It literally isn’t, tho. They decided to do it for the first time 50 years ago, or whatever, and it hasn’t worked out, yet they continued to do it.
I think you should reread all the Horde lore because apparently you didn’t understand anything about it. The whole Horde idea is grounded around the idea of war-prone races. Part of your argument even evokes this, but you fail to realize that it’s actually not the Horde’s naivety to welcome problematic races, and rather an aspect that moves the entire social, political, and military structure of the faction to understand that it doesn’t matter the problem, the simplest and most effective solution is to solve it with a war.
What makes the Horde diverse is simply that the races have different ideas of what drives them to war. Orcs are basically driven by the idea of conquest, trolls by the link to any land whatsoever because they believe they all belong to them. The tauren simply act at the wish of the orcs, and they have always been that way. To this day I don’t understand why they are characterizing them as a peaceful race, the facts prove that there wasn’t a war started by the Horde that the tauren didn’t have quickly entered.
And what do I mean by war? I mean that the functioning fundamentals of the Horde races have always been to harbor races that alone know that they do not live up to this defining aspect of their civilizations, but that acting together this idea of conflict becomes possible and achievable.
Even the elves of the Horde strictly adhere to this behavior of being belligerent. And so the nightbornes quickly fell in love with the idea of joining the Horde as their narcissistic motives for seeking supremacy would have a powerful umbrella on the Horde’s banner. And so, the elves in the Horde end up preserving their identity, they are not diluted in the idea of the great human empire that is the Alliance.
No wonder blood elfs and nightbornes today bear much more resemblance to their highborne heritage than kaldoreis do to their warrior/amazon origins of warcraft 3. Simply because once part of the Alliance you adhere to human ideas of diplomacy and passivity.
And that’s the problem with the Alliance faction, they are restricted on who should join the faction simply because the faction’s keynote is to follow a civilizational idea that bears enormous similarities to Western-Christian values of civility and diplomacy.
And the Horde is basically a stage in the construction of human civilization prior to these notions. It is basically the representation of what is barbaric and what is undesirable for those who seek order and predictability.
And finally, by saying that war is what truly unites the Horde races, that doesn’t mean I’m belittling the Horde races, quite the opposite. I find this theme much more captivating than the whole abstract and childish Alliance idea of being sacred defenders of Azeroth, practically every Alliance race has large neutral factions not by mere coincidence.
@topic
This whole idea of council is going to sink in the day after Yrel arrives in Azeroth, and it doesn’t take a lot to realize that this will likely happen in the next expansion, the signs of what lies ahead in the next expansion are pretty clear. Once Yrel arrives, the mag’har will act, and I highly doubt this isn’t the perfect opportunity for Talanji to seek revenge for his father’s death. And when that happens, the authority of that council will quickly erode.
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Yep, it started as a position essentially created and installed by Gul’dan of all people (though he was ostensibly presenting himself as still speaking for Ner’zhul at the time.)
The original Horde wasn’t really a sustainable model for a society; it existed solely to keep the orcs perpetually high on bloodlust and pointed at whatever the Legion wanted them to destroy while burning through resources at a breakneck speed. The purpose of the Warchief reflected that, as it was created to keep what was ultimately an unsustainable war machine unified as its growing power made it less internally stable and liable to collapse to infighting.
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Well, it may imply something else, but Metzen and Kosak have tweeted otherwise, saying that they control military forces.
In fact, Tyrande goes to retake Darkshore without Anduin’s help.
Metzen and Kosak haven’t worked for Blizzard in awhile, what they’ve deemed canon can easily be changed. The High King is pretty much the Alliance version of Warchief, as it commands its other faction leaders and inducts races into the Alliance without needing the permission of anyone else. This goes as far back as MoP. There are also various instances of Varian yelling at Jaina for doing things without his permission. Anduin hasn’t punished anyone for going against his orders because he’s soft.
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It’s not because anduin is soft it’s just that the other leaders grew a spine and said my people , my rules
tbh, it would probably be better than American politicians though.
It has always been weird to me that they -ever- took orders from Varian. Like, of all the Alliance leaders, I can confidently say the Gladiator with zero experience in ruling is the -least- qualified for role of High King.
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Yeah but the man had a heroic chin.
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You mean from a RL point of view?
Of course. It is. A Warchief is the sole ruler, his word is law. He is basically equal to a monarch.
That’s always a bad thing, no matter how good a single one might be. Also those very view are generally outliers among many horrible, or incompetent ones.
For a story, not so much no.
I think it’s certainly better if the Warchief has a council and is listening to them (WC3, WoW for most of the time). A council of elders could also be interesting. Both for voicing things against the Warchief and support him, or even to stay in the way of progress at times.
Power can corrupt and with ultimate power, well.
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Truth, up until recently the head position was “WarChief”.
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Inherently? Absolutely not. The replacement of the office of warchief with a council is an attempt by the writers to make a feature out of the bug of their own lazy, sloppy, repetitive storytelling. They cut and pasted the plot of MoP into BfA, point for point, and then tried to pretend that the system of government was at fault, not their own writing.
This is not to say that there are NO potential flaws with that system of government, or that it wouldn’t be possible to have an interesting look at what those shortcomings might be. But only if they took an equally hard look at the drawbacks of hereditary monarchy in the Alliance at the same time. The overall point could have been “No system of government is ever 100% perfect, and here is how each side struggles to make their system work.” THAT could have been cool.
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I don’t believe it’s problematic, the issues lies with Blizzard not actually fleshing out the culture and inherent politics. This results in the most simplistic version possible, and when it comes time to test that role, there’s nothing to hold it back or add any complexity to the issues.
There’s a lot of potential to create some interesting stories and nuance with pretty much all the political stations on both Horde and Alliance, but they flat out don’t want to put the worldbuilding work in, it seems.
The position of Warchief is problematic in the same way the Alliance is currently set up. Ideally, the Horde leadership should be a close collection of party members with the Warchief being the leader who also listens to his or her allies. The denouement cutscene showing the various Horde leaders eating around the table and chatting, that should be what the Horde leadership is like, something more informal and with comraderie showing, where they can suit up and be an adventuring party if they so choose.
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The thing is, the Alliance isn’t a hereditary monarchy. Stormwind is, but the Alliance is led by whomever the leaders of its member states collectively decide should lead, and they all retain enough autonomy that they aren’t traitors to the Alliance if they disagree with the High King, or Anduin would have been expected to take action against Tyrande and Genn for committing to retaking Darkshore when he believed it was better to go after Sylvanas herself in Lordaeron.
The Warchief has, from the start, always been basically an absolute ruler of everything in the Horde, and any constituent member state that prioritizes their people’s safety against his wishes is a traitor to be forced into compliance.
Consequently while from a moral standpoint Garrosh’s treatment of the trolls in Cataclysm was really bad, technically he was fulfilling his obligation as Warchief as per the nature of the position. We didn’t like it and a lot of characters didn’t like it, but built into the very fabric of the job is the agreement that the Warchief can resort to such measures when he/she deems it necessary. Thrall and Vol’jin opted not to use such methods, but had they done so, there wouldn’t be any real inherent “legal” grounds for complaint from the other leaders because such consequences are implicit to submitting one’s sovereignty to the Horde and it’s Warchief.
When the only way to address a leader not truly abusing their power beyond its bounds, but rather exercising that power to its fullest extent is to overthrow them, then the position is fundamentally broken. Such a situation is in effect an admission to submitting to a despotic regime from the get-go under the presumption that you’ll get riled up if the leader actually does what you’ve already agreed to let them potentially do when you first joined.
It’s why as unpleasant as it is, as nasty as Garrosh and Sylvanas were, and as much as they both needed to be stopped, the Horde rebels in both situations were still technically committing treason and breaking their oaths, because they knew what a Warchief was going into it (especially by the time it was Sylvanas, since they’d gone and appointed a new one in Vol’jin rather than inherited Thrall from having led the orcs from the camps) and only started to object when said Warchief actually utilized the absolute powers they’d ceded to whoever held the position by joining the Horde in the first place. Garrosh “betraying the Horde” with his antics is all well and good as a platitude regarding the Horde as a “family” and esoteric concept, but as far as the Horde as a government goes everything he (and even Sylvanas) did fell in line with what the Warchief was allowed to do, which was why it took so long for real, tangible resistance against it to manifest. By which point said resistance boiled down to effectively overthrowing the Horde government and replacing it, first with another Warchief, then with a ruling council.
Even with a benevolent person wearing it, the mantle of Warchief was created as a means to keep the fractious groups within the Horde under heel, and consequently retained the spirit of that purpose ever since. Meaning though Thrall and Vol’jin never chose to utilize it, that same purpose remained intact and just waiting for someone to come along who would dust it off and put it to use.
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Can we talk about how Anduin is bad at this politics thing?
First, to treat with Suramar/the Nightfallen he sends Tyrande Whisperwind, not realizing that Tyrande is angry at Suramar for effectively staying neutral during the War of the Ancients? This leads to Tyrande sending the Nightfallen into the arms of the Horde at the conclusion of the Legion campaign.
Then he sends Jaina to treat with Kul Tiras, not realizing that they’re mad at her for siding with the Orcs and killing their leader Dahlin? At least that time someone must have realized the mistake soon after since in her wake he sends the much more sensible candidate to treat with the Kul Tirans in Genn “I also used to hate the Alliance until I conveniently needed their help” Greymane.
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Had no reason to know her prior history, NIght Elves are rather private about such things. Otherwise from his point of view, an Elven Priestess was the best contact choice for elves.
Jaina is part of the ruling bloodline. Anduin is quite aware of their issues with her as Grreymane pointed it out. But not sending her means that that issue remains unresolved and even Greymane would not be able to get past that.
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Tyrande wasn’t “sent” by Anduin to negotiate relations with the Nightborne. She was already there by virtue of having led the ngiht elf portion of the assault to take down Gul’dan, Elisande and their Nightborne loyalists, so she just ended up being the de facto ranking representative of Alliance interests there once the fighting was over.
Kul Tiras was still being pretty isolationist at the start of BfA, so at the very least Jaina had a personal “in” to start talks with her mother being the Lord-Admiral and head of House Prourmoore, whereas if he’d started out by just sending Alliance diplomats on Alliance ships, it was more likely than not that they’d be denied entry at port just for being outsiders.
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That is such a lame excuse, and still doesn’t mean Anduin didn’t make a mistake.
Oh wait, so he is aware they’re mad at Jaina?!
…That makes it worse imo.
I mean, neither of these absolve Anduin of making mistakes. He doesn’t have to be perfect at everything, and they’re the kind of mistakes a young king would make.
Oaths are a two way street, generally it’s I give you loyalty (namely taxes and men when you call for them) and you give me protection. It’s not so much a “legal” framework as if everyone around you believes you an oathbreaker.
Most people viewed Garrosh as the oathbreaker here. He exiled the trolls from Orgrimmar and tried to have their leader assassinated; actually killed the Tauren leader over a political dispute he could have solved amicably, and got the Blood Elves kicked from Silvermoon after he framed them for using Dalaran portals to attack the Alliance.
In real life, if the king angers his nobles too far eventually they will rebel and try to depose and replace him.
Agreed. If anything, Thrall’s mistake was leaving Saurfang, Vol’jin and Carine in roles as “advisers” devoid of any real power to check Garrosh, which meant as soon as they annoyed him he banished them or challenged them to duels to the death.
Fair enough. I still think it was a mistake on Anduin’s part to have Tyrande lead that front because of the reasons I’ve said.
Yeah, but what actually happened was Jaina arrived, and the Lord Admiral immediately admonished her and then exiled her without giving her any chance to say her piece. So much so that the Alliance had to send someone else.
- That’s a counter factual in opposition to what actually happened and 2) the harbormaster of Boralus was pushing for Kul Tiras to re-enter the Alliance, so no, it’s not “more likely” Greymane would have been denied entry outright.
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One has to wonder, why would you advocate for changes that eliminate the need for the player to get involved?
The whole story point after all is to make the PLAYER the agent of change, the protagonist, not Jaina, nor Genn, not even Anduin.
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Why would we need to change it??
The idea that Anduin isn’t particular good at politics is interesting.
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Solving disputes by personal combat IS the traditional Horde way. It’s putting your Honor and Life literally on the line to back your cause.
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