Originally Posted by
Super Dickmann
When it comes to torture, especially in a fictional setting where magical healing is available, it is finite. Death is final. When you die, that's it. There's nothing left for you to go forward, nor any possibility of recovery, however slim. Death can be preferable in a narrative sense or heroic, of course, but that doesn't make killing someone any less the biggest deal you can inflict upon someone, barring again, fantastical stuff like sending them to hell, which is incidentally what also happened to these Forsaken. Derek's life has no more value than that of the crewmembers, in fact, given that the crewmembers are on his side of a total war, whereas Derek isn't, their lives both numerically and allegiance-wise have higher value contextually, and their fate is final, whereas his isn't. The idea that because they disagree with Baine's comical values, he has the moral authority, or per your post, the moral obligation to kill them would extend such a mandate to killing the shamans at the catapults at Teldrassil, the warriors at Brennadam, the trolls using night elves for target practice, every banshee and every slaver, etc, etc. Derek's fate as some kind of uniquely morally abhorrent act, somehow more worthy of opposition than the raising of his own people's dead into undead fodder is simply the most demonstrably false in this entire line of situations, all of which are either equivalent or worse and only a fraction of which involve Forsaken.
Re: The last point, I emphatically disagree. The Alliance are a faction of limpdicked appeasers who forgave genocide in which the Horde army as a whole, not just Sylvanas is culpable and a population that in their vast majority not only prosecuted the war in a 'dishonorable' fashion but only switched sides because Sylvanas flew off and called them some mean names. They'll forgive the deaths of 1-3 people in a likely doomed plan that was actually exclusively set into motion by Sylvanas and some dark rangers, especially after Jaina had already committed to a plan that had them purposefully not win the war and avoid further bloodshed to take a moral highground and had agreed with the "Remove Sylvanas, keep everyone else" warplan. Does it make sense if any of them were remotely normal human beings? No. But that's how they're presented.