You are… entirely missing the point.
I am saying that Horde players hold onto marginal events like Camp T because they don’t have anything else, regardless of whether or not that event ‘measures up’ to the list of grievances on the other side. Honestly, I’ve read your post two times over and I’m still honestly not sure what you are trying to get at, because it seems like the things you are saying are not related to the point I am making.
You say that but I remember on numerous occasions you would oppose any suggestion of Alliance rolling in and slaughtering the Horde.
So on one hand you complain about not having enough greivences but on the other oppose any suggestions of being the victim for once.
As I recall you said “The Horde lost enough in BFA”
So which is it?
Unfortunately this isn’t really a point I ever actually empathize with whenever someone brings it up. Usually Syriyna is one to point it out, but it is a pretty strange thing to ask for. To ask to be hated so you can have the moral high ground of defending oneself, it’s a very peculiar desire. I get the want to be heroes and good guys. But this doesn’t actually require anyone to be out for you or for people you could defend as a result.
My point is that there doesn’t have to be any justification, or always should be, and that it is wrong to always look for it even if it is a reflex.
The attack on Camp T has no moral justification either, it was only strategic.
Yeah!
The Alliance hates the Horde because of their freedoms!
Right out of Bush’s playbook.
A valid point!
To answer you honestly? It’s that the timing is bad. Very, very bad. I am not going to back off saying the Horde has already lost too much as a result of BfA - it needs buildup before it can be smacked again.
At the time of Cataclysm, that was very different. The Cata/MoP era Horde could have stood to take a few more lumps. Now? Sure, if you did have the Horde get beat up more, it wouldn’t be taken well. Would Tyrande be depicted as being excessive and unnecessary in killing more? Or wholly justified in doing what she was doing? I’ll bet you it would be the latter - which is the entire crux of my original point.
The Horde needs justification for themselves. Horde players hold onto Camp T, the Purge, and Stormheim so hard because they are some of the very few instances of apparently unjustified Alliance aggression. And, even in those cases, Blizzard’s narrative fights back against us, telling us why it wasn’t really as unjustified as it might have seemed at first.
To follow up on my previous point, I also don’t understand the obsession with the Alliance specifically being the desire for unjustified aggression.
Posters are quick to post that the Horde can be heroes without having to work with or help the Alliance - obviously currently most in reference to Tyrande.
Yet it is rare, if ever, that the same logic is applied to the Horde being heroes without having the Alliance being unjustifiably aggressive towards them.
If people want Horde content unrelated to the Alliance, it doesn’t really make sense that they would cling so much to a want of Alliance attacking them.
the horde nees feel god moments for themselves, that is justification, to do something bad to feel god for it.
At this point there are certain characters that can get a free pass for whatever it is they do.
One of them is Tyrande.
So I am afraid that ship has long since sailed.
Maybe a different character? Like Genn, even with his justifications anything drastic could seem in bad taste.
Honestly in a good war story both sides should be justified.
Not just one side, BFA was a great opportunity to right the scales but each time they cheapened the victory for the Alliance.
Which made your grievence that much cheaper too and now you lost things but not really and you kind of came out on top in the war but not really.
Its definitely a weird place to be in and I suspect its for two reasons.
I think the issue is that for some Horde players, it is required at this point.
By now, playing Horde and feeling a connection to your faction requires accepting you’ve aided and abetted in multiple genocides or near-genocides, committed war crimes, started every conflict between you and the only other super-power nation on the planet, and that’s just focusing on the large-scale.
That we sometimes take breaks to help beat up the local Extinction-Level Event monster doesn’t feel heroic, so much as done out of self-interest.
I’m not defending that point of view, nor would I attack it. I understand it, even if I might not agree the answer is being struck first a time or two.
The best explanation I have for it is it’s a plan b / fallback stance. The desired stance is to write the Horde as heroes with no Alliance involvement in their story. That being said, since they insist on faction divide being a thing, and they keep insisting on using the Horde as villains in Alliance questing, the next best option is to have the Alliance play villains to Horde questing.
Think of it this way - even in BfA, there were no credible Alliance threats to the Horde PC until Tides of Vengeance. The Alliance, by contrast, has Brennadin and a war campaign directly dealing with the Horde. The ideal solution would have been to keep the original version of Brennadin being attacked by quillboar. The next best option would have been to have the Alliance (not the Kul’Tirans - the actual Alliance at that time) doing something of a same or similar magnitude on Zandalar. Because the current lopsided situation is that the Horde is still dragged down by Brennadin even if it isn’t Horde content, so a bit of parity would be appreciated.
(And do remember that the Horde War Campaign took great pains to make sure that the PC knows that the Kul’Tirians they happen to be killing deserved it. They’re somehow all Ashvane sympathizers, corrupt tidesages, or otherwise morraly bankrupt. Clearly they’re the exception to the norm for the Kul’Tirans.
And, honestly, even Tides of Vengeance is debatable in terms of “credible Alliance threats”.)
I was originally going to state G’huun and the Zandalar leveling storyline as an example, yeah, but ultimately it all did feel like filler.
If anything, then to answer the title of the thread, what I find most cringe is people asking for the faction wars to continue or start up again.
This argument here is one of my pet peeves that makes me cringe.
Tyrande had every right to be suspicious or doubtful; the Nightborne outright abandoned Azeroth to save themselves.
They turned their backs on the resistance against the Legion That makes them deserving of skepticism, because they were clearly only in it for themselves back during the War of the Ancients. Anyone with half a brain should have been untrusting of the Nightborne.
Furthermore, the Nightborne’s electing to join the Horde and support the genocide at Teldrassil sort of cements the fact that the Nightborne cannot be trusted.
Time and place is an argument that can be thrown in the trash; Tyrande was right.
I am frustrated when posters ignore nuance to score partisan points.
And when posters use straw man arguments to, again, score partisan points.
There is a lot of both in this thread. Example:
“…honorable mentions to people saying that tyrande was an evil witch for telling nightborne the true.”
Who are these people? I have never once seen anyone post that Tyrande “was an evil witch for telling night borne the truth.” Lots of people, including me, argued that Tyrande was shown as a terrible diplomat in how she handled that situation, however much she believed in her version of the truth.
The “evil witch” statement is just a classic straw man argument, in which an extreme, almost parodic, representation of a legitimate point of view is created in order to knock it down as absurd. These are exactly the kinds of arguments that are increasingly common on this forum and are ruining it.
So that’s my main grievance: refusing to give an honest hearing to different perspectives by caricaturing them and ignoring nuance.
This forum is increasingly dominated by posters who seem to be RPing in that they identify so heavily with a fictional video game faction that they cannot engage in objective analysis of the story or countenance a different point of view.
Alliance players who get mad that Blizzard writes their faction as all forgiving ultra-good guys who never pursue actual payback against Horde aggression, but then tell Horde players who are upset about their faction being constantly villain batted to just accept that they’re bad guys.
Technical nitpick, but the Nightborne weren’t really involved with the War of the Thorns, much less the burning of Teldrassil.
Things do get more “grey” when we factor in Thalyssra being part of the extraction team to recruit a navy to continue the Horde’s unjustified war of aggression - though obviously the idea is that Thalyssra and the rest of the Horde believed the fear at the time that the Alliance was going to wipe them all out in retaliation for Teldrassil.
But then obviously Thalyssra pulls herself out of this by reminiscing on the Blood Elves and Night Elves working together to liberate Suramar and convincing Lor’themar to work with the Alliance again against both Azshara and Sylvanas. Though it did come really late in relation to Teldrassil.
Except she explicitly knew that Thalyssra and the rest were rebelling, just like her own faction did back in the WotA. This wasn’t an unknown situation she was walking in to. She was going to meet with rebels. Rebels fighting the same fight she was fighting.
I feel defender of Tyrande in this scenario likes to forget that.
Well after the fact justification? I thought mastery of time-warping magic was Elisande’s thing, not a trait Tyrande had. Justifying her attitude at the time by future events influenced by her attitude at the time is… Odd logic.
But y’know? Whatever floats it.
Though you remind me that I forgot to mention a huge pet peeve of mine is after-the-fact justification. Because a character’s actions much later on turned out to be on the right side of history doesn’t make their action right initially. If Blizz decides Sylvanas had to burn Teldrassil because its roots were growing deep beneath the earth and were about to free the Jailer by breaking some underground seal? I’d call bull. Any defense that hinges on and requires precognition to be justifiable is bull.
Elisande and Suramar technically also rebelled against Azshara and the Legion in the War of the Ancients as well. And still left everyone else for dead. Rebelling against Elisande was no actual assurance that the Nightborne would have anyone else in mind after, either.
Not that we see, no - but they stood by the Horde even after, and we see not even a single line of dialogue in the aftermath to support the notion that the Nightborne objected to genocide.
They just survived their own extermination - their own genocide. And now they’re going to stand by and allow it to happen to the people who threw their lives down to save them.
It didn’t come at all. I’ve made this argument before and I’ll make it again: the Horde did not ally with the Alliance during the 4th war based on moral principles - they did to save their lives.
It was out of necessity. So the “better late than never” argument doesn’t hold water here.
She also knew that the Nightborne abandoned the fight once before. If I have a history of leaving you to get beat up by school yard bullies, would you really expect me to suddenly stand by you out of the blue? So that take, but elevate the comparison, because we’re not talking about school yard bullies; we’re talking about extermination. The Nightborne, selfishly, abandoned Azeroth to the Legion.
That is absolutely deserving of doubt, even if there is a faction that is rebelling.
I’m not using the after the fact to justify it then; it wasn’t needed. Tyrande didn’t need more arguments in order to be suspicious. The WoTA was plenty.
I brought up this point to cement the fact that, for those of us here in the meta (not the characters), it turned out to be wholly justified anyways.
And I would agree with you entirely.
And this, too.
God, if one time makes a whole history, how did void elves ever get invited to the Alliance?
I mean, you’re in favor of Tyrande distrusting the nightborne who, at the time, were actively fighting the Legion against their own people, that pushing away a potential ally is alright if they one time chose self-preservation. A decision, mind, that was made by Ellisande, not the whole of her people.
So how would void elves who once actively joined the Horde until they were exiled for practicing forbidden magic with ties to the old gods not also count in this “one strike, you’re out” logic?
Except it’s stated (hilariously, I know) that Tyrande’s own actions caused the nightborne to side with the blood elves over the night elves. If you want to use after-the-fact justification, it supports my point over your own; had Tyrande not been snippy, there’d be one less enemy group for the Alliance to contend with. Had she bit her tongue in a time of active world-threatening battle, the nightborne may never have picked a side, or sided with her people.
And before people take all of this the wrong way (red portrait, so it’s bound to happen), I’m not saying Tyrande’s evil, a bad character, should be punished or whatever. I’m saying it was poor judgment, a minor flaw at most.