Whenever I see anyone bring up the story from the latest patch, it’s usually to bemoan its writing, but I haven’t seen these complaints go into much detail. I personally enjoyed the story, I thought it was fun to see how there are still people in the Alliance and Horde who utterly despise each other despite their leaders going all in on friendship and forgiveness.
So I’m asking you, forum strangers, what am I missing? Should I jump on the Legacy of Arathor hate train?
It’s a perfect confluence of faction brain, Bliz’s usual mid writing and outrage streamers with thousands of orbiters drumming up discourse over nothing
Anger drives engagment so right wing outrage merchants make mountains out of molehills and rile up their fanbases which the stupidest takes.
RIght wingers hate it because
Left wingers critique it because
and also, a both sides criticism is that the end questline cinematic was a little rough lol
What’s ibidem?
Your comment also reminded me of the quest where a bunch of human refugees were revealed to secretly be enemies, which I did feel was in remarkably poor taste. That was definitely my least favorite part of the storyline.
And of course ‘both sides are equally bad’ is an unbelievably cringe thing to say in 2025.
It’s a stuffy, archaic and oh so academic way of saying “idem too” in latin
Shorthand, look it up so you learn it better than me explaining it to you
they weren’t refugees, rather fascists snuck in with the refugees to cause damage, which indeed resonates with the whole “T Word are infiltrating the country” idea on the right wing, so yeah
These two points were the most egregious to me. Because Etrigg and Gey’arah both point out that they KNOW the Red Dawn is trying to set up the horde, so the alliance would turn on them.
Somehow that equates to Lets murder the trolls. Just to be sure. Like….what was the point of murdering a bunch of innocent bystanders who weren’t bothering anyone at the time?
The second point though. Danath stripping Marrin of her name and title and letting her walk off was dumb. Because I’m pretty sure that’s never actually stopped anyone in the past and would just give more legitimacy to her cause.
I would have done
I feel like it demonstrates that blizzard doesn’t know its playerbase.
cause if she really was just wandering the roads as a lordless rhonin, everyone would immediately walk outside and gank her.
alliance fans mostly hate it cuz their human fantasy of trying to make world domination was never justified.
I’m getting so tired of Blizzard’s constant need to beat the Trolls into the dirt. Off the top of my head, there were only three expansions where we don’t raid their homes and steal their stuff - WOD (because we were off in Orc land), Legion, and DF.
Legion still had anti-Troll stuff via the Human-lore artifacts
DF had foreshadowed that it would reveal Troll origins, which they didn’t do, but we sure did kill a lot of dark skinned polynesian motif humanoids with elemental affinities
A part of me thinks the Djardarin were originally intended to be the Proto Trolls that were teased for DF, but they decided to go with a name change instead.
I want to add to this.
-They threw us in jail with our weapons intact, which felt kind of like an insult to the audience. They’ve thrown us in jail before in more realistic ways. It’s like they think we’re stupid, or they just don’t care about immersion in RPG storytelling.
-We got knocked out by slowly moving guards when we kill cosmic horrors on a regular basis in a group of 20 or less.
-Characters bemoaning war in a game called Warcraft, as though the writers really don’t understand the setting they’re writing for.
-Faerin came off as dismissive, condescending, platitudinous, and out-of-touch from the masses she’s supposedly trying to help.
-A story that COULD have been about the material conditions that commoners face in a war economy, resource shortages, priorities between national security and social welfare of the populace…
…was thrown out the window by scapegoating everything on the obvious bad guy faction, allowing the Alliance to remain as boring and perfect as ever.
This questline was childish. It made me embarrassed to play this game. Do you realize how silly normies think WoW players are these days? And I’m including normies that regularly play video games. If I go to my local bar, or talk to coworkers, or go to the park and the conversation turns to video games? I honestly feel embarrassed when I admit I like WoW. Still.
Usual lore inconsistency post:
I hate it for two umbrella reasons.
I think the Red Dawn is a neat concept in theory but it is poorly thought out and even more poorly executed. It could be a really interesting coalition of humans who have different ideologies but are too weak by themselves to achieve their goals. It is kind of what made the Horde in Warcraft 2 so cool. A force of old rivals who put their grudges aside in the pursuit of something greater.
But that isn’t what it feels like. Instead, it just kind of feels like a weird, Ethno-exclusive favorite color (red) club.
The next reason is the preachy nature of it. It is worse than infantile “wacism bad” writing, it goes a step further and demonizes national and racial pride.
“Pride in our legends foments Stromic superiority” coming from Danath is not only super our of character, but it is also an evil, genocidal statement. The reality is that Arathi is an ancestral homeland to humans. And the Horde’s place there is that of colonizers. And we are told by the narrative itself that it is morally wrong to resist colonial oppression and displacement. And instead one should hate their own history, culture, and folklore. When we all know that if this story was told in reverse… Such as Orcs shaming themselves for killing Kul Tirans at Tiragarde Keep, the Horde players would hate this story just as much as those they criticize for hating it now.
I loathe that the mag’har were transplanted to Hammerfall to check a “token Horde presence” box in what the designer called a fundamentally Human story.
I’d say this happened sooner. Like, towards the end of BFA when Sylvanas bailed on the Horde. Geya’rah, who was all for the war before that, suddenly doesn’t want war anymore because… she didn’t want to lose her position as Overlord of the Mag’har I guess?
I feel like Geya’rah was supposed to mature into less of a hardliner over time, they just can’t be bothered to write Horde characters doing anything but dying or moping these days. So she gets to speedrun growth like everyone else in a way that implies Dreadlords have replaced half the population.