So Ardenweald story is as much troll as night elf?

Lore Story Forum
1360

I don’t consider Saurfang’s plan to be genocide but even if it had gone off flawlessly, it’s basically pants on head and doesn’t put the Horde in any better position morally speaking.

Also, I don’t want to get into this sort of thing since it would derail, but the sequence of events was Alliance getting killed at Silithus first, then goblins getting killed by SI:7. That said, neither is a decent impetus for war.

Stormheim would be valid if both sides weren’t aware that it was the result of manipulation by the Legion, but this would have been clearly revealed by even the middle of the expansion. In all honestly, a faction war was a dumb idea to begin with and should never have happened, at least not how it did. Just comes back to my theory of piecemeal expansions being squished into two, but think of how much more enjoyable BfA would have been without the faction war looming over our heads.

I dream of an expansion where I could have fully enjoyed Kul Tiras and Zandalar and gotten back to some middle fantasy Warcraft without dealing with some convoluted plot involving a vampire elf and blowing up ships.

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1361

I am aware of this, but it disgusts me to my core. Nowhere is there ever a reason given for WHY the Bilgewater attacked the Explorer’s League in Silithus beyond “LOL, they’re Goblins!”. Which literally was just Blizz’s excuse to handwave away the Alliance slaughtering Horde civilians mining a resource the Alliance had no claim to; even before Magni made a trip to TB. It truly is disgusting how Blizz cares so little that they don’t even bother writing justifications for Horde actions; let alone ever validating them.

And no, Stormheim was not valid. Genn and Rogers did not know why Sylvanas was there before the attack, and barely had an inkling of what she was doing after. Its just dumb luck that their attempted assassination of the Horde’s new leader ended up positive. And Anduin’s response to it was to … give them both a slap on the wrist. But whatever … it just more “the Alliance is always right, justified, and morally absolute in every god damned thing they ever do; and the Horde can’t even get justifications at all” from Blizz.

Truly, thank god no one ever looks too deeply at the subtext of shoving most of the non Traditional Euro-Fantasy cultures into the “LOL, default flawed, evil” Faction. While the unbelievably Euro Inspired Alliance are the flawless paragons of every moral virtue conceived by man.

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1362

Gameplay issues aside, BFA’s story could have still been laughable without the faction war but it would have been a relatively inoffensive bad. At the very least, devoting that time solely to the old god stuff would have made it more coherent.

Now that I think about, now that localized reorigination is a thing, couldn’t you clear out Silithus and then laser beam the sword to dematerialize it?

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1363

I feel pretty dismantled. I don’t even recognize the faction anymore.

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1364

Oh no, sorry, I wasn’t clear on what I meant, juggling a lot here. What I meant was that via the implied timeline and knowledge the characters had, it wasn’t a valid reason for war on either side. Ergo the whole of it was a manipulation of the Legion, or the end result of such.

  1. Dreadlord replaced Shaw (aka the worst spy ever).
  2. FakeShaw gives Alliance intel on Broken Shore, which is shared with the Horde. It’s inf act a trap because there are way more demons than what was shared.
  3. The Horde seemingly abandons the Alliance, which in the eyes of some characters is a declaration of war anyway.
  4. Genn does the thing where they break cloud cover instead of just bombing from on high and then breaks Sylvanas’ night light.
  5. Rogue campaign reveals that Shaw has been replaced, and saves the real one (instead of just leaving him there because, again, worst spy). Respective members of both factions are privy to this info, and would have shared it. Ergo, Alliance assumed they were already at war, did the thing, and then found out it was all Legion stuff anyway.
  6. Sylvanas seems to have ignored it anyway since mere months later, she allows Liadrin to lead the Blood Elves alongside the Night Elves against the Shal’dorei. Stormheim is never actually mentioned again, and seems to be completely taken as just another Legion manipulation untiiiil…
  7. Sylvanas uses it to try and convince Saurfang.

I wasn’t saying Genn’s dumb luck in stopping Sylvanas makes it justified, I’m saying that both sides were informed it was a manipulation outcome after the fact, as all the class campaigns canonically end after the zone chains. We’re in agreement on Stormheim in terms of outcome, it totally mucked with the actual mission of getting the Aegis.

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1365

She doesn’t actually bring it up, he just considers it himself when gauging her argument on whether Anduin was a strong enough leader to resist the calls to war from Tyrande, Genn, and even Shaw. The prior two of whom actually were trying to push him into pre-emptively attacking the Horde, its just Anduin proved he was able to resist. The thing is … there was no way based on Anduin’s response to Stormheim for Saurfang to ever think he had that sort of will. And with Anduin’s resolve/lack of resolve ultimately being the determining factor of IF the Alliance would attack the Horde, of course he’d think they were coming.

Especially with Stormheim, Silithus, and SI:7’s activities in Org. Anduin did not even punish Rogers, who he had full authority to punish. That’s a really bad look on an international incident like that. It makes him look too weak to do it at best, and absolutely complicit in it at worst.

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1366

Genn wasn’t “manipulated by Shaw into attacking Sylvanas.” He went there specifically and only to kill her.
https://imgur.com/a/UmdX7lp

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1367

Yet again you’re misquoting me and completely missing the point of my initial post.

I was saying the catalyst event that pushed Genn to want to go after Sylvanas in the first place, the Horde’s perceived betrayal of the Alliance at the Broken Shore, was due to the false intel that FakeShaw gave them. This created the entire renewed conflict in the first place, in that the Alliance assumed they were at war at that point, thus lending impetus for Genn to be off his leash (pun intended). Even Anduin at the time assumed they were at war, he was just focusing on the Legion. It was only after the Rogue class hall campaign, which canonically ends after the zone chains, ergo after Genn attacked Sylvanas, that it was revealed the entire Broken Shore had been a trap set by FakeShaw, and no betrayal had taken place.

That was the manipulation I was referring to.

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1368

I see.
I don’t really agree with that. Admiral KillHorde and Greymane had wanted to do nothing but kill Horde (or Sylvanas) for their entire time in WoW up until Legion ended and that book came out where Genn was like “Yeah, forsaken are people too.”

Admiral KillHorde still hasn’t changed to my recollection, though.

1369

They attacked the Explorers’ League with the intention of killing them, so that no one would know what they were doing there. At that time, Azerith was still a secret, and a war-critical resource.

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1370

The unwitting tool. Taken advantage of as they oh… you know…

Loaded the catapults

Set the ammunition on fire

Launched it

Used shamanism to make the fire spread faster and burn hotter

Reloaded the catapults

Etc etc

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1371

order of their leaders, yeah, the common soldier isn´t innocent, but not guilty.

Officers, higher officers, who commanded the common soldiers, yes, they are guilty and have to be punished.

1372

“I was just following orders” isn’t an excuse.

Further more the canon is that Saurfang was shouting for them to stop.

Their vaunted war hero whom without Sylvanas wouldn’t have been able to get them to go to war in the first place commanded them to not follow that 0rder.

They chose not to listen to him.

1373

It is not an excuse either, but at the end of the day the fact remains that they are common soldiers and the Horde certainly did not set up a moral rulebook for war.

and in the end: Warchief>highlord.

1374

Warchief>Highlord doesn’t factor in that Sylvanas herself stated that the Horde would never follow her into war. She needed Saurfang to get the othes on board and even then they had to lie to certain other leaders.

But when given the order to put civillians to the torch they gleefully ignored their war hero.

1375

You know, war is a strange thing, it always brings out the worst in you.

What I mean by that is, as I’m sure you know, the night elves weren’t exactly squeamish, nor should they be, they killed thousands upon thousands, ended up killing more soldiers than they suffered, they almost stopped an 8 to 1 force by a hair’s breadth and put them in an meatgrinder, with nothing more than a city guard, Malfurion and a couple of civilians.

Many comrades from the Horde forces fell, I think ultimately the emotional component of vindictiveness was certainly a deciding factor here. They wanted to humiliate the night elves at that point, to punish them, for their fierce defensive

Just to make it clear, look at the war reports around Iraq. How many soldiers there say they have avenged or defended their comrades, even though it is actually a war of aggression.

1376

The War of the Thorns was never an independent event from the burning of Teldrassil. There never was a “Saurfang’s WoT.” Specifically because from the very beginning the Horde was written as a tool manipulated by Sylvanas. And Saurfang knew this and turned a blind eye because he was so desperate for a war he could be proud of, as from the very titular nature of A Good War:

    The look in Sylvanas’s eyes gave Saurfang pause. She was more annoyed than he would have expected. If the Horde managed to kill both Tyrande and Malfurion, yes, it would be a great victory that would weaken the Alliance, but the objective was supposed to be conquering the World Tree. That wedge would split the Alliance no matter who ruled the night elves.

    Saurfang considered, not for the first time, that Sylvanas wasn’t telling him everything.

    Does that matter? Saurfang asked himself.

    No, he decided. She wasn’t lying about the importance of this objective, and if she had plans beyond the coming battle, well . . . she was warchief, was she not?

That is the albatross that Blizzard has written onto the Horde’s back. That the Horde let Sylvanas be Warchief. As was brought up in Shadows Rising:

    Thrall reminded them. “Not all of the Horde stood with her that day.”

    “And yet she spoke for your side, acted for your side,” Maiev shot back. “The warchief is the voice of the Horde, the hand of the Horde, but now you have scattered yourselves to a council, dispersing the blame, hiding behind cowardly revisions of a history that will not be forgotten!”

And it was this very problem that ruined Saurfang for many of the Horde fans, that Saurfang, and the Horde as a whole, didn’t stand up to Sylvanas sooner. That Saurfang and the Horde didn’t reject Sylvanas at the beginning of BfA instead of at the very end. And narratively that the Horde didn’t reject Sylvanas before BfA even started, as has been brought up by the Horde characters themselves, such as Thrall to Tyrande in Shadows Rising:

    “Baine Bloodhoof even sought to overthrow Sylvanas and remove her as warchief; it is only a shame that he did not do so sooner, and that more did not listen.”

Or Lor’themar at the end of the BfA War Campaign:

    A part of me will always wonder if this would have happened had I acted sooner. If I had confronted Sylvanas in the early days of the war. If Teldrassil hadn’t burned.

Even within the Horde narratively there is not clearly known difference between the War of the Thorns and the burning of Teldrassil. Thrall clarified this point to Tyrande during Shadows Rising:

    “High Overlord Saurfang engineered the siege with Sylvanas, though he had no intention of destroying the World Tree,” Thrall added. “His part cannot be forgotten, but he is now in the grave, put there by his own warchief.”

Yet earlier in the book Zekhan of all people muddled what the Horde knows about Saurfang and the War of the Thorns when he was talking with Talanji:

    “Our high overlord who fell at the mak’gora to the Banshee Queen’s magic. He…he wasn’t perfect, he was a killer, I know that. Not just a killer. What he did to the elves, to their tree, that is something too big for me to judge.”

For all of the players who cling to Stormheim and the metaknowledge thereof, the very complaint that Blizzard didn’t follow through with Stormheim as justification for the War of the Thorns only punctuates that the War of the Thorns never actually had anything to do with Stormheim. Not to Sylvanas, and not to Saurfang, who never even bothered to bring it up to any of the Horde soldiers or even mention Genn Greymane outside of his own thoughts. The complaint can go deeper because of that, as narratively the Horde soldiers are never presented with any dots connecting the War of the Thorns to Stormheim, or any idea of why they were marching towards the Night Elves’ home at all. And with Saurfang having died without having talked to anyone besides Anduin about what was going through his head, the Horde has been left without any idea of why they went to war against peace-nicks like Malfurion and Anduin beyond that Sylvanas wanted to use them.

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1377

I’m not really sure that’s much of a sympathetic plight, considering they wouldn’t have died in the first place, if they hadn’t launched a suckerpunch of a wrongful invasion.

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1378

But that’s just it. Saurfang’s thoughts were a very good indicator of Stormheim. It was a massive event, following on the back of a Legion invasion- the worst possible time for it to happen.

Sure, Saurfang didn’t lead with a boisterous speech with something along the lines of “In the throes of planetary destruction they’d still exploit the chaos to rain fire down upon us in a chance to kill the Warchief right there and then.”, but, if prominent NPCs know it and the General who orchestrates this invasion mentions it in internal dialogue, I can do enough filling in the blanks to piece together that was probably the leading reason why people were okay with waging this war.

It isn’t that mad of a world where the commonfolk of the Horde are slavering at the thought of waging war on the Alliance just 'cus, there had to be a reason why she, air quotes, “had the public’s approval”. A lie convincing enough that John Uninformed would nod their head and just embrace it, and not for an ulterior motive, seems most likely.

Don’t get me wrong, BFA’s story was atrocious, they did everything wrong, none of it made sense and it will forever go down as the worst thing Blizzard had ever made, but the original sin exists, we see it, it’s even nodded at. The Alliance in this story isn’t without guilt, the assault wasn’t sold on just “let’s smash the Alliance for fun!”, it was most likely sold on a good purpose worn as a disguise for a bigger lie, which is apparently doing ding-dong-doodly-whatever-the-hell in the afterlife. It’s just that we don’t really see much of it (mostly because it got handwaved to follow a really lackluster story. “WoW’s story is interpreted.”. Thanks, Steve. What a canned answer that I didn’t ever want to read from someone in such a position as lead narrative designer.).

It isn’t wholly on the fault of the Horde for this. It’s just that by the time she should had been opposed, she carried out her masterstroke and it was a little too late to put the genie back into the bottle.

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1379

You know what even Saurfang’s first thought was when she ordered them to fire? “Did Summermoon tell her they wont surrender? Was the Alliance already on its way?” The first impulse, “was Teldrassil going to be the same Horde meatgrinder as Ashenvale and Darkshore”? And ONLY Sylvanas truly knew what awaited the Horde in the tree. Only she was informed it was filled with only noncombatants. Thus, the only one making an informed decision on Teld was Sylvanas herself; and yet Saurfang still attempted to stop the bombardment. And somehow a single barrage managed to ignite a living tree that size … Blizz…

Teldrassil was a horror story, and is a crime I hate Blizzard for. I hate what it did to the NEs. I hate what its done to the Horde. I hate their response to it, and especially their lack of allowing the Horde to respond to it. They did something horrific for shock value alone, and did not know how to write their way out of it when the playerbase reacted extremely negatively to it. But I am also not going to sit here and pretend that at any point did the Horde outside of Sylvanas and maybe Nate intend to eradicate the NEs. And had the Alliance aggro proceeding the WoT been allowed to count, the WoT alone would have been more than justified.

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