And the Horde are like the invading alien Kaijus that the world has to fight right?
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I mean yes, but also if this theme exists in media y, there’s about a 90% chance that I’ll be annoyed with y for it. A truly stupid application of this idea absolutely ruined Disney’s Raya for me.
Whether a story falls in with the 90% or the 10% has a lot to do with how they define “vengeance” and how they define “justice.” If your definition is
Then you’re solidly within some of the worst of the 90%.
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I’m pretty sure that’s not the definition Blizzard intends, it’s just how it ends up appearing.
It’s the experience rather than the intent that matters, though.
Idek, I’m not 100% sure what the three of us really disagree on though. The thematic treatment of “vengeance vs justice” sucks because it feels paper thin and motivated by a lot of stuff extrinsic to the plot (e.g. faction balance). Is that something you’d disagree with?
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The definition of “justice” is one of the core questions of philosophy that the smartest and wisest of all of our species have been trying to answer since the dawn of civilization itself and I look forward to it finally being resolved in this thread.
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I think a lot of it is an issue of what feels good in a game like WoW versus things at least somewhat sensible in its logic.
Is vengeance wrong in the “I’m going to get a ton of people killed, including my own as we try do it, until I feel satisfied” way? Yes, but that is not a moral people want focused on and presented with what happened.
Should justice basically involve having your hands around another people’s necks to extract whatever blood is needed? Maybe not in a sense of building a better world. But it is not what people want focused on after their favorite race or just a race in their faction suffered genocide.
You don’t have to parse the Republic to feel confident that Tedrassil was unjust if anything in WoW is.
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Injustice is way, way easier to identify than its inverse.
It doesn’t matter if you’re Kant, Plato, Mill, some dude off the street. Unless you’re just a straight up nihilist, obviously Teldrassil is due some sort of restitution and/or someone Horde side is due some kind of retribution. You don’t need a specific account of justice if the case is so uncontroversial that everyone comes to similar conclusions.
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The notion that justice inherently involves retribution at all is subject to major philosophical debate.
I’m not saying I disagree with you, I’m saying that without a clear definition, pointing at justice as a concept and saying “give me that” is just sophistry. It’s like saying “give me good, don’t give me bad.” That desire is self evident but the demand can’t be realized on those parameters alone.
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It is also more complicated when applying it to a nation. Who do you hold accountable/put the bulk of the blame on? What do you do to people in various levels of responsibility for the injustice? And in this case, the Alliance did not have the Horde’s neck under its boot so it didn’t have the ability to force certain things to happen without risking further warfare that couldn’t be afforded.
Why this route was taken for the faction conflict is something I will never understand. It leaves no one happy.
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It leaves Sylvanas fans happy.
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I guess as a Lordaeron fan I was briefly happy when the Alliance held Capital City for like 3 minutes before that was ruined to make Sylvanas look more awesome too.
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If an ethical system can be confronted with willful and unprovoked butchery on the scale of Teldrassil, and then conclude that neither restitution nor retribution of any meaningful kind is owed, I’d argue that in itself is a reason to distrust that system.
You don’t have to be a retributionist, but you do have to believe genocide demands some response for whatever reason suits the system.
You implied to my read that justice is a traditionally challenging topic in philosophy, so we’re unlikely to make progress on it here.
Now you’re saying we can’t reasonably talk about what is or isn’t owed as a result of Teldrassil without a specific and rigorous definition of justice.
Taken together, it seems like you’re saying we can’t have a productive discussion re Teldrassil.
But I don’t think you’re making an argument so silly as “non philosophers can’t talk productively about morally relevant themes in media.” I think you’re just getting unnecessarily hung up on a loose or nontechnical use of the word justice.
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Who gets to decide? What higher court or standard of justice mediates? In the real world, most wrongs aren’t ever addressed. You don’t see the United States punished over it’s treatment of the indigenous population, nor it’s enslavement of a whole segment of humanity.
We’re talking escapist fantasy though. The authors decide by fiat what happens and the audience decides how to feel about it.
All of which would be decidedly weird / unpleasant beats to include in a story like WoW’s.
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I don’t, but that also wasn’t the point I was making.
My point was arguing against the whole notion of “Elune didn’t do ****!” And I’m suggesting the the point of soothing the NEs as they died was meant ensure a smooth transition to Ardenweald. Whereas if they’d died burning in agony, screaming for eternal vengeance, they could have been sent elsewhere.
For me at least, it comes down to intent. Justice is the desire to ensure the wrong committed isn’t committed again. Vengeance is simply the desire to commit a wrong against the one who wronged you.
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Totally with you on this. Blizz really plucked the feathers raw on this Night Elf chicken. The retcons are horrible, and the storyline progression is confusing at best. I was asking in my other post since I recently returned and played high enough to find out the Winter Queen is Elune’s SISTER??? What happened to An’she??? What happened to her lover Marlorne and her son Cenarius??? Considering Elune possessing Tyrande is such a big thing, her kins did nothing??? That makes the Winter Queen the aunt to Cenarius, and the grand aunt to all the dryads and keepers of the grove.
This also brings a bigger question to me like why would all the dead Night Elf souls go to the Shadowlands??? I thought they turn to WISPS and help to guard Azeroth. You know all those shiny things flying all around Ashenvale and hlped to defeat Archimonde??? What happened there… somehow Aessina is able to stop Night Elf souls from passing on and stay in Azeroth as wisps. Last I checked, Aessina is still in Hyjal, and still no one knows what she looked like. The whole Shadowland thing is just really messed up for Night Elf lore.
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You tease.
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Well, that’s just… like… uh… a Titan’s perspective or something.
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