Warcraft III - Arthas Did Nothing Wrong?
Channel: DesignerDave
Date: 2022-03-05

Addendum explanation of further story setup and payoffs here:
Metzen indicated that The Culling was the first step into evil on the journey to becoming a Death Knight and everything in the story to this point indicates why Arthas crosses a "terrible threshold" here.

Arthas' decisions were impetuous, short-sighted, and extremely dangerous. Based on previous missions, those are his traits that always get him into trouble and it plays out here too. Without Uther and his Paladins, the likely outcome of a major undead conflict was for Arthas to be overrun and turned into undead right there... thus bolstering the undead forces (ala the Hillsbrad mission where he just barely holds on). The only reason that wasn't the case was because the Undead's mission in Stratholme was to corrupt Arthas, not take the city. So the most likely outcome based on Arthas' past experiences would be for his army to be slain and thus there would have been no burning of bodies.

As to alternatives, if you can't think of any possibilities in a high fantasy setting, you probably don't understand high fantasy. But the point here was that they needed time to think. Instead of stepping back and giving it a moment's thought, Arthas lashes out and accuses Uther of treason, which is his fatal character flaw. Reacting instead of thinking things through. 

Either way, you can see that not everyone in Stratholme was plagued in the interlude afterwards. Those are non-plagued people from Stratholme burning the bodies. 

In the original version of The Culling, the villagers also did not turn into zombies unless Malganis did it. Thus making it more ambiguous if you were killing plagued villagers or unplagued villagers... in effect showing that Arthas was killing indiscriminately. There were also sounds for villagers pleading for their lives and weeping as Arthas invaded their homes. All of that was nerfed because it was deemed "too harsh" and people wanted a way to not be evil...

Thus the zombie timers were put in, and you can wait until they turn to kill them. Thus, people who only killed zombified citizens can truthfully say that "their" Arthas did not quite turn to evil just yet in their storyline. 

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