The horde has had a troll warchief and forsaken bloodelf warchief. Do you think Anduin would ever step down (or die) as high King and let someone like Tyrande or Genn run things?
Doubtful.
More likely another racial leader simply get more exposure while others get pushed to the background and irrelevance.
Kind of like Velen in the Darkshore leadup quest where he just stood silently watching everyone else talk.
Blizzard decided to explore Jaina for this expansion and you can already see certain posters here frothing at mouth because of it.
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Not until he splits open like an egg.
You abuse this word.
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why it matters here, or why do you care? what are you trying to accomplish?
Maybe isn’t, and maybe i have at least 2 other languages who are my strong suit
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Anduin has been shown in comics set 50 years from now. So he’s going to be the High King of the Alliance FOREVER.
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A non-human heading the Alliance?!
No seriously, too much of the alliance story and Alliance Pride as a whole has been wrapped up and simplified into human-ethnocentrism. Blizzard literally went out and stated that the Alliance is “humans and their sidekicks.” Everyone is entirely dependent on Stormwind to even function, and Blizzard re-wrote/retconned everything to justify it. The Night elves have suffered a humiliation conga since Vanilla to strip them of being a nation equivalent to the horde and alliance and boost Stormwind’s importance in the alliance. The Dwarves were the only race to actually have a case at being the lynchpin of the Alliance, but then Varian conveniently took a page from the Dictator’s Handbook undermined Moira’s claim and the writers turned her into a Wrynn sycophant in the end. It would undue much of the “work” Blizzard put into the High King story of showcasing humans right to rule.
Even if Anduin somehow bit the bullet or stepped down, Blizzard would move Nether and Azeroth to justify a human face on the Alliance, no matter how absurd. The other races don’t matter in their eyes, and never will be more than vassals of a human-lead empire, happy in servitude. Don’t like indignant Human Paladins passively standing guard on their precious Moral High Ground™" armed with Lawful Stupid Overdrive? Well tough, that’s the audience Blizzard writes the Alliance story-line for. Faction pride for non-humans is cheering at the sidelines for your human lords as they joust with the savage Horde and bowing to “Your King” who checks all the marks to actually be an Emperor.
If you want diversity in your faction, the Horde is waiting for you.
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They said this when they literally made the opposite with the horde, who was even more “orcs and sidekciks” than the alliance, since as the name suggest, was supposed to be an alliance of races
things get real crap after varian being called High king, i cringed evertyme other races, include the elves, call him and Anduin “My king”
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It is this rhetoric what i was thinking about when i did my mega-fan thread. While there’s some truth in it (on why Blizz doesn’t develop more other races that aren’t human) I myself atribute it to either laziness or lack of time and resources.
It’s actually not only happening on Alliance too. Horde has its identity reduced to “Blight Spreaders and Friends” for BFA.
I’m not saying that Blizz hasn’t done poorly to Night Elves by the way, they had, and a lot. But let’s be honest. What do (a group) of the Night Elves “mega-fans” would like to happen to be satistied with the story? Kill humans? Also kill orcs. Having power levels over 10000000000 so they can kick litterally everyone else’s behind? That’s not happening, even if they would devote themselves more to the Night Elf Fantasy.
It’s like what Droite said on another thread. Actually pleasing Night Elf fans with his uber-high fantasy is just imposible on this game.
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Its scary how times have changed. The Horde is more of an alliance than the actual Alliance, and the Alliance is more like the old Horde than the WoW horde ever was.
Also the Horde is the only faction to dip into its “WC2 roots.” The Alliance never has, outside of out of game advertisements of humans vs orcs.
No where to the extent of the Alliance. There has been no “Human fatigue,” and likely never will. Humans are put on a pedestal in the Alliance because cashing in on ethnocentrism is an easy way to drum up support and popularity with little effort because its based on association. Never mind the Horde has actually had non-orc warchiefs.
I recall in a Speech class textbook the dangers of using ethnocentrism in a speech. Its easy to go overboard and marginalize people not of the same ethnicity as the one you are appealing to, and even dangerous as it can come across as racial superiority. It seems Blizzard feel for this common trap in writing. Its easy to write for a human being the leader and overcoming hard odds with poorly thought out notions like “determination” or “spirit” instead of giving a reason backed by real thinking or biology. Its an extremely common trope in fantasy. Its the lowest common denominator in writing. Hell, Bioware straight up said in did in regards to Mass Effect not having playable aliens.
Don’t believe me? look it up on Tvtropes.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HumansAreSpecial
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MostWritersAreHuman
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EarthIsTheCenterOfTheUniverse
The fact of the matter is, Humans are the rulers of the alliance not just because Blizzard likes writing for them, but because Blizzard despises writing for the alliance outside of key characters. Blizzard as gone as far as to state they dislike writing for the Alliance back in Cataclysm because writing everything with a Lawful Good tint to it is boring and hard to come up with new ideas with. The High King title exists only to simply the alliance as a faction to one leader and justify the Alliance doing nothing but sit around for the Horde to beat up and kick off yet another faction conflict, as well as a cheap attempt to manufacture “Faction Pride” the only way they know how, by copying the Horde.
How does this tie into Night elves? Its simple: They don’t belong in the Alliance. As a druidic nature-based race, they are the anathema of the rest of the civilized Alliance. Chaotic Neutral cannot co-exist with Lawful Good. So Blizzard reacts with retcons and intentionally ignoring conflict that is natural with conflicting alignments. This also ties in with Reallyhappy’s theory that Blizzard targets Night elves because they actually have a strong lore foundation, and its easier to destroy than create new lore as well as Evil acts while Good reacts. The Gnomes and Draenei’s losses are backstory, the night elves are losing everything in game time. The Worgen are an exception, but Blizzard has been ignoring them like the Tauren usually are horde side.
As for the rest of your argument, I’m not going to bother wasting my time. Come back with one that doesn’t hinge on hyberbole and character assassination and maybe I’ll deign a response.
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This actually helps my case. You and perhaps other members of the fandom just want out of the Alliance (and probably out of the Horde as well) so they can be a
Powerhouse that beats everybody.
I already admitted that Blizz has done poorly to Night Elves. But that other option? Ain’t gonna happen. And you know what? It’s okay that it doesn’t. We’re not going to suddenly have a mega strong third faction with only 1 race as a member just because.
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It actually does not. No where in my argument did I bring up the night elves dominating anything. They simply don’t belong where they are now. Blizzard in their Lawful Good Overdrive passion, decided to just debase them and make the night elves like all the other little raindeer because they’ve made up their mind how the alliance should and will be, damn the consequences. Forget even bothering to waste brainpower to make them work well within the alliance, just nerf them and use them as a punching bag to start conflict and prop Varian/Anduin up as God Emperor of the Stormwind Empire.
I’d rather Blizzard sit down and spend actual brainpower writing the alliance story with nuance outside of a last-minute reaction to the Horde’s second crisis of faith. And probably made due with their promise of “MoRaLlY gReY” and dial back the 8-year old hero fantasy complete with the elven trophy waifu. They want to cash in on the Game of Thrones craze? Do it outside of Kul-tiras. Bring conflict in the alliance. Show us how and why Anduin is High King. Stop making the story and other characters bend over backwards to praise Anduin. Let Anduin make mistakes and get called out on it. Throw this “unity” drivel out the window, the Horde is the family like Vol’jin said, not the alliance. Bonus round: Let the dwarves of Ironforge be the dominate race and city of the alliance instead of sloppily retconning everything to put Stormwind on a pedestal.
The Alliance can be so much more than just a half-brained reaction to the Horde doing anything.
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TBF reindeer aren’t that little and can get pretty big…
Anduin shouldn’t be leading the entire Alliance, nor should anyone else.
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The odd thing is “The Alliance” isn’t an alliance as currently written. In order for that to be true every individual nation should be able to act of there own accord.
as plainly shown by the existance of a “high king” they are not an alliance but his subjects no different from how the Roman Empire would leave the heads of conquered lands in place but ultimately under there control to placate there people.
A King has subjects. An Alliance has members.
but the game has had to limit the scope of the “Alliance” due to how weaak the horde were originally.
The Night Elves by themselves could face the entire Horde (pre-Wrath)
The Dwarves by themselves could face the entire Horde (pre-TBC)
The DarK Irons by themselves could face the entire Horde (Pre-TBC)
but this did not only happen to the alliance faction, the Zandalari have taken a fairly large step back as they should have been able to face both the alliance and the horde, originally they were WoWs version of the british empire.
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Can’t say i wouldn’t like that.
Also, i think that their Lawful Good Overdrive is made first and foremost out of laziness rather than malice. Don’t we know the writing team “Doesn’t like to write for the Alliance”, look for a quick and easy target to emotionally charge the narrative (night elves over and over again) and - this is a theory of mine - write mostly human centric leadership not out of awe for the human race (tropes aside) but because it’s easier and derivative from previous work make from other people - AKA the least amount of work posible.
I’d like too see more in-faction conflict. But i don’t see it happening anytime soon. All that potential, squandered.
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I mean the Horde may have had many warchiefs but it’s clear that Orcs and Forsaken have always been the stars of the show… and Forsaken are humans.
This game is Humans vs Orcs and Humans vs Humans. Everything else is tangential.
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That’s been the Alliance’s problem since the end of Wrath when this new dev team took over. Its story has never been more than an afterthought to the Horde doing anything. Robot cat anyone?
I recall a dev biography from somewhere that described the developer base as overwhelmingly WC2-era baby-eating evil Horde fanboys. Chris Metzen was the main exception, being a fan of the WC3-era “misunderstood savages” Horde as well as a Lawful Good Overdrive human Paladin fan. He wrote Tirion Fordring’s story. He brought Varian out of limbo, who was now basically a orc in a human body. This along with the concept of “High King” which surmised of a Blue Warchief just like the horde.
However, the Trials of the High King were never favorably received by the fanbase. ESPECIALLY Tyrande’s. Hence why they stopped after two leaders being humbled by Varian. Metzen then backed off of WoW possibly due to the backlash to devote himself full time with Project Titan, and leaving us at the tender mercy of Dave Kosak.
I agree. However the writers have an unhealthy obsession with Anduin, his magic bones, and his beliefs at the moment. And they are willing to throw all sense and logic out the window whenever he’s around. They aren’t receptive to people who don’t drink his kool-aid. Nor does it help that Tyrande is Blizzard’s favorite punching bag to cart out whenever the Alliance needs to be petty or stupid.
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Reallyhappy wanted me to comment that:
This is all meaningless, The writers act like its this huge important thing when it has no purpose and no true theme.
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Thnks Anya, im gonna eleborate on that point
A major issue with wow is the fact it doesnt have a real theme. a true meaning to it’s existence at this point. What is the intended experience? When does the gameplay and story truly integrate? A game doesnt need a real deep theme, but in that case you shouldnt treat it as anything deep.
Wow’s writers believe their writing an epic, a story that will be told for generations, when in reality their creation is corperate bile with all the deeper meaning removed from it.
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