BFA didn’t stop us, why would that be a threat for them not to do a third go?
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No, you weren’t. The majority of your post is literally the official story that has been told.
And you’re failing, because in a medieval-fantasy setting that was directly based on Lord of the Rings—which did feature orcs as irredeemably evil and meant to be killed on the spot, by the way—what you’re suggesting is impossible, and would not happen, simply because it was “benevolent.”
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Demons aren’t people. Orcs, as shown in the games, are.
Orc are capable of the full range of human emotions, have families and friends and a significant number of them are not soldiers, but run inns/bars/shops. They’re capable of reason and can surrender in the face of defeat. They are not immortal.
So when faced with such an enemy and they all surrender at the end of a war? I wouldn’t kill/imprison every last one of them, no.
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Neither is your proposition, because by your very premise, even if Alliance players did say “Hey, you know what, hit us with the bat too, it’s only fair” Blizzard would look them back in the eye and refuse.
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Literally Tolkien admits repeatedly in multiple letters that he deeply regrets tying the possibility of “salvation” to race; literally admits his formation of the Orc race was deeply flawed due to the prevalent narratives of most of his life.
WoW just repeated his mistakes.
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Alliance getting hit with a villain bat properly is more likely than Blizzard putting the villain bat down forever.
At the time, humanity was not aware of that fact.
That’s the point.
Again, none of this was evident during the events of the First and Second Wars.
Except they didn’t all surrender at the end of the war. Turalyon literally had to grab Lothar’s fallen blade and fight Doomhammer himself. Even then, you still had commanders of the Horde operating out of Grim Batol and Blackrock Mountain.
No, WoW’s mistake was in failing to properly continue the story/moral that had been established with Warcraft III, which in turn deliberately took Tolkien’s original “Orcs is Evil, Humans is Good” and completely broke that mold.
Which resulted in one of the greatest fantasy stories ever told, imo, precisely because it was, in fact, a game-changer.
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No it isn’t. By your expectations of more of the same it would just get deflected onto villain batting the Horde again and justifying anything the Alliance did.
Because to pull it off they need to kill a lot of characters and rn Blizzard is trying to market a lot of characters in their franchise with figures and some lore books.
I re-wrote the original story of WCII-WCIII without having to even bring up the topic of camps vs genocide. And you acknowledge that it works just fine. In fact, it’s pretty much unchanged.
That’s why I’m calling Blizzard’s decision to include camps vs genocide as a matter of moral debate to be contrived and unnecessary. It was a bad decision.
And yeah, I’m saying that Tolkien’s decision to make orcs irredeemably evil was dumb too. Fortunately, that’s one area where Tolkien and I agree, as he himself regretted making that narrative decision in his own later writings.
What I’m suggesting -excluding camps/genocide debate- isn’t impossible. I just typed out an example of how it could work, and you just acknowledged that aside from the exclusion of camps/genocide, it’s no different from what Warcraft ended up doing.
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Um, no I don’t? Please don’t put words in my mouth. I said the majority of your post is the story that has been told.
What you are attempting to do is whitewash the narrative so that it excludes the camps because it makes you feel good, not because it necessarily makes for a better story.
It really wasn’t.
Yes, but Tolkien was writing during a much more patriarchal, and yes, religiously-dominated time period.
As I have already stated, the original Warcraft games set up that mold precisely so that they could break it. Guess what?
It worked, and turned out to be an amazing story.
Yes, because the presence of the camps is literally the only thing thing you changed.
That doesn’t mean excluding the camps will somehow make for a better story; if anything, it would make the story fall apart completely, because it would detract from showcasing just how morally-corrupt humanity truly was at the time.
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Then you stop playing and find something else to do. The writers aren’t obligated to have the story fair. Just like we aren’t obligated to keep playing and paying.
It’s fiction, if you don’t like it, leave. Many have, many still win. I find it bizarre you think people will want to share the guilt and punishment.
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I mean… Tolkien’s work was more philosophical than that, the orcs were representative of industrial/corporate corruption. It wasn’t really meant to imply that their evil is innately tied to their race.
People forget that Tolkien orcs are corrupted elves.
If Orcs are completely monstrous and would rather die than admit defeated, how exactly did they manage to gather them all into camps? Wouldn’t all the orcs have fought to the death rather than be captured? And the moment you started rounding up orcs, the existence of civilians would have been apparent.
I understand that the time period between WCII and WCIII is when Blizzard started treating orcs like people. It’s also when Blizzard decided to put out the question about whether it’d be better to put them into camps or geocide them all and portray camps as. They didn’t have to humanize them AND treat camps as the most benevolent of two options simultaneously.
And sure, LotR is one of the most influential and popular fantasy works ever. I’ve read and enjoyed it as well. But it’s not beyond criticism. The book had its detractors even back in the day, and even Tolkien himself had issues with it.
It’s possible to enjoy a thing and still criticize it without writing the whole thing off as horrible.
Edit: And for clarification. I’m not opposed to the existence of camps or genocide simply for the sake of being camps/genocide. My criticism is the writers (and many players) decision to treat concentration camps as the most “reasonable” or even as a “humane” option instead of treating it like the unmitigated tragedy it is.
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He literally said it was, that the Orc race was uniquely corrupt and fallen such that they could no longer even do any good, devoid of Eru’s light. And that this corruption was generational, inherited, his own twist on Augustinian original sin.
Which he later also stated to regret.
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That’s the point I’m making. We don’t feel that these days and they should bring that back.
Yeah, but orcs are corrupted elves… They aren’t even a race of their own. They were meant to be more a philosophical representation of something rather than something that we could realistically believe to exist irl.
We are comparing a narrative decision with a Worldbuilding decision, which are two entirely different creative processes.
An Allianceflaw?
The just too inhuman sympathy for the horde depleted. The hurts and old wounds of the last decades, they all come out. Hatred, hatred is what would be a natural flaw, simply because too many members of the Alliance have suffered under the Horde. Hate can manifest itself in many forms, including rejection (racist in nature), arrogance, dismissal as barbaric culture, and rage.
Anduin, Veleen, and Malfurion might remain exceptions, as Thrall did earlier on the Horde side, but …yes, that should be the flaw, hatred in all its ugly faces that exist, multi-faceted…racism is just one form of it.
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He literally said that they were based on Mongols and their inability to do good is based on original sin as per Saint Augustine, as well as the “industrialization is bad” metaphor. This is literally in his letters.
Hell he even states that his intent with the Hobbitverse is to make the English-mythos version of Dante’s Divine Comedy (i.e. Catholic-centric allegory using local cultural heritage and myths and folklore).
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