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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7401 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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My tender year chuds from my hometown, grew up playing WoW together in McBumFuckville Midwest-edition . It looks like there is some desire to get the band back together for WoW Forever. I've been seriously considering it, even going so far as to look at the talents calculators, and skills changes. We've dabbled in classic servers occasionally, we started playing late TBC, early WotLK, though I don't think anyone has been playing retail classic for a bit.

On the same note, I'm curious how other players map Horde vs Alliance to red tribe vs blue tribe. In my mind, the Horde is obviously blue tribe: a mix of indigenous refugees, freed slaves, alt lifestyle burnouts, history's victims trying to make good. The Alliance is obviously red tribe: your classical trad heroes joined by traditional religious belief and racist hatred of the Other. But I could equally see the alternative: Horde is masculine, aggressive, ugly while the Alliance is effeminate pretty do-gooders.

It's fascinating to me that you see horde x alliance as blue tribe vs red tribe. I know that a certain famous streamer of "Gamer-Chuds Rise Up"-mentality has some massive ally guild in beta, which confuses me. I see the opposite. Horde is straight up the bad guys in most cannon lore and they give as good as they get, underdogs they are not.

  • Alliance is full of soyboy NPCs who just want to larp Tolkien as basic bitches and need the lore to coddle them as the "good guys". You are playing the same races as 4 decades of fantasy. They are all "peace and understanding, nature woo-woo". Their warcry is this paltry: "For the Alliance!" like some limp wrist fanny.
  • Horde is the Mongol horde, its full of the rough barbarian races, the literal undead hordes. It's playing industrializing Sauron, Golgatterath, the Black Company. It's masculine, aggressive, original, authentic. No need to borrow 4 decades of fantasy NPC sensibilities. "Horde rapes, tortures, and kills poor humans and Elves - YesChad.jpg", It's made for the chud-gamers who cast off the school-marms and the church lady sensibilities. Part of their warcry: "Lok’tar Ogar" literally means "Victory or Death", and whole cry goes fucking hard. The Horde is civilized for now, but always that savagery underneath the surface.

As I type this, I do wonder if this is however a split between the different types of reds. The problem with the red vs blue dichotomy is that it only works on a our post-modern level. It is all together too binary, too simple. My inchoate thought is the divider is that in modern era "Christian" is red tribe, but in pre-industrial societies it was undoubtedly blue-tribe. Since WoW is pre-industrial-ish fantasy, values/themes are being projected on an imperfect axis.

My inchoate thought is the divider is that in modern era "Christian" is red tribe, but in pre-industrial societies it was undoubtedly blue-tribe.

You're picturing a Hegelian dialectical view of history, that the Zeitgeist of progress at one point rested on Christianity, but has now moved on to other things. This was how our old world history textbooks were written: Sumerians and Persians were important until the Greeks, Greece was important until Rome, Rome was important until Christianity, Christianity was important until Humanism and the Enlightenment, etc.

Eh, Thrall is green Jesus who just wants peace and freedom for his people. When you first encounter the trolls in WC3, they're a literal foodslave race. The Tauren are Native Americans. The undead just want to understand their place in the world, find out who they really are, maaaaan.

That's at least an outlook you can take that is consistent with the lore. But personally, I agree, fuck all that whiney pussy shit. Lok'tar Ogar! For Hellscream!

You are of course correct, Though, the undead lore is a bit all over the place. The real soyboys are undoubtedly Blizzard for being unwilling to write consistent, good characterization of the two sides in a way that is appealing without being cookie cutter. It's funny how a decision made almost 20 years ago on Ally vs Horde still burns a fire in my stomach.

That said, after thinking about it, some of my more local friends are much more lefty/blue tribe, they are joining my hometown chud friends in playing (I wonder if this is going to be a disaster) and they are also diehard Horde gamers. In that sense, maybe Blizzard has created an effective lore, with the goal being to create good narrative anchor points for a wide swath of diverse mindsets on both factions rather than make interesting lore/characters.

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