It is kind of funny that Wrath, the most popular expansion of WoW, does kind of screw up Forsaken identity with the Ebon Blade. Before, I think the general premise was that the Forsaken aren’t aligned with their living human counterparts because of prejudice. Because humans will not trust the undead.
Humans look at the undead as monster and make outcasts of them. Leaving no choice BUT to be what humanity says they are.
But then Death Knights happened. Send an undead emissary to Stormwind, who marches through the streets, into Stormwind Keep, up to the King Of Stormwind himself and are like “We want to join you.”
And the King of Stormwind, who was especially hateful towards the Horde at this time, was like “Oh word? Right on. I’ll tell the whole Kingdom to be nice to you.”
I think you are missing some important details intentionally. Like the PC DK getting spat on, receiving rotten food. Told to go away etc. Varian only accepts the PC because the letter was written by Tirion. That is the only reason why PC Dk’s were accepted. For horde it was because of the bond Tirion and Eitrigg have that convinced Thrall to accept the PC Dk’s.
What screwed Forsaken identity was giving them the ability to raise new undead because that’s the root of the entire problem of “why would any free willed individual join the people that raised them.”
Even the most charitable writing around that would still have to imply that being undead doesn’t suck and in fact is a thing that undead enjoy.
Humans, or at least humans in the Alliance, barely ever interacted with the Forsaken at all in Vanilla through WotLK, and when Forsaken interacted with them it was always with aggressive intent.
The idea that humans had some kind of built in engrained prejudice against undead was a byproduct of the Scarlet Crusade existing (even though they were xenophobic in general, not just towards undead) and attempts by the playerbase to rationalize the Forsaken’s aggression and was never strongly supported in the lore.
But let’s not get sidetracked. Regardless of who is being raised, be they human or Night Elf, it’s a humiliation. In fact it’s a targeted humiliation that the Alliance is never really able to come to terms with because the victims are always scooted off to the Horde, thereby denying the Alliance any kind of closure to it or opportunities to explore the grief process or heal the collective trauma inflicted by it.
Okay but later in that same expansion, Varian told Rohnin (Someone who is equally as respected as Tirion) “I hope this death god takes you all” because he didnt want to work with orcs. Much less Forsaken.
So like… Idk, it doesn’t seem consistent to me.
I feel like one can make this work on the idea that they have no real choice. But we don’t really see that. I feel like we should have been shown undead trying to reconnect with their living family, but getting turned away, belittled or screamed at.
When you lose everything that is important to you, the choice is either death or to forge a new life. And, well… they already trying dying so… Only one thing left to do.
Point is, conceptually, it is feasible. But like everything else, Blizz was lazy about it.
Even if this was something that actually happened it would only go halfway to explaining it, because “they don’t reconnect with the Alliance” isn’t automatically followed with “so they join the Horde.”
Especially if the undead are supposed to have established emotional and intellectual continuity with who they were when alive, which would mean that they would probably still hold the Horde in contempt for all the stuff the Horde did to them in life.
It’s a giant, giant mess and I maintain that if free-willed undead had to be a thing, they should have been neutral or non-playable. Having an entire society based on a shared condition that is also treated as being fundamentally superficial doesn’t work. It’s like having a society based on everyone having brown hair.
I mean, its not “So they joint the Horde” its “So they join the only people that will accept them.”
I feel like after you die and everything that connects you to your old life now reviles you as a monster, the things that happened to you in life kind of loses it’s meaning. It is not really important anymore. That’s not you anymore. That happened to someone else. A person who is now dead, and stayed dead, even if their body still moves.
It becomes less about that person and more about the person in the here and now, with nowhere to go except the Undercity.
That isn’t a difficult concept for me. But it is contingent upon the willingness of the living to see the humanity in the undead. At the time of War of Thorns, we really have no reason to believe the Night Elves would react that way. The Night Elves don’t have a history with the undead. Their lands were never ravaged by the Scourge. So it makes less sense for risen Night Elves to join the Forsaken… Because Night Elf society is less likely to treat them like an enemy, and are more likely to treat them like a tragic figure. Someone who was wronged and deserves Justice.
I think too much mental energy is spent considering this scenario and not enough mental energy is spent considering its inverse, which is where a good person is killed and becomes undead and is simply a huge a-hole post death for no apparent reason.
This isn’t unprecedented either. Nathanos Marris was widely considered a hero and a good person who was widely respected in the Alliance in life. Even after regaining his free will, it was obvious that something inside him has fundamentally changed. Undeath turned him from a hero of the Alliance into someone who seeks to destroy it, no rejection required.
And this seems to be the case for a lot of Forsaken. Lots of undead simply come back as jerks regardless of who they were in life or how they are treated as undead.
So the scenario that you’re describing could easily happen in reverse and likely has. Namely, a living human discovers that they have a relative who was raised into undeath and then reaches out to them hoping to reconnect, only to have that person be inexplicably cruel and hostile to them because they have come back changed.
This scenario would easily be just as traumatic to the living as being treated with hostility by living relatives would be for undead. And it was also probably more common because I would bet that lots of people tried vainly to reach out to loved ones who had been raised as Scourge, not realizing what that meant.
This just circles back to a fundamental problem with the Forsaken in that Blizzard can’t decide what undeath is. Is it a fundamental scouring of the soul that irrevocably destroys the person that the victim once was? Or is it a superficial condition that can simply be ignored most of the time?
Their current strategy when dealing with this question seems to be “it’s whichever is most convenient at any given time” and it sucks.
Something that has always stuck with me is when I clicked on William Saldean in Brill during Cataclysm and got this text.
I was here visiting relatives when Lordaeron fell, and then… well. I suppose I won’t ever be returning to Westfall, now.
Sometimes I wonder if my family is still alive. More often, though, I wonder why I no longer care.
His emotions have changed to be indifferent to the living while other undead have become more snide and snarky if not outright sadistic. I use to wonder if how much someone being connected to the Light changed this, since previous lore did imply undeath causing much more damage to the soul than it does now.
Varian was personally enslaved and forced to fight as a gladiator by the Horde. Then he lost one of his closest friends, advisors and Anduins caretaker during his “disappearance” to the Forsaken’s betrayal. He does mention the Wrathgate shortly before he said that line. Once again ignoring the context.
The fact that the Alliance Prince, Arthas, inflicted Undeath unto his own Alliance kingdom, as well as the neighboring kingdom of Quelthalas, makes the whole humiliation of Undeath for the Alliance completely self wrought.
Sylvanas would not be the Undead boogey woman, but for the Alliance Prince who succeeded his father.
The Alliance humiliated itself by bringing Undeath to its own people, and neighboring kingdoms.