Sylvanas did nothing wrong

Due to a friend, I recently switched my gaming time from one online game to another, back to an oldie that I hadn't played in a long time. In getting back into the swing of things, I wanted to get caught up on the story as well as all the gameplay dynamics changes, and what I found was rather amusing.

To put it shortly, in the World of Warcraft, a character named Sylvanas is the leader of a faction called "the Horde". There is a single major opponent to them, called "the Alliance". The two fight over all sorts of stuff, and in the game story, Sylvanas recently burned down a the massive tree that served as the capitol city for a race of that is a member of the Alliance. Because it was a capital city, there were "civilians" killed as well as military, and so the game and players of the game have tried to portray this action as barbaric and evil.

Except that they miss the justification offered by Sylvanas herself: "This is war."

The old phrase goes "all is fair in love and war", right?

People don't believe or understand that, not really. ALL is fair?

One of the major Horde characters chastised Sylvanas stating "There is no honor in this!"

You know, because during a time of war, honor is more important than survival. Ideals are more important than living another day.

The Horde and the Alliance have a set of mutually exclusive values. The Horde is largely a collection of outcasts and misfits, a largely untenable amalgamation, if not for the races of the Alliance, who have subjugated and killed all of them at some time or another in their own history. The Horde has struck back, so they are no innocent doves either, but what that means is that there is no "good guy" in this mess. Both sides have blood on their hands, both sides have done terrible things, and neither side is without the need for redemption in some manner or another.

But that doesn't stop people from virtue-signalling their pacifism and lofty ideals about how wars should be fought.

Peace is a lofty ideal, but it is just that, an ideal, and in a fictional realm where everybody is guilty of crimes against someone else, peace won't come through negotiations and talk. The races of the Horde and of the Alliance want different things, have different priorities, and deep scars that will never truly heal.

What this means for the Horde and the Alliance then, locked in conflict, is that whoever survives will be the one that eliminates the other. Whichever subdues or subjugates the other will "win". It's an existential fight, and so neither side has any reason to hold back on their enemies. They're enemies.

And this is where people try to confuse things, to insert their superior morality where they have no enemies, and so they would seek to broker peace. These people do not quite understand that, because it's a fiction, because it's not real, of course nothing that either side has done really matters, because it's all pretend. The story is make-believe, and so Blizzard can make it whatever they want.

In reality, though, peace often isn't an option. Diversity + Proximity = War, and that's despite lofty ideals, because those lofty ideals can often be the grounds for the ideological diversity that then leads to conflict in the first place.

The Horde and the Alliance are at war. There is, in the nature of their war, no way to fight that isn't terrible. It's all tragic, it's all horrible. War has always been described as such, and in portraying accurately how each side will do heinous things to their enemies, Blizzard unintentionally exposed the idealistic pacifists who do not really understand that they are playing a game which is simulating war.

In war, your goal is to win and go home alive. To do this, you will do terrible things that, were you not in war, could be categorized as "wrong". You will kill people. You will break things and destroy stuff. You will commit atrocities in the name of survival that, were they not required to be done in the first place, you'd not have pursued otherwise.

And that's why, in terms of war, what Sylvanas did was not wrong, and despite her own significant moral failings and personal flaws, she made a decisive strike against her mortal enemies in an ongoing war where her faction desires to remain free of the authoritarian rule of the Alliance, let alone worse.

Sylvanas essentially nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and if you've seen the revisionist history trying to make out the United States as evil for having done that during WWII, for having gone "too far", for not having tried harder to "make peace", then you'll understand why so many folks, even those who played Horde characters, were taken aback at the decisive action to destroy an enemies' stronghold.

Sure, the story has been written such that it supposedly backfired so the Alliance then sack a stronghold of the Horde as well, and Sylvanas' character is full of bitterness and hate, but those things are a distraction, an irrelevance, they don't change whether what she did was correct or not in the context of war, regardless of the entanglements that existed on a personal level.

Choose to fight a war, to win it, instead of dying for an ideal which cannot actually exist.

Understand the times you are in, and act accordingly.