Sounds like what would have happened if MoP did not start with the Shado-Pan decimated. Both factions did more evil than good to Pandaria, but it was the Horde that ravaged the Vale of Eternal Blossoms.
I know youâre just memeing, but I rather both factions had elements that want to genocide each other as well as villainous and lawful goody-two-shoes subgroups who all have to deal with each othersâ shortcomings.
Granted that also sounds like a morally grey quagmire, but itâd beat this notion that the Alliance and Horde are monolithic organizations that keep all of their races and subfactions on the same page.
2 Likes
Even prior to this, a lot of dissent had already formed in the Horde, no? A lot of this story is pretty fresh in my mind due to MoP Remix, so it wasnât exactly sorted by patches when I completed the content.
the Vale being blown up and SoO was more or less just the core Garrosh Sycophants (Blackfuse Company and KorâKron) or am I crazy?
There was. Both Lorâthemar and Volâjin were keen on keeping as much distance and independence from Garrosh as possible, and the Sunreaver operations at the Isle of Thunder were benefitting Quelâthalas instead of the Horde in general, but to the Pandaren it was of little consequence. The war didnât stop because of these conflicts, and the sha didnât grow less numerous either.
Itâs probably an ice cold take in these waters, but personally, I rather thought the Horde narrative could benefit from a new enemy. Because I do concur that they should have one to unite against, but I donât agree that it has to be the Alliance.
Maybe itâs time for the Mongrel Horde to rise in Kalimdor? Not as a Villain of the Month type thing, but as more of a constant foe to be forewarned (read: fore-armed) against.
1 Like
Cycle of Hatred is a cop out because itâs really just cycle of villain.
Start genocidal war(Blackhand/Doomhammer - Garrosh - Sillyvanas), get defeated, feel really bad about it, promise to be better (Thrall - Voljin - Council). Do it all again.
I understand the desire many people have to escape the Horde being recurring villains. The need to balance the scales by seizing onto anything that makes the Horde less of the villain faction or the Alliance less of the hero faction. The most common events pointed to being Camp Taurajo or Sunreaver Purge. But the Hordeâs list of Evil Deeds is incredibly long and much grander in scope compared to the Allianceâs own list. In BFA it wasnât even the alliance who blew up the Undercity, it was the Forsaken. The Horde is up 2-0 on capital cities destroyed, 3-0 if you count Gilneas though they werenât in the Alliance at the time.
The cycle of hatred reasoning requires some equality of action between the two. And there is none, itâs horrifically one-sided towards the Horde. I recall theories floating about during BFA that the Horde zones and Alliance zones were being written by two different teams that never communicated, so often the Alliance came off shiningly heroic and the Horde came off psychotically evil.
What the Horde needs most is not an enemy, what it really needs is an identity that it sticks with permanently. Thrallâs Horde, Blackhandâs Horde, pick one, pick anything but it needs to stick.
5 Likes
The short answer is no.
Weâve got guesses (like âDraenei zone came firstâ) but that still doesnât really work - so Tyrande, having fought alongside the Blood Elves, hears about issues with the draenei and belves, and immediately jumps to trying to sabotage them?
Okay itâs Tyrande, so maybe that is how it wentâŚ
Personal headcanon is that Fandral was to blame for it, but if Blizz wonât tell us why NElves joined the Alliance, no great surprise they wonât tell us why they attacked the blood elves.
Their savage chieftains vs. our noble monarchs heheheh
2 Likes
Itâs true that the Horde is guilty of far more bombastic and obvious forms of aggression that get all of the screen time because they get hit with the villain bat, but letâs view things from an orcâs perspective.
- Most green-skinned orcs in the Horde have suffered over a decade of languishing in the internment camps of the Alliance.
- When they free themselves and head west, they find themselves followed by Daelin who seeks to punish them for past crimes that they are trying to move past.
- After the Third War, they were harried by the Alliance even in the arid land that they had tried to escape to, see Tiragarde Keep, Northwatch Hold and Bael Modan.
- When trying to extract vital resources from Ashenvale, which has plenty of lumber that the Barrens and Durotar and even Mulgore lack, they are punished by night elves.
- Thrall treats all of the above as penance for the past crime of the orcs, which pushes a lot of bitter orcs straight into the arms of Garrosh, when he arrives without a real understanding of the history that led the current situation, and who feels compelled by his fatherâs legacy to fight back against these aggressors and prove himself worthy of his fatherâs name.
- And then the Horde gets smashed with the villain bat come Cataclysm and most of the nuance evaporates.
It takes some effort to view things from the perspective of the Horde, especially when itâs a perspective that has gotten next to no attention compared to all of the focus that is given to the things that the Horde does to the Alliance, but there was some equality of action between the Second War and Cataclysm.
And yes, all of those orcs were interred in camps for a reason, for the war that they waged to conquer an entire continent, a war that they lost and were punished for. The Alliance had every reason to punish them, as they were aggrieved, but itâs also wrong to expect anyone to just accept their fate of life imprisonment and allow their entire people to wither away and fade from the world in internment camps for their past sins.
Itâs especially difficult when most of the atrocities that they committed were done under the haze of fel-imbued bloodlust and after the fact, when they try to explain the situation to their children, but all those children really know is that their parents languished in human captivity, which may compel them to avenge their forebears.
Thereâs a similar situation approaching the Fourth War, where the Horde is given lots of little reasons to feel justifiably wronged, which is barely given any attention and immediately overshadowed by the insane crap that they do when theyâre hit with the villain bat.
How is a common soldier of the Horde supposed to feel when theyâre informed that their new warchief was ambushed by the Alliance when trying to lead an offensive against the heart of the Burning Legion of Azeroth, when they learn that their efforts to exploit a newfound resource are constantly being stymied by Alliance spies and saboteurs, when they learn that a human of the Alliance just tried to usurp their warchief as leader of the Forsaken and claim Lordaeron for herself?
Of course, Sylvanas and the Jailer manipulated and coordinated a lot of these events, but the common grunt or civilian didnât know that at the time. From their perspective, it looks like an increasingly hostile Alliance is once again denying the Horde the right to any sort of sovereignty, and that they have no choice but to defend their right to existence by taking the fight to the Alliance.
⌠And then they get smashed with the villain bat in the War of Thorns and onwards and suddenly, everythingâs all about how evil the Horde is and oh no, the poor Alliance.
There is a logical cycle of hatred that gets exploited by the likes of Garrosh and Sylvanas, it just gets completely overshadowed by the insane nonsense that the Horde gets up to, not because of some sort of inherent evil, but because in the grand scheme of things, Blizzard is incapable of not presenting the Alliance as the shiny protagonists, which means that the Horde has to be in the wrong whenever theyâre fighting the Alliance, hence the absurd war crimes.
12 Likes
Shogg absolutely nailing the point, 100%.
As someone who likes both groups, itâs horrendously frustrating ._.
Rest in peace, the entire Stonespire Tribe that was slaughtered so the dwarves could dig a hole.
1 Like
What I want is my Horde backâŚ
1 Like
I think the issue here is that often, Horde players react much better to their side doing bad things than Alliance ones, resulting in scenarios where the level of war crimes Horde is allowed to do without causing an outcry from their community is greater than those of the Alliance, resulting in Blizzard being able to write stories that paint Horde in worse light than the Alliance.
It however isn´t completely the fault of the players because due to factional divide in gameplay, many players outright didn´t play the other faction. This meant that John Alliancehuman never played through Horde zones and only had the Alliance perspective that paints the Alliance in way better light than Horde questing does (and, just a tangent, I also saw this on Horde side recently, where one person that apparently only played through Horde side of BfA without playing the pre-patch, was vehemently arguing in favor of Alliance being the villain of BfA because they invaded Lordaeron out of nowhere).
However, the bad things Horde does are often present in their own questing. If you are Alliance, you never find out about dwarves destroying Stonespire Tribe, but you sure do find out about Forsaken experimenting on living prisoners as Horde. This difference in narratives is part of what made Horde players far more accepting of being the villains because they got to see their side doing villainous stuff since the beginning, while Alliance rarely, if ever gets to witness the Alliance Empire in action. Horde races being ugly also helps, someone who picks an orc or a zombie is probably far more willing to be the villain than Arragorn and Leggolas.
The other problem I think is that while some Horde fans are accepting of being the villain (and even want it in some cases), others will vehemently try to argue that Alliance was actually just as bad during Cata/MoP and BfA. There´s a reason why Taurajo is a meme and has been for over a decade, because some Horde fans will just bring it up as some big gotcha moment that proves that Alliance is evil, even though in the same war the Horde genocided what´s left of human population of Lordaeron, invaded Gilneas, blew up Theramore and invaded Ashenvale.
I think Blizzard screwed up massively with BfA and in many ways ruined the Horde even more than it did with Cata/MoP, I can kind of understand why they might have found it difficult to change the dynamic of faction conflict when substantial portion of Horde playerbase reacted to Horde being hit with the villain bat either with âlol, basedâ or âumm, aktchually, the Alliance are the real bad guysâ.
3 Likes
isnât it cool how the war of thorns is just completely not playable, like they just deleted it from the game
isnât that cool
7 Likes
I had no idea about the Stonespire until just now.
And holy moly⌠Between that and AV, Dwarven Imperialism was the true Villain of Classic WoW 
2 Likes
Again, another example in which the Horde arenât allowed to have any lingering resentment.
The only time they registered any of this was with the vague âyou know they will never leave you alone forever, right?â That brought Saurfang onboard to the side of war.
It is, as far as iâm aware, the first real interaction between Ironforge and Cairneâs tauren. Surely, this would have had a lingering impact in the narrative and help formulate an opinion of the Alliance in the tauren conscious?
3 Likes
I genuinely wouldn´t be surprised if Blizzard just outright forgot these tidbits of lore. It has happened before (such as everyone forgetting Falstad existed in Cata or placing NPCs that were killed during Cata in Hillsbrad into Legion invasions because they were still alive in pre-questing version of the zone).
4 Likes
Oh i 100% put it down to this over any actual malice, itâs down to the story Blizzard wanted to tell and they just put the circular and triangle blocks through the square hole to make it happen.
5 Likes
Starting a Nightborne and getting a popup intro from Warchief Sylvanas, who is nowhere to be found, and then starting levelling in Dragonflight and then-
Yeah, the devs donât want to do a Cata scale reset, but theyâre going to have to grow a spine and do it at some point, because the game timeline and interactions As Is Right Now is a gods damned utter MESS.
I hate it.
1 Like
Letâs not forget the Baelâdun Digsite in Mulgore, where more dwarves from the Ironforge-aligned Bael Modan expedition carved a quarry into the mountainside, despite being discouraged by Baine Bloodhoof himself, and maintained a hostile attitude towards the Horde. In the end, their violation of sacred ground angered the earth itself and they were wiped out by elementals, despite Baineâs warnings.
Sure, the Alliance of early World of Warcraft wasnât exactly evil or monstrous, but they applied a lot of pressure on the Horde in all sorts of ways that arenât really talked about. None of it justifies the mana-bombing of Theramore or the burning of Teldrassil, but theyâre still instances of Alliance aggression that have been forgotten and swept under the rug, and never apologised for or mentioned again.
I advise reading the Heart of War short story, for anyone who wants a little insight into Garrosh and the Horde during that period.
http://media.blizzard.com/wow/lore/pdfdownload/leader-story/garrosh-hellscream/garrosh-enUS.pdf
1 Like
I miss those dwarves 
Instead the tauren are one of only two Horde races with an ambassador in Ironforge >.>
Also, before I forget! The Alliance does face âHorde racesâ in their introduction zones, the only race that doesnât are the night elves.
Humans â Blackrock orcs.
Dwarves â Trolls.
Gnomes â Trolls.
Draenei â Blood elves.
Worgen â Forsaken.
Sure theyâre the wrong kind of troll, orc, and elf but you expect average Joe the farmer/guard/citizen to know or care?
Blackrock Clan is so-so because the New Horde and Dark Horde had Blackrock orcs amongst their ranks.
Same with Tiragarde Keep, Horde claims it was Alliance, but the Alliance only manned it after the Cataclysm wiped out the Kul Tirasians and (AFAIK) after the orcs invaded Ashenvale.