I actually think that kind of tension is good, because it feels real - and if anything it is this kind of tension that the Horde actually lacks.
Example
When is the last time that the blood elves or the nightborne considered their interests as something separated from the amorphous blood that was the Horde during BFA? You’d think with their cities being set away from Kalimdor, within Stormwind’s reach, it would not be in their interest to aid the Horde in Kalimdor’s conquest. If the Horde conquers Kalimdor, they would have to beg their independent allies for protection by a powerful neighboring presence, the Alliance, which dominates the EK.
And yet we see nothing of this kind of - potentially interesting - political game. They’re just screaming “for the Horde” while they’re being exploited by Sylvanas.
But beyond that, I think the point is simple: the values that inspire the Alliance are still valid today. Those of the Horde, are not, and its people have cannibalized one another to the point that it is harder to sell that they should still gain benefit from standing together.
Garrosh was killed because he went to alternate universe and started an invasion of Azeroth.
Also, I see it´s really futile to talk to you when you try to turn everything towards “bUt WhAt aBoUT aLLianCe?”. Zaphius brought up an interesting point how Horde races (it wasn´t just Garrosh) often cause a lot of damage to other Horde races, and how at the end of BfA, Horde has effectively been through 2 civil wars to oust a tyrranical Warchief and suffered through multiple cases of Horde factions killing each other even outside of that, and how the justifications for its existence became severely damaged, if not outright disappeared as a result of that, resulting in a narrative where Horde has pretty much no justification to exist anymore.
You decided to completely ignore that in favor of some weird whataboutism about the Alliance.
This is however exactly why the storytelling that Blizzard has created about the Horde has harmed Horde so much. When orcs destroy a tauren tribe, or when Forsaken leader threatens to pull out her support and let part of Quel´Thalas fall to the Scourge when blood elves don´t jump at the opportunity to send their armies to Northrend, or when orcs try to assasinate chieftain of the Darkspear and then occupy their islands, or when people unwilling to partake in Warchief´s war machine are bombed, the argument that the Horde exists to protect its nations from outside threats evaporates.
On two occasions, the Horde has become the existential threat to some of those very nations, or demanded for those nations to participate in Horde wars even at the cost of their own safety. Fortunately, many of these problems are direct result of position of the Warchief and the power that whoever held this position had, which was solved by replacement of the Warchief by the Council. But if we look at it through lenses of late BfA Horde where the last tyrannical Warchief was just deposed, I think it would have been logical for many of the Horde races to just nope out of it in favor of creating something new with their closest allies.
I- I don’t see how that’s going against my point. Or you’ve completely misunderstood what i meant.
The point was that the Horde has had more of that such as was earlier pointed out; Sylv’s underhanded helping of the Blood Elves as a method to simply use them in their vendetta against Arthas. Which they can’t really oppose because they’ll lose half of their kingdom as the Forsaken simply march out. Putting them in a bind, but they couldn’t go to the Alliance because well, they were too busy trying to kill, spy and sabotage in Eversong and the Ghostlands (which is vaguely picked up again in the Theramore/Jaina novel when Lor’themar outright ignores Windrunners plea for support when she rails against the plan against the attack on Theramore).
Meanwhile, the night elves disagreeing with the Alliance is the first real big disagreement that’s been shown where a member of the Alliance has done their own thing over marching in lockstep with Stormwind.
So I stand by my earlier point - either both factions go or none of them go. Disbanding and dissolving only one of them would…accomplish what, exactly? Further peddle the impression that the Alliance are exclusively the ‘good guys’ and the ‘protagonists’ with a few token ‘scary races’ as side kicks every now and then?
Even ‘token’ is a stretch since most of the current expansion is exclusively neutral or Alliance characters.
Again, if people are saying “Well you should disband the Alliance too then!” uh, yes? Very yes. Admittedly now post DF there feels a lot less like there’s natural space to do this… But what else is new for criminally missed opportunities and bad writing?
He was killed for multiple reasons. They’re not mutually exclusive and there’s an entire quest chain showing the resistance building within the Horde against his increasingly volatile and horrific actions and treatment of his enemies and allies alike. It’s a fair bit more nuanced and complex than the entire Horde gleefully going along with and being complicit in Garrosh’s campaign. The same can be said of the Burning of Teldrassil.
…that’s not what I’m doing, though. It’s a debate and I am outlining my point of view as someone who has played the game almost exclusively because of Blood Elves and how deeply their core story resonated with me. I don’t care for either the Horde or the Alliance, I have repeatedly acknowledged that both are a detriment to various playable races.
Yet removing the Horde doesn’t resolve the long standing issues that the Alliance is responsible for and has never really paid for. Yes, the Horde did terrible things and has - for the most part - paid for them.
The Alliance, however, hasn’t and as someone who was pretty deeply tied to Blood Elf role-play back in the day, I still remember the…questionable messages many Blood Elf players received from those who unironically believed that Garithos never did anything wrong. So yeah, it’s a bit of a touchy subject and though this might be a case of crossed wires/genuine misunderstandings I can’t say I’m going to support the idea of eliminating one of the two major factions in the game.
It’d make more sense to disband both, especially if the plan to do away with the faction conflict altogether is intended to be a long term affair.
I mostly play Alliance myself these days so it’s not like I have a complete aversion to the faction. Though naturally as a role-player, who has many characters caught up in the faction war, it would be nice to get some closure even if that’s unlikely to happen.
If nothing else, if the faction war does somehow reignite again then hopefully the exact same mistakes as every other time aren’t made yet again.
Ok, less sarcastically, I think this is wherin a lot of the problem stems; we’ve already had this.
BFA ended with nearly exactly SoO 2.0, Not Electric Boogaloo, except there was no raid. Which is bad for the Horde as a ‘Can you stop hitting us with the Villain Bat, please and thank you?’, bad for Sylvanas because, uh, looking back at Legion and ALL prior stuff, and she got absolutely shoved into the blender for the sake of 1.5 awfully written expansions that no one really asked for, and bad for Alliance because ‘Well, we have to take the moral highground’ writing has resulted in Oop, More Dead People.
Like, the whole point, IMO anyway, of Genn was supposed to be a good example of ‘Letting Vengeance eat you up and become your driving force is bad for you and everyone around you long term’. Him being pretty objectively right was, uh… that was certainly a choice.
Nevermind shoehorning that arc onto Tyrande, and then again with terrible context and writing flipping the switch to Moving On, Now.
Both Thrall and Sylvanas attempted to kill Garrosh before this happened - Thrall at the end of SoO, stopped by Varian. Sylvanas during his warcrimes trial, stopped by Vereesa and Anduin.
Of course Thrall did get there eventually, but he wasn’t “killed for WoD”.
To be entirely fair, the Burning Legion itself was not dealt with through the Horde and the Alliance but through class orders, which again reinforces the point that the two-faction poles was no longer a necessity by then.
The Horde made sense before. But I have started to question its need post-BFA, when the Horde had become a threat to its people yet again, and had to be saved by members of the Alliance and the rebels of the Horde working together yet again, and then they resume the Alliance/Horde divide almost as if nothing had happened, yet again, ignoring massive divides within their culture, ideologies and so forth. Yet again.
At this stage, the Horde is not needed to defend the world from existential threats: the various nations of the Horde could easily send troops of their own to deal with, for example, the Void and then cooperate with the other groups then and there, because they already do all the time.
I think there is some truth to this, and it is possibly the sole reason the Horde still stands. But as a matter of fact, this appears to resonate more with certain groups (such as the orcs/trolls of Orgrimmar) than others (such as the tauren, the blood elves of Silvermoon or even the Zandalari), and it becomes less and less relevant to speak of that one time in which humans were mean to you, if the Kor’kron of Garrosh also did. And then Sylvanas.
I don’t think it is only that. When it is about a political alliegance, you want a limited suspension of disbelief.
I can’t bring myself to believe an organization like the Horde, right now, would work.
I am stating that from a writing perspective, the Horde is in the dog-house. But unlike other times, where you can go “well, duh!”, I am lowkey thinking it is actually not coming back. The writers just don’t know what to do with what was the spirit of the Horde, and that it has been lost. Or rather, it has been sacrificed on the altar of the faction wars during BFA.
That is actually what I am talking about: except that I don’t see it as a matter of punishment. I used to be a massive Horde fan, but you can only fail so many times. I don’t like it, I wouldn’t want the Horde “punished”, but it is just not working.
If it doesn’t work anymore, and you can’t fix it, then break it.
It is possible, with some copium, that maybe the Horde will have to go through some kind of drastic change and go through a rebirth, and become something else altogether, but… I really don’t see that happening in a way that caters to the various races inside it, not at this point.
Oh, you are Aerilen my bad. Yes, I did misunderstand your point.
Look, in my defense, you and Thalstarion have a very similar hair-coloration and really look like one another on a cellphone!
That’s actually what I would like- rather, what I would have wanted to see with the Horde: tensions and conflicts of interests that make the various factions inside the Horde feel both real, with their own interests and wants, and also at the same time part of a greater whole.
However.
The example you take is from WotLK, which is 16 years old. We haven’t really had anything like this since Mists of Pandaria ended. During BFA this kind of conflicts of factions within factions wasn’t really explored or touched upon in a satisfying way, and most of the time it was just a moustache-twisting villain manipulating all the factions inside the Horde because she was just that smart and perfect.
For me, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I felt like receiving a disappointment after disappointment, to witness the Horde, as a whole play second fiddle to Sylvanas’ and Nathanos antics. Case in point, Sylvanas became the center of attention in Shadowlands and, three expansions later, we still have to hear anything about the Horde.
I don’t think “received assistance from the Alliance at any point in the history of Warcraft” automatically translates into “has no bones to pick with the Alliance at all.”
Similarly, “wronged by another member race of the Horde at some point in the history of Warcraft” doesn’t automatically translate to “has no reason to be loyal to the Horde and should have left long ago.”
The former is a point in favour of the Alliance and the latter is a point against the Horde, which deserve to be taken in consideration, but I wouldn’t say that the tauren should ignore everything bad that the Alliance has ever done to them and everything good that the Horde has ever done for them, just because of that one time the Alliance gave them some cash.
I think it’d be neat if the Horde existed in any meaningful capacity (not helping alliance races or alliance race-lookalikes) for the first time in 3 expansions.
Half the screen time of DF and all the screentime of TWW is afforded to entirely Alliance plotlines and characters, and I’m not really buying that they’re not capable of doing better- they did better for some sixteen consecutive years prior to shadowlands.
But I suppose it is easier and cheaper to just only write one storyline.
Yep. People are right to be annoyed at the lack of Horde representation. Beyond a couple of quests involving their small army, and Thrall showing up every now and again to do Thrall things, there’s nothing there.
What would be nice is if Horde characters take the lead in the inevitable Haranir patch.
(And for Haranir to be a Horde allied race - I’m getting tired of all these filthy neutrals)
At the very least, we have an opportunity for more Horde content come Midnight. Not just Blood Elven: I imagine a lot of Troll stuff’s on the horizon too!
I wouldn’t call the current storyline an alliance story. It’s the Main Character story. Anduin, Thrall, Jaina, Alleria, Magni… Well mostly Anduin really. It’s the Anduin story.
Unfortunately the new stuff has haranir talking to Magni about their goddess who is presumed to be Azeroth.
Would’ve been an idea to maybe have the Tauren show up for this, since they’re the other race that reveres Azeroth - the Earthmother - as a goddess.
oh well lol
Jaina and Thrall are hardly front and centre. It’s Anduin and Alleria with a sidehelping of Magni/Moira/Dagran.
And those are all Alliance characters, hanging out with Alliance-coded factions (the Earthen and Arathi).
If the core cast was instead…I dunno, lets say Thrall, Nathanos (back from the dead, don’t worry about it) and the triple threat of Rexxar/Chen/Rokhan, hanging out with a new tribe of trolls and some subterranean tauren, I don’t think anyone would really sincerely say it was anything other than a Horde-focused expansion.
Both Thrall and Sylvanas attempted to kill Garrosh before this happened - Thrall at the end of SoO, stopped by Varian. Sylvanas during his warcrimes trial, stopped by Vereesa and Anduin.