He was right, after all.
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The thing that people misconstrue is that itâs moot because Daelin was a âbad guyâ; like murdering him proves any of what heâs saying as wrong.
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It´s a massive problem with Warcraft storytelling because Horde has, on multiple occasions, had a story that explored their identity and renouncement of their dark past, that was completely contradicted by later storytelling, resulting in situation where people like Daelin Proudmoore are proven to be 100% right.
When Daelin tried to destroy the Horde in TFT, he was in the wrong. We have seen Thrall´s journey, his new Horde that saved the Darkspear and tauren, and even allied itself with the Alliance. We knew his Horde tried to move past its history (even though the nature of Rexxar´s campaign meant that Blizzard had them do a few genocides, but I think we can ascribe this to Blizzard not realizing what they were doing) and because of that, Daelin Proudmoore saying they can´t do so was wrong.
Then Garrosh came and it turned out that orcs actually haven´t changed that much. WoD even showed us that they´re capable of doing effectively the same thing they did in MU without influence of demonic blood.
But, OK, Horde isn´t just the orcs and we´ve seen that pretty much all of it has rebelled against Garrosh and renounced his tyranny. No longer will the Horde act with such savagery as it did during his reign. It has learned its lesson about following the Warchief to total war and will from now be the bastion of honor.
Then Sylvanas came and it turns out that Horde is very eager to follow second Garrosh, now with added bonus of not actually rebelling against the Warchief en masse, even if their leaders did (still no idea how it works).
Now, on OOC basis, we know full well that Blizzard has moved past faction conflict and when Horde says it´s not going to start another world war, it´s 99,999% true simply by account of there never being another faction world war in the future. But if we´re to only analyze the story that has been written, or look at it through the eyes of our characters, then it paints a grim picture of who is right and who is wrong in the âHorde are evil monsters that can´t change vs. Horde has changedâ, and it´s completely Blizzard´s fault.
Also, obligatory âLordaeron should have been before Teldrassil and Alliance should have been the invader in BfAâ comment, the setup was perfect for it and they ruined it.
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Calia Menethil gets rejected and shot to death at the Gathering and instead of getting resurrected as an undead Light abomination sheâd be treated as a martyr (as she wanted to mend the rift between the Forsaken and humanity) and the rightful heir to Lordaeron by the Alliance while Sylvanas and co treat as her as an upstart usurper and a direct link to a royal bloodline that condemned them to undeath.
It would have been ample reason for Anduin to be a bit as reckless and great as his late dad and attack Lordaeron City. Sadly we canât have nice things any more.
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Even better reason;
Anduin being 1) still young, 2) STILL not going to therapy for the fact His Dad Freaking Died, 3) having Genn Grudgebearer still semi-justifiably having a bone to pick with the Forsaken (ha ha) telling him itâs only a matter of time before the Forsaken look further afield, etc etc
Which also ties neatly into the question of Are Supreme Rulers/Kings/Warchiefs actually a good idea?
But⌠Blizz donât seem to like that, either. Which is weird, for Americans, imoâŚ
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Also, it would justify the Horde´s basic premise of being the races that banded together because the world at large hates them and if they were to stay alone, they´d perish.
It doesn´t really work when these poor misfits unjustly hated by everyone end up starting 2 out of 2 faction world wars and annihilate multiple Alliance (and even neutral) nations/factions.
It´s also why I think Horde has such a big identity problem right now, because their Vanilla identity was effectively destroyed and replaced with the conqueror identity of Cata/MoP/BfA, leaving them with nothing once the faction conflict has ended.
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A lot of people have been extremely vocal about not wanting a warmongering Warchief and wanting Thrall back both during MoP as well as BFA (eg. the #notmywarchief wailing).
Now they got their status quo and the same crowd seemingly donât know what to do with it. Whatâs worse is that Blizzard doesnât either, at least until Metzenâs alleged magnum opus begins.
Yeah the massive disjunction between what weâre being told and what weâre being shown.
Itâs why Iâve grown to hate Anduin, Thrall and similar characters from the main cast. Anduin is there giving another Picard speech about peace and forgiveness. My brother in the Light, I just finished a quest where the Horde invaded a town and crucified the peasants on the walls of their own houses.
Itâs hugely jarring.
The struggle of figuring out how to clean multiple expacs worth of dirty laundry and warchief raid bosses without an unsatisfying handwave.
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The âstatus quoâ reached after Yet Another Massacre, a Warchief turning out to be the Big Bad (or kinda sorta not-really honest!â˘) and all the Mess that goes with all that, nevermind the mountain of bodiesâŚ
Yeah, Iâm not struggling to see WHY that causes so many issues, when the time, as you say, passed back in MoP or, ideally, in Legion. Dredging up the faction war WITHOUT something like, say, Old God influence and corruption, was a stupid idea. And now weâre here.
I think there´s more nuance to it. People who didn´t want warmongering Warchief and wanted Thrall back often looked at it through lenses of wanting Vanilla-Wrath era Horde back, and didn´t realize that this Horde got ruined by those warmongering Warchiefs (and Cata rework) in a way that couldn´t be fixed by simply bringing Thrall back. Similarly, Blizzard failed to reincorporate the post-conquest Horde into the setting in a way that would give it reason to exist.
Back in Vanilla, both factions could have been defined by what they said about themselves (and what they didn´t say about themselves.
What Horde says: We´re the misfits that have to work together to survive in this world that hates us.
What Horde doesn´t say: We´ve got substantial portion of our population doing horrible things and we don´t do anything about it.
What Alliance says: We´re paragons of justice that protect the world against evil.
What Alliance doesn´t say: We´re an empire that will gladly destroy someone if it suits our interests.
This mix allowed Horde to feel like misfits that need to fight against the world (because the Alliance empire would otherwise crush them), while Alliance was able to feel like paragons of justice (because the Horde was often being straight up evil). However, with Cata and BfA, the dynamic shifted completely because it wasn´t the empire that tried to destroy the misfits, the misfits tried to destroy the empire.
The big problem is that they succeeded. No longer was there a substantial human presence in Lordaeron, threatening the Forsaken. The humans weren´t sending their armies into Horde territory, building fortresses that dwarfed the bone and leather structures orcs, trolls and tauren built nearby. Forests of Kalimdor weren´t filled with night elven structures that put to shame hidden outposts of the Horde in them. The Alliance empire was broken, destroyed by Cata making factions more equally represented in the world, and by the decision to tie destruction of Alliance lands to Horde conquest rather than third parties (compare it to Vanilla, where Alliance didn´t encounter the Horde until their 20-30 zone, while Horde had to fight Alliance in their starting zones, resulting in a world where it was the Alliance that was intruding into Horde lands rather than the opposite).
This left us with Horde as the faction that houses the evil guys and Alliance as faction that fights for justice. However, with removal of those evil guys in two phases during MoP and BfA, Horde has lost that part of the identity too, while Alliance still got to keep its paragon of justice identity that can be easily applied to fighting enemies like Xal´atath. The current status quo is vastly different from the Thrall era because of the wars, and I don´t think it can ever be brought back.
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Summed it up better than I could put it, aye.
Iâd respect that angle if Blizzard actually treated this topic with nuance, but we know thatâs not the case. Iâve stopped caring about the Hordeâs identity crisis because Blizzard doesnât really dwell on it longer than justifying the next global war to then pin that on a handful of the perpetrators (acting Warchief and their circle of close friends).
Similarly the current iteration of the Horde is what people asked for. No warmongers among the leadership, only ten shades of Anduin acting as a council that allegedly has no disagreements and are as quick to jump into action as part of the Justice League of Azeroth as the Alliance are. We will very likely see Thrall and co getting the spotlight once Alleriaâs and Anduinâs arcs end (which I hope is extremely soon), but thatâs just fixing the issue of Horde representation in the story, not what the faction is meant to be currently.
I have to agree on one aspect, which is how the Horde is no longer a band of misfits. Them being aggressors and always having enough manpower to bulldoze the Alliance (by the end of BFA Anduin admitted that the war effort is taking a way to heavy toll on them in a cinematic) just does not mesh with the idea that they had to join forces to at least survive.
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I think the simple answer will always be that the setting changes and evolves over time. The Horde isnât the ragtag group that gathered in WC2 and bolstered in WC3, at least not anymore with the full backing of a Goblin Cartel and the Zandalari Empire.
Itâs a world-conquering superpower in every sense of the word. Financially, Industrially, Militarily, you name it and the Horde is on par if not the greater force compared to the Alliance.
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The Goblin Cartel in question did fit on one boat. And the Zandalari âEmpireâ was an Empire divided(by class, civil war, etc) to its very core when they did finally recruit them into the Horde.
The rest of the races are even in worse state.
Horde should, by all accounts, not be a
Especially compared to the Alliance, even with its many diminished races.
As it stands, the Night Elves are probably more of a world spanning Empire (with its holdouts all over Azeroth, and beyond even) then most playable races are at the moment, even with their diminished numbers.
And before their genocide, they were practically able to stop the whole Horde from advancing, until the Horde lowered themselves to ambushed and subterfuge tactics.
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Over time it has come to the point where there are just two military blocks obsessed with power and domination through any possible means. The Horde commits genocide and mass murder on a whim, time after time proving that Daelin was right and that the talks of redemption are just hypocricy. And in the hypocricies the Alliance has become an absolute champion as well. They were the first to legalize the massive use of the Void to the point of arranging ecological catastrophes (Zuldazar), it was them that started the conflict over the Azerite, they even openly invited members of the Burning Legion into their ranks (how many of the Petinent are actually willing to change and how many simply choose to fight for the victor is an open question as well). It has long since stopped to be about good or evil. Both are worse, and neither will stop the militaristic aspirations until they are victorious or dismantled. Itâs another too realistic part of this fantasy story: at some point it all boils down to power and domination.
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Thats the Draenei themselves, though. And not the Alliance. And the Penitent are restricted to Argus and under the watchfull eyes of the Lightforged Draenei when they do visit Azeroth, no?
With the sole exception being their leader, that is.
In the same way that the Kaldorei invited their Darkfallen and Druids of the Sun kin back into their ranks.
But you will see neither of those amongst the ranks of the Alliance in Khaz Algar, because they are not accepted by the greater Alliance as a whole, instead these are racial matters, between the Kaldorei-Darkfallen-Druids of the Fire and the Draenei-Eredar!
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At the time, and still they managed to beef up the navy and have enough R&D poured into them to fuel the first wave of the Iron Tide. Not to mention terraforming Azshara for clout.
They were still one of the greatest naval powers on the planet. Was the empire a bad place to live for anyone who wasnât Zandalari? Yea lol, that doesnât mean theyâre slouches though.
This feels like a moot point to just score some âgood boyâ points. If the alliance was really so much more powerful than The Horde, how come the Alliance hasnât just bulldozed them since WC2? At this point calling the Horde weak and emaciated just makes the Alliance look incompetent in their war efforts.
Both factions have enough manpower, technology and supplies to start and then maintain a war as the story dictates. We can only guess and hypothesize about what the Horde and Alliance should be capable of at any point because thereâs not a single person left at Blizzard whoâd want to do something like establishing hard facts about populations, resources, general morale or standing armies.
And thatâs easily justifiable. Keeping these details vague ultimately makes any storytelling involving war efforts a lot easier and stress free for everyone involved, while the 500~ players who care about this type of world building arenât a sizeable enough chunk of the playerbase to be concerned about.
Hence the Void Elves and Magâhar, for all intents and purposes, should be each at best a hundred-strong group, but we know they are effectively an endless stream of combatants when we need a narrative setpiece of either race duking it out with an enemy force.
You can replace any race with the examples Iâve given and itâll remain true.
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In the same way that Stormwind is a âcityâ you could walk across in about an hour, the actual numbers/size things being supremely nebulous is⌠vexing.
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I cannot name a single fantasy setting that has this stuff down to a science. Even George R. R. Martin described that one ice wall as being âa hundred meters tall and a hundred meters wideâ and when he saw the equivalent in real life he was like ânah too bigâ
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