It’s not just about fitting in the Alliance, they are in risk of being wiped by a Scourge 2.0 Sylvanas horde, the true enemy so far isn’t presenting a real treat to them.
Also, please don’t bring boring real life political stuff into a nice WoW universe discussion, please, Umbric doesn’t deserve to be badly labeled like that.
To be fair that applies to the Velves and Dark Irons pretty well too. That should spark conflict with the majority of the Alliance who is more concerned with righteousness.
I’m not criticizing that righteousness (I’m team Saurfang), just that the Void Elves and Dark Irons are more concerned at winning at any cost than winning the right way which is the rest of the Alliance for the most part.
They joined the Alliance before Sylvanas burned Teldrassil and they have no reason to believe she wants to kill everyone. Again, Sylvanas’ war is a mortal concern compared to the immortal Void and Light
Honestly, as bad as Sylvannas is, I keep thinking about everything Garrosh did. Gilneas? That was his order to Sylvannas. Theramore was all him. Vale of Eternal Blossoms? All him. All the Cata stuff? All the MoP stuff? Sylvannas is getting there and if unchecked, sure, she’ll surpass him. But if we’re talking about how Blizzard says the Horde’s not evil while showing us in-game a different tale? Garrosh is a huge part of that tale.
As much as I wish the Alliance could have conflicts that aren’t either “well, Cthulhu is about to destroy the world again, better call the Horde for our annual team-up” or “well, the Horde’s trying to kill us all. Better call half the Horde for our annual team-up”, with a handful of “this guy is super-mad at the Horde, better remind them how much we need the Horde right now”? As much as I’d like that, I also don’t trust current Blizzard story writers to tell it without the Alliance getting our version of “story development”.
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Blizz did say Sylvanas considers Garrosh an amateur so she will go past what he did. (And I personally will enjoy every minute of it. No mental gymnastics this time)
i think that the biggest problem here is not only the horde being an existencial threat.
is the high king nonsense, i just don’t understand, the alliance should be an alliance of equals.
Remember pre-bfa where we were speculation “genn or jaina will burn to tree to incite the war!”
now both of them are full on board with the anduin train, i don’t see them betraying anduin at all because apparently, he his “the king”
The lord admiral of kultiras and the king of gilneas call “king” a little boy just because his father died.
So even if they disagree with something would they be betraying the king that they named? (and also they adore anduin) and we are talking of the two big names who could have been easily the ones who not only started the conflict but also taking the alliance to a more #morallygraymane territory.
just… why the hell blizzard thinks that was a good idea?
already removed any form of true internal conflict before the expansion even started.
tl’dr high king is a cancer to the alliance storyline, and the story in general.
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Really, that’s the crux of why the Alliance doesn’t have the internal conflict or drama that the Horde does, and why a lot of their storylines fall flat or bland. While the Horde can have stories about the orcs, or stories about the trolls, or stories about the forsaken or blood elves (sorry tauren, goblins and pandaren. Not you allied races though, you got yours already) because each of those races have distinction within the Horde, the Alliance is written to be a bunch of different flavor humans. Sometimes the night elves, dwarves or draenie get thrown a bone, but only if the rest of the expansion focused on the humans.
When Blizzard brought back Varian in Wrath, they focused on him and his people almost to the exclusion of all else. During MoP, when the night elves should have been noticing similarities between the Vale of Eternal Blossom’s magic and the Well of Eternity, they instead got some strange immortality quest in Krasarang. During Legion when they were discovering parts of their homeland they long thought vanished, they only had Tyrande make off-handed comments about it. Also during Legion, when we were dealing with the titans that the dwarves had been so focused on for centuries, basing their entire belief system on them, there was not a prominent dwarf to be seen. At least Velen got some screen time with Argus to be the voice of his people’s longing for their homeworld and sadness at what has happened to it.
But because Varian died, those stories couldn’t be written. Because the Alliance is an alliance of humans now. So how can conflict between different races exist within the Alliance when those other races barely exist?
It’s the most frustrating thing about Alliance storytelling. All the missed opportunities.
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Because that’d mean there would be effort put into the Alliance story and the issues spurred are not caused by the Horde existing!
And we know we can’t have that.
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Blizzard really needs to stop putting warmongers in the Warchief position, it would make the Horde look way better and the Alliance wouldn’t be a punchbag. Maybe they should get rid of Warchief title and create something like a war council, similarly they could remove the stupid High King title in the Alliance and replace it with a council too.
With this, the different groups and races that made up the factions would be more independent and free do to their own affairs instead of being dragged by the faction leader will.
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And yeah, Garrosh was just as bad, i didn’t object against that, his horde was just as brutal.
As Happy pointed out in another thread, the vices of Alliance races are minimized.
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Well you hit the nail on the head I think.
What’s interesting to someone is stale to another.
What’s stale to someone is interesting to another.
You think Internal Conflict would make the Alliance more interesting, and you play Horde, the faction all about Internal Conflict.
Forcing the Alliance to a point of Internal Conflict would just be homogenizing the two further. The Horde is defined by it’s fractures, the Alliance by it’s unity, and we each play the faction most interesting to us.
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Perhaps you do. Others prioritize the races they like over factions. Its just coincidence that said faction happens to enhance their race’s story or suppresses it.
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I said it before in a post on the old forums and I’ll repeat myself here.
You play Alliance because it’s like getting your favorite food. You’re there for the consistency of the experience and not for something radically different each time you order. If you got your favorite food but it had some new sauce or spice or was eagerly massacring civilians that kind of defeats the entire purpose of it.
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“Scattered incidents” includes trying to kill every Goblin in the Bilgewater cartel for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time and Goblin miners in the Barren for racist revenge. Dwarves being Dwarves in involves wiping out the Stonespire Tauren. Their current noble hero tried to do exactly that Sylanas did and also had Dalaran shop keepers killed.
Even in BfA they kill Zandalari exiles which have nothing to do with the war, kill Goblin miners so they can loot corpses, and ally with the people who exterminated the Drust.
Blizzard always gave Alliance crimes short-shrift in the plot. Though obviously they have had Sylvanas go over-the-top with Teldrasil.
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BLizzard fails to understand that the playerbase of the factions are not homogenized. The reason there is no obvious inner turmoil in the alliance (Despite the fact the Night Elves, Lightforged, and Void Elves should all dislike each other, and the Dark irons should be met with constant suspicion do to their past) blizzard fails to realize the alliance isn’t a single nation. It’s why the High king position was created, so they could act like the Alliance wasn’t a bunch of nations working together, but a singular empire ruled over by a righteous king. While i’m not sure about all the story team members, 2 big personalities did play humans, Metzen was a Human Paladin main, while Golden plays a human warlock.
But finally the big issue is this, blizzard like good vs evil storylines and internal conflict in the alliance will lack that. It’s why Sylvanas was made warchief, so BfA could be a good evil storyline, the good Anduin/Saurfang vs the Evil Sylvanas and Old Gods. Mostly because good and evil make for better raids. Grey and Grey encourages player choice, which blizzard seems to hate, despite this being an RPG. A good internal conflict should have both sides have points, but blizzard knows that grey and grey means less raid raid raid.
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They did try to eliminate the witnesses of their attempts to capture Thrall, but it wasn’t with the intent to systematically exterminate the Bilgewaters as you imply. Two very different types of war crime, and still one of only four you mention.
By goblin miners, I’m assuming you’re talking about Silithus and… Nope, sorry, that’s not a war crime. Civilians or not, they were mining azerite for Sylvannas’s war machine. Military contractors would be the modern term. They’d be a viable threat to stop the flow of azerite.
Being allies with someone, like the Kul Tirans, isn’t a war crime. That the Kul Tirans tried to exterminate a people who also tried to exterminate the Kul Tirans sounds far more like survival than a war crime, and is portrayed as such.
As for killing zandalari exiles? I mean, unless they’re explicitly told these are exiles, then targetting them is just a miscommunication. An unfortunate one, but hardly comparable to 90% of the Horde’s war campaign.
Even if I grant you this entire list as being valid, you had to scramble as far back as Cata to compare a list of crimes to what I can find Hordeside during BfA. And my list will still dwarf yours in length and severity. I stand by my point.
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Except that she didn’t do it, did she? She chose not to. While possibly irradiated, I might add and with infinitely better reasoning to go about it. Why raise Theramore? Shall we speak of what was done there, with Horde support? While Jaina was denied support, even in direct retaliation. Shall we speak of what became of the survivors?
Your cherry picked example is something that was contemplated by a diseased, rogue agent, in response to that very thing being actually done. And even they knew better.
That’s not even what happened.
The rest was addressed very eloquently by Alynsa. I have nothing to add, but that discrete reference was made to the Southern Barrens—such that I assume she meant both it and more recent events. The event in question occurs at the end of the questline (alliance side), which is extremely well written, and that’s from someone who dislikes cata.
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Kind of hard to write internal conflict when it’s so easy to unite against an enemy like Sylvanas. Sure, they can have different methods and strategies on how best to deal with her and the Horde, but when your enemy is literally a threat to literally all things living, you’re going to suck it up and get along regardless of viewpoint.
This also has a lot to do with how Sylvanas has been written. Her goals may have been to divide and break the spirit of the Alliance, but everything she has done has been so extreme it’s turning elements of her own faction against her, while bringing the Alliance closer together than ever before.
They may have disagreed over Darkshore, but the Alliance is The Alliance. No member is forced to swear an oath of loyalty to Anduin. It was well within Tyrande’s rights to march her forces to Darkshore, because it was as she saw fit.
And trust me, I’m still waiting for the Night Elves and Worgen to go Rogue and start doing some morally questionable stuff. If anything, the story needs it desperately.
I feel like this is a point which deserves considerably more examination, and I was mulling it over for a bit and here’s what came to mind:
The Alliance races were, initially, written with a variety of flaws. Corrupt and racist humans, imperialist dwarves, isolationist night elves… probably something for the gnomes that I can’t think of right now. The point is, there WAS a lot of material to work with, but Blizzard was either unwilling or too uncomfortable to follow through on the implications of these themes for reasons which I shall get into below.
Gnomes and dwarves are, to oversimplify somewhat, basically different-shaped and -sized humans, so it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that the humans wouldn’t have a ton of objections to working in a close alliance with these other races, even if there was some grumbling. But we all know that real humans can be incredibly intolerant of that which they perceive as the “other”. I’m not saying the official position of the Stormwind government should be suspicion of the Night Elves, Draenei, and Worgen; on the contrary, the official position would most definitely be that these races are our close allies. But, the more conservative elements of human society - the church, the aristocracy - should most definitely have been portrayed as uneasy with their nonhuman allies, and of course openly hostile and unforgiving to those nonhumans who are not their allies. Most particularly, the almost-human quality of the Forsaken should be especially reviling - the concept of the “uncanny valley” could definitely have been examined here.
Dwarves have been, since the beginning of WoW, moving into the lands of “savages” and scouring the land for valuable artifacts, never mind who might have lived there or what the artifacts might mean to those people. They’re too ignorant of the “real” value, and so a little extermination, strong-arming, and fortifying the land of “savage” peoples is nothing compared to the immense cultural and scientific value of Titan artifacts, right? This is an incredibly imperialistic viewpoint to hold - very analogous to certain periods in history - and what has inevitably come out of it is that valuable cultural items from all over the world have ended up in the hands of invaders. Invaders that might have been polite, might have imagined they were working for the “greater good”, might even have used their knowledge for some kind of scientific or societal advancement, but invaders all the same. The Kul Tirans did this as well, moving into the lands of the Drust, then clutching their pearls at how savage the native peoples reacted to having their land stolen and settled.
You could also easily tie in a third facet here; religion. Though WoW’s religion is loosely defined at best across any society, you have a strong and powerful minority both in the church at Stormwind and in the new addition of the Lightforged who view their path to personal and eternal salvation as the only true path, and seek to bring as many people into their form of worship as possible, no matter what they need to do in order to accomplish this. This third example is more theoretical - I won’t pretend AU Draenei is a real example - but the groundwork is totally there for this to have been a flaw in the races of the Alliance.
So why haven’t any of these things been looked at more deeply? There’s the rub.
These things I have mentioned are still very, very sore and contested points in our contemporary world, and so I think Blizzard is very hesitant to associate one of their factions (the faction that looks most like us, humans) with the very real and very bitter evils of imperialism, racism, and religious zealotry. It’s a little too on the nose, as one might say. And so, they have steadily sanded away these rough edges from the races of the Alliance, or just never introducing potential flaws (such as dwarven greed), in favor of presenting only stock fantasy good-guy tropes where human flaws do not exist or live in only the hearts of a clearly misguided few who are quickly discovered and excised.
There SHOULD be more conflict. Humans should be suspicious of some of their allies. Dwarves should be causing diplomatic issues with their unauthorized expeditions into other peoples’ land. The Lightforged should be aggressively proselytizing among their new allies, believing their faith to be the path to salvation (and also bitterly suspicious of the void-wielding elves.) Instead, for reasons of cowardice or incompetence, Blizzard has chosen to ignore these deeper themes, and instead highlight only the flaws of the monstrous, nonhuman races - the Horde. Bonus points if you notice that the Blood Elves, another extremely humanlike race, also usually manage to escape serious discussion of their flaws.
I wanted to address this but didn’t want to make a separate post. I think that a lot of the very negative reaction you get from some Horde players stems from a related problem - right now, we feel that what we are getting (Sylvanas’ super evil Horde) is not what we were sold on when we signed up to be Horde. Finding that the ground has shifted so dramatically beneath our feet has led to a lot of bad faith.
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