If you’re honestly referring to the Warcraft I - Warcraft III era as “a dumb decision,” then this is going to be a very short conversation.
The whole point of what the Alliance of Lordaeron did in response to the Horde’s invasion was to showcase that “humans aren’t always good, orcs aren’t always evil.” Thrall’s freeing and redeeming the Horde would never have been possible without something to free and then redeem them from.
You also might want to consider that World of Warcraft wouldn’t even exist without the moral complexities of those early RTS games and their associated lore.
Only in that you don’t like your double standards involving the Horde’s races who were involved in demanding genocide or partaking in interment camps from Warcraft II pointed out.
Thats fair, but you can’t really study a new species, unless you know, you round a few them up. So I’m asking, outside of the camps, where were they supposed to put them all? Nobody alliance side knew the orcs were under a blood curse and you had to kill the demon responsible for it. Again, from a STORY perspective and not a emotional one, I can understand why the alliance reacted the way they did
In camps, but camps with, you know, decent lodging and food.
There’s a world of difference between what could have been a proper, Kirin Tor-run research facility and the torture center/very literal gladiator ring that Blackmoore was operating.
M … Give autonomy? To the bloodthirsty crowd? At the same time, trying to deport this crowd to her relatives, which will try to break through to you, because they have terrible hunger and earthquakes?
Maybe just kill them right now, and not drag out this war for many more years?
Edit: Why did it remind me of Japan? This is probably not an option either.
Blood Elves walked it back and have since support the Horde, and they now have a contempt for Alliance races due to racism they suffered shortly after those takes.
Which is exactly why Quel’Thalas and Gileans and Stromgarde left the Alliance, because they didn’t want to financially support any decent treatment of the Orcs.
As for what should have happened if the point was to not paint the Alliance leaders and those complicit with such a villainous brush? Well I mean if I’d been in the writer’s room and didn’t…
The Horde’s defeated after the end of the second war. The clans scatter. They continue to exist as isolated bands in the Eastern Kingdom’s less hospitable spots. Thrall is still found as a baby and raised as a curiosity, until he sees the situation other orcs live in and learns of their history.
Thrall roams around forming a New Horde with the intent of leading his people to a new land so they’re not just a bunch of scattered and broken people. But upon seeing that orcs are gathering in numbers for a third time, Alliance leaders jump to the conclusion that they must be gearing up for war and start attacking them again.
The rest of WC3 plays out as normal.
Yes, orcs can and do surrender/retreat and don’t just mindlessly throw themselves at certain death. I mean, f they did, then how the heck did the Alliance manage to subdue and keep them in camps? Also, civilian orcs are a thing that exists. We’ve all been to Orgrimmar and the Barrens before.
I’m calling the writing decision to reduce the decisions on what to do with orcs in the wake of WCII as “camps vs genocide” was a dumb writing decision. It was only one of hundreds of writing decisions made, some of which were good, others bad, and some just middling.
The blood elves are ready to support anyone. They almost returned to the Alliance. But there was a purge of Dalaran (which was professional persecution, not racial!) And they changed their minds. Nothing. Someday in the Horde, they’ll get sick again.
I do not speak English. What is written in your picture?
If demons from the twisting nether flew in from some portal and started indescriminately killing and destroying everything in sight, would you just let them go after you defeated them, or would you imprison them so that they would no longer be a threat? I personally would have killed the lot.
The orcs may very well have been victims themselves, but the denizens of Azeroth didn’t know it at the time. All they saw were monsters, who had inflicted an untold ammount of suffering upon them. The fact that they were just imprisoned showed extreme restraint on the Alliance’s part.
And if they refuse, and by the end of this expansion the Horde is once again beaten with the bat, what then?
How many expansions of Horde being Villain Batted is the Horde supposed to endure that you’re bearing witness to until you say “Hey, you know what, hit us with the bat too, it’s only fair”
I was able to cook all that up without having to treat the decision to stick orcs into concentration camps as the more benevolent of only two options. I’m trying to illustrated how bad and unnecessary it was for Blizzard to create a situation in which they only presented two options and presented camps as the most benevolent,
