Another thought is that while people commonly dislike Anduin as the big cheese of the Alliance (and his pursuit of peace/forgiveness), he is at least a consistent character. From when he was that terrible child NPC model up until the Manduin of BfA and onward, he’s always pursued that goal, he just matured and developed in his methods somewhat.
The Horde’s writing has them slide all over the place.
About five minutes after being recruited the Alliance sacked Dazar’alor, so it’s not really surprising she might go “Oh, the draenei were trying to wipe us out on Draenor, and now the Draenei’s allies are trying to wipe us out on Azeroth.” It’s a very clear line to draw that - for her - it was a defensive war of survival.
She didn’t ask Eitrigg because she didn’t have a chance. So far as I can tell from the questchain, he’s either captured by Sylvanas (loyalist) or escapes with the player (rebel) and then the siege happens shortly thereafter. I’d presume she didn’t even know Eitrigg had joined the rebellion. It was a secret, right up until it wasn’t.
I would guess - though this is a guess - that her finding out is part of the reason for her hard switch after the dust settled.
Again though, from Geya’rah’s perspective, was Sylvanas the one doing that? Baine’s arrest (not even execution - arrest) happened, and justifiably so. Rebels freed him and then Sylvanas just…didn’t do anything to them. We didn’t hear about them being executed on the street or anything.
Despite our disagreements, I am gonna agree here with you though tbh on Geya’rah. She does later state that she was wrong, but she believed that Sylvanas was simply showing strength as a warchief and making tough calls. It was only when Sylvanas threw her tantrum that she realized it was just selfishness and that the Horde didn’t matter at all to Sylvanas.
Honestly, I can barely remember a single thing about Geya’rah.
She’s that forgettable… Frankly a great deal of ARs leaders are.
Thalryssa is probably the most memorable.
It isn’t really a secret that we join though as the [Champion] as far as I know and so it still leaves one outlier. But I suppose in the interest of fairness you could absolutely argue the Loyalist route is the canon one, therefore meaning that you stay with the Horde and therefore Geya’rah believes she too has made the correct decision.
Fumbly writing overall, which as you say just leads to a hard switch afterwards with no real further outcome beyond “I don’t like this Horde, its leaders or its council but I guess I’ll stay anyways. . .loktar. . .”
I do still find it peculiar that she doesn’t think its odd that her MU reflection (Thrall) is a clear rebellion leader and chooses not to question what makes him immediately go rebel, but I suppose that can be handwaved both ways as “Blizzard clearly was not interested in telling a story about the moral nuance of that situation” which is. . .really unfortunate.
We haven’t blown up a city in two expansions and I’m starting to go into withdrawal.
And Mayla by virtue of being the only other notable fem tauren who isn’t Magatha. Moira doesn’t count, she’s freakin’ Moira, that’s all she needs.
As has already been stated in this thread, we should’ve just gotten the Outland Mag’har as the allied race.
Under the leadership of Greatmother Geyah. Go orc grandma.
Edit: And the questline could’ve been about us creating a vaccine against a second coming of the red pox just to piss off a certain demographic.
Moira was an extremely established character and from Cataclysm onwards a member of the Alliance prior to the Dark Irons being made an allied race, mind.
Alliance bad.
It’s hard to discuss the merits of the rebellion in BfA because BfA’s writing around Sylvanas was so bad that they forced her to have the “The Horde is nothing” moment because otherwise it still would make a lot of sense for a bunch of Hordies to stick with her.
The rebellion was formed on feeble ground - Baine’s objection to Derek Proudmoore, but not Teldrassil makes him look morally weak, plus Saurfang’s flipflopping where he actively disagrees with himself between cinematic and gameplay.
The stuff in Nazjatar was objectively a ‘Horde victory’ in that the far larger Alliance fleet suffered significant losses compared to what the Horde lost, and if Sylvanas’ dirty dealings with Ashvane weren’t public (or could be dismissed as Alliance propaganda) then Sylvanas as Warchief was doing a pretty solid job, while the rebels were weird hypocrites who Sylvanas seemed content to leave alone so she could focus on the real war.
The dialogue indicates that even at the peak of the rebellion Sylvanas’ loyalist forces outnumbered both rebels and Alliance.
The lack of a clear, coherent moral position from the rebels really hurt them.
I’d just like to say that in the wake of “Alliance characters are consistent” that I hate what they did with Moira’s personality.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/wowpedia/images/e/eb/CoTH_Moria.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/200?cb=20110416080624
bring her back
Remember when Mathias “no witnesses” Shaw attempted to kill off an entire goblin cartel because their ship fleeing ecological disaster (admittedly of their own making) had the misfortune of being near the attempted kidnap of Thrall?
Yeah, neither does anyone in game. Apparently. I guarentee if this was the inverse, it would have been a major plot point carried through BFA in which the Horde has to do soul searching over.
Yeah but she was done so well. Still makes her an ARs leader until her son takes over.
I wanted to shout my boy Kiro as being part of the known leader gang… But since he went on to crush a workers’ union and being utterly forgettable, even in the books where he’s mentioned.
So only Talanji, Mayla and Thalyssra have a strong presence among all these.
In fairness, Turalyon and Alleria are both respective leaders of their ARs (though they shouldn’t be - Captain Fareeya gets no respect) and they’re pretty damn prevalent.
Then she’s clearly blatantly evil? ‘Total war! To survive we must eradicate the (sentient!) species that aren’t us!’ is a comically evil line of thought
It is a bit weird that to a simple question people are going “huh remember this bad thing the Alliance did?”, “oh, but she had imagined the other side would eventually attack, that makes it a defensive war” (???)
Yeah… Alliance also do bad things.
It just happens that the Horde is undeniably worse.
Honestly, LFD should just fall under Velen, esp since the LFD are recruiting from Exodar Draenei apparently??
if they got rid of turalyon who would tell them that elephants could be used as battle mounts