spectrenihlus said:
I agree that the two factions should be working together but the alliance has very legitimate reasons for going to war with the horde. On another point the Forsaken should be working on a cure for their undeath instead of further developing a plague that is irrelevant now that the Lich King is dead.
In the words of vampire Sam Niell, what's to cure?
Above and beyond the fact it seems to be practically impossible (if I remember right there is one, and only one, sentient undead guy in the lore who has ever been restored to life) the Forsaken have also developed their own culture which generally doesn't see their undead state as an impediment. Many Forsaken seem to pretty much regard living humans (and to a lesser extent other living creatures) as little more than vermin, or at least outright inferior. I think other races in the Horde do sometimes think about trying to cure the Forsaken out of compassion, but the Forsaken themselves don't really care. They are what they are, and those who can't accept it kill themselves or revert to mindlessness.
Secondly, the Forsaken are in open war on several fronts. Their cataclysm story sees them fighting what is essentially a total war, in which both sides use magic to 'recruit' the human population of Lordaeron to their side (either by infecting them with the worgen curse, or raising them from the dead as new Forsaken). The Forsaken leadership see themselves (with good reason) as the heirs to the Lordaeron Empire. In their mind, the living creatures who live in Lordaeron are usurpers who refuse to recognize their ancestral rights out of sheer prejudice against the undead, and for the most part they're right. The alliance (culturally monolothic and devoted to a single religion which abhors the undead) would never have accepted a kingdom of zombies as equals. The horde (culturally diverse with a wide range of religious beliefs and interpretations) did.
Finally, the plague. The Forsaken use poisons and diseases as weapons because, being dead, they're immune to most of them. They don't have limitless numbers as they are dependent on either liberating mindless undead from the scourge or using the Val'kyr. Forsaken warfare hinges on bioweapons, which is why they are constantly trying to produce new ones.
A combination of the three factors above means that curing death is not very high on the agenda. Maybe not admirable, but understandable. The forsaken are not idealists, their experiences have largely beaten the idealism out of them as a race. They still have the mentality they earned fighting an unwinnable war for their survival against overwhelming odds, this doesn't leave much time for high idealism and moral reflection.
The Forsaken are not really Horde. Ultimately they are their own faction and many of them don't really care about the living all that much. Heck, there's a cutscene I recently encountered in which Drek'Thar spends several minutes slagging off the Forsaken as inhuman monsters (I'm right here, you know!) I think judging the horde as a whole by the actions of the Forsaken is a bit wrong. If the Horde can be accused of anything, it's not reigning the Forsaken in enough, and it doesn't seem to be for want of trying.
The Forsaken are still my favourite race in World of Warcraft though. I'm a sucker for antiheroes, and essentially they are fighting for the survival. If they hadn't joined the horde and the Alliance races had taken Lordaeron, do you think they would have been shown any mercy? If Gilneas had won the war, would they have taken prisoners? The alliance, fundamentally, don't see the Forsaken as people. The 'crime' of the Forsaken is to return the favour.
