the horde loyalist decision

[Clone]

Never liked Sylvanas myself, but I dislike Alliance players more.

[Mehrunes]

I mean we now have beautiful cgi proof that she doesnt care about the horde. the ones against or the ones for. they are all dumb and weak to her as per the monologue. And if you have been following her about because she cares for the horde well what now?

Technically she's still chill with the loyalist players. Though while I can see characters sticking out with her even after the horseshit of a cinematic Blizzard disgraced the world with (after all there are NPCs whispering to loyalist players about how they believe Sylvanas just performed a ruse or something), having, for example, a Tauren Druid remain in that conviction after Sylvanas told them about feeding souls to the hungering dark is just bizarre. But hey, it gets the lol factor points. Though the fact that Blizzard actually continues the charade of the loyalist path and it wasn't just "lel play along with Saurfang as he challenges me to a duel to the death" makes me afraid Blizzard wants to try something clever here. Because that means they will fail spectacularly.

Or are the loyalist gonna strap into the roller coaster and ride it out till the end because its sylvanas > horde > nzoth > murloc gamjee > campfire > alliance?

Gonna correct you on that because what's left after this shit show isn't Horde. It's Alliance's doormat. And it should rank even below the Alliance on this list (meaning that Blizzard achieved an impossible feat here by an accident).

And if Sylvanas can bring the End Times and put this miserable setting out of its misery by cleansing it, that automatically makes her better than the Hordliance that magically forgot all their grievances against one another on the spot because they vaped Anduin's holy bones dust. The shitshow gets bonus points for the fact that the Sylvanas loyalist player can still have N'Zoth's gift yet chances are N'Zoth's forces will be caught by surprise by Sylvanas' betrayal.

To be quite honest I'm more surprised that anyone was surprised by the revelation that Sylvanas didn't care about the Horde or the Forsaken. The moment that was obvious was when she decided to gun down a field of her own people in the book prior to BFA's release. She had every last one of the people she supposedly cared about murdered (Including the ones who were showing their loyalty by returning to her) without a second thought. Lets also not forget when she decided to Blight her own troops at Lordaeron and raise them as shambling husks like Arthas 2.0.She's not a bleeding heart like many try to portray her as. She cares about herself and power. Everyone swelled with pride when the Banshee screamed 'for the Horde' but I knew it was all an act. I called the ending to this story a year ago.

Except they weren't showing loyalty. They only started returning - in breach of the orders about how and when they should return - after Sylvanas already deployed the Dark Rangers and put the fear of punishment in them. Making their choice to return suspect. And we know from Calia that before Sylvanas realized what was going on 11 out of 12 Forsaken still on the field were already defecting. And the people who survived getting hit by Blight at Lordaeron apologize to the player helping them out because they got out of formation on their own and caused the situation. And we had Sylvanas' own internal monologues indicating she cares about the Forsaken.

it was the symbolism behind, Thrall formed a new horde,and gather other races like trolls and taurens.

And the symbolism of Thrall receiving the mantle of Warchief from Orgrim is that of establishing a continuity... Also, the Old Horde was allied with other races. Including Trolls...

[WolfRider]

I play a Blood Elf death knight, simple as that.
Death, decay and sexy dead female elf are my everyday life.
Why would I follow somebody else than Sylvanas?
Huh!

[Maljinwo]

Banshee Loyalists are the kind of people that enjoy being stepped on and willingly watch their partner cheat on them

Infracted.

[Friendlyimmolation]

Banshee Loyalists are the kind of people that enjoy being stepped on and willingly watch their partner cheat on them

Not gonna lie, starting to sound a little bit like projection or speaking from experience

Infracted.

[Life-Binder]

Banshee Loyalists are the kind of people that enjoy being stepped on and willingly watch their partner cheat on them

Dont judge others

[Mehrunes]

The war seems to have worked in the Honor-side's favour (because of course it did *yawn*), but back at the beginning Sylvanas's philosophy felt the more practical and likelier path to Horde's continued existence, where as Saurfang's philosophy was yet more orcish honor, diluted by the fact he and his kind were still all too happy to march on the night elves up until Teldrassil burned. Adding to that Sylvanas was actually fighting the war, while the Honor-side focused on foiling her plans in Alliance's favour. Saurfang's speech about Sylvanas failing in everything she did lacked substance due to that fact. I chose to be Loyalist for considering the philosophy superior to Saurfang's, not because I deluded myself into thinking Sylvanas cared about the Horde.

Yeah, that's spot on about Saurfang's speech. It's completely full of shit. Even going to his first two examples that happened prior to all the Saurfangs and Baines actively sabotaging the Horde's war campaign in favor of the Alliance. Teldrassil? He knew why she burned it and it wasn't because she got salty by what Delaryn said. She burned it to salvage the war campaign he fucked up by sparing Malfurion, an act for which he claimed he'd take responsibility for when the time comes even before Sylvanas decided to burn the tree or even talked with Delaryn. And then after she gave him her explanation, he agreed with it in terms of strategy even if he didn't like the morality of it.

Lordaeron? The factions did fight each other. That some of the Horde (by Saufang's own admission from the first cinematic, a tiny part of it) later decided to turn coat and become Alliance's lapdogs didn't alter the past events of Lordaeron. And the rest, as has been said, was Horde's traitors acting against the Horde. Where Sylvanas' fault was that she didn't stamp it out harder. But even then, when she was lenient towards Baine and at start only imprisoned him, most Horde leaders lost their brains and decided that punishing treason with imprisonment is the pinnacle of evil. Even though Baine himself argued in his defense of Garrosh that in Horde treason can be rightly punished by death.

Blizzard portrayed Saurfang's nonsense as some pinnacle of inspired speech when it was a pile of trite and false garbage. And he's supposed to be the glorious hero here. And the only reason why Saurfang's philosophy "worked" in the end is because everyone lost their brains and forgot their grievances against the other faction. Most of the Horde stood behind Sylvanas and her war even at the start of the cinematic. But apparently Sylvanas drained it out of them to power up her flight. Never mind that even Alliance and the traitors to the Horde discuss what each faction has done to the other in the first cinematic just 10 minutes earlier. They also get cleansed by Sylvanas' departure.

*yawn*: The atmosphere at the beginning of the expansion was that this time the Horde had gone past the point, where the Alliance could just forgive them, especially with Jaina going into "daughter of the sea" mode and the night elves going crazy with rage. Even Anduin had declared Sylvanas well and truly lost and was leading the charge into Lordaeron. This premise could've led to something interesting, but in the end Blizz went with the usual. There are still open questions on what the night elves will do and what is Sylvanas's end-game, but for the moment it looks like the larger war is over, the Alliance once again forgiving the Horde. So, yawn.

Well, that was to be expected even though the delivery was even worse than anyone could have anticipated. Because covering things in actually logical manner would not only require effort (which Blizzard is allergic to), but it'd run contrary to the childish morality that makes Naruto's friendship no jutsu look nuanced that they pretend is enlightened.

Incidentally, these two cinematics did wonders for Saurfang. While what his death lead to was nonsense and Sylvanas' outburst contrived as all hell, both his spiel to Anduin, his lack of initial popular appeal, his demonstration of care for the Horde on the walls and him finally invoking Mak'gora really improved his story. He's about the only one to come out of this patch better than they came in and being dead, he's saved from this narrative. Just the acknowledgment that he doesn't know honor and this transitioning easily to him deciding to give his life for others rather than for his own self-satisfaction was a solid development.

Anduin having to explain to Saurfang what the Horde really is again throws a lot of shade on the things you mentioned though.

[chronoblip]

...there are 6 cosmic forces set up in 3 opposing pairs, and no supreme deity over all of that in the Warcraft universe. This means that the fundamental framework for Warcraft's morality is not about inherent or objective "good" or "evil", but in how actions balance or unbalance the various opposing powers. Most of the "problems" we've had to address are when one tries to overthrow their opposite, and we mortal races simply get caught up in the collateral damage.

Sylvanas, having figured this out, is trying to place herself as the primary balance to "life", by becoming a focus for the power of death. She gets her "Kerrigan" ascension, she's no longer warchief, but she's also no longer a raid boss either because to overthrow her would create imbalance of "life", like the Overgrowth in Southern Barrens. Sylvanas is forcing the hand of the mortal races to grow in their power to no longer just be pawns of the various cosmic forces, but to rival or control them directly, because it's clear the cosmic powers simply don't really care about the fate of mortals.

That's aged pretty well.

I stayed loyal because characters like Anduin, Saurfang, and even Thrall are "stuck on Azeroth". Each expansion we've fought bigger and bigger baddies, and then afterwards we're just supposed to go "back to normal" while the cosmic powers retreat to lick their wounds and try again later?

The "big picture" is that if we want to be free of these cosmic powers' proxy wars, we'd all need to keep growing in power, only that Sylvanas wasn't looking to grow in power to just defeat the Alliance. Her internal measurement for success is with respect to having power over her own fate, if not completely, at least more than she'd had before.

Her disdain for "hope" folks is that hope will never effectively drive anyone to gather the actual power to try and master their own fate. Hope is the belief that something better could happen than what appears inevitable, and that's nothing more than surrendering to fate.

Characters are literally sacrificing themselves just to show how their surrender to fate is better than trying to subdue it due to "muh priciples". Is that really the way of the Horde though? To roll over and die for "muh honor"? Or is it to fight, to lay waste to your enemies, or be killed trying, dying in glorious combat? If fate is an enemy, why succumb to it?

Even her outburst that "The Horde is nothing!" is just channeling Carl Sagan from "Pale Blue Dot":

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

In this manner, the "Horde" and "Alliance" don't become a unifaction out of some lofty idealism, holding hands for some rousing rounds of kumbaya, but because the old distinctions are made entirely irrelevant because of the size of the stage that conflicts are being played out on.

Her words are only offensive if one doesn't understand that, from her perspective as a representative of one of the six cosmic forces, those around her quibbling over meaningless trivialities do quite literally amount to nothing. No matter their success or failure, all their efforts will eventually be undone, by time or circumstance.

"Nothing lasts."

Garrosh failed because he aligned with mere subordinates of cosmic power, where Sylvanas is dealing with Death directly.

Now Death clearly has a champion in Sylvanas, the gauntlet has been thrown down, and there is a need to counterbalance Death through tapping the other five.

Should mortals successfully wield all the cosmic powers for themselves and to their own ends, they'll no longer be pawns to those greater forces. They'll be free from someone else determining their fate for them, and they'll all get exactly what they want out of life. Or undeath.

Except for an absence of conflict, because the balance of power must be maintained, and a balance based on mutual weakness can be overturned, exploited.

There will always be war in Warcraft.

[mickybrighteyes]

I mean bfa opens with sylvanas openly killing her own troops and anduin giving it more care then she ever did. Both sides are people who want to kill you but one might actually care and let you live.

Yeah but he still wiped brill of the map with the same forces that were also caught in the event. I'm sure he was real sorry about that... and about how his people killed Rastakhan despite his intentions otherwise...

If the killing you mention wasn't largely collateral damage, I'd agree.

- - - Updated - - -

i know but the problem is, sylvannas IS supposed to care for the horde, alliance isnt. I know the dialogue is a vortex of foolishness in that makgora but still thats the story we got. like, she says "i trusted you" to saurfang, then 15 seconds of melee later tells the whole world "they mean nothing, ever!". So her trusting him was meaningless too because she had ulterior motives in the first place, just didnt work out cuz big green orc didnt follow the breadcrumbs.

Another problem is trying to figure out how much of anything she says these days is actually true. We're already aware about how we aren't being told everything, but then when we ARE being told something we have no way to really verify anything.

[Bigdoser]

I sided with her because I don't want world of peacecraft.

[mickybrighteyes]

Blizzard rapes Horde players over and over... They have killed or otherwise removed 4 warchiefs (only 1 for Alliance) and two additional faction leader (Tauren and Zandalari)

To be fair... alliance leadership has also had figures removed for various reasons. Magni went MIA to come back totally stoned. Katrana and Bolvar were the effective rulers for Stormwind till Wrath or their eventual demise (Ony in vanilla and then Bolvar stepping down to get really fucked over in ICC)... Mekkatorque isn't exactly in a good place right now... but it's true that the Main Leader position has only really had one death based replacement.

Blizzard have allowed Alliance armed forces in Horde capital twice and now, Alliance is on Orgrimmar's doorstep once more; Horde have never sacked Storm wind or any other Alliance capital.

Actually... inside UC twice. I'm counting Anduin walking into org as a time so... Inside Org twice... Not sure I'd count that TB bit cause I want to forget any references to conflict and thunderbluff (and they ported out almost immediately). Alliance high command has invaded horde territories with less than peaceful intentions more than just a couple times.

[Dellis0991]

I hate to say this but we all know in the end the loyalist probably gonna get the last laugh.

[Army Dreamer]

I don't follow her. I follow her storyline to see what she is after and how. Anyway, her opponents' story is unbearably lame and boring.

[Estravolt]

I sided with her because I don't want world of peacecraft.

And "world of Pants of head retarded genocide" is somehow better than the usual tension we've had forever?

[Fetus Rex]

I have never liked Sylvanas. In fact my dislike for her steadily continued since W3. But she is a Warchief and there is Blood Oath. Loyalty is everything to me and I'm glad I could do the thing I couldn't with Garrosh, to stay loyal.

[Life-Binder]

And "world of Pants of head retarded genocide" is somehow better than the usual tension we've had forever?

literally anything is better than Baine/Anduin love story, sprinkled with Sadfang and guilty Thrall

so, yes



kill em all, raise Azeroth as Undead Titan, the works

[Estravolt]

literally anything is better than Baine/Anduin love story, sprinkled with Sadfang and guilty Thrall

so, yes



kill em all, raise Azeroth as Undead Titan, the works

Don't cut yourself on all those edges.

[Life-Binder]

Don't cut yourself on all those edges.

thx, but I'll be fine

[Bigdoser]

And "world of Pants of head retarded genocide" is somehow better than the usual tension we've had forever?

Man, i'm such a bad person for wanting war, in a setting based on it. My only hope now is Tyrande, but as we know she is going to get screwed by the writers or Anduin will wiggle her finger at her and get consumed by his human potential.

[Estravolt]

Man, i'm such a bad person for wanting war, in a setting based on it. My only hope now is Tyrande, but as we know she is going to get screwed by the writers or Anduin will wiggle her finger at her and get consumed by his human potential.

I mean, there's war and then there's being a pawn of a ghoul gone bonkers.