Not to open a can of worms, but I believe Jaina’s attempt to drown Orgrimmar was as bad as Theramore or Teldrassil. I also believe she’s morally guilty of that action even though it was counteracted twice and she eventually stopped trying after that.
There are those who don’t agree, and that’s fine. I won’t go any more rounds on that particular argument right now.
I don’t agree, but I’m liking your post anyway.
No … That’s not my argument 
I’m not sure how you got that from me pointing out the contrast of the Horde’s actions upon Theramore & Teldrassil compared to any of the Alliance’s crimes, but I even stated what my argument was →
Is my argument.If you simply misunderstood, or missed that text of mine then fair enough — However given the context of you changing the narrative of what I’m saying; twisting the intent of my words, I’m not sure whether presenting anything else would be worthwhile; so lets simply agree to disagree & leave it at that.
My bad. Years of dealing with peacebois and MHPs have given me a kneejerk reaction to these things.
Yes, I said that.
Horde have historically scapegoated the ‘bad leader.’ The bad leader forced them.
The Alliance has typically have some level of justification for what they did.
Both result in the story letting them off the hook. I am not arguing which is worse. Because, ultimately, which is worse ends up being determined by more subjective things.
There were two. One of them was DEEP in Alliance territory. And the other was them trying to push the Alliance out of a zone. They lost in that they failed. But they also didn’t get pushed out themselves.
Key there, with the rebels. The Alliance only got there because the Horde rebelled. And both times it happened they made a point of having characters flat out directly say the Alliance could not win without the help of the rebels.
The Horde was not humbled by the Alliance.
I do not disagree with that. The Alliance is not portrayed as purely good as some people will often claim. However, over the life of WoW the Horde has unquestionably had more portrayal as the villain.
My biggest complaint with your post was the claim that the Alliance ‘humbled the Horde.’ That is objectively not true. Quite the opposite in fact. The Alliance was the one that was humbled, repeatedly, in order to tell the Horde narrative. To the point of being told we could not defeat less than half the Horde without help from the Horde rebels. In fact that is one of the complaints Alliance players have about the faction wars. Again, Horde players have legitimate and fair complaints. I would never claim otherwise. Just remember, the Alliance players do as well. And it is not fair to try and pretend the Horde were actually the ones humbled. That ends up just being dismissive of the Alliance players and their complaints.
Well, Horde players were told that the entire Horde could not defeat just the Night Elves if their army and leaders were present. And even the left-behind civilians and shopkeepers inflicted heavy losses.
So that particular bit of bad treatment extends to both sides. (Which doesn’t make it less bad.)
I’ve read about psychological studies that suggest most people will emotionally feel a loss more strongly than a corresponding gain - which I think applies here. Each side gets told “you mostly succeeded, yay! (but can’t fully succeed because the other team is too tough)”, and humans being humans will forever bridle against that second part.
That’s the biggest issue with faction wars, as I see it - even if they’re technically balanced, with each gain by one side mirrored so everyone gets one champion trophy to offset one loss… it won’t feel equal. Each side will feel they lost more in the exchange, for reasons that are not anyone’s fault.
I don’t think it’s an impossible issue to overcome, but I do think it’s very difficult and there’s no guarantee. I think the only real way around it is to build up and emotionally charge the goal that the side will win, while laying the groundwork to make the inevitable corresponding loss feel less emotionally charged. Even then, players will get more emotionally attached to some concepts than others - I, for example, care way more about Darnassus getting destroyed than if it had been Stormwind that was sacked (again), even though Darnassus was a much less populated and gameplay-relevant city, but there will be thousands and thousands of players who feel the opposite. That’s the nature of having such a wide audience.
One fairly good example of this, I feel, is Genn’s attack in Stormheim. (It does rely on someone caring about Genn’s character, but I feel he is pretty popular - he seems to have far less of an Alliance hatedom than similar problem-starter characters like angry Varian.) His pursuit of Sylvanas is strongly personal - it’s been a goal since she killed his son in Cata, an event the player also experienced firsthand and could easily empathize with, that has been building for years and finally got a decent callback plus payoff. These emotional tones are then enough to overcome the annoyance at losing the Skyfire to the Horde player as part of that very same plot. (To be a great example, I think the Horde would have needed a similar personal, long-running goal to achieve. The Skyfire wasn’t enough of a hated rival to them for it to be a satisfying trade.)
The Horde, unfortunately, has not been given many of those long-seeded, clear and specific goals. Taurajo’s butcher was killed in the same questline he was introduced, the long-running lumber/hunting conflict with the night elves has no one antagonist NPC face to it nor instinctive win conditions, and Jaina has been declared a Friend To All Azerothians that the story would rather fawn over than confront. I think this is yet another story issue that causes the Horde to get slotted into the role of aggressor whenever faction conflict rolls along.
I don’t agree. I know the studies you refer to. And yes, that is a thing. And I do get where you are coming from. However, especially in Cata, Alliance did experience quantifiably more losses in game than the Horde did. It isn’t just feels like they lost more. I have theories for why that happened, but that is likely a whole different conversation. The end result did just end up being the Alliance experienced more losses, and also more significant losses, like Theramore and Teldrassil.
On top of that Blizzard actively tried to heighten the feeling of loss for the Alliance. Look at the whole save the civilians quest in Teldrassil. Or the aftermath scenario of Theramore and questing that was associated with it. There was an active effort to show the Alliance losses and make you feel them.
That would probably be true. And part of the reason a faction war was never a good idea.
I am pretty confident that, ironically, a lot of that build up was largely an accident. Blizzard ran out of time for Alliance content in Cata and had to cut a LOT. And among the cut content was a lot of the Alliance questing for Worgen. There is a reason it cut off so sharply and just sent you to Darkshore. While the Worgen story continued into Trisfall. Worgen didn’t get resolution on that and other story threads because Blizzard just didn’t have time to implement the Alliance questing. Blizzard was so busy and focused on the Horde story through Cata & MoP that they just never did anything to resolve all the hanging Worgen story threads. So, it was completely open to be used as a story point in Legion.
Honestly, I think a lot of that has to do with Blizzard just not wanting to show the Horde losing or appearing weak. They started a trend in Cata of the Horde being this unstoppable, metal, butt kicking powerhouse. A trend they have more recently seemed to be trying to step away from. (Saurfang rejecting it seems to be where the direction started to change). But one that effected a lot of their choices for years.
I honestly credit that ‘metal’ Horde mentality for a lot of the villain story lines. I think they just thought people would like the ‘For the Horde’ unstoppable army fantasy. I don’t think they realized the negative of being the bad guys would outweigh that for many of the players.
I often got the feeling that the writers in Cata felt that the Alliance players didn’t like to fight and thus needed slain characters to motivate them, while the Horde players liked to fight and thus needed no motivation other than a pointer on the map. It would certainly explain a lot.
The Alliance questing experience has a whole lotta “please find NPC X!”->find a dead body described with pathos->slay the mobs responsible and bring a memento back to the questgiver, who then probably cries or is otherwise sad and passive about it. Whereas the Horde had Mankrik, who went on a memetic quillboar murdering spree. I think that’s fairly emblematic of how they view the Horde as dealing with their feelings.
I don’t know about Cata, but that was explicitly stated in the case of BfA. Quote from Terran Gregory:
iirc that was specifically why they made teldrassil burn first, cause they felt the alliance fanbase wouldn’t want to fight the horde
Smallioz
Definitely. I feel like the issue was at the time they viewed the Horde as some kind of combination of rock star, 80s/90s action hero, and stereo typical alpha male type. They were ‘too cool for feelings’ and just had to ‘kick butt.’ You even saw a lot of that overly aggressive attitudes showing up in Blizzcons, to the point public apologies had to be made. The revelations we have gotten in the last few years about what was going on behind the scenes gives us a pretty good idea where a lot of that attitude was coming from.
The behind the scenes stuff included a lot of people whose main self inserts were alliance characters while Danuser, who was routinely accused of playing dolls with Nathanos, was one of the cleanest guys in the studio, so I would probably not try too hard to tie both issues together as that is both petty and a frankly childish way to understand what went on
Also no races got the brunt of that attitude like blood and night elves, who are on both sides. There’s very little argument that Humans, dwarves and worgen got written on the dudebro end of the spectrum compared to the elves. The blood elf jokes were rancid and absolutely not something that most alliance races got remotely splashed with.
To be clear, I was not specifically referring to self inserts. More that the ‘metal rockstar action hero’ that doesn’t take anything from anyone and kicks butt was seen as cool. And the Horde was what the used as an outlet for that.
I would not say one was the singular, only cause of the other. Motivations for behavior are rarely clear cut, one to one cause and effect. But to think that there is not a relationship between the two seems naive.
Oh, there was definitely toxic aspects inserted into multiple races. And you are correct in that the elves in general got the more sexualized aspects. What I was getting at is the Orcs and Forsaken in particular (and Trolls to a slightly lesser extent) got the outlet for the over aggressive ‘alpha male,’ rockstar side of it. They clearly thought that ‘bada__, smacks everyone down’ characterization was cool. And they used the Horde, and predominantly the Orcs and Forsaken, to show it off. It is hard to not think the toxic attitudes behind the scenes didn’t play at least some part in driving that.
The difference is that the Alliance never suffers enough consequences to need a “scapegoat”.
Jaina tried to do what Sylvanas did (except she did it out of racist hatred rather than a delusional idea of “setting us all free”). Having your atrocities go wrong is not a moral high ground. And there was no “scapegoating” or her or blame for the Alliance. They just forgot about it.
And note, I would hardly call it scapegoating to not blame people who had no involvement in an act, other than some sort of racial guilt idea.
The thing is human writing got through the same arc, especially in Cata-Mists with the whole “Varian is a good king because he treats his allies like vassals through sheer manliness” arc, hence my dislike of diagnosing the rot as expressed on one side specifically (and orcs, humans and forsaken take turns in those jabs at the various elves)
I am not suggesting it was only expressed on one side.
And to be clear, I am not sure that the toxic issues in the back ground were behind the whole Horde villain arc. Probably not in fact. But as they started that arc, especially with the nature of Orcs being historically aggressive and the undead being so easy to play into those themes, I think it exacerbated the issue. Basically the story and the aesthetics just lent themselves to that aspect being driven more. The devs got excited by it and ran with the ‘metal’ Horde.
At the end of the day, the Horde was treated differently. It was more aggressive. There was more of the Horde winning everything. That wasn’t a coin flip. They saw an outlet in at least some of the Horde races for that over aggressive attitude more than they did in the Alliance.
And to be perfectly clear: This is not a indictment of Horde player in any way. It was something Blizzard did. And it negatively impacted both Alliance and Horde players.
Or she did it because the Horde just nuked her home and killed nearly everyone she loved and held dear. That her actions were the result of the Horde COMMITTED ATTROCITIES, and the reason the story has treated her fairly well is because her extreme actions were caused by the Horde betraying her/destroying everything she loved.
That she was s victim of the Horde as much as anyone else and the Horde was her Frankenstein.
“The Horde”. Blaming “orphans and babies” for something they had no part in because they were the wrong race. That is racist hatred.
But this is just more “Alliance did nothing wrong” distraction…