In context, the shadowmoon thing was Ner’zhul breaking the taboo because Grom came and told him to join him or die, and to make himself useful. Thus he adopted void magic to give his clan an edge and justification to be kept alive.
She justifies working for sylvanas paraphrasing the schutzstaffel motto at zellig’s execution. Yikes. Whoever let that slip under the radar?
It takes some metal gymnastics to both-sides it but the lightbound are authoritarian, even if not malevolent.
Yet their major sticking point against the lightbound is religious freedom to pursue their halfhearted, flawed shamanism and objectively incorrect beliefs about the genedar.
Such as healing it. Light is Life, causing wilted flowers to bloom.
The orc I vote most likely to make a principled stand and refuse whatever dramatic change the lightbound require, no matter how justified and necessary. Honour before reason trope.
We will never be slaves! But we will be slavers. Orcs and hypocritical slavery, name a more iconic duo.
That’s the excuse given, but weirdly we only got told that what 10~ years after? Along with the caveat “it did not improve the asian market.” Sooo…
Considering how many quests, throw away statements and oblique statements about Blood Elf males and sexuality over the years too.
Yeah sorry that don’t fly guv.
What living in a cultural monosphere while pretending to be hip and progressive will do to the mind: A case study into crypto-incel culture at Activision Blizzard.
It’s an unfortunate cornerstone of the setting, really. Both Jaina and Mekkatorque are raid bosses in the Battle of Dazar’alor yet they both walk away injured whereas King Rastakhan is slain even accounting for having a pact with a Loa of Death that could have plausibly led to him being injured but able to escape as well. Even if the writers were so intent on having his daughter replace him, he could have just abdicated…
Mysteriously they were able to do just that with Anduin and Genn when it came to allowing someone other than themselves to rule on their behalf/abdicate.
In the event that an Alliance character does perish, it almost always involves the character going down in history as a hero who was tragically cut down as part of some sort of heroic sacrifice.
More often than not, their Horde counterparts are taken out through becoming so completely unhinged that any redeeming qualities are extinguished or they are eliminated through treachery and humiliation. There’s some exceptions to the rule here and there but not nearly enough to ensure a healthy balance.
The whole thrust of the conflict’s end is that it’s a borderline impossible choice and not everyone in Eorzea or Garlemald is willing to make it. No one wants to forgive Garlemald for what they have done and Garlemald has no feeling of regret, but the world has to move past the war in order to reform them and that sucks for all of Garlemald’s victims but the other option is what, lining up all Garlemald civilians and executing them? It’s not nearly as a cut and dry “apologia” as you make it out to be.
If the question is ‘Which one has been the worst written?’ then Horde. Every time, and absolutely. They’ve got done dirty time and time and time again. I mean, Cairne didn’t even get to die in-game, they killed him off in a freaking book off screen, how’s that in any way good worldbuilding, devs?!
But what is worse, being badly written or being out of the spotlight? I often run into the argument that BFA was a better expansion for the Horde than the Alliance, because the narrative focused so heavily on the Horde even if that narrative was crap.
Depends, I guess. It can feel nice to have the ‘freedom’ to basically do whatever you like without having to worry about disruptive plot developments while Blizzard neglects you (even if it’s going to be simultaneously frustrating).
Hmn, I’d argue the opposite; Horde getting “Are we the Baddies?” 2, inferno boogaloo, the ‘What do you mean Honour, anyway?’ mess, Sylvanas getting villain batted badly (badly handled, badly written, badly Not needed) and all that just… wasn’t good. In my opinion, anyway.
It’s like Thrall having the exact same ‘I need to find Myself’ plot arc in TWW for the… heck, how many times are we on, now? WC3 and then a handful of other times since?
FFXIV is a little guilty of “every problem that a society has can be solved if you remove the bad regime and replace it with a good regime.” Garlemald has swiftly transitioned from being a Germano-Roman ultra fascist empire into a collective of poor, soft, sweet and misled victims of propaganda who just need to be led by good people instead of bad people, with almost no one who seems to want to cling to their imperial legacy.
As someone who lives in a country full of millions of people who look back on its imperial history with nostalgia and longing, despite all of the monstrous acts that said nation has committed across the centuries, I know for a fact that it’s far more complicated and nebulous than how FFXIV tries to portray it.
Prelude to Cataclysm, where he has to abandon the Horde, embrace the elements and become the World-Shaman.
Elemental Bonds quest line, which involves him wrestling with all of his emotions and overcoming them to become a better man.
Warlords of Draenor, during which he has to come to terms with his orcish heritage and adapt to the primal elements of Draenor.
Legion, which involves him having to surrender the mantle of World-Shaman and accept that he can no longer serve as a protector of Azeroth.
Battle for Azeroth, during which he has to choose between his desire for a simpler life and standing up for the Horde that he helped make.
Shadowlands, in which he meets Draka and is forced to confront his doubts and overcome his anxieties about his past actions.
And now the War Within, in which he has to wrestle with even more insecurities that I am certain that we will learn about in the coming months.
Depends on how bad and damaging the writing is. Shadowlands is a good example of this for the world as a whole. For pretty much two years, we got nothing to work with that wasn´t tied to this other dimension (exception being 9.2.5 questlines). Effectively, the whole world was out of the spotlight. But, I think overwhelming majority of RPers found this to be preferable to having Shadowlands lore come to us through Mawsworn invasions or some other story that would have forced us to interact with Shadowlands lore.
But, if we´re talking ordinary bad rather than extraordinary bad of Slands, then I´d say it´s better to have bad story than no story at all. I don´t think the quality of BfA´s story somehow hurt the RP community, all the drama I´ve seen would have happened even if the story was amazing because, at its core, the basic theme of Horde´s story was divisive due to effectively splitting Horde into two factions for some time.
The internal divisions of the Horde were handled extremely poorly. 7.3.5 through to 8.2 was a very discouraging period for a massive amount of people who preferred the Thrall’s Horde approach. 8.2.5 onward was a gigantic disappointment for all of the people who enjoyed the 7.3.5 to 8.2 period of an evil, monstrous Horde.
I think that this could have been handled better, in a way that didn’t alienate both groups so thoroughly.
What really hurts the Horde is Blizzard painting some believable justification for the Horde; poverty, being shunned, the looming threat of Alliance attention inevitably turning to them. But as soon as it’s built there’s whiplash. Because this is wrong actually. After retconning the Alliance declaring the war is a kick too.
There’s whiplash as gnoll adds are painted over with Horde adds to generate a barbaric scene for shock value. One that mirrors something out of Mists of Pandaria.
The Warchief is replaced with another, someone who - like Thrall - had been there from the start. And yet seemingly Vol’jin did nothing. There was no progression, no lesson learnt despite the song and a dance and 2 years of plot building up to it. Round and round, we go on the Warcraft 2 carousel.
This is all while the Drustvar are depicted as being uber villains while being eradicated by a colonising force in the form of kul tirans. The natives were wrong to be angry at the alliance coded people actually.
This isn’t even going into the character assassination that happened in the books.
The double standards and broken record of Blizzard being incapable of anything other than dressing up Warcraft 2 in different coats has really damaged the setting imo. Ultimately the setting suffers when the alliance story sucks (anduin’s holy bones telling him when people are lying. Every defias agreeing to be good now actually except for the super evil ones) and the setting suffers when the Horde narrative is repeatedly used as a punching bag.
This is just categorically false. The scions buddy with more co operative Garleans of course, that’s just human relations in a nutshell but the Garleans at large, including their interim government, are consistently shown as obtuse and unwilling to work together and would much prefer the Eorzeans to leave rather than accept their help.
