Duncan Jones' Warcraft: Rambling Geeky Lore Primer

Story Changes Real And Imagined - A Excessively Geeky Lore Breakdown

As promised long ago, Travis Fimmel's shoulders have become encumbered by pauldrons.

It's been a year, but news has been coming out, and also this trailer. As one can see, the plot of the trailer mostly tracks to what I rambled about above - but not quite; and there's been other announcements since then that raise questions as to where they might be going.


City In The Sky

Dalaran floats.

The tl;dr: Dalaran floats.

The length:
Dalaran may be the city of mages, but it was a perfectly normal, grounded city during the events of all three real time strategy games - until an enormously powerful demon showed up and used his magic to crush it like a sandcastle.

Literally like a sandcastle.

When Dalaran finally rebuilt, they decided to also relocate, ripping the city out of the ground so it could go float over another continent to deal with a magic war. Obviously, the people making this movie realized that 'city in the sky' is both a cool visual and an informative shorthand - Dalaran differs from the city of Stormwind because it's the one run by mages, and nothing quite says an excess of magic like a city on a chunk of rock above nothing. (It's likely not moved continent though.)

Garona Halfwhaten?


The tl;dr: Garona Halforcen, formerly half-orc/half-draenei, is now half-orc/half-human.

In length:
This change comes not from the trailer but an interview with Paula Patton, who described her character as half-human.

Few characters in Warcraft's lore have been so extensively retconned as Garona. She was introduced way back in the manual to the first game as a half-orc, half-human whose half-human-ness made her sufficiently literate to write up stuff about the Orcs and their ways. An adult half-orc/half-human made sense because the orcs had been on the world of the humans for a couple of decades before the events of the First War... but when the timeline was shortened that the events of the war happened very soon after the Orcs arrived on this world, Garona was too old to have been born and become an adult in the time to kill King Wrynn. So it was decided her other half was that of a 'near-human' species native to the Orcish homeworld that they had wiped out, later clarified to mean the Draenei.

So if she's half-human, does that mean that the orcs have been in contact with humans for a couple of decades? Well, the trailer doesn't seem to imply that - the orcs are shown leaving their old world and arriving in the new world and wanting to settle there and all that - and, more to the point, the existing lore about Garona being artificially aged by Gul'dan's magic could work with a half-human baby as well as a half-draenei, so I'd bet her adult nature will be explained away something like that.

The Alliance?
"If we do not unite, our world will perish."
- King Llane Wrynn, Trailer


The tl;dr: The Alliance may be created early to appear in this movie.

The length:
As you can see from this picture, the movie's marketing has heavily played up the Alliance/Horde conflict. They are the two player factions of the ongoing MMORPG, after all, and both the orcs (the central race of the Horde) and the humans (the central race of the Alliance) have played a major role in all three RTS games.

But here's the thing: In Warcraft's timeline, the Orcs had indeed already formed the Horde, but the belligerent human power was the kingdom whose capital was Stormwind. After they were defeated, the human nations of the north - in addition to dwarves, high elves and gnomes - came together to create the Alliance.

So consider this council picture (helpfully marked by someone on reddit:)


Reddit: Reliably dorks.

This round table discussion includes Queen Taria of Stormwind, and may include representatives from all Seven human Kingdoms in addition to representatives from the high elves and dwarves. Judging from the lion icon in the corridor the meeting is taking place in Stormwind, which loves the lions like the Lannisters - and not, say, Lordaeron, the city the Alliance was formed in in lore. At the very least, the movie probably has a scene where the prospect of this alliance is discussed, and given the marketing, likely formed - to some extent, anyway (given the major human castmembers are affiliated or work within with the kingdom of Stormwind, likely not much.)

Durotan: Betrayer And Proto-Thrall
"You side with humans... against your own kind!"
- Presumably Ner'zhul, Trailer*



The tl;dr: Durotan will actively help the Alliance fight the Horde, as opposed to helping a faction within the Horde and then getting killed for his troubles.

The length:
This is the big one. As you may recall, Durotan is no friend of the Horde's leadership, and he distances himself and his Frostwolf Clan from it and also feeds some critical intel to Orgrim Doomhammer - before he gets hacked to death by orcs loyal to the Horde's leadership. But that's it, the only Orc to actually work with the humans against the depredations of the Horde is Garona Halforcen. From the looks of things, the Frostwolf Clan will be actively working with the humans to bring down the Horde's wretched demonically infused leadership. This more proactive role is very similar to what his son Thrall (the green baby sent Moses-like into the reeds) will do.

This change makes sense - Durotan's role in the current lore is too passive to be much use as a hero - though it does make one wonder what his relationship with Orgrim will be - Orgrim is a member of the Blackrock Clan, whose leader, Blackhand, is the puppet head of the Horde. Orgrim may be Durotan's friend - and, in the movie's lore, his right-hand orc - and one that betrays Blackhand (and Gul'dan, the Horde's true master), but he only replaces it with his own kind of brutal assault on the Alliance (and is killed in the Second War - i.e., this movie's probable sequel - by Lothar, the Travis Fimmel character Durotan is making nice to here.)

We have one hint how this may play out in the trailer; early on Orgrim tells Durotan: "For orcs, there is no other life but war," and Durotan replies "No, but with the human's help, there could be." We don't know Orgrim's response to that, but he's not in the group shot of orcs Durotan brings to Lothar's aid; so one could deduce that while they both agree Gul'dan and Blackhand need to be taken out, they probably differ on whether or not to seek the human's aid in doing so.

Will he still die? Probably. I can't see his mate Draka abandoning their child if things are going well, and Thrall's backstory assumes he's raised by humans, not his parents (hence a name that literally means 'slave.')

...well, that's all I got.


*I couldn't find an online consensus on who this orc is, pictured below:

His pauldrons are very warlock-looking (yes, shoulderwear can tell you a lot about someone in Warcraft shut up) and it looks like he's wearing some kind of makeup or tattoo with a dark area around the eyes, which fits the description of Ner'zhul as a guy who was in to skull facial tats, as you can see here:

I hadn't heard that Ner'zhul would be in the movie; his role in the lore was he was essentially the guy who began getting the Orcs corrupted by demons, but he got cold feet, so he was betrayed by his disciple Gul'dan, who took over the operation; and rather than killing him Gul'dan left him on their dying homeworld. He's also the guy who, in a rare non-dick move, let Durotan and Orgrim know drinking demon blood was a bad idea, which was why they backed out of it. He's basically just not that important during the events of the war with the kingdom of Stormwind, but he's eventually important (becoming the king of an entire undead army because Reasons), which may be why he may appear here.