We seem to be back to calling him Thrall. Weren’t blizz trying to make a push to him being called Go’el?
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No one liked the Go’el push
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True but this is the forums. No one likes anything that happens in this game
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Let’s keep it that way. Go’el was always a dumb sounding name, as if they wanted to get him as close to Superman as possible without just calling him Kal-El.
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Thrall wins by superior branding, it’s also the name that the bulk of the Horde knows him by, and the last thing the Horde Council needs is naming confusion among the masses.
I don’t think that Blizzard ever intended to retire the original name, because again… branding. It would be harder to sell a G’oel action figure compared to Thrall.
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He really needs to keep ownership of Go’el. People who change their names for similar reasons as him don’t do it or cast that aside easily. If you want to make him a more layered character, his struggles with identity have to be front and center. Anything else is just reducing him to a nostalgia trip.
I know that, as players, the name coincides with some of his worst writing. That is not in itself a reason to discard it.
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Everytime this comes up, I think that I just prefer Thrall, and why. “Thrall” is more letters than “Go’el”, but HALF the syllables!
I understand the allusions to themes surrounding ancestral names in comparison to names given by a conquering society. Thrall is his name under subjugation, and as it is a word in the tongue of Azerothian Humans, there likely was never an Orc named Thrall previous to him. I can understand the drive to see him drop his “slave name” for one more like his people.
I don’t mean to minimize the issue in an IRL discussion. I understand people can take that issue all sorts of ways. But as far as a fictional story largely made to drive video games… Thrall is just easier and everyone knows it already.
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I disagree, but I understand your perspective and I appreciate your understanding.
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This does raise the question… When Thralls reunites with Draka, what will she call him?
Go’el undoubtably, Thrall was a name he took on long after Draka was dead.
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To be fair, he never changed his name so much as learned the name he was given when born. Did he attempt to take ownership of that name? I don’t know. Identity issues have been his thing since Cataclysm when he stepped down as Warchief of the Horde. Since then he’s struggled with his identity.
There is Thrall, founder of the New Horde, formerly Warchief, successor to Ogrim Doomhammer.
Then there is Go’el, the former World Shaman, mate of Aggra, Father of Durak and Rehze.
The Horde, the world of Azeroth, they all know him as Thrall and call him Thrall. He took a name given to him out of spite and humiliation and made a legend out of it. The ones who started calling him Go’el were Mag’har on Outland who never knew the living legend he had become, but only the babe Draka had brought into a war-torn world.
The character struggles with his identities intensely, on a daily basis.
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Grom offers him a new name almost immediately after meeting him and he goes “nah”.
So why now? I remember War Crimes kinda made a Deal out of him not not going by Thrall anymore, but it never sat right with me, because there really wasn’t anything stopping him from dropping the slave name before. It just felt weird.
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Which I can’t help but get the feeling of the story recycling itself. He was first Thrall, then they gave him the name his parents would have wanted(Doomhammer wasn’t close enough with Durotan to know that I guess). Then Blizzard slides Go’el under the rug, only to drag Draka out and probably bring Go’el back again.
This, too, is a common part of that journey. “That’s ridiculous, a name is just a name” can be either an actual representation of being at peace with your identity or be a way to shove side a complicated issue when you don’t have time to or even really know that you need to sort out your feelings on your conflicting identities.
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Maybe that’s how they’ll gently reintroduce the concept and do it properly this time instead of the absurd Aggra thing everyone hated.
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In real life sure. But in his story it felt like the writers were just backtracking, then immediately changing their minds when they realised people don’t approve.
I’m not the type of fool to ask for a video game’s writing to be consistent and I’m all for Thrall having identity issues, but… yeah, my complaint is that it doesn’t feel like a character conflict in the slightest, instead it feels like messy writing.
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It is definitely writer level when you think about the context in which it was written and by whom. But it’s such a common part of the real life parallel that I think it dovetails well, at least if the landing is guided better than we got.
To be honest, I think it’s not so much a name he wishes to take on and more a case of just “people know me by this name, so I don’t really care if people call me it.” It’s like how some people know me by my real name, but prefer to call me by my character’s name because that’s what they familiarized themselves with first.
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I suppose that depends on how they are introduced. If someone introduces him to her as Thrall, she may just give him her normal courtesy. She may comment like: “A curious name for one of my people.” Thrall would know her name. How common is that name among their people? Would he simply say: “My mother was named Draka, too.” Again, how they meet would color the interaction.
Let’s say they meet on a random battlefield, in the maw, on separate missions that can end up having them work together. Baroness Draka runs into Thrall, with no one to introduce them. Who says what first?
If he says: “I am Go’el.”
She may reply with: “That is the name I gave my son.” Which might lead to the conversation.
If she says:
“I am Draka, once of the Frostwolf clan, now Baroness of the House of the Chosen!”
That would probably lead to the conversation.
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I don’t think that’s going to happen. Draka is dead, and he isn’t. Nor is he a Maw Walker.
Draka seems to have done a good job of moving on from her mortal life.