The druidic tradition of the drust is based on balancing it with necromancy, up to the point of using constructs of wood and flesh instead of treants, shapeshifting into undead and binding elementals with runes not unlike those used by the Scourge centuries after. Not to mention Thros being an off-shot of the Emerald Nightmare, if I’m not mistaken. The guys have assembled a corruptive bingo anyone in their sense would want to crush on sight.
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No don’t you remember how Vol’jin at the beginning of Legion invasions turned the whole underside of Orgrimmar into shelter for homeless. He was such a nice guy. It wasn’t at all added as a way to make Sylvanas seem even more villainous because she used Underhold for military complex.
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The fact that they made them savage, murderous natives who needed to be cleansed by the peaceful settlers is a bit of a yikes narrative to begin with.
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Original druidic magic as practised by the Drust was simply that, druidic magic. It was corrupted over the course of the war, especially when they grew increasingly desperate after repeated defeats at the hands of the settlers, because of that corruption the would be Thornspeakers sided with the settlers.
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The story of the Drust vs Waycrest is easily one of the most tone deaf that Blizzard have come out with, especially in recent years.
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The thornspeakers themselves say that their kind of shapeshifting is the drust tradition. Which means that the half-undead forms were their thing in the first place. When losing the war it made sense for them to dabble in the darker side of their art, but it was there since the beginning. And again, since the drust were vrukul, I don’t remember them coexisting with anyone peacefully, be it in Kul Tiras, Broken Isles or Northrend.
Blizzard’s writing was just very misplaced and scuffed when deciding on the Drust’s history.
Making the indigenous population who didn’t want to cede land to foreign colonisers the unambiguous villains is just ew.
It’s one of those cases where Team Blue should absolutely have been treated as the historic antagonists of the story.
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Their druid forms are a bit weird, yes, but that’s wood, not bone. That darker side wasn’t there from the beginning, Ulfar confirms as much when he accuses Gorak Tul of disgracing the Drust by corrupting their old ways.
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The issue with Drust isn´t as much an in-universe problem as the Drust went for instant aggro option upon encountering other people on their islands and when one of their druids suggested peaceful coexistence, Gorak Tul refused to even contemplate it.
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Into_the_Flame
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Pieces_of_History
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/The_Sixth_Sense
The problem is more that the indigenous people are made to be the villains while the newcomers are made to be the heroes, which, given that the story was written by Americans, is a bit tone-deaf. And also a bit whitewashy, where not even the ancestors of humans are allowed to be the bad guys (although, it´s not like the “we arrived to this new land and locals attacked us, so now you have to kill 10 of them, adventurer” story isn´t universal to most races in Warcraft).
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Orcs looking at quilboar territory and licking their lips.
A fair part of Northrend vrykul are genuinely evil, often going to allying with the Scourge and becoming undead willingly. Stormheim ones… well, they’re questionable in their battle-lust and desire to enter the Halls of Valor through destruction of their enemies. And with how much of a jerk Odyn himself is, human ancestry definitely isn’t one to be proud of.
The difference is that humans in WoW don´t really identify with vrykul. It´s like the elf/troll distinction, in general you´re not going to bring up Mon´mon the Throngler, Beloved of Loa, who killed 5000000 puppies 20000 years ago when talking about whether blood elves are evil.
However, modern Kul Tirans do identify with those first colonists and their current homeland exists because those colonists defeated the Drust, meaning they still profit from their actions.
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It’s a thing with far more than humans. Blood elves have conquered a great bit of the Amani territory and were rather close to wiping Zul’Aman from the face of Azeroth. Highborne among the night elves (and even some of the satyr) still remember the times when their empire nearly ruled the world without care for any of the “lesser” races. Of the trolls themselves enough has been said already. A half of the races with some sort of glorious past know and appreciate the conquest done by their ancestors, and it’s normal.
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How much time needs to have passed before your natives instead of colonisers?
All land is troll land.
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They worshipped the Lich King as a death god, but they do not become undead willingly. The worthy proved themselves and became Ymirjar, an upper caste of vrykul who were still alive. It was the failures and defeated that became Vargul, an existence of sheer dishonour.
As long as the cultural legacy of the original colonisers is maintained, celebrated and continued by the current inhabitants, I would say that the current inhabitants can still be considered colonisers. It’s not a matter of time, but how much cultural DNA connects the current inhabitants of the land to the colonisers who conquered it.
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ngl somehow you went and took a case of colonisers conquering another people and made it even worse by straying eerily close to blood and soil territory.
The Lich King recruited the new val’kyr from the vrykul shield-maidens, like the one in the Utgarde dungeon, which were purely undead. Same as with Drakuru in Zul’Drak, undeath was a reward for those who have proven themselves before him.
Care to expand on that statement and the logic behind it, if you’re going to be invoking the NASDAP out of nowhere?
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