The reality of it is, Blizzard needs to stop writing the Horde as violent brutes. This entire situation is a problem of Blizzard pumping up Horde and it’s “warrior culture” and then having the only people they can punch on be the Alliance.
This is entirely on Blizzard, and its that way because they want faction rivalry.
Horde players are upset that Alliance thinks the Horde (it’s faction) should be punished for the stuff the Horde does in game, and so they blame the Alliance players for being upset they lost stuff. Their story lost stuff.
But they never ask Blizzard to stop writing the Horde in ways that puts them into these situations. Tell blizzard you dont want to attack the Alliance. Tell them you don’t want the warmongering horde. They do, in fact, listen to player feedback.
With any luck, the Horde council is a first step to them stopping to write the Horde as the evil faction.
With respect, as someone who frequents this forum and various other lore adjacent forums for over a decade at this point.
They generally do not.
There are outliers, but it always tends to be “But we like the Hordes feel and the fighting, we just don’t want to be the bad guys, can’t you make the Alliance the aggressors?”
Or something similar. The Horde playerbase, by and large, WANTS to be the underdog lashing out and winning in battle against the Alliance. They just want to do it guilt free (and by this, I mean have the story set up in a way so their actions don’t influence the story)
Because that warrior aspect is part of the fabric of the Horde culture, and not just in game. It’s something that is baked into the fan base. Lok’tar Ogar. It’s something ingrained into the faction.
And it is not compatible with Blizzard’s writing of the Horde as it currently stands.
It is, ultimately, one of the reasons we need a large time skip. To be able to write around this problem and put the Horde into a position where they can be that faction identity without it coming at the expense of the Alliance.
The other option is to build up horde organizations (long over due) and stop having the Alliance nuetrals carry the show.
There is frankly zero reason the Horde player should be interacting with Tyrande at all.
Again, this ignores the fact that Saurfangs plan was to always start killing civilians if the Alliance tried to retake Darnassus.
The mass death of Night Elves was ALWAYS the Horde’s plan on the off chance the Alliance didn’t splinter under it’s own weight. That Sylvanas did it without waiting for the Alliance to attack first does not change that. That she changed the plan, does not change that, at it’s core, those people were always in Saurfangs sights.
His plan was to threaten to do so. His actions prove it was a bluff. You don’t have to accept that truth. It’s still there and still canon when he orders us to save night elves.
I don’t believe a time skip would fix anything. You can’t undo the fact that the current horde has now gone on two corruption-free rampages, one of which involves a genocide this time around and especially not allowing the horde player to properly disconnect from it.
To me, the whole appeal of the underdog stuff requires more than just being smaller or lesser than the opposition; it needs to be about overcoming some kind of unfairness or injustice as well. You can’t go back to that kind of sympathy because the horde have been the oppressors.
Yes, because saying Alliance leaders SHOULD react to Horde players with mean words and condemnation, and the solution is to just not have the Horde and Alliance interact is totally out of line.
Oh, didn’t realize that being a “warrior culture” automatically means being evil and eating babies, my mistake.
Sure, Horde fans want to Loktar Ogar. That’s why they picked Horde. If they wanted to play ““peaceful and civilised”” races, they’d be playing Alliance.
But I think you’ll find that most Horde fans prefer to think that being ““savage”” is not synonimous with being evil. The interest in Horde races for a lot of people stemmed from this exact idea.
I mean, of course it does in the context of Blizzard’s writing.
The Horde isn’t the Warrior culture that expresses value and supports well trained citizens and battle tested warriors. It’s the warrior culture that places self worth on battle.
And for that to happen, there has to be battle. And the only battle that matters is the biggest person in the yard. The Alliance. Kobolds and Gnolls and Quilboar may make for great individual battles, but they aren’t going to prove worth to an army.
And look, this is one of the core complaints that’s been around forever.
The Horde cannot be the savage hit back harder underdog warrior faction as long as their entire culture is built around the glorification of the Old Horde warriors and it’s ways. As long as the Helscreams and the Doomhammers are central to Horde doctrine, its gonna be what it is.
This SHOULD have been what MoP taught the Horde. That Garrosh and his views of old Orcish tradition and his fathers version of Honor were bad. Were toxic.
But Blizzard decided that they need to keep repeating that storyline and this type of behavior is still core to the Horde.
The legion seems like it would have been a good and narratively safe target to flex that while also providing some closure to the faction against an enemy that caused its creation in the first place. It’s a shame Blizzard didn’t think so!
It certainly could have been. Certainly should have been. And was until BFA. Which, I mean, wasn’t even supposed to be as black and white as it was. But Teldrassil was such a massive intentional screw up that it kinda… ruined that.
You really did have the foundations for the Alliance to be the aggressor. Jaina and Genn pressuring the Alliance to attack, Anduin wanting revenge for Varian… The seeds were there, made even worse by the Old Gods prison weakening.
I never saw it being central Horde doctrine. Hell, I don’t think the Horde even has a doctrine. It was always just “rough around the edges”, “ugly” races that are maybe a bit problematic, but not inherently evil.
What tradition? The Horde from the first war only existed for like several years.
I genuinely don’t think itš that deep. The writers just should not have Horde characters do unncesessary evil stuff for no reason and weŗe golden.
Old Horde worship. The modern horde still worships them. Named cities after them. Built monuments after them. Glorified them.
Like, this was an issue way back in pre-Cataclysm books where Thrall realized he literally couldn’t call the Horde out on it’s behavior for fear of being deposed.
The aggravating thing to me was that I didn’t even want another faction war expansion in the first place. Even if the alliance was the aggressor, I had little interest in it because I figured it was just going to be overdue payback for Cata/MoP.
But apparently Blizzard decided that the horde never learned their lesson after MoP (because they never wrote it) so the faction got Electric Boogaloo’d but made it worse.
Going back to my earlier comment, it’s why I think a time skip can’t work. In order to move past Teldrassil, I think you’d need to go so far into the future that you’d need to wipe out the current cast of elves due to old age and introduce a replacement generation. And that’s a hella long time. And even then, the horde player was still a member (if even nominally) so the character insert itself brings that baggage along.
