Is Warcraft's narrative leaving the Horde behind?

Think this is where a bit of nuance come in. The Scarlets - on paper - fighting the Scourge and the heavily expansionist Forsaken isn’t hard evil/black per sey if that’s all they were relegated to (especially in Vanilla when the Forsaken were dabbling with Legion Cultists, old god stuff and planning to help depose the Bloodhoof alongside the Grimtotem).

It’s the entire prosecution of non humans, dogmatic stance, excessive and gratuitous cruelty (and the fact that they are manipulated by a Legion agent which encouraged their descent into what they are now) which paints then as villains.

I think conducting a villainous act doesn’t inherently paint something black from that point on (else Shaw’s recieved the whitest of washes since Cataclysm).

From the Titan’s perspective re-origination was the only sure way to be rid of the void and the old gods and it wasn’t until Wrath that they discovered* the natives can actually fend the intrusions off.

*or deigned to look. Aloof and largely indifferent is how i’ve found them depicted and regarded them.

In contrast to the void/old gods, which have never really been depicted as ambivelent to everything – even in Vanilla wherever the void popped up it was never linked to anything vaguely beneficial. All paths are viable to the void/old gods, but it’s their paths and you bet everything gets a shade of purple, psychosis and an extra limb or six.

hold up a minute they did what now?

It’s a questline in Thousand Needles vanilla, the Grimtotem and Forsaken were palling it up.

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didn’t play horde in vanilla

legit fuming right now

omw to undercity to have some words

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I’ll try and pull the questline up next week. Man is going home and the laptop stays at work.

Scratch that https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Secret_Note

There’s also that tauren woman in the Undercity who drank poisonous water seeking treatment from the apothecaries and they make her drink more poison as a test and she dies violently.

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imagine making yourself totally obedient to the forsaken just for a chance to stick it to cairne

grimtotem the dumbest tribe around for real

This is a misrepresentation of the actual state of the Titans, btw. They don’t have One Plan Above All, in fact their original plan was to destroy Azeroth during its full corruption because they weren’t sure if it could be saved, and if they allowed it to continue as was then the Void Lords would have entry into the physical universe and would have engulfed everything into nothingness (objective evil). Instead they put it to a democratic discussion with all of the Pantheon, with Aman’Thul acting as Mediator between the Pros and Cons; ultimately Eonar and Aggramar swayed the rest of the Pantheon to action to help save and try to uncorrupt Azeroth.

This leads to what Azeroth is today, with all the life (flora/fauna etc.) on it (created by Freya, Eonar, Golganneth, Khaz’Goroth etc). I doubt they care overly much about singular lives, but for life as a collective or even groups of mortals they certainly do seem to care at least to some degree because they create protectors for them, they create the ability for planets to sustain them easily and simply, they create stars so that they may gaze up in wonder and suns so they may feel warmth. I mean hell, when we meet the Titans in Antorus Eonar tells Aman’Thul that if they must give their all so that the Children of Azeroth can continue to live then they shall do so (queue Eonar ressurrecting us).

Creators that inherently create chaotic, sentient life and allow it to flourish also wanting preordination is an oxymoron and a contradiction of the highest regard.

A lot of people for some reason or another also misinterpret Algalon and the purpose of reorigination, it isn’t just a nuclear button anyone can press at anytime they want for any reason, Algalon does have the ability to transmit his findings to the Pantheon and request it but ultimately this only happens in the event a planet is deemed to be at a stage of corruption that is irreversible, we see that with numerous NPCs in Shadowlands who tell us tales of their planets becoming utter hellscapes where the few survivors of the Legion/Void are just constantly fighting a war of attrition. If given the opportunity to save my planet from such a fate and restart life on it without the Void/Legion, I’d personally be more than happy to take that opportunity knowing that it would mean trillions more lives can ultimately be saved at the cost of the few surviving remnants of a doomed planet (though this isn’t to say that it isn’t still a painful and sorrowful choice, of course it is, because you’re still damning a small few to know that one day a whole planet’s worth of life can breathe a sigh of relief).

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A thought comes to mind of how to do a Horde and Alliance narrative.
The first half of the Battle for the Wrathgate.
The Alliance start first, pushing forward and wiping out the undead as they gain ground. When the vrykyl emerge, they still fight but it is clear they are outmatched.
Then the Horde arrives, allowing a victory to be achieved, however short it ended up to be in the second half.

We need more moments like such pushing forward if there is to be a joint narrative.
And if there are to be moments for each faction, then they should be balanced.
Velen’s sacrifice and Ga’nar sacrifice in WoD can stand as well as single faction moments that let people see the greatest virtue of each faction in their own light. Self-sacrifice, in different ways, to benefit everyone.

No one wants one faction to be left behind, but the process they are doing by shoving them together when not needed or set up right only does a disservice.

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Let me just say that I do not use “amoral” to mean “evil.” I am not trying to paint the Titans black or anything like that. I use “amoral” to mean exactly what you just said, it’s just a lot easier to use a single word than it is to use the thirty or so that you just used. From a mortal perspective, the Titans are amoral - they operate outside of mortal morality and with no regard for it, which is what leads to Titanforged antagonists being one of the most common threats that we face in the game.

I could use the TV Tropes terminology of Blue-and-Orange Morality instead but I think that would quickly get obnoxious.

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I’ve always seen pre-Algalon Titans as being more akin to Dr Manhattan in terms of morality. Dr Manhattan wants to do what he perceives to be good, but he thinks on such a higher cosmic scale now that he can’t relate to the daily lives of humanity anymore. The timespan in which his thoughts exist span eons, and he births stars and creates life in his ultimate devotion to the greater good and the flourishing of life.

But because he’s so far divorced from our daily lives, it’s easy to see him as cold and uncaring, because he fails to show the sympathy for individual lives. That’s not to say he doesn’t care, but that he has a bigger picture to weigh it against. His story was always of a god-like being forgetting his humanity and the struggle to learn it again.

By Legion, as Meronspell pointed out, the Titans do care about the fate of the people of Azeroth. Because Algalon showed them that we are worth it, where previously:

Algalon the Observer yells: I have seen worlds bathed in the Makers’ flames, their denizens fading without so much as a whimper. Entire planetary systems born and razed in the time that it takes your mortal hearts to beat once. Yet all throughout, my own heart devoid of emotion… of empathy. I. Have. Felt. Nothing. A million-million lives wasted. Had they all held within them your tenacity? Had they all loved life as you do?

Their MO changed after that.

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Please don’t butcher my beloved like this… I beg you :worried:

Sorry, the Horde will be hit with the “your city is accessible to everyone now” bat now too.
At least you will have massive Void invasion and group on the other side of the invasion that views the place as home to justify this.

In all honesty, letting Void Elves into the city after banishing them for what they did, would be the dumbest story writing I have ever seen…

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I mean, the Forsaken did worse to Gilneas then the Void Elves did to Silvermoon, yet here we are🤔

Compromise:
Alliance can walk in the city.
Void elf characters are still banned and get OHKO’d by guards if they attempt to approach

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This is literally the Void.

Honestly I think that’s why it’s kind of good the forsaken showed up. The void elves dont’ really have much to atone for - they nearly caused a disaster, but I don’t think that was ever the intent, and their punishment is to be outcast from the blood elves and reluctantly taken in by the Alliance.

With the forsaken I think there was more of a reason for them to atone. Now whether or not the forsaken should be a faction that even considers atonement is a fair question, but I think Blizz are - for better or (probably) for worse - trying to move them away from the “death to the scourge, death to the living” mentality they had back in WotLK.

That was used for a villainous faction that was denounced and cut out of the Forsaken.

Ideally, that would have been a great point for the Forsaken to reconsider their place in the world after they had gotten their vengeance and lost the life-hating warmongers. However, that didn’t happen and the Forsaken proceeded to double-down because the writers wanted to make the setting more metal and more over the top for Cataclysm.

Which resulted in the same story eventually being told again with the life-hating cancer needing be to cut out of the increasingly extreme Forsaken yet again.

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The Horde shifting from a Warchief to a council should have happened after Garrosh.

But they milked the exact same story again. :pensive:

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