I think he was talking about among humanity specifically. Stop jumping to conclusions and assigning people intent that you don’t actually know is there.
Come to think of it, it’s pretty messed up that the religious fanatic allied race ended up with what amounts to be a suicide bombing racial.
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Honestly thinking this thread should be locked. It has deviated quite significantly from its original topic. Much of the current discourse has nothing to do with the Horde heroism or even Alliance.
If you want to talk real world politics you can probably find a suitable thread in the off-topic channel. This is supposed to be about Story items not CRT.
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Yes, and I also said that I would like some human cultures to also be not German/English, at least, if Blizz absolutely must keep them white. What are you arguing?
WC3 is the part in the franchise when Orcs became so much more than just the novelty of getting to play monsters. It’s also when Darkspear Trolls, Tauren, Forsaken, spiritualism, goblins as neutral trader race (not a common trope then), and so many other actual defining elements of the Horde were introduced. WC3 Horde is so beyond WC1/2 Horde in terms of themes and characterization.
And they did it all by making most of the story about the trying to escape humans as they pursued their own story. Not serve the role of tormentors or morality pets for humans.
Similarly, it’s where the settings’ humans were absolutely at their least traditionally chivalrous. Human characters in WC3 were allowed to be racist-not just against orcs, but against their own allies. They were allowed to squabble among themselves. They were allowed to fall from grace and commit regicide and become villains. They were also allowed to be heroic and stand up to injustice and learn lessons and save the world and have complex conflicted feelings and not be framed as the “default” campaign.
And it wasn’t really until WC3 that the franchise actually blew up. It’s the WC3 characters and arcs we all remember and want to see continued. It’s the WC3 stuff that made so many people like WoW.
WC3 had so much more imagination than what we’re seeing in stuff like BfA or Shadowlands. Or even what we saw in WC1/2.
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All art is political.
How could we possibly talk about how to portray characters in a given work without examining how they’re expressed in that work? How can we examine how to write them differently without ever examining how they got there to begin with?
Politics aren’t anything to be afraid of. Especially not in a game that wats to explores the consequences and nature of war.
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I’m going to ignore the art bait.
This started as an honest discussion on the topic of the Horde and their concept of honour and heroism.
They were designed using a Mongolian cultural aesthetic. If you need to discuss real world cultures perhaps it would be beneficial to start with one relevant to the topic?
Which is shaped by the IRL basis of the races of the Horde and the cultural stereotypes and motifs therein.
If the conversation is too hot for you get out the fire lmao rest of us are fine
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This has been a thing since Warcraft 2. When we actually found out there were several human kingdoms. Whether is be Genn general disdain for the Alliance or Perenolde outright betray. The humans of Warcraft 2 were not perfect angels.
This is a horrible reading of what Blizzard has done. If anything Blizzard has CONSTANTLY reinforced that its not what you look like that matters but how you act. There is a reason draenei are part of the Alliance even though it looks the traditional demon of Warcraft. There was an entire contrast made about how Worgens are not monsters for how they look but the Horde was because of how it acted.
It is in this position because it was suppose to be a Warhammer game, which drew inspiration from Tolkien, who then drew inspiration from an obviously western view of how they wanted to portray good and evil and who iconographic view of “barbarians” were shaped by literal Mongol Horde that did once attack Europe.
and yet you keep forgetting the very core events that happened to the orcs in Warcraft 3(at least Reign of Chaos). The fact that the Horde did keep sliding back into bad habits, like drinking demon blood even though a witch doctor warned Grom it was a bad idea or That Grom went and aggroed every Alliance base he could even when Thrall told him no(I remember being a Great Hall in the middle of Grom so he gets attacked and not me!)
That the Horde actually does have to atone for what it did in Warcraft 1-2 and now it clear Blizzard doesnt think it did enough.
No I think Blizzard doesn’t think this at all. I don’t think they’re thinking, generally, about what they’re writing and the meta implications. They’re definitely not taking into consideration the full body of lore.
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Maybe, maybe not. But it was a hell of a coincidence that one of the things I absolutely hated about Thrall in the Shattering(his refusal to give up potential criminals to the Alliance) managed to end up being address in Shadow Rising.
And yet the main State crisis of the Horde is a lack of resources in Durotar
Yet if only the Horde were composed of multiples races whose primary heritage magical power involved terraforming and doing stuff like summoning water lol
Like what
Nah b
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The assumption is summoning water/terraforming is not some parlor trick you can do at will. Also consider the fact the Horde have a shamanistic heritage which means they are probably even less incline to upset the natural balance of the world.
So the solution, instead of using elemental Magic to make rivers for irrigation and asking the Tauren to grow some trees is, *checks notes * chopping down Ashenvale?
Argument don’t hold my guy
Horde writing makes not a lick of sense and the writers don’t know how to handle what they wrote (Global South based Monster Races).
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The whole reason we got on this tangent was because the argument was made that because were designed using a Mongolian cultural aesthetic and do not resemble humans, that it should be taken for granted that they will always, at best, be ancillary characters whose best purpose would be to join the Alliance so they can better be defined by their relationship with “more human” characters- with what constitutes being “more human” being defined by Stormwind.
So yeah, having to explain why the Horde should even exist on a conceptual level is pretty fundamental to figuring out how they can be portrayed as heroic.
And no, I don’t think WoW is art in the sense it’s a masterpiece. It is, however, a creative work that combines images (still and moving), music, writing, cinematography and various other disciplines that fall under the arts.
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I mean, the only time the resource thing was even an issue post WC3 was during the Cataclysm, and the Tauren were pretty preoccupied trying to keep the marauding army out of their homeland. I think they’ve got things taken care of when there’s not a globe spanning resource crisis going on
You mean the Not-native american leader telling the Not-British leader that her people colonializing his lands and killing his people was actually a perfectly fine thing is not great when you look at it critically?
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- growing trees in zones that are design for it is a recipe for disaster. Just ask Naralex what happened when he tried.
- The taurens have oral stories about the dangers of using elemental magic to change the landscape/having it ultimately bite them in the end.
The Ashenvale thing is down to a few reason. Chopping a forest seems relatively natural to orcs(especially considering their experience with the Botani). There was already built in enmity between them and the night elves. Lastly, Thrall seemed willing to turn a blind eye(even when orc shamans told him the desecration of nature was a bad idea.
I still think it’s pretty crappy that Blizzard ended up writing this message. The whole “not monsters on the inside” was what I thought made the horde’s concept seem cool, but then the alliance whips up its own monster race to adopt that theme while the horde simultaneously loses it. It’s disappointing that if you want a race where that horde theme is preserved, you’d be best off looking to an alliance race for it.
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Nightmare corrupted, not because he did anything per se.
They don’t.
I still wonder why they never really made a point of pointing out the fact that the Gilneans bailed on their allies for a petulant reason. You’d think former EK residents and the blood elves and forsaken would be a bit madder about that “Walling yourself in and telling everyone else to go to hell” thing, but aside from Varian being mad about it once, it’s not come up.
My issue with the barrens reclamation process is that Savannahs are a perfectly fine and healthy biome. Why does everything have to be forests with the damn elves?
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