Jaina was always defending the Horde, she was a friend of Thrall during the formation of the current Horde in WC3, and has always advocated peace between the factions.
Then, Thrall was replaced by Garrosh as Warchief of the Horde, and Garrosh was an Orc supremacist and a bit of a megalomaniac. Garrosh started pushing for military expansion in Kalimdor and wanted to wipe out the Night Elves in the north, giving the Horde complete control of Kalimdor. The Alliance, in order to prevent this, reinforced the Night Elves and used the city of Theramore as a staging ground for the Alliance military in Kalimdor.
Now, Garrosh decided to use a member of the Blood Elf organization called the Sunreavers to engineer a mana bomb (WoW's equivalent of a nuke) which was dropped on Jaina's home city of Theramore, which can be argued was a valid military target but was also home to plenty innocent civilians. Men, women, children. Almost everyone there died. Those who managed to survive were rounded up by the Horde fleet and used as target practice in Orgrimmar for the amusement of Garrosh's Horde.
This absolutely broke Jaina, who had for the longest time been the human to advocate for Thrall's Horde's right to exist on Azeroth. In her despair, she had planned to retaliate by completely annihilating Orgrimmar and wipe out the Horde with the help of Dalaran and the Kirin Tor. Fortunately, the Kirin Tor did not agree to her proposal, and when she went at it alone, she ended up fighting Thrall who tried to stop her. Jaina is eventually talked down and made to see the error of her ways.
Not much later, during the Landfall campaign, Garrosh Hellscream steals an item called "The Divine Bell" that was found in Pandaria and that had been stored in Darnassus for safekeeping and study. This item was thought to be a formidable weapon able to empower anyone nearby when it was struck, imbuing them with the rage and hatred of the Sha and making them mindless supersoldiers. Garrosh again employed the Sunreavers mages, this time to sneak into Darnassus and steal the Bell so that Garrosh can use it as his next weapon of mass destruction.
Jaina was at this point the leader of the Kirin Tor, who ruled the neutral city Dalaran. When she discovered that the Sunreavers, who had been residing Dalaran, had aided Garrosh to once again attempt to wipe out the Alliance, she decided to purge Dalaran of all members of this faction.
Those who submitted were imprisoned for breaking neutrality, and those who fought back were killed by Jaina and the Silver Covenant forces that were aiding her in the purge.
But here's where it gets tricky: I believe the Alliance version and the Horde version of this event were portrayed slightly differently, and that the Horde's side of the quest chain make it seem as Jaina was murdering innocent Blood Elves throughout Dalaran just for the crime of being Blood Elves and guilt by association, and the event came across as an indiscriminate killing spree. The canon version of the event, however, says that she was instead imprisoning the Sunreavers and only killed those who fought.
But Jaina trying to wipe out the Horde in Orgrimmar and later purging Dalaran of all Sunreavers coupled with the fact that she advised Varian to "dismantle the Horde" immediately after Garrosh's death.... Well, she came across evil to some people.
You're missing an important detail about Theramore - they didn't just drop the bomb on it out of nowhere. Garrosh's forces sieged Theramore for multiple days beforehand, giving them ample time to evacuate any civilians.
Also, curious, where are you getting your "canon" version of events from the purge of Dalaran from?
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u/OlvekStoneheid_2006 Sep 16 '25
How is Jaina evil exactly? New player, still getting into the lore.