The Horde: A Different Type of Heroism

Because only the cursed elven forest has enough resources to supply the Horde?

I still don’t get why they wouldn’t just regrow the jungles of Durotar then. It was a jungle before Daelin and the burning blade defoliated the place.

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I spent some time on a response before I realized that it is like yelling into the wind. You’ll get wet and have nothing for you efforts.

no. Night fae are Average American Twitter user.

As Druids, we are tasked with protecting the balance of nature. My life’s work has gone against this. In my folly, I have sewn chaos, and this deviant crop must be reaped before it spreads further.-Naralex

It is clear he regrets what he did. Nightmare or no nightmare. Again, he was suppose to keep the balance of nature. Not shape it to his will.

They do. It was part of the shaman manga as I recall.

Eh, they’re pretty clearly influenced by Gaelic faerie folk

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Lol he tried to edit immediately but you’re too fast

Sad etc

Moonberry sounds like the average american.

I have a lot of time to post in between water breaks on my TBC classic paladin’s pulls qq

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This absolutely true. WC3, however, sees the straight up disolution of the Alliance of Lordaeron, the murder of the king by his son, internment camps, etc. WC2 humans weren’t any angels, but WC3 straight up did an anti-LOTR.

But what’s most impotant is the fact that this didn’t completely turn people off the franchise.

Which is why it’s so absolutely frustrating when Cataclysm starts framing characters as being bad by virtue of being a member of a Horde race while simultaneously whitewashing the bad things the Alliance does as being good actually.

And Blizzard chose to continue with that path. They chose not to add more diverse Kingdoms. They chose to eventually do a 180 on the orcs and decide they actually weren’t all evil bloodthirsty monsters. They chose to later add elves and dwarves and then draenei and vulpera and how to code them.

It’s not like this stuff just happened. If Blizzard’s excuse for what they do is, “We’re just doing what everyone before us did,” then, like I said, they’ll never come up with anything even the least bit original before. And they have come up with more original stuff before.

The Orc’s story, for all their faults, in WC3 was not about them terrorizing humans and being defined by how they compare/contrast with humans. Going indepth from their point of view when it comes to dealing with depression by drinking, backsliding into using fel to win a desperate battle, and fighting with the people who literally followed you across the ocean to try and kill you are all pretty human reactions that make the orcs more than just a plot device.

It’s way better than what BfA had them retroactively do under the justification for “Orcs are bad because they’re bad”.

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This I can agree with. Though I’m forced to say that at this point in the game lore the Horde as an organization should really just dissolve. The Alliance too. This whole faction war concept is old hat and constrains ideas.

The whole Orc mentality isn’t that of humanity. It isn’t that they can’t be anything else. Thrall is a good example of that. If I had to ascribe a human psyche to Orcs I wouldn’t necessarily say Mongolian. It would be approx. 19th century Americans with the concept of manifest destiny. It exists and it is in “my power” to conquer it. To make it mine. Also kind of fits in with their titan origins.

The same drive to conquer the Draenei as it was to conquer other worlds. With the breaking of the first Horde the Orcish population is forced to re-evaluate its place in the worlds. Draenor destroyed; much of their population dead on both Azeroth and Draenor. All the things they did. All the stuff the Dev’s should have been thinking about instead of just using the Horde as a whipping boy any time they need a new antagonist.

It’s actually poignant that they retcon’d Orcish bloodlust as inherent/genetic between Chronicles and WoD.

Like they did a 180 on WC3 only to do a 180 again in WoD

For why? What reason? What was the purpose? Who did this benefit? How did this help the story?

(except, of course, the in-game Humans, because the Monster Race was actually genetically inherently unstable and violent)

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Mana bomb suramar plz

I say the opposite. In order for the Horde and it’s themes to be better, their story needs to be independent of the Alliance/Humans. Not that Alliance/humans can’t show up, but their relationship can’t be the focus.

And there’s no way they’re going to have Horde races and Alliance races in the same room over and over again and not have that happen.

It’s like how they introduced Black Panther among all the other Avengers, and yeah he was cool, but it was about his relationship with the other Avengers or him pursuing his ow sidequest. And of course he had to compete with the reveal of Spiderman. But then they made the solo Black Panther film which wasn’t about his relationship with the Avengers and he had his own issues and his own conflict and his own moments with his own cast of characters and he got to shine as his own thing in a way he could NEVER be in an ensamble cast.

That’s the thing, at one point, Orcs were written as having a human mindset. They were, at one point, written as being people like any other before being deceived and manipulated by the Legion. There have been countless warrior societies in human history. Even the idea of a previously nomadic clan society eventually settling down to start practicing agriculture, building cities, and creating a new society is not unique in human history.

But it’s not the mentality of humans as presented in WOW as presented by Blizzard as of late.

And they do this while all the while basing so much of WoW humans on 13-18th century Western European Kingdoms- as if those people couldn’t possibly understand the appeal of foreign conquest or contemplate mass slaughter or do anything other than tend to their idyllic fields waiting on foreign invaders to ruin their day :stuck_out_tongue:

Then Blizzard went back and actively CHANGED that. So now Orcs are just naturally bloodthirsty in a way humans in WoW and humans in reality never were, and that’s why they do bad stuff.

It’s not that Orcs in WoW were always inhuman. It’s that WoW humans became less human in an idealized way that robbed the setting of conflict that Orcs had to be less human in the opposite direction to compensate. Otherwise, there’d be no fighting.

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The trouble is that this game depends on a steady pipeline of content that’s up to a certain standard of quality, and that means time and resources need to be allocated, and it will always, 100% of the time be more plausible to create a larger metanarrative that both factions participate in than create one narrative for each faction that’s completely independent from the other.

We can’t have the same kind of independent campaigns that we had in Warcraft 3 anymore. The game would need to be like SWTOR for that to be feasible and it isn’t.

As we discussed, this is the element of chivalric romance that also informs the human aesthetic in WoW and a lot of people enjoy that as its own form of escapism. Even in Warcraft 3 which exhibited humanity at its worst, they were still treated as being fundamentally good, with the bad humans being exceptions. They were actually pretty clever about it because Arthas’s downfall was in part because evil forces turned those chivalric ideals against him.

A lot of the pathos that I enjoy from Warcraft 3 human campaign is only there because it takes place in an idealized context.

Good for you. It doesn’t make it any less of a destructive pathos in a two faction game. Let alone how WoW was sold. Nor does it make the subtext of the way Blizz writes the two factions any less subtly racist, with how they chose to originally humanize the Horde races (and still add to it to this day) and subvert GoodRace/BadRace tropes. Then reneged on that, and turned the Alliance into Morality itself in this setting. For goodness sake they just added “Zandalar foreva!” and Roma/Bedouin hybrid Fox people to the default “evil” deeply flawed faction.

Garithos? The Scarlets? Daelin? Arthas? Pre-Cata Varian? Blackmoore? Old-School Genn? Dwarves being pretty damned racist at times? The current races of the Alliance are simply not capable of these sort of characters or characterizations anymore. Which is why Daelin got absolutely validated in BfA, and its very likely Arthas will see a redemption in SLs. The Alliance aren’t capable of grey. Aren’t capable of flaws. Aren’t capable of being anything less than the moral paragons of all virtues. Which means the Horde has to pick up the slack on all those things.

EDIT: Hell, at this point I’m just waiting for Blizz to whitewash Blackmoore, and really frame it as if Thrall is the “only mostly good Orc” because he was “adopted” and “raised” by the kind human man. Who was just not prepared for the burdens of raising an evil Orc baby, and made some mistakes along the way.

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This is a matter of taste and opinion. You not liking parts of it doesn’t make the people who do like it invalid.

That’s also not what pathos means.

No actually, making only one side good and one side bad with zero moral nuance in either direction is bad storytelling objectively, thanks for playing

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Not after BfA its not. Its gone WAY too far. It is an objectively destructive writing trend.

Blizz’s writing philosophy for the Alliance has created a situation where the entire Blue faction has been rendered little more than victims. A deeply passive and almost exclusively reactive entity, that is even shackled in how they are allowed to react due to a very artificially maintained purity test. In response, Blizz has turned the Horde into an absurdly forced Proactive entity. Where it doesn’t matter WHY or HOW they Horde is forced to do things, they just HAVE to do them. In part, because the Blues CAN’T.

The Alliance was once capable of darker shades and flaws, which left the Horde races openings for lighter shades and virtues. But now … none of that nuance exists. And the Alliance are these inhuman idyllic concepts that are incapable of flaws beyond occasional stupidity (for plot needs). While Blizz just defaults more and more to “Evil Horde” race tropes to justify why their Plot-Device red faction does anything anymore.

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What are you even going on about? I said I liked the Warcraft 3 human campaign because its darker elements took place in an idealized context. Specifically, you don’t care about Arthas’ fall and the destruction of large swathes of humanity if they’re all jerks that you don’t care about. I’m not sure what you’re objecting to here.