The Alliance isn’t allowed to win or be right, has their favorite characters do complete 180-turns into villainhood, and has their resources ignored when its convenient, and it’s only in BfA have all of these things been so explicit.
The Alliance gets totally crushed at Teldrassil and then would have been totally crushed again had we not had Jaina Ex Machina come to our rescue, and even then, Undercity was a Pyrrhic victory at best. Brennedam got totally crushed, and our war campaign ends with us doing the Horde a favor by killing the elf vampire that was killing their troops.
Where are the draenei in this, with their giant spaceship? Shut up, it’s not important.
8.1 is supposed to be the Alliance rallying and coming back with a vengeance - except its not. They want us to believe that Tyrande and the night elves are going to take back their lands, except they made it a warfront, which means it’s going to be locked in a stalemate for the rest of the expansion. Any gains the night elves could theoretically make will be immediately erased as soon as the Horde fill up their Magic War Bar.
Dazar’alor is supposed to be a victory - and we at least kill an enemy leader! - but we’re not allowed to pursue it. “We would be just as bad as Sylvanas to attack the Horde while they’re grieving,” say Anduin and Jaina, the Big Ones In Charge.
It’s difficult to overstate how nonsensical that is. No one who cares about ending their war and protecting their realm and has any concept of warfare would say that. No one who had innocent citizens of her homeland burned to death would say that. There’s only one reason they wrote that - because we’re less than six months into the expansion and there’s no expansion without the war, and no amount of squinting and stretching Anduin and Jaina’s personalities to fit that can hide how blatant it is.
As a man much smarter than me said, “when verisimilitude fails, authenticity is no excuse.”
We are also slowly having all the characters we like either go evil or get put on the chopping block. Yrel is evil now. Thalyssra is evil to us now. Delaryn Summermoon, our prepatch questgiver, is evil now. Alleria is on the chopping block because of the grape juice she drank, and if the line in Tyrande’s scenario is any indication, the Night Warrior will either kill her or make her evil too.
It’s like they introduced all these female characters just to turn around and make us hate them. Hmm.
Both factions have plenty of reasons to dislike their story, but the way they address the Horde’s complaints is markedly different. The Horde get to have a central tension with branching quests that they’ve indicated won’t just be a one-off thing. The Alliance gets minor tweaks to make it slightly more palatable I guess.
And then they get on the stage at Blizzcon and try to dunk on us for being bad and having terrible characters. Gimme a break.
None of these problems are new - and trust me, I’d love to be told that they’ve all been addressed in datamined stuff I just didn’t see - but BfA is the first time they’ve been so explicit.
We’ve seen the man behind the curtain, and it’s Ion wearing a rubber Grom mask.