When we first meet the young orc warchief Thrall in Warcraft 3, he’s just woken from a nightmare; visions of orc and human armies clashing on a battlefield as the sky burns above them.
“Like fools, we clung to the old hatreds,” a voiceover laments. It’s rendered stunningly, this battle, in an early progenitor of Blizzard’s now-renowned cinematics. But unlike in the previous two games, there’s no glory to it. The morally simplistic battles of old are chronicled in the language of regret. Old triumph is revised as cyclical folly.
Thrall wakes from his vision and jolts up in bed. We can see terror on his face at first, and then… sorrow. And just like that, Warcraft’s orcs are given something they’d never really had previously:
A chance to be people.
Warcraft III Intro Watch on YouTube
As far as I knew at 10 years old, no-one had ‘invented’ orcs. They just were. Like giants, fairies, or dragons. I’d fought them in HeroQuest, all protruding lower canines and piercing red eyes, brandishing meat cleavers and falchions above their heads. I’d defended castles from them in the Dungeons & Dragons board game DragonStrike. I’d even controlled orcish warriors and catapults and giant snapping turtles in Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness. I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but I’d placed orcs in the realm of folklore, a part of our collective storytelling public domain. That is, until my Year Five teacher jokingly called a story I’d written a ‘Tolkien rip-off’ and lent me her personal, faded hardcover of The Hobbit. It was, I thought at the time, even cooler than C.S Lewis. It had bigger battles. Dragons. Gollum. And a lot more orcs.
Evil. Disposable. Generally up for a party but will probably end up killing each other. Disposable. Bad at tactics but too numerous for it to really matter. Disposable. Just good enough at fighting to make our heroes look cool, but never good enough to pose a real threat.
Disposable.
This isn’t what makes them endearing, and enduring, though. Sure, they’re often hilarious. Mostly fearless. But they’re also perpetual outsiders. Sometimes, like Warhammer 40,000’s Goff Rockers and Blizzard’s mohawked trolls, they’re punks. Fantasy’s counterculture. Scrappy. Resourceful. All DIY aesthetics and painted banners. Backs against the wall, grog held high in the air with one hand, and a long, gnarled, green middle finger on the other.
The first level of Warcraft 3’s prologue starts with a line of text on a loading screen. A single line that grants Thrall, and by extension the Horde, more agency than the previous two games combined.
His troubling dream. Imagine that. Thrall is . Not angry. Not vengeful. Not somewhere on the spectrum between recently having finished killing humans and planning out which humans to kill next. But troubled. When he speaks to the prophet Medivh in the following cutscene, his voice is measured. A tone of resolute contemplation, in sharp contrast to the ornery Fozzy Bear gargles that delivered the old game’s orcish text scrolls.