For the Horde!
I’m a World of Warcraft player. I’m not one of those super-hardcore, “Leave me alone because I have a raid” no-life players. I enjoy the game, and I play it quite often, but I mostly play because I enjoy exploring the world and becoming involved in the lore.
One thing that a lot of people don’t know about me, and something I consider one of my more charming character quirks, is that I am completely incapable of playing a bad guy in a video game. When I play BioWare games, I’ve literally reloaded a previous save when I accidentally get Dark Side or Renegade points. I play all games with a morality system as the super-ultra nice guy, because I get really uncomfortable even PRETENDING to be a jerk.
When I play World of Warcraft, I strictly play Horde characters.
Aren’t they the bad guys, you might be thinking?
Not when you really look into it.
When I first picked the game up, I played on the side of the Alliance as a Night Elf Hunter. A friend got me into the game, and she played on the Alliance. I wanted to play with her, so I made sure we were on the same faction. While playing, I considered the Horde races nothing but animals, savage races incapable of compassion and rational thought.
I stopped playing for a long time, and then picked the game back up on a whim and started a Draenei Paladin. I got about 15 levels in before something happened in my personal life that had made me rather upset, angry, and, well, unlike me. I decided I wanted to try playing as a Blood Elf Paladin instead.
Then I started reading the lore, spending leisure time reading WoW Wiki entries on the different Horde races. I came to discover that I, perhaps, had been mistaken about the alignment of the Horde and the Alliance, and it wasn’t as clear cut as I had previously thought.
The tale of the Blood Elves was a tragic one. Formerly High Elves, constantly bathed in magical energies from the Sunwell, their home of Silvermoon had been ravaged by the Lich King’s Scourge armies, destroying the Sunwell and subjecting them to crippling magic withdrawls. Over 90% of the High Elven population was slaughtered, and 90% of the survivors renamed themselves “Blood Elves” in honor of their fallen bretheren. Draining magic from small magical creatures to feed their unending thirst, the Blood Elves found that their once allies, the Alliance, no longer welcomed them amongst their ranks.
Whose idea was it to betray the Blood Elves? Oh, it was the humans.
The Orcs, who had battled the humans and the Alliance many times in the past due to their demonic bloodlust brought upon them while enslaved by the Burning Legion. After being freed from their influence, they still find enemies in the Alliance, who refuse to think of the Orcs as anything other than mindless brutes despite their noble, shamanistic society.
So who’s the real bad guy here? Looks to me like it’s the humans.
One of the great things about World of Warcraft is that it’s the only fantasy property that actually portrays Orcs in a positive light. Tolkien and countless other fantasy writers use Orcs as a failsafe evil race, nothing but an unending legion of dirty, vile soldiers.
On the surface, you’d think World of Warcraft was the same way. On one side you have humans, who are portrayed as heroic and honorable, who are allied with Dwarves, Gnomes, Night Elves and Draenei, who are all very pleasant looking. Their cities are clean and their banners are all a brilliant royal blue. On the other hand, you have the Orcs, the Blood Elves, the hulking Tauren, the undead Forsaken, and the Trolls. They’re not as clean looking, and their cities are more thrown together and unkempt. It’d be easy to take everything at face value and say “Okay, the Alliance is good and the Horde are bad.”
Looking into it, though, it really seems the other way around.
I realize a lot of it has to do with shades of gray, with no faction undeniably “good” or “evil.” Each side has its members who hope for peace and others that lust for war. But when I look at the Orcs, and their Warchief Thrall, who so desperately wishes to cleanse the negative image unjustly earned by his people, and who welcomes all who have nowhere else to turn, it gets a bit easier. They are closely allied with the Tauren, who revere nature and live in harmony with the land. The Trolls of the Darkspear clan were saved by the Orcs, and have given up their previous rituals of voodoo and cannibalism in order to adopt the shamanistic ways of their saviors as a sign of friendship and respect. The Forsaken, victims of the undead curse of the Lich King, have more questionable motives but they had nowhere else to turn. You already know about the Blood Elves.
Meanwhile, you have the Dwarves, Gnomes, Night Elves and Draenei, who, while perhaps not guilty of anything themselves, follow behind the xenophobic humans, who are too proud to look past face value and serve a king who is hellbent on wiping the Horde races from the face of Azeroth.
So who’s really the good guy here? Who’s really the monster?
And who is it that takes this stuff too seriously?
(For the record, I currently play a Blood Elf Paladin and I’ve just started leveling a Tauren Druid on the Stonemaul server.)
12 Comments
Huh. You don’t like playing as bad guys? I prefer playing the villains because I’ve seen that hero stuff too much. I wanna see how the other side lives. But whatever.
It just goes to show you. Light doesn’t always equal good, darkness always doesn’t equal evil, and humans are bastards.
Also, Orcs aren’t evil in The Elder Scrolls games and lore either.
I played Mass Effect as a paragon at first and then went through again to play renegade for a different feel. I didn’t like purposely being an ass to people at first, but after a while it got funny. Renegade Shepard has awesome lines that paragon Shepard can never bring him/herself to say.
Back when I used to roleplay in various places, one of my favorite joys was playing villains. Playing a hero was impossible because in many cases, everyone else wanted to be the hero, and no-one wanted to be the villain. Win some, then lose some, and things went along great. And it was all the more enjoyable to defeat said villain if they were worth kicking the crap out of.
It’s strange, I always play the good guys too. Sometimes doing bad stuff in games is just funny, but other times it doesn’t quite feel right. For instance, I really like animals, and I can never bring myself to eat Crunchy Chicks in Fable… They’re so cute!
On another note, I recently got the WoW trial version and it’s pretty fun. True to form, I play a Night Elf Druid. I haven’t read any of the lore but now it really does seem like the humans are the bad guys.
Most of the horde, not so bad. Most Orcs, Trolls and Tauren are for the most part normal.
However, I don’t believe that The Forsaken or Blood Elves aren’t particularly as neutral as the rest.
The Forsaken, while tragic in creation, have the same basic goal as the Lich King – wipe out the living. Really, they are no better then him.
As far as I am concerned, Blood Elves also pretty bad. They are glorified drug addicts who are willing to do anything, including feeding off demonic powers, to feed their addiction. The creation of Blood Elf Paladins is the worst, as they basically took a being of ultimate good and siphoned it’s powers until it was drained into a shadow being.
Overall, no race is good or evil exclusively, it’s all based on the individual in charge. However, the races of the Alliance are still the more honorable in recent times in my opinion. Well, except for the Tauren, they are perhaps the most honorable of the races.
I’ll concede on the Forsaken, although it seems that some of them are really trying to prove themselves as different from Arthas. Really, as proven by the Battle for the Undercity, a lot of the evil is being plotted by the Apothecaries without Sylvannas’ knowledge.
Blood Elves… I can honestly see both sides. Keep in mind, though, that they don’t all feed off of demonic powers. Most of them drain energy from mana wyrms, which are the equivalent of pests. I agree with them drawing power from the captive Naaru, but lore-wise he’s gone, and it’s been said that many of the Blood Knights have started using the powers of the Light legitimately.
The only Alliance race I really DISLIKE is the humans. I like the Night Elves a lot, and the Draenei really tempt me sometimes (I actually fooled around making a female Draenei Shaman this morning), but since I like all of the Horde races, I think they’re more my thing unless for some reason I wind up playing with people who are strictly Alliance.
Honestly, I LIKE the races of the horde more. Tauren are by far my favorite playable race in both looks and background. The Horde’s bestial races just look cooler, and although I play a human, I’d prefer another race (but it’d be hard to ween off the human’s excellent racials.)
Right now I’m looking at a level 5 Tauren Shaman and a level 5 Draenei Shaman and I for the life of me cannot decide which to level. I think it’d be neat to see things from the Alliance side, but… c’mon, Tauren.
Gnomes or gtfo. My fave race hands down.
I need to make a horde character to see the horde side. When I first played at WoW’s launch, I leveled a Tauren hunter to 48. WoW wasn’t as appealing to me back then, so I didn’t really start playing serously until WotLK. However, due to my obsession with achievements, I have love since passed the limit of quest for the 3000 quest achievement and the Loremaster achievement. So, I know almost everything about lore brought through Alliance quest, but not much about horde ones since I only did a few quest back in the day, and was doing them from a leveling standpoint rather then a info one.
For the Horde!