In defense of Danath Trollbane

Many times, when I see Danath Trollbane brought up in lore or story discussions, it’s-… Usually not a particularly favorable light. Accusations of racism and being unfair to orcs (and trolls, obviously) are pretty common, and let me just say-

I get it. I do. Danath does not like orcs. That’s pretty much indisputable. He is pretty belligerent towards Eitrigg and Rokhan during the Arathi warfront.

…But I also think we need to give the guy a break. Here’s a short version of the guy’s last 30(ish) years, from his perspective;

  • Led the liberation of Khaz Modan, witnessing first-hand what the Horde did to the Bronzebeard dwarves and their lands.

  • Was the original pick to direct the orcish internment camps, tasked with containing and imprisoning the surviving orcs, who had just been stopped from swarming over the entire continent in a murderous campaign.

  • Went to Draenor, the Orc’s homeland. One of the first things he sees is the path of glory- A road quite literally paved with the bones of the Orc’s victims.

  • Survived the Ner’zhul destroying the orc’s own planet, and making the choice to stay on the shattered world, because the only path home was closed to save it from destruction as well. (Also he 1v1s and kills Kilrogg Deadeye)

  • Spent twenty years trapped, defending Honor Hold, on a destroyed planet, fighting off Orcs at their absolute most corrupted. He misses the entirety of the orcish redemption story on Azeroth, and instead deals with attacks from red-skinned orcs.

  • BC, Finally receives aid from his Azeroth, only to learn that his homeland has fallen into ruin. Vows to return home and restore it to greatness. Also other Orcs show up? An apparently redeemed Horde, fighting the Burning Legion alongside the Alliance.

  • The next time we see him is in Legion, where he is heading to the Broken Shore to survey the battlefield after the first, disastrous attack, where the belief among the Alliance is the Horde betrayed and abandoned them. He gets shot out of the sky but survives.

  • Finally, in BFA, he is back home, trying to rebuild his kingdom, after the Horde destroyed the home of Alliance elves on a far-off continent, and total war has broken out. It seems that once again the Horde wants to wipe the Alliance and its people out.

  • The Horde arrives in his homeland, telling him his claim to this, birthplace of human civilization and his family’s ancestral homeland, has expired/is illegitimate/is superceded by trolls (even though the trolls who live in Arathi aren’t even in the Horde I sincerely have no idea what Rokhan was talking about but that’s another issue).

Just… Put yourself in his shoes for a minute. The guy has every right to think “Oh, to hell with this Horde.”

He missed pretty much all of the Azerothian Horde’s heroic moments, their redemption, and instead spent that time fighting the Fel Horde. And then when he does encounter the Horde, they’re attacking the home he sacrificed so much to protect, and fought so hard to return to.

Again, if you think he’s racist, that’s probably fair. Like 80% of Azeroth is lol. But I don’t think he’s as bad as a lot of people make him out to be, and I hope Blizz eventually gives him a chance to show how much he really does deserve that statue in Stormwind.

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Danath Trollbane and similar characters suffer dramatically from the imposition of actual morality into a setting that didn’t originally have it, that wildly fluctuates between realistic depiction of war and convenient theme park versions, and is written by a variety of time crunched writers with different biases and interpretations. Leaning on the instances of the lore that paint him sympathetically basically damns an entire faction.

I kinda think we just need to quietly forget about everything related to the faction wars and simply take the characters from those times as presented rather than analyze them if we’re going to find things enjoyable at all.

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I think most people agree with that. But here’s the problem. Try to see this, if Danath was horde, blizzard would have made him a villain by now because he’s racist. But because he’s alliance, he’s just a victim in a tragic story.

Nowadays, if a horde character had a similar background as Danath, he’d be evil. Look at Garrosh. In BC, he had no racist tendency. In Wotlk it was against the alliance. Then for no reason that evolved into orc supremacy. Garrosh was Villain batted because he hated the alliance, then was shoehorned as an orc supremacist so that Horde characters had a reason to hate him. The whole rebellion started because he was racist against voljin and the trolls for… no reason. Literally out of nowhere.

But if alliance are racist, they are justified and have good reason to be. If they are wrong in their racism, they get a revelation, a glow up, then become outstanding individuals. Look at Greymane or Alleria.

The problem isn’t Danath. It’s the fact that racism gets forced onto horde characters to make them villains and killed… but alliance characters are just misguided and thrive afterwards. This makes it so the alliance has all their living members (Turalyon, Alleria, Rogers, greymane, Danath, etc) who are developed and getting screen time, while the horde cast is low and getting lower

What would be a death sentence for horde characters is character growth for alliance characters. I suspect that’s where the arguments stem from, concerning Danath.

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But here’s the thing.

Garrosh hating the Alliance never really made sense. He was ashamed of his father and the Horde until Thrall explained things. He never even MET a human until he was an adult. He personally experienced no hardship from the Alliance, basically ever.

And as to your main point, the idea of writing characters “To be even” is a demonstrably bad idea. Look at Nazgrim and Admiral Taylor. Nazgrim was killed in SoO. Then, in WoD, to “Keep it even”, Taylor was offed in a WoD questline. Fast forward to today, and Nazgrim is an active, enduring character in the Ebon Blade, while Taylor wastes away as a ghost in our garrisons.

Each character needs to be taken at their own merit. I’m sorry if you feel that Horde characters have been given the short end of the stick, but it’s a bad idea to let those feelings influence your opinions of a character in a vacuum.

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What? In my many years here, I think I’ve seen him talked poorly of once, in relation to the Warfront.

I always forget the phrase. It is something like, don’t condemn but don’t condone. But basically, we can accept someone is the product of their environment while also accepting that doesn’t mean we should accept that makes their actions ok. So we can understand some people were fine or supported slavery in history. But also, that doesn’t mean we can’t accept we know slavery was and is wrong.

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Oh I don’t mean only here, I mean reddit, twitter, lots of places where people chat about WoW

If he continues to be aggressive towards those races once he’s gotten the full story, and rebuilt his home, then we can talk about comparing him to slave owners. Otherwise… I think we’d do well to avoid that comparison.

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I don’t know why you’d need to make an excuse. Danath “green of skin, full of sin” Trollbane is hilarious. Even Eitrigg got a kick out of him.

To be fair, Danath spent twenty years fighting red-skinned orcs, so to him it’s not a slur- it’s a legitimate distinction!

/rimshot

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Fair. Instead you can use Danath “if the blood is black better watch your back” Trollbane.

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Why? Your entire defense was claiming we should cut him some slack because of the circumstances.

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Because he’s been overall doing the right things- fighting for his home, defending himself, etc. He’s just been belligerent while doing it.

Slavery was/is never the right thing to do. In ANY situation.

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But we’re talking about his belligerence specifically. We’re not analyzing good things he’s done. Which you seem to think is ok given the circumstances. That’s what is being compared, not his fighting for his home and defending himself.

Yes, and there’s an enormous gap between being belligerent to your aggressor enemies in the middle of a war, and engaging in a slave trade. To the point where I don’t feel it’s a good or fair comparison.

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Well I used it because it was very easy to understand. The concept is the same. I’m not saying what Danath is doing is as bad as slavery, of course not. Merely that we can understand his circumstances (like how some people were raised in some societies that gave them their moral outlook) without saying such things are good just because of that.

If it makes you uncomfortable, we can look at any sort of historical racism. We can understand why someone might be racist being raised in a racist society. But also understand that doesn’t make their individual actions ok in retrospect.

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For sure, that’s what I was saying. I just think it’s too extreme an example.

Moreover, though, I think it’s also just more common in Warcraft. As Taran-zhu said these Alliance-Horde wars often boil down to little more than race wars. I’d say most characters in canon are, to some degree, racist. I understand it rankles some people, and I’m sensitive to it. I thought it might just help to better contextualize Danath’s words and attitude.

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Not sure what you mean by this, since the original version of the setting had the orcs as literal demons from h3ll. Could you expand?

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And what he learned put him on that path. These were the same community of people that his father, Grom, had been fighting for, and, no matter Gul’dan and the Shadow Council’s manipulations to spur this violence, nothing was ever going to make it right and freedom now could only be purchased by distance and violence. If there could be no quarter taken, then it certainly creates the foundation for future generations to hate their opposition. What Garrosh learned could certainly make him a warhawk that wasn’t batguano insane, especially when his background is from a culture that has a norm of standing up to strife.

It did make sense, but that sort of aggression has a reckoning in the Horde story where they inevitably are consumed by hatred and start seeing red everywhere, even among allies. Which makes me scratch my head in confusion when I see these same traits in characters on the opposite spectrum of the story portray similar features and don’t have a reckoning for it.

Heck, the only time a character’s negative traits caused any consequences in the Alliance’s narrative is when Tyrande burned the bridge with the Nightborne, which just happened to make them want to favor the Horde, due to their more agreeable outstretched hand, and even then nothing came of it except for an introduction of a character that has no presence in the story, only a romance subplot for Lor’themar.

I’m not asking for parity. I’m asking for consistency. If the message is “hatred is an all-consuming maelstrom”, stick with it. Not “sometimes it’s okay but most times its not”.

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But isn’t that a key tenet of the Horde’s identity? Reckoning with their savage past and roots? It made sense for those stories to come from the Horde side.

Not all characters are the same, though. Not all stories have the same ending. I guarantee if they pursued a storyline like that for an Alliance character, it would be met with eye rolls and “Blue Horde” comments, the same way characters like Baine are called “Red Alliance”, now.

And, I hate to be like this, but- The Alliance overall does lean closer to good alignment than the Horde does. They always have. They don’t have a monopoly on it, of course, and the Alliance has plenty of blood on its hands, but…

Yeah, we’re gonna have to agree to disagree.

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And yet we have Rommath who is as racist as they come managing to survive like a rat. Face it, not ever Horde who has a racist blood in them have been killed off just as much as not every Alliance one has. I’d also point out we have Twinbraid, a person who had a justifiable reason to hate the Horde end up dead. https://wow.gamepedia.com/Twinbraid

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Not in the way of friendly fire.

But they are the same product of the same writing team. They decide where the pin falls on “fierce opposition of their rivals across the sea and some entrenchments on the the homefront” and “literal supremacists”. This isn’t an organic human being with nuanced feelings in a chaotic world with uncertain consequences as a result of their actions of we’re talking about, this is a story that is crafted (albeit very hamhandedly) to tell a message, where everything serves a purpose to say something. The canned “I didn’t write it, the character did!” response is sort of quirky and weird in a controlled environment where they can dictate the outcome. Again, it is their story that they use to broadcast very specific messages.

So, if the message they’re broadcasting is “hatred is self-defeating in the end”, then, stick with it.

I did want to talk about this, though, because it’s very particular and relevant to the conversation.

Baine is called “Red Alliance” because of how he’s written in the story. He is an apologist that doesn’t really stand or fight for anything, and, more egregiously, nothing comes as a consequence for the way he acts. Nobody has challenged him for his position as Chieftain, or attempted to exclude him from much of anything, nor has his decision making put him in a position where his inaction has lead to further peril by giving the Horde’s opposition an inch, that they instead take for a mile. He is, for all intents and purposes, a patsy.

This isn’t to say sound, diplomatic minds can’t exist in the Horde. Thrall is very much open to using his words, as he does throughout the story, but he’s shown that, without hesitation, he will fight and lead when it’s demanded of him. Baine hasn’t done much of anything. Which, again, loops back to; “character flaws don’t deliver consequences, especially if it’s in a storyline favorable to the Alliance.”.

“Red Alliance” is a criticism of that. That and the stripping of central themes to the Horde, by taking core themes from the Alliance story and applying it to them. And, in a weird twist of events, the inverse is happening to the Alliance, where they have one central authority, rather than a council of allies.

I strongly do not buy the the good Alliance vs evil Horde idea, though. It rebels against the defining feature of humanity, in both fantasy and reality, that being; we are capable of great things, and the most horrible evils that no other living organism could ever hope to achieve. Treachery and extreme cruelty is exclusive to us. It would be earth-shatteringly absurd to absolve humanity of this theme in a fantasy story and on the same stage say that the other actors exhibit it, especially when we can see that it is apart of the human story in Warcraft, such as where the kingdoms of Stromgarde and Alterac went to war more than once for political reasons.

I think, genuinely, the point of the story is to define good and evil not by origin, but by virtues and flaws that are consistent in mortal lives.

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