Warcraft/YMMV

Here are the subjectives found in Warcraft series.


 * Alternate Character Interpretation: Plenty of them among the Lore Fans.
 * Arc Fatigue: The length to finish the first two story Acts of Frozen Throne's "The Founding of Durotar" bonus campaign can get quite tedious for some people as Act One: To Tame a Land, and Act Two: Old Hatreds, can take between one to two hours each to complete. Especially if the player really gets Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer wanting to find every piece of loot or stat tome available.
 * Awesome Music: The 4 related faction's themes.
 * Base Breaker: Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream are the two most prominent cases, in both cases basically for being racist war-promoting bastards of questionable leadership skills taking over from level-headed, peace-seeking, experienced rulers Jaina Proudmoore and Thrall.
 * Big Lipped Alligator Moment:
 * Coming across some secret areas and things throughout Warcraft III can be considered this, such as the Panda Relaxation area in "Digging up the Dead", the Largest Panda Ever in "Brothers in Blood", or the Penguin King in "The Return to Northrend".
 * In the Blood Elf campaign's third mission "The Dungeons of Dalaran", Kael comes across two captured Blood Elves that are, for some reason, polymorphed as spiders before they reach the weapon rack to rearm themselves as two Spell Breakers. Why they're spiders is never explained, and often goes completely unnoticed to the player since the spiders are marked as enemy targets.
 * Canon Sue: There's a very simple, one-question test to determine whether a character is a Canon Sue: "was this character created or popularized by Richard Knaak?" You'll only ever be wrong for the few characters that reached Canon Sue status without Knaak's help.
 * Fortunately, their Sueness doesn't really transfer into other media. Several of them were added into World of Warcraft but play fairly minor roles, even though Rhonin is technically a key person as the leader of the Kirin Tor. But even in the Ulduar trailer, his role is fairly passive compared to Jaina and the others.
 * Goes so far that Knaak often gets blamed for characters he didn't create (such as Med'an).
 * Cliché Storm: Every line that doesn't contain a proper noun, you've heard in some other fantasy work. This is particularly noticeable in Reign of Chaos.
 * Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Considering the very, very long hiatus before patch 1.29, the metagame of Warcraft III had ample opportunity to become stale. You could pretty much expect everyone ever to open with a Blademaster, Demon Hunter, Archmage or Death Knight depending on their race, and each matchup was mostly railroaded into a single game plan. Night Elves versus Orcs, for instance, would turn into mass Druids of the Talon + Beastmaster and Tinker against Tauren Chieftain and mass Raiders nine times out of ten, and Undead used Destroyers as an answer to basically everything.
 * Complete Monster: Gul'dan. Almost every other major villain(Except for the demons) have some sort of backstory that explains their actions, though not justify them. Gul'dan dooms his entire race for the sake of personal ambition. Then, there's the experiments he did with Garona...
 * Designated Hero: Tyrande Whisperwind could be seen as one since she slaughtered a group of innocent prison Wardens who were just doing their job trying to keep a condemned criminal, Illidan, behind bars. Maiev even calls her out for this in Frozen Throne.
 * However, the character she freed is a fan-favorite, and possible Designated Villain, Illidan Stormrage. Not to mention that before then Tyrande helped a group of Furbolgs (try to) escape the corruption and eventually turned from her racist ways.
 * Gameplay Derailment: It's very easy to abuse the AI of enemy peasants/peons throughout Warcraft II. The reason being that if you damage a structure, but leave it burning in the red, it will cause the AI to immediately send their workers to try to fix the structure. Then, if you constantly kill the workers that the AI attempts to send, it will cause them to keep sending their remaining workers, as well as the newly created ones, directly to the structure that is in the red for needed repair. Eventually, the enemy faction will use up all their gold on making workers, and leaves the AI as sitting ducks to get steamrolled with no means of being able to reinforce themselves.
 * Goddamned Bats: Due to its playstyle, Frozen Throne's bonus campaign has a few of these:
 * Centaurs, mainly because you end up fighting so damn many of them. Particular standouts include Firecallers, who can deal a fair bit of damage with Flame Strike, and Deathcallers, who can revive other centaurs.
 * Harpy Storm-hags cast Sleep to put your heroes out of action and Curse to make them miss half their attacks. They're not dangerous by any stretch of the imagination, but fighting them gets tedious very quickly.
 * Hilarious in Hindsight: Remember when Arthas said "What trickery is this!? Mal'Ganis! I don't know how you survived..." and later, after encountering Muradin's dwarves, "Doesn't anyone stay dead anymore?" It's funnier to think about it after some characters are Back From the Dead in World of Warcraft :
 * That particular example also counts as Hypocritical Humor, since Arthas is the one who got them all killed (or tried to) in the first place.
 * It Was His Sled: The RTS games in the franchise are considered to be quite old nowadays, so some of what may have been interesting plot developments back in the day have become well-known within, and outside, the Warcraft fanbase. Especially since many of these story moments were used as the foundation to set up World of Warcraft, and its later expansions.
 * For Warcraft I:
 * Blackhand gets ousted as Warchief.
 * For Warcraft II:
 * Gul'dan betrays the Horde, and dies at the Tomb of Sargeras.
 * The city of Alterac betrays the Alliance, and gets destroyed soon after.
 * Lothar dies.
 * For Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos:
 * Arthas turns evil, and kills his father, King Terenas.
 * Uther dies.
 * Arthas kills Sylvanas, which he then proceeds to resurrect her as an undead.
 * The Human Kingdom of Lordaeron, and the High Elf Kingdom of Quel'thalas, get destroyed by the Scourge.
 * Thrall moves the orcs to Kalimdor, and establishes the current day Horde alongside the Darkspear Trolls and Mulgore Tauren.
 * Grom dies.
 * Illidan is released from prison, and becomes a demon after claiming the Skull of Gul'dan.
 * Archimonde dies after failing to consume the World Tree.
 * For Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne:
 * Prince Kael moves his Blood Elf faction to Outland.
 * Sylvanas and Varimathras take control of Lordaeron to establish their undead Forsaken faction.
 * Arthas becomes the Lich King.
 * Thrall's Horde claims a home for themselves in Kalimdor, naming the territory Durotar.
 * Magnificent Bastard: Ner'zhul - just ask Archimonde and Tychondrius.
 * Moral Event Horizon:
 * Arthas massacres Stratholme so the city does not fall to the Undead.
 * That can be justified, depending on whether you think the villagers could have been saved from the plague or not (there was never a cure mentioned, meaning that it definitely would have fallen to Mal'ganis). For other players, the true act that made him despicable was hiring mercenaries to help him burn the ships, then telling the men that the "foul beasts" had done it all.
 * Also, it's not the massacre, it's the way he announces it. He refuses to consider anything else than slaughtering the entire city.
 * A questline in World of Warcraft reveals that even some of the mightiest beings in the setting can't cure the plague, not even on one single person, and Arthas didn't even know about those.
 * It's even noted in the Death Knight unit entry for Warcraft III that Death Knights are actually created primarily from Paladins who went mad because, whilst their Light-granted powers shielded them from contracting the plague, those powers were useless to cure the plague. One of the D20 RPG books actually mentions cases of living-but-infected victims spontaneously bursting into flames when a healing spell was cast on them.
 * It's sad, certainly, but what else could be done? Let the Scourge have the city, and thousands of new servants? Realistically, the entire human campaign in Warcraft III is one long, ever worsening Moral Event Horizon. The culmination being when he takes up Frostmourne.
 * Ner'Zhul and Mal'Ganis gave Arthas a no-win situation; that was their whole plan from the start. However, given many options ranging from bad to horrible, Arthas chose the worst one imaginable. He could have tried again to cure the plague; we never see any attempt at all. He could have tried to quarantine the infected from the uninfected; he doesn't consider it. He could have given the infected a chance to die with dignity; instead he kills them himself before they zombify. He could have asked his mentor Uther for guidance or even ceded authority to him; that would be a cowardly approach, in a way, but for all Arthas knew at the time Uther actually could have done something he couldn't. But instead, within five minutes of learning that that part of a city was exposed to The Virus - only the second time he's ever seen the affects of this disease - he orders the entire city massacred. That's called Jumping Off the Slippery Slope.
 * Was it only part of the city? Arthas knows that at least some of the city is infected, but from the evidence, the entire city could be infected. Furthermore, Arthas has no way of knowing who is and is not going to die and turn into a flesh-eating zombie until they actually do.
 * And if you do consider the culling justified, his virtual firing of Uther (and the Knights of Silver Hand) for having reservations against killing the people they swore to protect was clearly not a good sign.
 * This. Even if one makes the leap of logic that Arthas may have seen some of the soldiers he was fighting alongside in the prior mission succumb to the plague, and thusly learned first-hand that Paladin magic can't cure the plague, going berserk over the fact that a bunch of Lawful Good Paladins are refusing to just slaughter people out of hand is pretty clear proof he's losing his mind.
 * And there's the fact that Medivh had warned Arthas earlier that the harder he tried to stop the undead would only deliver his people to them. After telling Jaina that those who were killed in Stratholme will only remain still for just a moment, it turns out that Medivh was right; Massacring the people of Stratholme did nothing and was all in vain. If anything, Arthas actually made it easier for his enemies to bring them back as Undead, all while being a dick to his own allies.
 * Ner'Zhul himself crossed it after Warcraft II, when he abandons the Horde to save himself, opening countless portals across Draenor in an attempt to escape to new worlds, which ends up tearing the Orc homeworld apart (and unintentionally sending him straight into Kil'Jaeden and a Fate Worse Than Death).
 * More Popular Spinoff:
 * World of Warcraft, to the point where Blizzard once released "WOW: Heroes of Azeroth" as a prequel to World of Warcraft, on April Fool's Day. The game in question was better known as Warcraft III.
 * They also changed the novels accordingly by giving them the World of Warcraft icon even if the stories take place during the RTS games.
 * Some Dexterity Required: The first Warcraft game required much more clicks to move a single unit than most of the modern RTS games.
 * Sturgeon's Law: The enclosed "World Editor" allows a creative player to create their own scenarios and maps for the game with a great deal of customization options. Unfortunately, many of them suck.
 * However, some of them are very well done. See: Defense of the Ancients and The To the Bitter End.