Its really convenient that PEACE in all these instances is so often used as a weapon and narrative tool to invalidate some extreme Alliance aggression (even straight up declarations of war) so the Horde can always start it. OH crap, we had the Alliance do something aggro! Can’t have that, time for another peace treaty to wipe that away to a sterile shine! And yes Zahir, I do get that despite your retorts when confronted about it … you just REVEL in the Alliance being these pure, flawless, faction.
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That was due to the fact that the Lichking still had to be taken down and there was no other choice to end the hostilities, even though in Icecrown we see that this ceasefire was not strictly held either. After the events both sides decided to put hostilies on the side and rebuild despite bad blood on both sides.
This was one of the better sudden peace treaties we first got to experience.
The main commander was a good guy, his aid was not. Besides this was only allowed to be experienced on the Alliance side where you know who the true culprit was. Kind of a good story of the chaos of war and more personal stories. The finale where the bad second in command takes command and becomes more convinced in his hatred was a good bit of writing. However I don’t think this invalidated what happened to the Tauren. IMO this is what a grey writing is, something that has been clamored for on these very forums.
So first off I am not quite sure if the message was unprovoked but rather what he did to destroy it. Theramore was always and Alliance territory, Jaina’s neutrality was only to her father’s aggression. Jaina openly participated in the war so if any sort of media was describing Theramore as a neutral location that was supposed to be off limits is just bizarre. Do you have a quote or something to show this?
What was whitewashed about it? Genn blamed Sylvanas for Varians death and he was going there to get at her supposed betrayal at the Broken shore. This is some writing I am fan of because its Alliance aggression with good motives on both sides. This is what faction war should be like, idk why you would want this piece of WoW history be rewritten.
Unless I am misunderstanding you and you think this should have been the catalyst for the next war if so I completely agree, this should have led us down the path of BFA.
Honestly this bit I completely missed, I don’t know much about it but it just seems something we have seen so many times in wow it bares no mentioning. How many quests and events have we had where one faction attacks another for exploiting resources or scouting where they shouldn’t be. Too many too count.
So Alliance sending spies to see what Horde is doing is bad now? Did the Horde characters act as if “Yeah we totally deserve this” to make you feel bad or do you just think spying is wrong?
I am sorry Droite but it seems you are really grasping at straws here, why didn’t you mention the Purge? I think that would have been your strongest argument.
Here is my problem thought if we want to talk about whitewashing why not talk about Tyrande and the Night Elves?
In BFA we got promised some sort of vengeance. Darkshore Tyrande gets her powers and then poof disappears. Darkshore warfront goes on forever where Alliance kill Sira and Delaryn over and over. By the end the vengeance is no longer on the Horde but just the Banshee.
Ok. Fine, so we are absolving the Horde and just blaming one person. I guess this is the more moral choice.
Queue in Shadowlands and now the narrative is Tyrande got the Nightwarrior state NOT to get more power and right the wrong against her but as a way to let go of her hatred and vengeance.
Because vengeance is bad. 
I mean if we want to talk about whitewashing and hand waving we just need to look at this little arc of a story. Has anything been as bad as this in wow history? I struggle to think of it.
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I’m probably badly misusing the phrase here, but wouldn’t deploying that many spies specifically for mass intimidation be some kind of act of terror? That goes way beyond information gathering when the intent would be to incite paranoia and fear in an opposing government.
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Weren’t they just observing though?
Or were they actively bombing and sabotaging the Horde infrastructure?
If both factions did not have spies running around in each other’s cities I would be more surprised.
It will never cease to amuse me that ‘master spy’ Shaw was so obvious in deploying his spies that the Horde knew about them the whole time.
Can Anduin make friends with Vanessa VanCleef or someone rogue-like besides Shaw so we can have a competent spymaster and also more stories about Shaw having adventures with his boyfriend?
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I mean you’re not SUPPOSED to spy but obviously everyone’s going to do it. I’m trying to handwave the concept of spies doing spy things because that’s kinda par for the course there.
But Droite’s argument is that the intent of sending so many spies to Orgrimmar is to make the horde know they’re being spied on, which would be an intimidation tactic. They’re there to be “seen.”
That’s kinda why I was nervous about using the term “act of terror” even though I didn’t know how to describe it. They’re obviously not destroying infrastructure but the whole point is to make the horde leadership fearful, if that’s indeed the reasoning.
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Given the majority race in Orgrimmar is orcs I’m imagining they barely cared. Some orc matron goes out to check her laundry and casually hangs it up on a spy frozen in place. A bunch of orphans climbing on an elite scout as he refuses to move, with a very confused look on his face. A tailor wakes up and walks to get his morning coffee before opening his shop, waves and offers a greeting to the brooding human rogue in the shadows, who awkwardly waves back, just like he always does.
I think most orc would reply to being spied on with “So?”
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Honestly if that how certain players wanted to perceive it then I guess that is their prerogative as some injustice on the Horde.
I just wonder what sort of handwaving was involved? What needed to happen for the Horde player to feel that this was properly addressed?
Or is the issue that in the end everything the Alliance were afraid of and were using SI7 to spy on the Horde came to fruition?
Horde and alliance need more characters overall.
A faction story is dull as hell when it is just “Thrall Gokuson” or “Sylvanas Kerriganclone”
Where are the generals etc
I love this.
“Monday’s huh?” edgy rogue.
“Work work” says the smiling tailor.
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I mean Thrall and sylvanas and anduin and jaina in the current game are about as interesting as a guy starting a date by talking about how smelly his left ballsack is.
In short, “I recognize that everything even slightly fringing on Grey the Alliance does is buried under mountains of justifications, whitewashed, or handwaved away by even the other side. And I recognize that a partial consequences of that is the Horde races are rarely ever allowed motives to do what they are tasked to do by the plot (and NEVER valid ones). But I’m OK with that, because I enjoy playing an ALL Good faction. And what I’m actually mad about in BfA is that my Moral Absolutism (my inherent purity) is being used as a tool to shackle my expected Absolutist Power fantasy.”
In essence, I LOVE GoodRace/EvilRace tropes (even though they are subtly racist with how Blizz chose to humanize the deeply flawed, evil races of the Horde). Its just whats the point of being ALL good, if you can’t be ALL powerful too? It has to be BOTH ALL the time to be worth it. Like the Alliance in Legion.
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Thats just called proper writing. You are supposed to have justifications and handwaves on your own biased side.
Unprovoked aggression with idiotic reasoning is not the norm here, you are supposed to elevate the writing not dumb it down further to spread the suck around.
So the problem is the Horde having proper motivations rather than removing them for the Alliance.
This is like the Alliance attacking Vulpera. Just why? It was so dumb that all it served was to somehow explain why they went red instead of blue. Is this really what you want more of?
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Not just that it came to fruition, but that the alliance seeded it themselves and induced an attack because that intimidation and loss of security made the horde feel insecure enough to “head off” an alliance attack that apparently was never going to happen.
But I feel like acknowledging that would result in the alliance going “we brought Teldrassil on ourselves” and that would go over like a lead balloon.
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I don’t think anyone can possibly take the SI7 spying caused the burning seriously. Lack of proportionality of response doesn’t make the Alliance look back, its more the other way around.
Blizzard was struggling to find a valid reason to somehow explain why the Horde would immediately after the legion invasion embark on an elf killing expedition.
This is like those “Honor moments” they tried to squeeze in like Saurfang refusing to kill civilians (Minus Aastranar). Like really? Bravo Saurfang for doing the bare minimum, want a cookie?
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Can we have more stories like that instead of Shadows Rising, or smth?
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That was me just sassing the way WoW’s writing felt. 
You could pare it back to just the WoT in general if you want.
But I think the point is that even if the reasoning was valid, it self-invalidates when it turns out Sylvanas was just using it as an excuse to get a new high score and the moral of the story loops back around to “both sides need to work together and trust one another” as most expansions tend to do. It doesn’t help that the last in-game example of alliance aggression was Genn’s ambush in Stormheim and then you progress the game to find out that Sylvanas was trying to do a bad after all.
So now the player has visible recent proof of Sylvanas being shady so I feel BFA’s moral degrades to “the alliance needs to trust the untrustworthy and the horde must trust the alliance over themselves” or something.
I think. Last expansion was weird.
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It was the current writers wrapping up all the old lore because they didn’t want to deal with it anymore. From now on its their show.
Thats why it was weird.
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Blizzard would never have them consider that either tbh. Because truly, while NOTHING can justify Teldrassil, if the events proceeding the WoT were allowed to count then Saurfang’s WoT was MORE than justified.
The attack on the Horde’s new Warchief in Stormheim (and Anduin’s total lack of response to it) was every bit the declaration of War as Varian’s was in WotLK. It also broke the peace from the end of the Garrosh era, and was a MASSIVE political incident that was just swept under a rug (by even the Horde). You have SI:7’s attack on Bilgewater miners in Silithus, which Blizz tried to invalidate not once … but twice (with the second being them just defaulting to an EvilRace trope). And finally Anduin FLOODING Orgrimmar with SI:7 members to send that deliberate message that “The Alliance is Always Watching” (in response to the Gathering).
WE know on a Meta Level that the Alliance was doing all of this (as well as sending Kaldorei troops south to secure the Azerite) to suppress Sylvanas; not to start a war with the Horde. But the stupid thing about Sylvie’s “A Good War” argument isn’t that the “they’ll attack us eventually” part is nonsense and fatalistic … its that the Alliance was ALREADY attacking the Horde (and magically just none of it was allowed to count). Hell, she was even right that Genn and Tyrande WERE placing pressure on Anduin to preemptively hit the Horde. Both she and Saurfang just turned out to be wrong about him not being able to resist that pressure.
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In theory, there should now be a text stating that the Horde itself has brought concentration camps and an attack on the Undercity (Wrathgate, was that Forsaken called Putless?). Right?
Hmm. From personal madness, I moved on to predicting other people’s reactions. Am I trying to spare myself the responsibility for words?