People generally didn’t complain as much back in WC3 and Vanilla that the Alliance was a bunch of lawful stupid pacifists getting their teeth kicked in or that the Horde was a bunch of a bunch of 2 dimensional baddies that game made them feel guilty for playing.
People were quite intrigued by Blizzard’s unique and relatively less simplistic take on classic fantasy.
What’s happened now is that people- secure in the dynamic of the Alliance as morally superior and the Horde as morally inferior- have convinced themselves that it was always this way. Namely those that want the Alliance to finally get to be bad like the Horde… but not actually be portrayed as bad the way the Horde is. Or have any of the kinds of flaws Alliance characters had in WC3 or Vanilla. While also simultaneously wanting to play up even more of the flaws that Blizzard has exaggerated in the Horde.
Blizzard has always portrayed playable races as superior to all other races and that they have a divine right to massacre the nonplayable races for fun and profit. their viewpoint is that we care about these particular races because we have the potential to be these races.
If you are talking about why killing Night Elves is a tragedy but killing Murlocs is not probably because of bias by the characters that give us these quests.
I only responded as I did because it seemed that you suggested that Alliance was escaping some outrage.
Both factions consistently kill natives peoples and wildlife if they are primitive enough or stand in their way. This is also true somewhat towards some faction holdings.
Stonespire is a tragedy to the Horde and South Shore is a tragedy for the Alliance.
The difference is the Horde is allowed to attack the ones responsible while The Alliance not so much. This is something that needs to be fixed.
But both sides get amnesia when things like this happen.
Events like Teldrassil or Theramore should NEEEEVER happen, if you need Jaina to go evil then kill off a lover or something.
I would have preferred if Shandris died to Sylvanas to drive Tyrande to such rage than the Horde made into horrible villains again.
Lets say Horde attacks but fail to destroy Teldrassil and are driven back but not before killing Shandris. That story would have been more palatable than this garbage.
I am just getting tired of this bad take that Alliance is getting away with bad actions that are just as bad as the Horde. The Horde is on a different league and no matter what Blizzard does to explain it they are nowhere near the same.
There’s an error in here that I want to point out - in an RTS, this doesn’t matter to anywhere near the degree that it does in an MMO. The RTS simply does not cultivate the kinds of investments and personal attachments that people have at the character level, which itself has connections with favorite places and with a sense of belonging to this group or the other.
And YOU are accusing ME of making outrageous assumptions based on headcanon? You’re going to sit here and tell everyone that the presence of one delusional ambassador in the basement of a church translates to overt Alliance support for literally every single thing that the group that that one guy is affiliated with has done?
You really aren’t. Your misremembered account of Theramore’s origins was cringeworthy and it’s troubling to think that it’s where the bulk of your beliefs on inter-faction relations are borne from.
Well no, not everything, just the undead killing. They clearly don’t like the human killing, cause yknow, they’re racist and don’t view undead as sapient people.
I mean, is your assertion that they don’t know hes there somehow? Otherwise how are they not supporting them? Btw it’s actually 3 ambassadors in 3 different Alliance towns.
The idea that he’s delusional seems to be something you made up just now, also.
So clearly, you can see how Blizzaerd deciding to continuously portray large swathes of the Horde character population as all too willing to go along with and perform “evil” and not actually giving them ay valid perspective ends up just having them come across as antagonistic.
While at the same time, scrubbing the Alliance clean of evil characters and/or at least ot making them unsympathetic.
Blizzard is basically using the Horde the same way it uses other bad guys. That needs to stop.
If we ever do get Gnolls Kobolds or Murlocs or Naga or what have you as a playable race than i have every expectation that blizzard will go out of their way to explain how this particular group of these races is the only good group of that race for some special reason magical or scientific
How do you know that? You’re already admitting that the Alliance didn’t know what the Scarlets were really doing and that if they had known, they wouldn’t have supported it. So how do you know that it’s ONLY the living slaying that they would object to and not the slaying of innocent sapient undead? Because that one guy at the end of the questchain didn’t explicitly include “the Forsaken” when he dresses down the Scarlets for killing innocents?
I don’t know if he’s delusional or if he’s malicious. The point is that he wasn’t presenting the whole picture and the whole point of the questchain is to learn that the Scarlets are bad news.
Cause they only bring up the innocent human slaying as a gripe and never once condemn the slaying of undead, which is literally the main reason the Scarlet Crusade exists that they aren’t quiet about at all?
I really am. I don’t just acknowledge it’s origins, but also it’s actual place in the narrative.
Daelin (and co’s) efforts out of Theramore/Northshore really were played up as the biggest threat to the tenuous peace between the Orcish Horde and Human Alliance.
I know it’ll never happen but I do have a secret wish that naga could be added as a neutral race (obviously I’d prefer horde at least, but still) because the game has Vashj’s Illidari naga right there and they’ve conveniently been divorced from all of the bad stuff the full-time Azeroth naga have done since vanilla WoW.
I mean they did mess up Zangarmarsh but still
Besides, if they were neutral, you could do a good cop / bad cop routine with the pandaren, because that race could really use someone to bounce off of, and it’d be fun to either play a “I don’t give a crap” hate-neutral character, or one that actually has to work through mutual distrust to align with one side or the other.
But as I spent time at the Monastery in Tirisfal Glades I realized that their grasp on reality was slipping. They now think everyone is plagued who doesn’t wear the tabard of the Crusade. Innocent men and women were tortured because they were supposedly plagued.
He says “innocent men and women” who “doesn’t wear the tabard of the Crusade.” Nowhere does he qualify that with “only the living one.” He also mentions his crusade to eradicate all undead as something he doesn’t believe in anymore.
If you’re going to base the notion of a homeland “on the first literal place you feet touched”, then technically, that’d be contemporary Northrend. But we aren’t doing that, because the concept of a homeland is dependent on a shared cultural and political identity. As I said, humans were disparate–this means they didn’t have a single, unified place to call their home. That didn’t happen until Thoradin united the human tribes into their first kingdom. In cultural anthropology, that sort of cultural-political unification is considered the birth of the ideological homeland.
I agree, it is significant. The whole continent is significant. And I think that’s where the confusion is coming from. I think you are inadvertently using Lorderon in reference to the continent and kingdom interchangeably. When I initially addressed the point, it was in regard to whether Stormwind or Lordaeron was the human homeland, e.g. the matter was kingdom vs. kingdom–and as I pointed out, it was neither. Lordaeron, as a kingdom, could not be the human homeland, because it was formed after Arathor.
And just as a note, this particular cultural event happened during and after the Troll Wars, after the founding of Arathor, so while significant, it doesn’t have a weight for the “homeland of humanity.”
I mean, I’m afraid I don’t really agree. We do have to take into context the tropes associated with a fantasy world, the stone-cold evil that Blizzard has these races doing, and the fact that the quest usually has us retaliating against something like attacks on settlements, etc. I don’t really see the value of deconstructing the Horde’s war on a people that in Warcraft III were out to commit a genocide against the Tauren, for instance, or their attacks against a local group that allies itself to the scourge.
These things just don’t land, on either side. So I find the deconstruction of the trope to be pretty meaningless when stacked up against the things that the narrative does give weight to, and which deserve that weight because again, there are actual people (in the form of players) on the other side of things.
This is a continued stretch of what he actually says, which is that he no longer believes the Crusade’s cause is noble. He used to think it was, because they were killing undead, “But as I spent time at the Monastery in Tirisfal Glades I realized that their grasp on reality was slipping. They now think everyone is plagued who doesn’t wear the tabard of the Crusade.”
You’re also putting it in a vacuum and divorcing it from context, which is as I have said like 500 times, it’s not about this dude, it’s about the Scarlet Crusade in general being open about killing Forsaken (something that Raleigh, who lived in the Monastery in Tirisfal, could not have possibly not been aware of).
The closest that you’re going to get to a shared cultural and political identity for humanity is the Church of the Holy Light, which absolutely has its foundations in Lordaeron.
That’s not quite correct. The unification of of the various human tribes into Arathor was undertaken shortly before the Troll Wars, in part because Thoradin knew that a war with the Trolls was inevitable and believed that unity was the only chance that humanity had. Conversion to the proto-Holy Light was the condition for Lordain’s loyalty to Thoradin, and it’s from that that the Church of the Holy Light traces its origins.
And the Alliance ceased to have any official ties to the Scarlet Crusade following the death of Alexandros Mograine. You’re trying to tie the Scarlets and the Alliance together by way of the guy in the Church basement, which ultimately leads to this one guy where the objective changes completely.
So yeah, this one guy DOES matter. This one guy is the only sliver of evidence you have for your assertion that the Alliance maintained a genocidal policy towards the Forsaken, and it’s poor evidence.