A Non-Evil Antagonist

When you watch this trailer, how do you react? Because with the exception of the very last line "But we will be conquerors," everything that Grommash does in this trailer is actually really awesome and laudable. He declines the demon blood offered to him by Gul'dan and he freaking kills Mannoroth in a manner that took the Pit Lord completely by surprise. This Grommash is just as heroic, if not more, than the one who died at the end of the Orc campaign in Warcraft III. This is one who never fell to corruption, who always stood strong against the Burning Legion.

The thing about the Iron Horde is that, in a way, they're just plain better than the Old Horde. Their industry probably doesn't run by EPA standards, but it's a hell of a lot less harmful than Fel magic. No matter what the Iron Horde does, it seems really unlikely that anything like Outland is going to be the result.

I mean, that trailer shows you exactly what you'd hope your people would do if a bunch of demons tried to corrupt them - not just defy the demons, but utterly defeat them as well.

The Iron Horde is not intrinsically evil the way that the Old Horde was. But are they good?

No. That's clear.

But they're only evil in the way that, to be frank, the vast majority of human history has been. Think about this: it's only in very recent years that the notion of international cooperation on a global scale has been even thinkable. The Orcs are a decidedly pre-Enlightenment society. Arguably, they're an Iron Age civilization, except that they've just been given a whole bunch of modern technology (well, I don't know exactly what stage of technological development an Iron Star is from, but I'd approximate Industrial Revolution-era.) If you handed a bunch of machine guns and tanks to a bunch of pre-Roman Celts, it wouldn't exactly be pretty, and it would hardly be surprising that they'd probably go on a rampage of conquest, with little thought to the consequences.

Is it evil? Certainly by today's values. And I'm not even saying that we shouldn't be applying those values. But the Iron Horde, unlike the Old Gods or the Burning Legion, wants conquest, rather than destruction.

How does this differ from Garrosh's "True Horde?" Well, the distinction is subtle. Indeed, one could argue that the "True Horde" were more of this mundane kind of "evil of the past." The only reason why I don't think this quite holds up is that Garrosh should have known better. The modern Horde is not modern in the real-world sense, but the culture of the Horde has progressed to the point where endless war and conquest is no longer sustainable or even desirable. Many of the Horde races are just looking to keep their own territories safe, and engage with the world in a position of strength. The civil war that took place in Mists of Pandaria was about establishing the character of the Horde. Garrosh felt it was a machine built for conquest, and Vol'jin felt it was a stable coalition of nations, united to protect each other and benefit mutually from their alliance.

On Draenor, the Iron Horde has never learned to exist in a stable global environment. Everything in Draenor is trying to kill you, and thus there's no incentive for peace. They are dangerous because they have an old-fashioned mindset, and Garrosh, being a real reactionary, went back in time specifically because he knew that those Orcs of Draenor would share his old-fashioned way of looking at things, and thus he'd have a Horde that would act the way that he felt it should.

What thus intrigues me about the Iron Horde is that, without demon blood crowding out any rational thoughts, I wonder what will happen as we begin to score victories against them. Obviously, the mechanics of the game do place some limits on the storytelling, but one almost wants to capture an Iron Horde orc, show them the kind of society that the modern Horde has become, and see if perhaps they'd far prefer that to the society that the Iron Horde is.

By taking demon blood out of the equation, the Iron Horde is no longer a group of supernatural monsters, but is instead a misguided population irresponsibly armed with dangerous weapons.

I suspect that for the most part, we'll deal with the Iron Horde as we have with any of the supernatural threats we did in the past. But this time, we're not fighting demons (well... maybe some demons, but not in the Iron Horde,) zombies, lovecraftian monsters, or evil spirits. These are people. And not just people, but, for at least the Orcs in the Horde, people who actually turned away from the evil that they or their parents' generation did not.