This is what led to my (not fully serious) gauge for whether something is an Alliance race or a Horde race. A Horde race is one that the PC kills in droves in raids, dungeons, and neutral questing (usually along with reassurance that it’s the right thing to do or at least not a serious matter). It even holds up for blood elves and Nightborne.
I think the only exceptions are Dark Iron, tauren, and now vulpera.
Weren’t Tauren just as “native” to Kalimdor? Either way I think you’re kind of missing the point she is making, which is more a meta conversation about the way WoW (and lots of other games for that matter) frames conflicts and conflict resolutions, if that makes any sense.
My point is the progenitors of the titans creations were on said land long before the trolls ever set foot on them. Saying it is not ancenstral land of the humans just as much as trolls is idiotic.
Especially considering there would be no trolls at all if not for their ancestors.
The Aqir war happened after the trolls reawakened them with viles sacrifices.
Indeed. I mentioned Quillboar and Centaur explicitly as other races that get this treatment in game. And it’s not like the Horde doesn’t slaughter trolls either.
It’s just that the Horde does occasionally have to grapple with it every once a while, as you come into contact with friendlier trolls or have situations where a Blood Elf and Amani troll have to cooperate. Whereas for the Alliance, the only good troll is almost without exception, a dead one.
You do remember that during the Cataclysm it was Vol’jin and the Darkspear that came to warn the Alliance about the Zandalari attack and helped them clear out the Gurubashi again, right? And before then it was the Zandalari themselves who were recruiting both the Horde and the Alliance to clear out the Gurubashi and the Drakkari.
The Stonespire were destroyed because dwarves, man.
I’m going to be silly here, but only just. Because there’s a kernel of truth.
Even when settings try to upset the expectation of dwarves, the “too greedily, too deep” trope chases them.
You’ve got the classic Tolkien, Warhammer Dwarves, Azeroth Dwarves, various D&D settings… hell, even when they’re elves, they’re still Dwarves, and in a big way (looking at you, Elder Scrolls.)
Mechanically competent, industrious, organized (loveable imho) idiots. And I say that in the most endearing way possible. I mean, hell, in Elder Scrolls it arguably is taken to its logical extreme- they are SO logical, competent, and industrious that they are entirely awful and quite possibly manage to erase themselves from existence.
We tried that. Didn’t work out too well. We just wanted different things.
They wanted our blood. We wanted to keep our blood.
I actually agree with her. It would have been a cool twist if after Ghuun was defeated, with the Blood Trolls having nowhere else to go, Mathias Shaw struck a bargain to get them allied with the Alliance to keep up the pressure on the Zandalari.
Well one troll and the handful of neutral Zandalari you meet are obvious included in those aforementioned exceptions.
And it’s worth noting that neither are asking you to kill trolls for some reason as petty as “We want their land” or “They dare attack us as we continue to drive them out.”
In the instances you cite, they’re specifically targeting trolls actively trying to resummon Hakkar. Trolls who feel driven to desperation in large part because they’ve been driven to the brink after centuries of being driven out of their old lands by various forces in Azeroth. They’re turning to the very dark power that they themselves once fought against. It’s pretty tragic, really.
I don’t have any of the flavor text from when Alliance players meet Vol’jin in Cataclysm, but they do meet him in MoP, and the flavor text emphasizes his poor diction, “savage” grin, and his terrible odor.
Like I said before, the issue is largely in the framing. Not just the cold hard facts, but how they’re presented and how they’re clearly intended to make us, the player feel about Trolls.
Two problems with that. One, They’ve killed far too many of our own people to ever let them join with us. Second, The Zandalari were never our true Enemies to really bother.
At most, a Non-aggression pact. We let them keep killing Zandalari and Horde unabated and we wouldn’t aid in their destruction by continuing to fight against them.
But that would depend on the blood trolls not still being sore at us for killing their god, or even relying on them to not be psychotic killers and backstabbing us first chance.
I mean it’s Blizzard. They can just come up with a faction of Blood Trolls that are like “Okay you know what… we are in tough spot, how bout we ask those guys that gave us weapons for some more help in exchange for not killing them any more?”(Doesn’t Shaw arm them at one point? I thought that was a world quest but I forgot). It would be a better contrast to Vulpera joining the Horde than those abominations that are Mechagnomes since both races would come from Zandalar, and it would help spice up things on the Alliance by giving them a different kind of race for once.
Nah. Closest thing we got was the introductory quest that sent us to find the envoy who was sent to ATTEMPT to enlist them against the Horde…
It didn’t go well.
After that, every WQ was about us killing them.
Hmmm… I could have sworn there was some world quest in 8.1 or something people were up in arms about. Maybe it didn’t make it out of the ptr. Anyways if I remember that “attempt” correctly it was the woman who attempted it that went crazy herself and tries to kill you? Like she wants them to worship her or something.
Right except she just bought into the whole “glory of Ghuun” bit. Totally became one of the Blood Trolls after pretending to be one of them and living among them (and learning a little too much and getting too much into their religion)
Well maybe if they had sent some one else! I mean the Void Elves are fine surely some Blood Trolls could be fine.
I keep seeing the argument that troll land isn’t troll land just because elementals and old gods once owned it. This is a poor argument for a fairly simple reason.
The trolls didn’t move into an inhabited area and start killing people to take it. They evolved in their specific regions naturally and settled land that was, at the time, empty. The aqir woke up later after millennia of having been sealed away and tried to wipe out the trolls.
You can’t really blame the trolls for being born and trying to survive in the lands they were born in.
I can, however, find fault in the newly en-fleshed humans and dwarves proceeding to emerge from the earth and killing the creatures who lived there prior because they wanted more land to live in.
And as for the elementals… Trolls have shamans. They commune with elementals in the same way orcs do. The elementals don’t seem to be demanding their land back so it is kind of a moot point.
And that is without getting into the theory that trolls are descended from elementals in the same way dinosaurs and proto-drakes seem to be.
I agree. Like the elementals can’t be compared to mortal organic beings in this way. They’re the spirits of natural forces essentially which Shamans can commune with.
No, they were mindless robots at the orders of the keepers which their only mission was to keep the planets bloom in life by itself.
Trolls were the first race among those new life forms and creatures like human, dwarves and gnomes emerged wayyy after and by part of a void curse not as native life forms fromthe planet.
At this point I’m sure you will argue most of the universe belongs to those races because the pantheon shaped life in a big portion of the universe.
Literally the only reason the old gods are here is because of the existance of the pantheon made the void lords envy their power according to chronicles so yea thanks for creating the problem and convently fix it 
If you do the original arathi highland quests on the horde side, it says the Witherbark, like most forest trolls, betrayed the Horde, constantly raid hammerfall unprovoked, and some times eat the fallen orcs.
Also, the original inhabitants of all land, if were only counting organic beings, would be the Aqir and N’raqi.
This is kind of an overlooked and good point. The Titans are kind of like imperialists of the cosmos.
The Horde betrayed Zul’jin, not the other way around. Thrall doesn’t get to call forest trolls disgusting, doesn’t get to invite the mortal enemies of the Amani into the Horde, happily partake in butchering and stealing from forest trolls, and then turn around and say “Oh no they betrayed us” when some of them fight back.