What happened to Thrall wanting to be called his birth name? I know some of the playerbase didn’t like it but screw them! Thrall going by the name his mother gave him and not the name of his slavemaster is relatable, believable, and fully justified. Why would anyone want to go by the name of their slavemaster? Him letting it go is part of his character development. I wished blizzard story department stuck to their decisions as desperately as blizzard gameplay department.
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This is most likely the reason (even though we learnt his true name in TBC, but most people first saw it in Cata). I believe the only character who still calls him Go’el is Aggra.
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he shouldnt be called go’el either. but you know he is.
You can’t really rename iconic characters. It’s just bad for branding.
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I hear what you’re saying OP and it makes sense, but I think people still calling him Thrall kinda makes sense. He rose to fame and lead the Horde under that name. So it’s natural that most people in Azeroth would still call him that.
It would make sense for his close friends and family to switch to Go’el, but speaking as someone who has a family member that changed their name as an adult, it was hard to break the habit of calling them by their original name.
Not that I think that Blizzard has thought too hard about any of that. I assume it really is just as simple as the community/players continuing to call him Thrall.
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I get why other people may still refer to him as thrall, I’m talking about Thrall himself no longer emphasizing his name is thrall. Like in tides of war, Jania called him thrall and Thrall corrected her. Nowadays Thrall just accept friends and family to call him thrall.
Ahhhh, gotchya. I misunderstood.
That is pretty weird considering how he got the name and what it means.
I’d chalk it up as either an oversight, or Blizzard not caring enough to pay attention to it. But that’s just a guess. 
I 100% believe if they hadn’t given him a Superman parallel name nobody would have complained and we would have been calling him anything but Thrall today. It was all Metzen’s ridiculous obsession that ruined that.
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Oh wow… I’m not a big superman fan but now that you mention it I see the similarities. Wow Blizz, couldn’t even be original with naming your own character.
okay /thread
I’m just now realizing this 
Take a celebrity, they become famous under a stage name. That is the name they’re known by, but they branch out. It takes years, and years before their regular name is nearly as recognizable as their stage name, if ever.
Also as far as marketing goes, he’s known as Thrall to the community. I think the half hearted attempt in Cata really backfired when it became so annoying that no one wanted to hear Go’el.
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I think that, to some extent, it might signify Thrall coming to terms with who he is now. Aggra insisting he call himself Go’el wasn’t because he treated Thrall as a personal name, it’s because he was THRALL, Warchief of the Horde and great Orcish hero. Even as he’s returned to the Horde, he’s not that person anymore, but at the same time, he never can be the simple shaman he once tried to be either.
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oh my god all these years ive been deceived.
it slipped right under my noses that it was a superman reference.
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It’s kinda funny actually. One way to quickly piss off my comic nerd brain is to call Laura “X-23” despite that being her more famous moniker. I even go about saying X-23 is her slave name.
And yet despite that I hate Go’el and was quite pleased when they quietly stopped using it for Thrall. I felt like the moment they decided to lean into Go’el was the moment he became a far far less interesting character.
(Speculative): Thrall took a name meant to be degrading, humiliating, and derogative, and made it into a legend. He defied his slave master by turning that name into the name of a Hero and a Savior. Thrall essentially owned the name he was given, taking it and whatever power it had away from his owner, and making himself stronger for it.
(Commentary): I found it inspirational, personally, and seeing him cast it aside for his birth name felt like a weakness, as if he hadn’t actually taken the name from his slaver and made it into a legend, but was ashamed of it.
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Hmmm ,…
On the other hand, he never was the person he could have been under his birth name. He became what he is under this name. It is what led to his legacy and maybe it was also used by him to humble himself so he will not go the paths of the dark horde every other warchief was going.
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Name’s Go’el, bub…
Not just a Superman reference, but also a Goku reference (“GO’el”). “Thrall” may also be a Thor reference since THRall contains 75% of Thor’s name (on top of both of them being able to control lightning).
And what do all four of these characters have in common? Each of them is a child of two worlds.
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Slave means slave. they just keep it because of the guys history.
What happened to Agg’ra anyway?
They make an interesting Strong Female character…and side line her to be Thralls Baby Maker and write her out of the story entirely? Weak Sauce.
BTW if Thrall and his Fem Counterpart from WoD who is currently in Org hooked up…would it be incest?