I think you latter point is the answer.
I mean, the goblins have nukes - we used them as far back as Cataclysm questing in Hillsbrad. The Dranei have a spaceship.
In reality, if all of the races and characters used the capacities they’ve been shown to have in lore, then the war would be over very quickly and all that would be left of Azeroth is a smouldering ruin. So Blizzard just doesn’t go there.
Teldrassil wasn’t a genocide and if you think for three seconds that Nagasaki and Hiroshima were less morally depraved than the War of Thorns this conversation is over; what the US did to Nagasaki was a thousand times worse than Teldrassil in moral terms, and a hundred times more cynical; hence why i settle at the extreme of equalizing the two - and only reluctantly with much apprehension. The only remote case to the contrary is that WoT ostensibly started a war and Nagasaki ostensibly ended one, but the case needs to be made for both, frankly, and even the most indisputable one cannot hope to equalize the events on moral terms.
as to A and B, this is the basis of all military conflict, except its a) absurd and laughable to think anyone thinks in terms of entitlement, or that b) “kill them all root and stem” is not a ludicrous bait-and-switch for “make it impossible to fight back” … RE WoT, they had weeks to evacuate the Tree, there were plenty of other Night Elf settlements all around Kalimdor (as is frequently noted by some in the forums, their main militia is in Feralas), and WRT your own explication of Hiroshima, this makes Teldrassil look far less nefarious.
No it was not you utter fool.
At no point the US effectively occupy the city and then decide to nuke it when they realize they are unable to hold it.
That’s some Genghis Khan crap right there.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had military value and deep in enemy hands. There wasn’t even an invasion of Japan.
Cities were being flattened all over europe and towns were being raided with impunity by the Japanese in the pacific theater.
The US told Japan to surrender and they would not.
So they used a single bomb to obliterate one city home the Second Army HQ.
It was to show the Japanese with this new weapon they stood no change at defending anything so they are better off just surrendering.
If the USA wanted to maximize civilian destruction they would have targeted Kyoto or Tokyo.
Kyoto had immense religious and cultural value to the Japanese and Tokyo was obvious home to their government and both were home to millions and not a few hundred thousand. The US wanted to send a message but they did not need to cripple their government or their holy sites and kill millions unnecessarily to do it.
Yeah, no I won’t engage beyond this comment unless what follows is self-reflection, apology or actual substance.
Sylv burnt it, not nuked it. Plenty of people evacuated as the war party came through Darkshore and Ashenvale. Plenty of people evacuated as it burned. The idea that instantaneous vaporization is somehow … better? is indefensible.
tbh Genghis Khan is better than the US in many ways, definitely possesses an honor that suits the Horde (like his relationship with Jebe, his general). At least he attacks when his honor is slighted - on the field himself - instead of supporting terrorists to fight proxy wars, cynically assassinating sovereigns to obtain their resources, and setting up despotic puppet regimes to maintain that order in perpetuity.
Doesn’t justify the vaporization of civilians - in either Teldrassil or Nagasaki - in moral terms.
And Nagasaki. Which was only related to the war effort in the sense that every major settlement was: the people were patriotic to defend and serve.
This is meaningless in this context. Nagasaki was almost entirely civilian and entirely vaporized. The bomb was dropped on Asia’s largest Cathedral as it was letting out of mass, for God’s sake. Plus, in the context of WoW, Teldrassil is the ONLY major military and economic power of any serious threat to the Horde in Kalimdor. The fact that Nagasaki wasn’t so for the US (given that it was callously added to the list of potential sites as a relative afterthought) vastly increases the moral depravity of the act, rather than decreasing it by any amount. When it comes to mass murder, at a certain point numbers are overtaken by the methods, intents and circumstances wrt moral calculus (c.f. the Shoah).
To … which Japanese? Nagasaki was so populous with Christians that it was called the “Rome of the East.” (The 400 year old Urakami Kakure ethnic minority that predated the unification of Japan, and survived centuries of persecution until they were finally able to come out of the shadows in the late 19th century and build a Church.) As I said earlier, the bomb specifically targeted Urakami Cathedral, the largest church in Asia at the time. It was almost entirely a civilian center. To the survivors who escaped the radius or happened to be away, those people were martyred by soulless demons.
You can justify this event rationally, logistically, etc all you want, but in moral terms it’s far more vile than the War of Thorns. Context mediates the moral calculus, and here it’s on my side of the argument. Vaporizing civilians so tritely as a show of force is so cynical and evil it can never compare to Teldrassil, where the city has the ability to evacuate weeks in advance, and the explicit wartime rationale for destruction isn’t literally to showboat.
I am not even American and I find this ridiculous and offensive.
Your post is riddled with incoherent false equivalencies but this one takes the cake.
Yeah we got nothing more to talk about. I have put up with far more than I can handle with edgelord university.
Isn’t Genghis Khan seen as a national hero in Mongolia though?
Yeah, that’s a super normal phenomenon, idolizing war criminals, terrorists and conquerors. The US has Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers. Britain has Churchill. France has Napoleon. Etc.
What I like is this is all tritely waived away as “Edgelord aesthetics” even though it’s a pretty normal critique in Post-Colonial, Anti-Imperial or Marxist political discourses.
I mean, let’s put this in perspective: the current US administration just put Elliot Abrams in charge of Venezuela - Abrams, who, the last time he was in charge of Latin American politics, Trojan Horsed guns and grenades into El Salvador under the auspices of “humanitarian aid” to arm US-trained militias that then proceeded to ravage the countryside, accounting for over 90% of civilian casualties in those civil wars by explicitly targeting civilians as a terror tactic. They perpetrated the El Mozote massacre, which alone led to the death of almost every person (over 800) in the Protestant civilian village, who had been assured beforehand that the right-wing death squads from the US would not harm them because they didn’t support the Socialist regime like the Catholics in the surrounding villages did and were willing to cooperate. The soldiers bragged about their vile deeds with female children (which I will not write here), and played games with toddlers where they tossed them around and caught them on their bayonets. All the while Abrams is sitting back watching this unfold and lying in front of congress saying it’s not as bad as the rumors are saying, though now official CIA documents tell it true and show he knew exactly what was going on and lied about it. And rather than be punished, he’s promoted again to do his Trojaneering in Venezuela. Yeah that’s just one war criminal in the American Iron Triangle exalted by the system. And yes, that’s at least equal to Genghis Khan if not worse. (To be frank though, Nagasaki is the greatest monument to the sins of the US, and no Mongolian warlord could ever measure up.)
Also, wild that Lithya’s offended about the comparison between US and Khan (which I believe she conjured), but is fine with trivializing the Shoah with a trite, uncritical comparison to Sylvanas as if that’s not many times more offensive.
The horde does not seek redemption
Leaders that do not represent the interest of the horde are disposed, but they are under no burden of finding redemption. That is an alliance trope.
Saurfang begs to differ.
Not once does he use the word redemption.
I fear you did not read the second line of a 3 line response.
Self interest, and the interest of the horde motivates saurfang. There seems to be this notion that the horde cares how they are perceived. They don’t. They only care of the efficacy of their leader.
This is not a redemption narrative
Maybe.
I would be interested in seeing Saurfang or the Horde justifying Teldrassil.
Oh right they plan to blame Sylvanas instead.
Who would they justify it to?
They answer to no authority
One of Saurfangs most notable complaints is that, “now they will all come for us”
His honor is a means of self preservation, in that if he acts honorably, there is less a chance that the horde is exposed to risky campaigns.
Interesting take on it.
I guess we will see how this will play out.
Most honorbois are fascist in nature, it is either ‘FOLLOW MUH HONOR OR DIE!’, in that case they are no better then the Alliance, which explains why most of them like Saurfang and Baine, considering how sympathetic they are to the Alliance and how willing they are to kill members of the Horde over the actual enemy. They are the fascists that believe that every race has to adhere to their code of honor, which is tryrannical in nature. So when a Warchief comes up that does not follow their belief, they cry and moan and cheer when a Warchief, who has shown to be more effective then any before her, is villain bated by bad writing, only because she would be too sympathetic any other way. The Alliance was planning to keep Dazar’alor, Gelbin says so himself. They released furies and other beings and slaughtered civilians and priests as well as the handful of Guards who remained behind on Dazar’alor. Had the Alliance the capabilities to turn Dazar’alor into a smoldering crater, there is no doubt in my mind that Genn would have ordered it and psychopaths like Shaw and Rogers would have obeyed. But as it stands, when the Zandalari and the Horde returned from slaughtering that huge force they sent out to distract as well as the many people dieing and getting their collective rear ends handed to them by the combined forces of the Horde and Zandalari, forces the Alliance bonded together by the way, they were pushed out, which shows that by all intents and purposes, the Horde SHOULD be winning as we have seen that their standing army is much stronger then the Alliance. But bad writing has us believe that the Horde is losing for some reason that is beyond me.
Yeah I was just thinking about this the last few days: how does one’s IRL political vision reflect their allegiances. My guess is the Alliance attracts cultural Christians, Fascists and Liberals or Progressives that like “clean” aesthetics; the Horde’s “honor code” draws in Fascists too, and like you said, they have a particular vision they want imposed and carried out; but the Horde also attracts Progressives and Pluralists for its aesthetic and cultural diversity, and also Collectivist or Communist types for several reasons; and the Forsaken, besides above, seem to attract edgier Western subcultures, nihilist Atheists and Agnostics, and-in my experience-certain kinds of Christians. My guess is that Sylvanas puts off most Progressives and some Pluralists, especially those who don’t see the post-colonial critique of the Alliance-as-Western-Hegemony. Collectivists are willing to sacrifice individualism for the Horde in total, which is basically the entire arc of Sylvanas’ narrative struggle. But Honorbois are too bound up in their vision of morality to accept that alternative visions exist - and ironically end up having identical moral vision to the Alliance, which is why I tend to think they’re exemplars of the “ideological colonization” that we have analogues for IRL in many non-Western countries: essentially sincere and unwitting shills for Western powers, liberalism and capitalism. So, it’s a toss up whether they’re shills or fascists but it’s not good either way.
I’ve long ago stopped making assumptions about RL tastes based on the sort of fiction people like. People often like things in stories that they would hate IRL:
Well big dude, you can dictate the tastes of the players and the construction of the narrative when you both pay for the player´s subs and the dev´s salaries. Otherwise, respectfully… pis off.
/rollseye, stop throwing a temper tantrum of more than a decade old. It makes you look awful.
If you hate Belves so much, then roll Alliance or unsub, cause we kinda are here to stay.
So far, they have failed twice already… I wouldn´t bet on them tbh.
You aware the evilness started AGAIN with your core Orcs, right? Again, don´t be so hasty to overlook the sins of your favs just to dogpile everything in the ones you have failed to adapt to (for more than a decade may I add)…
Do you really believe the Alliance will make mana bombs after what Jaina went through?
Of course not… you guys are forbidden from taking one inch more from your “muh moral highground!!” chains…
Frankly I could never understand how you manage.
I mean, yeah I think many people just pick what their friends do or what aesthetically pleases them. But our worldview subconsciously pushes us in certain directions, especially when it comes to opinions about how to interpret events and stories.
It’s definitely true of me. I liked the Alliance because I’m culturally inclined to Humans, philosophically aligned to Light, etc and the aesthetic that comes with it. I’m also drawn to the Horde narrative on my alts for several reasons described above, predominantly that I’m a collectivist in many respects, and a pluralist, and on some days, really vibe with the Cult of Forgotten Shadow. I think most people have similar reasons why they like something, even if they don’t know how to articulate it or haven’t thought about it.