Why is there so much Orc propaganda?

Community General Discussion
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This is not a hate post, so please don’t take it personally. Like I see people reporting posts for their race or spec being questioned or criticized, lol. And this post is not attacking people who play Orcs. Just some lore-related discussions.

Anyways, why is there so much propaganda about orcs? It feels like from Blizzard’s side, they are trying to kill the idea of good guys - bad guys, like with holy light and void, for example, but it’s so awkward. Let’s settle all the arguments, and I hope you can give me some counter-arguments, real ones. No whataboutism towards Alliance please. Don’t defend the horrid actions with others’ horrid actions.

1. They were tricked to drink demon’s blood, so it’s not their fault.
Interesting… when I was reading the book, they knew it was demon’s blood. Or even if some of them didn’t know, why would you drink a green stinky substance from an orc with questionable origins? Their home was dying, they were desperate, I get it but they keep listening to Gul’dan for so long, but their wold keep dying. Why they don’t stop listening to him? Gul’dan didn’t come out of nowhere and convinced everyone, no. It was a work of many years. He said “kill Draeneis to fix the problem.” They did (before drinking, there was a lot of attacks on Draenei already), and that didn’t fix the problem. So why they won’t throw Gul’dan away? Notice, they were not corrupted before that, they were continuously tricked, for many years, and they did whatever he said, never had any results, but kept listening to him. Well, he has a cloak and a staff, probably he is smart to listen to. And if they were so peaceful, why they so happily accepted the offers to genocide a neighbouring race?

  1. The aggression came after drinking Mannoroth’s blood.
    A big lie again. There were many orcs who didn’t drink, like Orgrim and Durotan, but they were savagely attacking Draenei and later humans with their clans. Later they retconned that Orgrim was from Frostwolf, but originally he was from another clan. But anyways, many orcs who didn’t drink the blood, still committed genocides. And even before meeting Gul’dan, they would still have big clashes between clans and with Ogres, so aggression was still there. That is one of the reasons why the legion targeted them as their genocide tools. What’s funny, in that book that I read 10 years ago and don’t remember the name, the final decision from Legion’s spy came while he was watching Durotan and Dreka having a “warful sex.” Interesting…

  2. They were peaceful shamans before the legion targeted them.
    Another lie again. Like I said, there were countless clashes between the clans. Peaceful societies don’t build killing-machine citizens.

  3. The new horde is good guys because legion was defeated.
    This is one of my favourite lies because it combines some combos of arguments that just destroy this point. Garrosh, a guy who didn’t drink the blood, knew they were tricked to attack Azerorth, saw peace between Alliance and Horde, decided to nuke a trade city Theramore. You can justify this in any ways you want, like you always do, but it doesn’t change the fact that most of the Alliance forces were outside of Theramore, and while they were gathering, a mana bomb was dropped on a city that did not have any intentions to attack them. Very “peaceful” orcs, indeed. And again, until now, the officials from Horde feel 0 guilt about this or the original portal invasion.

  4. After they kept captive, the blood effect left and they became peaceful.
    This is so ridiculous. They beheaded all the guards, rescued all orcs, created new horde and attacked the alliance again. No Gul’dan, no Legion, no blood. They attacked a nation that spent taxes to keep them alive in cages and had mercy on them and did not massacre them after the war, while they could do it easily and nobody would judge them.

  5. Thrall is a good guy, so here is an example for you.
    The only normal orc that does not have the zug zug oozy brain was enslaved by humans and grew in a human society. It was bad towards him, I get it, but that time orcs were known like unintelligent savages, and they killed many members of the alliance, so the hate towards Thrall was justified. And he was educated by humans, probably that’s why he is the only orc that is not zug zug. But even for Thrall, he used shamanism in Makgora against Garrosh, who was just punching him. Very honorable orc, what can I say…

Some other interesting notes. The horde, which was mostly orcs at the beginning, never apologized for the genocides and massacres and still remains terribly hostile towards the Alliance, even though the Alliance showed mercy on them 2 times already and didn’t rightfully, completely wipe them. 0 empathy or guilt for doing all these horrible things. Truly, a peaceful mindset.

Again, I understand the intention of killing the idea of good-bad guys, but you can’t just ignore all the horrible things they did, and always find excuses. Why it’s so hard for people to accept that Orcs are just aggressive brainless creatures, I don’t understand. Literally, the slang Zug Zug which means brainless rush and zerg on someone is Orcish. Think about it.

Another important note, with this post I don’t want to attack anyone who plays an orc, nor I am trying to protect the horrible things that humans did, like beheading Tarreta. And before replying to this post, please make sure not to drink redditor’s blood, so you remain “human” and civic. Thank you. Show how peaceful you are in your replies, prove it to us.

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Game revolves around orc vs human from start. Night elves doing their own things thats why too much orc and human things from start.

Also you asking about justification of lore hic ups in wow like garrosh - there is none; its intentionally screwed up. Lore is meaningless after warcraft tbh.

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Because orc master race. Zug zug.

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game is tired of everyone being a “good guy”. Horde was way cooler when it was consider a bit “evil”.

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Could you write a tldr please?

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There seem to be two styles of writing the Horde in the writing team:

There’s the “Warcraft 1 and 2”-style, the Horde is evil, “RARRR SMASH!” and stuff, grab what they can, burn or otherwise destroy what they can’t, Garrosh-style.

And the “Noble savage”-style, seen first in “Warcraft 3”, shamanistic culture, “Strength and honour”, that sort of thing.

For some reason, the Horde alternates between these two every few years (Vanilla up to Wrath they were good-ish, then Cata and MoP evil, sort-of good again for WoD, back to evil from Legion to BfA, and now noble again, for as long as it lasts), while the Alliance is always the same, bland “Lawful stupid” stuff (I play Alliance, i’m allowed to say that), and it’s maddening, the Horde is tired of the moral roller-coaster, and the Alliance feels held back by lawful goodness.

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The orc mantra of ‘Strength and honour’ is heard a LOT in game. Orcs are supposed to live by this code.

But as strength comes first, honour second, and sacrificed a bit too easily.

The writing would be better imo if a few wayward characters acted excessively, so we could see difficult decisions played out more often by leaders deciding how to handle it. Sometimes enforcing honour via quests or learning, and trying to fix small mistakes in choices.

Less of the ENTIRE Horde being told to buy into the craziest stuff.

I think Blizzard have favoured the Horde because they had more freedom to experiment, and it fit a fun, heavy metal, rebellious, sweaty male teenager trope, which is a bit dated.

If you don’t believe me, in BFA, Boralus is lovely, but expected.
However, my jaw dropped when I saw the temple of Draza’alor and giant dinosaurs for the first time.

Draza’alor was actually less practical, but it feels like the creators let their hair down on that one (for me at least).

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No, people do like it as long if it is well written. Thats why good guys tend to win and be unharmed in practically every single movie. Wow writers just are not that capable of writing amazing quality stories, it often seems they already lost the concept of the expansion in the first patch of most expansions

Honour is different per culture, if you were to compare the honour of vikings among eachother to some royal knights order i guarantee you they are going to have different idea about what honour is.

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Well Europeans invaded, genocided and stole lands from natives for centuries and Europe wasn’t dying back then, it was fine.

We don’t call ourselves the baddies nowadays, do we? So yeah, certain individuals still alive who made malicious choices (talking bout orcs now) sure aren’t grey, they are very much the bad guys, but generally speaking you can’t blame all orc society for it.

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why would they? Europeans only did what was normal for nations at the time. Try to expand their territory and power by invading other lands. Not that long before the colonisation times it was europe holding on for dear life against the ottoman empire

People love japan as well, and tend to ignore what they did in ww2.

the problem with orcs is, they come from another planet and have completely different ideals and cultures compared to most big azerothian races. Making their savageness stand out more. The orc race already was pretty barbaric before they eagerly and willingly accepted the demon blood ( twice). Cannibalism for example also was not that uncommon for an orc seeing the bonechewer clan. Guldan already was a bad guy before he contacted the demons, and most orcs did not even have that much fel energy in them compared to demonhunters. So technically they should have been able to stay in control

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I maybe should have put “seen as uninspired by the new cabal of writers” instead of leaving it like that. I assumed that the rest of the post would show that I am not opposed to simple storytelling. But in recent times there has been a push in storytelling to normalise the “morally grey” and to pull down the heroes people revere. This can be a very interesting premise, if done correctly. However, I was arguing that WoW’s writers lack the ability to write in a nuanced enough manner. They’re hitting you with a literary sledgehammer where nothing fits, everything feels jarred and flat out wrong.

Trust me, I want to go back to a level of storytelling where we have a clear bad guy to unite against. Because that is what Blizzard has always excelled at. Those have been the stories that people to this day still love and hold dear. But BfA and SL are tales we would want to forget they’ve ever even been told.

Everyone invaded, genocided and stole lands from everyone else as long as humans have existed. Even the natives the Europeans invaded have been genociding each other for centuries and millennia before the Europeans have arrived. Stop with the stupid “Europeans bad” narrative just because it’s fashionable.

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I still think Strength has priority in Orcish Wow.

You got my interest piqued on Vikings, so I briefly looked it up. It looks interesting, I would hope paired with common sense it offers some flexibilty and choice depending on the situation.

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The point of the story is that yes Orcs are bad, but not all Orcs. Same goes for the humans, some are evil but not all. It was never meant to be good vs evil.

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Chatgpt summarized it as follows: The writer questions the widespread propaganda about orcs in Blizzard’s game and argues against several commonly accepted ideas. They dispute that the orcs were tricked into drinking demon’s blood and that it’s not their fault for their subsequent aggression. The writer points out that orcs repeatedly listened to Gul’dan despite his bad advice and committed genocides willingly. The article also claims that many orcs who never drank demon blood still committed violent acts. The writer criticizes the idea that orcs were peaceful shamans before being targeted by the Legion and that the new horde is the good guys because the Legion was defeated. They also argue that the orcs did not become peaceful after being held captive and that Thrall’s use of shamanism against Garrosh was not honorable. Finally, the writer notes that the Horde never apologized for their genocidal actions and remains hostile towards the Alliance, showing no guilt or empathy for their actions.

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Yeah that sums up the orcs pretty well. They eagerly did these things except for the frostwolfs to an extend. And now a frostwolf is in charge all the other orcs from other clans are like “we are good now, we have a frostwolf leader” And then mostly eagerly follow gary as he wanted to drink some void juice instead of fel juice during MoP

Warcraft orcs are basicly like death knights but on steroids. Deathknights inflict suffering because they need to. Or like blood elves wich had to suck the mana out of creatures to survive. Orcs have to commit genocide every few years or they go insane.

It would be an interesting idea to use if we ever go to the fel lands whenever blizz feels the need to release sargeras and illidan. With the whole plot of orcs being free of maghteridons control but not of the influences of fel wich makes them extra aggresive

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I am not from Europe, I am from Armenia, and we call you baddies for that. Not you directly, but the people who were responsible for it in the past. But even so, you won’t see school teachers trying to justify all these genocides either.

I feel bad for CHATGPT for putting so much efforts for him, cuz he will definitely not read an entire paragraph.

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In concentration camps

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No it’s fetter when the horde are the underdog heros

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Why have you come out with this now? The reason I ask is because it’s definitely been this way since at least Warcraft 3. For the last decade the Horde have been lead by the odd war-criminal warchief. If anything, I think they try to make the Horde into bad guys these days.

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Better than wiping them out anyways.

What do you mean why I came out with this now? Because I made the post now, it doesn’t mean I had this idea just now.