Remove ads

What should the Alliance have done with the Orcs at the end of Warcraft 2?

Mosshadow95

Mosshadow95

At the end of the Second war in Warcraft 2 the Alliance was victorious and many but not all of the Orcs were captured and would be put into Internment Camps. The alternative options voiced by some members of the Alliance included executing all the captives instead and Gilneas would leave the Alliance due to this not happening. The camps were expensive (I'm surprised fantasy medieval kingdoms can deal with the logistics, when the Brits could not) and the Orcs would eventually escape during the events of Warcraft 3.

If you had say over what would have happened at the end of Warcraft 2, what should the Alliance have done instead to deal with the captured Orcs? Are there better and less expensive/oppressive ways to deal with this instead of canon, or is execution justified? Its been argued that the internment camps were a horrible crime, but what other solutions were possible?

Assume this is the main timeline and thus no timetravel shenanigans would occur to undo things.
 
Does this include non-game media like the novels?

If so, in Lord Of The Clans, I recall a big issue was how the Orcs in the camps just stopped being motivated to do anything, due to withdrawal of demonic energy. (I don't know exactly what that would be in the current lore; "fel" or something.)

I vaguely remember a scene where Thrall tried to break out some Orcs from a camp, and they just stared blankly at him.

So that's something else to consider.
 
Mosshadow95 said:
what should the Alliance have done instead to deal with the captured Orcs?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Whatever they did instead would have been sabotaged by the Bronze Dragonflight to maintain the one true, perfect timeline where all the 'neccesary' events took place, including the internment camps and the whole slave race plot going on there, because Blizzard top level writers are hacks high on their own supply.
 
hghwolf said:
Whatever they did instead would have been sabotaged by the Bronze Dragonflight to maintain the one true, perfect timeline where all the 'neccesary' events took place, including the internment camps and the whole slave race plot going on there, because Blizzard top level writers are hacks high on their own supply.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I wrote at the end of the prompt that this is the main timeline so there would be no intervention for that reason.
 
hghwolf said:
Whatever they did instead would have been sabotaged by the Bronze Dragonflight to maintain the one true, perfect timeline where all the 'neccesary' events took place, including the internment camps and the whole slave race plot going on there, because Blizzard top level writers are hacks high on their own supply.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Now to be fair the Bronze Dragons don't do that anymore (now they create experimental pocket realitys they can use now that The Legion, The Void and Murozond (who worked for the Void) are defeated)


... surprisingly they are trying their best to salvage what's left of Warcraft after "Shadowlands" happened, but I don't trust them enough yet to actually go back and play World Of Warcraft yet... I'll give it another expansion or two just in case
 
Rule 2: Don’t Be Hateful
Honestly, I'd kill em. They're backstabbing genocidal invaders they cause far and away more problems than they solve, them being dead rather than alive is probably enough of a economic boost that the Alliance doesnt fracture, and even after they supposedly learn better, they're right back to the genocidal invasions again and again and again and again.

Leave the Frostwolves alone in Alterac, they can at least be trusted as neighbors, but the rest of the Horde can't be.
 
Last edited:
Darth Locutus said:
Honestly, I'd kill em. They're backstabbing genocidal invaders they cause far and away more problems than they solve, them being dead rather than alive is probably enough of a economic boost that the Alliance doesnt fracture, and even after they supposedly learn better, they're right back to the genocidal invasions again and again and again and again.

Leave the Frostwolves alone in Alterac, they can at least be trusted as neighbors, but the rest of the Horde can't be.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Maybe this is a hot take, but I don't think you should be endorsing genocide as a response to attempted genocide. (Especially when the root failure of a lot of this is the absolute shitshow that was a lot of WoW's post Wrath writing)
 
The weird thing is the Orc internment camps are considered one of the more moral solutions in-universe, because of a variety of factors that were written into the situation, and none of those factors were written in in order to make the internment camps a moral solution. As in, each of those other factors were written for other reasons, often "because it's cool", but together they have the unintended result of very few other alternatives to the internment camps.

As of the end of Warcraft 2, the Orc Horde was an invading army (where "army" apparently includes children; "noncombatants" seems limited to those, if at all) from another (dying) world, and at the end of the war, the primary portal where they could enter was shut down, presumably without any way of opening it back up. So the Orcs were all stranded on this world, with no way to repatriate.

Every member of that army was full of demonic rage energy. As in literal demons influenced the entire Orc Horde to be violent and bloodthirsty and genocidal. When the Orcs lost the war and the portal shut down, the demonic rage energy ran out, and now the entire army is going through withdrawal, turning them apathetic and unresponsive.

What should be done with this Orc population, then? They cannot be motivated to make new communities for themselves in this world. They cannot return home. At the most, some small groups have managed to find a small amount of motivation and go into hiding, where they act like raiding bandits, because they want to re-experience that demon rage.

Now, as mentioned, none of this is aimed at making the internment camps the "best solution". Instead, it's all set-up for the introduction of Thrall, who's the one surviving Orc untainted by demons (who has blue eyes instead of the "demonic red eyes" of every other Orc), and who gets picked up by a Human lord who trains him in strategy and tactics, and who reconnects with the "ancient Orc traditions" of "shamanism" (which I'm not sure has ever been mentioned before in Warcraft lore, prior to the lead-up to Warcraft 3). In other words, the internment camps are to give Thrall a ready army to lead the Orcs to a "new destiny" in Warcraft 3, over on another continent.

The stacking of situational disadvantages that make the internment camps "moral" is just a side effect of the Thrall story. So it's difficult to analogize it to anything in real life, because these circumstances were created just for Thrall, and I don't think much worldbuilding thought was given to them otherwise.

Now, I have no idea what the current lore is on any of the above. For example, as mentioned, I don't even know what "demonic energy" is, in the context of the Warcraft cosmology. (It's apparently still a thing, given I think at least one World Of Warcraft expansion features it in a trailer; Warlords Of Draenor, I think?)
 
Adloquium said:
Now, as mentioned, none of this is aimed at making the internment camps the "best solution". Instead, it's all set-up for the introduction of Thrall, who's the one surviving Orc untainted by demons (who has blue eyes instead of the "demonic red eyes" of every other Orc), and who gets picked up by a Human lord who trains him in strategy and tactics, and who reconnects with the "ancient Orc traditions" of "shamanism" (which I'm not sure has ever been mentioned before in Warcraft lore, prior to the lead-up to Warcraft 3). In other words, the internment camps are to give Thrall a ready army to lead the Orcs to a "new destiny" in Warcraft 3, over on another continent.

The stacking of situational disadvantages that make the internment camps "moral" is just a side effect of the Thrall story. So it's difficult to analogize it to anything in real life, because these circumstances were created just for Thrall, and I don't think much worldbuilding thought was given to them otherwise.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think there's at least some allusion to orc shamanism in the lore in the Warcraft II manual, which is written from the point of view of Gul'dan, the orcish warlock who is in large part responsible for the whole "fall to demons and attack another planet" schtick the orcs have during that time period.
 
Simon_Jester said:
I think there's at least some allusion to orc shamanism in the lore in the Warcraft II manual, which is written from the point of view of Gul'dan, the orcish warlock who is in large part responsible for the whole "fall to demons and attack another planet" schtick the orcs have during that time period.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
There is indeed but it's... ambiguous whether it was already similar to what Shamanism is in modern Warcraft :

Gul'dan by way of the WC2 manual said:
In what passed as my youth, I studied Orc magiks through the tribal Shaman of my clan. My natural
talent for channeling the cold, negative-energies of the Twisting Nether brought me notable standing
amongst the other Shaman, and I knew that even Ner'zhul, the greatest of my teachers, became jealous
of me as my abilities grew ever stronger.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The word 'shaman' pops up nine times and always either refers to someone who is already a fel channeler or uh... the binding of Alexstraza which doesn't really strike me as the sort of magic 'real' orc shaman used to do.
 
I will not argue otherwise.

I'm fairly sure the orc shamans were retconned in concept and that in their original incarnation this was basically just a 90s-era term for "this is what we call a magician who happens to be orcish and therefore gets a 'savage' 'tribal' aesthetic."
 
Warcraft 1 had a pretty standard 'evil priest/wizard' aesthetic for the Orc spellcasters, the Necrolytes and Warlocks, but WC1 in general had a much less tribalistic aesthetic for the orcs to begin with. Later games retconned these to be fairly new traditions of magic for the Orcs but what hasn't been retconned in Warcraft ?

(Other than the things that really should have been)
 
Yeah, pretty much.

As I understand it, essentially all of that stuff was ported on after the fact as part of the gradual runup to what became Warcraft III (including anything about Thrall), because Blizzard wanted a setting with a little more depth and complexity, with more playable factions and more reasons for them to bounce off each other both violently and nonviolently.
 
Yea I do it all because I am evil may be bog standard fare for a faction of an RTS but if you want to attract someone to play a faction in a major MMO you need a bit of subtelty and a grey/alternative draw.

Hence the Orcs being really victims of their leaders or the Trolls being the original residents of Azeroth or the Tauren being chill cow people...

Anyway Interment Camps were a reasonable solution for...

Well, back then it was a giant defeated army of catatonic zombies that came within a hairs breath from genociding the fuck out of every Alliance race retconned to be in fact a giant mass of tribes, complete with women and children that came within a hairs breath from genociding every alliance race.

The mistake was leaving them to the tender mercies of a bunch of feudalistic wardens and noblemen that quickly turned them to a source of free labor possibly with the tacit approval of several kingdoms.

At the very least Dalaran should have been heavily involved both in monitoring them and trying to find out whatever the fuck was wrong with them.

Plus put in place measures just in case the pliable zombies suddenly were unzombified.

Alternatively they could have simply pushed the whole lot to say Alterac or some other place with plenty of open space to fend for themselves, since apparently they were perfectly capable of going through the motions of life and not starve and observe them from afar.

Far less expensive and dangerous and if/when the formerly crazed killers regained their senses perhaps peace and trade could be achieved.
 
I think that the camps, in the context you describe, make the most sense when viewed as a sort of muddled compromise measure. The Alliance, in the aftermath of this enormous, devastating war to fight back the army of demon-energized big green dudes and whatnot from another world, probably has a lot of different factions advocating different courses of action. I can picture a series of Alliance leadership figures saying stuff like:

1) "Just kill the ones cut off on our side of the destroyed portal; they're passive right now but that could change at any time without warning for all we know, and these people/things/??? slaughtered, like, millions of our respective peoples in the last two or three rounds of warfare. Right or wrong, for literally as long as we've known they existed they've been walking supersoldier kill-crazies, so this anomalous docility is an opportunity we can't pass up to finish the threat without losing a lot of good soldiers trying to take down giant orcs."

2) "This feels like mass murder, not warfare, so we need a solution that isn't that."

3) "What if they start going berserk again?"

4) "Nah, we're pretty sure they're going to remain docile, also dear Light do we have a shitload of heavy labor and rebuilding to do from this massive multi-continent war to push back the Horde, so a bunch of very strong and vaguely biddable laborers who might do stuff like chop trees and dig canals and quarry stone for us sounds in exchange for food and basic shelter way too useful to pass up."

5) "We should keep a very close watch on these guys. Whether they're under guard or not, we need wizards monitoring them and trying to figure out their deal."

6) "That sounds really time-consuming and us wizards have a lot of other things to do too. Are we getting paid for this? Our hourly fees are..."

7) "SWEET MERCIFUL SPIRITS OF STICKER SHOCK!"

8) "Okay, clearly we need some kind of compromise between making this whole process ludicrously burdensome for our war-ravaged economies, but also reasonably secure for the foreseeable future barring outside-context problems, so..."

To be clear, it's suppoesd to be a different person saying each of those things, by the way

And after several rounds of that, you get, well, a lot of docilized confused orcs shambling around in the camps and doing some amount of effectively unfree prison-labor enslavement on behalf of lords who theoretically are plowing the profits back into maintaining the camp security but in practice have more and more incentive to cut corners as the years go by.

Because most systems are subject to compromise and corruption over time, unless there's narrative fiat keeping them "pure," if you will.
 
Last edited:
Not that familiar with the newer stuff, but...

The camps made sense as a short term solution; due to being "apathetic and unresponsive" they really weren't likely to survive on their own so alternatives like exiling them all in some island or isolated region where they could live their own lives but couldn't easily start a new war from would have just been a dishonest means of genocide. "Stick them in camps, kill them or let them die off by neglect" were the only real immediate choices.

In the longer term however effort should have been made into finding some way to fix that and make them functional again, while either propagandizing them in a less warlike direction, or just settling them in one of those isolated spots.
 
In practice, what I remember of Warcraft lore is pretty clear that 'the Alliance' had no one position or policy when it comes to the Orcs. Which should be no surprise when you realize that it is crumbling pretty much immediately after the Second War.

Again, I may not have it all correct, but what I remember is Lordaeron came up with the internment camps, pitched them to the others, and they got a resounding 'I'm sure not going to pay that' from pretty much everyone. For reasons that range from having legitimate rebuilding they needed to do (Stormwind insofar as they existed and probably Khaz Modan) to just saying to kill them (for sure Kul Tiras, probably also Gilneas and Stromgarde). And then there was Silvermoon, who had barely contributed to the war, didn't care and was already leaving, just on the principle that interacting with humans is considered beneath them.

So they tried to fund it mostly on their own. Which is actually directly tied to both the camps being so bad and how many freaking cultists popped up in that particular kingdom, because as it turns out outsized expenses lead to outsized taxes which lead to unrest.
 
I think there's a reasonable case that while the Orc's lethargy started because of demon blood withdrawal, it only lasted 20 years due to the feeling of purposelessness inside the camps. The ones who escape don't seem to suffer it long term, even the ones who aren't violent raiders. Eitrigg is depressed in his exile but it's more the what was it all for, existential crisis kind of depressed than a lethargic withdrawl stupor. Thrall's reintroduction of shamanism is more the metaphorical kind of spiritual cure than the literal magical kind, most of what he does is give them a new purpose to rally behind.

The Alliance wouldn't know much about them but the Frostwolf exiles are around. Any successful alternative to the camps should probably involve them somehow delivering the mother of all "I told you so"s.
Eliar said:
Hence the Orcs being really victims of their leaders or the Trolls being the original residents of Azeroth or the Tauren being chill cow people...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Why are high elves and humans so similar? Eh, it's fantasy, don't worry about it usually, but then Warcraft gave us the evolutionary history of all the species. Elves are weird mutant trolls, and humans are the completely unrelated descendants of stone giants that were turned to flesh by lovcraftian gods, and by a series of coincidences convergently evolved similar appearances. If you consider all Titan construct species as kinda related Humans are more closely related to animal-headed races like Mogu and Tol'vir than Elves. As of the Chronicles Draenor retcons they're more related to Orcs than to Elves. Not directly related to anything but always funny to point out.
 
Avernus said:
Not that familiar with the newer stuff, but...

The camps made sense as a short term solution; due to being "apathetic and unresponsive" they really weren't likely to survive on their own so alternatives like exiling them all in some island or isolated region where they could live their own lives but couldn't easily start a new war from would have just been a dishonest means of genocide. "Stick them in camps, kill them or let them die off by neglect" were the only real immediate choices.

In the longer term however effort should have been made into finding some way to fix that and make them functional again, while either propagandizing them in a less warlike direction, or just settling them in one of those isolated spots.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Furthermore, it is very unclear to me whether the orcs were, factually within the text, so nonfunctional that they would have just starved on their own. I'm not saying they were or weren't, but honestly I never read the "bridging" material between Warcraft II and Warcraft III, so I'm not really sure what went down in there and what evidence exists.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Furthermore, it is very unclear to me whether the orcs were, factually within the text, so nonfunctional that they would have just starved on their own.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It's not just the simple ability to feed themselves, it's that if you just dumped them to fend for themselves in some place not already claimed by somebody else they'd have to build a homeland from the ground up, which is hard for fully functional people. And by the time you gather them together to cut down on costs, built a support infrastructure, defenses against wild animals/monsters, and lines of supply to maintain all that; well, you've got yourself a camp right there.
 
Avernus said:
so alternatives like exiling them all in some island or isolated region where they could live their own lives but couldn't easily start a new war from
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Also, and I admit this is out-of-universe rather than in-universe, I'm really not sure the Warcraft devs had come up with anywhere outside the (currently known as) Eastern Kingdoms at that time.

I recall even at the time of Warcraft 3, the kingdom now known as Stormwind was still then known as Azeroth. I also recall some point in time when the Eastern Kingdoms was also known as Azeroth.

Otherwise, "send them all to Kalimdor" might have been a valid alternative, but that would leave nothing for Thrall to do in the Warcraft 3 demo, so that might not be possible for the dev team.

EDIT to add now I'm not on mobile:

Eliar said:
The mistake was leaving them to the tender mercies of a bunch of feudalistic wardens and noblemen that quickly turned them to a source of free labor possibly with the tacit approval of several kingdoms.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Case in point, the Human lord who took in Thrall in the first place (and whose name I've forgotten; Blackmoor? Blackmore? Blackwall? Something like that) did so because he wanted Thrall to lead the Orcs as a ready-made army, to overthrow the kingdom and rule it.
 
Last edited:
hghwolf said:
There is indeed but it's... ambiguous whether it was already similar to what Shamanism is in modern Warcraft :



The word 'shaman' pops up nine times and always either refers to someone who is already a fel channeler or uh... the binding of Alexstraza which doesn't really strike me as the sort of magic 'real' orc shaman used to do.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
What's really funny to me about this quote predating many many retcons is that by the time of WoW not only is Shamanism very different, but the twisting nether no longer has anything to do with Fel.
 
Yeah, quotes from the Warcraft II manual are taking us waaaay far back to a time when frankly, Warcraft as a setting hadn't diverged very far from its roots as sort of a thinly veiled Warhammer knockoff.

The original concept of "the Twisting Nether" was probably very, very similar to 40k's Warp, now that I think about it.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top