Reality vs Fantasy

If you want to understand the current frustrations with the lore behind World of Warcraft, take a trip down memory lane to when you were a child and played pretend with other children. Often times, such games had a "good" guy and a "bad" guy, acts of heroism and evil to add dramatic tension, and a resolution where the "bad" guy loses and the hero "good" guy is triumphant.

Among groups of children where there was some semblance of parity, who played the "good" guy and "bad" guy would change in the interest of social cohesion within a group. Ultimately the children are not actually "good" or "bad", they're just playing a game of pretend. One day a child plays the hero, the next the villain.

Except it didn't always work out like that with some children, who could not understand or entertain pretending to do something outside what they themselves would ever do. These were the types that evoked responses like, "but you always play the ______". What's happening is that such children do not want to play by the rules when they don't suit them, and when confronted, would rather that nobody played pretend at all then them being left out or excluded.

That childish behavior is the foundation of the Alliance in World of Warcraft. They are the "good guy" not because that's the role they're taking on for the sake of playing a game, but because they're literally the "good guy" in every sense, and can do no wrong. They are never the villain, they are never the aggressor, but they are always the victims of barbarism aimed at them by the Horde, who they have tried to forgive and rehabilitate time and time again, repaid only with unveiled aggression.

Growing up, this would be like someone refusing to every play the Axis in Axis and Allies, because literally Hitler.

Or in Counter Strike, always quitting whenever the player was placed on the "terrorist" team.

What is "fair" is that nobody is required to pretend that they're the "good" or "bad" guy all the time, just to alleviate the existential conflict that other immature people experience because they can't accept that it's "just a game".

What makes this worse is that, while the Horde are by no means "good" guys, the main conflict between them and the Alliance is one of sustaining their existing identity, which is different from the members of the Alliance. Most of the Horde races are the traditional underdog types, downtrodden and short on luck, in a tough place circumstantially and just trying to survive. The Alliance embodies the colonial oppression that is so often criticized in the mainstream media and historical accounts, and yet the Alliance merely sees it as "civilizing savages".

It's about this time that it's worth stating that the people in charge of the lore are a diverse team, headed up by a woman, so any attempt to malign such an arrangement of the story to suit some "white supremacist" position falls entirely flat on its face, which is genuinely surprising to some people given that the leader of the Alliance is a blonde-haired blue-eyed Brad Pitt lookalike who "just wants to have peace".

The Horde, with its acts of aggression, are frequently painted as being evil, because who doesn't want peace? Evil bad guys don't want peace, that's who!

So the Horde is then put in the place of the child who, wanting to still play the game of pretend instead of playing nothing at all, resigns to yet again be the villain that the knight in shining armor vanquishes before securing the love and affection of the fair maiden. Their reluctance is reinforced by the attitude of the other child, acting as if their pretend moral superiority meant anything at all outside the game of pretend.

This is the heart of the frustration with the story, because with the acts of hostility from the Horde increasing dramatically, people who play Alliance characters are frequently expressing their hatred for fictional characters of the opposing faction with such passion and fervor that is typically reserved for actual mortal enemies. They demand justice be served to their liking, because they are "good", and if they don't get what they want, then they're going to ruin the game for everyone.

The vitriol and hatred expressed, over a game, a game, is genuinely a sight to behold.

What's really disturbing about it though is that it's clearly not just a game to those people, and those same people who can't tell reality from fiction can vote.