Did that not stick? He insisted to Jaina that she addresses him that way, yet Jaina continues to call him Thrall, and now literally every other NPC.
I guess changing your name in WoW is as hard as it is IRL…
IIRC, it proved wildly unpopular with the playerbase and it was tied to Metzen’s mid-life crisis at the time so it was probably easy to drop that plot point and have him go back to Thrall.
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At this rate, Blizzard should make a book of dropped plot-points and retcons, I’m sure they have enough to fill a couple hundred pages…
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I think at this point the only character to still call him by his real name is Aggra.
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They stopped doing it because it was cringe.
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Because it turned out that fundamentally changing and renaming the most iconic and foundational character of the setting was a pretty short-sighted idea.
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Glad it didn’t stick.
Thrall had a legitimate reason to keep his name, but suddenly a random orc is added in a book and now he goes by Go’el because his wife who has existed for less than 10 minutes refuses to call him anything else.
Honestly not sure why Aggra was even made as a character, feels like they just wanted to give Thrall a wife but felt like it HAD to be an Orc.
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She turned up in the Cataclysm pre-patch events to teach Thrall traditional orcish shamanism, the mag’har way.
She also gave him his traditional mag’har trench coat and anime prayer beads, then took him to the traditional mag’har chiropractor.
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Drek’thar, the main shaman of the Frostwolf Clan, was literally his teacher.
How was Agrra any more capable to teach him this than a guy that’s been doing this since before Orcs even landed on Azeroth?
I would unironically prefer this to be the canon reason for her existence.
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It’s possible that Drek’thar put her forward to instruct Thrall himself. As of as recently as the orcish heritage armor quest he still seems to hold her in higher regard as a shaman than Thrall.
At least when it comes to knowledge of customs and traditions.
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To be honest it was because of Thrall’s grandmother Geyah. As the elemental on Azeroth were freaking out about Deathwing and the impending Cataclysm, Thrall decided to journey to Outland to get insight from Geyah and the other shaman as they’ve dealt with elements who suffer terribly in the hopes of using that knowledge to learn what troubled the Azeroth elements.
Now while Geyah did help, she felt that Aggra would be a better fit as a teacher for him and because making the two of them working together amused her. Considering how that ended with her as a great grandmother, she may have been doing some secret shipping.
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A lot of people called it out as cringe because it came in at the peak of his Green Jesus “World Shaman” phase and it was too on the nose to have a clear Superman name parallel.
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Thrall: “Thrall means slave. I am no slave.”
Blizzard: It’s actually better for marketing if Thrall keeps his name because that’s how fans know him.
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I mean taking the name your captors gave you and owning it is just as valid a decision really.
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Reminder that Geyah was intended to have died of old age during the TBC quest where Thrall shows up to speak to her but it went over Golden’s head so she’s randomly just still alive but never referenced past Shattering.
This lore messup has annoyed me since I read Shattering when it first came out.
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The thing is, Thrall took “Thrall” back from his human slavers.
He made it his own.
He saved so many people as Thrall.
It’d be dumb for him to go by Go’el when using Thrall is such a victory.
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Thrall is one syllable and Go’el is two. It is just easier to say for lazy people like me.
If I knew Thrall and he wanted me to call him Go’el, I would just call him “Go” for short.
We started with one syllable, we ain’t adding more.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking why Thrall is (or isn’t) a better name than Go’el… but considering it was a plot point that he stressed upon, that people address him as Go’el… Blizzard needs to give an ingame explanation as to why he started going by Thrall again.
On that note, didn’t Draka and him have a conversation about it in Zereth Mortis? cringes at the thought of SL
I wouldn’t exactly say it is renaming. We know that Thrall is not his birth name. It was a name that Blackmoore gave him.
Thrall learning his birth name happened in TBC when he met his grandmother.
" Greatmother Geyah says: Go’el. You are Go’el, son of Durotan - rightful chieftain of the Frostwolves. This day, grandson - you are the great joy of my heart."
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Hero_of_the_Mag%27har
Which is funny as neither Thrall, nor Superman are meant to be Jesus-like characters. They are both based off Moses. I mean the Warcraft movie has Draka put baby Go’el in a basket in a field of reeds.
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They did… it was dropped.
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