At the Battle of Lordaeron, Baine saw his own men get blighted and resurrected as undead to fight the Alliance once more.
But clearly, that didn’t bother him. Sylvanas could raise as many bodies as she liked, but she made one misstake, raising a Proudmoore. No, that was clearly the limit for Baine. Not his beloved Jaina Proudmoore who was indirectly the cause of burning MUH Taurajo. Anyone but her. He had to warn her and so he did.
So we see him at the meeting of Wrathion and Anduin, and guess who actually bothers to involve us what happened there? That’s right, Valeera Sanguinar. Not Baine, who was present and literally watching the whole ordeal. No he was too busy standing 10 feet away from Valeera Sanguinar in Dazar’alor.
Is the role of Baine in the Horde to get the Alliance involved? What else did he do this expansion? Everytime the Horde had a problem, he always pointed out the Alliance. Even when the Zandalari King wasn’t even cold, he again pointed towards the Alliance, to make peace with them.
He doesnt’ care about his own men. He has shown this many times before, with Taurajo, with banishing his own warriors, with not giving one damn that they were resurrected before his eyes. He’s a god damn hypocrite. He should just join the Alliance and give up the title of Chieftain to someone else. My vote goes to Tagar.
The problem is that the status quo is “Alliance being the good ones”, so Baine, being the designated “good guy” of the Horde, has no choice but to support them. That how the writers see it, I imagine.
I don’t believe he’s intentionally written as the Alliance’s sympathizer, more like he needs to sympathize with them in order to appear in the right.
What’s funny is they write Baine as an Alliance sympathizer who seems to care more about the Alliance than the Horde. Meanwhile they write Anduin as a Horde sympathizer who seems to care more about the Horde than the Alliance.
I think someone said this already, but when Derek is in the Hall of Ritual, Baine should have been like “it’s time to put an end to this madness”, and then smashed Derek with his totem.
The entire battle bothered him, but he was more worried about Saurfang who wasn’t dead yet as opposed to those who were already both dead and destroyed. You might miss it if you didn’t play it Hordeside, but he is not leaving his meeting with Sylvannas and Nathanos as a happy camper, and it’s also clear that he’s not fully in on the full details of the plan that were entrusted to Nathanos.
Baine is one of the few active leaders on either the Horde or Alliance side that tries to be a good guy. And he nearly pays the full penalty for doing so.
Undoubtedly. If they want us to think Anduin is always right and Baine is doing his best Anduin impression it stands that we are to see Baine as right.
Yeah, and this why so many people are annoyed with Baine. It doesn’t feel very good when the token voice of reason hero has to literally team up with the enemy because they’re the only ones who are reasonable and just.
I find the attitude that Baine doesn’t care about Teldrassil or his own people is a bit silly
Teldrassil and everything else piling on added to the strain he was under. Derek Proudmoore wasn’t A Line He Couldn’t Allow To Be Crossed, it was more the straw that broke the camel’s back. One more insult on top of all the other insults he had to endure. And he was presumably working under Lor’themar’s advice to wait for the right moment to act, but after Proudmoore he was completely fed up and decided he had to act even if it wasn’t the right time, would probably backfire and possibly even endanger himself and his people.
They do, however, need to show Baine having some good times with the Horde and bad times with the Alliance, because yes, at this point I don’t understand why his father’s blood oath is keeping him in a faction that constantly abuses him and his people when he has found more consistent aid and acceptance in the Alliance.
He’s on the PLOT DEVICE side. That is what he is. He is the token Good Horde that Blizz drags out whenever they want to go completely unhinged with another Horde leader; so the big cow can serve as a counterbalance. On the other hand, like with every other Horde leader of BfA, he has to remain convenient for the story being told. So any outcry and “moral stand” he takes can only be taken when it wont really interefere with anything.
Which is a shame, the character conceptually does have a lot going for him. Hell, I actually liked the version of him Golden wrote in War Crimes (and have been waiting for years for that darker side she wrote into him out). But, his functional need to be that counterbalance has always outweighed and overshadowed his individual needs as a Character. And since ALL good, pure, and virtuous things are Alliance, he naturally comes off as Alliance leaning.
I think that the Horde needs Baine. I don’t think he’s written as an alliance sympathizer but as a buffer against the hordes more savage inclination. A lot of the horde members are rampaging, bloodthirsty blight throwers. Baine and the Tauren in general are a balance to that. They’ll fight for the Horde but you will hardly see them commit atrocious in its name, that’s usually the Orc’s, Troll’s, and Forsaken.
On the flip, Anduin isn’t Baine’s counterpart. Anduin is the sympathizer and he’s naive. I don’t see Baine that way. Baine knew that Sylvanas had gone too far and did something about it. He knew this war was stupid especially because said world was dying.
Even if he doesn’t have as much of a dark side and is more the Superman/Clark Kent character, they need to use him in something other than a faction storyline. He has nothing to do outside of these stories because his race and faction are pointless in WoW’s metaplot. Even in the beta version of the SL intro that’s since been removed, his captors just kind of let him go because they realize there’s no point in even holding him because he’s irrelevant.
A character like Anduin who sticks to their morals and ideals no matter what can be interesting if this creates interesting conflicts and these characters are challenged in interesting ways. They aren’t, usually, as things tend to go their way. I agree that Baine has so much potential as the soul of the family-oriented Horde that we’re just not seeing. He could claim the patriarchal position that his father had. The tauren are perfect for that.
Aesthetically though, he’s the most approchable Horde leader. Like his father, he doesn’t stand inside a hold or sitting on a throne surrounded by guards, he literally greets his visitors at the front door of his lodge.
The very fact that he is one of the only two living Horde members to make it into the Shadowlands (and is likely one of the only two we’re stuck with the entire expansion) and they did that with him is very telling about how Blizz writes the Horde. We are not, nor ever will be, a faction to develop. We are an accessory and tag-along to the grander Alliance narratives, and a plot-device to villain bat to push the next expansion when we do get focus.
Baine is a massive disappointment. I don’t mind that he’s peace oriented, but with how Blizz uses him he’s more of an accessory of Anduin and the “see not ALL Horde bad” button. He lacks the balance his father had between Peace and War; and he’s far too much of a safe-space comfort zone for Blizz to “token” a Horde rep into Alliance stories they aren’t writing to be inclusive for the Horde. I suspect Calia is going to gete built into the same. Where is the version of him he was supposed to have accepted as a part of himself from War Crimes? The Tauren with enough strength to rip Garrosh in half with his bare hands, when he let his rage out? That Baine ALSO needs to exist.
Baine is criticized here for going against the Warchief and being a traitor. He’s also criticized for waiting too long to act becuase clearly he should have gone out guns blazing from the beginning. Which is it? Is he a coward or a conniving traitor?
I think he’s an interesting place inbetween, but the narrative has not done a good job of showing that. I think the fact that he did wait for a while but eventually couldn’t is interesting and speaks to the idea that tauren are calm and peaceful people, but eventually if pushed far enough they stand firm. There was nothing cowardly about what he did, especially since he did it fully expecting that Sylvanas would eventually siege Thunder Bluff to remove him and presumably place it under control of Magatha or something.
