Warcraft/YMMV

Here are the subjectives found in Warcraft series.

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Plenty of them among the Lore Fans.
• Base Breaker: Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream are the two most prominent cases, in both cases basically for being racist war-promoting bastards of questionable leadership skills taking over from level-headed, peace-seeking, experienced rulers Jaina Proudmoore and Thrall.
• Canon Sue: There's a very simple, one-question test to determine whether a character is a Canon Sue: "was this character created or popularized by Richard Knaak?" You'll only ever be wrong for the few characters that reached Canon Sue status without Knaak's help.
  • Fortunately, their Sueness doesn't really transfer into other media. Several of them were added into World of Warcraft but play fairly minor roles, even though Rhonin is technically a key person as the leader of the Kirin Tor. But even in the Ulduar trailer, his role is fairly passive compared to Jaina and the others.
  • Goes so far that Knaak often gets blamed for characters he didn't create (such as Med'an).
• Cliché Storm: Every line that doesn't contain a proper noun, you've heard in some other fantasy work. This is particularly noticeable in Reign of Chaos.
• Complete Monster: Gul'dan. Almost every other major villain(Except for the demons) have some sort of backstory that explains their actions, though not justify them. Gul'dan dooms his entire race for the sake of personal ambition. Then, there's the experiments he did with Garona...
• Crowning Music of Awesome: The 4 related faction's themes.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Remember when Arthas said "What trickery is this!? Mal'Ganis! I don't know how you survived..." and later, after encountering Muradin's dwarves, "Doesn't anyone stay dead anymore?" It's funnier to think about it after some characters are Back From the Dead in World of Warcraft :Muradin and Mal'Ganis themselves, Kael'Thas...
  • That particular example also counts as Hypocritical Humor, since Arthas is the one who got them all killed (or tried to) in the first place.
• Magnificent Bastard: Ner'zhul - just ask Archimonde and Tychondrius.
• Moral Event Horizon: Arthas massacres Stratholme so the city does not fall to the Undead.
  • That can be justified, depending on whether you think the villagers could have been saved from the plague or not (there was never a cure mentioned, meaning that it definitely would have fallen to Mal'ganis). For other players, the true act that made him despicable was hiring mercenaries to help him burn the ships, then telling the men that the "foul beasts" had done it all.
    • Also, it's not the massacre, it's the way he announces it. He refuses to consider anything else than slaughtering the entire city.
  • A questline in World of Warcraft reveals that even some of the mightiest beings in the setting can't cure the plague, not even on one single person, and Arthas didn't even know about those.
    • It's even noted in the Death Knight unit entry for Warcraft III that Death Knights are actually created primarily from Paladins who went mad because, whilst their Light-granted powers shielded them from contracting the plague, those powers were useless to cure the plague. One of the D20 RPG books actually mentions cases of living-but-infected victims spontaneously bursting into flames when a healing spell was cast on them.
  • It's sad, certainly, but what else could be done? Let the Scourge have the city, and thousands of new servants? Realistically, the entire human campaign in Warcraft 3 is one long, ever worsening Moral Event Horizon. The culmination being when he takes up Frostmourne.
  • Ner'Zhul and Mal'Ganis gave Arthas a no-win situation; that was their whole plan from the start. However, given many options ranging from bad to horrible, Arthas chose the worst one imaginable. He could have tried again to cure the plague; we never see any attempt at all. He could have tried to quarantine the infected from the uninfected; he doesn't consider it. He could have given the infected a chance to die with dignity; instead he kills them himself before they zombify. He could have asked his mentor Uther for guidance or even ceded authority to him; that would be a cowardly approach, in a way, but for all Arthas knew at the time Uther actually could have done something he couldn't. But instead, within five minutes of learning that that part of a city was exposed to The Virus - only the second time he's ever seen the affects of this disease - he orders the entire city massacred. That's called Jumping Off the Slippery Slope.
    • Was it only part of the city? Arthas knows that at least some of the city is infected, but from the evidence, the entire city could be infected. Furthermore, Arthas has no way of knowing who is and is not going to die and turn into a flesh-eating zombie until they actually do.
    • And if you do consider the culling justified, his virtual firing of Uther (and the Knights of Silver Hand) for having reservations against killing the people they swore to protect was clearly not a good sign.
      • This. Even if one makes the leap of logic that Arthas may have seen some of the soldiers he was fighting alongside in the prior mission succumb to the plague, and thusly learned first-hand that Paladin magic can't cure the plague, going berserk over the fact that a bunch of Lawful Good Paladins are refusing to just slaughter people out of hand is pretty clear proof he's losing his mind.
      • And there's the fact that Medivh had warned Arthas earlier that the harder he tried to stop the undead would only deliver his people to them. After telling Jaina that those who were killed in Stratholme will only remain still for just a moment, it turns out that Medivh was right; Massacring the people of Stratholme did nothing and was all in vain. If anything, Arthas actually made it easier for his enemies to bring them back as Undead, all while being a dick to his own allies.
  • Ner'Zhul himself crossed it after Warcraft 2, when he abandons the Horde to save himself, opening countless portals across Draenor in an attempt to escape to new worlds, which ends up tearing the Orc homeworld apart (and unintentionally sending him straight into Kil'Jaeden and a Fate Worse Than Death).
• More Popular Spinoff: World of Warcraft.
  • To the point where Blizzard once released "WOW: Heroes of Azeroth" as a prequel to World of Warcraft, on April Fool's Day. The game in question was better known as Warcraft III.
  • They also changed the novels accordingly by giving them the World of Warcraft icon even if the stories take place during the RTS games.
• Some Dexterity Required: The first Warcraft game required much more clicks to move a single unit than most of the modern RTS games.
• Sturgeon's Law: The enclosed "World Editor" allows a creative player to create their own scenarios and maps for the game with a great deal of customization options. Unfortunately, many of them suck.
  • However, some of them are very well done. See: Defense of the Ancients and The To the Bitter End.