Greetings Argent Dawn!
Since the PTR thread seems to get clogged up with talks of which of the factions, Alliance or Horde, is the worst lately, I took the liberty of creating a thread just for that, so that PTR can get somewhat back on track, and so that there’s a dedicated space for this discussion.
Enjoy!
Edit:Nvm, found out how to link.
Steve Danuser
Horde is the worst.
Created as a allied faction to the Legion, it is responsible for the existence of the Scourge, Dark Horde, Fel Horde, True Horde, Iron Horde, Fel Iron Horde and the destruction of multiple worlds!
The mass grape, genocide, slaughter and slavery of multiple species too.
And to this day they occupy night elf territory and don’t understand why the night elves are warring against them over it!
Frankly the most morally reprehensible faction is the one I personally, actively RP on at the time someone asks.
I have also, carrying on from previous Draenor conversations, remembered that Geya’rah’s BFA casual dialogue isn’t really helping her beat the Orc Hitler but Female accusations either when her first thought on arriving on a new world after the questline is with no context:
“The Alliance embrace the Draenei, that alone is reason enough to crush their cities to dust.” which, uh, idk chief.
Ultimately I do think the Horde is the worse of the two factions.
Looking at their origins first:
The Horde was specifically founded to be a swarm of corrupting, warmongering invaders with no purpose beyond razing and pillaging whatever their masters set them upon. Their masters in questions being literal demons.
The Alliance was specifically formed by people from the lands the Horde invaded and their allies, and founded to aid each other and stop this otherworldly, demonic threat.
As also discussed in the PTR thread, even without demonic influence the Orcs in particular are prone to commit horrible atrocities by essentially default, despite saying that they are a honorable people.
Completely disregarding the Old Horde, the new Horde has had 4 seperate Warchiefs until recent history. Two of which turned out to be villains. One was a warmongering tyrant who unprompted decided to commit warcrimes and attempted genocide. He did so with large support in the Horde, primarily from orcs and goblins. It was only when he began to fight internally that most other members of the Horde revolted.
The second evil warchief turned out to be even worse, starting the 4th major world-war of Azeroth, causing even more damage and devastation than before and was found to have been working together with a being of pure evil from the realm of death itself, with plans to annihilate the cosmos. It is hard to top that. And she only faced major backlash from the rest of the Horde when she at the very end said she didn’t care about the faction.
Many species among the Horde are also much like the orcs, prone to almost by nature, happy to do evil acts for no reason beyond self-pleasure.
This whole discussion just solidifies it for me that the game could’ve been so much more nuanced and interesting had we been faction-free as was originally intended.
Both are equally as messed up at their core, the Horde only got more chances to demonstrate it and usually had less level-headed leaders.
An example that comes to mind is that while the Horde did drop the mana bomb, and the Iron Horde followed Garrosh’s manipulation while using their newly acquired tech to do so, the Alliance’s leadership of Khaz Modan first instinct upon finding out about Azerite was propositioning making Azerite nuclear weapons to drop on every major Horde population center. It was only Anduin telling them not to that made them not do so.
To quote Taran Zhu,
https://youtu.be/koq36-hMOGc?&t=82
Sadly, though, most of the Alliance’s nuance as of this last decade came from books from outside the game, so, there is that; and even then, there were some books and short stories that did away with it.
For every time the Horde gets an attempt at nuance, or some kumbaya-ing about being misunderstood and sticking together or whatever, there’s also a moment in which the writers feel it is necessary to go back to WC1/2 where they’re the most blatantly obvious villains because it’s classic Warcraft
Horde, due to two very unfortunate circumstances created by Blizzard which prevented it from ever being better than Alliance:
Anyone who plays Vanilla might notice something interesting: While Alliance fights local threats in its early zones, Horde fights the Alliance. This resulted in Alliance being far stronger when judged by the amount of camps, fortifications and settlements it has. Just look at Silverpine, second zone of the Forsaken. They get Sepulcher and a single farm. Alliance has entirety of the south. Even the worgen Pyrewood village is friendly to Alliance during the day.
So, when Cataclysm came and Blizzard switched to stories focused on faction conflict, suddenly they were presented with a conundrum: Horde had much smaller presence in the world. So, they balanced things out by Horde destroying bunch of Alliance places. Ashenvale became much more balanced, Silverpine and Hillsbrad were put on the same level as Alliance 2nd and 3rd zones (a.k.a., the other faction places got destroyed either before or during the zone´s questline) and everyone lived happily ever after.
You know, if we ignore the fact that Horde went on a rampage throughout Kalimdor and Lordaeron while Alliance destroyed…Taurajo. To put insult to the injury, Theramore was destroyed in MoP and Garrosh was made into a villain, which meant that, as Horde, you do some pretty bad stuff (albeit in MoP, at least Alliance is somewhat trying to equalize the warcriming).
At the end of MoP, we have Horde that is arguably worse than the Alliance, but at least, because of Darkspear Rebellion that ended up with everyone except Kor´kron, Dragonmaw and Blackfuse joining, Horde has already done some redemption by standing up to the Warchief.
Coming into BfA, we were in a perfect position for the Alliance to get a shot at being the ones who turn small-scale conflicts into world war and have some gamer moments of their own. Instead, Blizzard had the Horde repeat their evil Warchief storyline, but with added benefit of the rebellion being only a minority rather than almost the entire Horde.
You know how every single Horde race stood against Garrosh? Well, this time it´s different. Despite almost every single Horde leader joining the rebellion, somehow majority of the Horde stood with Sylvanas. Somehow, the Loyalist Horde army was the only force in the entire world that could stand to N´zoth. Somehow, combined forces of Alliance and Rebels were only enough for one last attack on Orgrimmar. Orgrimmar that didn´t have Blackfuse and his miracles, spoils of Pandaria, mantid allies or heart of an Old God.
Somehow, after Teldrassil, after all the attrocities, after dealing with evil Warchief few years before, after their leaders rebelled against her, the Horde decided that this Sylvanas person is actually awesome.
Blizzard spent years villainizing the Horde, followed the villainization with half-hearted “we´re good now”, before again villainizing the Horde. At the same time, any attempts at Alliance being the villain are either accidental, removed before going to live due to player outcry, or part of out of game media. Of course the end result is Horde being much more evil than the Alliance. Blizzard never seemed to have bothered asking the question “How will the stories we tell influence how the factions are viewed?”
Its never going to really help the Horde that throughout Warcraft 1 and 2 they’re meant to be demonic genocidal monsters invading Azeroth and not even remotely sympathetic or empathetic, that’s always going to be a dark cloud looming over them; the fact that Blizzard keeps insisting on repeating this trend every few years however is sort of what cements it more than anything else.
As Adelais has already said, its peculiar that for every time the Horde goes on a “finding its heart” quest they inevitably end up doing 3+ genocides on the way.
I also do not think that , unless really weird things happen, we will see another faction war if only because most of the leaders that harbor grudges against the other, seem to have either left or just given up on it.
On the Alliance, until recently we had Genn Greymane, who could not cope with the loss of his nation and his son at the hands of Sylvanas, and Tyrande who was pissed at the destruction of Teldrassil.
But the both of them have learned to let go of their feelings of vengeance, through a ritual/simply giving the reins of their people to someone else respectively.
On the Horde, the ones with reasonable beef with the Alliance could be Talanji ( for the death of her father aswell as the attack on Zandalar) and… that’s it. You maybe have Deathstalker Belmont in the Desolate Council, but most of them seem to listen to Calia now.
The way Blizzard has written it, the majority of leaders simply don’t have an interest in restarting a faction war anymore, and the way for it to happen would have to either be an elaborate masquarade by Xal’atah ( which we’ve seen the Void-followers be perfectly capable of, even without Old God illusions), or something really convoluted.
So, all this could be boiled down by… Not having opened the can of Worms that is Alt-Draenor. It was fine, if abit jarring, as a self-contained story and it should never have reopened to recruit -their- Mag’har when we could’ve recruited the Mag’har from Outlands in a similiar fashion as how Alliance recruited the Dark Irons after years of already working together.
Hell they could’ve added a whole questline about how there were so little Mag’har in the Horde because the rest was reforming their old clans and traditions back in Outlands, then the only 2 things that change with the Mag’har recruitment scenario is the location(Outland instead of Draenor) and its MU-Mag’har instead of AU-Mag’har.
And instead of Yrel and the Lightbound, you could’ve added a questline of the Mag’har trying to temper the Fury’s before they unleash Elemental hell across Outlands, and thus saving what remains of Outlands to forever float through space, or whatever.(Bonus points that it could’ve also added Fel Orc red skin to normal Orcs as rewards)
AU-Mag’har as Allied Race was such a convulated and unneccesary way to get Mag’har.
Aside from that; Horde has and will always be a foil to show how good and upstanding the Alliance is. No matter how or why its formed, it will always be a band of (evil) monsters. When they were the underdog in Vanilla to WoTLK they were more aggresive and more prone to violence. And when they became the same size as the Alliance, well we know what happened; they literal became what their owen questgivers described the Alliance as; an Empire hellbent on conquering lands, destroying everything in their path until whole continents were painted red. Garrosh made the MU-Horde and the AU-Horde do exactly the same thing, both at the drop of a hat.
In true words to be spoken RE Horde being villain batted so much:
‘I’m tired boss…’
I think the Alliance is more evil than the Horde.
While the Alliance of Lordaeron was a reaction to Horde invasion, it is ultimately a Human nation that birthed the vessel that would very much lead the way into opening the Dark Portal and siring the child who would do that. The Orcs just wanted to start over after unwittingly having destroyed their own planet. Sure through violence, but that’s all they’ve ever known! Have you ever heard of Orcish diplomacy? Yeah me neither, because words don’t get you anything on a planet as brutal and violent as Draenor, you have to fight for everything!
The Human Kingdoms didn’t even took the threat all that seriously until Stormwind fell and even then it took further convincing for certain elves to be involved. The Horde took in Zul’jin and his people, seeking to return them their ancestral land that were stolen by the Imperialistic High-Elves. Orgrim was an upstanding guy like that, heck so much so that the Kingdom of Alterac decided it’d be better to let Orgrim and his Horde pass through in exchange for non-agression which he upheld.
Even in victory the Alliance further insulted the Horde by not giving them a glorious death in battle as all Orcs should, but sent them to internment camps humiliating them and working them to death. They even had the audacity to try and install a human in Orc’s skin as their new leader to fight their war. Disgusting! Thrall liberated his people and they left Human lands peacefully at the behest of -another- human to save the world, taking in the Tauren and Trolls under his protection AND even the Forsaken who were related to those very humans who opressed their people… Truly only the actions of honorable people.
Since then, the Horde has done nothing but engage in Wars of defense against Alliance incursions into their newly claimed territories which they only want to live in peace with and continue their traditions all while doing as much as the Alliance in saving Azeroth from the ongoing threats that would threaten the plane.
… No, I don’t wanna talk about anything post-cataclysm.
Yeah man, the draenei killed her dad, probably killed her mum, definitely killed her Warchief. They’re different draenei to the one she knows but “first thought” is “first thought” (and also, not that different, what with the Lightforged and all).
I don’t see you out here calling Turalyon “Human Hitler” for referring to orcs as savages and monsters, so maybe check the old third reich references. It’s definitely a bit weird.
Horde, and not becouse I am diehard ally. It was already all explained above. The one to blame is Blizzard for keep making the Horde bad. If we take only the new Thrall’s Horde, ok, one bad warchief, sure. But 2? Sylvanas was also poorly exucuted too. Garrosh at least belived what he is doing is for the Horde. His last words in the IP are literally “For the Horde!” before he broke the 4th wall and unsubscribed from WoW. Even as die hard ally, I have to say - Garrosh was a true Warchief. He even felt more tyranical than Sylvanas. Alliance had a potential villain arc, and it should have been done. I wouldn’t like to be Horde main and always ending up as a villain.
And now, after all of this, and yes, the Alliance commited crimes too, we are just supposed to belive that all the grievances are forgiven like 4 years after the last war only? You need few generations for that, mate.
Every orc he has encountered was a literal demonic-infused monster almost as per literal as you can get with either definition.
And outside of that, a majority of orcs that didn’t have this influence has been shown to be just as if, if not more evil on their own volition. I don’t think its comparable.
What? Do you think referring to a character as “Female Orc Hitler” is appropriate? You don’t think that might be a bit weird?
That’s literally not true when he’s still dropping the ‘savages’ line in TWW 