World of Warcraft/YMMV: Difference between revisions

* [[Alternate Character Interpretation]].

** Illidan: Was he a hero who was willing to go to extreme lengths to save the world? Was he an Anti-Hero who did the right thing in the end? Was he a Well-Intentioned Extremist unaware of his own evil? Or was he a power-mad loner who did a couple of good deeds to justify it to himself? Notable in that the writing of the games has zig-zagged on the way it portrays both his current and past actions over time. Legion and its supplementary material, in particular, posit that all of these interpretations are valid to some extent, and various other characters lean in one direction or another over him (the split between Kayn and Altruis being the most obvious).

*** Another one has emerged Illidan for Illidan after he chose to chose to stay behind at the Seat of the Pantheon while the surviving Titans imprisoned Sargeras. Was Illidan staying to help ensure Sargeras' imprisonment? Did Illidan want the chance to fight Sargeras himself? Or did Illidan just want to torture Sargeras for everything he had done?

** Arthas: was he a genuinely good person wanting to do the best for his people but was warped by the power of Frostmourne, or was he a spoiled brat who set the stage for his own fall? This continues as a Death Knight, with speculation over the degree of awareness Arthas had for his actions and whether he should be held accountable or was he also as much as a victim as those he killed? Was Stratholme an act of callous cruelty or what had to be done in those circumstances?

** The debate around General Hawthorne's destruction of Camp Taurajo. Was he a war criminal responsible for civilian deaths, someone who tried to win while showing more mercy than his comrades, or someone who wanted to show mercy but wasn't competent at doing it?

** Whether Kael'thas was a good man Driven to Villainy by unfair prejudice and a set of impossible circumstances in Warcraft III, or was he an incompetent commander who should have been able to overcome the odds stacked against him without accepting forbidden help? The RTS and various supplementary materials suggest the former, but The Burning Crusade stripped away most of the sympathy fans had for him and turned him into an unambiguous villain. It took until Shadowlands for this to be resolved, by showing him as an individual who did evil things with good intentions but is ultimately not irredeemable.

** Is Tyrande a good-natured and fair leader or a dangerous, zealous bigot? Is Thrall heroic and selfless or foolish and naive? And so on.

** Garrosh during his final battle with Thrall. Does he have a point, and did Thrall give him a responsibility that he wasn't ready for? Or is he simply making excuses and refusing to accept responsibility for his actions (throughout Mists of Pandaria, he'd mocked Thrall as being too soft to be an effective leader or a "true" orc)?

** After the "Rejection of the Gift" cinematic, a very big one happened with people becoming divided on whether or not the Light a force good in the Warcraft universe. While some consider it so citing a long list of past events, the cinematic led to a lot of negative sentiment towards the Light, some going as far as to consider it as bad as the Burning Legion or the Void Lords at the extreme. This is because it had the naaru Xe'ra attempt to Lightforge Illidan by force, especially since as the Prime Naaru, Xe'ra is the highest-ranking Light being who's appeared in-game unless Elune turns out to be a Light overdeity (which has scant proof to back it up). There also how the lightforged draenei can come across as the Knight Templar trope and the subsequent actions against the Mag'har on alt-Draenor (albeit with a level of [[Kick the Son of a Bitch]] and [[Cycle of Revenge]] on the Draenei's part). Ultimately, the interpretations range from considering the Light itself a force for good even if not all of its agents are {{Note|Blizzard themselves said they wanted to give the Naaru a morally grey angle with Xe'ra}}, people who consider the Light the big good [[Rooting for the Empire|regardless of its worst extremes]], those who consider the Light an amoral force that anyone can use and those who consider it just as bad as the Void {{Note|Which is unlikely to be true, as both the Legion and the Void want to destroy the universe and kill or corrupt everything in it while the Light does not}}.