The game also doesn’t try and pretend Admiral Rogers is a Horde-friendly character we should ever encounter with a green name plate. Golden tried really hard to recharacterize Vereesa as just a poor wholesome peacemaker; God only knows what that unearned rewiring will bring come Midnight.
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I would way rather fight Vereesa than Alleria as a raid boss.
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Given that the Crusade was aided and abetted by the Church of Stormwind, that’s a hard call to defend.
The Forsaken weren’t the Forsaken until they were rebuffed by the living. That’s the whole origin of their name.
Anduin is Remastered Pathfinder which means he’s left alignment behind. 
So he’s been running from the Agents of WOTC all this time.
Unless the afterlife is so fundamentally different from your mortal life, that you still have a vested interest in preserving the latter. Also failure to protect your mortal life is considered a venal sin in some religions that bar you from the Eternal Petting Zoo.
That’s his happy face.
This implies that the church of Stormwind had the authority to recognize paramilitaries as members of the Alliance without the consent or input of the leaders of the Alliance’s actual nations. Given that’s an absurd implication with nothing to support it, I feel that it can be confidently dismissed.
What support the Church provided to the Scarlet Crusade is questionable at best, but can be better framed as fighting a war by proxy. Supporting the Scarlets allows for the Church to strike at the Forsaken without expending it’s own manpower.
If the Arathi Basin battleground was instead the Tirisfal Glades battleground, featuring the Scarlets vs. the Forsaken, I think that would be more indicative of the Alliance supporting the Scarlets. Even then, that’s not evidence of the Scarlets being members of the Alliance.
Didn’t Sylvanas name them, ‘The Forsaken,’ during the WC3 campaign? It’s been a hot minute since I played that, so I’m uncertain.
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She did
Sylvanas Windrunner: The capital city is ours, but we are no longer part of the Scourge. From here on out, we shall be known as the Forsaken.
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/A_New_Power_in_Lordaeron_(WC3_Undead)#Mission_Complete
At the same time the Alliance did cut all ties with the crusade once we learned just how far they had fallen. I mean we had a defector in Southshore who gave us a quest to kill the leaders of the crusade stationed at the Scarlet Monastery.
It is just that we didn’t have phasing tech until Wrath and by Cata that questline was removed.
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There are two main reasons:
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Stormwind is the holy centre of the Church of the Holy Light, which correctly sees undeath as a curse and as anathema.
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Stormwind’s sister-kingdom, Lordaeron, was just wiped out by the undead. All contact with Grand Marshal Garithos’ resistance was lost. It’s fairly simple to understand why the humans would initially hate the Forsaken.
It’s always been interesting. For a long time (it might still be true) the Scarlet Crusade was deemed evil when it they began to even kill the “living”. Message to the Forsaken? We don’t care if they kill you.
That was the way it was painted in Vanilla. At first you do a few quests for them that involve killing undead in Desolace. Then you go to Southshore to speak to the guy I mentioned. They believe the person they are sending you to is still a #truebeliever but obviously they drew the line when it came to torturing and murdering non-undead. Simply because Balnazzar made the Scarlets see anyone who isn’t wearing their tabard as “undead”. This is the same reason why the Argent Dawn was formed. They were defectors from the surviving Order of the Silver Hand (that would later become the Scarlet Crusade) who saw what they were becoming. Although they were not aware it was because of Balnazzar pulling the strings.
But like with any form of corruption, distance from the corrupter can be a factor in freeing the mind from its clouds (See Sabellion and the Black Dragons on Outland). So who knows, maybe the person in Stormwind and the guy in Desolace were not aware of the crusades crimes to the living.
Sylvanas naming the Forsaken was justified during Warcraft III anyway. The first living Alliance troops she encountered and approached was Garithos and his soldiers, and the first thing he did was order his men to resort to violence. Blink and you’ll miss it, but it’s clear that neither the living nor the undead trusted the other to act civil unless serious concessions were to be made.
Sylvanas was also being advised by a Dreadlord, the single worst mistake she could have made before the Frostmourne “split-souls” thing was created to remove the majority of her agency in the story. And her ordering Garithos’ death was clearly meant as a sense of relief or justice in the story for the fact that the man who caused so much trouble for Kael and the Blood Elves was effectively punished despite the fact that his primary victim was not present to see it.
Despite the fact that Garithos apparently was loathed by the southern Alliance states, who were glad to be rid of him, it still makes little sense to me why Sylvanas would send ambassadors to those same states looking for new allies. Golden forgot to mention what she did to Garithos rather conveniently, instead having Sylvanas become melancholic that her ambassadors to Stormwind were rejected and slain, as if those same states would be oblivious to the outcome of the power struggle in Lordaeron and not be influenced by survivors who fled southward for safety.
Hell, I wouldn’t even bother blaming Onyxia for the Ambassador’s deaths, because despite Onyxia wanting to undermine Stormwind from within, she probably could have orchestrated something terrible if she could whisper in Sylvanas’ ear instead of forcing her to be another enemy. Imagine the Forsaken and Stormwind being allies, and Onyxia basically encourages Varimathras’ agents to stock up Blight barrels in the city and detonate it.
No, I don’t think Forsaken and Stormwind relations would ever have worked based on the setup that proceeded Vanilla World of Warcraft.
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The Church kept a Scarlet Crusade representative in it’s catacombs. for the first few expansions of this game. You find it that inconceivable that influential and powerful forces in Stormwind might operate on the down low? Especially while the Prestors were running things?
And the Argent Dawn had a representative above ground in the Cathedral Square as well. That doesn’t make the Argents any more a member of the Alliance than the Scarlet Crusade would have been.
Hardly, they did it quite often. That said, I don’t see how something could be, “on the down low,” and also officially a part of a faction at the same time, particularly when the Scarlet Crusade was against everything that wasn’t human, which as far back as of Vanilla meant 75+% of the Alliance.
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Who said anything about official? The fact that the Crusade had a presence in the Alliance is prima facie evidence of at least unofficial support that had to be kept secret as the Crusaders were killing Alliance as well. They had even had a recruiter present, which is what started the quest chain back in the day
The original set of quotes. I had stated that it was a fact that the Scarlet Crusade were not a part of the Alliance. You argued it was a hard call to defend. We’ve been discussing it since. Do you concede that the Scarlet Crusade was not a part of the Alliance?
Sure, “at first glance,” it seems that way, until you actually pick up a quest and read the dialogue and then end it by fighting the Scarlets multiple times. The Alliance’s stance on the Scarlets may have initially been open to diplomacy, but once it became clear what the Scarlets were, that stance ended. The continued existence of that NPC becomes a matter of game mechanics, as they do hand out quests. I don’t recall whether that changed in Cata or not, but its possible that NPC themselves eventually realized the Crusade had been misled.
My contention is that the Scarlet Crusade enjoyed unofficial support from the Church of Stormwind by at least a faction that was opposed to the Argent Dawn’s policy of tolerance of the Lordaeron undead.
And the Church is unarguably a central cultural touchstone for the Alliance. That probably became less tenable once the actions of the Scarlet Onslaught in Northrend became open knowledge.
We have no evidence of that beyond the church allowing a recruiter in the city, meaning the Scarlets received as much support as the Argents themselves. Probably less so as I believe the Argents actually received supplies and funds from the Alliance around the Naxxramas patch.
For the humans, yes. For the rest? Not so much. The Dwarves practiced the same faith, but we didn’t see Scarlet Representatives in the Hall of the Mystics in Ironforge.
Alliance humans hate the Forsaken because we’re evil zombies who, when given free will, decided to act pretty much just as evil as when we were the Scourge.
They hate us cause they aint us
That’s because the Crusade are xenophobic humans. You don’t see any other races in their ranks.
Well there were. Scarlet Monestary had elven and dwarven statues. It was only much later when it got infiltrated by that dreadlord that they went full mask off.
Like, sure there were alot of bigots in it, but there were those(like its founder Morgraine) who were quite tolerant/ok with the non-human races. One can argue without Balnazzar they might have change their ways. Hell, we did redeem a bunch of scarlet priests and they joined the multi racial priest organization in Legion.
The Crusade had taken over a pre-existing structure and were too busy murdering their neighbors to work on the decor. You don’t find these on the cathedral they built in Northrend.
The argents are a splinter group of the crusade. So those elven and dwarven members were original members of the scarlet crusade.
Besides, by the time of wrath they had fallen far from what they were founded on