I dunno, I don’t feel like committing genocide.
Not sure if genocide is the term, but yeah, not keen on wiping out a people
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I don’t think it needs to be said that the behaviour of a great deal of Forsaken is not a monolith representing all. Punish the ones who’re torturing people in their basements and planting human crops to test war crime weapons on.
In case this hasn’t been covered already: Sadly, no.
The Alliance quests are about evacuating - the Alliance player starts by getting 6 (maybe 8?) students out, starts flying back to save more, and then the bomb drops and knocks the player and questgiver out of the sky. It’s made clear that there were many students left in the school that we didn’t get to in time.
That’s the overall tone of Alliance Cata questing in night elf zones. That’s why there’s so much built up anti-Horde sentiment and resentment about being made to helplessly watch as the Horde kills people. That’s why Teldrassil was received so poorly - we’ve had so many of that tone of quest already, and really didn’t need another that we know can’t be satisfactorily resolved because it involves the other faction.
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I double-checked the quest text, and I disagree that it’s “clear there were many students left in the school.” I’ll put the text of the quest chain below.
https://www.wowhead.com/quest=25880/warn-master-thaldarah
https://www.wowhead.com/quest=25889/save-the-children
https://www.wowhead.com/quest=25891/last-ditch-effort
The fact that you rescue five “helpless young druids” for the second quest is obviously just for gameplay—they wouldn’t require each PC to pick up “dozens” of students, so either each one stands in for a larger group, like when you see armies onscreen, or you assume that multiple PCs are doing the quest at the same time and each one is picking up a few.
And if they meant it to be clear that you definitely didn’t get all the students out, I don’t believe they would have worded the last quest as they did. They would have Master Thal’darah say “More students are still in the school and we must rescue them all before time runs out!” rather than “Search for any druids that might be left behind.”
Then the cutscene contains this dialogue:
Again, Master Thal’darah just says “The grove is destroyed,” not “OMG, those jerks killed my students!”
I would say it is ambiguous at best. There may have been a few stragglers that the Alliance PC doesn’t succeed in rescuing, but there is no firm evidence that this is the case.
EDIT: Video of the entire quest chain in case you want to see for yourself:
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Ehh, at best I can agree that it’s not guaranteed that students were left behind, but the phrasing is slanted more towards there possibly being some left rather than there not being any left in the blast zone. Even if the meta reason is just to set up that dramatic moment of being knocked back by the blast, the story setup is set as the player requiring one last sweep because someone might be left behind.
More specifically, “The grove is destroyed and with it our hopes and dreams”, which could just as easily include the students who were in the grove, and doesn’t explicitly exclude them. Even the story around the Burning of Teldrassil tried to refer to children’s deaths pretty obliquely. Just look at all the arguments about the Frostmane Troll Whelps and all the weaseling around using the exact quest text to argue that the player was not sent out to fight children and thus the whelps must not be children.
I don’t really want to get into the weeds of picking apart every line, because there isn’t an obvious conclusion. The player is sent in for a last sweep for survivors, but the place explodes before the player knows whether there were any more students left behind. The result is left to player assumptions. But I will argue that the tone of that story is very much that of loss and death and destruction, which sets up the player to make the assumption one way rather than the other.
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The point of letting them be is because they’re a playable race and shouldn’t have been put into the story position they were, or at least not to the extent they’ve been for the last decade and a bit. As far back as Cataclysm the actions the writers had them and Sylvanas commit were stretching the point of credulity when it came to them just being left alone. When the Lich King was destroyed, I get that the whole goal of the race was adrift, but the writing team at the time clearly realized it was getting silly, because we went through MoP and WoD and Legion without addressing the events in Silverpine and Hillsbrad.
Cue BfA and the writers doubled down and tripled down, making them into villains that could never actually be truly defeated because, again, playable race. They’d already made the same mistake with the Orcs and Garrosh in MoP, but apparently hadn’t learned the lesson applied there.
They’re being left alone because they, like a few Horde races, desperately need to be given themes outside of antagonism with the Alliance, and be rebuilt as a playable race with a lot of nuanced traits that are independent of the Blues.
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Seriously Stormwind is such an undressed salad of a city. And despite the story centering around it’s leaders, who’d also win 3rd place in a mediocrity contest (oooo lost king with amnesia, dead wife and there’s two wolves inside him - what’s next an anime trope healer who gets power ups from crying?), we actually don’t know much about SW.
All the quests in the surrounding areas are just extended movie refernces. Not parodies- reference. It’s literally just;
I’ve never seen a fantasy faction in more dire need of world building.
People who think removing the Forsaken, a WoW USP not found in any other comparable or competing genre game or even setting, and replacing them with more bland tapioca knights should be barred from any creative endeavor. For life.
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Stormwind suffers from all the nuance it once had being stripped away with Cataclysm, honestly. Though that vanishing of complexity actually started when Varian came back and neutered the House of Nobles
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I guess we’ll have to disagree about that. As I said above, I think the phrasing is slanted toward there probably not being any more left. But that’s one reason why I posted the text, so that others can make their own judgments.
True, it’s not explicit. But the school was his baby, so he could be talking about that too.
To be honest, the behind-the-scenes scenario I suspect is something like this: someone in the writer’s room originally wrote it as the school being blown up with all the students inside—maybe it was the same person who later went on to design the “rescue 1000 people from Teldrassil OH WAIT YOU CAN’T” quest, for all we know—and someone else came along and said “No, that’s too dark. Let’s have the Alliance PC rescue the students first.” But then the original writer was all “Muh dark vision” and the second person was all “But player agency,” and they eventually compromised on saying it was an awful thing to happen without being explicit about exactly why.
Or, alternatively, the quest chain was originally written by the second person in the above scenario, with all the students being definitely rescued, and the other person then came along and said, “Don’t be such a wimp! You’ve gotta kill some kids to really tug at the players’ heartstrings.” But the writer got all “The players have to feel like they made a difference” and the other person was all “Don’t pull your punches, man” and then they compromised on “Well, maybe some kids got killed.”
Pure speculation, though!
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I just want to nap. Thats the point of letting me be!
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There is the conspiracy theory, which sounds awfully plausible to me some days, that what happened to the Forsaken and Sylvanas was a direct result of what happened to the Orcs and Garrosh—either as simple revenge or an attempt to prove that someone else could’ve done it better.
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And then they went out and said that Garrosh being furious about that bombing was a mistake between writers not coordinating 
Seriously, I know Cata was rushed really badly to meet deadlines with how massive an undertaking it was to redo the old world, but its not like the faction stories since have been much better
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I may dislike the Forsaken but Lordaeron is their home. They belone there and no amount of Alliance claims will be enough to justify invading that territory.
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If there weren’t such bitter tensions between the living survivors and the forsaken, I’d be all for making part of the Forsaken atonement process being that they have to allow enclaves for former loraedonians so that they can choose to rebuild their former home.
But any hope that relationship being anything but openly hostile died with Southshore’s open support of the Scarlets and it’s eventual destruction. Arathi was retaken though, which is probably close enough.
It does make one wonder what would happen with the plaguelands once the Argents are done with purifying it.
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I’d say it died in during the events of Before the Storm when humans were conviced to reunite with their undead families and friends only to have them murdered by Sylvanas.
That’s why Alliance will always have a hard time trusting them. all they know is that they are evil murderers.
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That’s more on Sylvanas though.
If you saw your deceased relative show up and greet you like nothing’s happened wanting to legitimately get back in touch, just to see them shot by Sylvanas, you’re likely going to be mad at her, not assume that your relative being murdered means he was a monster all along.
In fairness, now that Sylvanas is gone, there is a chance that relations between the living and Forsaken can improve. Especially (here it comes….) with the likes of Calia and Derek to vouch for them.
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But general population won’t have detailed information about what happened or how things happened. All they’ll hear is that Undead set a trap using dead relatives as bait. We have to remember people don’t have access to that much information. They don’t have phones, tv or internet so what little info they get will eventually be distorded by their own bias and past encounters.
Anduin has to take some of that blame. To my knowledge it was supposed to be a vetted meeting and he brought Calia along of all people. Not only the sister of the hated Arthus Menethil, but potential heir apparent to the kingdom of Lordaeron.
Forsaken shouldn’t need the likes of them to vouch for them though. If the forsaken are as the lore suggests, the dead of Lordaeron, they should have at least a few characters, especially characters who had some standing in the former kingdom, be able to demonstrate that and speak to that perspective. I mean the forsaken should easily have characters that rubbed shoulders with or was even friends with Turalyon.
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That’s because Blizzard forgets that while Forsaken are undead, not all undead are Forsaken but you know how they like everything with the same pen.