Problem is that being a huge weirdo is the default setting for Horde, and in a faction where everyone is a weirdo, nobody is.
Having a company of misfits that otherwise don’t appear to go together is another JRPG trope, though.
I am fond of the emo elves, myself.
Clearly it ain’t working for the Horde, hence this thread.
It does however seem to consistently work with the Alliance, even when they add spacegoats, werewolves, and anime edgelords into the mix. A character can’t be a misfit without a normal, orderly background for them to be juxtaposed with.
and thats totaly fine, but to make a competition out of it, doesn´t lead to anything.
The only reason why it’s working for the alliance is because things got sanded down to make them fit and Blizzard went way too hard on unity even when it shouldn’t make sense. Hell, if I remember right, the whole reason why alliance got worgen to begin with is because they felt like they failed hard enough with draenei that they wanted to “try again” with another monster race, and look how they turned out. Their mental issues are largely cured with moon juice and their overemphasis on their humanity just makes them too easy to blend in with the actual humans, leaving them with little to stand apart.
Honestly the Horde is overwhelmingly mundane. That’s what made me fall in love with the Forsaken. The vast majority of their NPCs are pretty average people. A magical creature of the night that’s just a mushroom farmer or dog breeder is really funny to me.
The Horde’s elves are probably the biggest weirdos as they have a penchant for the dramatic. Always found that bit in Ashenvale amusing where a Nelf assassinates a Belf dignitary and the Orcs are “Well that sucks but hey its a warzone. These things happen”.
And the Belf Paladin charged with guarding her is going into like a Shakespearean soliloquy about how he’s failed his Lady in this most noble charge.
It’s because the Alliance is a tolerant faction. I know that this is heresy in the eyes of a lot of Horde players but it’s true. The notion of the Alliance being one giant psuedo-Scarlet Crusade never had any basis.
And frankly, I prefer having new members in the Alliance adapt alongside old members of the Alliance because the alternative is a collection of balkanized stereotypes whose relationship is artificial. This ability to adapt is also why the Alliance tends to fit into the universe better than the Horde does, and the adaptability is a feature of the Alliance’s genericness, not a bug.
This actually reminds me that it’s a bit difficult for me conceive of an Alliance character going to Revendreth when they die, as their lore tends to be strongly slanted towards a strongly idealized lawful good framework.
Near as I can tell, it’s possibly where Alliance Warlocks, Rogues, and probably Demon Hunters would end up, possibly Void Elves since I liken them to be the spiritual successor to Kael’thas’s ideal of using darker and more forbidden forms of magic.
Of course it certainly seems like a place where some formerly Alliance and Horde villain groups appear to end up in as well, but from a standpoint standpoint it has always felt perhaps the most tricky with imagining an Alliance person to pick as a covenant because of less sinful thematic of the faction.
It seems pretty easy for me to imagine though? As a covenant, Revendreth is about rehabilitating fallen souls which seems really Alliance to me. It feels more like Alliance and less like Horde in fact because the Horde tends to indulge people who need rehabilitation rather than help them.
That’s putting it mildly.
Alliance tolerance didn’t have any effect in defanging the worgen or…whatever the hell Blizzard did when they introduced the draenei. Both races were changed on a conceptual level to make them fit.
For example, it’s one thing to say “oh the alliance can look past the fact that the draenei merely LOOK like demons,” which can be a good story beat if they chose to tell it. But what I’m talking about is how Blizzard reimagined them to copycat the best traits of all four alliance races so that there didn’t have to be any sort of adjustment or growth period. They were just naturally the wisest, longest-lived, most magically adept, most faithful, strongest and coincidentally the most perfect victims to really ramp up the sympathy for their inclusion.
Or hell, Ardenweald’s a recent example. The alliance didn’t do any adapting to fit; the entire universe was rewritten to try to accommodate the night elves so they could have an Emerald Double Dream.
True, I more mean like dying and actually going there though. The place seems to be an entire realm of reformed villains. (Which is where I can agree it has a Horde feel there, if the red and bats aren’t enough, I can probably see Horde more likely to go there since ruthless pragmatism is more common there.)
I think this is kind of a reductionist take on Ardenweald. In fact, everyone seems to be prone to reductionist takes on the covenents.
My Death Knight is in Bastion, my Paladin is in Ardenweald, my Priest is in Maldraxxus, and my Warrior Knight is in Revendreth, and none of them feel out of place to me.
I don’t know if this is strictly speaking an Alliance thing but it might be the result of an attitude about the Alliance (and by extension my characters) that I’ve cultivated over the years.
And I think that you’re minimizing the differences between the Draenei and the rest of the Alliance here as well. As a human and dwarf fan they certainly looked and more importantly felt really different even if they weren’t philisophically at odds with me. They were a bunch of big blue goats who worshiped a wind chime and lived in interdimensional crystals that they channeled magic through.
Something can be very different from the rest of the faction without outright contradicting the rest of the faction. There is a middle ground between “every member of the faction is literally the same” and “every member of the faction is at odds with each other”
All it takes to end up in Revendreth is a particularly nasty fatal flaw or sin, even if someone is otherwise heroic. Sure, there are a lot of souls around that we recognize as villains from Azeroth. For example, there’s an event during the Ember Court that can happen which involves Denathrius’ loyalists showing up and abusing souls by forcing them to fight against you. While fighting, these souls will often shift from the generic soul model to a ghostly version of a recognizable enemy, such as a Scarlet Crusader or one of Elisande’s Nightborne loyalists. However, there are also readable sinstones throughout Revendreth, and some are for people who would likely have been publicly seen as heroes while alive, but who had serious sins privately. Two of them are even Night Elves: Sentinel Shal’raven, who was a fierce protector of the forest but murdered a priestess he was infatuated with, and Faedra Ambershade, who died a hero of the War of the Shifting Sands, but who secretly chose who she aided and who she left to die in the sands based on petty favoritism and envy. None of her victims lived to tell of her treachery, so her reputation with the living remained unblemished, but the Venthyr know her crimes. There’s also Dresh-Khevan, whose sinstone I particularly like:
A member of the Alliance can absolutely end up in Revendreth. The Alliance isn’t so uniformly lacking in sins as to ensure that not a single citizen would be sent there upon death.
There’s actually one Night Elf in Revendreth from the War of Shifting Sands
(Whispering) The night elves weren’t part of the Alliance back then.
Yeah, about that…