Your armor is stupid-looking and whoever designed the Kaldorei-themed sets from Darkshore needed to be slapped for this gaudy and shoddy work. A race who resonates with nature wears equipment that makes them spottable at fifty miles away and looks like some 12 year old chuunibyou had a stroke while overdosing on ritalin.
An unpopular opinion?
As much as I want the Horde to make repatriations to the Kaldorei (and a lesser extent, the Worgen), I know at best if we do manage to get that, its going to be a throw-away line about us sending supplies to aid with the rebuilding and a line of Peons tossing crates into a kodo-drawn wagon, and the Alliance version will be them having a bunch of Peasants offloading those crates out of the back of a horse-drawn wagon.
Couple of things I have been sitting on that are unpopular.
Peons are Special Needs People
Something I spotted while grinding Draenor content for moggery and leveling is that we never see any of the stereotypical “okey-dokey” Peons in the Iron Horde. Even the most basic scrub-tier carry-my-stuff Mag’har is just a ‘normal’ Orc.
Then we get to our Horde, and Peons exist. They’re always male, and they’re … not the brightest sorts, but able to take massive amounts of punishment, prodigiously strong and generally speaking, kind and gentle souls who just want to help.
Now, that was something that took a few years before the idea percolated and suddenly I was sitting there wracked with guilt about every ‘booterang’ joke I’d told, but it also made a kind of sense about why Peons existed in the Horde as a labour-caste, because they wouldn’t be able to fulfill the coming-of-age rites of the hunt, they would be relatively useless in battle, and Orcs, despite the multitude of “YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG” stuff I can hang on their spike-covered hats, care for their people, especially under Thrall’s guidance and that was something not even the successive Warchiefs could stamp out, who do not abandon their own.
Every Peon is somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, somebody’s nephew. They might not have a glorious future within the Horde, but they will have a future, and according to the Orcish view on things, they will have earned their place within the Horde through honest work and honest labour, and be valued for that service.
It is also important to remember that Orcs have a racial that reduces their time stunned, referencing their sturdy skeletal structure and bone-density, so what to a Human might be a horrific amount of abuse is, to an Orc, no worse than a clip over the ear.
That said I also don’t believe all Horde Overseers in charge of the Peons are as outright abusive as the bastard we meet in the Den, and we see in the Vulpera scenario that Peons have their champions and respect within the majority of the Horde, just not the ‘Twue Whauwioaws’ amongst the Orcs, who, let’s be honest?
Kind of douches to begin with?
Then we get to the ‘why’ of the Peon, and it is important to remember that Peons did not exist until the Original Horde started using Fel Magic to artificially age-up their troops by draining their life force in a very specific way, which made them age faster, turning a five-year old into a fifteen-year old and making them physically capable enough to be able to fight side-by-side with the ‘adults’, which had the side benefit of also giving the Warlocks a lovely package of vitality to use to either extend the lives of the Shadow Council or to convert into more Fel for their own use, and is part of the reason that people like Grom lived as long as they did.
yes, Mr True Warrior there got where he did by taking in the life-force of his own people’s children. Meditate on that.
It could be that some quirk in the Orcish blood made manifest, but this artificial aging process seems to have made ‘Peon-hood’ a trait that can just randomly pop up in anyone descended from these artificially-aged Grunts.
A more disturbing trend could be that the Shadow Council kept ‘broods’ of female Orcs that they would keep churning babies out from, the aged-up boys get sent to the frontlines, the aged-up girls get kept with their mothers to increase production of troops, and I really really hope this was not true, but I also remember Garona exists because of the Shadow Council’s ‘breeding programs’, and Blackhand and Gul’dan ran the Shadow Council, and these were two monsters who desperately needed to be beaten into bloody smears with their own limbs.
Moving on, it seems that every family is at risk of giving rise to a Peon amongst their male children, and I think that’s something that a lot of proud Orcs fear, which results in one of two outcomes.
The first is that the parents reject the child and he is raised communally by the Horde and brought up to see pride and self-accomplishment in that service, that his care-takers and the Horde itself are their family.
The second is that the parents accept their child and attempt to raise him as normal, but the child is a Peon, with all the frustrations and difficulties therein, and the Peon has both his family and the Horde to fall back on for support and guidance.
I also imagine all Peons see each other as brothers, and while a Peon without a family might be sad and lonely at times, he has his ‘brothers’ to commiserate with, and I imagine the families of other Peons are probably the type to grab a lonely Peon and bring them into the fold during public holidays and celebrations. I don’t know why, but the imagine of a Orc family coming together for Winter’s Veil and there’s Gurthurk the Destroyer and Vek’kana the Bloodied hugging their big brother Dunk the Peon and his ‘brother’ Peons, and the family’s kids crawling all over their uncle and ‘uncles’, while the other adults look on and smile because of how happy the Peons are just to be accepted and valued as family and …
On to something less likely to crush my heart …
Zo’val the Jailor has a tragic backstory.
Anyone else remember the giant stone statues in Legion-era Druid and Emerald Dream/Nightmare content? The big, smooth ones?
Anyone else notice a resemblance between the leaked image of the Jailor and these guys, once you squint and imagine what Zo’val looks like without his armor on?
(don’t judge me!)
An unpopular opinion is that Zo’val is not some uber-mensch threat to all life, but the last of his kind shackled into the Maw for refusing to obey the Titans when they set about re-Ordering everything, and those giant statues we find? Dead members of Zo’val’s race who were cast out of the Shadowlands during that cataclysmic battle for control over the destiny of Death and the creation of the Covenants and the Arbiter, and used by the Titans when they were re-Ordering Azeroth and building the Emerald Dream to bind the Dream to Ardenweld through these petrified corpses to act as ‘anchors’ for connections between the two realms to solidify, especially since we only see these statues in an area directly linked to both the ‘heart’ of the Emerald Dream and the Rift of Almn.
Zo’val is a First One, and he’s after Azeroth’s soul because with all the anima he can harvest from a nascent Titan’s World-Soul, he could possibly revive and restore all of his lost people and set about righting the ‘wrongs’ done to the Shadowlands.
I like to keep it simple. When I roll a hunter, he’s a ranger or a hunter who might work as a scout/recon or is a survival or animal specialist. When I roll a warrior, he’s a warrior who might be a weapons-specialist or a merc or a soldier. It makes it easier for me because I’m old, and old school RPers prefer to be creative within the limits of hard lore/ the book I guess. YMMV. But that’s why we did it the way we did.