My favorite Horde race and possibly my favorite race in the whole game (despite being more and more committed to the Alliance over the years) is the Undead. My mom used to be head of our local "Area Council," which organized events in our neighborhood, such as Village Day at the beginning of the summer (right around my birthday, usually) when local restaurants and merchants would set up booths in the street and everyone would come out to enjoy the festivities. She also ran the annual Halloween party in the gym of an elementary school that closed in the '80s and had become our local community center.
Anyway, I have loved Halloween since I was a little kid, and who is more Halloween-y than the Undead? (The Worgen might have them tied.)
When WoW started, the Undead were sort of the odd men out in the Horde. While Orcs, Trolls, and Tauren were all tied together by a shamanistic culture (one that, at least in those days, Thrall was trying to emphasize over the more brutal warrior culture that had previously defined the Horde - it didn't seem to last,) the Undead were explicitly there as an alliance of convenience - indeed, Western Horde characters got a slight boost to reputation with their fellow Kalimdor-based home cities, but started out Neutral with Undercity, and vice versa.
As an undead player, the story you got was one of being caught between a rock and a hard place - on one side, you had the Scourge - every worst thing you could imagine about a ravenous undead blight, its footsoldiers (whom you were doomed to join if you fell to them) were mindless zombies, but the leadership was cunning and cruel. As one of the free-willed Undead now called Forsaken, you had managed to escape that zombie-like fate by pure dumb luck, but your home was in ruins and under constant siege by this menace.
Meanwhile, on the other hand, you had the Scarlet Crusade, a fundamentalist sect of zealots who were dedicated to eradicating all undead - whether they be mindless Scourge or people like you, namely an ordinary person who just happened to have a horrific affliction.
Now, I don't mean to make the Forsaken of the pre-Cataclysm world out to be totally good guys - they were already testing their plague on living prisoners and fighting to wipe out human towns in order to expand their territory.
Why, though? Why did these former humans turn on their own kind?
We're told in Chronicle that in the early days of the Forsaken, they sent emissaries south to other human lands like Stormwind to try to secure their place back in the Alliance. After all, most Forsaken were former citizens of Lordaeron. If they could get recognized by the Alliance as such, they'd have formidable allies in the fight against the Scourge, many of whom were old friends and even family.
But those emissaries never made it.
Now, we're never told what happened to them. Chronicle leaves that vague. But it's clear that the Forsaken concluded that the emissaries were killed because they looked like Scourge, and the Forsaken then oriented their behavior in a purely antagonistic direction toward humanity.
If there's one uniting ethos to the Forsaken, it's the idea that the Alliance will never accept them for who they are, and that has given them the justification to commit acts of horrific barbarism. While I think most members of the Horde would settle for the Alliance submitting to them, the eventual Forsaken gameplan is to kill all humans and raise them as undead. They believe the only way to see eye-to-eye with humanity is for all of them to be undead.
And to be clear: there are certainly exceptions, and I imagine you might think your Undead character has a different attitude. My Rogue certainly does, thinking that it would be a lot easier if he could work for both sides, doubling his potential customers. But Sylvanas has certainly taken this attitude when it comes to humanity, and many Forsaken follow her without question.
But the thing about this attitude is that it's demonstrably wrong.
Not only have we had figures like Alonsus Faol or Leonid Bartholomew who have been not only welcomed back among humans but actually given important positions in Light-based organizations, but we also saw that average Alliance citizens were willing to reach out to and embrace their undead family members at the peace summit in Arathi Highlands in Before the Storm.
Many of these Forsaken decided to try to return home with their living family, making their way to Stromgarde. It wasn't the Alliance that stepped in and stopped them - it was Sylvanas who ordered them shot.
See, here's the problem: Sylvanas' entire claim to authority over the former citizens of Lordaeron is based on the idea that she shares more with them than the living do. She might be a foreigner form Quel'thalas, but she has gone through the same curse of undeath and rebirth of free will that the rest of the Forsaken have experienced.
The Desolate Council never intentionally threatened her authority, but the implication of what they demonstrated - that the Forsaken and living humans could, in fact, get along - undercut the entire narrative that she built her empire on.
For those loyal to Sylvanas and her vision of the Forsaken gradually replacing humanity, the possibility of peace with the living could undo that entire ethos. The very identity of the Forsaken would be called into question, and their status as members of the Horde and certainly as loyal subjects to the Banshee Queen could easily dissolve in a matter of days.
So it behooves Sylvanas to maintain the narrative at all costs. Dissenters have to be silenced and any prospect of peace needs to be sabotaged. As she sees it, this is the only way to maintain her position and save herself and her people from the oblivion she fears.
It all requires the strict adherence to a vicious lie.
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