Their culture is in no way unique in this sense. But they are somehow at fault for being the ones getting manipulated?
If Kil’jaeden’s had stumbled on a completely different culture and manipulated that into killing the Draenei, would also say their culture is somehow the problem that caused their downfall? I think that’s a faulty argument.
It’s the Draenei’s fault Argus was destroyed because they garnered the attention of Kil’Jaeden. They destroyed their own planet first. If only they hadn’t lured the Legion there in the first place… It must have been the result of their culture of using Fel.
It really is kind of bizarre that Erevien wants rolling green hills with quaint villages, enchanted forests, snow-capped mountains, etc but is adamantly against even entertaining the idea of rolling Alliance
Bro we’ll take you. Have you seen how our faction is doing right now? We’ll take anyone.
Alternatively you can just have the Horde join the Alliance and we’ll get to work making your lands stop sucking.
They were manipulated sure, but only a scant handful of them began to suspect it wasn’t their ancestor spirits pushing them to butcher an entire race that had up to this point been living peacefully beside them for generations.
It wasn’t exactly a slow burn or subtle either. Ner’zhul literally saw his wife’s spirit go from talking about simple wisdom in one instance to immediately telling him the Draenei were not only out to get them all but to organize and try to kill them off first.
Heck, not too long into the process Kil’jaeden stopped trying to be subtle altogether and revealed himself openly. And when Ner’zhul naturally asked ‘uhh, where’s my wife?’ Kil’jaeden just said ‘uhh, I’m the GREATER spirit YOUR spirits follow.’
And the numbskull just went along with it despite all the alarms going off over how ridiculously suss this was all starting to sound.
They were just THAT conditioned to accept anything the spirits said at face value, even when it started sounding nuts.
Personally I blame shoddy writing. Just take the spirit’s word on it and start prepping for mass genocide with no attempts at any in-depth scouting or diplomatic overtures to see if there’s a scrap of truth to what was said?
It just makes the Orcs look stupid and blindly dogmatic to be so easily manipulated.
Humans have been manipulated by dreadlords and other demons before as well, they just tend to sever the moment really weird stuff starts to happen instead of doubling down on it.
The argument was that “their culture caused Draenor to die”, but how is that the case when they were doing 100% okay right up to the point where an alien force purposefully started messing with them and twisting their strongest beliefs?
They didn’t even bother to advance past mud huts, how are y’all suggesting their culture is in any way world-destroying? If it wasn’t for Velen landing on their planet they’d probably still be chilling at the same spot. They might be primitive and therefore naive, but Draenor turning into a Fel wasteland has 0 to do with their culture and everything to do with Kil’jaeden trying to f Velen over. If posing as someone’s dead wife hadn’t woked, he’d try something else.
Well, the elders themselves knew that if the Orcs didn’t remain separated, things would not go well. That said, if WoD proved anything, its that the Orcs are more than capable of destroying their world in the pursuit of conquest and racial supremacy even without demons whispering in their ears and spiking their koolaid.
The Legion used the Orc’s shamanistic roots against them originally, but it was the warrior culture which ultimately caused the Orcs to be easily manipulated in both timelines, to seek more power at any cost to defeat their foes.
That said, I’m not entirely sold on this being a major flaw with the culture, so much as with their origins. The whole, a Titan came to Draenor and created the Orc’s most distant ancestor specifically to destroy the Sporemounds and all.
The fact that their culture was built around ancestor worship they were so conditioned to blindly accept the wisdom from at face value is EXACTLY why Kil’jaeden was able to so easily co-opt and corrupt it.
And because none of them seriously questioned their ancestors suddenly taking such a bloodthirsty and xenophobic stance against the Draenei until it was far too late, the Orcs were willing to pretty much change their ENTIRE culture almost overnight to follow their increasingly questionable whims.
So I’d say it was definitely a cultural problem just like it was for the Eredar.
They chose to MAKE it their culture when they drank the demon blood to fulfill their dreams of conquest.
And it wasn’t the Legion that made Ner’zhul literally tear the planet apart.
Alternatively alternatively, the Alliance could join the Horde, and we could finally realize Wrathion’s dream of a united Azerothian defence force.
Aside from the fact that they were literally created for deforestation.
That wouldn’t solve Erevien’s problem, because then Alliance lands would become Horde lands and consequently become crappy.
Alliance forces are better suited to defend Azeroth, aren’t they? At least, the Alliance army has never been in a state of civil war.
Aside from the fact that forests on their world act as planet cancer
oh i like you! hitting 'em with the facts.
Tumor? M … To pervert and through kinship with Sporemountain recognize orcs, ogres, grons as tumors? True, there is also an admixture of the Titans.
Yeah but, once you take them off their world, like on say…Azeroth, they just act as environmental destroyers.
I think it’s an interesting point how they might not fit on Azeroth because they’re from a different world, but even then, they somehow still failed to destroy a single environment. They chopped some trees. Big deal. They’re not the only ones who use lumber. Goblins and Forsaken have a much more impressive track record of making places unlovable and those races aren’t even created to be walking weed-wackers.
The Ghostlands? They torched the entirety of southern Quel’Thalas with dragonfire during the Second War.
Garrosh also made quite the mess out of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms.
No, that timeline was corrupted by having someone come from our timeline. We do not know what it naturally would have done without that happening.
The minute you do AU style stories it literally opens everything up. Somewhere there’s an AU where Azeroth had no World Soul and Draenor did, and the Humans were corrupted and invaded Draenor.
We have a retcon to deal with now.
Dreadlords, as they have reach into death, we have to modify the use of ancestor worship as a subversion tool. Through them, using that against the Orcs was going to be abnormally powerful, and possibly the actual ancestors being puppets.
The whole range of: “But group X was subject to corruption Y” discussion is useless in WoW now. Every group has some kind of corruption angle already.
I’m not disagreeing necessarily. Rather, my point was that whether it was the demons manipulating them or one of their own telling them what should have been unbelievable stories, the Orcs seemed quite ready to form a Horde and start going on the path of conquest.
That’s sort of the point of alternate timelines, seeing what is possible if the situations were different. Perhaps the best one to settle the matter of Orcish culture would be a timeline where the demons never found Draenor, and see what they do then. Considering it didn’t take much of a push in two very different circumstances to make them go full on Mongolian, I’d argue it would’ve been only a matter of time until some Orc got the idea in their head.
Realistically though, tribal Humans can be argued to have the same basic arc.
We’re not really talking about a special thing for Orcs there. It’s just an early primitive expansionism.
Fail to introduce the Draenei, and the natural resource competition that would cause.
Or fail to introduce the Legion hopping them up on blood, and then sending them to other worlds, and what do you get?
Flip it, have the Legion subvert Thoradin, and it’s the same story we got, just a different planet.
TBH, part of the art, which I don’t think even Blizzard has thought about enough, is the different era each major party is in.