Budd is actually a different and arguably worse form of removing the pathos from your enemy. He turns the situation comedic.
This is the sort of thing goblins and gnomes get a lot too. A lot of misery and pain their characters go through gets made into a joke which in turn inhibits any sort of pathos from forming. It is a bit of a double edged sword in their case because goblins and gnomes are supposed to be funny, but it does rob them of a chance to really feel the tragedy of their race and therefore a chance to empathize with their chosen characters.
With trolls is just adds onto the whole “dumb, barbaric, almost an animal” baggage they already have to deal with. The execution of an Old Horde hero and the fall of a once great civilization gets reduced to redneck jokes about stealing his stuff. It removes the dignity a villain could have.
They aren’t in the same boat as the Witherbark. Neither are in a situation where players are asked to go in and remove them from lands they’re inhabiting and have been inhabiting for a long time. And the driving out of the Darkspear by the other Jungle troll tribes because they weren’t as savage and powerful as other trolls is generally played for sympathy.
The fact that their abusers were other “bad” races like other trolls, naga, and murlocs and not “good” ones like the elves or dwarves probably helped.
The Zandalari have been vilified though. Not just in Pandaria, but also whenever they went to the aid of the trolls who are in that situation. Like in the troll wars.
I’m pretty sure that if Blizzard did a quest that let players take on the role of a Witherbark troll, as they go into an Alliance/Horde camp and kill as many people as possible, then it would absolutely be played up in text and narrative as a bad thing, and indicative of just how terrible the Witherbark are.
Blizzard has asked us to play bad guys before, and has lampshaded that the acts being perpetrated are being judged as bad. Maybe not by the player character- but in the context of the game’s narrative and other characters and not be presenting them as the selfless hero.
Yeah, Zul’jin made the argument that the Amani have been beat down for thousands of years and betrayed by their allies left and right, but rather than sympathize with him, the game still chose to make him the bad guy and us the heroes for going into Zul’Aman.
Also the primary antagonist of the Zandalari when they are finally made playable is actually not even the Alliance, despite being raided by them. The story arc of 8.0 has you fighting other trolls, such as blood trolls and followers of Zul. Then the raid happens, and the Alliance aren’t even painted as being overwhelmingly bad. When you see it from both sides, since we actually get that option for playable factions, the Alliance is shown to just be doing a little justified preemptive strike with some unfortunate collateral damage in the form of shop keeps, and that silly primitive king who didn’t know when to surrender.
Burning Crusade was full of really bad writing (and we do love to throw that term around nowadays), but what they put in for Zul’Aman’s playable “story” was astoundingly some of the worst of it.
No, the Darkspear were the opposite, where the Kul’Tirans driving them from their islands was portrayed as so sympathetic to the Horde and the player through the Horde that they aided the Darkspear and wanted to save them from the brutal Humans that were wronging them.
Sylvanas even cites this as one of the reasons the Horde should premptively attack the Alliance in A Good War.
And before they went to aid the Trolls, the Zandalari were the ones there asking the Alliance and Horde for help in putting them down, both in Stranglethorn and Zul’Drak, and the Zandalari were presented as heroic for it in both cases.
I completely disagree. The Witherbark would more than likely be getting gold/Azerite/Commendation Medals the same as the Horde and the Alliance did.
As bad as the original Zul’Aman was, it never actually called us heroes for it. We were mercenaries for a bumbling profiteer.