Edit: Restored the post. Don’t know why I’m bothering since I don’t really feel up to discussing it like I thought I would at the time I wrote it, but at least the original post will be viewable.
Huh, I tried making a post about this once myself a while back but I deleted it after hitting my nerd shame limit of the day.
Well, going into this with admitting I’m biased in favor of the horde and all that. I also think aesthetics and themes are intertwined.
When I think of the alliance from a playable PoV, I think of stock medieval fantasy first: Typical Tolkienish races, knights in shining armor, Christian churches, wizards, etc. Human at its core, though dwarves overlap heavily with the additional “dig stuff up” and “beer”. Ancient practiced elves too, but night elves are/were supposed to keep one foot out of that by eschewing stereotypical wizard magic in favor of being nature fanatics.
Then, going into what their “core four” races show off in the game starting from vanilla, that filters down into those humans having knights, paladins, light worship. Dalaran being one of the original alliance kingdoms covers the wizard angle with arcane magic. Dwarf digging is for the purpose of archeology, researching the past, and learning about the titans. I’d think night elves subvert that the most, relatively speaking, but still not by very much because their magic is forest-themed. So moon worship and the Emerald Dream “belongs” to them.
The only real missing link there is the other half of elves, which wouldn’t be “resolved” until void elves got blood elf skin tones.
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The horde gets a little messier because its direction changed in WC3, but when I think of that faction, one of the core aspects of it is “monster races you’d typically expect protagonists to slaughter en masse for EXP”, but with the important caveat that maybe those monsters are people too, and not evil even though they may look the part. All of the core four horde races fall under this: their appearance, the spookier magic they’re associated with, the way they live, all fall under more fringe depictions in fantasy (from what I’ve seen). But whereas the alliance plays friendly tropes straight, the horde’s subversion of evil tropes is itself an important theme.
When boiled down into how WoW shows them, I think of its shamanism, warlocks (if the horde actually had any notable ones), berserkers, overall “wilder” aesthetics, etc. But orcs also come with racial guilt as a theme, which is part of what was used to subvert their evil monster trope in the first place. Forsaken take zombies and express that through a wild mishmash of emotional and mental damage, and religious persecution. Tauren took the rampaging cannibalistic minotaur myth and turned them into gentle giants. Trolls… are just filler, I guess, lol.
Everything beyond the original 8 is either an attempt to be a twist or flavoring, and I guess I struggle to care about what the expansion races bring to the game because I think the factions’ original appeals supersede an individual race in importance. (Which is why horde’s heavy blood elf population bums me out so much.)
As the factions are now, though? Meh. I think the faction wars have broken that original horde theme too thoroughly to be repairable. You could probably delete the faction and all of its races and the only thing that would adversely affect the story from here on out is the sunwell going missing for residual high elves.
