So long as the Alliance holds moral-absolutism, there can truly be no nuance between the factions in a two faction game. And as a part of that, so long as the Alliance operating in that absolutism is always exclusively reactive … it will result in Blizz having to default to the Horde to “pick of the contentious slack” when they pit the two against one another (or hell, even when working cooperatively … someone’s gotta be capable of flaws). Truly, the Alliance remaining this Bastion of all that is Virtuous and Good is one of the most damaging writing philosophies in this game. Especially to the idea that the Horde should have they ability for “A different type of Heroism” … since all thats really left that they can really bring to the table is all that’s Flawed and Bad.
The writers have this odd disdain to any past work, I find, and it’s really a shame because there’s so much there that can be drawn from to bring the Horde back to a heroic faction without being defined by antagonism to the Alliance, or made similar to them.
They had it down pretty well from Vanilla until the end of Wrath, and then it slowly derailed as time went on. I think one of the biggest mistakes made was restoring the Sunwell, honestly, because that took away all the nuance and teeth from the blood elves as time went on. They’re just High Elves that like red now, which is… not great.
Two major instances of Horde heroism that I’ll always consider to be the true Horde spirit, and the true Warcraft orc spirit, always stand out to me. One was the Wrathgate, where the Kor’kron did their charge to fight alongside the Alliance while shouting For the Horde. The factions were defined, parallel to each other but not blending. You saw the differences but the same goal was realized.
The second one is, ironically, in WoD, the expansion I feel took a shotgun to orc lore. The Frostfire Ridge finale cutscene is pure Warcraft orc without making them into warmongers. A lone warrior charging into battle against overwhelming odds until the clan shaman can blow up a mountain and block the pass. How something like that managed to pop up in an expansion like WoD amazes me.
An honourable mention is Thrall tossing his axe at Helya. I know people weren’t fond of it, but I thought it was more endearing and orc-like than almost anything else he’s done. The humans are busy flapping their lips while everyone is entirely trapped, it takes the orc to see the obvious solution. And it worked.
I also find the writers manage to bring out Horde style heroism in the levelling quests, it’s the overarching big narrative where they seem to lose their minds.
Can someone explain why Horde players seem to love the whole “we are just trying to survive” trope but also are unhappy the Horde has underdog characters that are weaker compared to the other faction?
You can’t have powerhouse characters and still be an underdog faction.
Here we go with Droite’s usual soapbox again. Next stop Night Elf powerfantasy.
Moral Absolutism just means the Alliance will be the perpetual victim unable to strike back in any meaningful way. Given that you and fellow Horde fans have shot down ANY sort of Alliance vengeance scenario on the Horde I would have guessed you would be a fan of the Alliance maintaining their moral absolutism.
The idea behind the Horde, at least pre-Cata, which resonated with people a lot was that they were a bunch of outcasts who united to be more of a family than just a political alliance of different races. Their closer ties made them much stronger as a whole than they would be apart, and ideally there would also be emphasis on the physical power that the Horde races had over the Alliance ones.
You’re right, the powerhouse character thing doesn’t really fit with that, but that’s because there weren’t really powerhouse characters at the forefront when the Horde was portrayed as a bunch of rugged survivors. That only came with Cata, when the writing methods shifted and the Horde suddenly became a powerful war machine.
Really, a lot of the issues would be solved if Blizzard got rid of major lore characters always being front and centre. Because those tend to define the factions they represent because of how in your face they are.
Just go take a look in the DI redeem thread. Its look clear that after all the alliance player don’t even want to be anything but morally right. Not only they defend and absolutely love all the whitewashing and retcon that blizzard did to make them look right but they don’t even want the DI, one of their only morally grey race, to be morally grey…
Droite and others have been okay with the idea of Alliance vengeance. Droite’s -who is always on message- has repeatedly stated this. They only usually have a couple caveats. Two I particularly like are…
-
Blizzard doesn’t kill off main Horde characters and lets them get some development.
-
Blizzard doesn’t get cold feet and try as hard as possible to try and justify any wrongdoings the Alliance may engage in, by using the “X race is just generally bad and deserves to be wiped out”.
Through WC3 and WoW, up until the end of WotLK, Blizzard had little issues with Humans, Night Elves, Dwarves and other members of the Alliance to have flaws and be aggressive towards the Horde and seek vengeance. That’s also the time most people cite when they speak of he appeal of playing the Horde most people seem to to enjoy playing under.
So it’s not even a hypothetical. It’s how things actually used to be.
This is kind of true early on but the thing is when you speak further there is a big problem with the desired caveats.
The development is not what they like. Baine didn’t die and he now he is the best of the Horde. I don’t think anyone appreciated him.
And Droite has said the Alliance has suffered so much and repeatedly by Horde’s hand that any reprisal that went too far would just be viewed as some sort of eye for an eye justice even if Blizzard tries to present it in any negative way.
Think of it this way, the bar is as low as a faction burning civilians alive on a scale that can be compared to a whole country since the vast majority of the population lived in this one small location.
That’s how low the bar is, what is Blizzard going to make the Alliance do that players would think “Oh boy what the Horde did was bad but not THAT bad” to garner some sympathy points.
So the trying to survive trope is not about being an underdog faction but about their relationship with their counterpart?
And the Horde had Slavery even through Thrall’s reign, into Garrosh’s, and even as current as Sylvanas’ with forced labor and the mass murder of civilian populations…
I’m not really sure why it’s reasonable to criticize the Alliance for the internment camps when it was the most merciful choice compared to an (arguably) justifiable death sentence of all Orcish warriors who invaded Azeroth during the First War. You can’t blame the children for their parents mistakes, supposedly, but this is exactly the reason Sylvanas uses to justify the War of Thorns, and the annihilation of the Alliance.
I think this is pretty spot on. I’ve long wanted both factions to get independent stories for a while. Put the kids in time out. Separate their narratives. Let both grow and redefine themselves away from this ridiculous parity-approach where both factions have to be engaged in the same story.
Blizzard has proven that they can’t write a coherent, sensible narrative that satisfies both factions. Just let us have time to cool down and enjoy our individual aesthetics and narratives.
The High King position has done to the Alliance what the Warchief trend has done to the Horde: it hyper focuses the story (both positive elements and negative alike) on the WHOLE, instead of the individual. There are no Trolls, Humans, Orcs, Kaldorei, Dwarves, Draenei, Goblins, etc. There is only THE HORDE, or THE ALLIANCE, and none of the races will ever get the genuinely deserved development time because Blizzard would rather focus on big ideas.
It ended up being a very non-merciful choice. Idk how any human could claim they are doing it out of supposed mercy when they clearly did not see orcs as people. I don’t blame them, by the way. I think it’s good that humans were cruel, anyone would be, it’s a very natural reaction. It would be extremely annoying if humans were nice to the orcs. (Something I feel would happen if Lord of the clans was written today)
Literally every single orc warrior would’ve preferred death.
Sylvanas reasoning can be summarised as “the Alliance hates you, they will try to destroy you sooner or later. Better strike now while we can”.
I was thinking of making a thread about the post war consequences of what people expected from the Alliance leadership to do with the demon fueled orc prisoners.
You wanted the Alliance to do a no prisoners doctrine and kill any orcs on sight? Even the ones that surrendered?
I have repeatedly said I am fine with a Alliance vengeance scenario. Just with the asterisks of: A) That sort of one-sided power fantasy being used as a unique environment to give lasting development to our pathetic roster (which means a certain level of expected plot-armor for them; and B) Blizz actually commits to Alliance aggression. Rather than what they’ve done for years. Get cold feet and then walk it back as far as they can.
And no … its actually that trend towards Alliance Whitewashing, Handwaving, and Burying under mountains of justifications that really ramped up in Cata that eventually led me to abandoning the Blue Faction entirely. I found the reinforcement of Good Race/Evil Race tropes gross, especially when combined with how exactly Blizz originally subverted them between WC3-WotLK to begin with (and hell, are doing even now outside the Meta-Narrative). Nothing quite like attaching “Zandalar Foreva” (Wakanda Forever!) and Romani/Bedouin Hybrid Fox People to the by default deeply flawed, prone to evil, and easily manipulated through their primitive and wrong faiths Faction … while the Euro-Inspired Alliance gets constantly built up as the sometimes stupid, but otherwise pure, flawless paragons of every virtue ever known by man. Yup … nothing creepy in that subtext there.
No, I’m quite happy with what we have in canon.
I am as well. But we are talking about the morality of the situation aren’t we?
What did you realistically expect to happen?
I think most humans would want to execute the orcs, I think I would, too. But then we wouldn’t have the story, would we.
Yeah a lot of people wanted them executed, thats kind of why the Alliance kind of broke off some big members because they didn’t want to pay the cost of keeping all these prisoners alive while their free brethren were still engaged in guerrilla warfare.
I have seen some players though say the Alliance should have freed the Orcs and let them live somewhere in peace right after the war was concluded as a more moral option than kill or internment. I don’t know how realistic that would have been but this narrative event has been considered one of the dark bits of Alliance history by some.
To be clear though I am quite happy with this portion of the story. Its all shades of gray and interesting both on the human side and the orc side.
What sort of aggression can the Alliance even do on the Horde that will tick off those boxes?
To be frank I did try asking this very question from the posters in the Horde rebuild thread and lets just say they didn’t want to hear none of it.
Just to be clear you yourself have said no matter what the Alliance does it would be overshadowed with that Horde has already done to the Alliance many times over.
Justified aggression is not the same as Whitewashed aggression. You can have the Alliance get their hits back, if Blizz actually commits to those sort of stories rather than trying to bury or “walk it back” to absurd degrees. Like they did several times with the Purge of Dalaran. Hell, both the Garrosh and 4th War were both proceeded by many instances of almost exclusively Alliance aggression (and an outright declaration of War by Varian) … but Blizz got cold feet. Invalidated them all. And then still forced the Horde to pseudo-react to those now invalid events … so they can be the ones to “Start It”. All Blizz needs to do is actually commit on the Alliance being proactive, and stop operating off of GoodRace/BadRace tropes (those lazy fools).
As for our characters getting development? Since the instances of Horde FORCED aggression never actually results in the character deaths of Alliance characters, I don’t see why a certain level of Plot-Armor for certain Horde reps (our current leaderships chief among them) should be an unreasonable request.
Can you explain by what you mean by invalidating them?
Describe what happened and then what you would have wanted to happen.
Because otherwise I think that any further discussion from here on would be misunderstandings and victim Olympics of who got it worse and what counts and what doesnt.
Plot armor isn’t development. What sort of development would you expect from an Alliance aggression and what would this aggression look like because as I stated before the Horde posters on the rebuild thread did not want to hear anything about an Alliance attack on the Horde as a way of rebuilding them. Which is what development is to my mind.
OK:
- Blizz invalidating Varian’s declaration of War in WotLK with a conveniently placed Peace Treaty in an in between expac book; just in time for Garrosh to “start it”.
- Blizz putting more effort into invalidating Hawthorne for Taurajo than was actually placed on the event of Taraujo itself. He was just a good guy, and Horde tragedies are all “Valid Military Targets”.
- Theramore throwing all neutrality out the window in the Cata era, but thanks to another convenient treaty in another in-between expansion book … Garrosh’s attack on the city was rendered “unprovoked”.
- The Purge of Dalaran not only having a conveniently “Bugged” part of the scenario (that gave WAY more nuance to Aethas, but they have systematically walked that sucker back may times over the years. To the point where the only person to ever beg for forgiveness for it … was the leader of the victims … Aethas.
- The attempted assassination of the Horde’s new Warchief in Stormheim. So inconsequential, even the Horde was forced to not have an opinion on it.
- The slaughtering of Horde civilians in Silithus by an Alliance military Organization (SI:7). Which Blizz was so committed to whitewashing and invalidating, they did it twice. Once with the abduction of Sapphy in “BtS”, and once with just Evil Race tropes once they realized the first would not chronologically work.
- Anduin flooding Org with so many SI:7 Agents civilians were literally tripping over them (in response to the gathering), to send the deliberate message “We are always watching”. And absurdly aggressive act, but not really counted beyond using it against the Alliance in our “unprovoked” WoT.
In short. Alliance acts Aggressive. Blizz gets cold feet. Whitewashes or Handwaves the crap out of them. The Horde STARTS the War completely unprovoked and without reason.
This “peace” happened because 3.3. Icc
Later the same thing happened by deathwing in 4.3
This “peace” happened seemingly ingame and don’t forget: the horde attacked alliance troops during start of wotlk with no reason…and thralls only response was : im disapointet, Garrosh…