Please go back and actually read my posts before trying to put words in my mouth.
I’m saying that the act of spying, the open act of war at Stormheim, the Allaince slaughtering miners in silithus, and the (apparent) Alliance failed coup attempt on Sylvanas were all evidence of the Alliance being openly hostile.
With that in mind, the WoT as Saurfang pitched it, where there’d be minimal civilian casualties due to using the Allaince’s own willingness to start hostilities against themselves, is a hell of a lot more reasonable. They were not attacking unprovoked at all. The major issue came with the escalation that Sylvanas and Sylvanas alone planned.
What’s with Stormheim? Is this the island where Genn smashed Sylvanas’ lantern? I still do not understand, Stormheim was used as an argument by Sylvanas or not? People say yes, no, that Stormheim was implied, that the Horde didn’t know about Stormheim at all, because Sylvanas would have to answer the question about the flashlight …
What Sylvanas and Saurfang pitched was lets attack our enemies before they can.
The problem with you bringing up Alliance aggression as a reason for the Horde to start planning an attack on the Alliance and hold Night Elves hostage in perpetuity for their supposed peace then I assure you with that faulty logic the Alliance had plenty of reasons to attack the Horde as well.
The reasoning is paranoid and illogical.
The faction issues did not start at the beginning of BFA.
The Horde absolutely knew about the Alliance attacking one of their anti-legion military expeditions for no apparent reason. Kind of hard to miss a navy being pearl harbor’d.
The head-scratching thing is that their design of Maldraxxus and Revendreth shows me they get the core concepts. They just refuse to apply them to the actual Horde for some reason.
Which, as a note, as this was ultimately his “practical case scenario” plan with the WoT, this was the reason HIS plan required both the Kaldorei people AND leadership to survive. Its why he never treated Malf and Tyrande as anything more than obstacles best avoided if possible. Why he was more open to sparing Malf, as Malf’s death on paper was ultimately counterintuitive to the plan Sylvie’s argument inspired him to make. And, finally, the “tipping point” to validating the types of Arguments Sylvanas was making was actaully Anduin’s total lack of response to Stormhem. Where at best, he was too weak a leader to punish those responsible (even Rogers, who he had full authority to punish), and thus too weak to resist the calls to pre-emptively attack the Horde from Genn and Tyrande (who were doing that). At worst … he was complicit in that attack.
But … Blizz doesn’t like “nuance”. So they invalidated and whitewashed the sh*t out of nearly all of the Alliance aggression leading up to the WoT, and then had Sylvie pull a flashy as hell genocide to really cement any lack of that icky ambiguity away. Blizz is nothing if not predictable there. Can’t have the Alliance actually attacking the Horde actually count for why the Horde thought the Alliance were going to attack them lol!
I want to ask about this - because as disgusted as I am that the War of the Thorns gets framed as this thing that was only bad because it made the Horde look bad - I think this is important.
Let’s say that a group representing a given racial group shot down a given country’s president’s plane, killing said leader. Would a war against such a racial group be justified on said basis in your view?
They probably could if they hadn’t spent the last half of the game’s lifespan cultivating an Alliance playerbase that says things like this:
Truly nothing more “interesting,” than failing to narratively challenge the obvious false dichotomy of “put them all in camps and enslave them or commit genocide, there are NO OTHER OPTIONS,” to the point that people STILL regurgitate that trash to this day.
Blizzard’s writing has created a status quo where some of the most racist and fascist actions in real life American and European history seem reasonable to some people who approach the fiction from a certain perspective. Its a perspective that can be challenged and even defeated within the fiction itself, but Blizzard has refused to use their authorial authority for that purpose and instead has coddled that perspective by creating moral “outs,” for many of those actions and continuing to shoe-horn the victims of those actions into malice. That malice is then taken as not only continued justification, but RETROACTIVE justification. That’s why even after the expansion where the climax of the Alliance campaign was “Daelin Proudmoore was such a monster that even his wife can’t blame his daughter for killing him to stop him,” we STILL see “Daelin Proudmoore Was Right,” posts. As if “about committing genocide,” isn’t the end of that sentence. Or maybe BECAUSE its the end of that sentence.
The fact that this nice, positive thread has been swamped by 200 posts of the most heinous rhetoric imaginable is all the proof that you need that Blizzard may have irreparably broken this story. How do you write something to show people saying things like this that they’re wrong without them completely rejecting it when you’ve PRIMED them to reject it for like 15 years?
BFA’s ultimate narrative arc for the Horde was supposed to be about addressing its own crimes and how they’ve been papered over by Horde warrior society. Saurfang’s speech saying “I have never known honor,” was a chilling moment in which a character was brutally honest about the horrors of his own origins and his society’s crimes, and how easy it can be for ANY society to justify or erase even the most horrific atrocities. It was an incredibly powerful moment, even is the story that got us there was incredibly bad and not worth it. And all I can think about lately is how the Alliance needs a moment like that and the writers will probably never do it out of fear of how the very attitudes they’ve cultivated would respond to it.
This’ll probably be my last post on this forum, its just too depressing to read some of the things I’ve been reading here, both in this thread that I initially really enjoyed and in general. I wish you all luck in the Forum Wars to come.
I’m not sure I follow unless you’re trying to make this about race? Because what Genn and Rogers did was co-opt Alliance military assets to make an attempted assassination against an opposing factions chief leader, with little to nothing tangible to justify that attack either before or after. Then the Faction responsible for that attack has THEIR main leader wipe it away with a slap on the wrist. This is like some top officials of the US attempting to very publicly assassinate Putin and then the President doesn’t do a damned thing about it.
And Saurfang’s WoT was NOT an attempted Genocide against the NEs. It was an attempt to take the NEs out of the War and use Teld (worst case scenario) as a bargaining chip to sue for a lasting peace; with the Horde in a better position of power in those talks. It wasn’t “Race” oriented, it was entirely founded in conflict between two political powers. And had Stormheim, Silithus, and SI:7 little “we’re always watching you” threat after the Gathering been allowed to count … the Alliance was already attacking the Horde. Repeatedly. The Alliance already broke the post-MoP peace. The Alliance was already acting hyper aggressive.
I found it to be the opposite, personally; I think that moment was a huge mistake and even the best build-up to it would have damaged the game narrative and the faction.
But I agree with a lot of the other things you said in your post, and I envy you your ability to walk away from the forum. I keep thinking I’d be happier if I did that myself, but I keep coming back.
I do remember when this forum was more fun. BfA made things exponentially worse.
You mean your total headcannon thats desperate to turn the story we actaully got with both Saurfang AND A Good War into something about “Race”? Because it makes it easier to conflate Saurfang’s WoT and Sylvie’s BoT, so it makes it easier to make the claim that the Horde ENTIRE wanted to Genocide the NEs? They wanted to from the start. And it wasn’t just a political conflict before Sylvie’s nonsense? It also makes it easier to keep the Blue faction perfectly white-washed, as it just invalidates ALL the absurdly aggressive acts from the Alliance leading up to the WoT. Which Blizz enables, because “GoodRace/EvilRace” tropes are just so much easier to write .
And Saurfang ultimately was convinced that Anduin was (at best) too weak to resist the calls to pre-emptively attack the Horde coming from Genn and Tyrande (who were actually doing that). And he used Anduin’s total lack of response to two High Ranking Alliance leaders using Alliance military assets to attempt to assassinate a World Leader as the tipping point for falling for that argument. Because YES, Anduins lack of response to SH DID portray him as too weak to resist that pressure at best; and at worst, portrayed him as complicit in it. And Sylvie’s argument was only stupid because it wasn’t “They’ll attack us eventually” … its “that they were already attacking the Horde, its just “GOD/Blizz” wouldn’t let it count”.
Droite, you’re going in like sixteen different directions here.
Sylvanas did not argue that Genn Greymane was unhinged or that there was a temporary political issue with Stormheim. She argued that the races of the Alliance, including the Night Elves, would come for the Horde one day, and expanded that time horizon to up to 100 years. Whether you see this as ignoring Stormheim, or as I do - of them fitting Stormheim into a broader narrative of racial paranoia - is immaterial given that this narrative again was a) firmly rooted in race, and b) fully accepted by Saurfang.
So again, I must press on with my earlier question, and insist upon an answer.
But, they never did. They didn’t adress anything. Saying that what you did bad things and then change your government around isn’t adressing anything at all. It’s just running away from responsibility. Those things are easy to do, and takes almost no effort, or sacrifice.
His words simply ring hollow when that’s all they were, words. The council has done absolutely nothing to make up for what they were complicit in.
No, Sylvanas made the argument that “eventually” the old grudges of the Alliance would eventually lead them to attacking the Horde. And it didn’t matter how long that would take, it would happen … and thus the “Price for temporary peace” was not worth it. Since it would be only staving off the inevitable. With this argument only being stupid … because the Alliance had already repeatedly shown hyper aggressive movements AND attacked the Horde several times. It wasn’t a “when” thing, it was an “Already” thing that Blizz invalidated.
It was SAURFANG that brought up Anduin. NOT Sylvanas. As it was Anduin’s total lack of response to the attempted assassination of the Horde’s Warchief that convinced Saurfang Anduin was too weak to resist the call for War from his elders. Specifically Genn and Tyrande (who DO hold long grudges). At best. And at worst, Anduin was complicit in it (which he kind of was in several ways honestly). HIS motives for falling for her arguments she used against him (because she knew they would work on him, it seems very unlikely she believed them herself) … were entirely political. Motived and persuaded by a recent event that did back Sylvie’s point.
Yeah, undermining Sylvanas knowing that discovery means death, and creating a rebel army to fight against Sylvanas even with there being no guarantees that the Genns and Rodgers of the Alliance wouldn’t slaughter them all afterwards is definitely “doing nothing”.
Your retort doesn’t remove the racial angle, and it’s notable that Sylvanas spoke in those terms. She referenced the Night Elves having a prejudice against the Blood Elves as an example, among others where the intent was to toss out political solutions and make the concern innate, immutable, and again explicitly racial.
She did not use the language of racial disgust, she used the language of racial paranoia, and again, Saurfang accepted it almost uncritically.
M … Of course, revenge on your past Leader is very interesting, but when are you going to apologize for mass murder, desecration of corpses and destruction of territories?