Originally Posted by
Diaphin
It wasn't though. The implication was that the Scourge just pulled out until they can strike right at the heart of Lordaeron with Arthas as their champion. And he could have issued a quarantine and tried to get as many uninfected people out of the city as he could. you know the Benediction quest? The one where you replay a priest trying to get out as many refugees as possible, who end up being slaughtering by the scourge because Arthas is too busy making things worse? Even in the interlude, we see survivors of Stratholme, so the city as a whole wasn't lost ever. All the time, Arthas culling is named as the core catastrophe which befell the city, with the fires he started literally burning even years afterwards. Stratholme is not a moral dilemma, it is just showing Arthas true colors: When he has the choice, he will always go with the most brutforce, straight forward solution he can, especially when somebody provokes him.
Nobody gives a fuck about your fanfictions. Blizzard is unambigious about him being evil even as a Paladin and him still having his free will and even his humanity intact but suppressed. In the friggin novelization of the events we even know that in the scene where he claims to not feel remorse anymore, he is lying, he knows deep in his heart he that this is a lie. He wilfully choses to follow the Lichking and ignore his own humanity. And again, it is not like he is manipulated like for example made believed that the fate that awaits him is literal hell and that for no reason at all the powers that are condemn him to the same torture as his greatest abuser, like a certain other character who is supposedly more evil, he is baited. He is provoked and he follows the bait at any point. And again, the people who try to counsel him are trying the best to solve the situation without becoming Monsters themselves. If you share Arthas point of view, the flaw is on you as a person. The entire scenario of Warcraft 3 is a test of personality, in which Arthas over and over again proves that he was a bad person from the beginning. All the good that was ever there was the expectations others placed on him, hell, he didn't even wanted to be a Paladin. The campaign shows that underneath every pretense, Arthas was a bad person. What Ner'zhul and Frostmourne did was to unleash the evil that was always there.
He was not inheritly evil, he was evil by his own choice. Arthas story is all about the choices he makes which lead him exactly to where he is. He always had this evil aspects inside of him, but he certainly also had good aspects inside of him, as seen in the fact that his humanity still existed inside of Arthas and wanted him to repent. It is the choices he makes, which prove him to be truly evil, because he had every opportunity to be good and made the choice against it at every step. I mean, hell, even the so called manipulations of Mal'ganis and Kel'thuzad are nothing more than Arthas rather listening to a creepy old man and a literal demon than the people who love him and care for him.