It was in Before the Storm.
Nah, I mean the story with the goblin and gnome couple where the goblin defects from the horde to be with her. I don’t think azerite happened yet in BtS, did it?
It does happen in BtS:
Prologue
It had been plunged deep into the heart of the world, right here in scenic Silithus. The bright side, of course, was that the enormous artifact provided a great deal of what he and the other hundred or so goblins were searching for right this very moment.
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I think it would’ve mattered a lot more if they made Genn wrong, the whole thing is undermined by the undeniable fact that Sylvanas was trying to enslave the valkyr of someone we could very much use as an ally at the time. All that questline really did was affirm Genn if anything lmao.
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It kinda does, though? Players can think what they want, but when the game doesn’t back up that thinking, it’s like the ideas don’t exist. There’s no reflection of them in the game world we are presented.
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…
That’s not how lore works.
Just because it isn’t used in active writing, doesn’t mean the lore doesn’t exist. I mean, again I refer to that meme about the Tauren and why they’re part of the Horde and dislike the Alliance. They have the Alliance assault their homes, desecrate their land, engage in blatant warmongering and commit genocide against an entire Tauren tribe.
They also ally with and arm their enemies, the Grimtotem Tribe (although admittedly that alliance did not last long), but it still meant that many Horde commanders were slain, including General Vaurajo, one of the Tauren Generals serving under Garrosh Hellscream.
All of these are valid reasons why the Tauren would hate the Alliance, but neither Blizzard nor any of the writers working for them are going to constantly bring these points up over and over again.
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I get what you’re saying—the events canonically happened. But if they’re not being used to drive NPC or player feelings, then the fact that they canonically happened doesn’t matter when it comes to player feelings. No NPCs are ever shown to be angry about any of this stuff in current content.
Well, they should, if they want Horde players to feel like they have a reason to fight the Alliance.
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We need Droité. She worked out the timeline on the Silithus attacks.
Odyn deserved what is happening to him. HE is a villain adn Sylvanas was right in dealing with him.
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In terms of faction conflict, I don’t think the problem is that Alliance actions are whitewashed - but rather that Alliance actions are given grounded reasons while Horde actions are made to be almost spurious and over-the-top, all while the story chooses to dwell on Alliance suffering but ignores Horde suffering except for the occasional speech… used by a soon-to-be-villain-batted leader in order to exhort the Horde to bloodshed and now genocide.
For example, I think Hawthorne was actually a good example of actual grey storytelling (…in the moment - I don’t think the long-term aftermath was handled as well as it should have been). Hawthorne did his best to show restraint and spare the civilians he could while still accomplishing his military goals - but none of that changes the fact that he still was:
- Invading and occupying tauren land
- Burning down a tauren camp occupied by civilians
- Caused the death of almost all those civilians
- Capitalized on that civilian-killing victory to then besiege the gate of Mulgore
There’s plenty for the Horde to feel rightfully angry at. Even those who appreciate Hawthorne’s attempt at restraint can still feel justified in fighting and slaying him and his troops, because they are still invaders who will conquer and/or destroy towns.
But Hawthorne has just enough explanation of his actions and his attempts at mercy to keep the Alliance player from feeling truly villainous when working for him. The reasons for the majority of civilian deaths - the quillboar and the ex-prisoner troops Hawthorne was provided with - are just barely removed enough from his direct control that the player can choose whether to feel remorseful about their failure to predict and stop them, or feel sad but not responsible, or just ignore those deaths as a consequence of the chaos of a war.
None of those explanations directly contradict the Horde grievances, but they are enough to assuage most Alliance guilt and responsibility. And that’s how I think all player-involved faction war should be.
The problem with Hawthorne’s story, in my mind, is that A) it was set in the context of Garrosh, both with contemporaneous issues in Cata and tainted by the following villain bat in MoP, and B) the Horde isn’t written as dwelling on the horrors inflicted by that invasion - again, neither in Cata nor in the following expansions.
A: Garrosh’s character and story was framed as a brash warmonger. We lore fans can parse timelines and individual plot elements for a precise view, but the themes and style of the story painted Garrosh as the warmonger… And so the Alliance, as usual, had the themes of a bereaved party trying ultimately to calm things down even as they were literally invading and occupying tauren land. That’s fine for the Alliance player’s POV, but this theme was over-the-top enough that Horde players felt it, too - and that’s unacceptable in a two-player-faction war (unless one side has always been sold as the evil aggressors, but WoW hasn’t).
B: Right out the gate, the tauren seeking to avenge Taurajo are met in their temporary camp that they’d been banished to just for wanting revenge. I think it’s utterly ridiculous. They should have been normal members of the tauren military, fighting back the Alliance invaders - there was no narrative need for them to be banished. (I suspect that it was due to the writers/whoever wanting to keep Baine and Jaina as friends, and thought this was how to do it. -.-) And as much as Taurajo is brought up on the forums, it is rarely referenced or remembered in-game, when it should be an example of both/either Alliance aggression or how even the Alliance’s attempts at attacking only ‘evil’ targets will still cause death and suffering for Horde innocents.
Ultimately, I feel like this was written this way because the writers/directors/whoever at the time honestly didn’t believe that the Horde needed emotional reasons to fight - That they believed in the ‘metal’/WC2 Horde player, where all they needed was a “hey, who wants to kill Alliance?” and didn’t want to waste time on wussy things like remembering the dead and thinking of their noncombatants.
I don’t think villain-batting the Alliance will help the Horde regain or build a better foundation for itself - I think more events like the Orc heritage quest are needed to show what the Horde is, rather than what it fights against. Throw in several more Dranosh-at-the-Wrathgate-type events, where the Horde and Alliance show up on equal terms to battle a shared enemy in the name of their own faction rather than under neutral parties, and let faction rivalry be more about shows of strength and local squabbles rather than invasions and slaying civilians. I don’t think that’s a perfect way out of the mess that the faction story is in right now, but I think that’s one of the better and most plausible methods.
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It’s Golden. Like straight up, she’s literally the one who wrote and pushed for Baine to be okay with Taurajo.
She always writes the Tauren as your stereotypical anti-Amerindian tropes, and how Taurajo was handled by her in her novels and by the in-game quests I am CONFIDENT she had a hand in due to their identical tone and style, is purely her.
Golden’s style of writing never evolved past the violently racist tropes that were normal and accepted in the 80s and 90s. She visibly struggles to get with the time, most visible with her WILD comments at the Thrall panel invoking immigrant/Racial Other motifs incoherently left and right thinking she was really doing something.
I really do want to know what percentage breakdown the dev team is NOW tbh, in the wake of the utter failure of the past 6 years.
If it was net majority Anti WC3 and Pro WC1/2 when Metzen was around until he left (Legion), and what with the swarth of firing/hiring in the wake of the lawsuit, and what with the hemmorhaging of players for both gameplay and story, surely the devs have realized their hubris and error NOW right?
The lack of moral parity will always haunt the narrative until kingdom come.
The fact of the matter is BOTH factions need to have two things:
- An INTERNAL justification for existing, aka why do the “races”/Nations of each Faction WANT to be in unity and collaboration with their peer Nations
- An EXTERNAL justification for existing, aka why do the Nations of each Faction pick that Faction and not The Other Guy
What you describe explains the First Justification
But what is missing eternally is the Second Justification for the Horde
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It reminds me of when Ainhin would still post and wanted Calia to reform the forsaken to being more alliance-acceptable, or something like that, since he wanted to “compromise” by making Lordaeron a joint living-undead neutral territory under the premise that it would be good if the undead didn’t feel trapped on the horde and would instead prefer to be around their living human kin again.
I think the problem with that kind of thinking for the story is that it invalidates what Baal calls the external justification for the horde, that they’re a found family of outcasts. Being othered and on the outside is supposed to be part of the horde’s appeal, but the stuff that makes up the horde needs to be unfairly othered for that to work. And it’s not just about faction wars; I think stuff like having undead elf skins on both sides further undercuts that even during “peacetime” because it reinforces the premise that the alliance is becoming even more tolerant of undead than they previously were with death knights. So then players ask “why not forsaken on both sides” because they’re already shown to work alongside space demons and werewolves and insane eldritch elves and etc. until you wonder what the point of the horde even is, if they don’t seem to be ostracized based on typical fantasy monster tropes anymore.
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I do agree, but I will quibble that a lot of the calls I’ve seen for Alliance villain-batting go into the “make them do something completely evil and stupid”, which I think will not help and will just make things worse.
I think more actions like the above Hawthorne’s attack on the tauren, or Genn’s attack on Sylvanas, would be great. Events that display why the Horde can’t just make peace and join the Alliance, while still being well-explained events Alliance-side which don’t feel the player feel downright villainous for joining in or inexplicably powerless to react to.
Turalyon going full Light zealot, when his whole thing is about not blindly trusting the Light and forgiving even those who destroyed the Light Mother? Not historical/well-explained, and so would build Alliance player resentment against the Horde players for calling for it and removing an entrenched character for little reason.
Genn’s vendetta is about as villainous as this can get (with player involvement), in my mind: The reasons for his (and Rogers’) actions are long, well-documented, and very believably human even if one does not agree with him… but those reasons are not truly applicable in the scenario Genn uses for. He makes some major assumptions to justify his actions… assumptions which can be historically supported in the Alliance’s POV, but not in the Horde’s POV.
And Genn is politically savvy enough to cover his non-existent tail when it comes time to answer for his actions - so even Anduin, or the Alliance player who disagrees with Genn, can feel that there is no legal avenue to remove him… while the Horde player sees that Genn is allowed to get away with his stunts. (Because if the anti-Anduins get purged or slain by the Horde too easily, it leads back to the same issue of ‘the Alliance is good now, so how can you justify fighting them?’)
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My own wish is that the Alliance kept a strong theme of abhorring the undead - where even the kindest Alliance PoV is a belief that it is better to destroy their friend’s undead husk to free their soul from undeath’s painful corruption while some of the soul is still left to save, and even the most accepting Alliance who won’t actively strike down the Forsaken they meet might still bring the idea up now and then.
The Forsaken have a clear reason not to trust or feel safe around the Alliance, and the Alliance doesn’t have to be villain-batted as evil in order to have this (sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect) belief - freeing undead souls by slaying undead and purifying the bodies is a recurring quest objective, after all.
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I mean there goes another Goldenism
Roux writes Turalyon as a self-righteous crusader who almost enjoys holding an orc mother in bondage while his wife mutilates her psyche.
Golden then slides him right back into Muh Goody Two Shoes Precious Boy in the subsequent novel that loves and finds worth in the undead after trying to Light-nuke his ex-mentor
I think Roux was better than Golden by orders of magnitude, it’s more realistic due to the nature of the Light itself and his being infused with it, not unsimilar to Anduin’s Magic Bones nonsense.
Alas, Golden.
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I’m genuinely getting tired of every time we follow a thread of why the Alliance is rendered impotent and the Horde rendered pointless, it almost invariably ends at Golden.
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Personally, the reason why I find a villainous light antagonist appealing (and why the Scarlet Crusade remains so) is because that feels like a proper trope inversion of putting monster races up against traditional-looking knights and holy men but simply flipping the labels of who you’re meant to root for.
So in that light (pun intended), I get why people ask for Turalyon to become a light zealot. It’s because you’re taking a theme that’s already coded in WoW to be powered off of extremism and taking that to its limit. And paladin is still the original “alliance” class in WoW, same as how shaman will always be more horde, both owing to how they were originally faction-exclusive.
I’ll never really get why Genn is seen as an answer for a compelling alliance antagonist for horde players, though. Not only because he’s a werewolf, but “I hate you because your side murdered my son” is up there with Jaina’s “I hate you for blowing up my city” and now Tyrande’s “I hate you for genociding my people”. That feels inherently incompatible with any stories where the horde player is still meant to feel like a hero.
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Unless of course all the Undead Gilneans hadn’t been killed and the fight over Gilneas was framed more as a civil war between the Worgen-Cursed Living and Undead.
Maybe double down on the trope and give all the Gilnean Undead the Vampyr curse
Goold ol’ Vampires vs Werewolves.
Alas, Blizzard.
If you fight the alliance you are evil by default. That is the setting Blizzard agrees to. And the Horde narrative suffers from it because we can’t get rid of our true enemy without villan batting and losing our lore characters.
I’m fine with that.
This is the main point that rankles me, though - Turalyon is the wrong character for it. It’s like if a bunch of Alliance posters repeatedly said that Thrall should lose control of his bloodlust and go all lok’tar ogar on Stormwind so that the Alliance can beat him up to put all the evil orc themes to rest - Thrall is defined by not being that orcish theme. Turalyon is defined as being devout but not fanatical.
I’m perfectly up for the Alliance having a fanatical paladin/Light-user arm, but I don’t think Turalyon should be part of it.
Turalyon’s worst to the Horde, to me, should be like Roux’s depiction: he will not go out of his way to fight the Horde, but will unhappily but willingly cause harm to Horde members in order to achieve what he believes is a not-solely-Light-driven necessary goal.
Probably because he’s at a faction-leader level. My main other thought is Rogers, but she’s a much more minor character, and also has the “because Southshore” background. Otherwise, there’s the idea of the new Alliance firebrand character that’s been tossed around in a few forum topics, but that character won’t have the same history as an established character, and I’m not sure how that will affect the Horde’s view of them as an antagonist.