it’s nearly 5 in the morning so i have to physically restrain myself from typing up another storm about this but garrosh has never gotten to be his own person and both within the universe and from a developer/lore/marketing perspective garrosh was never intended to be anything but a simulacrum of grom, and in-universe garrosh’s rage and hopelessness stems from him knowing every single decision he makes will forever be shaped by where it falls on the grom scale (the gromometer if you will). garrosh DID in fact get killed by his own personality because he has wanted to die from the moment we meet him in outland because it is the only executive decision he can make about his own life without leading to more rage and more failure and more scrutiny through the hellscream lens. with geyah’s passing he knows there will be literally nobody left to have faith in him as an individual person—until he meets thrall, who gives him hope, but ultimately traps him in the same cycle as before.
even thrall’s visit is more about grom’s memory and his relation to grom than about inspiring garrosh on the merit of his own deeds. geyah is literally the only person in the entire world—worlds, even—that has faith in garrosh for who he is as a person, not whose bloodline he belongs to. chalk it up to orcish clan mentality all you want; garrosh’s clan was that of the mag’har. a very fucking distinct line in the sand was drawn when grom chose having green, then red, skin over the pox-riddled brown skin of his own son. grom went the way of the warsong, and garrosh was left with the tatters of his dying race—the sick and the elderly at death’s door—to claim belonging to. geyah here even served as garrosh’s surrogate mother, another source of love and acceptance denied to him by his father: grom left golka, garrosh’s mother and grom’s mate, to die, just as he left his son. in some ways, even garrosh choosing to die is still fulfilling his father’s plan. garrosh wasn’t sealed away for his protection like varok was forced to separate from his son, dranosh, and promised his wife he would do so; garrosh was dumped in garadar because he was sick and weak and could not fight and was therefore better off dead. kargath echoes this when the horde returns for more recruits beyond the dark portal. “do the horde a favor and die.”