The Horde: A Different Type of Heroism

Lore Story Forum
1638

A nation of the living dead is the sort of thing that makes headlines. Only truly isolated societies like the Pandaren seem to be oblivious to who the Forsaken are.

And there is a cute moment early in Pandaria where some random rice farmer assumes Shademaster Kiryn was injured severely in the zeppelin crash and is like on the verge of tears that she’s somehow still moving. Then your undead walks up and goes Ahem, no, that’s just what we look like.

The Sin’Dorei of all people had to be well aware of the Forsaken. Even if their ex Ranger General wasn’t leading them, they’re still neighbors. The Belves were busy not oblivious. Blizz didn’t have to show us them learning about them, it was safe to assume Farstriders were already keeping tabs.

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1639

I think I understand colonialism just fine given that I’ve studied it for years. I think that Horde posters are simply hypocrites who think that colonialism isn’t colonialism as long as the “right” races are doing it, which is in itself insanely colonial thinking.

And I think that most Horde posters seem to also be in psychotic denial about the Forsaken and their actions, and your inability to grasp why people outside of your dedicated forum bubble focus more on Forsaken crimes than the crime of other races makes engaging with you on the specifics pointless, because you don’t seem to fundamentally have any empathy in the context of this fictional universe.

Case in point:

Was this Droite post written 3 years ago or today? If not for the little number next to the post you’d never know, because despite repeatedly engaging them and correcting their fundamental lore mistakes they always return to literally the exact same script. Alliance/Humans are horrible and prejudiced and evil but also they aren’t portrayed as such, complete with the same fundamental lore errors (like we see here, where Droite’s account of human and forsaken nationality doesn’t make any sense in the timeline because they have a very poor grasp of human lore and have made no effort to improve it.)

Even though these things are contradictory. If they aren’t portrayed as such, then you can’t base your assertions that they’re doing horrible things on any objective evidence. Conversely, if there IS objective evidence of them doing horrible things then you have no room to complain that they aren’t portrayed as such.

They can ring themselves in circles trying to reconcile these two positions all they want but they’ve probably noticed that despite constantly doing so, they still aren’t happy and secure in their position. That’s because they’re trying to convince themselves that 2 + 2 = 5.

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1640

Like, it would be really, really refreshing for some people to just come out and say what’s already become incredibly obvious to anyone with a conscience; that they have no problem doing evil things. That they only have a problem when those evil things have consequences, even if they’re so minor that they only take the form of someone saying “Yo that was messed up.”

1641

Well I mean the idea that he returned to Kul Tiras. I don’t see that outlined. I was always under the impression Daelin pursued the Orcs who stole ships from Southshore, then had the conflict where they met the Darkspear. And then he just kept pursuing from there.

I don’t doubt that in-world books (much like the song) claim he had noble goals. I think it is more telling that he starts his assaults against the Horde before confirming her whereabouts. And places it over the priority of returning her to Kul Tiras.

  1. Send soldiers to attack the Horde.
  2. Try to trick Thrall into a trap to kill him.
  3. Find Jaina.

The order of events doesn’t really support these in-game claims to me.

If the Alliance sends me to collect Murloc Fins for Murloc Fin Soup or crush harpy eggs, I’d be kind of unhappy if the game tried to make me feel bad about it. Like, I’m fine feeling some things. But I didn’t sign up to play the game to be forced to do questionable stuff then made to feel bad about it.

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1642

Nobody is “forced” to do anything. That’s a nonsensical complaint in and of itself in a video game with linear narrative progression.

I used to main Horde back when I first started playing but noped out as soon as I realized that being Horde meant that I was doing horrible things as part of its story.

It’s like picking all renegade options in Mass Effect and then complaining that you didn’t get the Paragon experience.

And yeah yeah “WC3 Horde was what I signed up for, being forced away from that” etc, and I get holding that sentiment in Vanilla and maybe even in WotLK or early Cataclysm, but it’s been 17 freaking years since TFT was released. You don’t get to keep on riding that excuse for that long.

More time has passed between now and Warcraft 3 than between Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3. If you were going to be troubled by the Horde’s direction because they weren’t living up to your WC3 expectations the time to do that was 2006.

1643

You’re being pedantic.

If I want to play the game, I have to significantly inconvenience myself to avoid doing things I would consider immoral to level and play. That’s what I mean by forced. I can’t play the game as intended.

Well I’m talking about playing Alliance. So my only other option is to either seriously inconvenience myself or just not play.

Yeah, I could just not play. But I’ll just say I’d rather the game not try to make me feel bad for things it is designed around and written with.

Thankfully it is fortune that most quests don’t shove making me feel bad for my bad actions in my face. But I can easily say I don’t want that to be the case. Which was the question at hand.

Except there’s no Paragon experience in this hypothetical where we’re suppose to have bad acts shoved in our face. I’m either screwing myself being hypervigilant avoiding immoral stuff or I’m not playing. There’s no some easy golden path where I can clearly avoid specific stuff.

Mass Effect specifically is designed around choosing how you interface with the story. What you choose impacts stuff. Warcraft is not like that. I just have to hope Warcraft isn’t shoving things back at me or I’m dodging landmines playing a weird philosophy emulator.

Notice how I said ‘If the Alliance’ and you immediately kept on with your line of thought about playing Horde running through your script instead of engaging with it.

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1644

Doing those bad things IS how the game is intended to be played. That’s the experience that you’re being offered and you payed for. Your alternative is to not play it.

If you object to the morality of the actions of your character but choose to play it anyway, it means that you’re willing to compromise in some way. Maybe you decide that you’ll just ignore it and pretend that it wasn’t canon in terms of what your character does. Maybe you’ll simply acknowledge that you’re playing from a 3rd person narrative perspective rather than a 1st person one.

Either way, it still means acknowledging the terrible things that are happening in front of your eyes. Something that Horde players on this forum seem to be perpetually incapable of doing, either because they’re in denial or because they simply have no problem doing terrible things in the video game.

The latter is far, far more refreshing than the constant embarassing whinging of the former.

Then this would mean you’re willing to tolerate playing through the bad things for whatever reason. Which is fine.

I decided I was uncomfortable doing the sorts of things that the Horde did, so I chose not to do it by rerolling Alliance. I’ve still leveled Horde characters, but only for information on the events happening in the story, not because I thought that what I was doing was suddenly acceptable in the context of the fictional universe.

There is. It’s the Alliance. Nobody is forcing you to pick the edgelord faction other than yourself. And if what you expected from the Horde was something other than edgelord stuff, it did not take long to realize that you weren’t getting what you thought you would and react appropriately.

That’s because the Horde and the Alliance are two different things with two different narratives with radically different tones. It really, really does not take long playing either of them to get a good understanding of what they’re about. Even in Vanilla you could figure it out in an hour.

Apparently we’ve had people here playing long enough to be able to drink and still haven’t figured it out.

1645

Anyone else ever notice how it isn’t the evil Warchiefs that are the Horde characters that get the most flak from Horde players on this forum? It’s always characters like Baine. Whenever Garrosh or Sylvanas even come up the complaint is never that they did bad things, it’s that they made the Horde look bad.

Having a good relationship with the Hoo-Mons is the crime that’s complained about more than sending everyone’s souls to Hell.

1646

Chronicle III, Page 53:

“Thrall and his people took refuge on a nearby chain of islands. The clouds eventually parted and the seas calmed. The Alliance navy was nowhere in sight, but that did little to ease Thrall’s anxiety.”

So the Alliance fleet lost the Horde fleet in the storm.

Followed by:

“The days ahead were not easy for Thrall and his people. They found themselves fighting enemies old and new. The storm had blown part of Daelin Proudmoore’s fleet to the islands, and humans had fanned out across their shores.”

So the Kul Tiran forces they fought on the Darkspear Islands weren’t being led by Daelin; they were a fragment of his armada, blown off-course by the storm as they had been. Daelin himself was with the main fleet.

And for him to have subsequently learned of Lordaeron’s fate and gone off in search of survivors, he had to have returned home to find out about the Scourging and the fact that Jaina had taken a fleet to evacuate them.

Attacking the Horde became a priority again when he discovered the Horde still existed in Kalimdor, upon arriving there. Prior to that, he had no way of knowing they had made it through the same storm that had cost him part of his own fleet.

And yes, he then prioritized destroying the Horde ahead of finding Jaina, because he was just that fixated on revenge against the orcs. Plus as soon as he found and occupied Theramore he’d have learned Jaina was alive from the inhabitants, satisfying that goal, as he took over the place while she was away with Thrall trying to figure out what was going on with the trap set to kill Thrall.

The first thing we saw in-game was him attacking the Horde not because that was the original reason he’d come, but because as soon as he arrived in his search for survivors he saw an entrenched Horde and prioritized their destruction instead.

Moreover the in-game books aren’t contextualized as being from a biased source; since Vanilla they’ve basically amounted largely to more detailed exerpts from the game manuals and a few summaries of events from the novels, containing details spread across multgiple POV’s that no single source in the lore could have known to include them in the same aggregated account.

Chronicle III, Page 111:

“Though the Horde and the humans of Theramore Isle maintained peace for years, it did not last.”

Chronicle III also establishes here that years had passed between WC3 and the Founding of Durotar campaign, so it would make little sense for Daelin to have still been puttering around at sea for that long looking for the orcs straight off the disastrous pursuit into that storm. He was looking for survivors of the Scourging, meaning he had to have gone back and found out the Scourging happened, as WC3 didn’t have the late WoW-era precedents of magical trans-continental communication, and in fact numerous plot points throughout it are dependent upon that not having been possible at that time.

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1647

Yes, that is what I said.

I can still claim that I do not want to have attempts made to make me feel bad about it.

That was the entire thing you were asking for.

And yet I can still say what I said before.

Yeah, playing Alliance, there are times where I don’t want the game trying to make me feel bad for playing it.

[quote=“Ainhin-thorium-brotherhood, post:1644, topic:988047”]
There is. It’s the Alliance. Nobody is forcing you to pick the edgelord faction other than yourself.[/quote]
You’re still doing the script! I can’t believe it. I don’t know how many times I have to say I’m speaking from an Alliance perspective for you to say, ‘hmm, well, the Horde player…’.

Again, I’m solely saying as an Alliance player I cannot play the game and reasonably avoid all the things I consider bad. I don’t want the game making me feel bad about those things.

It is a game. The point is to have fun. There are some games that are meant to make you question your morality and reflect on the emotion state it brings to you. World of Warcraft really isn’t that game.

I don’t want to be told to make Murloc Fin Soup then have the game or players wildly shame me for it.

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1648

Great, and I’d tell you that feeling bad about doing bad things is the sign of a healthy and mature human being and not something to be ashamed of. It’s certainly not something that is worth waging multi-year forum campaigns to get people to stop telling you that a thing was bad.

I wasn’t talking about you. Stop injecting yourself into the conversation as though everything is about you.

And one of the reasons I play Alliance is because generally, you don’t do bad things as Alliance and when you do, it has consequences because one of the things that makes the Alliance distinct from the Horde is that the Alliance actually cares about doing the right thing.

That being said, I think that it’s pretty messed up that you compare quests to hunt Murlocs for food to be analagous to anything that the Horde, specifically the Forsaken, do in their questing. It’s such a twisted sentiment and it baffles me that you can’t see why.

1649

I actually struggled with this a bit when I quit in early Cata and came back right before MoP. I had burned out on WoW at the time and I remember being stuck at the character selection screen because I was wondering if I should just reroll as worgen instead of coming back to this troll. But it’s like…this character was the main I stuck with for about 4 years at that point. It was my “do stuff” character, and there was also never a time I played it where I wasn’t in my guild. It also would have sucked that I’d be unable to transfer mail between my other alts that I had also made during TBC, but the main stopping point was the idea of socially “starting over” online, and potentially not clicking with another guild ever.

So I ended up just gritting my teeth and sticking with this character, and hoping I could tolerate the non-faction war side of MoP and wait for that stuff to blow over and not be revisited afterward. Welp.

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1650

I struggled with that when I made the decision too, and I needed to ask myself the question of just how critical the lore and my perception of my faction’s actions and history were to my enjoyment of the game, and ultimately I realized it was really important and that I would never really have fun as Horde as a result.

That realization made the decision way easier.

1651

Point being, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to do something in a game story that’s bad then not have people make you feel bad about it.

I don’t think anything deserves multi-year long forum campaigns, shaming people or not.

You literally said it in the thread not responding to anyone, “I wish some people would admit this”. Apparently you mean, ‘I wish I could just preach about why I want to shame people’.

Yes, as an Alliance player, I think basically everyone doesn’t want a game that just involves you do some bad things then also trying to make you feel bad. Apparently that’s just not what you wanted to hear.

Uh, not really, lol. I’m starting to get worried.

I think it is utterly bizarre you’re apparently chill with eating people and what’s the equivalent of killing children of other races. Kind of a feels weird man.

You’re eating people and butchering them for trophies. Heck, I think there’s even a Northrend quest around testing Blight on a Vrykul prisoner and he turns to goo.
Absholutely… Thish Will Work!

I can easily say the Forsaken stuff is messed up (testing weapons on people, eating them, enslaving them) while also saying some Alliance stuff is messed up (testing weapons on people, eating them, enslaving them). Just because the Horde do it on a greater scale doesn’t somehow absolve the specific quests a person is involved in.

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1652

If you’re kept up at night sufficiently by people on the internet telling you that your faction did bad things then I’d say, grow up and stop taking attacks on your faction as a personal sleight.

“Shaming” people by accurately remembering video game events. Give me a break.

If you want to say that the Alliance is evil for butchering Murlocs or whatever, go for it. I don’t care.

1653

Here’s an idea; if someone points something out and you feel shame for what they pointed out, stop and think about why you feel shame for it. Shame doesn’t come from other people. It comes from you.

1654

Cool? I mean, it sounds like you just want to preach about stuff more than have a conversation.

You realize these aren’t necessarily two different things right?

So again, it wasn’t about having a conversation, just about repeating some bullet points.

Yes and no. Ultimately emotions are personal. But as emotional and social creatures, we are never in perfect control of our reactions. Someone might feel shame because they think what they did was wrong. Someone might feel that way because of social pressure.

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1655

If you say so mate.

Maybe there aren’t any conversations left to have. Maybe preaching is all there is left to do.

1656

Do you feel like you’re missing out by not being able to play most of the monster races, though? I thought for the most part, you’re not really into that.

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1657

Who knows? As they are now I’m not interested, because I think that the only depth that the monster races in WoW have are that they are monster races, allowing one to preen about how subversive and rebellious they are because they aren’t bound by traditional fantasy norms, which to me has the effect of the Horde not coming off as a group of characters but as a group of gimmicks.

I compared the feeling of playing Horde to the feeling of watching Shrek because it’s the same exact gimmick but with less Smashmouth.

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