#even makes Jailer (or better yet N'zoth) look actually cool instead of being the writer's pet

[petrenocka]

Cataclysm was the last time Warcraft was able to write members of the Alliance doing wrong.

Yeah fr, name one thing they did wrong since the goblin incident.

I mean, Graymane is right there. His vendetta is literally the perfect way to antagonize Sylvanas, just let him be a little stupid and/or paranoid and it all just falls into place for you.

But I'm not JUST talking about Alliance being typcasted as the good guys. Because truth be told, as a Horde player, I am all for Horde being ""the badguy faction"", if the writers commit to it, and actually let us be cool and threatening in the villain role.

And that, unfortunately, is a big IF

Because compare how the Varian died in Legion vs Vol'Djin. Or the way Gallywix's azerite mech gets defeated by the gnome one in the bfa war campaign. Or how the Alliance war campaign ends by destroying the whole entire reason why Horde pursued the Zandalari to join them (their naval fleet), meanwhile in the Horde campaign you revive two guys, plan an assassination plot, and it goes nowhere because you get betrayed.

I mean, just compare the notable faction characters. Alliance has the absurdly powerful mage Jaina, an absurdly powerful priest Tyrande and just a pretty powerful one in Anduin. Vellin too is Alliance but he doesn't participate in Azeroth politics. Malfurion is the strongest druid ever.

And who does Horde have? That one Nightborn mage? The Zandalari princess with some Loa favor? The situation is so dire, choosing Sylvanas as the warchief almost makes sense: she's literally the only Horde character who's up to the powerscaling.

WoW writing team is just as uninterested in making the Horde cool as it is uninterested in giving Alliance any shred of moral complexity.

But you can't be taken seriously as a villain, as a threat, if you're catching Ls the entire story. And you can't be taken seriously as a complex character if the world you're in is one sentence deep.