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It came across less religion and more politics. As in the good guys will always go full Nazi if they win. 'Both sides are equally bad' and that sort of rot.

I'm gonna be provocative and say that this is all, ultimately, Warcraft III's fault. Blizz took one evil and one good faction and tried to make them morally grey. The thing is, it is impossible to escape the fact that the Horde is, at its core, an evil faction. This is the yoke around Warcraft's neck that keeps dragging storytelling down; the Horde keeps being squeezed into a shape that it, fundamentally, never was.

The Horde keeps being schizofrenical about whether it's an alliance of people being decent and backing eachother up or whether they're still genocidal maniacs trying to murder the Alliance because that's what the Horde does. Meanwhile, the Alliance is stuck trying to react to Schrödinger's Horde that is simultaneously honorable, reasonable people and Adolf McMengele. The entire setting is being strangled because Blizzard is playing up the edgy, misunderstood hero angle to a faction that, at its core, was all about being literal alien demons invading the world and burning everything.

TL;DR: Blizzard pandered to edgelords in WC3 and the lore is a result of this.

I feel like the bigger issue really is that Blizzard is an uncreative story teller.

Ancient evil banished to the void, and noble heroes corrupted by some tragedy are the only plots they know. There are totally ways to play the Horde as less evil than rough and uncivilized, and the Alliance as less good than arrogant and judgemental, but because Blizzard only knows 2 kinds of plots (usually just slams the two together, i.e. the foreshadowing that some power is behind the scenes manipulating things ala all of BFA) they end up greating a long series of repetitive idiot ball plots that always end in interesting characters going stupidly evil, stupidly wangsty, or dying just as they were getting interesting because someone else did one of the two.

I honestly feel like the Warcraft movie in particular really hammered home how uncreative Blizzard ultimately is, as even their "Orcs aren't really that evil" break from typical fantasy still plays out as an evil wizard corrupts the kingdom cliche.

Biggest problem is that the Horde encompasses groups that are:
-Evil
-Rough and uncivilized

The Forsaken, as of when I quit back with Cataclysm, fell under "Evil". Victims of circumstance maybe, but they weren't exactly hoping for redemption I felt.
Some of the Troll tribes fell under a similar auspices.

Then you had the Tauren and Orcs, who fall under the "rough and uncivilized" bit.

With the Blood Elves trying to transition away from the former.

At the very least, they're not "rough and uncivilized".

Blizzard does have one more plot. Namely, it's "that person that everyone should be able to see is someone who should never be let anywhere even remotely close to the levers of power, but that everyone just agreed to put in charge."

On a semi-related note -

Has it been revealed exactly why Sylvanas is ripping a hole in reality to go to the Shadowlands?

Eumerin wrote:

Has it been revealed exactly why Sylvanas is ripping a hole in reality to go to the Shadowlands?

Not entirely. There's various cinematics and story bits you could watch, but what it boils down to a couple possibilities:

One is she's convinced there is some ultimate evil behind everything (which is probably Void Lords and loosely... probably true), and that the only way to win is to fight the ultimate enemy, but life and things like 'hope' are obstacles to that.* So apparently she wants everyone to die and empower her to go get the baddie. And to do that she's going after some ancient evil (that's never been mentioned before) imprisoned in the Maw zone of the Shadowlands and something something profit.

*seriously, the hope thing is a weird trigger. The original war plan at the beginning of BFA was to kill Malfurion and take Teldrassil, yielding thousands of hostages, basically securing the entire continent as a Horde stronghold. Then a random sentinel captain told her that she can't 'kill hope' and she burned the world tree to the ground in a fit of rage and/or 'Oh, yeah? Hold my beer.'

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Second possibility is this is all pure crap, and she's just a nihilistic monster who wants to kill everyone for the lulz. The 'storytelling' is that vague.

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Alternately, (and this is more in line with her actual behavior and old storytelling- see the story link in the first post) she's selfish, only cares about herself, and sees other people as "arrows in her quiver." And she made a series of deals, first with a cabal of Valkyr (who've been following her around since Cataclysm, and dying one by one in various incidents, and once the last one dies, she's toast), then Helya, and lately Azshara herself, all the while scheming to come out ahead. This isn't entirely incompatible with the second interpretation, that she wants to kill everyone and come out ahead, but Blizzard assured everyone at BFA's launch that the story was complex and morally grey, which should mean she's not an evil person of evilness that just wants to kill everyone evilly. But that promise has honestly never materialized in game, and I have doubts there is any meat to it.

It's an even toss up if Blizz is going to keep her actual personality and behavior intact, go full murderous rampage for no raisin, or go for some sort of crazy redemption arc like they have repeatedly used for other characters in various franchises (see LordofHats' post above)


As of the current patch (8.25) she's abandoned the Horde with a vague promise of making everyone see and that they are all nothing, and her followup is apparently to make this gateway.
Mind you, the finale of BFA hasn't happened yet, so it isn't clear if she has another move in patch 8.3 (which is partially up on the public test realm), for the big confrontation with the last Old One (on Azeroth), N'zoth.
The reveal of the new expansion rather pre-empted the finale of the current one.

And more than likely there will be a Christie Golden tie-in novel in spring/early summer that will come up with a completely different explanation for literally everything. Or not address it at all...

Voss wrote:
[or go for some sort of crazy redemption arc like they have repeatedly for other characters in various franchises (see LordofHats' post above)

Blizzard does seem to enjoy doing that for characters that are pretty screwed up.

And conversely, the writers for WoW seem to endorse (Killing Joke) Joker's "one bad day" philosophy for nominally good guy characters.

Not surprised one of the best characters in WoW went from great to extremely uninteresting with vague character motivations.

I said in another forum that Sylvanas this expansion is the least interesting part, we have dead characters all throughout warcraft history that they could bring to the forefront. Like Uther the Light Bringer, Anduin Lothar, Arthas, Grom Hellscream, Ogrim Doomhammer.

Though N'zoth did warn us about it

The veil wanes

His crown will open the way

The fall of night reveals her true face

She will bring only ruin

When the arrow finds its mark, the last fetter will fall away

I alone can save you from what is to come.

Pretty much this expansion in a nutshell.




Personally, I would partially forgive Blizzard for the bad writing if she did actually breakdance her way to victory.