True - but as the saying goes, “the second best time is now”.
Blizz drops storylines all the time. It’s a consequence of having so many cool potentials in the game, that some get forgotten when they really should be present, though some absences are worse than others (sorry, shaman in Shadowlands, shaman in Dragonflight, …shaman in general…)
The various Stay a While and Listen in Hallowfall, showing the various Light-using faiths there, shows that there is someone paying attention. So there is hope!
I agree, their cockroach act is old, let the Forsaken have uncontested control of the plaguelands (minus an allotment for the Argents) since they lost so much in BFA.
The forsaken attitude softening due to not having murdermonks dotting the landscape makes more sense to me than Calia Disney princessing them into compliance.
Or we could get a writer that enjoys the scarlet crusade as well as the forsaken and create a storyline that begins the slow formation of a national and cultural identity for Lordaeron by unlobotomizing the Crusade and keeping the Forsaken as inhuman, cruel bastards.
Calia can even be a foil to this paradigm as Lordaerons identity crisis is slowly resolved and realize…
Will it anger a lot of players?
Absolutely.
Will it allow the original forsaken mindset as well as the scarlet crusade zealotry make absolute sense?
To a level that would make both fanbases incredibly uncomfortable.
Would this allow Calia to come in and try to rectify a thrice fallen kingdom?
Maybe, but if she fails at the very least the hands of the living and the undead can be clasped together once more as her corpse burns on a pyre and the last Menethil perishes.
It’s more about showing that Lordaeron was always rotten to the core. But because the people loved King Terenas, the city gets propped up to be something that never really existed.
They wouldn’t be uncovering it or fixing it though. It’s just that Lordaeron is a cesspit and both groups are absolutely evil groups who descended into madness trying to murder the other side down to the last man.
And than Calia basically realizes that everything she cared about was a lie and everyone around her only ever cared about themselves
You could very well leave it up to the player uncovering it. Or it becoming even more obvious through the actions of the desolate council.
The best way to play this out is actually through the forsaken storyline, with a few minor caveats on the alliance side through (I know this is a hard ask of blizzard) well written Scarlet Crusade propaganda that talks more of Lordaeron and less the Light.
You already have a sort of quasi shared history of high elven arrogance with Quel’thalas being a Lordaeron ally to the point of partially sharing cultural aspects.
Just pull the magnifying glass back away from the church and look more at the broader aspects of the Kingdom itself and you won’t even need to mention the scarlet crusade, as it would just be revealed to be a product of Lordaerons culture at the time.
Edit: This would also legitimize an alliance villain faction, much of the living Lordaeron population was forced to assimilate with Stormwind.
It kinda meshes badly with what we know of the kingdom previously though. It almost certainly had it’s darker side, all kingdoms/nations do. but this would all be entirely out of left field. Terenias was a decent enough leader by all accounts.
It would also kinda ruin the part of the forsaken where most are just regular people thrust into a cursed undead existence for me. It’d be less of a tragedy if they were inhumanly evil in life. I like the idea that for every cackling maniac throwing chemicals around, there’s a handful of regular joes living their unlife the best they can.
King Terenas can still be a genuine, caring charismatic failure of a King whose pride and arrogance to dismiss Medivhs warning leading to his own death, and the permanent rot of his kingdom King who still suffered from the typical trope of absolutely corrupt aristocracy, and revealing the kingdom already in its falling stages by the time the Cult of the Damned (empowered by power hungry aristocrat’s and downtrodden serfs) came to its peak of power.
Considering Garithos is basically the only non menethil of Lordaeron of some popular renown, it’s not exactly out of character to write this kind of history.
The Loraedon aristocracy could be awful, for sure. I know I personally feel like Stormwind’s nobility are low key recurring villains, and Genn and Proudmoore were not the most ethical leaders in WC2.
But I just don’t see the juice being worth the squeeze, even if the writers do a good job. Which is far from a given, given some of the last few expansions.
I feel like the Forsaken growing as the inheritors of a respected fallen kingdom now that they’re not facing enemies on every side is more compelling than them being effectively crazed beasts gnawing at the carcass of a kingdom that was rotting years before it died.
Because why would they be bad guys. The light going evil is almost so rare it only happened with one group of people, that literally was brainwashed by a dreadlord. The light is all about positive thought and emotions to the point the moment doubt, negative thoughts turn up, you start to lose said power to the light.
Even Arthas, who was 100% thinking what he was doing was right, was still doubtful to the point he was losing willpower to use the light. You need to either be brainwashed by a dreadlord or real psychos to use the light in an evil way.
The church dungeon was filled by a bunch of crazed out people that they were going against their own tenants.
Yeah, because AU Draenei was never supposed to exist in the first place. Also it was such a massive curveball from the story they wrote that it only showed up for one quest for an allied race.
Everyone else can be evil with their power. If Light users cannot be evil with their power*, then it suggests light users are always inherently correct and anyone who fights them is wrong.
*Light users have used their power for evil since WC3.