Know Your Lore: The undeniable failure of Thrall

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Thrall, former Warchief of the Horde, came from a line of leaders, destined by his parentage to eventually take leadership of the Frostwolf clan -- but he ended up doing far, far more than just that. Through Thrall's efforts, the Horde was rebuilt anew into a different organization, one built not on the concept of bloody battles and victorious conquest, but instead on the ideals of freedom, liberation, unity. Family. With that goal in mind, he allowed a multitude of races to join as allies with this new Horde, establishing a home in Kalimdor.

But that Horde was not the Horde that the orc race was familiar with. It wasn't the same Horde of united clans that drank the blood of Mannoroth, ripped through the Dark Portal and stormed into Azeroth with the intent of conquering the planet. It certainly was a far, far cry from the Horde of Draenor -- the Horde from days not so long before the orcs first arrived on Azeroth, the Horde that thrived prior to Thrall's birth.

And perhaps it was that curious dichotomy between the two that led Thrall astray. Or perhaps it was simply that his parents, Durotan and Draka, were killed while he was still an infant, and he was raised in as a slave in a camp of humans that taught him human ideals, human ideas. They taught him to read, they taught him to speak, they taught him how to be. What they did not teach him was one very important thing -- how to be an orc.

Please note: The following Know Your Lore contains several spoilers for Warlords of Draenor, including the cinematics that were released last week. If you are avoiding spoilers, don't click!

Leadership

The onerous task of teaching Thrall to be an orc was left to one Grom Hellscream, leader of the last remnants of the Warsong clan. Thrall escaped his imprisonment in the internment camps -- with the help of a human girl, no less -- and found himself at Hellscream's door. To put it bluntly, Grom Hellscream was a shadow of what he had once been. Embittered by years of fighting the lethargic malaise that afflicted the rest of the orcish race, Grom had all but resigned himself to a hopeless future that would eventually lead to an inglorious end for both himself, and the Warsong.

It was Thrall's arrival that began to wake him up and make him see that perhaps there was more out there for the Warsong, perhaps there was hope. He told Thrall of the Horde's history, of orcish history, painting a grand, glorious picture that Thrall looked at through blue eyes -- through eyes tinged with the taint of being raised at the feet of humanity -- and promptly interpreted in a wholly different fashion. Thrall went on to find the Frostwolf clan, to take on the onerous task of becoming a shaman, an art thought largely lost at that point in time.

And it was with the Frostwolves that he met Orgrim Doomhammer, learned more of the orcish race, expressed an interest in freeing the orcs and leading them from captivity, uniting them once more. Doomhammer, with Thrall now appointed as his second-in-command, led raids on the internment camps until he was killed during one of the battles -- and he handed the Doomhammer to Thrall, naming him Warchief of the Horde.

Thrall was eighteen years old when he was made Warchief of the Horde, and had spent most of those eighteen years of his life learning from the human race.

Horde

Do you really think, given the amount of time spent in the company of humans and comparing that to the amount of time he spent with Grom and Orgrim, that Thrall was capable of leading the Horde? Do you think that Thrall really knew, at that point in time, what it even meant to be part of the Horde? What the Horde really was? Did he really have the time to learn all about his heritage before he was handed the title of Warchief? No, he didn't. He had only the barest inkling of knowledge, and the rest was flying completely by the seat of his pants. The orcish race was following him -- gladly following him, for he was the first real shaman they'd seen since the days of Draenor, he set them free, and he gave them relief from that weird lethargy that plagued them all. That was the extent of their loyalty -- Thrall saved them all, so they served Thrall.

Oddly enough, that is almost exactly how Thrall brought every other race in the Horde under its wing. The trolls were being attacked by murloc, naga, and human alike -- Thrall saved them, they joined the Horde. The tauren were being attacked by centaur, Cairne's son Baine was taken away -- Thrall saved him and got rid of the centaur, the tauren joined the Horde. The Forsaken were brought up by Hamuul Runetotem, a tauren who pointed out that the Forsaken had the potential for redemption. They could, in Hammul's eyes, be saved. And so they joined the Horde.

The blood elves, tattered remnants of a once proud civilization that had nowhere else to turn -- joined the Horde. The goblins, whose island home had exploded in volcanic fury thanks to the Cataclysm -- they were saved pretty much directly by Thrall, and consequentially brought into the Horde. The entirety of the Horde was built not just on the concept of freedom and loyalty, it was built on this notion that Thrall was somehow this savior that made the world better again, and by following him, the world would automatically be a better place.

Garrosh Hellscream

But that is not enough to lead a faction. It's not enough to simply exist as people that have been saved. You can't sit there and express gratitude forever and simply be content with that -- you need more of a purpose to life than that, and that's where Thrall began to falter, because he never really seemed to have any idea of what that purpose ought to be. He got the opportunity, in Burning Crusade, to travel to the lands that were once a part of his heritage, to visit with orcs who had never been corrupted by the Burning Legion, and to see first hand what it was like to be an orc of Draenor. And there is where Thrall made perhaps one of the biggest mistakes of his life -- he met Garrosh Hellscream, Grom's son. Garrosh was mired in self-doubt and depression, because he came from a bloodline that was, in his eyes and the eyes of the Mag'har, irrevocably tainted.

And Thrall saved Garrosh Hellscream. He showed him a vision of his father's death, how Grom spent his last breaths killing Mannoroth in glorious battle, forever lifting the curse that tied the orcish race to the Burning Legion and becoming a hero in the process. If he had left Garrosh with that knowledge, maybe that would have been enough. Maybe it would have been fine -- Garrosh would have taken over leadership of Garadar and the Mag'har upon Geyah's passing, and lived a fairly quiet existence in that small corner of Nagrand. It's unlikely he would have ever dreamed of more.

Instead, Thrall took him back to Azeroth -- to act as an advisor. It wasn't enough to simply show Garrosh that his father wasn't the monster Garrosh thought him to be. Thrall had to rip him from his home and take him back to Orgrimmar, a part of his collection of saved individuals, a new addition to the Horde. And over the course of the next several years, Garrosh balked and buckled and seethed under the constraints of the restrained, diplomatic life that Thrall apparently viewed as some sort of noble ideal.

Thrall said that this was the Horde ... but it didn't look like any kind of Horde Garrosh had ever known.

Warchief

And maybe, somewhere in the back of his mind, Thrall began to realize this for himself. Somewhere during that Northrend campaign, when the orcs who had readily followed Thrall to freedom now thrived under the leadership of Hellscream -- a leadership that was far more in line with everything they had known on Durotar. Hellscream didn't save them, Hellscream simply pointed the way, and they followed. He gave them glorious battle and conquest, something they hadn't had since the days of the Second and Third wars. He gave them something to fight for, and with his brown skin and vicious nature, he was every inch the orc that Thrall, green-skinned, blue-eyed and full of strange diplomatic notions, could never be.

So when Thrall stepped down from being a Warchief, when he handed that title to Garrosh, the orcs were more than fine with the decision -- after all, Hellscream was everything that in their eyes, the Horde was supposed to be. Thrall told Garrosh to lead the Horde in the old ways. Hellscream took him at his word and went to work doing exactly that -- making the Horde a war machine of conquest, a force to be reckoned with, an army to be feared. It's what the Horde was. That's what the Old Horde was created to be -- the clans were originally brought together under Blackhand specifically for the purpose of conquest and slaughter.

Is it any wonder, then, that Hellscream looked at the rest of the Horde with clouded eyes? To his perception, Vol'jin and the Darkspear did nothing to further that perception of the Horde that he'd been raised with. Neither did the Forsaken, neither did the blood elves. He did his best to try and make spaces in which these races could be useful and contribute -- the goblins created machinery, the blood elves were asked to delve into secrets of the arcane that could be used to bolster the Horde's strength. But by that point the Darkspear had already largely torn themselves away, uncertain if this Horde was really an organization they wanted to be a part of.

Hellscream's reign

Garrosh Hellscream has been a part of every expansion of World of Warcraft. We've watched him go from despondent son to a warmongering, vicious leader that would have made his father Grommash proud. Make no mistake, if Grom Hellscream had lived to see his son's rise to Warchief, he would have been backing the kid every step of the way. He would have been there right beside Garrosh during the Siege of Orgrimmar, he would have likely killed Vol'jin the second he stepped out of line, Darkspear be damned. Garrosh was an orc of the old ways -- and those old ways were not the placid, spiritual ways of the shaman that Thrall had so eagerly embraced.

This is Thrall's biggest failure -- a constant, overwhelming absence of any kind of realistic direction. He floundered his way into leadership of the Horde, he floundered his way through bolstering its ranks, he floundered his way just as easily out of the position the moment it began to occur to him that maybe, just maybe, he wasn't cut out to be the leader that Grom or Doomhammer thought he was capable of being. Thrall knew he wanted to return the Horde to glory, but he barely had any inkling of what the Horde really was. How could he successfully build something with only a bare, fleeting glance at the blueprints before he began construction?

He left Garrosh Hellscream as leader, thinking that would solve everything -- after all, Garrosh was an orc of the old ways, surely he knew how to lead better than Thrall ever had. And he had the gall to be horrified by what came as a result of his actions. He left Garrosh in charge. He told Garrosh to foster the ways of the old Horde. Garrosh Hellscream did exactly that, and then watched this strange, odd collection of races Thrall had fashioned together unite and turn all their ire on him.

Hellscream's escape

Garrosh Hellscream showed no remorse at his trial. He had no reason to -- everything he had done, he was asked to do. Everything he had done, he had done for the Horde. It's just that his perception of the Horde, and Thrall's perception of the Horde were two vastly, drastically different things. Of course Hellscream laughed at his trial -- how could he not laugh? He had done exactly as he was told, and now he was being put to trial for doing it. He had various races and species tell him that he had no concept of what it meant to be Horde -- when in reality, it was very much the other way around.

The trolls, the tauren, the Forsaken, the blood elves, the goblins, even the pandaren -- none of them knew what it meant to be Horde. Thrall didn't know what it meant to be Horde. The only people in the Horde that knew what that meant were those that were there on Draenor. Those that were there at its inception, those that had fought and conquered and fought some more and witnessed it all with their own eyes. Guess what? Most of those orcs were the ones that were fighting on Garrosh's side during the Siege.

Of course Garrosh went back to this alternate world. He went back to change history, yes. But he also went back, perhaps, to prove a point that had been lost somewhere along the way. Hardly anyone left on Azeroth has any idea what the Horde really is. They can sit there and accuse and point fingers and blame him all they want to, but Garrosh knows it for a fact -- that thing that Thrall put together may have been a group of allied races, but it was not the Horde, and it never would be.

Hellscream's fall

And that's where we get to that cinematic that was released earlier this week, featuring Thrall and Garrosh Hellscream's last confrontation. It ended where it began, on a green field that, in another universe, would become the little town of Garadar. On the surface, this looks like Thrall and Garrosh exchanging both words and blows -- but those words have a much deeper meaning than petty insults. When Garrosh says "All I have done, I have done for the Horde," he means it. What's worse, he's telling the absolute truth. Everything he did, he did for the Horde -- the Horde of old, the Horde of Draenor, his father's Horde, the Horde that Thrall never witnessed and could never hope to fully understand.

Thrall made him Warchief. Thrall left him to pick up the pieces. And when Hellscream at last shrieks, in a fit of rage, that Thrall failed him -- this is also the absolute truth. Thrall failed him. Thrall plucked him from his home, placed him in an alien situation he was not capable of comprehending, left him in charge of a group he barely understood, and conveniently showed up to execute him when Garrosh "failed" at what was, at its onset, an impossible task. Garrosh could never lead Thrall's Horde, because Garrosh didn't know what Thrall's Horde really was, because Thrall himself didn't know what Thrall's Horde was. Hellscream was set up, he was doomed to fail.

And when Garrosh Hellscream snarled, in his final moments, that Thrall made him what he was, what he had become, Thrall had the utter gall to suggest that Garrosh had chosen his own path. This is flat-out the biggest lie Thrall has ever told. Was he saying it to try and deflect what he had done? Was he saying it just to try and justify his actions to himself?

Here's the utter truth of the matter: Thrall found a tiger in the jungle, pulled a thorn from its paw, then dragged it home with him and expected it to act like a domesticated house cat. And despite the blatantly obvious fact that said tiger was a wild creature and far from domesticated, he left it alone to its own devices, and when it turned around and killed the neighbor's chickens, he killed it. Not only did he kill it, he blamed it for being a tiger, he blamed it for doing what was pretty much in its nature, and told the tiger, as he squeezed the life from its lungs, "You chose your own path."

Bull.

Whether he realizes it or not, the rise, fall, and death of Grommash Hellscream's son lies solely on Thrall's shoulders. That was not the life that Garrosh Hellscream deserved. It wasn't the death he deserved, either. Was he a warmonger? Yes. Was what he did to Theramore, to Pandaria, to the races that were allied under Thrall's Horde unforgiveable? Yes. Was it his fault? Yes. He chose to take those actions, he made every decision that led to countless innocent lives lost.

But he never would have been in a position to choose, had one green-skinned, blue-eyed orc not given him the opportunity to do so. Whether or not this thought even occurs to Thrall or weighs on his mind, we don't know -- but I think it would be a complete disservice to Garrosh's story if this did not have some greater effect on Thrall in the years to come.

While you don't need to have played the previous Warcraft games to enjoy World of Warcraft, a little history goes a long way toward making the game a lot more fun. Dig into even more of the lore and history behind the World of Warcraft in WoW Insider's Guide to Warcraft Lore.