Alliance vs Horde: Which one is the worst according to you?

Argent Dawn
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People are quick to forget that the Horde, post Wrathgate, also decided to attack and destroy an entire Alliance contingent by attacking them in the rear as they were about to take a foothold in Icecrown, leading to both forces being destroyed by the Scourge gaining the upper hand. A subsequent quest from a dying Horde soldier has you not helping him to safety but instead killing any wounded Alliance soldiers you come across, which to me comes across as such a hilarious level of hatred and spite even by Old Horde standards, but this is technically Thrall’s Horde.

There is never an explicit reason given, just vague insinuations that the Alliance knew the Horde was looking for an opening in their forces and that the Horde commander involved just seems that hellbent on wiping the Alliance off the face of Azeroth.

"The time of tolerance for the Alliance has passed, name.

They have earned our hatred! They shall live in fear of the Horde until they no longer pollute our world!"

On the flipside, it did give us “Heart of War” which is a pretty good short story about Garrosh’s attempts to impress Thrall (he does not impress Thrall).

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122

I do agree with the “Every Orc in Ashenvale deserves death” part, ngl.

Hopefully, in the same way those 3 Orcs in the Terror of Darkshore cinematic died.:bear::worm:

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123

‘While the Alliande and Horde are busy slaughtering each other, doing the Lich King’s job for him, we will stay focused on our task.’

-Darion Mograine

Wotlk seems so silly in that sense. Id be willing to bet that any military commander in Northrend would logically understand to prioritize the Scourge.

Gunship Battle was cool as a concept. But ICC was the wrong encounter for that one imo.

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124

:zzz: :zzz: :zzz:

125

They kind of just pale in comparison to everything the Horde has done, a lot of it isn’t even “atrocities”.

Because of a war Garrosh started after the night elves refused to trade lumber to the orcs in the wake of Twilight’s Hammer cultists killing druids while disguised as Horde warriors, which the Horde simply laughed off.

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126

A ceasefire Garrosh broke in a war Varian started, if we’re correcting things here.

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127

She was ride or die Sylvanas literally up to and even shortly after “THE HORDE MEANS NOTHING.” Now I can see Gallywix being fine with this (and even going into hiding afterwards) because he’s the embodiment of crony capitalism and a stand in for Bobby Kotick but Geya’rah literally went ‘Jahwol mein Kriegschef’ because the Draenei (JUST THE REGULAR DRAENEI TOO) were part of the Alliance. The fact the Lightforged joined (and again not even from the same timeline) was irrelevant.

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128

I don’t really view it through the lens of the Horde and Alliance, anyway. I despise both factions and consider them to be largely to the detriment of specific playable races.

Ultimately WoW is a lot like FFXIV. Both games are extremely preachy when they want to be but they lack the stones to actually commit to the rules they lay down for everyone else beyond the favoured few.

So you end up with laughably disconnected narratives and war crimes that are never truly addressed because the games decide to hand-wave atrocities committed by specific ‘favoured’ characters rather than follow through on ever holding them properly accountable.

What’s worse is that the faction war does provide a great spark for role-play but it’s so very boring when it’s one-sided and especially so when there’s no real meaningful payoff or consequences for those responsible for escalation. Unless they’re Horde, then they almost always pay dearly.

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129

In a way yes, FF14 (especially in Endwalker) did this whole apologia for Garlemald which seemed extremely extraneous and forced. Now in Square Enix’s case the cultural background and context to past genocidal regimes owning up to and understanding their role their ancestors had in perpetuating some of the grimmest and inhuman treatment of mankind in human history aside, it made no sense even from the projections we had going from 1.0-through-to-6.0.
Ultra fascist, (literally fascist STRONG MUST LEAD THE WEAK, MAN MUST RULE HIS ENVIRONMENT) militant empire cosplaying as the Roman analogue SUDDENLY gets this apologia where their capital city has been basically Hiroshima’d and we’re supposed to now suddenly feel pity for them? That we’re supposed to forgive them? Lets not handwave the fact their imperial conquests are LARGELY intact as well by the end of 6.0. The Empire has no Emperor but it’s still the same ultra-authoritarian imperial power.

Now I could go into mass depth about how this is basically a cultural reflection of Japan’s incapability of taking ownership of utterly vile and despicable war crimes absolutely on par with the horrors of the Shoah, but this is neither the thread nor the time.

WoW handles it in laughably a worse situation, mostly because you have West-Coast California Liberals running a company who are completely disconnected from any sense of awareness of nuance. The Horde has always been the ‘other’, the non-White American counterparts to the red blooded American imperialism (Stormwind/Lordaeron) + fellow hegemonic allies (Dwarves/Night Elves/Draenei etc) that makes the Alliance.

The Alliance always had had the optics of the ‘NOBLE’ and ‘RIGHTEOUS’ faction. Despite the colossal chauvinism that has emanated out of it over the years. You’ve had outright racist and bigoted ‘Light-based’ (Ie a stand in for conventional mainline Christendom) opinions spiral into the Scarlet Crusade, the Lightbound, and even simply the mainline Silver Hand.

It’s not even been done intentionally, it’s been done because the majority of writers at Blizzard grew up in the 80s and 90s, the “YEAH, AMERICA.” golden era of cultural hegemonic supremacy and that translated into their writing. It’s utterly insane that the Horde is made up of the caricatures of the general ‘East/Eurasia’ (Orcs) Afro-Carribeans (Trolls) and Native Americans (Tauren) with their Counterculture allies (The Forsaken).

Blood Elves were literally added to make the Horde look ‘pretty’ (ie more inline with conventional ideas to the American cultural hegemony) and yet there was still that utter uproar in TBC’s development that the Blood Elf males looked ‘too feminine’ (or any other byword for homosexual) and thus they were cemented again in the cultural ‘other’ faction as a result.

And yet throughout all this the Horde are the ‘villains’ despite the big Blizzard voice boxes loving to go on stage at Blizzcon and scream “FOR TEH HORDE GUYZZZ”. Hello tokenism!

So who are the worst? The Alliance, through the malignance of incompetence and the discrimination of low-expectations from the writers who use the Alliance as their vehicle to ‘solve’ Azeroth’s problems. It’s amazing how much of ‘The white man’s burden’ can be applied to how the Alliance generally operates. They even have the whole “WE MUST CIVILIZE THESE SAVAGES” spiel.

Or you know Umbric going LOL LOL LOL TIME TO DESECRATE THE ZANDALARI SPIRITS WITH THE VOID - and it’s just shrugged off.

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130

Why are you forgetting the Broken Front? It was a whole Alliance Army wiped out by the Horde attacking them in the back when they were attacking the Scourge during the ceasefire with the Horde


If anything, the Horde broke the ceasefire first, but the Alliance decided to ignore that until it happened a second time.

You know Blood Elves were added due to the Asian market, right?

It had nothing to do with America and more to do with how the Asiannmarket was leaving the Horde side on the side walk, more so then the American players and as a reaction they had to give Blood Elves to the Horde, otherwise they might aswell remove the faction(if I remeber correctly)

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131

Yet people ignore the fact that a few years before that orcs invaded and burned down most of Quel’thalas and were at the gates of Silvermoon, how many elves lost family to the Horde?

But somehow the Horde can easily be forgiven that, and its been glossed over and ignored for decades, but the Alliance has to be blamed for the actions of a warlord and a neutral nation for the rest of eternity.

This was also after two peace summits that were ruined by the Twilight’s Hammer iirc!

I vaguely recall seeing a youtube video/interview were Blizzard added blood elves to the Horde because a prettier race was requested a lot bu Chinese players (big market!) and they needed something to balance the numbers and pretty race does that??

Blaming that on American cultural hegemony when chinese and faction balance were the driving force is abit
 weird?

Thats mostly the Alliance about the orcs and trolls (ancient enemies), they seem quite friendly towards the tauren, goblins, nightborne, blood elves etc even trying to recruit most of those races into the Alliance at one point or another.

Only Forsaken were the odd ones out, until recently :sweat:

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132

That happens after the war is declared again, wasn’t it? It’s in Icecrown so chronologically it’s after the events of Wrathgate, and that’s when Varian say “we’re at war again :c”, in the Undercity.

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133

Yeah, that happened after the Battle for Undercity, were Varian and the Alliance discover Alliance dwarves, Alliance humans (and also Scarlet humans) are/were tested upon by the Forsaken (since the Alliance ends up in the Plague Quarter) and declared war upon the Horde.

Wonder why the Alliance declared war :roll_eyes:

Then the Broken Front happened, murder and mayhem in the Argent Tournament, then Gunship Battle, then Cold War and two attempted Peace Summits (ruined by the Twilight’s Hammer), then Garrosh invades Ashenvale, Alliance invades Barrens and the 3.5th War is in full swing.

134

Because there wasn’t a ceasefire at that point.

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135

Blizzards writing has been the real villain, all along.
Being 100% serious, too. The mishandling isn’t even a fumble at this point, its just Chronic.

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136

Ohh fair enough! I didn’t know it happened after the the betrayel by the Forsaken!

In that case, I stand corrected!

Garrosh didn’t invade, since the Horde had been in Ashenvale since vanilla. He just decided the little piece of Ashenvale, they unrightly claimed, wasn’t enough :weary:

I mean we can discuss all we want, you have a valid point and no matter what we discuss it all comes back to how Blizzard handles the faction that gets people riled up

137

I don’t think that’s ignored, especially with the amount of Blood Elf role-players who actively remained in Quel’Thalas for the most part outside of events and campaigns. At best ‘tolerating’ the other members of the Horde.

Sure, there were exceptions but I remember it being a common part of many Blood Elf role-player’s backstories.

138

It’s entirelly ignored ingame and in-Lore, I meant!

I know many roleplayers use that to have their blood elves be tolerant towards the Horde (at best), heck I used to do that on my blood elf, tho she’s more pro-Horde nowadays by virtue of time in the Horde and accumelated grudge against the Alliance

139

In the end either is as silly as the other to use in an OOC arguement to explain why the blood elves joined the Horde, it just boils down to Not Thralls horde + Not true alliance hierarchy

Either or is however fair in explaining why an individual elf, like a playable character, would have problems with humans (they’re probably blood elves then) or orcs (they’re probably high elves then)

Elves joining horde had more to do with geography, forsaken assistance in taming the ghostlands and the shenanigans you see in the belf starter zone with the alliance spies and implications behind the documents you can find for quests related to these spies from the story standpoint

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140

Horde is the more evil faction. Draenei however are the root of all evil.

And that’s fine. Most of us are OK with that, as far as I know.
What’s weird is that on one hand Alliance seems to want to identify as the good guys, but also whenever Horde does something attrocious people come out of the woodworks screaming reeeee we want to do evil stuff too, but also when you point that “bruh your faction is evil”, they lose their marbles.

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