My Enemy's Enemy is... Still a Horrifying Person - Alternate Gul'dan

I had theorized that the most powerful mortal warlock in Warcraft might play an unusual role in this expansion, and guess what?

Well, nothing's confirmed, but in a recent interview, Ion Hazzikostas mentioned that Gul'dan is decidedly not with the Iron Horde, and may in fact prove to be something of an ally against them.

Obviously, this is problematic for both Alliance and Horde.

Gul'dan may not have meant anything all that specific to the races of the Alliance. He was the shadowy man behind the throne of the original Horde, and as such is certainly responsible for the genocide of the Draenei and the First and Second wars. Yet the original Gul'dan was mostly an external threat. We know that even in this alternate Draenor, Gul'dan has a direct line to Kil'jaeden, and as such represents just about everything the Alliance stands against. Yet as an enemy of the Iron Horde, some of the more reckless members of the Alliance (read: us) might reach out to him, or far more likely, the Grand Master of the Shadow Council might reach out to us.

In the case of the Horde, things get a lot weirder and a lot trickier. Make no mistake, the Iron Horde is a menace, and we all saw that Garrosh's vision for the Horde is a horrifying, essentially fascistic war machine. Yet the Horde from our original timeline was that and more. On top of the insane militarism and brutality, the old Horde was run by warlocks, and happily tampered with dark magics to defile the very nature of its people.

Our Horde, in that sense, was worse than the Iron Horde.

Yet our Horde has gone through an incredible transformation. First by cutting off the flow of demon blood, and then integrating such benevolent races as the Tauren, Blood Elves (once Kael'thas was gone) and the Darkspear Trolls (definitely the nicest of troll tribes,) the current Horde has had to at least settle into some kind of stable state that isn't all about constant conquest. Yes, our Horde was bad, but it has spent the last 30-40 years learning from the past, and the recent civil war essentially settled that the old ways were being put behind them. The Iron Horde, on the other hand, is too young to have learned these lessons.

Yet here is Gul'dan. Gul'dan represents everything that the Horde has left behind - the cruelty and barbarism, and the callous apathy toward morals and ethics (setting aside the Forsaken - that's the big asterisk in all of this.)

By teaming up with Gul'dan, would the Horde be proving Garrosh right? That they had become too weak, and too willing to compromise themselves in order to gain power?

And beside all that, there's another big question:

If we ally with Gul'dan against the Iron Horde, what does he get out of the deal? There is no way in hell (or the twisting nether) that anything good will come of it.