I think that above all the Forsaken need to move away from being a “things poached from the Alliance” group.
Nobody in the Alliance wanted undead Calia Menethil, Derek Proudmoore, and various undead Night Elves to be in the Forsaken. Nobody in the Horde wanted undead Calia Menethil, Derek Proudmoore, and various Night Elves to be in the Forsaken either.
So why did it happen? Why do things that literally nobody wants keep happening?
Personally I think it was the game’s attempt at trying to jackhammer in new forsaken characters to preemptively compensate for losing Sylvanas and Nathanos. Calia becomes the replacement leader, Derek becomes the new right hand man, and the unnelves would be the generic in-universe substitutes for whatever valueless number of dark rangers that poofed as well.
Except it seems like hardly anybody wanted this nonsense. And I also think the implementation is doomed to trip right out of the gate because the horde is the scourge in this parallel. They shouldn’t want to be part of the horde any more than Sylvanas and the forsaken would want to rejoin the scourge. But we’re stuck with them anyway.
Once again: Derek should be Davey Jones, and Calia I think will be turned into a Banshee by Anduin to wrap it all up
It also really irritates me as an Alliance fan to see the constant barrage of “the moment you’re undead you go Horde” occurrences because it also dumps all over the Alliance’s whole “protect and comfort the meek and helpless” thing since apparently people who have been raised into undeath are completely and utterly unable to find support in the Alliance, even though we’ve seen numerous cases of people in the Alliance being supportive of them.
And, as you pointed out, people like Calia but especially people like Derek and Delaryn have no rational reason to want anything but to be as far away from the Horde as humanly possible.
So we get this situation where we have Alliance characters “joining” the Horde via undeath, and to Horde/Forsaken fans it comes off as an intrusion by Alliance characters and themes, and to the Alliance it comes off as the poaching of Alliance characters and themes by the Horde/Forsaken.
Literally nobody wants it and everyone suffers for it but we blame each other for it anyway, because the Forsaken are such a conceptually toxic playable race.
Your alliance centric worldview makes it hard to take your suggestions seriously.
The Forsaken are not “poaching” Alliance things, they ARE previous Alliance citizens. They are Lordaeron citizens. Lordaeron belongs to the Horde now, and I’m glad Calia believes that Lordaeron belongs to the Forsaken.
Personally I like the idea of the forsaken being able to find refuge and comfort in the horde. They may have been dialed up to extreme levels but I don’t think the solution should have been “let them rejoin the alliance,” because I think all that would do is rob them of an interesting angle of having their humanity denied because of their condition.
I think it also helped play into the early horde’s theme of “you’re not a monster just because you look like one,” although yeah; the forsaken were definitely the darkest of the bunch.
You are literally describing poaching. Things were taken away from the Alliance so that they could be given to the Horde and the Forsaken as a playable race owe their entire existence to things being taken from the Alliance and given to the Horde. I have no idea why this is so hard for you to grasp.
Probably because there’s no proper inverse comparison. Nothing is ever taken from the Horde and given to the Alliance.
I think that the notion that them rejoining the Alliance would automatically make them “less interesting” is pretty presumptuous. Being interesting isn’t conditioned on being part of the Horde.
Ask one of the few worgen players around here what they think of that.
I’m one of those Worgen players, I just can’t post on every character at once.
Proficiency in Void.
Historically, Shadow/Void magic was Forsaken Cult of the Forgotten Shadow, Troll Voodoo, and the MU Shadowmoon survivors within the Orcs.
Forsaken Forgotten Shadow was undermined in Legion (canon changed so the religion was almost dead, Natalie Seline was made a human), Troll Voodoo not centered at all, and the Horde’s use of Shadowmoon MU magic was completely ignored in favor of “Orc Mages” even in the new portal room.
We almost got Void-Tidesages introduced to the Forsaken, but Blizzard took the ONE well developed new Forsaken character and killed him for MUH SHOCK FACTOR.
Alliance got Void Elves instead, who apparently are so numerous and powerful it forced the entire Horde army to retreat in Battle of Lordaeron, nobody Horde side sufficiently competent to do anything.
Likewise Arcane magic, with Jaina the Mary Sue being a better mage than the likes of Rommath and Thalyssra due to Human Potential.
Nothing was “taken” by the Horde.
Alliance citizens died and became Horde. The lands they held in life became lands they held in Death. The Alliance doesn’t own Lordaeron, it belongs to it’s people, and it’s people are Horde now.
If I recall correctly, you also once said that you like how each race tries to homogenize itself into the alliance collective when they join. Worgen are essentially a forsaken parallel, both running off of similar halloween-ish scares and motifs, and even have familiar build-ups in them becoming an ex-human race.
But one of those themes is humans fearing them. Just by being on the horde, the forsaken can play into that because death and disease are scary concepts. The worgen cannot, because just like zombies, pop fiction werewolves are a largely anti-human thing instead of anti-monster. And because the worgen end up allying with humans, they (by default) cannot fully embrace their trope because they have no hostile humans to infect and turn. And then the game went the extra mile to largely suppress, if not outright remove, the mental illness analogue that came with the race.
And I think that’s one of the reasons why Calia gets such a reaction out of people. Her being raised by the light is a similar thematic threat to their identity as monsters.
Ignoring your extremely simplistic presentation of events, yes, those people and those lands were taken by the Horde. Blizzard took things from the Alliance, more specifically the most developed and narratively relevant portion of the Alliance in the RTS games, and gave them to the Horde. The Horde now has that thing, and the Alliance does not. The Alliance lost it so that the Horde can have it.
It does not seem like it would be difficult for a normal human being with empathy to understand why this might damage both the Alliance, and the Forsaken themselves in terms of their narrative and faction identity.
But like I said, I guess that I can’t really expect you to understand because this is a one way street. Alliance things are given to the Horde, Horde keep them, Alliance are left to sit and spin.
I would point out that you can’t really play up the “humans fearing them” concept to its fullest extent on the Horde either, because you don’t regularly interact with humans who can react to you. Especially in the context of the Forsaken, where they are feared because of their actions. Anybody who did what the Forsaken did would be feared by their victims, not just undead.
So much about the Forsaken’s relationship with others is unknown because they are Horde. They don’t have any humans to interact with in a non-antagonistic way so that the relationship can be explored.
You sound like a kid who is upset he has to share his toys.
Here, you can have Baine and the Tauren. Take em, they are Alliance now. No take-backsies.
It’s not sharing when only one player gets all the toys and the direction of “things being taken and given” flows entirely in one direction.
The closest we have to an inverse is Void Elves but Blizzard has been going out of their way to politically marginalize them and we certainly don’t have any major Blood Elf NPC’s going Alliance because of it, or Blood Elf territory being given to the Alliance, or Alliance characters going around talking about how they’re the TRUE people of Quel’thalas while the Blood Elves say nothing in response.
I’m going to counter that by agreeing with you.
Yes, that sounds weird. But what I mean by that is that the only reason why you can’t play that up anymore is because that storyline has already been explored and played out. If there weren’t faction wars in Cata and beyond, then sure; I think it WOULD make sense for forsaken to try to make more efforts into reconnecting.
Unfortunately Blizzard wanted to keep the hate going, and wanted fresh reasons for the alliance to continue hating the forsaken at large. So the old story was lost and replaced with justifiable reasons to hate them, as you said. And I think the alliance ought to hate the forsaken now more than ever, even if it’s for disappointing reasons.
I literally gave an entire body of examples, which you conveniently ignored lmao
We actually have more information on how humans react to Void Elves than they do with Forsaken now, because Void Elves are Alliance and they can scatter little flavor things around like the NPC in the Cathedral of Light feeling awkward welcoming you inside and politely asking you if you’d consider hanging out somewhere else. Because Void Elves are Alliance and so they can actually interact with people.
I’m not so sure about this. BtS seemed to be deliberately setting up reconciliation between the Forsaken and the Alliance and that seems to be the intent (however awkward it has been executed) with Calia and Derek. Both of them spend time with both the Alliance and Horde in BfA after all.