Christ, it somehow escaped my notice that Thrall was slotting in as surrogate daddy #4. Bail out, Thrall! You already have kids! Blood your thunder! Lok your Tar! Throm your Ka! Doom your Hammer! Go your El! Drek your Thars!
I’ll stop now.
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I miss Roux. Thrall’s opinion of Anduin was that he looked like a pink child in oversized armor.
I’m all for Thrall being nice and even diplomatic but why does he care about this vagabond that abandoned his crown? His only importance to him was as leader of the rival global super power and even then he didn’t hold him in high regard.
With Jania in mind maybe it just turns out he’s just got a thing for blondes.
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How??
The TWW cinematic was my first glimpse at it. He gives Anduin the “my son’s a criminal addict” style speech about why nobody visited him while he was in prison detox. “You needed time, we stayed away. But time doesn’t heal everything, so come back to your family Anduin!!”
He even gave Anduin sad but understanding dad eyes when Andy pointed a sword into his sternum, with the whole “I trust you” bit. They even telegraphed it with the whole “hand on the shoulder into ghost daddy flashback.”
How did you miss this?? Hoowwwwwwwwww?
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I think I had mentally stuffed Thrall so far down in the irrelevant guest-star box that I tuned it out entirely. I was also pretty annoyed at watching Anduin speedrun Thrall’s decade long and counting internal struggle in a single patch.
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If this were a better written story, I imagine we’d have gotten some dialog about how Saurfang changed Thrall’s opinion on Anduin, and seeing Anduin all broken reminded Thrall of the orcs in the internment camps. Something about a changed opinion on Wrynns overall after Varian’s sacrifice, and maybe a degree of sympathy for being a young leader thrust into a position of leadership over a global superpower. Maybe even toss in some introspection about how Anduin was still trying to reach out to Garrosh after everything Garrosh had done to the Alliance and Anduin personally. And how, in his older age, Thrall has learned to respect this kind of quiet strength far more, and it hurts him inside to see that strength broken and makes him see his own current problems reflected in Anduin.
But the reality is, Anduin needs a new dad, so Thrall has to like him so Thrall can be Go’el Wrynn to his Anduin, son of Varian, son of Llane.
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I’m betting Xal is in fact the main villain of the expansion. Let’s see who’s the final boss in the final raid.
Alleria had way more focus than a “single tiny cinematic.” We all had to go through Alleria’s Angst Tour and after that, follow her (and others) through exploding Dalaran at the beginning of the expansion. Then she comes back to clown on Xal with “I wasn’t aiming at you.” I’d bet money that they’ll have another showdown when Xal finally becomes a raid boss.
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Xal is likely dying in Midnight and not TWW. I only say this because The Last Titan will be dealing with Iridikron and whatever the titans have planned
Zero chance Xal’atath is the final boss of TWW. Maybe Midnight? Probably not. I’m gonna go with Dimensius for Midnight. I would actually be delighted if Xal’atath was just a background villain that stays around for a long while, but they’re signalling pretty hard with Alleria.
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Thinking of the remaining two expacs in the series, I wonder if the Dracthyr will play a major role in The Last Titan alongside the Aspects.
Edit: Been obessed with the dracthyr since they were able to be other classes, so they been on my mind a lot lately since my hunter is a drac(Again)
Ugh, and as far as I’m concerned, the one redeeming feature of the Desolate Council is that I can forget they exist.
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Reworked Faranell is by far the best Forsaken character we’ve gotten in awhile. Belmont’s suitably blood-thirsty and Voss is a dimensional traveling lightslayer. That’s a pretty good set up.
Velonara is the only one I struggle to come up with anything of note for. She’s a pretty standard brooding elf and we get enough brooding elves from all corners of the globe.
Calia I’ve maintained could be fascinating if used correctly. Either as the token sensible good guy or better yet as someone driven to embrace undeath’s true nature.
Have her eat someone. It’s that easy. /Cannibalize a mfer. Stain that porcelain white with gore.
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I never claimed it was Horde themed.
I have no problem with the individual characters—well, except for Calia. And Lillian Voss. But mostly, I just hate the Desolate Council as an entity.
Unfortunately, over and above my conviction that they’re not going to do that because they have other plans for her, I’m afraid that wouldn’t fix Calia in my eyes.
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Fair enough but I’m going to keep trying to will it into existence.
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I’m gonna be 100% honest with everyone here. I’ll never accept Calia as Forsaken, not because she’s all shiny, not because she’s all goodly good-girl, not because she has a babe-in-the-woods vibe going with the Forsaken.
I’ll never accept her because she’s a Menethil. She’s Arthas’s sister.
I know!! It’s super-petty, I know!! You can tell me all about last rightful heir, something about royal succession, and I get all that.
But to me, that ended not when Arthas stabbed daddy. It ended when Sylvanas became their Dark Lady. When the fallen people of Lordaeron accepted a foreign elf as their ruler. To me, that is the clearest possible break in that old line as you can possibly get. And really, the forsaken had every right to accept her.
A Menethil murdered them, either directly or via proxies. No Menethils came to their aid when they were mindless zombies. No Menethils came to their aid when they regained their free will. But Sylvanas did. She was the leader they chose, because the lives they knew had ended.
And yes, she turned out to be the wrong choice in the end. That should never have meant they turned around and went right immediately back to their old ways, their old ruling family.
I dunno who it should have been, except it never should have been her.
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Thrall had some potentially fascinating interactions with the expansion’s other Alliance heroes lined up, too. Remember Alleria’s unresolved blood feud with the orcs? What better time to resolve it than an adventure alongside the orc?
Kind of feels like another Jaina-Aethas situation, with all traces of Alleria’s stint as an actually flawed character scrubbed from the canon. Does pretending it never happened make her a more palatable Horde quest giver? Maybe. But so would working through those issues, and we’d get a much better story out of it.
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Arthas did that. Not any other Menethil, just Arthas. And Calia had to go into hiding because Arthas was Lich King crazy.
And after he was defeated, Caila tried to help the free Forsaken reconcile with their still living families. And Sylvanas assassinated her for making the effort.
Now if you want a better reason not to trust her. She was raised into undeath by the Naaru. And after what Xe’ra tried with Illidan, I have zero trust for them any more.
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I know her brother did that. I don’t know many people who would trust the sister of the guy who killed their family, let alone trust her enough to rule just because “well we had Menethils before we died in a zombie apocalypse and got our wills restored and persecuted by the humans for being what we are and then joined a Horde thing and then got our city blown up again by a leader.”
You’re skipping over a convenient decade or two there where she was not trying to help them at all. A very rough time for the Forsaken at that.
Who said anything about trust?
I’m explaining why I’ll never accept her. Me. The person typing this.
I get my reason doesn’t make meta-lore sense, but I did fully disclose
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Not liking something doesn’t always need a lore reason to it and it doesn’t always need to make sense to anyone else. Sometimes we just dislike something because it fell flat in that persons eyes.
Also, people sometimes tend to forget that we’re allowed to have personal opinions without someone else getting mad for us having differing opinions
Which happens far too often on this forum. The whole getting angry over different opinions I mean
Edit: Not that that’s what happening now or anything. I’m just saying it’s something that’s far too common 
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You’re skipping over the entire fact that while Terenas loved her, he viewed her as literally nothing more than a political tool to be married off to whatever noble he decided would be most useful, whether she liked it or not. She had literally zero say in the matter. BTW the noble he happened to pick was Daval Prestor. If you don’t know that name, it was the human disguise for Deathwing.
And after managing to sneak away and badger priests for long enough to convince them to marry her and her actual low born love, she had a child that her mother the Queen decided would be sent away and raise by the father in secret until after Arthas was married and had a male heir.
And that whole decade you talk about her doing nothing, was running and hiding from the Scourge because Arthas wanted her dead. The whole time she was being protected by the self-freed undead Alonsus Faol (the guy who founded the Silver hand and trained Turalyon, Tirion Fordring and the other original paladins). BTW both before and after the whole Scourging of Lorderan, Calia had no actual power to do much of anything other than smile and be pretty so daddy could marry her off to whoever he decided to. And the best her mother could do was make her give up her child and husband and sit and wait countless years for her YOUNGER brother (who would have every choice she was denied) to eventually get married and have a kid, just so that she could finally get a tiny bit of her own agency in the world (while also probably still being looked down on and held in disdain by her father, and maybe even her mother).
So yeah, your choice may be personal and not lore based. But you seem to be basing it entirely on the incorrect lore based concept that she just sat around twiddling her thumbs combined with projecting Arthas’ crap onto her when Arthas spent probably more effort trying to find and kill her personally as he did any of his other countless victims.
Just sayin’ /shrug
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