Originally Posted by
Super Dickmann
The main problem with the Forsaken narrative, besides everything in BTS that is, is that there's no way to properly frame the conflict in Teldrassil as being proportionate or even relevant because the Forsaken have no preexisting conflict or tie with the night elves whatsoever. They barely ever meet, let alone fight, they have histories which don't intersect at any point backstory-wise, and live on an entirely separate continent. If you do every single Forsaken-related quest in Eastern Kingdoms I doubt you'd meet a single hostile night elf. If you play Night elf, you can meet some Forsaken fodder in Ashenvale and kill them, but that's part of a much, much larger campaign against orcs. It is the orcs who's story has a heavy focus on Ashenvale due to border disputes and resources, it's been a thing for ages. It's why focusing on Saurfang for it and having a near absence of Forsaken except Sylvanas and Nathanos themselves in War of Thorns was a right call. It's also why the Darkshore Warfront is so limp as undead - it has nothing to do with much of anything you've been doing and you're fighting people who you have no preexisting tie or beef with up until a patch ago. The order of the two capitals being destroyed doesn't matter regarding the Forsaken storyline because it has nothing to do with the Forsaken.
Indeed, very little in BFA has much to do with the Forsaken as a people, as much as Sylvanas is constantly talked about. The loss of Lordaeron, the whole focus of their beef with humanity, is glanced over. None of them oppose Sylvanas except newly raised characters that have fuck all of the baggage associated and exist solely to die to beef up Baine. Fuck all of their extant cast from previous zones is there because any mention of them would break Calia and to a lesser extent Voss's story wide-open in how out of place they are with the race. At the end of it all, Calia doesn't even take them over on-screen but is already in charge by the time Shadows Rising starts with nary a comment and their existing chain of comment is supplanted by Voss, who wasn't even part of the Forsaken political entity until BFA. The Night Elves' demolition was more spectacular and on-going, but the Forsaken one was thorough and entirely apathetic to pretty much all aspects of the race. In the span of it, once you've removed undeath as having any effect except the cosmetic, removed their conflict with the Alliance as being entirely the result of deception by Sylvanas, removed their entire prior supporting cast, their racial leader and the only character of theirs they bothered to focus on - Nathanos, there's not much for them to do. They shouldn't even be Horde in their current incarnation or, from a story sense, exist given there's nothing left for them to do, but gameplay necessitates they fester on the roster.