I see a lot of people arguing this, and I find it fun to research the background over the Anduin Lothar vs. Anduin misunderstandings.
Spoilers for TWW ahead!
So Faerin is a Lothar, and the Lothars aren’t related to the Wrynns, right? Well, they are! Kind of.
See, the Arathi Empire was founded by Thoradin, and Thoradin has two established (named) descendants in the lore. One is Lothar, and the other is a man named Faldir. Who is Faldir? He’s the man who established Stormwind!
Faldir traveled south with other descendants of Thoradin to establish Stormwind, and from all we know of the lore, the Wrynns are the ruling family of Stormwind. There has not been a recorded Stormwind king that did not bear the Wrynn moniker. Since Faldir was self-titled as one of two marked Thoradin descendants of import, and the Wrynns are the only ruling family to be heard of in all of recorded history, it goes hand in hand that they descend from the man who is credited with founding Stormwind, Faldir. I mean, if you’re going to found a whole city, and every else credited with founding the city is ALSO a descendant of Thoradin, it’s incredibly unlikely the Wrynn line didn’t come from this founding elite.
So, are the Wrynns and Lothar related? Well, all signs point to yes, but thinly. Not closely, not in a way that you could nail down without a lengthy family tree. They simply had the same prestigious ancestor, but it is funny that both of Thoradin’s only named (important) ancestors are tied to the Wrynns and Lothars respectively.
Also worth mentioning the lore used to say Lothar was the LAST living descendant of Thoradin, but now that it’s established there’s a whole Lothar noble family, with a new Duke Lothar also being established in new quest text, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
At this point I just treat them like Lilo and Stitch. All the experiments called each other cousins even if they weren’t that blood related to my memory.
So…very distantly related to the point their blood differs and thus if she became his love interest instead of Talia their child would be perfectly fine more or less? Idk… still seems like he’s more Baine’s boyfriend of late but we’ll see how the story plays out. Anduin for all we know may go down a dark path like Arthas did if that fact his cinematic walking into the throne room of Lordaeron being very similar to Arthas’s one wasn’t pure coincidence. I’d find it rather funny though if part of his trauma is that he discovered a truth he fears he can’t tell involving an unseen part of Arthas’s past, Arthas having been good friends with Varian and visited him but who’s to say nothing crazy happened during a visit. Anduin may be a secret love child of Arthas and his mother and raised by Varian who felt there was no betrayal due to Anduin’s mom being blonde… but we’ll see…I’ll pull the tinfoil hat off now.
I really have no dog in the fight of the community’s battles over which woman Anduin has ever interacted at any point for any length of time on if she will or won’t be his future queen, I just think the history is neat.
The folks who split off from the original arathor empire did so thousands of years ago. Calling them related is an unbelievable stretch. With hundreds of generations you’re talking thousands upon thousands of “relations”.
Stormwind was founded approximately 1200 years before the First War so it isn’t so much thousands as thousand singular. It’s not so much hundreds of generations as probably around 30ish on average. Since Faldir and Lothar are the only two named descendants of any import, I’m presuming their bloodline is pretty pure/close to the original Thoradin, or at least Faldir’s was as he was also another 30 generations back wheras Lothar would be 60 from the original Thoradin.
I’m not here to argue bloodline reproduction impurity semantics, just relaying an interest that they have the same patriarchal founder whose bloodline reaches to both the Arathi Kingdom and our current Alliance High King.
They might be related, but the House of Wrynn is not descended from Arathor’s bloodline. We know this, because the only one who could call upon the High Elves’ blood debt in the Second War was Anduin Lothar. Prince Varian Wrynn couldn’t do that.
The Arathor bloodline specifically refers to the Arathi tribe led by Chieftain Thoradin that united the other tribes and founded Arathor. Lothar is the only living member left who descends from this tribe. Even House Trollbane, the royal house of Stromgarde, does not descend from this tribe, as their ancesetor, Ignaeus Trollbane, actually came from Alterac.
I speculate that the ancestor of House Wrynn was a member of some other tribe that was eventually brought into the Arathi domain, and as the centuries passed they began inter-marrying with the Arathi. But they weren’t really Arathi themselves. We must remember that it was an “empire”, an empire is compriesd of many different cultures and ethnicities. The only living man who could trace his descent to the Arathi tribe in the modern age was Anduin Lothar.
This is why I want an entire expansion set in the Empire of Avaloren (aka Empire of Arathor 2.0).
See, they said that, but that also seems to have been reverted with the new (recent) Duke Lothar mentioned in a Hallowfall text as well as Faerin herself, so I think maybe Lothar was the last living one they knew of, but parts his bloodline set sail off to Avaloren so we didn’t know until now that he wasn’t.
Aka we both know they’re retconning, and trying to make sense of it
But it’s still the Lothar family, I’m talking about OTHER families. Technically the appearance of Faerin and Duke Lothar does not disprove Chronicles’ statement that Anduin Lothar was the only man who could claim descent from the Arathi tribe. So, King Llane Wrynn, Prince Varian Wrynn, and (the unborn) Anduin Wrynn could not claim that descent.
As such, House Wrynn does not claim descent from King Thoradin and the Arathi bloodline, which actually makes them even cooler and more badass, because they might not have any special ancestry, yet they have come to rule over humanity’s mightiest kingdom.
What will be interesting to see will be Faerin in Midnight. Here is a living descendant of the Arathi bloodline… will the Blood Elves keep their ancient oaths, or break them, as they broke so many other oaths in the past?
Yeah but the arathi who left, from whom Faerin descended, left before the seven human kingdoms were established. Blizz didn’t say how long before. But even calling it 1200 years, that’s 1200 years ago at best that they shared a common ancestor. They’re about as related to one another as they are to every other human.
I think our attitude on ancient oaths is neatly summed up by Babylon 5’s Lord Refa: “Ink on a page!”
Really, given how badly the human population got bottlenecked by Lordaeron and most of the other northern kingdoms getting wiped out, it wouldn’t surprise me if Anduin is more related to the average human than to Faerin. Of course that depends strongly on how much of humanity is made up of Stormwind, which is one of those questions the writers will probably never answer and would probably get wrong if they did.
Theyd be further out than i am from elvis being my cousin. Hes my nineteenth cousin making Micheal jackson my 20th by marriage lol
But theres been 100s of years here this would be similar to the royal familes in Europe where they all married each other at diffent times in history for political or monetary reasons. Fun fact this happen so much to the point the current King of Egland is the great great grandson of Vlad Tepes aka Vlad Dracula aka Vlad the Impaler. So have no fear The implied love story between Aundin and the 12 year old girl can move forward
