Don’t reply to me if you’re going to strawman please.
Also where is his beard?
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First of all I don’t mind Dagran’s character. I like his nerdy approach when everyone else is worried about the end of the world. It’s nice that they didn’t turn him into Anduin 2.0 who worries about politics from a young age. He’s still a child and doesn’t need to be the center of attention. Let him help what he’s good at. But it would be cool if he got a cool moment. Maybe seeing Magni or Moira in danger will activate the powers of a shaman or a priest inside him.
Alleria got a lot of epic moments. We should have gotten some scenes where Dwarves showed their best side. You know, the race that’s the cover of this expansion.
On the topic of Dagran… all the derogatory phrases aside, reading the short story about him, it is pretty obvious that they are using him to deconstruct the racial stereotypes of dwarves. Considering the racial character of fantasy races is totally made up of these stereotypes, that’s not a good thing.
He is heavily contrasted with the rude, brash, hairy and overly masculine dwarven representatives, and controls them in the end with reason, scholarly knowledge and calculated manipulation for the good of all. And that is presented as the positive vision of the future for dwarfkind. I guess one can argue that the story was written from the perspective of the proud and protective mother, and thus not entirely a reflection of dev opinions, but well… that’s the story they explicitly chose to have told about dwarves. That’s not irrelevant.
In the game itself I found much less to be concerned about, though. I don’t think we needed a new nerd to spout exposition and make nerd jokes, since we already have tons of mages, dragons, gnomes, goblins, dwarves and elves that were already doing that, and the “teenage genius” trope is getting a bit tired for me, but frankly, Dagran could just have been replaced with pretty much any of them and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Even the plot around Magni wasn’t much changed by him being there, instead of just Moira. So I really don’t care. Might be they’ll use him to humanize dwarves more than they should in the future… But that’s the future.
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oh my, it’s even worse then I thought lmao. However, after the Gazlowe or whatever that goblin’s name story I shouldn’t be surprised. Cancer of modern dnd metastizes into wow, deconstructing everyone and turning them into hoomans.
Well, the story starts with:
Among all the great craggy, unfeeling boulders of our people, Dagran was always my flower.
For all the good it ever did him. Or me.
It is very much told through Moira’s eyes… but it isn’t really subtle about anything.
Yeah, not so subtle really, but this “narrative mask” can pass, I guess, for now. However, Gazlowe at least still acts as a goblin in-game, his good-aligned cooperative quirks are made as exactly that, quirks. He’s still a sneaky green rat, they’ve managed to find some sort of balance there.
Here’s hoping they’ll find it for Dagran too.
But that’s his character, in his core, he’s still a priest who prefers the word to the sword.
And for a good reason. He was thrown on the throne, had to fight in two wars, was then kidnapped and now needs to redefine himself and what he belives in. Now compare that to Varian, the perfect warrior, who won almost every fight, praised by everyone, who was blessed by gods and demigods, just to find death mere minutes after he experienced his first growth of character and started to show a personality that didn’t resemble a 90’s action hero.
Without weak moments, “strong” characters get boring in no time.
I replied to you, because you were talking about Anduin. There was nothing to “strawman”, since you didn’t have any arguments and just stated your personal opinion, which happens to be the usual “omg what a soyboy olol”-hot take, that I find incredibly childish.
I can relate to that, when I first saw his model I thought “White hair, glasses and no beard? Really?” - but then, when you think about it, what would be the point of another stereotypical dwarf character, when we already have Magni and 90% of the other dwarfs fulfill that role? Yes, it doesn’t fit the stereotype, but on the other end - just like with Anduin - it makes it very hard to predict what might happen to these characters.
Right now, I’m not sure when we’ll see Anduin on the Throne again or if he even returns to it (even though the Renilash-Vision implied years ago that he’ll lead the armies of the Light in that final battle). I also don’t see where Dagran fits in, especially, when he’s supposed to be King of Ironforge one day. Which… makes their stories interesting imho.
Again: Keep in mind that he’s still growing up; Anduin is also going through the self-discovery of adulthood right now and realizes that he needs to stop trying to follow in his father’s footsteps, so… give it time.
Which is dubious in itself. People flock to specific playable races for certain tropes and their biggest enthusiasts are not interested in seeing those stereotypes ‘deconstructed’ as it always ends up positioning such characters as better than their peers and more enlightened.
Final Fantasy XIV is going even more off of the deep end with that sort of thing, though it has even less racial lore in the first place and every settlement is basically a melting pot.
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The obvious point is the one I don’t like. Deconstruction of the stereotype, and thus the racial identity. WoW is not alone in progressively homogenizing fantasy races, since the idea of inborn racial character traits is seen as at least borderline racist in educated american culture.
So as far as I’m concerned… I just don’t think we needed him, when we already have Magni. I’d rather have some more stories about Magni and the rest.
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I agree that he wasn’t really a necessary character. I didn’t like the whole “Council of Three Hammers” thing in the first place and I’m not a big fan of Moira either. But due to the time that went by, I guess they had to do something with Dagran. They really have to be careful not to turn him into another Anduin. Intelligent characters who like peace talks and act rational aren’t really helpful when you want to keep war going - unless it’s no longer a morally grey Horde vs. Alliance story and you’ll focus on otherwordly external threats entirely.
Dagran could have been another Genn, someone on the Alliance side that acts on impulse and asks questions later. But I guess, before we see the Alliance misbehave, we’ll have playable Protoss in WoW (but, of course, still no Ogres). 
…not really, no. He’s a dwarf, and not yet 20. You don’t need to make him a relevant speaking role, just because he exists. They had to make him a genius to force any relevance onto him. There are hundreds of characters that could be relevant in Warcraft that aren’t given any spotlight. Dagran hasn’t gotten some spotlight because they had to do that, but because they wanted him there.
As I said, nothing wrong with it at the face value. As well as there’s nothing wrong in helping them along the way while you continue with the mission. But outright promising to save them or whatever? Like bruh, you are not some random hobo adventurer, you have your own people to save. And you are right, this is Anduin. I just after all these years still hope he will mature. And he is maturing, that’s why I was kinda caught off guard by this.
As for Varian, I can’t percieve him as anything but a Conan easter-egg. His death scene was awesome and epic tho.
Exactly. That’s why competent writers play inside and around fantasy racial stereotypes. Have you played NWN2? There was some certain Kelgar Ironfist, a stereotypical dwarf as it ever can be. But they played around his character, making him interesting within his racial role with all this becoming a monk and everything. It’s just one example of how it can be done. It’s quite hard tho.
Yeah. I just care for some reason, gotta speak out using rude words lol
yeah, and modern dnd-esque writers seems to not get it, which is so stupid and enfuriating
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The most logical thing that comes to mind is: "Well, there’s earthen in this expansion, so we should have Dwarves in it!" After including Magni, Moira, Bran and even Kurdran, maybe someone asked: “What about they baby?” 
But who knows, at least I’m curious what they have planned for him.
Well, maybe it was just an awkward way to show that Anduin still doesn’t judge by appearance and embodies the “Respect” virtue of the Light religion, even when he’s facing spidermonsters in a dark cave. 
For a while. I liked the first NWN and its expansions better. But you can’t really compare these games - Bioware always had outstanding storytelling and character building in their games, from the beginning. In WoW, the storytelling was more superficial.
We all do, otherwise we wouldn’t post here 
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Dagran has actually been one of my favorite characters to my surprise. They don’t overdo it with the nerdy aspect and he feels like a well balanced character. And I’m very curious to see where they take him in the future. He is still very much in the phase of growing up, and hopefully blizzard won’t try rush him into a leader position so soon after we just started really seeing him.
As for Moira, I think she is just a very protective, sometimes overprotective mother. If you consider where she’s come from that’s not too surprising, or new. She has been very protective of him since Cata. I never saw any real indication that she is trying to control and mold every part of him into someone she thinks should lead.
If anything, Dagran seems more then willing and able to go do his own thing. For good and for ill. He joins you for parts of the main quest as well as side quests. He even shows up in one of the Delves and joins you for that while getting some adventure lessons from Brann.
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Moira is a colossal P.O.S, the nuw writers massively rectonned her to make her yet another girlboss. Her original story is that she’s a complete entitled nepo baby and a narcissist. They then made a book to basically force into the plot that magni is a bad dad??? and tried to do a woe is me bit with her.
Let’s just clear this up, she married a man that killed members of her clan, out of spite, he was always the aggressor, was planning to invade her country murder her father and enslave her people. But go off on how good she is.
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Yes, Moira has always had a very dark personality, and I think that’s also why her story is very itneresting. But she isn’t evil
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She was completely fine with the concept of invading her homeland, killing her own father and enslaving her people…
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What the hell are you talking?
Neither if this applies to Moira.
Are you confusing her with Arthas, because that applies more to him than to moira?
She travelled to Ironforge with her entourage during the shattering, after magni became a diamond.
If that was intentionally or pure coincidence of her timing to claimin the throne, we don’t know.
She wasn’t really invading since she was Legitimate successor to the throne.
And tbh since magni was mean to her uts not surprising ahe ia a bit overprotective with dagran
No, she was on board with Dagran sr’s plans of invading ironforge, enslaving the other clans and murdering her own father. That was Dagrans plan when he kidnapped her and she was fine with that. Then she turned up leading the dark iron, the hated enemies of the other clans and demanded the throne of ironforge…
So in a way yeah she’s basically a really crappy entitled version of Arthas without any of the skills to back it up. All the positions of power she’s had are either from her father, or from sleeping her way to the top, she’s a vile character that they’re trying to parade around as noble and a good person, she’s evil AF
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