Sylvanas Character Assassination

[Varodoc]

If we look at them in a vaccuum that is fine and dandy. But at the moment we have to do significant mental gymnastics to explain how these blighting, murdering evil creatures are part of the same organisation that has Paladins and Druids and those folks do NOTHING about them. The whole Horde knows what sick experiments are going on in the Undercity by now, but people allied with Life and Light just shrug about it. THAT is my problem. It is not that the Forsaken are evil, it is that everyone else has to be effectively blind to their existence to accomodate this one group and only because some players wanna be the bad guy.

Pretty spot on. WoW just is not a game structured around playing an evil character, when 99% of the time you are teaming up with good guys to defeat the bad guys. You can RP your character as a villain, and that is fun, but it was a mistake to make undead playable, because the story has to twist and bend as to keep them playable even though the Horde should have kicked them out long ago.

[Super Dickmann]

If we look at them in a vaccuum that is fine and dandy. But at the moment we have to do significant mental gymnastics to explain how these blighting, murdering evil creatures are part of the same organisation that has Paladins and Druids and those folks do NOTHING about them. The whole Horde knows what sick experiments are going on in the Undercity by now, but people allied with Life and Light just shrug about it. THAT is my problem. It is not that the Forsaken are evil, it is that everyone else has to be effectively blind to their existence to accomodate this one group and only because some players wanna be the bad guy.

Within the Horde, as soon as it does come out what the Forsaken are doing on the broader level they're put under martial law and the then Warchief has them under oversight so they're executing his goals. Before then, the reason why they weren't attacked by the Horde is fairly transparent - they served the geopolitical goals of expanding the Horde's place on the other continent with relatively little cost. As for the tauren, they were on another continent and had next to no capacity to do anything against the Forsaken anyway given the power differential. It's a fundamental misreading of the Horde, or rather was before this nonsense, to think that these wouldn't be more relevant factors in the arrangement.

As for why the Alliance didn't do anything, they did, there's a reason the Church of the Holy Light was to toast undead and why the undead you meet over in Cata Gilneas are scattered and spooked once the Alliance starts fighting in force. Before certain books holding certain revisions there was a degree of rationality in how the undead were treated.

[omeomorfismo]

If we look at them in a vaccuum that is fine and dandy. But at the moment we have to do significant mental gymnastics to explain how these blighting, murdering evil creatures are part of the same organisation that has Paladins and Druids and those folks do NOTHING about them. The whole Horde knows what sick experiments are going on in the Undercity by now, but people allied with Life and Light just shrug about it. THAT is my problem. It is not that the Forsaken are evil, it is that everyone else has to be effectively blind to their existence to accomodate this one group and only because some players wanna be the bad guy.

or you know, they could focus on these contraddictions? isnt like the forsaken dont want to save their asses from other menaces, and setting insights are anyway good storytelling. at worst they could simply maintain the same inconsistencies that let the dks and warlocks be playable...

[Soon-TM]

oh god, they did it.
thats the bullshittier retcon they could even conceive.

WTF is that quote?

[Combatbutler]

WTF is that quote?

https://de.wowhead.com/news=312240/s...le-and-strings

The new Horde description is also killer XD

You are a soldier of the mighty Horde, a diverse band of races from across Azeroth who fight for freedom and honor.,

This shit is just so god damn funny.

[Soon-TM]

You are a soldier of the mighty Horde, a diverse band of races from across Azeroth who fight for freedom and honor.

This shit is just so god damn funny.

God, this !@#$ is even cringier than "tHIs WoRLd iS A pRiSOn!!1!!1one". Now we are all the same, bland version of Stupid Good, only in different sizes and colours. This feels like outright trolling... "for freedom and honor" WTF. It's something some jackass politician could say in one of his speeches.

[Necromind]

who fight for freedom and honor.

Ok, i get the Honor part, thanks Mr. Varok.
But what's up with that Freedom? What freedom? Whose freedom?
Horde is Free, just like Draenor, isn't it? Is it Freedom from Human Potential? Or freedom from common sense? Will horde be like "Team America" now, fighting for freedom in a vaccum?

I think those are just drafts of descriptions, they are really bad.

[Raisei]

Within the Horde, as soon as it does come out what the Forsaken are doing on the broader level they're put under martial law and the then Warchief has them under oversight so they're executing his goals. Before then, the reason why they weren't attacked by the Horde is fairly transparent - they served the geopolitical goals of expanding the Horde's place on the other continent with relatively little cost. As for the tauren, they were on another continent and had next to no capacity to do anything against the Forsaken anyway given the power differential. It's a fundamental misreading of the Horde, or rather was before this nonsense, to think that these wouldn't be more relevant factors in the arrangement.

The problem is, it all feels too "soft", compared to what we do to other dangerous races/individuals.
Thrall posting guards after the Wrathgate is a nice touch, but did that change anything? Did that prevent the creation of more blight to use in Gilneas? Did it make Sylvanas change her ways? No.
Garrosh then being openly mocked by Sylvanas and leaving her indifference to his orders completely unpunished when he kills people for faaaaar less... it just feels like, "Ye, we have that evil group, but since they are player characters we can't do anything about them, have a bandaid."

Let's have a thought experiment. After the Legion was defeated, let's say the Alliance got Eredar demons as a new race. They have not changed, they just burn stuff with Felfire in the name of the Alliance instead of Sargeras. They burn Horde cities, adduct and murder Horde civilians and are in general evil.
Anduin's solution is to put up Gnome guards in their capital and give them a stern talking to (Which is probably realistic...), because players have now made Eredar characters and you can't just remove the faction again. So everyone else has to be blind to their evil, even the Draenei who were hunted by these creatures for 10000 years have to shrug and be okay with it.

Change out a few names here and you have exactly the situation the Forsaken are creating and I personally just find it unsatisfying. Characters and whole groups within a faction have to be twisted beyond recognition to make this happen, because someone had the glorious idea of making Scourge playable Horde members without thinking of the in-universe repercussions.
If I were a cynic, I would say "someone wanted sexy "belly-button-showing" Sylvanas as a leader in the Horde, because that sells well with the teens buying the game, so anything else was handwaved to allow it."

As for why the Alliance didn't do anything, they did, there's a reason the Church of the Holy Light was to toast undead and why the undead you meet over in Cata Gilneas are scattered and spooked once the Alliance starts fighting in force. Before certain books holding certain revisions there was a degree of rationality in how the undead were treated.

True true. I feel this is more a problem for the people forced to play on the same side as the Forsaken, less for the Alliance, which at least on and off gets to treat them as the enemies they are. Even if we will also never be allowed to kill them permanently.

or you know, they could focus on these contraddictions? isnt like the forsaken dont want to save their asses from other menaces, and setting insights are anyway good storytelling. at worst they could simply maintain the same inconsistencies that let the dks and warlocks be playable...

That is ignoring the problem. The "contradictions" have been focussed, but the game mechanics prevent any kind of satisfying outcome. You can have another Horde civil war, but the outcome will be just as bland as the outcome of the Blood War between Horde and Alliance was, because the story cannot penalize a player for their faction choice and we do not have "personal" stories where a player could feel repercussions for the decisions they made without affecting the larger story.

[Super Dickmann]

The problem is, it all feels too "soft", compared to what we do to other dangerous races/individuals.
Thrall posting guards after the Wrathgate is a nice touch, but did that change anything? Did that prevent the creation of more blight to use in Gilneas? Did it make Sylvanas change her ways? No.
Garrosh then being openly mocked by Sylvanas and leaving her indifference to his orders completely unpunished when he kills people for faaaaar less... it just feels like, "Ye, we have that evil group, but since they are player characters we can't do anything about them, have a bandaid."

I see what you're getting at, but I think you're being too simplistic about it and taking the revisionist view of what Thrall's Horde was, i.e this band of honorable friends sticking together out of principle who didn't have any major issues before the bad people showed up to ruin them. While I've given endless shit to how insufferably perfect Thrall's Horde was in WC3 and in stories like the Daelin one, with how little room was left for them to develop replaying Vanilla has shown me how it was already handling it much better, contrary to my memory of it.

The Horde back then, contrary to now, was not motivated solely by vague abstractions that were entirely in line with the Alliance's equally vague abstractions. It was, as Thrall set it out to do, aspirational with the goal to set aside war as the first resort and reembrace what he saw as their Frostwolf heritage. But it was also still a group that had plenty of old hatreds going on and also had to make compromises - hence why while you were trying to set up subsistence farming it wasn't cutting it and Thrall still had the lumber camp in Ashenvale greenlit and was skirmishing with the night elves. Or why there were warlocks in the city that he kept around because they were a way to make them useful and keep the lid on them since if he put the hammer down they'd scatter and be hostile to him, etc. etc. Because you had nothing to rest this new foundation on you had to use old things to do it, hence how you had places called Kargath and it was still the same people, hence why the first thing you get asked as an orc is whether you've killed any humans yet. The Horde were not pathological altruists, the Horde were not martyrs - they were people either trying to do better but struggling or those who wanted to survive, with the Forsaken very much on the later camp. The Forsaken were there because they conferred benefit at low cost, and like I pointed out earlier in the thread, what was secret about the Blight was to a point, the way it was tested and prepared and its side-purpose against the living, not its intended use against the Scourge, the Horde was supportive of that because it gave them an edge against the enemy.

What changed with the Wrathgate and why at the end Thrall is sitting there pondering if he hadn't failed, is because it's the point where said compromises caught up with them - the Warsong Offensive is based on what the Horde and the orcs are at their foundation, not on what he tried to make them be, the slavery he cautiously tolerated as regards the Ring of Blood had Varian now declare war on him and the Forsaken he'd let do their thing were not only fucking around with humans - he scarcely mentions that, but had shown themselves untrustworthy to them - sure, Sylvanas hadn't done it (at the time) but she'd okayed the experiments and kept it from them and couldn't control her people, so she'd failed as a leader. Hence, martial law and Varimathras being replaced by Bragor.

The entire Cataclysm Forsaken story has constant elements of having to prove themselves to the Horde as being useful under the oversight placed. No other race in the entire game has had minders be there for its leader or had its city under foreign occupation, nor had core parts of two zones (Hillsbrad and Silverpine) center around their place in the Horde as a whole and how that dynamic works. Both in the oversight exercised and how they prove themselves worthwhile and how they do their best to skirt around the rules whenever they think no one is watching because, much like the Horde as mentioned above, they haven't actually changed all that much. For the same reasons there's death knights, warlocks, slavery and warfare in general, the Horde tolerates the Forsaken. Group interest dominates.

I appreciate you taking issue with it on behalf of the Horde playerbase, but just at a glance on this and every other forum you'll find that this is by vast majority an Alliance issue, not an intra-Horde one until they made the Horde's traits mutually exclusive and forced people to choose which foot they wanted to chop off. And an Alliance issue that Blizzard could've allayed by having the Alliance snag an on-screen win against the Forsaken more often. And by that I mean a physical victory where they kick the ass of the Forsaken army, not a mental one where they override the Forsaken codes and all of them want love and peace.

[omeomorfismo]

The problem is, it all feels too "soft", compared to what we do to other dangerous races/individuals.
Thrall posting guards after the Wrathgate is a nice touch, but did that change anything? Did that prevent the creation of more blight to use in Gilneas? Did it make Sylvanas change her ways? No.
Garrosh then being openly mocked by Sylvanas and leaving her indifference to his orders completely unpunished when he kills people for faaaaar less... it just feels like, "Ye, we have that evil group, but since they are player characters we can't do anything about them, have a bandaid."

Let's have a thought experiment. After the Legion was defeated, let's say the Alliance got Eredar demons as a new race. They have not changed, they just burn stuff with Felfire in the name of the Alliance instead of Sargeras. They burn Horde cities, adduct and murder Horde civilians and are in general evil.
Anduin's solution is to put up Gnome guards in their capital and give them a stern talking to (Which is probably realistic...), because players have now made Eredar characters and you can't just remove the faction again. So everyone else has to be blind to their evil, even the Draenei who were hunted by these creatures for 10000 years have to shrug and be okay with it.

Change out a few names here and you have exactly the situation the Forsaken are creating and I personally just find it unsatisfying. Characters and whole groups within a faction have to be twisted beyond recognition to make this happen, because someone had the glorious idea of making Scourge playable Horde members without thinking of the in-universe repercussions.
If I were a cynic, I would say "someone wanted sexy "belly-button-showing" Sylvanas as a leader in the Horde, because that sells well with the teens buying the game, so anything else was handwaved to allow it."



True true. I feel this is more a problem for the people forced to play on the same side as the Forsaken, less for the Alliance, which at least on and off gets to treat them as the enemies they are. Even if we will also never be allowed to kill them permanently.



That is ignoring the problem. The "contradictions" have been focussed, but the game mechanics prevent any kind of satisfying outcome. You can have another Horde civil war, but the outcome will be just as bland as the outcome of the Blood War between Horde and Alliance was, because the story cannot penalize a player for their faction choice and we do not have "personal" stories where a player could feel repercussions for the decisions they made without affecting the larger story.

lol, the only outcomes excluded is the annihilation or eviction of the forsakens. all the others options are there. the fact you dont find all the other options satisfying is your problem, that anyway shouldnt justify the literal retconing of an entire race with a 540° turn. damn i found insufferable to see my city occupied by kor'kron for 4 expansions, or having the entire post tirisfal questing halted by cromush. damn, shadowfang keep was fun only thanks belmont making fun of him all the time

[Nadiru]

lol, the only outcomes excluded is the annihilation or eviction of the forsakens. all the others options are there. the fact you dont find all the other options satisfying is your problem, that anyway shouldnt justify the literal retconing of an entire race with a 540° turn. damn i found insufferable to see my city occupied by kor'kron for 4 expansions, or having the entire post tirisfal questing halted by cromush. damn, shadowfang keep was fun only thanks belmont making fun of him all the time

What retconning? Forsaken have been depicted as cartoonishly evil since vanilla.

[omeomorfismo]

What retconning? Forsaken have been depicted as cartoonishly evil since vanilla.

now we are suppoused to be heroic protector of the livings.

[Raisei]

lol, the only outcomes excluded is the annihilation or eviction of the forsakens. all the others options are there. the fact you dont find all the other options satisfying is your problem, that anyway shouldnt justify the literal retconing of an entire race with a 540° turn. damn i found insufferable to see my city occupied by kor'kron for 4 expansions, or having the entire post tirisfal questing halted by cromush. damn, shadowfang keep was fun only thanks belmont making fun of him all the time

Very sorry to hear how your sick sociopath with a wish for mass murder was inconvenienced by orcs in your city (doing nothing to you or anyone). Thrall should really have cared about your feelings. The nerve that orc has!
What outcome for a civil war precisely do you envision that gives you the option to keep on being a Scourge zombie but leaves the rest of the Horde with the feeling they do not have to worry about you going mass-murdery anymore? A big pinky swear that you will be gud now, which you will break the moment the Horde turns their backs (the outcome of the BFA war basically)? Imprisonment? Hard Labor?
In the end what you mean is that all outcomes are fine that do not penalize you and basically get the Horde of your back, which is simply impossible as long as you are part of the faction.

[omeomorfismo]

Very sorry to hear how your sick sociopath with a wish for mass murder was inconvenienced by orcs in your city (doing nothing to you or anyone). Thrall should really have cared about your feelings. The nerve that orc has!
What outcome for a civil war precisely do you envision that gives you the option to keep on being a Scourge zombie but leaves the rest of the Horde with the feeling they do not have to worry about you going mass-murdery anymore? A big pinky swear that you will be gud now, which you will break the moment the Horde turns their backs (the outcome of the BFA war basically)? Imprisonment? Hard Labor?
In the end what you mean is that all outcomes are fine that do not penalize you and basically get the Horde of your back, which is simply impossible as long as you are part of the faction.

oh dude, my point was that from a rp perspective these events were big deal, downplaying them only because they didnt genocided the forsaken on the spot, like you would love, is ignoring the basis of rping.
and i am not the best one to take as envisioner for wow, because for me the death of the narrative was the pussification of the belves, without the horrid epilogue of sunwell, half of the problems wouldnt exists. the strenght of the forsaken army with the belf aid alone could counterbalance perfectly every tauren's complaint for simply realpolitik reasons. no bullshit light for the horde, at best the prelates, that thankfully are openly zealots in a culture that embrance the voodoo magics instead the shitty humans with long ears we have now.
btw im even a fan for a forsaken faction. if the divide between w3 horde and the other is so deep that blizz cant wrote anything then let them split. 2 faction not interested in fight each other (so basically they can mantain the status quo of the same faction) but only in their survival. i can be happy in murdering only the lunatics invading lordaeron like in cata. i dont be to be catapulted in every single evil faction because "making humans sad"="evulz free ticket11!!!1" (damn my character even cleansed the void gift). i can be even killed in game if they cant even do this, at least let the players mantain an rp that was this way for what? 15 years?

[Raisei]

The Horde back then, contrary to now, was not motivated solely by vague abstractions that were entirely in line with the Alliance's equally vague abstractions. It was, as Thrall set it out to do, aspirational with the goal to set aside war as the first resort and reembrace what he saw as their Frostwolf heritage. But it was also still a group that had plenty of old hatreds going on and also had to make compromises - hence why while you were trying to set up subsistence farming it wasn't cutting it and Thrall still had the lumber camp in Ashenvale greenlit and was skirmishing with the night elves. Or why there were warlocks in the city that he kept around because they were a way to make them useful and keep the lid on them since if he put the hammer down they'd scatter and be hostile to him, etc. etc. Because you had nothing to rest this new foundation on you had to use old things to do it, hence how you had places called Kargath and it was still the same people, hence why the first thing you get asked as an orc is whether you've killed any humans yet. The Horde were not pathological altruists, the Horde were not martyrs - they were people either trying to do better but struggling or those who wanted to survive, with the Forsaken very much on the later camp. The Forsaken were there because they conferred benefit at low cost, and like I pointed out earlier in the thread, what was secret about the Blight was to a point, the way it was tested and prepared and its side-purpose against the living, not its intended use against the Scourge, the Horde was supportive of that because it gave them an edge against the enemy.

This is eactly how I would like the Horde. They do not have to be the absolute good guys, they should just TRY to be better then the savage band of fel-crazed mass murderers that gives them their name. They can have conflicts with other races, N'zoth knows, the Night Elves are hardly the most social people towards anyone without knife-ears (or were in WC3 at least). I have no problem with them trying to fight for their survival and bending the rules for that. In fact I find such characters extremely interesting.
It just stops at the point where we have Forsaken that clearly do not want to even try to be decent people and are not struggling with the problem of this but rather go out and murder people for fun with a shovel, not because they are threatened and need to fight for their life, but because they died and and now hate and envy everyone alive for that. If instead their motivation was more in the idea of survival instead of mass murder they would fit much better.
"Okay, we can't live with the humans, they are (understandibly) opposed to having undead around after what happened in Lordaeron. But we found this group of people that allow us to stick around, so let us work with them for our own sake as much as theirs."

The entire Cataclysm Forsaken story has constant elements of having to prove themselves to the Horde as being useful under the oversight placed. No other race in the entire game has had minders be there for its leader or had its city under foreign occupation, nor had core parts of two zones (Hillsbrad and Silverpine) center around their place in the Horde as a whole and how that dynamic works. Both in the oversight exercised and how they prove themselves worthwhile and how they do their best to skirt around the rules whenever they think no one is watching because, much like the Horde as mentioned above, they haven't actually changed all that much. For the same reasons there's death knights, warlocks, slavery and warfare in general, the Horde tolerates the Forsaken. Group interest dominates.

This is a decent enough amount of consequence for the general race I think and it does create an interesting dynamic. The problem is not the Forsaken as a whole at that point. It is that the Forsaken harbor some people that are not acting in the interest of the Horde still, with the Apothecaries being a prime example, but Sylvanas after all also cares very little to not at all about what the Horde wants, she only plays along because much like the Forsaken themselves, the Horde is a shield against other hostile forces that she rather not loose.
So there is the problem: Elements inside the Horde go clearly against the group interest of the Horde and the shared interest of survival is what bonds the Horde together, then these elements cannot be part of the Horde. It just doesn't seem to work.

I appreciate you taking issue with it on behalf of the Horde playerbase, but just at a glance on this and every other forum you'll find that this is by vast majority an Alliance issue, not an intra-Horde one until they made the Horde's traits mutually exclusive and forced people to choose which foot they wanted to chop off. And an Alliance issue that Blizzard could've allayed by having the Alliance snag an on-screen win against the Forsaken more often. And by that I mean a physical victory where they kick the ass of the Forsaken army, not a mental one where they override the Forsaken codes and all of them want love and peace.

While I am quite obviously pro-Alliance, I am not necessarily anti-Horde. I just would prefer a Horde that we can coexist with on a faction level. There can and should always be disagreements, political ones that come to blows on a level of some of the races fighting each other (much like the skirmishes between Nelf and Orcs in Ashenvale). There is interesting tales to tell in that, but having some straight up bad guys on one side is undermining that completely.
We cannot coexist with the Legion, because it inherently does not want to co-exist, it wants to burn the universe to ashes, we cannot make politics with the Lich King, because he does not make treaties, he kills you and reanimates your corpse. It is fine to have these villains, they allow us to be heroic without any moral conundrum, but the relationship between Horde and Alliance should in my eyes be seperate and different from that. These tries to wipe out each other with mixed success are just unfulfilling.

I have to think of a scene from The Tudors that perfectly encompasses how I find the relationship should be:
Cardinal Woolsey is meeting the French ambassador, they disagree as French and Englishmen usually do especially at that time and Wolsey threatens with war. The Ambassador smiles and replies: "By all means, let's have war," with a jovial acceptance that war is an expression of politics.
The countries aren't going to wipe each other out. They are going to meet in the field and kill each other and when one side has lost there will be new talks with the winner dictating terms and a few years later the cycle will repeat. None of these countries is inherently evil, they just play the game of politics.
Leave the truely evil people for NPCs to be slaughtered when we need bad guys and make the factions play this game.

[Super Dickmann]

This is eactly how I would like the Horde. They do not have to be the absolute good guys, they should just TRY to be better then the savage band of fel-crazed mass murderers that gives them their name. They can have conflicts with other races, N'zoth knows, the Night Elves are hardly the most social people towards anyone without knife-ears (or were in WC3 at least). I have no problem with them trying to fight for their survival and bending the rules for that. In fact I find such characters extremely interesting.
It just stops at the point where we have Forsaken that clearly do not want to even try to be decent people and are not struggling with the problem of this but rather go out and murder people for fun with a shovel, not because they are threatened and need to fight for their life, but because they died and and now hate and envy everyone alive for that. If instead their motivation was more in the idea of survival instead of mass murder they would fit much better.
"Okay, we can't live with the humans, they are (understandibly) opposed to having undead around after what happened in Lordaeron. But we found this group of people that allow us to stick around, so let us work with them for our own sake as much as theirs."

That the Horde did keep the name, structure, institutions at history, that they look at those guys from the Second War and go "Hey, some of those were pretty cool" is part of the point. You don't play a group who's closest association is the Mongol Horde and assume they're all sunshine. What matters is that they're still recognizably people driven by some kind of motive, that they're the protagonists within the story portrayed. There's been very few issues with this over time - I mentioned in other threads how the Forsaken actually had far more rebels than anyone else and invariably most of these rebels were those who thought even Sylvanas was a bridge too far - Godfrey, Stillwater, Putress all of those dudes we killed. But the self-interest of the undead, the struggle between humanity and inhumanity as well as the surface elements I keep ragging on about regarding being a mad science zombie are key. Sylvanas back in Mists going "I'm not into this war because they'll kick my ass" or "I'm going to help you fight these demons because they want to kill everyone and we're part of everyone" is about what you need to justify this kind of race participating. It's why the amount of arguments produced regarding how saving the world means they aren't also fairly bad dudes baffles me - saving the world is just common sense. Simple pragmatism can and has justified the Forsaken, Death Knight, Warlock etc. presence in stories up to this point without fail.

This is a decent enough amount of consequence for the general race I think and it does create an interesting dynamic. The problem is not the Forsaken as a whole at that point. It is that the Forsaken harbor some people that are not acting in the interest of the Horde still, with the Apothecaries being a prime example, but Sylvanas after all also cares very little to not at all about what the Horde wants, she only plays along because much like the Forsaken themselves, the Horde is a shield against other hostile forces that she rather not loose.
So there is the problem: Elements inside the Horde go clearly against the group interest of the Horde and the shared interest of survival is what bonds the Horde together, then these elements cannot be part of the Horde. It just doesn't seem to work.

That's part of the dynamic - the Forsaken are allies of convenience, it's part of the appeal. They didn't join the Horde because they had much in common beyond having little else to go. In their best stories, this is focused on - be it in one direction or another such as the orcs and Forsaken teaming up in Silverpine, Cromush coming around to the Forsaken and so forth. Those who were committed to being dicks first and survivalists second you kill. But I do agree in one sense and that's that Blizzard have completely deemphasized this dynamic - save for the Rebellion banter and the now non-canon bits in BTS, the Forsaken rewrite takes for granted that none of the bonds they have with the Horde matter in the slightest and that what they have to do is join the Alliance. In turn, their natural allies - past the goblins who they were still buddies throughout, in the blood elves, had their biggest bond cut in licensed fanfiction when the blood elves were blandified beyond repair past TBC. This unmoored the Forsaken from the other races in the Horde for years and both lost out on it, when they have a lot of overlap.

Take BFA even - you have the Orcish Horde, who were basically beaten at Lordaeron ages back, defending Lordaeron and the Forsaken, who have kept the Horde at a distance and been mistrusted by them, now fighting side by side with them to defend their home. In a story that cared about either race or faction, this would be a major thing. The Val'kyr would be a major thing, given that they're warrior spirits, two things the Horde espouse, something that was even there in the Beta with Eitrigg. But instead, the Forsaken stand completely apart in what should have been their story and in that sense I totally agree with you that these were wasted opportunities. The Forsaken are more than Sylvanas, but the story writers of BFA seem to drastically disagree - they've tied all of their previous traits and hooks to her and thrown them in the bin, and much like the blood elves, have kept nothing that keeps them in the Horde at all and skipped any chance to develop it. Even if you want to soften them up, you can do that without completely compromising their place on the faction. The 'Will of the Forsaken' should not be waiting around for Calia to get them out of their funk, they should be committing further to the Horde because the Horde stuck by them when Sylvanas didn't, hell, they should even be glad that Sadfang opened their eyes and realize that separation was what made them possible to use as fodder. But we get none of that either.

While I am quite obviously pro-Alliance, I am not necessarily anti-Horde. I just would prefer a Horde that we can coexist with on a faction level. There can and should always be disagreements, political ones that come to blows on a level of some of the races fighting each other (much like the skirmishes between Nelf and Orcs in Ashenvale). There is interesting tales to tell in that, but having some straight up bad guys on one side is undermining that completely.

I both agree and disagree. I am obviously a Horde partisan, and for me it's important that the Alliance offer a different, logical opposition. But as the consumer of any race or class's story, it's essential to me that everyone be the protagonist in their own story - the Forsaken, night elves and so on were not this time around. The Alliance definitely wasn't, they were along for the ride. Making a side well-reasoned and its place in the world logical with consequences flowing from its behaviour are far more important than its out of universe moral standing in a setting that, as we talked earlier in thhis thread, will have as core gameplay loops shit that is obviously wrong. But there has to be humanity in there. Take Silverpine for example - as written, it's a war that the Forsaken didn't actually want, but it's also a war that once they're in, they're waging totally, because this land is without consequence to them and life has less meaning. Slavery, chemical warfare, the works. And yet what you ultimately aim to do is to avoid further unnecessary losses by coercing Crowley and you go out of your way to show that the cost matters to you and that the ones fighting on your side are people - be it the Deathstalker at the very start of the zone sacrificing herself to get you info, Forward Commander Onslaught in Gilneas proper holding the line at his post knowing he'll die, or the terrified troops you find and rescue and the dog tags you collect. You know why you're fighting - because this is your land and you know why your enemy is fighting - it's theirs and you've kicked them in the balls. You also know what lines you don't cross - after the dog tag and rescue quests you get another rescue quest where Godfrey blows your own troop's brains out because he considers them weak, while telling you to shut up about it because he knows that won't fly in a society where care for the in-group is the biggest deal. So it's no wonder who's the end boss of the zone - not the Gilneans, where the negotiation/coercion ultimately works, it's the guy that you raised and who hasn't picked up on the nuances of what is going on, who lacks the stake that you do and is motivated solely by spite instead of solidarity. And since you're the one who raised him, it also shows the weakness of your approach - that bad people slip more often through the cracks.

It's a top notch story. And my main problem for a while now is that I struggle to recall a story of similar quality regarding the faction war Alliance-side, even on a low tier. Stormheim comes the closest, but we've got that one too - and we also have others Ashenvale, Stonetalon, Hillsbrad etc. That's had a massive effect on the Horde-Alliance dynamic and left a ton of people dissatisfied.

[Zulkhan]

There's no trust to be had anymore. Blizzard cannot write the faction war and should stop trying. But we know damn well we're going to be served yet another repeat of that shitty plotline in 2-3 expansions when it's time to "put the War back in Warcraft" and other such marketing-driven speech that people eat up every once in a while.

Yeah, that's the most revolting aspect. They use the faction war for marketing in a totally disingenuous way, fooling people into believing it's an actual war when in fact it's the same bullshit again. They got me once with BfA, they're not going do that twice.

[Martymark]

Well, they just did a character assassination on all the Forsaken, so Sylvanas' chracter being giga-raped in BFA doesn't seem so bad anymore...

Yeah, that's the most revolting aspect. They use the faction war for marketing in a totally disingenuous way, fooling people into believing it's an actual war when in fact it's the same bullshit again. They got me once with BfA, they're not going do that twice.

In 2 expansions it will be time for the Darkspear Trolls to "find themselves" by genociding the Night Elves.

[Varodoc]

Well, they just did a character assassination on all the Forsaken, so Sylvanas' chracter being giga-raped in BFA doesn't seem so bad anymore...

In 2 expansions it will be time for the Darkspear Trolls to "find themselves" by genociding the Night Elves.

What's left to genocide? 20 druids harvesting pumpkins in Stormwind?

[Combatbutler]

What's left to genocide? 20 druids harvesting pumpkins in Stormwind?

Make that ten!!!! It is of Utmost importance, with Anduin telling the survivors he can't be bothered with them right now, he needs a shoe shine.