I’m not sure why the Scarlet Crusade would exist in such a scenario, though. I thought they were explicitly anti-undead because of the Scourge, and only spun out into supremacist stuff after that. Putting them and forsaken on the same side kinda cuts the legs out from under that, and soils the thematic play of having evil light against (relatively speaking) good undead.
This hypothetical might have cost the alliance night elves, though, since another reason was to keep the continents from being too faction-dominant.
I find it relatively easy to imagine a group of zealous fanatics who are horribly racist and totalitarian but that the Alliance supports and looks the other way of regarding their crimes because they’re really really really good at killing Scourge, making them popular among the common people and too powerful a strategic asset against Arthas to cut loose.
The dynamic could be even more interesting if the Forsaken continued to exist in this hypothetical alternate WoW as they did in the real WoW but as Alliance, and you have a dynamic of two groups in the Alliance who loathe each other that the rest of the Alliance needs to moderate.
Do the scarlets even have a presence off of the Eastern Kingdoms? I’d think that their primary target would be focused on forsaken anyway, making them nothing but self-harming for the alliance.
Some of it comes from the RPG’s but people forget that the Scarlets primary target was pretty much always the Scourge. The Scourge and the Scarlets clashed constantly off-screen, and we see it referenced in-game by the fact that the Scarlets managed to retain a foothold in Stratholme of all places, and Scourge and Scarlet records of battles and sieges between them.
The Scarlets didn’t really regard the Forsaken as much more than a nuisance.
This could have been played up in a theoretical alternate history of WoW as an aforementioned “deal with the devil” that the Alliance makes out of a combination of trauma, fear, and desperation. The crusaders are psychopaths but they’re also the only thing keeping the Scourge from consuming the rest of the Eastern Kingdoms.
So if a handful of crusaders want troops to kill Orcs in Kalimdor as well, maybe that’s something the Alliance would grant them because they’re too valuable against the undead.
It’s kind of hinted in early WoW that this was the case already, since there were Scarlet emissaries in both Stormwind City and Nijel’s Point in Kalimdor.
I just want the Alliance to be bigger than Anduin or humans again. Have Worgen, Night Elves, Draenei, etc dictate its interests.
To quote Cass from New Vegas:
I don’t want a good Alliance or a bad Alliance, I just want an Alliance that has some risks and limitations based on being an amorphous blob of different cultures being displaced by the Legion/Horde. And just because these nations are allied with each other doesn’t mean they have to like each other. I’d like more stories about any philosophical differences of Elune-worshiping Night Elves in SW vs the Draenei vs traditional Holy Light worshipping humans. Or how Void Elves are integrating into human society after so long.
The Alliance will always be united against the Horde due to gameplay mechanics, but that shouldn’t preclude more quests about internal tensions within the Alliance itself.
That and for the Alliance storylines to be proactive rather than reactive
To be fair, Eastern Kingdoms: Chronicles seems to have realized that the legacy of the Third War is a clear path for Alliance (or at least, human) development going forward.
There are some great lore tidbits about how the Alliance built that memorial for Terenas and how refugees managed to recover his crown and bury it at the Stormwind lighthouse, and about how the Cathedral of Light’s bell was a twin of Lordaeron’s famous palace bell whose tones are now found melancholy by most of Stormwind’s population due to Lordaeron’s fate.
One of the biggest things that should have been given greater prominence though is learning that Benedictus converted to the Twilight’s Hammer because of his trauma from Lordaeron’s fall, and his inability to reconcile his faith in the Light with the things that he had seen during the Scourging of Lordaeron.
I like that plot point. It would have been nice if we had gotten it in Cataclysm but I guess that would get in the way of Kosak shoehorning his characters into the game or adding more fart jokes to Redridge.
Alliance’s story needs to be intrafaction, not extrafaction. It can only improve itself by focusing on its own races, credos, faiths, “guilds”, etc. War against the Horde is only a momentary fist pump, but it’s also only an empty one. There’s no real character/faction growth.
“shady” terms like “redemption” aside, I would add that it’s almost hillarious that after all the events that happened so far, if san’layn would ever become playable, with the current story they would be a perfect addition to the void elf struggle, yet an undesireable neighbor for the blood ones. Irony is strong in the situation.
Although, blood trolls would’ve been an interesting addition into the mix.
The alliance wont ever get Lordaeron again. Stop throwing every other alliance race to the garbage and stop trying to take what belong to the horde just so you can fully you MHP dream.
Blizzard carved half of the Alliance away from it and put it on the Horde. In cases like the Forsaken or even the Blood Elves, that IS internal Alliance story. If the Horde has ever felt like a vestigial element in the Forsaken or Blood Elf storyline (or vice versa), that’s why.
It’s not that big a surprise that Horde players tend to have difficulty comprehending this because there’s no inverse comparison that can be made, where a large segment of the Horde was stripped from the Horde, put on the Alliance, and a decade’s worth of story was written with the intention of alienating them further from the Horde.
May the Anduin be unable to rule, once the mindo control by the jailer damaged so much his psychological health that Turalyon and Alleria incite to reclaim Alliance territories (Whether they will succeed? I don’t know, but it’s a story to be told). May the Void’s whispers or other motives lead to the battle of Silver Moon and culminate in the destruction of the Sunwell because of the Void’s Chernobyl.
With the coming of Yrel and her consort Grommash or Garrosh( I know isnt Garrosh, but (Son of grommash is to long to write) AU they will convince as many people as possible to be part of their crusade, since by establishing a relationship with Grommash/Garrosh AU, they finished recruiting who was left behind on the mission of Mag’har recruitment, so they departed for the cosmos to continue the army of light.
With the destruction of the Sunwell, with the political instability of the Alliance with the Scarlet Crusade contesting the right to the Throne of Lordaeron with its heir, many internal battles will take place in the faction. In this moment of fragility Talanji, queen of the Zandalari sees the perfect moment to take revenge on the blue faction and have the head of Lord Admiral Proudmoore
With the Yrel arriving in Azeroth, it is revealed that the Naarus always knew this moment would come and they all paved the way for Azeroth and Draenor’s history to that moment. The Naarus knew that the Eredars would corrupt and separated some of them to lead their offensive, just as the Burning Legion also chose the Eredars to be their generals. So the Naarus who traveled with Velen helped knowing they would go to Azeroth and help establish the relationship with the Light. They also manipulated Velen into not revealing about the Burning legion to the Orcs because it was the Draenei’s destiny to go to Azeroth, and in Draenor AU it was an event outside the curve that served its sacred purposes.
The Naaru that was vampirized by the Blodd Elves knew of his mission and that he would be the bridge to the redemption of a people who would one day have the light as sacred, so the Naarus always engineered the coming of the Velen to fulfill that purpose. Sa’ra helped pave the way between the Forsaken through Calia Menethil, and with that they have strong light influence on both factions. Sin’doreis and Forsakens in the horde, Humans and Draenei in the Alliance, and thus the vanguard of light would finally be completed and the enlightened Crusade would begin.
And during that time they’ve had little story advancement and have stagnated.
Blood Elves have been around since TBC and haven’t gotten as much as Void Elves have gotten since BfA, because unlike the Belves, the Void Elves are in their element.
This is just plainly false. Blood elves had more development during TBC than void elves had so far.
Blood elves had a lot of development in tbc (intro expac) and played a large part in MoP, and lastly in legion where they delved more into their newfound kinship with another highborne remnant (nightborne).
Compared to the void elves that were introduced in late legion and had nothing outside of the intro scenario, and then got a few questlines in BFA and sadly pretty non-present for the whole N’zoth debacle except for being trash mobs in the visions.
I mean it should be, Kael is still the official ruler and prince of silvermoon at the start of tbc, they then join the Horde which aid them to enter outland to go reconnect with that group of Blood elves only to find that a bunch of them (including Kael) became legion lapdogs, so they have to stop him. This ultimately culminate in the whole sunwell patch where he returns and tries to summon KJ into the world with the sunwell, but is stopped and the sunwell is reignited.
That’s a lot for a player race, but it’s also the expansion where they were added so it’s understandable, just like there’s a lot of zanda/kt stuff in bfa or pandaren stuff in MoP.
