With my death knight, the idea of ‘honour’ is a laughable concept because all it does is impede tasks being done. That does not mean that they do anything just because, however.
They won’t go and kill civilians to sate because it is impractical and there are plenty of enemies to kill that would be a more productive use of their time.
They will assist and even heal (If they can) wounded fighters, not to save their lives but so they can get back up and keep fighting to see that the job is done.
The idea of honour guiding their actions is dismissed and is instead held up by what is practical and will get the job done. This also means that things like not harming civilians, don’t kill for the sake of killing, and in general ‘good’ acts are actions that fall under this catagory of what others would call ‘honourable’.
They have see living races weild this ‘honour’ however, and find them all to be hypocrites who only care about honour when it suits them and discards it the moment it is inconvience to the goal at hand.
How some orcs can look at acts like the ‘Path of Glory’ and the Burning of Teldrassil with pride, but then wail like a child when their friend gets stabbed in the back by an assassin.
Seeing much of this hypocritical behaviour cements her belief that there is no such thing as honour. Just people trying to justify their actions as ‘good’.
I think Drinul considers honour to be stuff like being upfront and giving everyone an equal opportunity. Like, don’t talk about people behind their backs or kill unarmed people. Instead, say it to their face and/or give people a chance to fight back.
Being a dwarf, loyalty is also important. Don’t backstab your friends. If they’re being a tool, tell them off or even slap them around. And if someone is being rude to or threatening your friends…
Kill them all (not the friend in question though, obviously).
The problem here is that the supposed honour tacked onto a given culture isn’t elaborated upon. Paladins have a code of sorts, making a decent example of an internal regulation but then you smash that into whatever broader sense of right applies to their respective faction and seemingly anything becomes tolerable in the moment.
Add to this the myriad cultures that make up the factions that need to cooperate on some level of common ground on occasion. The writing is not consistent on the nature of what’s expected of individuals but as a group, standards are enforced regardless of morality.
Orc honour culture is the big meme and oft reiterated as a focal point of their identity to the point of having “ur’gora” as a slur. Mak’gora as a way to settle differences and slights is another internal regulator. The problem is that orc honour culture is, as inspired by real life examples, a response to clannish culture stepping in to correct behaviour and injustice in a society without reliable state institutions to handle transgressions and injury. This means that it’s highly subjective and defined by the in-group making use of the system to self regulate, demonstrated in the vastly different orc clans.
Following the above logic, one group can declare it honourable to purge a town of defeated foes as a show of strength while others can declare harming the defeated to be a crime, see the war of thorns. As each questions the other’s honour, it’s settled by force and is fundamentally inconsistent.
Notions of a vauge good and bad as helped along by adjacent cultural factors like religions and social conditions is all we really have to go on and even the supposed moral absolutism of The Light seems heavily reliant on what its weilder believes is correct. When it comes to the judgement of elders and ancestors, you deal with a factor with an interest in preserving old patterns but old doesn’t mean correct either.
I’ve played characters who laughed at the idea of honour and I’ve played rigidly honourbound characters. The more interesting examples end up dismissing the supposed honour of some while clinging to a different standard, even if it’s not strictly called honourable conduct.
At best, honour as such is a standard one holds oneself to, independent of other rules. No matter the word of law, one’s personal sense of self and right and wrong, upholding one’s pride. Without it, the person has no shame and will stoop to any low to reach a goal. Even a villain has a reason and betraying any trust along the way to a greater goal may be considered permissible in a sort of “the future will absolve my sins” kind of way.
It’s a morally complicated subject ultimately left to each character writer to work with and what few definitions we’re given in the lore are too vauge to be useful beyond a few feelgood moments.
Tl;dr
The writers like using a word they have no interest in elaborating upon and in want of codes of conduct, every individual’s sense of honour will differ. Even supposed honour cultures have no common standard and it’s largely useless to argue.
I’ll join the chain of well wishers and thank you for thinking of this topic, Shogganosh. It’s been useful to consider the topic for much of the morning.
“Honor” in the way Darbakh understands it is refusing to use the words “please” and “thank you,” and not expecting to hear it from others either. Dishonor to him is avoiding a deserved punishment.
Rules. You can’t get anything done in a world without rules. Even if the rules don’t make sense, you follow the rules. He also tends to defer to people of rank within their own society; he’d show more consideration for the words of a Darkspear witch doctor than a Darkspear basket weaver, for example.
A little of both. In his Warcraft incarnation, Darbakh started as a blank-slate Dark Iron, and then I just chose which personality traits to push to logical extremes.
Given that Kem lived on his own for most of his life out in the wilds, for him everything goes in the heat of battle. If someone uses cheap tricks, magic, lies etc. For him that is normal and doesn’t really find it dishonorable. After all if you try so hard to best your foe, you show respect and honor to them.
However, he won’t really go for unnarmed civilians, as he doesn’t see it as a challenge. But if they pick up arms against him, he will honor them and will fight them and might even kill them. Because if they die, they died for something they cared for and risked their lives to preserve it.
For Akulé, honour can be broke down into three simple concepts;
1. Respect: Respect nature, the Ancestors, respect for the Shu’halo community and for diversity (as long as the diversity does not upset balance – for example, in Akulé’s mind, Warlock Shu’halo is a big no no).
2. Integrity: Being honest and sincere (Akule was morally grey for a time with integrity and still can be at certain periods, but it doesn’t impact his idea of honour).
3. Duty: Serving the welfare of your Tribe / people, being a steward of nature, preserve ancestral traditions through rituals, ceremonies and acts of kindness / bravery and ensuring that values of fairness and harmony are central to friends and allies and applied to all decisions made (and even enemies in terms of fairness – this can mean acting defensively or even offensively, for example, it’s fair to neutralise a threat that’s going to wipe out a village etc).
It’s those three things I always try and think of when I meet someone IC, for forming an IC opinion of them.
The most important thing to note here is that honour is subjective and reliant on the rules agreed upon by the group you belong to. What the Samurai believed was honourable doesn’t match our expectations of honourable behaviour – and even at the time, there were contemporaries who would have disagreed with that kind of conduct as being honourable. But to their group, it was, and that’s what mattered to them.
Each group’s own code of honour is important because it creates the standard to which all members are expected to adhere if they wish to be considered trusted, reliable people with integrity to abide by the group’s social rules. The concept of “honour among thieves” is important because such a group cannot exist and is bound to fall apart if there’s no trust that others within it will honour their word.
That’s why “honour” in WoW is seen as arbitrary by many because they’re trying to apply their own universal code of honour to other groups, when honour by its definition is subjective and reliant on the specific group culture you’re analysing.
The better question to ask – do orcs consider this behaviour honourable? Is there a difference between the different clans when it comes to their interpretation of honour? The answer to that is an objective yes – the clans have different interpretations, there’s no universal “orc code of honour”. Blackrocks (Saurfang’s clan!) considered it honourable to drown sick, weak, or deformed babies at birth because it preserves the honour of the family by ridding it of perceived weakness.
Frostwolves on the other hand embrace their weak and the sick, because they’re an incredibly small clan whose numbers peaked at 80 and they can’t afford to leave one another behind. To them, abandoning a member of the pack behind is dishonourable, because they’ll only survive by working together. Just because someone’s born sick doesn’t mean that’s their only lot in life. Draka was born with some undefined hereditary disease, but became one of the greatest warriors of the clan through hard work and discipline, because the clan’s code of honour dictated she must be given a chance to prove themselves.
And while I’m on Frostwolves, Lord of the Clans shows more insight into their code of honour. Because they inhabit cold, inhospitable places, they are honour-bound to aid anyone they find trapped in a blizzard and give refuge to those escaping bad weather. But their hospitality has its limits, as not carrying your weight is in turn considered dishonourable. There’s an expectation of repaying the hospitality by putting in work for the good of the clan through physical labour, hunting, and other acts of contribution. Freeloading will get you exiled.
Warsongs used to have a code that revolved around the complete domination of the enemy at all cost. The only way to gain dishonour from a fight was to give up, as they were expected to fight to the end. This was reflected in the Mak’rogahn and the fact that no Warsong was ever taken alive to the internment camps. They all died fighting, and Lord of the Clans shows that mentality almost decimated their numbers, which is why Grom had a change of heart towards the end when his devotion to “victory at any cost” – victory or death, if you will, led to the humans killing all the Warsong children. He gambled the future of his clan because of their honour code and he lost, which led to him threatening to kill Iskar for suggesting they should continue and resort to giving back eye for an eye and killing human children.
Kazura would for example never strike an unarmed person who has cleared surrendered, unless that person for example would attempt to strike back with a hidden weapon.
She would extend her aid to those in need in a blizzard, for example, but cross the path and attack and she will return the favour.
Mess with her wolf and there will be hellfire on azeroth, Honour is a strange and convoluted thing.
I’m not sure human culture has any meaningful consensus on matters of honour. Some will look to the Three Virtues of the Light for honour and justice, others look to the battlefield for glory and victory.
Alice does not have a code of honour as such. She has principles she sticks to whenever she can, but honour is not really a part of the equation when she does so. It’s more of a personal set of values, honed over the years, that makes her sleep just a little better at night.
For Kopt, there is an immediate link between Compassion and Honor.
He is devoted to life and favours pity over anger or hate towards others despite how passionate he can get. His supposed good faith is linked to the way he acts and his reputation, and it is this good reputation by virtue that he considers Honor.