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Notes -
World of Warcraft as the Model for the Second American Civil War
On a play through of my childhood gaming favorite, I was thinking about the plot of World of Warcraft. I’ll note to start that I am commenting purely on World of Warcraft vanilla and The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, I never played anything after WotLK until TBC Classic the past two weeks or so.
The setting is post-apocalyptic, though it’s rarely presented as such, instead viewed as a standard fantasy setting. The original Warcraft set up an invasion of an otherwise organized fantasy Azeroth by demon fueled Orcs from another planet. Over succeeding games, the Orcs are defeated and enslaved by the humans, but then coming off that demonic alien invasion, they face a zombie plague which destroys the entire northern human kingdoms of both humans and elves, a slave revolt from the orcs, and a fresh demonic invasion leading to a tentative peace between the humans and orcs and a series of ententes signed between different races, the Horde and the Alliance.
Which brings us to World of Warcraft; The Burning Crusade, and its parallels to America. The Alliance is the red tribe coded grouping, the traditional fantasy heroes: religious normies (Humans), extractive industrialist miners and metalworkers (Dwarves), tech bro engineers (Gnomes), traditional ruralists (Night Elves), and a handful of weird fanatics from abroad (Dranei). The Horde is the blue tribe coded grouping, persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, the traditional fantasy villains reformed: liberated racialized slaves trying to regain some kind of culture after decades of subjugation (Orcs), Caribbean refugees (Trolls), the indigenous (Tauren), downtrodden burnout former criminals (the Forsaken), and metrosexual drug addicted faggy nu-males (Blood Elves). Notably, just like the Democratic Party, the Horde understands itself as symbolically lead by the liberated slaves, but its manpower largely comes from the faggy nu-males; while the Alliance understands itself as lead by the Humans, and the Humans make up the bulk of its manpower. An Orcish Ta Nehisi Coates or Ibram X Kendi would call the Horde the subaltern and the Alliance fascists and falangists; an Azerothian Dread Jim would call the Horde the bioleninist coalition.
((So narratively, we’re going to assume that “level” is largely if not entirely a gameplay concept divorced from storytelling. Else the entire narrative concept collapses: the first twenty levels of the human game are spent oriented around the Defias Brotherhood, their headquarters is the first big group dungeon of the game for Alliance players, by level 50 you could solo it in a few minutes, and it’s a two minute jog from the major human city of Stormwind, so why don’t they just deal with it once and for all in an afternoon and protect two major provinces along the way? It’s an inherent flaw in the RPG story telling method, which can’t be fixed easily or completely, but can safely be dismissed as “Willing Suspension of Disbelief” for our purposes, as otherwise there is no story to examine, and there very clearly is a story being told.))
From the moment the story starts, regardless of faction or race chosen, you begin in a world at war(craft). The safe zones you begin for the first five levels all feature some level of dangerous threat from demon worshippers, rebellious criminals, or monstrous chthonic races. After level 5, it only increases, by level 20 you’re in zones where the vast majority of the land in any area is not controlled by Horde or Alliance forces, instead by any of dozens of other groups. The war between the Horde and Alliance is in theory a bitter struggle for control of Azeroth, in game it is mostly a footnote, PVP is relatively unimportant to gameplay and more of a sideshow from a design perspective. But more than that, both the Horde and Alliance face bigger problems, even in their putative homelands they lack a legitimate monopoly on violence, and instead face rebellion and subversion and invasion across two continents. The Horde and the Alliance do not make up a majority of the forces in Azeroth, not combined and certainly neither individually.
Rather what distinguishes the Horde and Alliance from all the other factions is that they are trying to be a legitimate government of all of Azeroth. Most of the other factions are either regional criminal players or omnicidal maniacs, but both the Horde and the Alliance want to achieve something like normalcy. The conflict between the Horde and the Alliance mostly, after a while, just seems kind of stupid. Why are we even doing this when there are demon worshipping omnicidal religious cults around every corner? And there’s not really a good answer to that question that isn’t, well there’s a long history of racial hatred we’re dealing with here, somebody killed somebody’s grandfather, etc. Sins of the past, lack of forgiveness. Fighting a war that has long become irrelevant in a world we’ve lost control of.
The handful of NGO factions that are neutral, the Argent Dawn and the Cenarion Circle or the Capitalist Goblins, would clearly be able to lead a better world, but no one wants to put them in charge, least of all those factions themselves.
And I think that’s what a second American civil war will look like. Not true balkanization with Texas and New England and California and Appalachia as countries, there are too many blue tribers in red states and too many red tribers in blue states. Rather, a patchwork of war from coast to coast, with every state having bases of both sides and a million small regional violent interests to worry about on top of it all. A world of war.
Very interesting. And notably the "faggy nu-males" happen to have many hot chicks as their coevals. If one notices that sort of thing.
To shift fictions for a second, Stephen King's excellent short story Nona from the collection Skeleton Crew is essentially an allegory of the 60s dynamic of guys being drawn into the world of leftist radical violence by hot women.
I felt like I had read that book but I'm probably thinking of Night Shift. Anyway now will read.
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This undersells the case against the Horde. They’re bulk-importing a new voter base from shitholes beyond the Portal. Sylvanas wants to convert our kids, down to the live-naming rhetoric. Every raid must have an at least population-proportionate share of undergeared Orcs who pull mobs at random. And don’t get me started on the Apothecaries’ response to the shit that came out from the Plaguelands six years ago (leaving aside the question whether it came from the cauldrons or plaguebat meat).
Stormwind doesn't need to be the world police! I'm tired of this administration wasting our gold on fighting in places no one has ever heard of. Who cares about the Warsong Gulch? Why is it that I can't walk between two farms in Goldshire without getting robbed by the Defias Brotherhood, but we're sending our best soldiers overseas to fight in Kalimdor? Have you seen how much grinding it takes to make a Westfall stew today? Our great cities like Gnomeragen are becoming unlivable and the regime wants to blame all our problems on the Horde. I'm tired of talking about the Greenskins! They left, let them live over in Kalimdor if they can, we need to rebuild at home. I don't care if they blockade Ratchet, let the Goblins get the straits open again. Make Stormwind great again.
I don't want to see a single silver sent overseas to fight imagined foreign boogeymen until the government control all of Lakeshire. Support our troops, bring them home!
The conflict between the Horde and the Alliance is real enough, and justified enough, but it makes little sense that the Alliance has a presence in every zone in Azeroth, when they don't exercise a monopoly on violence in any of the zones. If they refocused, they might actually be able to win! But they can't do that, it would undermine the entire project, they exist to fight the Horde, to struggle for control of all Azeroth. Regionalism has no appeal.
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Love this thank you for writing it. If you ever want to play some WoW let me know.
Which version do you play? Right now I'm just playing TBC Anniversary, but I think my old main WoW characters should still be there, albeit back at 80.
Lately I’m playing on turtle wow but I’m thinking of hoping on the whitemane cataclysm server when it opens hah.
I prefer private servers because, well, free, and they have boosted xp and convenience stuff. Plus blizzard banned my account from back when I was a teen for no reason I can discern and I haven’t been able to get it back, so fuckkem.
I have to confess my ignorance and say I have no idea how a private server works.
Basically you download their launcher, make an account and go. It’s quite easy!
You left out the part where over a period of time the private server is highly likely to devolve as the politics between the mods unfolds and evolves. Alas. :(
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