One of the central ideas of the Warcraft setting, starting in WCIII, is that there are two groups of genuinely heroic forces that are nevertheless locked in opposition with one another. One has to wonder, if the Orcs had seen through Kil'jaeden's deceptions and resisted corruption by the Legion, we might have seen the mortal races all band together on Azeroth. If you think about it, a lot of the races on either side don't really have that much of a beef with the others, but faction loyalty leads to conflict. Take, for example, the fact that the Nightborne have very little reason to hate the Alliance, but by befriending the Blood Elves, they wind up getting swept into that whole Horde faction, and are thus enemies of the Alliance by default - indeed, the Blood Elves themselves were on the cusp of returning to the Alliance, but it was the actions of some Blood Elves loyal to Garrosh and then the debatably justified reaction on the part of Jaina Proudmoore that severed that potential rapprochement.
I doubt that the Highmountain Tauren and Lightforged Draenei were eager to start fighting each other - they presumably had no idea the other existed a year ago, and neither group has any real conflict when it comes to territory or ideals.
In that way, you could say that the real villains of the Warcraft universe are the factions themselves - not the people within them, mind you (though some would qualify,) but the very tribalism that the factions represent.
But that factor might also be working in Azeroth's favor when it comes to its villains.
Both the Burning Legion and the Void Lords effectively wanted to destroy the universe. But their versions of that destruction looked different. The Legion saw worlds charred to ash, perhaps the only surviving version of the universe one so flooded with fel magic that ordinary life - that which was vulnerable to void corruption - was incapable of flourishing.
There's actually a kind of interesting philosophical question to be asked regarding the Burning Legion: Had Sargeras succeeded in creating his Fel Pantheon, with Fel Azeroth working by his side, and the universe had truly been purged of anything the void could corrupt... what would that look like? What would Sargeras triumphant have looked like? If everyone was a demon, would there not be any real reason to massacre or conquer? Probably it would still happen: you'd have a totalitarian dystopia of cruelty and oppression, or perhaps Sargeras would simply wipe the board clean, leaving nothing by ash as soon as he had convinced himself that the Void was robbed of its prize.
The use of chaos to produce a singular end could be thought of as a kind of magical heat death of the universe - you burn out everything until the whole universe is just warm embers, entropy leading to its ironically inevitable conclusion.
While Sargeras required a well-regimented crusade against existence - a very Titan (order-based) way of using demons (chaos-based) - the Void Lords seem to not really have a plan so much as they're just tossing Old Gods at the wall and seeing what sticks. The goal is corruption, but as we've learned more about the nature of the Void, we can speculate a bit more on the nature of that corruption:
The Void is either total non-existence, meaning that their ultimate aim is to reduce the physical world to nothingness, or it is pure potential. We see that people who follow the Void actually see it as more of the philosophy that "Nothing is true," and therefore anything could be. In this sense, it's less non-existence, but more of a lack of illumination - anything could be hiding in the darkness.
Both come off as evil because both involve the destruction of our reality. Seems like a good metric.
But Warcraft now has an issue, which is that the Burning Legion is pretty definitively ended. That leaves the Old Gods and their Void Lord creators as the only cosmic threat in the setting.
Now, of course, one way they seem to be dealing with that power vacuum is by focusing back down to the ground level. We're seeing the more mundane warfare of Alliance and Horde coming to a head in BFA, and a lot of the zone plots involve more conventional military threats, like Lady Ashvane in Tiragarde Sound or Spoilers McSpoilerson in Zuldazar.
Still, those magical threats are generally what draw us to the fantasy genre - even Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, while they focus a great deal on the various powerful houses, has always had the White Walkers lurking in the background.
The Old Gods and their general side of things are very useful villains thanks to the fact that they come in many different flavors. The Nightmare felt very different from C'thun's Qiraji forces in Silithus. Likewise, the Void-affiliated Ethereals feel very different than the corrupted Titanforged in Storm Peaks.
But the problem is that they can't be the only threats Warcraft faces. If everything boils down to Old Gods every single time we face a supernatural threat, it'll get old really fast, even with all the different flavors.
So how do we preserve the separate evil forces in the Warcraft universe?
First off, the Legion's end does not mean that all demons are gone. One could easily see these beings of chaos, now robbed of a Titan's discipline, could splinter off into their own factions.
Second, I think that the undead present a great potential as a new magical threat. Yes, it seems that Chronicle Volume III confirms that the Scourge is truly a product of Kil'jaeden's power, but with the introduction of Helya and the hints at whatever being it was that gave Odyn the power to turn her into the first Val'kyr, we could see some big bads coming out of the Shadowlands.
Third, having something from a "good" side go evil in a logical way can be very effective. Malthael from Diablo was really interesting as a villain. The Mogu were also cool to see as Titanforged beings who took their role in safeguarding the world as a license to be total jerks. Now that it seems that Hakkar has nothing to do with G'huun, perhaps we could see more of the darker side of the Wild Gods.
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