"I finally know the pain of Thrall fans" Genuinely interested, what's the deal there?
So Thrall is basically Orc Moses (in the movie they even put his infant body in a basket in a river at the end it’s so on the nose like slow your roll dudes!). He was born to a people in bondage, raised among his peoples’ captors and thus afforded privileges and education, and used those privileges and education to free his people and lead them to a new land. For players of Warcraft III and vanilla World of Warcraft, Thrall represented everything that (most of) Horde players loved about the Horde; he stood for honor, nobility, for the scrappy underdog who forges deep bonds of brotherhood with other scrappy underdogs to stand against a cruel and dangerous world. He was a lore hero with multiple games’ worth of heritage, and a great man who wanted his people to thrive. While he genuinely valued peace for its own sake and would happily have embraced peace with the Alliance if it were possible, he was 200% willing to throw the fuck down to protect them when necessary, including murdering the shit out of Alliance kings to secure a safe home for his people and spearheading defensive and retaliatory military actions during the cold war that lasted until the Wrath expansion. So a lot of Horde players were really invested in him as the face of their faction and the guy who embodied everything they loved about Warcraft.
Then three expansions in he quit the Horde, made an incredibly bad decision about his successor, joined a neutral third faction and became a shared questgiver with no particular interest in or loyalty to the Horde, came back to deal with the fallout of choosing the second worst possible successor by cheating in an honor duel with him, then immediately ran away again to a literal different dimension, letting the Horde once again fall into the hands of thoroughly malicious leadership as the actual worst possible successor took the throne. He’s not the face of the Horde anymore, he doesn’t even have a relationship to them, really, he’s just a putz who abandoned his people and his responsibilities and his honor to grow wheat on a floating space rock.
Satele has followed a similar arc. The genetic descendant of the heroes of the first KotOR game, she is a Big Deal Lore Character who’s intimately connected to previous stories, the personified heritage of the Old Republic. She’s the leader of the Jedi who got that position by finding them a new home, guiding them in recovering and rebuilding after a lost war. In both your class stories as a Jedi and the various flashpoint quest conversations for everybody, you get to see her calm, confident leadership, her compassion, her humor, and her strong sense of dedication and responsibility for the Jedi and the Republic. In the trailers, on the box, and in the game itself, she’s the face of both those groups, the hero who embodies everything a Jedi should be. She’s even the face of the Republic if you’re an Imperial, as the first Republic character you ever speak to in game. And given that the faction divide in SWtOR is literally good democracy vs evil fascist imperialism instead of Warcraft’s (ostensible) gray vs gray racial divide, her strident defense of her people against the opposite faction is even more consistent than Thrall’s.
Then three expansions in she quit the Jedi and Republic, developed an incredibly cold take on the Force that is only not in complete defiance of everything we know about how it works because it’s almost completely incoherent what she and Marr are even trying to say to you in that little arc, threw her support behind a neutral third faction and let the Jedi fall into leaderless, scattered exile and disarray. She then showed up at the end of a war to lift one building into place and then immediately fucked off again to wild space instead of staying to help protect and rebuild her shattered and vulnerable original faction, and sent the Imperial player character a goodbye letter affirming her support and friendship for them as they rejoined the Empire, attempted genocide against the remaining Jedi, and geared up to grind the Republic into dust. She’s not the face of the Republic anymore, in fact 50% of the time she’s allied with their active enemy, she’s just a putz in the middle of an Edgy Gray Jedi Phase who shit on everything she used to believe in and stand for so she could be BFF with a dead Sith and start a little cult.
Personally, as a Warcraft II player who never got around to playing III, I never had a lot of sympathy for Horde Filth, but KotFEET has given me new perspective on their pain.
