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.)