Why tho?
But after all, the usual structure of the text on the forum, isn’t it? Claiming - looking for a similar event in the past on the part of the enemy - justification on both sides, isn’t it?
Right, but that’s us drawing on conventions of morality and justice. The death penalty is our most final, absolute form of justice. It is irreversible, so it is seen as the WORST penalty. The inverse is to spare one from death: that is considered the ultimate mercy.
That said, it doesn’t match Orc culture. Whether the Lordaeron humans did that on purpose or not, who knows… but they made a choice that was in line with their own moral compass.
Blizzard will never be able to keep a tune; it’s just what we’re stuck with, unfortunately. 16+ years of evidence can be used to draw this conclusion.
One of the most important things lacking in WoW is nuance. There is nothing concrete tying all these “huge moments” together (like sensible rationales), and everything unravels.
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I mean, when conditions are so obviously inhumane, I bet a lot of people would think twice about swift death being a less merciful choice.
But that goes beside my other point:
“These guys are mindless animals, they don’t have feelings” and “They are our prisoners, we want to be merciful” don’t exactly go together, imo.
But I suppose that’s a story oversight.
It strikes me that I’ve played single-player games (e.g. games where there are no actual ‘people’ on the other side) where the antagonist is given more nuance and reasoning for their actions than a game like WoW where you have actual human players on both sides.
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It was not as inhumane as you wanted to point out. The orcs did get food and a place to sleep and while there were those who did abuse them(Blackmoore) and people who did turn a blind eye to said abuse(like Arthas taking gambling money from the arena fights). For the most part the Alliance did want to rehabilitate them.
Terenas entire goal was to someday make the orcs a member of the Alliance and Antonidas was studying the lethargy of the orcs to potentially cure it(of course there were objection to said attempt especially from the elves but I digress).
I’d also point out that ultimately because the Forsaken/Blood elves are now part of the Horde they should a portion of said blame but I don’t see the Horde dealing with it.
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It’s a major issue that Blizzard has never worked out. I think they were doing just okay up until MoP where they sort of just lost it entirely. Like someone on a bicycle who tries to overcompensate when they start to fall, and end up taking down the whole column of riders behind them.
And we are talking about enemies quite literally pumped up on demon juice; there was nothing ‘humanoid’ about them for the denizens of Azeroth.
Throughout the history of human conflict, it’s been easy to label and categorize our treatment of each other because we’re all the same species. Insert an alien race that invades and tries to annihilate us? I would bet we’d see them as “less than human” in a heart beat.
I think it’s something that deserves a lot more discussion in this community.
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Funny, people seem to forget what happened to the Horde in Warcraft 3. Namely Grom sliding back into warlike ways, ignoring advice from witch doctors that what drinking the corrupted pools was a bad idea. Only for Jaina to later help Thrall in purging Grom.
Sound familiar?
The Horde has always dithered between two versions of itself. The Horde has not actually tried to resolved why it keeps doing this time and time again until maybe in BFA when the realized the structural flaw in the Warchief system.
And people forget when the War between was not a focus how many players actually wanted the “war back in Warcraft” myself included. Garrosh/Sylvanas has always had an appeal. Being gray probably means you are closer to being black then you realize.
Slyvanas has acted like Slyvanas and people seem to just ignore it. The moment Sylvanas decided to betray Garithos(no matter how much he deserved it) to letting plague experiments occur in Vanilla. She has always been a horribly influence to the Horde and Horde fans generally ignored it because it let them have a few punches against the Alliance. Now they actually have to pay for her actions.
He leaves to find a place for his people AFTER he stole an Alliance fleet. Not exactly the best optics for wanting peace.
That is the problem with Thrall those “border skirmishes” ultimately turned into a full blown war for Ashenvale.
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Welcome to 15th through 19th century political and social approaches to slavery by the majority of society of Europe & Colonies.
WELL THANK YOU MASSA FOR A BED AND FOOD
Christ do y’all hear yourselves
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Baine doesn’t get development though. Which is especially nuts because like you said, he’s the best of the Horde. He’s also the first character with whom we get an actual glimpse into the Shadowlands (Tauren heritage quest) and he hails from a society of people who revere and speak to the spirits of dead people. He should be getting tons of development in the expansion about the afterlife.
Which is why Bliizzard doesn’t need to 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”. Players will already be mistakenly doing that work for them. Yeah, that is going to mean trying to illicit some sympathy for some people who didn’t do things that were that bad.
Not at all. The Horde can be an underdog without the Alliance by focusing on the story about how they’re building a new nation in Kalimdor or-as of BfA- rebuilding from a crippling war. They’ve been through several civil wars in a couple of years as well and have just adopted a new method of government. Kalimdor is still a harsh place to live.
But if the is going to be continued animosity between the Horde and Alliance, the Horde can’t be the the big bad evil guy beating up on the poor Alliance because HORDE SMASH, while the Alliance only wants to mind it’s own business and is just too pure and good to ever do anything that isn’t pure and good.
And WC3-WotLK Alliance/Horde relationship is a good example of how to avoid that.
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I always did wonder that if Orcs were just so unreasonably dangerous, mindless, and insatiable in their blood lust that they’d never give up trying to kill people, just how the heck did so many end up surrendering and spending decades together in camps? And why, upon escaping did they leave the continent entirely?
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“Civilians”? You mean those goblins sent to mine the planets’ blood so Sylvanas can start to weaponize it against the Alliance?
Of all the times the Alliance has sinned this ain’t one of em’ Droite. In fact, this is one of the few times the Alliance actually did some research into the motives of their enemies and actually made a well-informed attack on them instead of the usual wildly throwing themselves at them and the story being spun to retroactively justify it.
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Considering the Horde just rampaged across a continent and nearly genocided the entire Eastern Kingdoms? You’re welcome.
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Yeah. Civilians.
Also the Goblin waitstaff that were just working on Gallywix’s Pleasure Palace when he wasn’t even there.
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More like Gallawix’s thugs and Before the Storm clearly painted them as aggressive is not the aggressor during the conflict.
More like Gallywix’s wageslaves (or literal slaves) who are just mining stuff before Before the Storm retroactively decided to make some of them the aggressor because -as mentioned before- Blizzard likes to 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”.
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Or you know Blizzard wanted to paint both Gallawix(a greedy despot) and Sylvanas(someone no one should have ever trusted) as clearly dubious people and the attempt at mining a resource that clearly had alot of military application would be seen by anyone as a threat.
Also, it is canon now that conflict between the two sides were still on going and blaming the Alliance for using more aggressive measures while ignoring the Horde was doing the same is hypocritical.
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And on the flipside Alliance wrongdoing is explained by it not occurring at all in the Blue story.
Like the Alliance version of events always seems to star the Mirror Mirror Universe Horde who kick orphans with the same frequency I use commas. But at least on the Red side you’ll have a version of that story where it was sorta morally dubious.
With the Alliance though like in Vol’Dun, they just harmlessly scare off the vulpera with totems. They don’t set fire to them.
And it would’ve been so easy to just say there was bad intel and they thought they were transporting weapons for the Horde. And the Commander froze up when they learned otherwise and now it was too late to stop the attack on these innocents.
But no, no, let’s not have one milligram of complexity in this war story. Instead let’s have a PG version of the event where you just spook the Vulpera and maybe fondly tussle their hair as the little rascals scamper off.
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And just like Stormheim, neither Genn nor Anduin could prove a damned thing, and only had a vague suspicion about what they COULD do or where doing. And thus, an attack on civilian targets by a military group with nothing but “they could do something bad with it” is pretty friggen sketch. Unless you are coming at the point from GOOD Race/EVIL Race mentalities. Which gets extra ironic when you realize the only thing the Bilgewater actually did with the stuff was use it as a new power source for their mechs. Oh no … whatever will we do? The Bilgewater are building robots?
And our issue is with Silithus is that Blizz had to default to “EVUL RACE LOL!” to justify why the attack on the Bilgewater workers by SI:7 was A-OK! Which is why they wrote in not ONE, but TWO different prepped excuses to invalidate it. First the kidnapping of Sapphretta in BtS, and then when someone realized that chronologically that excuse would not work … they just went LOL EVUL GOBLINS! and had them attack the Explorers League “a first time” cuz … reasons? Which is dumb even for Goblins given the situation, not that Blizz cared enough to give motives for such an attack. Cuz the Horde don’t need motives lol! They’re evil.
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Even if you’re against penal labor, I feel like you have to see the difference between that and colonial slavery.
But I do think that what some of the Orcs experienced went beyond penal labor, so their escape followed by their journey to form a new nation for themselves was justice for their maltreatment.