What would the alliance need to do in order to match the horde crimes?

From my understanding both sides are pissed that the alliance is too much of a goodie two shoes.
So what would be needed for them to match the horde in crimes.

How to villian bat the alliance?

It wouldn’t be crime, it would be justice. If you commit genocide, you shall be committed genocide upon.

3 Likes

That is what makes it so hard.
There is nothing i can think off.
That the alliance could do.
That cant be justified as protecting itself from those who would slaughter them all if given a chance.

In my best case scenario the factions wouldn’t exist and wars would be of a much smaller scale, but since that’s neither likely to happen, nor the question at hand…

The Alliance should do what they do, but actually double down after a win. Try to conquer the savages who have shown to be unable to rule themselves, instead of killing their leaders and going away. Making threats like Varian’s “we will end you”, only if they are prepared to follow through.

We really don’t need to villain-bat anyone to have a strong Alliance AND a strong Horde. Just let both sides be willing to actually fight for what they think is right, instead of letting the Horde fight for the lulz and the Alliance purely for survival.

For example, if the Alliance decided to reconquer the land the Horde took, like Gilneas, the Ruins of Southshore, and the whole of Ashenvale, they could well be aggressors without just being unreasonable. And assuming the Horde doesn’t just let that go, you already have an escalation.

2 Likes

They’d have to commit genocide and send innocents to hell.

Doesn’t work against the Horde though because the Horde is evil and deserves everything bad happen to them after they commited so many genocides.

2 Likes
  1. Move Calia Menethil to the alliance.
  2. Push her to go all in with her “I wish to prove worthy of the name Menethil”.
  3. In attempt to “help” Arthas’ victims, gather the remains of the scourge.
  4. Now you have a buch of characters who would have no problems doing whatever atrocity imaginable as long as they can say after “but look, it worked!”

Alternatively, there are blood trolls. The alliance could learn a trick or two from them.


gl hf

1 Like

So your soulution is… to import new forces into the Alliance, because we can’t have a dark side without our story dominated by foreign elements? Veto.

2 Likes

Let’s be honest, when you have a story with, say, Anduin, who says that he feels pain when he does something evil, and this is the face of the faction, what are you going to do?

Yes, there is a Varimathras quote, yes, we can expect someone in the alliance killing Turalyon and that could push Alleria to a killing frenzy. Would it make her evil?

We have Vereesa, whose husband was killed because of the events of MoP, but she is not a full-time alliance. And she does not seem to have problems with Jaina going into Warcraft 3 horde-friendly mode, even though for her it is personal. She could be, but that is an indication IMO of what will happen with Alleria if the story goes there.

And, once again, is this actually evil, to be angry at someone who killed your loved one?

Hence why I think it would require a roundabout solution, and the current dev team is unlikely to push the alliance cast into a villain state, without seriously contradicting what is known about them. There are no faction leaders who would fit the role at the moment. Like, at all. Even Tyrande has elements in her story that are likely will push her out of vengeance mode once the devs will found a convenient time.

Well, given the way it was handled before, I have to agree, that would be the best option for the devs. Replace the rigid 2-faction system, say, with an evolution of the covenant one. Maybe even reshuffle them between the expansions.


gl hf

So… you can’t make the Alliance a villain, you just can give new villains the Alliance label?

Well, I guess that’s true to some extend. But looking at the Horde “villain-battings”… not really. The usual pattern would be to have a new leader take over, go genocidal and then have the rest of the Alliance rebel over the rest of the addon. And we already have Turalyon leading the Alliance forces since Anduin is being abducted to hell. So there is a kind of likely candidate, who has already been shown to have no real qualms about nice things like the torture of innocents. He isn’t very far from a “This whole city must be purged” moment, so I don’t really have a problem with casting him as a villain.
If you want a more emotional teamup, #TeamVengeance, headed by Tyrande and Genn might do the trick.

We can talk about how “evil” that stuff is, but I hope we can agree that it would certainly make them villains. And if something like that happens repeatedly within the Alliance, at some point the moral distinction to the Horde would become quite mushy, since any future Horde attack would also be a retalitation against this Alliance violence.

Is it cheap? Horribly so! But I find your idea of further shifting the blame by making the Alliance be taken over from the outside with new troops from there to be even cheaper. If we are to villain-bat the Alliance, we should villain-bat the Alliance peoples, not the Scourge.

But like I said in my post… there is no reason to villain-bat anyone anyway. We don’t need the Alliance to be evil to feel proud of it, nor to feel justified to hate them as Hordies. We need it to be strong. And not just in numbers, but in deeds.

2 Likes

The horde has Warcraft 2 roots. You don’t need “villain-bat” that faction, just tip the scale of the influence toward the crowd representing what always was there.

The story of the alliance out of the box is “we united against a threat to out our world”. Yes, there were betrayers and backstabbing inside the alliance, but I do not think this topic was ever explored in the game.

Could be an interesting dynamic, IMO. If in canon the alliance would be way stronger than the hotde, but pre-occupied with internal tension, lack of trust, backstabbing, fighting for the influence, etc., that it could kind of even the play field.

Turalyon as a zealot is a borderline fan-fiction IMO, that was born because of the “golden one” whisper. He explicitly tells Anduin not to follow the Light blindly. And iirc approves the idea of the Gathering.

If you are looking for a more sinister characters in the alliance, I’ve read that dwarfs, at least Wildhammers, wanted to use azerite to destroy the horde completely. And you can also combine

Varimathras:
When your thrones run red with betrayal… when your holy places burn and the shattered mask hangs above your hearth… only then you will know. And it will be too late.

with

Prophecy of the Three Signs:
The wolf cub will inherit a bloody pack.

then you can also have Tess Graymane as another face of really going all-in for war.

You could also add to the description of that scene that he tried not to use such method, that he restrained the victims so that they would not harm themselves, and that if they would not do it, Sylvanas would succeed with killing Bwon. Otherwise, yeah, sure :roll_eyes:

Lightforged are, but it’s just balancing the overly peaceful draenei image.

As I said before, Tyrande has a story behind her which can turn her away from vengeance. She brought into the story (well, the writer through her) that no matter how evil something is, it can be forgiven.

Genn is already in the “horde is fine, it’s all Sylvanas” camp.

I am not aware of any serious ideological defference between the factions at the moment. If anything, it would be better (IMO) to push the views of factions further away from each other instead of finding common things.

After what happened with Hillsbrad and Darkshore, that would take 2-3 expansions of non-stop action. Blizz could not even maintain the conflict for the full BfA. It could be nice, I would be glad if the devs commit to the theme of the faction conflict and we would only have hot and cold stages from now on, like, forever, but I am not sure if the dev team is capable.

Nope, it’s more like alliance looks at how effective a new approach is. Alliance adds it to the arsenal as a good tool. No taking over, but gradual cultural ship shift to have more acceptance (and maybe internal conflict because of it) of more… sinister characters and methods.

remembers the Crossroads cinematic
If only, my dear gnome, if only…


gl hf

1 Like

No. For me it was 100% born out of Shadows Rising. A paladin who uses the Light to help innocents to be tortured is a zealot. I really don’t need the foreshadowing for that. He is 100% the ends justify the means. That the torture wasn’t his first choice doesn’t change that in the least.

But it didn’t yet. And we are doing our discussion right now. Blizz will not villain-bat the Alliance. The discussion is how they could. And Tyrande is one way.

In a calm moment he was. But he is an emotional character, who is likely to change the harshness of his opionions with his state of mind.

Also… that was before the fourth war. Afterwards it was “You know, Anduin, Tyrande has a point.” and raging and raving at corpses under the cathedral.

So what? This threat is about how to villain-bat, not if. If our speculations comes up with a story that takes 3 addons, so be it.

If the Scourge becomes the face of the “bad side” of the Alliance, it’s enough of a takeover for me to call it that.

2 Likes

I definitely could see the possibility of Maiev going in the “evil” direction. But it would not be as emotional as Tyrande. We’ll see. Yeah, maybe she can go in this direction. But the presence of “any evil can be forgiven” in her story makes me look for other candidates.

Ok, if that’s how you see it, that’s fine too. It’s fine to have not just blood knights as an “other side” of paladins.

I do not see it that way, but it’s not relevant. Time will tell.

It’s not the vibe I got during his appearance on top of ICC, but I would need to see more of him during the upcoming events to get to any conclusions. After all, there are some “flukes” that make a character appear not how they act overall (Stonetalon Garrosh, BfA Calia).

Well, in that case the only thing that I could think of is condemning the ways of the alliance completely as inadequate and turning to… I am not even sure what would be the end game. That would be not even as much of the alliance, but going against what the alliance was. Just like Garrosh story in the context of Warcraft 3 horde.

Would the scourge convincing the current leaders to adopt new methods so that we would see worgens / dwarfs / possible future undead using it in practice, be a good enough middle ground?

Or, void elves learning about old paths of following old gods and spreading the corruption that would gradually turn the alliance into a subsidiary of Black Empire?

Or, make the elves accept highborne not just on paper, but make them see the reason and value in what was the Kaldorei Empire?


gl hf

1 Like

Light magic always took the conviction that you were doing the right thing for it to be successfully summoned. Doubts hinder your ability. If you can successfully summon it to torture people who haven’t done anything, that says all I need to know, really. And I prefer a zealot Turalyon to revising the concept of Light magic, to make it just “that yellow magic”.

But sure, that’s not necessarily how the Blizz-writers thought about it, we can never underestimate how much they can suck.

Sure, the Alliance has to be the bad actor, where they get their motivation doesn’t matter to me. But I don’t see why we would need the Scourge for that.

Frankly, I still see Void Elves as a foreign element within the Alliance, since Blizzard made no effort to explain why the Alliance thinks they are okay, so no, Void Elves bad wouldn’t be enough for me. Indeed, it would be quite bad, since we would just get additional reasons to kick them out, without doing it in the end.

Imperialism is always a great way to go, sure. Kaldorei, human supremacist, or the gnomish regime of ultimate reason, I don’t care, it’s always a good way to go bad.

3 Likes

If I was in charge much more alliance characters would die. These arrogant hacks of a faction deserves nothing but bad things happening to them. By the sun there is nothing I hate more then the alliance. I hope they collectively step on a Lego.

Btw, after thinking about it for a little while.

is it actually true? Ex-scourge human-undead are from the alliance originally. San’layn were part of the horde only on paper, forces of Kael’thas were in Outlands by the time the remaining blood elves got into the horde. And they were fighting alongside the alliance at some point in the past.

So, are they really foreign forces? Seems like a bunch of undead can have their relatives / friends among the humans / void elves.


gl hf

1 Like

They are none of the playable options, so true enough for me. Indeed, undead are associated with the Horde, no matter how Alliance they were when alive.

2 Likes

Actually, after learning a bit about the subject, I would not really mind if some join. For example, stories of Darkmar, or Elsie. Maybe I am just a bit too sentimental, but if they want to, I would support the reunion. They were part of the alliance. I do not think prejudice is a good enough reason to deny them a chance.

Not all undead even care about the time in the horde.


gl hf

1 Like

Ogrimar plant huge tree and use all there as ferilizer, Silvermoon finish arthas work then we can talk about crimes.

1 Like

Making Alliance more “evil” is not too hard. To be frank there are crumbles already placed. Whilst the peace holders are kidnapped in SL the tensions are already rising. Turalyon has already expressed his interests in key places of EK. And yes, as Wimbert mentioned I get the idea that Turalyon thinks ends justify the means, not only torturing innocent, but he also working hand in hand with Void magic is a give away.

Also Alleria who hasn’t shown any sympathy to Horde from the day of her return, her methods can really escalate. Heck her convincing Turalyon to sweep EK all the way up to Queen Thalas is already pretty big.

On the other hand we have…(for now) Night Elves and yes Tyrande gone I doubt Maiev supposedly in charge, that she will miss the opportunity to strike oh Horde and violating the armistice.

The possibilities ar there - it just needs following up.

1 Like

Oh, me too. Just not under faction banners.

1 Like