Its not a moral reason, but having Night elf lands that close to the heart of the Horde is definitely a weak spot. Personally I’d have rather they fortified the everlasting hell out of the Morishan ramparts and placed a few fortifications along the Southfury, but that wouldn’t prevent alliance dickery on the Eastern Kingdoms.
I mean the whole point of Teldrassil in the original WoT pitch was that it was a hostage. The night elf population of Darnassus being treated kindly was the carrot, and treating them badly was the stick to get the Allaince to not relaliate and to come to the negotiating table.
What good is the moral highground in a realpolitik sense? Thrall bent over backwards to try to get the Horde and Alliance to see eye to eye and prevent war, and the Allaince still tried to kidnap him.
I definitely won’t disagree with that. I don’t think anyone really liked the start of BFA’s story… or the middle… or the end…
You’re point? I thought the option to choose how your character did things was ultimately a good thing for the sake of RP.
Are you jealous that Alliance characters don’t get similar options to be bad?
So you admit that calling Saurfang evil for it and not Hawthorne is a double standard. Good to know.
It’s still a promise broken. Magni would have been disappointed.
It wouldn’t have worked.
As we can see, the Alliance tried the same thing by assaulting Dazar’Alor and killing Rastakhan, all as a message saying, “this is what happens to allies of the Horde, so stop trying to be nice to them.” Instead, all it did was make the Zandalari angry and solidify their union.
Alliance would have retaliated similarly after War of Thorns.
I think the major difference was that the Alliance wasn’t able to hold onto Daz. They killed the king and bailed (with as much loot as possible to add insult to injury). The horde was planning on actively occupying Teldrassil in this case, so aggression would immediately result bad outcomes for your average night elf.
In the end it all comes down to author fiat anyway.
Well, if we want to say soldiers going against direct orders is a sign of an incompetent leader, then we have to say Saurfang is such a leader.
I never called Saurfang evil. Least not for that reason. I think he is incompetent, and I think he is a blind follower. Teldrassil was a line crossed for him, but man did he have a hard time actually bringing himself to doing something about it.
The fact that Sylvanas was able to convince him into invading Night Elf territory also leads me to believe he is weak willed.
Evil? A solid maybe, but not for the reasons you seem to think I implied.
if the Horde wasn’t a direct threat to world peace and the health of our planet, then the Alliance would not have been forced too.
There is a difference though in that if the people who killed the night elf civilians were agents of Sylvanas who were loyal to her orders and not Saurfang’s then there’s little he could have done regardless, at least not in that estimate.
Personally I think the thing Saurfang mostly did wrong was going along with the War of Thorns in the first place. As you said, he was a bit too loyal for his own good, but that’s true for a lot of orcs and Horde in general who swear oaths of fealty to the Warchief.
Hence why it’s a good thing it was abolished as a position of power.
If the same can be said of the soldiers under Hawthorne’s command than he can make a similar claim. If you want to blame whoever decided to conscript criminals as soldiers, feel free.
If you want to claim that the Alliance did it because they were at war with the Horde and a have an equal footing, then at least be culpable in the fact that promises were still broken and say, “sorry Magni but we kind of had to.”
Of course, this is all assuming they had any intention of honoring that promise to begin with, which I’m still unconvinced about.
The Zandalari didn’t come to Azshara and offer to cede land in exchange for peace.
Azshara was already expanding into their territory, clashing with them, and winning every engagement. She “graciously” offered to let them keep some of the Zandalar mountain range if they promised to stop fighting back. And the Zandalari accepted it because they knew they had no choice because they couldn’t stand up to the Night Elf empire’s magic.
It was a textbook example of intentional campaign of genocide and displacement but since it’s Night Elves, the narrative never calls them out on it.
“If X had just surrendered all their territory, then Y wouldn’t have had to kill a bunch of them as they moved into it and pushed them out!” Is such a ridiculous line of argument.
When it comes to Taurjo, I blame the AWOL soldiers and the Quillboar, not the Alliance, because the Alliance was actively trying to avoid civilian casualties.
When it comes to Teldrassil, however, it’s the opposite. The Horde as a an institution participated in the Genocide of the Night Elves. Sylvanas gave the order as simply “Burn it”, and it traveled down the chain of command and near instantly, soldiers of the Horde were not only throwing fire at Teldrassil, but enchanting the flames to burn hotter, and calling on the Elements to spread the fire faster. Sylvanas never told them to do that, she just said burn it… It was the Horde soldiers, with the approval of their leader, who took the initiative to make sure that the fire was all encompassing and unescapable.
Saurfang might have been a sad, old boy about it, but I feel his morals were already compromised when he decided to go to war in the first place.
So that is the distinction that I make, why I say the Horde is responsible for Teldrassil, but the Alliance is not responsible for Taurajo
If they hadn’t… they could have lost the war, and no one would have been able to stop the Horde from killing the World Soul.
That is your bias showing through. Of course Anduin fully intended to honor the promise for the sake of healing the world. That’s his one and only character motivation.
Alliance safety net “If we don’t talk about the active genocide of the trolls and close our eyes really hard, than it never could have happened because it wasn’t spelled out word for word for us…plus we didn’t see it.”
Remember when arguing with alliance fanboys, all their crimes need to be explicitly spelled out or they will claim it never happened. They will justify just about ANYTHING, because Horde bad, troll savage
The Alliance and Horde aren’t real. Just would like every one to keep that in mind in this ongoing raging insightful chit chat. They’re fictional. You are not a part of either. You’re a person playing a video game.
What? Didn’t the Alliance conscript soldiers who had questionable moral values (ie. criminals) into their army? Yes?
That makes them responsible.
Stop trying to dodge around Alliance’s guilt on their misdeeds. It’s not like they have that many to worry about anyway.
Uhhh… When has the Horde ever threatened the world soul? I’m still in the middle of the Alliance war campaign but I don’t recall ever seeing anything that makes any sort of aggression towards Magni, the Heart Chamber, or anything of that sort.
Or is this a case of “Horde mining for Azurite = Horde Threatening World Soul”?
If that’s the case isn’t the Alliance just as guilty of that threat by also mining Azurite?
That is how Blizzard has written the Lore. We can’t make assumptions that the Lore shows zero evidence of.
Maybe? But when does the not happen?
Are you implying that this sort of thing only happens when Soldiers had a history of crime?
That is a naive and fundamentally incorrect view of war. The Alliance is responsible for what it does as a united institution, not for the actions of AWOL soldiers going against their orders.
By literally mining the wound at the end of Legion…
We have already been over this. The Alliance did this only to fight the Horde, who was already a threat to Azeroth. If they lost the war, then no one could stop them.
Alliance existing is a crime against Azeroth. Loads of fanaticism has been born from the alliance. See xe’ra and the army of the light which got born because of E’lune.
I am hardly an Alliance fan boy. Just ask any real fan boy here. When compared to the Horde though, the Alliance have seldom ever been portrayed as villainous.
