Alternate Realities and Stakes

Alternate Universes are fertile ground for speculative fiction. They're usually more of a science-fiction thing than a fantasy one - though one could argue that all fantasy is basically alternate-universe fiction, though oftentimes, as in Warcraft, there's no solid connection made between our universe and the fantasy one (except for that one little girl in Blade's Edge who claims to be from "Eng-land," which I suspect is more there as an easter egg than a real hint at some big lore reveal.)

In Warlords of Draenor, we're heading to an alternate universe, created (as they often are in Sci-Fi) by time-travel. Actually, we're also traveling back in time. Basically, if you think of alternate universes/timelines as being arranged horizontally while simple past/future time is arranged vertically, we're essentially going diagonally. The idea is that we're seeing something very similar to the past, but we're in a paradox-free zone. The timeline was interfered with once, and that one interference (performed by Garrosh and Kairoz) split Draenor B off such that nothing we do there will change our own history.

Not that the Iron Horde of Draenor B isn't a threat. It is, but it's a physical threat - literally an army that is trying to invade Azeroth. Truth be told, we have them at a disadvantage. The Alliance and Horde know all about the various leaders of the Iron Horde, while Kilrogg and Blackhand must be standing around going "wait, what the hell are those wolf-things and bull-men coming at us?"

As always with WoW, we're going in with support from our factions. Each faction has a headlining leader to come with us. The Horde has Thrall - now a twice-ex Warchief but still fairly respected in the Horde (probably moreso after standing against Garrosh, at least with the non-Orcs) and the Alliance has Maraad, who has not had nearly as much screen time, but what little I've gathered from the data mined conversations he has, seems like a Paladin of the old-school - less of a "spread the love" type we see in people like Uther and Tirion, and a bit more "Old Testament" fury and vengeance.

A few other people are going to be coming with us, (I know Khadgar will be among them,) but many of the figures we're interacting with will be Draenor B's version of them.

Now, I don't want to get into spoilers, both for respect to those who like surprises (though I've been leaning more toward the "I know how Hamlet ends and it's still a good play" side of the spoiler debate these days) and also because this is pretty much the earliest phase of public testing (actually, it's not even that, really) so we could have a Grand Magister Rommath situation here (about four years ago, early data mining of Cataclysm had Lor'themar calling Rommath out as a Twilight Cultist, mirroring Varian calling out Benedictus. Neither event wound up happening, though they did reveal Benedictus to be in the Hammer in 4.3.)

But that caveat aside, while we're seeing a lot of familiar faces in Draenor, there is a certain question to be asked of how much we should care if one of them gets killed off. Obviously, Thrall, Maraad, Khadgar - those are the very same people we've been dealing with all this time. But if someone dies and then we can just go to Orgrimmar and chill out with them - older, but definitely still among the living - it may cut a little into the stakes.

This doesn't really matter for villains, though. Indeed, the whole idea of the threat of the Iron Horde is that all those people we fought so hard to put down in the First and Second Wars (and that applies to some Horde races too, as the Forsaken and Blood Elves were, of course, previously the humans of Lordaeron and the High Elves) are now back, better armed, and thinking a little more clearly given that they aren't hopped up on Demon Blood (then again, Demon Blood was clearly an advantage in some ways back then, so who knows.)

We're looking forward to taking down those threats once again, but does it make sense for us to get all that attached to the people we meet in Draenor B?

Actually yes, but mainly for those people who are not alive in Azeroth A. For the Draenei in particular, Draenor B represents a chance to effectively save their people. Most of the Draenei on Draenor were exterminated by the Horde back in the day. We've been hearing about Y'rel, for instance. I would guess that Y'rel did not survive the slaughter in our timeline, given that we've never heard of her before this. Yet given how long Draenei live and how tightly packed they were for a very long time, one could imagine that many Draenei knew their Y'rel.

But for those duplicates we encounter, I imagine the pang of loss we feel should they die would be a little undercut.