde potential for Shadowlands, however, so I don’t want to derail that.
Any other time I’m happy to talk with you about the impact of the narrative on the Alliance, too, because they’re standing with zero agency as well.
This is my specific beef, yes, and why I reacted with incredulity when you suggested such things cannot be whitewashed. Dalaran has already been largely whitewashed, in the Horde narrative no less, in a matter I considered to be in extremely poor taste (in a fit of stubbornness, I stood there and tried to get killed in the ‘rescue Baine’ mission while filing snarky bug reports.)
However, I will accede to your point that this threatens to derail the thread, so I will make this my final post on the matter.
They were thrown in the trash bin unjustly. We both know that Vol’jin’s story was nowhere near its’ conclusion when they unceremoniously axed him by way of random fel guard.
Horde players just keep proving they dont want redemption, they want to be villians but at the same time they dont want to be villains I think they want is plot armor, they want to do villainness things and want the story to pat them in the back for it, and then they want the alliance to be unable to response in a meaningful way
They were but it doesn’t matter now. Pulling them out doesn’t mean you get rid of the stink of having been in there. I don’t want them and I’ll always consider the story to be bad while they have any part in it, both in Shadowlands and anything past that.
Vol’jin very much matters rn, because that’s why he’s being setup with a side plot throughout BfA and will continued in the Shadowlands.
He matters now because people were invested in him throughout MoP, and wanted his story to continue afterwards.
He matters because his death basically nullified a massive factor of MoPs plot. Literally, Warchief Sylvanas and the actions she takes invalidates around more than half of the Hordes plot in that expansion.
You may seem content with accepting the loss of certain characters and moving on, but do you see the story moving “forward” in any way? They’ve been leaning heavily on their WC favorites since the end of Garrosh and haven’t moved from them since. Some the AR characters are good, yes, but none of them are capable of carrying the story forward.
Now the Horde is very depleted on its’ WC3 roster and we still have yet to develop any impactful new characters onto the roster. Horde can’t build up new characters without a foundation to build them upon.
You think that giving characters who were unjustly killed off another chance at progressing their story as a bad thing, and to that I simply cannot agree. There are some instances in which drastic times call for drastic measures, and with WoW taking a nosedive in quality, this is one of those times.
I’m a little rusty on my lore but how did people get over the elves nuking the planet into multiple continents and presumably murdering a large chunk of the Azeroth population in the process?
I’m jealous of your optimism OP … but from everything I’ve seen … structurally Shadowlands screams WoD2.0 for the Horde. Where Blizz default to writing stories in their comfort zone with emo-Thrall obsessing over his dead parents; and the BEs just lingering around … and by that I mean Liadrin. Outside of that, they will just attempt to ignore all the damage they’ve done to the Red Faction … even if it remains to be seen if they at least give something to the NEs with Tyrande.
The Horde is clearly not a Faction to be built up to Blizz. It is a Faction meant to be ripped into pieces as Blizz uses it as a plot device to push whatever hairbrained storyline they have in mind; in between stories about the real hero faction defeating some big bad. And once complete, they absolutely have proven they despise trying to put the pieces back together. For gods sake, Saurfang became the MU Orc leader in a tweet … that’s how little they care.
There is no path to redemption, if such a path even could exist. We’ll just be “redeemed” and “fixed” magically, because its too much work to do anything but sweep what they did with the Horde in BfA under a rug. Its all Sylvie’s fault after all!
I’m actually in agreement here. Bringing back characters reads to me as “We can do it better than the old writers” aka BFA MoP 2.0.
It also feels cheap to me. “The roster of developed characters is running low, what should we do? Develop new ones? Nah, lets just recycle old ones so we don’t have to put in the effort of expanding the roster.”
And in general it just cheapens the weight of death. If people can be brought back from the dead, does death have any meaning?
Hell, its even recycle new ones over just developing the roster we still have left! Like, I could totally justify bringing old legacy characters back from the game if and only if the ones being brought back were solely for the purpose of developing the remaining living roster.
The Horde characters that could easily benefit especially from a waltz through the land of the dead are: Rommath; Mayla; Baine; Talaanji; and any number of Forsaken reps … especially Lillian Voss. Could you imagine her having a character arc involving Benedictus, and coming into her own as a true leader of the Forsaken? That would be amazing. She’s had the foundation to be a good one for years, just never the development!
But, the current WoW writing staff just does not seem to think like this. They are just so lacking in creativity and passion, fixated on these outlandish ever-escalating stories that they cannot stop for a moment to “build” anything of substance. So they just sort of destroy.
