Problem with the ethos approach in Blizzard work: their writing, and even their conception of canon, is so inconsistent that any such claims have to be examined, rather than taken on faith.
That said, as I noted earlier and others have reiterated, by modern definitions of the term, which take intent and cultural impact into account, this was a genocide- furthermore, Sylvanas’ intent was genocidal, even if the rest of the Horde’s was merely strategic.
I’m expecting some pushback on that, but let’s be clear “I don’t want Night Elves shooting at me when I go to harvest wildlife or lumber” is a far, far cry from “I don’t want Night Elves to exist.”
There is an argument to be made as to the use of the word genocide being in the minds of Alliance characters at points in the story that were expressing their perspectives.
That genocide is never stated as some objective narrative fact outside of the perspective of Alliance characters.
So to claim their perspective as right because it aligns with yours seems dishonest.
I agree with the above argument. It just was mentioned as Alliance perspective.
Personally - I dont care what anyone calls it. Slaughter. Genocide. Massacre. Holocaust. It certainly raised the stakes.
But as far as the narrative: I dont see Baine and Sylvanas and Nathanos and Saurfang ever claiming to genocide races who agree to submit to the Horde simply to genocide them for their race or religion.
The Horde has always tried to slaughter those who oppose it. As does the Alliance.
We have literally never seen a peaceful occupation in WoW. Every territorial conflict is fought with extermination as the stakes.
This is lazy writing, but it is true, nonetheless. That’s really one of the things that muddies the waters- when your victories leave no deliberate survivors, only captives and refugees, the whole conflict is arguably genocidal in nature.
That’s one of the things that makes it harder to recognize when you’ve moved from implicit intent to explicit execution, but we have done so.
Just as I caution people against saying “Blizz called it a genocide, so it is,” I’d like to caution you against reducing the arguments in favor of the claim to that line. There is ample support, via examination of the actual definitions and implications of the term, to say it qualifies, even if Blizzard had never said a word about it.
The ending of the second war. Humanity opted out of extermination. Since orcs came from another planet and had no birthright to any land, occupation was replaced with internment.
That’s actually the only peaceful resolution I can think of in the entire franchise so like, I’m not even remotely trying to counter the main point of your post. I mean, it was a controversial decision. Silvermoon and Gilneas threw fits over it. Azeroth is filled to the brim with awful people.
I chose my words carefully- at the end of the second war, the orc survivors were all either captives or refugees.
Occupation implies some degree of social integration, albeit with a CLEAR power dynamic between the occupier and the occupied. Suramar was occupied, but there were no player factions involved in that relationship. It is almost always exploitative, but it is still easier to tell humanizing stories with occupation than with internment.
No I know. I saw what you were doing. I chose to focus on the “Every territorial conflict is fought with extermination as the stakes.” just for that paragraph and emphasized it was not meant as a contradiction to your overall point. Just felt it had merit pointing out all the same since this is the thread asking about genocide, and there is that one time genocide was taken off the table.
Reiterating: You rite tho. Azeroth doesn’t know the meaning of peace, non-exploitation, or empathy. Like, at all. These people are awful.
The internment camps were genocidal, too. They completely destroyed orc culture- broke up the clans, subjected the survivors to constant abuse- the parallels to the “kill the indian to save the man” endeavors of the US govt were… likely not accidental.
I’m not saying it’s not an aggregate good that the New Horde’s culture was built from the ground up on a combination of Frostwolf idealism and Warsong determination, but orcs born during or after the second war generally do not know their heritage, which is likely an allusion to the cultural annihilation of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade and/or the native american genocides.
We don’t know for a fact that speaking Orcish was a punishable offense in the camps, but it seems likely from context.
The camps weren’t a black-and-white issue, of course. Aside from the fact that there were no practical choices beyond captivity or slaughter(making that one of the precious examples of actual moral grayness) Gul’dan did plenty of cultural damage on his own, to the point that there were next to no active shamans in the captive population by the time the camps were founded, and some of the suffering and malaise the orcs endured was explicitly from demon blood withdrawal. This is all a digression, but I wanted to make it clear I wasn’t laying the entire thing at the Alliance’s feet.
I can agree it fit the cultural definition of Genocide up to a point. However, as you rightly pointed out, Gul’Dan had corrupted orcish culture that it was pretty unrecognizable in alot of ways from what it originally was. The Alliance had zero idea that there was even a different version of Orcish culture to begin with, and those that did find out any of that information would have been trapped on Draenor when it blew in Beyond the Dark Portal,
As you said, there were no right answers, and as Severin pointed out, even do that placed massive strains on the Alliance.
It’s implied the vast majority of the Kaldorei survived, but let’s be clear here: the Kaldorei just lost thousands of people and the center of their power and the Alliance’s power on Kalimdor.
It was absolutely an attempted act of genocide by Sylvanas, who did it as a combination of her own malice and what the United States did during WWII: she was hoping to break the Kaldorei’s will to fight.
Unfortunately for her, she gravely underestimated the resilience and willpower of the Alliance as a whole. While she can certainly beat Anduin in matters of experience, the young king of Stormwind has proven far wiser in matters of leadership than his young age would imply.
Exactly. I recall from reading the novels that King Terenas Menethil actually chose to defy the popular sentiment that called for the vengeful extermination of the orcs and instead opted to have them confined in the camps. Genn Greymane was so incensed that he pretty much stomped back to Gilneas and walled the kingdom off for 20-something years.
Certainly. I’m not saying that the Alliance as a whole is morally culpable of genocide.
I am saying that, regardless of all of that, the outcome of the second war WAS a form of genocide for the losers- to whit, we have functionally had no non-genocidal conflicts on Azeroth, and I’m getting mighty sick of it.
That I can totally understand, but that is because well, Blizzard operates with some really strange blue/orange morality and tells morality plays throughout their storylines. So you get these really…frustrating tales, if that makes any sense.
Up until the Pandaria Conflict and the Third War? Yeah, pretty much.
There is a lot of bad blood between the Alliance and Horde going back for at least two or three generations, even longer depending on the races involved. That’s not going to vanish overnight, and there will be malcontent actors from either faction that want nothing but, death, vengeance, reprisal and destruction.
Why is my main impression reading over the whole thread that people are massively conflating genocide with extinction or annihilation? Wiping out the entire group is not what the word means. Targeting the entire group is. Genocide was a word invented post 1940 to have a new way to describe a specific sort of holocaust - a scourging specifically targeting an ethnic or religious group.
I see people in particular, up above, using this conflated version of the word in the “attempted genocide” talks. The scouring of the people by flame was accomplished and it was specifically targeting a religious/ethnic group, guys. The attempt was a success, and attempt isn’t exactly a caveat modifier to the word to begin with.
Third War ended with an armistice between the Alliance, Horde, and Night Elves, but during the conflicted portions? Extermination, not occupation, was the intent. I’d argue it still qualifies.
Pandaren conflict? The simple lack of civilian Horde and Alliance settlements in Pandaria accounts in its entirety for that conflict not qualifying. Varian and Garrosh still wanted each others’ people OFF their planet.
I really wouldn’t call it genocide, because genocide requires a plan bent on the elimination of that group, there was no real plan in place to do this. It happened on a mere whim, there was no plan or intent on eliminating the Night Elves from the face of the world.
As Horde we actually rescue Night Elf civilians.
Did Sylvanas kill a thousand Night Elves that day? Yeah she did. To call it a deliberate intent on wiping the Night Elves from Azeroth to me is a hyperbole.
You can say what you want. People will always feel someway about something, regardless if that’s what actually happens. Nothing will probably change the minds of anyone who’s posting about this anyways.
She wanted to inflict on them “a wound that would never heal.”
The fact that her specific method was extremely from-the-hip doesn’t change the fact that her intent was to permanently disrupt the Alliance as a union, and her chosen means of doing that was by disrupting Night Elves as a society.
There are enough definitions of genocide that it’s possible that some match your definition, but “deliberate” and “targeted” are far more significant adjectives than “methodical” in categorizing it in most definitions.
And saying “there’s no point in debating because people never change their minds” is a copout. I literally changed my mind on the validity of the term in the course of a previous discussion because I was driven to research the definition of the term, and found that it fit far better than I’d thought.