A broken clock is still right twice a day. Arthas’ reasons for pursuing the purge plan were flawed. He was flawed as hell, hence why his fall was so accelerated after this. But none of that actually means that there were other viable plans that were being ignored because Arthas wouldn’t shut up. Whether it’s events shown in the game or in the book they had minutes to hours before people would start turning. And once they do… you’re purging the city anyway. But now fighting even more of the populus, even the still living ones. Can’t risk still living but infected people getting behind your lines and boxing you in etc…
The purge was the best available, practical option they had. Arthas lacked the strength of character to do it and then, ironically, survive it himself.
Why, oh why didn’t he outline an alternative in the microscopic span of time Arthas provided before degenerating into leveling ultimatums and dismissing him?
The fact of the matter is, Arthas was freaking out and just leaping at the first thing that came to mind. The novelization even shows how he’s spiraling into fear and despair as he observes the infected city on approach. Yet people insist that such panicked, unstable and emotionally driven reasoning was somehow the only level-headed way to handle the situation because Arthas pretended to be in control even as he was panicking inside.
But hey, if you like thinking the most rational person in the room is the guy who’s losing his mind, you do you.
Quarantine and calling reinforcements. That’s a solution. The threat could have likely been contained by decisive military action and force of arms. Especially since at the time, then Alliance was already mobilized. Thrall’s and Grom’s shenanigans had their armies active and mobile, meaning that rather than being in peacetime and minimally prepared for an attack, the Alliance’s armies were already on alert and ready to respond to an attack.
Alexandros would literally fight a war against an entire kingdom worth of Scourge with his shattered remnant of the kingdom’s army, yet part of a single city’s population as Scourge was going to overpower a rallying of the entire Alliance?
And all Arthas experienced before was people dying to the plague, then coming back. He had absolutely no evidence whatsoever to suggest that killing people before they died from the infection would prevent it from still reanimating them, because prior to Stratholme he hadn’t been murdering innocent people who hadn’t been turned yet.
He jumped the gun, slaughtering an entire city based on severely incomplete information, an unjustified sense of certainty and his own fear of failure.
Stratholme was one of the largest population centers, if you think quarantining that large city was possible that’s all you. But once undead start killing the uninfected while you hold the entrances and then start pushing it because you lack the man power to actually god those entrances, hey you obviously think it’s the right call.
A city that size, assuming a level of complexity in engineering comparable to Stormwind, would have a sewer system. That’d lead out somewhere, probably not terribly near one of the proper entrances. Probably several access points actually. And that’s assuming they’d need to walk out. Magic portals were an established thing, even in those days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVsZvxY-coc
The only thing the razing of stratholme accomplished was turning the living into undead faster, and also permanently damning them and the land forever. It was literally the worst thing Arthas could have done. He turned it into a Domain of Dread / Silent Hill.
In the past, I always thought that razing it was so clearly the only option that nobody could argue against it with any degree of intellectual honesty. But that’s because we have omniscient knowledge; we knew Stratholme was doomed. But Uther, Jaina, and Arthas didn’t know that. They didn’t understand the state of the whole city. If you see a few plague victims, you don’t immediately say “burn the whole town.” They had incomplete knowledge; not enough to make a judgement call.
Arthas was right, but on accident. He would retroactively be right in a utilitarian sense, but in any kind of Kantian or scientific way, he was out of his damn mind.
Sure, it was more delaying the inevitable. Those folks were dead either way. Killing them simply prevented the scourge from being able to use them for a little while which may have saved more lives.
I mean, after we chase out Mal’Ganis the survivors have time to pile everyone up on pyres, Uther returns to talk to Jaina and Medivh even had a chat with her. As opposed to Mal’Ganis just raising everyone right then and there I’d say it wasn’t quicker.
More than likely the scourge came to re occupy strath after Arthas’ fell and returned, the scourge had at the time taken over the kingdom of lordaeron thus would’ve taken up strath as well. Dreads argument acts on what we know now, not how Arthas thought (since he had no other reason to believe otherwise) that malganis’ death would be what would stop the scourge in its tracks.
That’s the irony of it, despite Arthas best attempts and intentions he couldn’t do what he wanted and in fact damned his home. That’s the tragedy of his story.
Killing the people to stop them from becoming undead never really made sense to me. I mean, the necromancers will just raise em up anyway, especially if you take a fair chunk of soldiers on what was, at best, a wild goose chase and at worse, a trap.
We’ve beat this horse a few times(to say the least) since its inception. I’ve always been of the mind that he could have at least tried to save some.
This is what Shaw says in the latest excerpt about Strat:
“SI:7 agents are often faced with life or death decisions that must be made in a heartbeat. The right decision can mean salvation or doom. Arthas was faced with one such.”
“There was more than one way to handle it - ways to grant salvation to some, if not all. But Arthas, enraged and untested, chose doom.”
My biggest question was were there survivors; was there anyone that managed to escape Arthas culling? Shaw says that there are some that are alive and are yet surviving; but its not clear because in the previous paragraph he mentioned that Arthas murdered them all.
Edit: There should have been some give and take.
He could have entertained Uther and Jaina on some level; threw them a bone or two. Maybe they would have been more inclined to help him.
He should have, but that was out of the cards after he had lost invincible. It changed how he viewed things and the dreadlords and Ner’zhul knew that having Arthas see all these horrible things happening to his people would trigger him to further go into “if sacrifices have to be made to save others he would do whatever it takes, whatever it takes.”
But you do have a point that he should’ve thrown the two a bone, But if he had the two of them with him during the purge they could’ve talked him down afterwards to avoid northrend perhaps. It’s hard to say what could’ve been done differently cause forces beyond Arthas, Jaina and Uther conspired for Arthas to fall hard.
