So if Battle for Azeroth = Warcraft II

Lore Story Forum
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…what happens next?

Let’s begin by reviewing the state of things between the Second War (Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness) and the Third War (Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos):

  1. Stormwind City was in the process of reconstruction
  2. Alterac City had been either destroyed or at least captured in light of Aiden Perenolde’s betrayal
  3. Gilneas had seceded from the Alliance
  4. Quel’Thalas had also become more isolationist
  5. Kul Tiras was essentially represented in the form of Daelin Proudmoore declaring all-out war on pirates throughout the Great Sea
  6. The Orc Internment Camps were up and running under Adelas Blackmoore, in which the captive orcs of the Horde were subject to increasingly-monstrous living conditions, and even gladiatorial combat

Now, I’ve seen a lot of comments from players—in both factions, Red and Blue—comparing Battle for Azeroth and its fallout to Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and its fallout, just on a purely narrative level. While the most obvious connection is Kul Tiras, more importantly we have the common themes of:

  1. Horde does something monstrously unforgivable
  • Destruction of Stormwind, First and Second Wars
  • Burning of Teldrassil and the Fourth War
  1. Alliance must rally together to stop Horde
  • The formation of the Alliance of Lordaeron
  • The War Campaign against Zandalar
  1. There’s clearly-visible faction infighting on both sides
  • Alliance during/after Second War: Perenolde’s betrayal, Gilneas and Quel’Thalas becoming more isolationist
  • Alliance during/after Fourth War: Anduin refusing to aid the Kaldorei, and Tyrande choosing to become…more isolationist
  • Horde during/after Second War: Doomhammer vs. Guldan
  • Horde during/after Fourth War: The rebellion against Sylvanas, followed by the formation of the Horde Council and the new tensions in Shadows Rising with Talanji
  1. The Horde is portrayed as being unable to overcome its infighting, while the Alliance does overcome theirs:
  • Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness: Gul’dan’s betrayal directly leads to the Horde’s defeat at the hands of the Alliance
  • Battle for Azeroth: The Horde can only oppose Sylvanas’ betrayal with Alliance aid

One noteworthy difference many players have noted, however, is how Blizzard won’t allow the Alliance to be anything but “morally-superior,” while the Horde must be forced into the role of villain. One might conclude from this that the current Alliance is thus “immune” to a lot of the political infighting that plagued the original Alliance of Lordaeron, because they’re too “perfect.”

To an extent, that’s true. However, we have also seen recent divisions between Anduin and Tyrande over Darkshore, thus giving us at least some form of splintering on Team Blue. And to be fair, the Kaldorei do seem to be increasingly threatened by the prospect of human exceptionalism within the Alliance (Night Elves = new High Elves?).

So, where we are now:

  1. The Horde has done something truly evil/genocidal.
  2. They seek to make up for it, but must make it up to the Alliance, whom they victimized. Meaning, the Alliance effectively controls/holds the keys to their redemption
  3. The night elves are becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the Alliance.

Where do we go from here?

If Blizzard really is intent on repeating the history of “Righteous Alliance (Humanity) vs. Evil Horde (Orcs),” without the “Shaman Thrall redemption arc” we saw in Lord of the Clans and Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, then what is most likely to happen next, given what we’ve seen so far with Battle for Azeroth?

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There are key differences.

The big one is that demon blood isn’t a factor. You can’t reduce Alliance policy down to a misunderstanding of this phenomenon, instead the problem is ideological, and BFA ended without even trying to mend that ideological impulse to conquest and genocide from the Horde. It’s still there, and Blizzard intentionally left it unresolved.

This and the fact that Horde wasn’t truly defeated removes the key element of Warcraft 3’s portrayal of the Horde - that they were in a position to be oppressed, and were oppressed before they escaped the humans and built their own society. In the present situation we are left with a council mostly composed of people who were not just complicit, but mentally stable and unimpaired in their complicity for most of BFA.

Warcraft 2 is only really comparable in that the developers wanted the Horde to be evil, but a Warcraft 3 follow-up really isn’t in the cards here. The developers closed the door on that.

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I mean, just because WC2 is comparable to BFA doesn’t mean we’re gonna do a full loop of events that occurred afterwards.

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To be honest I don’t think the comparison is uniquely strong with the Second War, as basically every Horde-Alliance conflict follows the same pattern:

  1. The Horde attacks an isolated nation out of nowhere and has a big, flashy, violent victory with an immense cost in innocent lives (see: Stormwind, Theramore, Teldrassil).
  2. The Alliance is shocked out of its internal bickerings, unites* and goes on the offensive.
  3. The internal unity of the Horde starts to fray in the face of a united enemy, eventually triggering an internal coup or civil war (see: Doomhammer vs Blackhand, Gul’Dan vs Doomhammer, Vol’jin vs Garrosh, Saurfang vs Sylvanas).
  4. The Alliance defeats the disunified Horde and its internal nations start to go their own way once again.

*I say ‘unites’ but there’s always some level of internal dissent, it just never boils over into civil war as it does with the Horde. Those who do betray the greater faction tend to do so without aid, and fail.

If anything, I’m hoping the next war is Daelin 2.0, but this time it’s the entire faction, rather than a splinter group. Turalyon ought to decide he’s restoring the Alliance to its former glory come hell or high water, and just go for it.

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And this is where we do kind of run into the area of “Blizzard wrote themselves into a corner.”

Because yeah, they can’t exactly get away with something as extreme as internment camps this time around, not when the two-faction system in WoW is far more prevalent and relevant than it was in Warcraft II.

At the same time though, there are parallels in the realm of the, as you put it, ideological. The orcs—or any other Horde race, for that matter—can’t get thrown into camps for what they did, but we have seen:

  1. Saurfang openly accusing/questioning whether the orcs are naturally vicious, using the example of the Path of Glory and openly confessing to Anduin that he “has never known honor.”
  2. The complete and total obliteration of the Forsaken’s faction identity, along with the loss of their capital city
  3. The subsequent responsibility, implied or otherwise, on the part of the Horde in particular to atone/make things right, as we see during Thrall’s conversation with Tyrande in Shadows Rising.

It’s actually why I made this post to begin with, because there are parallels, but as stated in the OP, it’s the parallel of “Horde did evil, must atone” without the possibility—or at the very least, the likelihood—of a redemption arc to clean their hands.

Right, and this is actually why so many people (granted, most have a red background) have called for the Alliance to return to its more prejudiced roots ala Daelin, which was another staple from Warcraft III. It would at least provide a familiar “outro” to the events of Battle for Azeroth, if the Horde doesn’t get a “Shaman Thrall” redemption arc.

But as many Horde posters have pointed out, this would still require Blizzard to not only allow for the Alliance to be the aggressor, but to then hold them accountable for it, which has become increasingly unlikely of late.

And the absence of either scenario does threaten to drive us toward a “static” Warcraft II situation, in which the Horde is constantly forced to seek atonement that it can never fully gain, and which the Alliance will never fully grant them anyway.

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But as many Horde posters have pointed out, this would still require Blizzard to not only allow for the Alliance to be the aggressor, but to then hold them accountable for it, which has become increasingly unlikely of late.

I don’t think there’s necessarily anything unlikely about it. It’s doable and solutions should fit those contours, but as I’ve encountered here - I’m not sure that Horde players are psychologically ready for what that means.

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I think WC2 is the wrong comparison; MoP is much more on the nose. It does overlap with WC2, but the writers took a different way out of that expansion, which is being exactly replicated:

  1. Horde gets evil warchief, who eventually stops being warchief.
  2. Former Horde warchief leaves Azeroth to forward his/her plans and a select group of heroes from Azeroth follow.
  3. The next expansion is spent in this non-Azeroth location.

If they’re true to form, the next step after that will be Legion: a cosmic force threatens Azeroth and the Horde-Alliance conflict is swept aside. I’m betting on the “Light Can Be a Threat Too” expansion, personally.

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Neither Horde players nor Alliance players are ready for it. Both sets of players think that they are, but they aren’t.

At the end of the day most of us play the content on both sides. We have both Alliance toons and Horde toons, but most of us emotionally identify with one faction more than the other. I would argue that is what makes one a “Horde player” or an “Alliance player”.

The emotional impact of content that I have played is greater when it happens on the faction that I identify with. So as an Alliance identifying player, content played on an Alliance toon has a greater resonance and impact on me than content played on a Horde toon.

I have played all of the Horde content, so I can understand intellectually the arguments put forward by Horde players on these forums about the issues that they perceive with that content. I can even agree with some of them on an intellectual level. However, I would never suggest that I can grasp them on an emotional level or that they would have impacted me in the same way as content that I have played on an Alliance toon.

All of which is a long winded way of saying, that if Blizzard does ever switch it around, I don’t think anyone is ready for what that means. It would make for interesting times.

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I mean if they did go the route that you are suggesting it does open up possibilities for a more aggressive/dark/grey Alliance or Alliance splinter faction. If the Light is the cosmic bad guy, given the Alliance’s strong Light connections, it seems pretty feasible that you could add a WC III Alliance splintering to some degree angle to it.

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It’s feasible.

What I worry about is that it could also end up being Legion all over again in that Alliance reps are the only ones who get screentime and development, while the Horde reps sit in the basement and ask people to track down muffin thieves. :frowning:

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I mean that is always going to be risk in any shared content given Blizzard’s track record. If I were hopeful, I would suggest that it would also be an opportunity for Blizzard to develop some Horde characters who could a la Khadgar or Muradin or Bolvar be the face of an expansion.

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Except:

was literally the plot of Warcraft III with the Scourge and the return of the Burning Legion. So even WoW’s expansions are a repetition of history.

The problem/change here, though, is how far they’ve now gone with how “evil” the Horde can be—Theramore, for example, could be argued as “military target, fair game.”

Teldrassil was genocide.

Not to mention that another point which has been brought up is the generational aspect—Thrall wasn’t even born at the time of the First/Second Wars; he quite literally represented a new age for the orcs, hence the redemption arc.

The Horde at the moment doesn’t have that luxury with Teldrassil, which was also a more recent event, vs. approximately a decade and a half (10+ years) between the Second and Third Wars.

Which is probably why time-travel has also been suggested as a potential solution; it’s far easier to “break the cycle” when an act of genocide occurred, say, 10+ years ago vs. “just the other day,” or even a month ago.

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Yes, but the intervening non-Azeroth expansion didn’t happen between WC2 and WC3. The journey to another world allows the Horde-Alliance conflict to be simply ignored when we return to Azeroth, as the audience is assumed to have moved on and they can just say that hostilities have died down. WC3, on the other hand, directly addressed AvH as a major part of the story, pointing to how it actually contributed to the direness of the situation—a perspective that was absent from Legion.

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Technically, it did with Beyond the Dark Portal, but that was more a continuation of the faction conflict than an intermission.

Still counts for narrative purposes, though.

More importantly is this point here:

The problem here is, again, the question of “just how villainous is considered ‘too far’?”

Because while the destruction of Stormwind (First War) and the razing of much of Quel’Thalas (Second) are comparable to the destruction of Theramore (Mists of Pandaria) and the Burning of Teldrassil (Battle for Azeroth), I reiterate again that there was a much larger gap in time between the Second War and the Third, to the point of having both the Alliance (or rather, the survivors) and the Horde literally being led by a new generation entirely (Jaina and Thrall).

We don’t currently have that luxury here outside of a major, Bronze Dragon-esque timeskip; the characters responsible for Teldrassil, and even Theramore, are still very much in positions of leadership, hence the cries for vengeance.

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Wow, I hadn’t thought of that. So we are in fact on version #3 of this merry-go-round.

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Saurfang and Zekhan slowly approach the Darkmoon Faire.

Zekhan: Then…what are we doing?

Saurfang glares angrily at the merry-go-round while brandishing a baseball bat.

Saurfang: Breaking the cycle.

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In Warcraft 3 there was a long period of time that passed since Warcraft 2. In Wow was it even a month between BFA and Shadowlands ?

In Warcraft 3 in addition to what was mentioned above it was made very clear how each side had to unite to stop an age old enemy. This feels like a dragged out siege of Ogrimmar. We are building up our strength to take out the evil warchief in its stronghold again. The Jailer might be pointed at as the big bad but we have no strong connection to him and there seems more cinematic time given to Sylvanas and that unfinished business atm.

Dragging out the settling of that situation and not settling it before the expansion or in the first raid is making Shadowlands almost BFA part 2.

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Interesting… Very nice detail post… and I can see some of the comparisons. :thinking:

So, basically if we are in W3 version of WoW SL… does it mean that they purposely burn the Night Elves Home just like Arthas destroy Silver Moon, but with Sylvanas? Errr, wow I really hope not… if any of this is proven true… the a lot of the player base will not be happy at all. :roll_eyes:

If anything I got the impression that, this expansion was to expand the Cosmology or Universe of WoW… including leaving behind our old leaders for new ones, or did I got that wrong? :no_mouth:

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Oh, they already did:

  • During the War of the Thorns, the Alliance uses fire to burn the bridge(s) spanning the river. Sylvanas uses her mages to create an ice bridge to cross it.
  • During the Invasion of Quel’Thalas, Sylvanas initially destroyed a bridge using a grenade. Arthas crossed the river by flooding it with corpses from his army. Later, he uses Frostmourne to create a “Path of Frost” to reach the Isle of Quel’Danas and the Sunwell—this is recreated during the mission “The Fall of Silvermoon” in Warcraft III: Reforged.
  • Not to mention the Warbringers cinematic clearly showing how Sylvanas took direct inspiration from what Arthas did to her, before ordering Teldrassil be burned.

The War of the Thorns is very much intended to make us think of Arthas’ Invasion of Quel’Thalas, with Sylvanas being the aggressor this time around.

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So many years WoW in the market, so many good story to get inspired by and the story team is hiring writers to write the same storytelling of the original RTS? :unamused:

Well this is disappointing and extremely discouraging… :sweat:

So Maldrauxx is basically WoW writing animated into the game? A flouting dead carcass of mass and gore pile together and Blizz just scavenging and farming what’s left of WC 1-3 for parts to create this new Abomination! LMAO! :rofl:

Apologies I just had to lighten the mood with this lame joke that pop into my head! lol :sweat_smile:

I guess in Blizzconline we will have to see were this story ends up then… :man_shrugging: