I’ll make the same argument people like to make about the orcs in Ashenvale: As soon as they were attacked, they knew it wasn’t unclaimed!
Here’s the thing. You’re describing how the Elves would see it, from their point of view. But you can build an equally long version of how the Amani would see it—the people who had been fighting them and driving them back for centuries coming into their territory and trying to take it over. And it would make just as much sense. That’s good storytelling.
Not a mindset I really subscribe to. People attack each other for all kinds of reasons, many often terrible. Wandering into a claimed forest is hardly enough reason to just ruthlessely attack someone, as far as I am concerned, and the butt-whooping you receive as a result thereof is well deserved.
No, I am describing it how I see it.
I know how the troll sees it - I just do not agree that they are deserving of any sympathy or that it is a complex situation. The Amani are quite clearly in the wrong here, and the butt-whooping they received is well-deserved.
The Amani are not in the wrong for defending their lands from invaders, who AFTER being attacked, continued to arrogantly march DEEPER into Amani land and build Quel’thalas.
The elves are to blame here, not the Amani.
So many white imperialist colonizers in this community. Blizzard needs to evict some good placed bans.
Hardly.
The fact that the Elves fought with only the Amani trolls, and not the primitive humans they met says a lot. And this was way before the elves even founded Quel’thalas. The Amani was in it for genocide, and the elves just defended themselves, the Amani was even so vile and bloodthirsty, that the humans only started forming a bigger nation and army due to fearing the Amani.
Yes, and that’s what needs to change. Everybody’s sick of Blizzard’s twisted moral takes and endlessly arrogant lecturing sessions. Everybody’s sick of the dichotomy between Alliance and Horde basically boiling down to good VS evil.
Also, I find it really hard to sympathize with Garrosh more than with Sylvanas. And agreed, the question of the Amani is not that complex : by all accounts, the High Elves are douchebags.
Okay, but that doesn’t mean the other point of view doesn’t exist.
At least with Garrosh, his bad behavior was driven by his own flaws and insecurities. Sylvanas’s motives never really made sense, and frequently were completely obscure until some book would come along months later and offer an explanation that conflicted with previous explanations.
I just find Sylvanas, personally mind you, to be a much more interesting character. Garrosh is a literal racist orc supremacist. Which is really hard and downright wrong to sympathize with 
And the modern high elves are all part of the alliance. If the Amani were smart they would team up with the Horde again.
But they werent fighting them initially for taking anything. They attacked them simply for passing though at the time. If they had started by talking instead of attacking the elves on sight I have more sympathy for them. Hell, they could have maybe made agreements so they would not settle in any troll lands.
But that is also part of why the thread exist. Amani are not the “good guys” of WoW even with their understandable actions that were still horrible.
And opposite is we all end justifying all our endless wars and continue a cycle of hatred forever.
To be fair, I think the best analysis of Garrosh was in Shadows of the Horde, and that has really affected how I think of him as a character:
But given that it is a stupid point of view, I have elected to ignore it.
You do not get to cry about being hurt in a fight, when you started the fight.
An inconsistent character is interesting… aha. I know Afrasiabi tries to claim that she was never inconsistent, but at this point, how much do the writers actually know about their characters… very little.
Atleast outside of the actual authors who write the books, of course.
Says the guy who sympathizes with a literal racist orc supremacist. That’s rich coming from you
And the elves would very likely have done the same to any Amani they spotted on their territory. Like I said, there was bad blood going back a very long way. It would be assumed they were up to no good, unless they were explicitly carrying a white flag or something.
But even if we set aside the very first incident, once it became clear that the High Elves intended to establish a settlement on Amani land, I don’t see fighting against that being presented as “warmongering.”
And my original post that you’ve been arguing with said that neither side are “the good guys,” because the situation is more complex than that.
Your argument seems to be less “The Amani aren’t the good guys” (which I can agree with) and more “The Amani are the bad guys” (which I don’t, at least not entirely).
The fight didn’t start with the founding of Quel’thalas. It stretched back for centuries if not millennia before that. The High Elves settling in Quel’thalas was just the latest version of it at the time.
I also sympathise with thieves, mass-murderers, and all kinds of people who do horrible things. I am just an highly empathetic person.
Sylvanas is just inconsistent, and without the burning of Teldrassil, I could have afforded her character the same treatment. Sadly Blizzard wanted it to be a bad story.
You do you boo. She’s a infinitely better character than Garrosh will ever be
Indeed, the trolls attacked the elves even before they settled Quel’thalas and was any real annoyance or threat - even while the elves were also settled near the primitive humans - which I can only presume was a little further away from troll territory.
Again, the elves fought the trolls, they never fought the humans - although the humans would be a much easier target. Gives me more than enough reason to believe, that the elves were not actually the aggressors here.
Sure, that is your perogative to enjoy terrible characters. Granted, Garrosh is not better by a huge margin - his little stonetalon episode was - allegedly - a mistake. But disregarding that, atleast he was a consistent character with an actually complex story… again, something they nearly got right with Sylvanas too.
But then Teldrassil. At the end of the day, saying that anything in Warcraft story is -good- would be a lie. It can be mediocre at best. Sylvanas just ended up outright bad.
Her stooping to necromancy wasn’t even that bad to me.
You’re welcome to enjoy racist scumbag characters.
Like I said, you do you boo.
Yep, the Amani threw the first punch in that specific situation. I just don’t think that makes them “the bad guys” when you consider the entire context of the ongoing conflict between them and the elves.