The reason I say it wasn’t communicated in the meta sense is because the Alliance’s perception of the orcs in WCI and WCII is really not too much different than what’s presented to the viewer.
So when the Alliance is shown to not kill them all and instead put them into camps, they’re coming at it with much the same information we the view are. From both their point of view, and ours, based on how orcs had been shown- they are dealing with creatures that are practically inhuman.
The revelation to the Alliance that orcs are actually people coincides more or less with that of the audience. While/after they’ve grappled with the decision and decided to go into camps.
So basically, they went with a race and thoroughly demonized them (literally) to the point of inhumanity and then, after having the in-universe characters respond inhumanely, pull a “But see? They were people all along!” stick.
That’s a bad way to illustrate the flaws of racism and bigotry.
Better examples of Alliance racism would be their treatment of Dwarves and Elves in the earlier games. Because we, the audience, already understand that Dwarves/Elves are actual people. Therefore, the Alliance’s treatment of them is recognized- not as a logical conclusion based on their experiences with them- but as the flawed discrimnation it actually is. Or their treatment of newly introduced races, like the Tauren, who are introduced from the outset as characters who don’t have a history of being portrayed as uneasonably hostile to the Alliance, but get attacked by them anyway. And shown to the audience to be “gentle giants” to boot.
For the Alliance’s bigotry to properly work as a flaw, the people it’s directed against first have to be established to the audience as actual people. Not caricatures. Which isn’t so much how orcs in WCI and WCII were handled.
A story in which you portray a people as being thoroughly terrible and fail to humanize them in the eyes of the audience, only to turn around and say, “Now don’t anyone IC/OOC be bigoted against them!” ultimately rings hollow.
That’s why showing the orcs as people at around the same time you establish the camps is a bad idea. The orcs haven’t had a chance to be established as actual people to the audience yet. You just spent WCI and WCII making them out to be jerks deserving of genocide, lest they do even worse to everyone on Azeroth. But now we’re supposed to feel for them?
Instances of Alliance racism against races of the Horde works much better after(or during the latter parts of) WCIII, after they do a better job establishing the Horde races as no longer being a bunch of cartoony demonic conquerors. After the narrative has shown us that they actually have families and friends and culture and civilians. When the game has humanized them to the audience every bit as much as elves and dwarves and other races we know to also be “human”. That’s how you can communicate that bigotry against them is a vice.
And that’s why I think that writing decision: to have the Alliance grapple with putting orcs into camps vs genocide at the end of WCII, and framing the decision to go with camps as the more humane one- was a bad decision.
I agree that the overall WoW narrative pre-Cataclysm is better than what we’ve had since, but not every single writing decision was a hit out of the park. There were flaws there too.
And some of the things that bugged me in pre-Cata WoW still exist in post-Cata WoW are still in the game. Just because there’s different writing teams, it doesn’t mean they can’t make some of the same mistakes (in addition to their own). They’ve even made several decisions I would have liked to have seen back in Vanilla!
