Yeah, that garbage does kind of demolish everything about the Scourge, doesn’t it?
The Lich King was in everyone’s heads. That’s how the Scourge works. It’s how he controls his army of undead. Meaning Ner’zhul and Arthas should have known if Kel’thuzad wasn’t really loyal to either of them.
And if the Jailer was powerful enough to contact allies within the Scourge and shield his mind from the Lich King’s scrutiny, then Zovaal should have been able to outright supplant the Lich King.
It’s a shallow, pathetic attempt to make Zovaal seem more retroactively impressive and influential than he really is, and it fails hard, while wrecking an established character along with years of established lore in the process.
I don’t see what is hard to reconcile. We have Orc and Human Liches. Kil’jaeden first made the Orc ones. Kel’thuzad later helped make the Human ones. We see Orc ones in Warcraft 3. We see some other Human ones (and probably some Orc ones) in World of Warcraft. That seems rather clear cut.
But of that era? Sure. Since then we’ve seen ones that aren’t. We learn new information often enough. The few human ones that get killed, but also the Troll Liches in Zuldazar.
It’s blizzard simple forgetting their own lore and not wanting to be beholden to what’s already been established . Years ago I would have called it was laziness, now it just feels like it’s malicious and intentional.
I don’t think that Kel’thuzads words actually are all that clear in saying “I was working for the Jailer the whole time!” He says he was working for false masters, but that was always true.
What they really need to do at this point is make Zovaal’s relationship with the Scourge clearer. What was he responsible for, what was he not responsible for, what were his goals, how was he trying to attain them, and why couldn’t he attain them without the Scourge
It’s not the first time Blizzard has pulled a larger villain out of thin air (the most prominent example being the Burning Legion itself, with Warcraft 3 largely being about how the Horde was small-time compared to what their masters were capable of) but they explained a lot more about the Legion in a much shorter span of time than they have so far with the Jailer. This long patch cycle hasn’t helped things.
I believe that the Jailer constitutes a huge threat, but as it stands his threat comes solely from retroactively seeing what he’s done in the past (namely, created the Scourge.) He needs to do something to up the ante and he needs to do it soon.
Edit: He’s condemning all souls to hell which is definitely a massive and horrible threat in itself, but they still haven’t explained why he’s doing that or if he’s even responsible for doing that. All we know is that the Arbiter was KO’d, which benefited him but as far as we’re aware was not his doing.
We don’t know how Sylvanas destroying the Helm of Domination and tearing the veil benefits him, we don’t know why destroying the Helm of Domination even tore open the veil at all.
Presumably the point of the Scourge was to build up enough of his influence on Azeroth that he could eventually invade fully, but why does breaking the helm of domination complete it? How does that tie into all souls going to the Maw, a situation that seems completely incidental to tearing the veil open?
There are all sorts of plausible answers to these questions but we don’t have any official ones. All we can do is speculate, but speculating gets old after a while.
Honestly if you are so interested in the white spectrum of morality why not just go play Alliance?
Our zones are either memes or defensive.
You don’t give the typical Horde player reasons for going the edgy race.
It can’t be a guild can it? Its been a decade since cata.
Thank you for your extremely important and valuable assessment of my academic career forums-poster Izhkarl-Khaz’goroth, level 60 Undead Warlock, I’ll be sure to keep it on file
Well, I did say that “most” Horde players seemed unsatisfied with playing an evil faction. I understand that there are some people that want to indulge that fantasy, even if the game’s narrative isn’t particularly well-suited to it.
I mean, if you want to have that option, fine, an MMO should - but the exercise of that option shouldn’t completely destroy the reasons for why other people play the game - not unless there’s a gameplay remedy for the attempt.
Nothing wrong with being evil. I want the game to give me the opportunity to kill as much alliance scum as possible. Death to the alliance always! Lok’tar!
What’s weird to me is it feels like more Alliance posters want to be completely evil and murderous than Horde players, they just want to be told they’re good people for doing so.
I think the Alliance side of it is closer to how Horde should be treated.
The Alliance commits a ton of things that within context are legitimately horrifying and screwed up, their narrative just doesn’t want to address it as such and people don’t reflect upon anything that the narrative doesn’t address.
Similar to how the Horde used to be doing atrocities and war crimes against their local environmental threats but nobody really minded slaughtering Quillboar children or stomping on Harpy eggs, since the story doesn’t want to make you deal with the actual implications of what you’re doing.
The issue with the faction war narrative after Cataclysm is that the story is deliberately highlighting how horrible the things you’re doing are as Horde, rather than having everyone pat themselves on the back.
In Alliance BfA after committing atrocities, Wyrmbane pats you on the back and calls you a good soldier and says you’ll win this war.
In Horde BfA after committing atrocities, the characters gasp at how horrible the thing you just did is. While ignoring the 500 other times you’ve done something similar or worse.
BfA at least semi-remedies this by portraying the leaders of the Horde as having a minority opinion among the citizenry, but that just makes them taking charge after and scapegoating it all on Sylvanas look worse.
