Actually, alternate Gul’dan recognised it aswell. During the audiobook about when he’d just been yeeted from his Draenor to our Azeroth, he eventually makes it to the Tomb of Sargeras with Khadgar and the Wardens right on his heels. He makes it into the Tomb and manages to harness the incredible source of fel magic there, and has a choice to make.
He can either use the power to open the portal and let the Burning Legion through, or keep it all for himself. He eventually decides to throw his lot in with the Legion because if he kept the power for himself, he’d have to fight everyone on his own, all by himself, including us 25 murderhobos that will come try and kill him. He actually acknowledges us there.
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Its been a while so thanks for the refresher.
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Yeah I remember that too. It was a very good audio book.
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Imagine having actual lore in the game itself. Y’know, keystones and worldbuilding and characterisation and…
Lol
Lmao
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Arthas was one of the few villains to recognise this group of murderhobo’s is stronger than anything else the Alliance or Horde had to offer (Nzoth being the only other villain to come to my memory to make a similar achknowledgement.) and realised raising them gives him the power to see the Scourge’s campaign to its brutal end. That is a terrifying thought.
Even more terrifying to think that Arthas would have managed to raise them successfully if our Tyrion Fordring didnt have a literal Deus Ex Machina-moment at the end of ICC.
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Its Tirion, though… 
Ooof, my mistake
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Warcraft Retrospective 22: To Atrocity and Beyond
https://lintian.eu/2024/03/24/warcraft-retrospective-22/
Excerpt:
The campaign begins with a bog standard fantasy setup: the valiant hero, his love interest, and his wise old mentor. But Arthas is flawed from the start. A little too brash. A little too impatient. A little too uninterested in negotiations, in gathering intel, in assessing the situation, in planning ahead instead of blindly charging in.
We follow all the standard beats of a save-the-world story. A confrontation with the henchman of the big bad guy. An early confrontation with the big bad guy that strengthens the protagonist’s resolve. An enchanted sword that can only be claimed by those who overcome the trials. This may indeed have been how Arthas saw this scenario in his head, a golden path that his destiny laid for him. But it’s all wrong, set up by the Lich King to superficially resemble a hero’s journey, and Arthas kept making wrong decisions. He executed Kel’Thuzad one spot instead of trying to capture him and learning more about the Scourge’s plans. He was far too eager to purge Stratholme, alienated his friends, and didn’t try to reason with them. He sailed into an obvious trap, and once he did, he fell to the sunk cost fallacy, committing one atrocity after another because if he stopped and went back, the atrocities already committed would have been committed in vain.
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There´s an interesting aspect to Culling where the story we see clashes with what Blizzard seemingly had in mind. Here´s the video from the guy who designed the mission (one of them, in others he calls people who defend Arthas psychopaths, but I can´t find that one, clearly we´re talking about stable and well-adjusted person here):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tigJUxQmJs
The intent seemingly was “Follow Medivh, he´s right, if you don´t trust him, you´re wrong. Also, the story clearly shows you killing people of Stratholme achieves nothing because they´ll be raised anyway. By not killing the people you slow the spread.”
He gets even more unhinged in the comments, it´s kinda hilarious to read.
Now, does the story do that? Because when we look at what the previous missions present us with, we find that if someone eats the infected grain, they die without any further help from the Scourge or Cult and rise as undead automatically. On top of that, Mal´Ganis starts raising people of Stratholme even if Arthas does nothing.
At the same time, Arthas never encounters non-infected people. Every citizen he meets and doesn´t kill turns into a zombie. And, afterwards, we see the city burning (something which the dev claims was done by uninfected citizens Arthas ignored because he didn’t even bother to finish the job or burn the bodies, and we are to figure this whole thing out…somehow), meaning the population of Stratholme was saved from becoming zombies that would bolster the Scourge.
While the further missions don´t show us Lordaeron, I don´t believe there is anything in the story that would suggest Scourge organizing another large-scale attack in Lordaeron before Arthas comes and kills his father. Arthas won, he made the Scourge to flee and if he wasn´t filled with rage and stayed in Lordaeron, that great gambit of Ner´zhul and Mal´ganis wouldn´t have worked. Lordaeron, at least for now, was saved because Arthas made the right choice. Of course, said right choice was made for wrong reasons, as you also point out.
The story of Culling is so good that even now people argue about it. However, it seems Blizzard really didn´t see it the same way. To them, it wasn´t a moral problem where the right choice would involve slaughter of the entire city, it wasn´t a problem at all, Arthas was objectively in the wrong.
And, given how nobody in-universe ever views Arthas as anything else but monster (the ordinary people, which makes sense), morally wrong person they regret not doing more to save (Jaina) or spoiled manchild (Sylvanas), I´m inclined to think that this is how Blizzard has always seen it. It´s a symptom of a problem that will be seen more in the future, where the story we see is viewed differently by the viewer than by the creator, who then develops the further story based on their intent rather than what the players see and how they interpret it, resulting in scenarios that, to us, make no sense.
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You bring up a good point — one that I think deserves being added to the post. Given what we know, if Arthas had just stopped after purging Stratholme and not taken the bait, disaster would have been averted. The Scourge’s hold on Lordaeron was broken, though at a ghastly price, and their ultimate plan wouldn’t have worked if Arthas had more restraint. Or was restrained.
Of course, the Scourge would still roam Northrend, and Muradin and his expedition would have perished.
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Arthas did nothing wrong in Stratholme.
Jumping ahead here, but the Rise of the Lich King covers it in closer detail as we get direct insight into Arthas’s headspace in the moment of the Purge itself, and the book makes it very clear that Arthas doesn’t know if he did the right thing. It’s portrayed as if even he thought it was wrong, but after he killed the first child, he had to double down because the alternative of having been wrong would have destroyed him, or worse.
We see Arthas crying through out the Purge, desperately hoping – praying – that he did the right thing, and it only got easier by the time the citizens started fighting back, because then he could justify in his own mind they were already infected even when it wasn’t always true.
By the end, his hammer had grown heavy and the Light within it dimmed, as the glow and weight of his hammer is a constant motif through out the novel symbolising his waning faith in the Light. At first the hammer becomes weightless in the hands of a Paladin as the Light courses through them, and by the end when he finds Frostmourne, it was dead weight in his hand that he had grown to resent.
Arthas knew that what he was doing was wrong, but after the first kill his fate as sealed and he had to believe he was right. He couldn’t have killed them for nothing.
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This and even the WC3 version just further adds to how much the WoW version leaves alot to be desired.
As in the WoW version, after his speech, Arthas calmly walks into town and is greeted by a concerned citizen who openly says that people are sick and in need of aid, but showing absolutely zero signs of infection.
Arthas just very casually walks up to him and says “I can only offer you a clean death” in a very (heh cool one-liner) style and cuts him down in-front of a whole group of civilians. He then coldly walks to the next person, who’s cowering in fear and kills them in the same manner, but instead now saying “This is just the beginning”, before being interrupted by Mal’Ganis and then going on his kill spree.
WoW’s re-telling of the event makes him out to be alot more clearly in the wrong and even with a hint of actual evil behind it.
For context:
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One thing that I remembered only later is that Cult of the Damned is in hiding in first Scourge mission, meaning that even though we don´t know what was happening in Lordaeron at the time Arthas was in Northrend, the Cult had to go into hiding to survive, suggesting the kingdom was safe to the point where the organization that took over Andorhal and was behind deaths around Hearthglen and in Stratholme couldn´t stay in the open.
EDIT: Also, found this thing from WoW
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/The_Restless_Souls_(1)
The people of Stratholme hurled themselves into the fires to prevent being raised as undead, which somewhat goes against the dev´s idea that the fires were only started after Arthas left by the uninfected citizens he didn´t even bother to kill or investigate.
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The first mission is also a bit ambiguous what happened to Arthas after killing Terenas.
The loading screen says he hasn’t been seen since, and the first scene has you “spawn” in a graveyard in a magical effect, with Arthas acting confused before seeing Tichondrius.
It’s very possible Arthas was slain by the guards and resurrected as an actual undead later.
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Personally when looking back on the Culling, it’s as Lintian said earlier. Stratholme was a no-win scenario for Arthas. Either he stepped in, or Mal’ganis would have managed to raise the majority of the largest city in the Eastweald into the undead.
And from Arthas’ perspective, if you’ve read Rise of the Lich King, this wasn’t just about denying the Scourge an army. He also truly believed, or atleast wanted to use that as further justification, that he was doing the people a favor by allowing them to die as free-thinking humans, as themselves. Before being turned into monsters that would harm everyone and everything they’d ever loved.
But that was only added later and the game only shows us the Arthas wanting to prevent the Scourge from raising an army.
It was the wrong thing to say, and she watched as Arthas’s face closed up. “I’m trying to protect the innocent, Jaina. That’s what I swore to do.”
“They are innocent—they’re victims! They didn’t ask for this! Arthas, there are children in there. We don’t know if it affects them. There’s too much unknown for such a—a drastic solution.”
“What of those who are infected?” he asked with a sudden, frightening quiet. “They’ll kill those children, Jaina. They’ll try to kill us…and spread out from here and keep killing. They’re going to die regardless, and when they rise, they’ll do things that in life they would never, ever have wanted to do. What would you choose, Jaina?”
She hadn’t expected that. She looked from Arthas to Uther, then back again. “I—I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.” He was right, and despairingly, she knew it. “Wouldn’t you rather die now than die from this plague? Die a clean death as a thinking, living human being rather than be raised as an undead to attack everyone, everything you loved in life?”
Her face crumpled. “I…that would be my personal choice, yes. But we can’t make that choice for them. Don’t you see?”
He shook his head. “No. I don’t see. We need to purge this city before any of them have a chance to escape and spread the contagion. Before any of them turn. It’s a kindness and it’s the only solution to stop this plague right here, right now, dead in its tracks. And that is exactly what I intend to do.”
Tears of anguish burned in Jaina’s eyes.
“Arthas—give me a little time. Just a day or two. I can teleport back to Antonidas and we can call an emergency meeting. Maybe we can figure out some way to—”
“We don’t have a day or two!” The words exploded from Arthas. “Jaina, this affects people within hours. Maybe minutes. I—I saw it at Hearthglen. There’s no time for deliberation or discussion. We have to act. Now. Or it will be too late.”
From Rise of the Lich King.
Still, as said, it was a no-win scenario, and no matter Arthas’ actions, Stratholme was doomed.
And I do believe that if Arthas had not gone through with the Culling, but found another way to destroy the Scourge in the city, then either the Lich King would have found another way to lure him to Northrend and to Frostmourne, -or- he’d find a different way to bring Lordaeron to heel and resurrect Kel’thuzad.
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this is why i always wish people would read or at least get an idea of rise of the lich king if their hardline in their stances on arthas but have never read it. the entire novel gives so much insight into his thoughts not just on the culling but on every event of his life. the childhood trauma of losing invincible to his own hubris haunting him into his adult years was poignant, especially when his first act after his atrocity in the capital was to go and raise his beloved steed.
another moment was when he met Taritha during a visit to Blackmoore’s internment camp and his unease at how she was made to dress and sent to him for “entertainment” . im often surprised by how often i meet people who arent aware of that scene
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Trust Christie Golden to inject character depth into the setting!
Yes, novel Arthas is more fleshed-out and more sympathetic than “my way or the highway” game Arthas, and in your excerpt, he and Jaina are at least engaging in the constructive discussion that was entirely absent from the game.
Novel Arthas is still flawed, and still falls, but at least he displays self-doubt and remorse whereas game Arthas is a complete 
to everyone at this point.
I can’t really hold it against the game, though. Its writing had to work under the extreme constraints of short cutscenes with limited animation, so there was little room for subtlety, and the characters had to be basic and easy to understand.
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oh without a doubt its just there was more room to write those flaws.
example: his taunting of kael’thas was a lot more pointed than I recall in-game
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