Let's break that down, then, shall we?
I wasn't aware Fandral had an intense, personal, obsessive hatred of Thrall. Seemed to me it was simply him doing his job, not out of any personal spite. The guy's a powerful shaman, Fandral works for an elemental lord aligned against the Earthen Ring. Why wouldn't he be a target?Similar to the above, this posits that a Mary Sue is someone who gets too much attention from the other characters, especially if their personality and actions don't seem to fully justify such strong reactions. It's important to note that this isn't confined to positive attention; if every single villain the Sue encounters develops an intense, personal, obsessive hatred of them, that qualifies too.
Plus, you have to take it with a grain of salt. Thrall has been Warcraft's poster boy since Warcraft III was released.
Untrue in Thrall's case. His critics (the unsympathetic) don't inherently have a hate for him. They bring up valid complaints and we as readers and Thrall as a character do not outright hate on them for that.In fact, most Sues by this definition combine both types of attention: they're loved by every sympathetic character they meet and hated by every unsympathetic character.
Nor do all of the sympathetic characters inherently love him. They have different levels of care for him, the majority of which are simply respect.
You'd have to point out where minor characters obsess over Thrall when they don't need to, to the point where it's distracting them from vital parts of their life. I've never remembered such.It's true that most fictional characters are designed to be charismatic, striking individuals who inspire strong reactions in the audience, but it's also true that in the real world, no matter how charismatic you are, most people you know just don't spend all their time thinking about you. It's been said that the best writers remember that every character, no matter how minor, is the hero of his or her own story — think of the anecdote about the actor who played the gravedigger in Hamlet and described the play as "a story about a gravedigger who meets a prince." Conversely, if every supporting character in a story seems to spend more time obsessing over the main character than they do worrying about their own lives, that main character is probably a Mary Sue by this theory.
Thrall has some very significant virtues, nor does the universe really revolve around him. Being center stage for a portion of one expansion's content does not make one the center of the universe and we can see that especially in Mists of Pandaria. He's been a shaman since Cataclysm... which had the primary focus of elements and elementals... which are things shaman deal with. In Mists, that's not really the core of the story and shaman Thrall doesn't need to show up for it... he's in the parts that are relevant to him and the parts where he is appropriate... i.e. the parts concerning Garrosh's increasing tyranny.How much more annoying is it when the character doesn't have any obvious virtues, and yet the universe still seems to revolve around them?