Infodump. Mostly about Gunmar 👇
Trolls have a lot of unspoken rules regarding respect of life and peace between tribes. There's an understanding between all tribes that innocents are to be excluded from conflicts, to protect those who don't choose to be warriors. Any violent disputes are handled outside of communities for this reason.
The exception was Orglak, who was known to all for being mad. He was wrong in the head, and he pretty much ruined the reputation of the Gumm-gumm tribe(which previously was a traveling warrior tribe).
He would raid and slaughter masses, and take the whelps for his own purposes. It's one of the reasons the gumm-gumms are hated so much.
Now, Gunmar is the product of a corrupted hearthstone, a heartstone that rotted from the inside out because of the wars that began to break out between humans and trolls. He is not evil incarnate though, and his purpose isn't revenge or world domination, but justice and protection. He's the manifestation of what the heartstone couldn't do; help its people. His experience with Orglak disrupted that though. He still has thoughts and feelings and he was rather young and impressionable when Orglak found him, so that deep seated need to protect and provide got manipulated in Orglak's favor. To an extent anyway. Gunmar despised Orglak's wicked ways, but learned very quickly that if he didn't, at the very least, pretend to embrace it, he'd be killed. And habits and philosophies are hard to break once you've adopted them for so long. He also put a lot of his effort towards the care of the whelps Orglak would take,(his paternal nature is ridiculously intense) since he literally couldn't stand the thought of any of Orglak's brainless, violent followers anywhere near them.
When Gunmar had Bular he knew he had to kill Orglak. Having a whelp of his own basically had every single instinct that he came out of the heartstone with come back full force. (At the time of his emergence, he didn't know what any of it meant, since he was basically a 10 ton toddler.)
Now, you may ask, if Gunmar is so protective of whelps, then why did he agree to let Morgana make changelings? Well, my friends, he did not know. After Gunmar's fallout with Merlin, Morgana said she could give him the means to better influence humanity. He agreed, and only found out what exactly Morgana had done until after. He was furious, but couldn't do much about it, because at the end of the day he is not going to seem ungrateful to the eldritch mother. It's why the babies that get stolen are so well taken care of. The bare minimum would do just fine, but he couldn't stand that thought. Human or otherwise a baby is a baby to him.
But Villr! Doesn't Gunmar raid other tribes once he becomes king of the gumm-gumm's? Doesn't he take whelps for his army?
Only if he really had to, which was more often than he would've liked. You see, because Orglak was a violent maniac that ruined any semblance of peace between the gumm-gumm's and other tribes, sometimes Gunmar had to resort to taking what his tribe needed to survive, because other tribes refused to negotiate, despite his best efforts.
The only time he took whelps was if the parents were killed during a raid, which was not very often, but still happened sometimes. And later on, when the Krubera trolls allied with them(an alliance the Krubera's kept a secret from the other tribes) They thought that Gunmar the black would want some of their whelps for his "army". (There's so many misunderstandings...) He only took them because if they're so willing to give them up then obviously they don't deserve em.
Now, he is still brutal, don't get me wrong, and I'll probably post about that later on. But he ain't no monster. Terrifying? Yes. But evil? Nope!
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