Zul'jin for Warchief!

Rubbish. Honour is a universal concept, in the sense that it demands honesty, fairness, and respect. You cannot be called an honourable person (no matter whose faction you are from) if you are a lying conniving “misanthrope”

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It’s not rubbish at all. There is different understanding of honor in various places IRL.

In Arabic culture there are “honor killings” for women who lose their virginity before marriage.

Or encouraging a war via Jihad.

In Japan it was loyalty to your shogun and your duty in protecting him. Regardless if he was right or wrong.

Or commiting suicide to maintain the honor.

There is no ultimate understanding of what honor is.

Often in barbarian fantasy honor is shown in ability to defeat strong foe by yourself.

So it’s perfectly reasonable to expect cultural insight in various races, since they all are different, and priotize different values than the others.

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Naturally - It’s an indoctrination device invented to control the behavior of a population, aiming to install dogmas into their minds.

So it will depend on the intentions of the inventors of a particular code. Quite often, it’s simply a means to preserve the status quo or create tribal cohesion - You may screw “them” but screwing “us” is dishonorable. Thieves codes are a classic for the latter.

That said, in the world of organ transplants, the only honorable death is a donor-able death!

Loyalty is honourable. So?

Again this is a FAIR fight and nothing underhanded, assaulting helpless civilians IS. Therefore, the Horde needs to regain its honour - not by merely getting “rid” of Sylvanas who they followed right into slaughter.

Albeit there may be varying degrees/shades of honour - the concept remains intact. Anything that goes against truth and fairness is not honourable. Being conniving AND honourable just does not go together.

Which the current Horde didn’t even do, Sylvanas had to renounce them and only after that did they have the penny drop.

We’re told the rebels were a miniscule minority in comparison to the loyalists, so yes, the villain bat strikes deep.

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Not really, Honour is a cultural concept. In some Middle Eastern countries it’s honourable to kill your sister when she loves someone you don’t like, in some others it is needed to marry the guy who raped you to keep your honour, in the Sengoku-Jidai in Japan it was perfectly fine to betray your Allies to get an advantage but being captured in battle demanded ritual suicide to not dishonor your Family.

So Honour has nothing to do with some specific valuens and varies extremely depending on the culture.

ps. should have read the whole thread before posting, much of what i wrote Zarao has written before.

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Not even in WoW, if you recall Saurfangs words.
But then Honor or Honorable are muddled terms in WoW it seems.

Remember that the supposedly honorable Baine chose to shrugg of his dead people and the sacking of an entire Tauren village, turned a blind eye to the Alliance’ siege of Mulgore…and most recently in BFA chose to go under cover and sabotage Sylvanas’ plans for Jaina’s brother, without stepping up and confronting her directly.
Wich he could have done aswell shortly after the Siege of The Undercity.

To be fair, we’re told a lot of contradictory things.
Lor’themar says Sylvanas has the “support of the people”.
Anduin, upon seeing the rebel army, comments “So few”.
And Alleria says Sylvanas has the superior forces and that we can’t beat N’zoth without them.

But then, on the loyalist side, you learn that there is quite alot of opposition against Sylvanas even among the civilians in Orgrimmar.
The only forces you see are Forsaken, Mag’har and Goblins and Nathanos even orders you to form a militia because their ranks are seriously depleted.

So I think it’s really hard to tell who outnumbered who at this point.

How about this Zarao- Honour means not genociding a race and blowing up capital cities/towns/villages/schools full of innocent civilians just because the Horde wants to or they feel it’s their right because wahh wahh they are undead or living in a desert or havent got enough wood or were spyed on when they were sucking fel and mana etc etc

Let’s see the Horde cope with that simple concept and then we can move on to more complicated concepts such mulptiplication tables and colouring within the lines :man_shrugging:

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Maybe because he was “outnumbered” he did not behave as bravely as a warrior of the Horde should? But being wary of Sylvanas and playing it cautious actually tells us that Baine has brains. Our last war chief is a psychopath. How else was he to act? Besides, when he did what he did, he no longer had any loyalty for her. As far as I understand the scenes, he was through with her.

While Camp Taurajo was a tragedy (based on false information delivered to Northwatch) Theramore paid a high price for it. Maybe that is why Baine considered it “paid for”?

Not to be a Buzzkill but the honrable alternative was to start a “good war” by invading enemy territory with rogues assassinating every moving nightelf, misdirecting the enemy into thinking you go to silithus just to turn around and attack them without further notice in an “honorable” war were you outnumber them because they are just some city garrison. ah yeah and not forget the honourable thing of taking an entire tree of civilians hostage.

I mean it was only Worgen and Nightelfs that defeated the Horde forces in Darkshore which were compromised of Goblins, Undead and Orcs going with the Trailer so its not impossible. And as you say numbers were never a thing to be bothered about in WoW I´m not saying i like this but why should the story suddenly account for Troopnumbers, logistics and all this stuff when it never did before.

Just as an example Velen and Anduin could easily be strongarmed into conflict by other Factionleaders with the right justification for a battle. Not like the peaceful Anduin and the good Jaina devised a siege attack on the Zandalari. I think it is not necessary that the whole Alliance is always on the same page regarding every battle they fight if 3 or 4 Races decide to battle the Horde in Ashenvale for example and 2 are occupied in the Eastern Kingdoms or so you can creat conflict without the whole allaince lusting for war.

I also don´t think that anything Faction related or Faction War related is coming around any time soon i think SL will be like Legion in that regard more neutral Storytelling and very little Faction Character development but it could happen in the future.

I agree with the first statement. Regarding the second i´m afraid this kind of super Warchief runs the same Problems people like Thrall, Anduin and Sylvanas suffered. At a certain point people get just fed up with a npc and if this Npc is the Warchief it becomes increasingly more difficult to write a good story around this character.

Then don’t. Really, I don’t want the Warchief/High King as someone that is always in the action. Just the contrary, really. I don’t think it needs to be a character that has much of a development at all. Their job is to represent what the faction is supposed to be, and I don’t think that that is something that should change much. And they need neither super powers nor omnipresence for that. Being seen only in exceptional circumstances when decisions for the whole faction must be taken would be my prefered role for them. Like BfA Anduin, really.

The decisions about how to implement the leader’s will (or not) are not inherently less interesting than the leader’s decision itself.

Just the Guards as far as i remember

Only possible because the Alliance flooded OG with Spies

That’s smart, prevent a long drawnout war by using deception. Lower casualties on both sides etc.

It’s stupid to send your whole professional army to the desert just to shadow the Horde without knowing what they are up to. Especially in a Situation where they just can take the other road and invade your homeland. Its like parrying the bare
fist of your enemy with a shield and simutanously baring your throat and rolling over when he has a dagger in the other hand.

To prevent a long very big war in the future that Sylvanas sold as inevitable to the other leaders. One of her arguments was Stormheim by the way.
Ony Sylvanas herself knew of her goal to burn Teldrassil.

I understand that idea but don´t you think it would be a huge waste to take a character and have him undergo, what i assume are hard trials that become sort of development for this character because in Literature Trials are often used to help a character grow and define themselves so it would be weird if Blizz did not do that, just so this character can sit back as this enigmatic leader who never participates? That´s why i think no Warchief might work you don´t have to shoulder all the Faction respresentation on one Person. I still find your idea interesting but i think for this to work the overall storytelling in wow would need to change away from what it is now back to the more subtle approach classic and Bc had. And i´m not sure this will happen eventhough it could be nice.

She only sold this idea to the honorable Saurfang. Baine was sent away and no other leader was present but i don´t want to go into this again just this i think to this day it was a very weak argument and nothing in Bfa could convince me otherwise.
About your other replies. I´m not arguing against the smartness of the measures taken by the Horde all i wanted to do is point out that nothing of this can be considered honorable in let´s say the Orc Culture we got to know in WoD or in Tauren Culture. I wanted to show that in the story the word “Honor” is thrown around like Carnivalcandy but no one actually ever bothered to define the word. It has no meaning as does every action taken in this sense of honor. For me at least everyone can feel differently but in my ears Honor is just another hollow nonsense word.

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Not really. The story of their growth would be finished. That’s the story the novel/comics/whatever were there to tell. The rest is just their rule. if you have a good story, with a good ending, any sequel is just as likely to ruin it as to add to it, if not more. But if somone asks why that guy/gal is the one everyone defers to… well, you can point to the story of how they got their position.

And if they have a great idea how to continue his arc… well, nothing is stopping them. But as you said, that’s a hard thing, and that should only be done, if they actually have the great idea. The most important thing is not to ruin the character, because it’s more than just one character. It’s the representative of the faction.

While I would like that (well, Classic at least,TBC was a clusterf***), I don’t think it’s necessary. There are more characters than the faction leader around. Like I said, I think BfA Anduin was actually in a pretty similar position to what I had in mind. Well… mostly. Let’s cut the “Anduin stabs an Azerite war machine to death” scene… though it might fit a Horde leader, actually… Apart from that he was mostly representative. We mostly saw him for short breifings and debriefings where we learned about the situation, then he empowered some enforcers… and that was it. That didn’t stop us from getting drawn-out character arcs this addon, quite the contrary. And Anduin certainly isn’t the character I would have had in mind fpr that position, but that’s the kind of role I would want to givve the leader.

Sure, neither am I. But it can be nice to write down what you might like to see. :wink:

So sticking to Sylvanas after Teldrassil is to you honorable, right? Loyalty is honorable according to you.

I think you should really read some proper books or essays regarding honor subject. That is typical evidence of lack of knowledge.

That could work but if i were a lead story guy or whatever i think i would not spend resources into a character in whatever way (comic, book, quests ingame etc.) and then simply relegate the character to the sidelines just so he can do diplomatic tasks and head nodding. I mean in the best case no one likes your new character anyway so it´s no problem if hes sidelined but in the worst case you creat a new Sylvanas Waifu with a huge fanbase and then proceed to never drag her into the spotlight again.

This is also an interesting aspect you mentioned. I sometimes thought Blizzard left the definition of what is the Horde or the alliance vague on purpose so they can write about changes in said faction with more ease. I think it can be highly entertaining to write and eperience a story about the values of a faction and how they change over time. I just think this kind of story has been done poorly in WoW.
Also i think the more factions you add to the game the harder it gets to validate this one Character that pleases them all and i don´t think they will stop with expanding the playable roster because money.
Going back to you original Statement i think this kind of leader you envision could work with a lot of effort put into and no one doing an oopsie in the character development but I also have to say that for the past 2 or 3 years Blizzard has only disappointed in Story regards, me atleast, and i simply have no faith in them to pull that off. Because for this to work you would first need to properly outline every race and what their core values are so you can create a trial that feels representative of this very race and i think this has not happened. so every further step would seem pointless if they did not even lay down the proper foundation.

Well, we can certainly agree on that. I think they will continue to ruin everything. Not just because they are bad at what they do (and in some regards they certainly are), but also because it isn’t easy. Factions with 12+ different cultures should never exist, they are about impossible to balance, if no one is ever allowed to leave.

But that goes for every possible way forward, so I don’t think it’s much of an argument against my specific proposal here. I don’t think it’s likely or easy, but apart from dissolving the factions it’s the only thing that I can come up with that I think might actually work, given the limitations the story and the game presented us with. For the Alliance I personally can’t even get that far…

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I see it like this. The first loyalty is to stay true to one’s own principles. Thus, if I want to lead an honourable life, I must see to it that no outside allegiances compromise that, e.g. if I come to realize that my boss, my political party is not what they proclaim to be, I must either a) try to convince them otherwise, or b.) take my hat and leave. IF said boss or party are also doing something destructive to others or the community I must (if I remain loyal to my convictions) see to it that they are hindered in doing so. By whatever legal means possible.

In my view - this is what Baine did. Nothing more, nothing less.

I got quite a good guide-line for my life with the books I read on the matter. But thank you anyway.

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Agree but when Saurfang said that there was no honor in Sylvanas actions he was talking about the Horde consept of honor. Any ather consept we know from our real life is irelevant for the Hotde of Azeroth.