Originally Posted by
Super Dickmann
The issue with that reading is that the Thrall setup wasn't that. The Thrall-era orcs didn't have distinct clans in any sense that the story acknowledged. The only ones at the time of Vanilla were the Frostwolves - which were added in WC3 and essentially the generic Thrall orc anyway, the Shattered Hand, which were some weird multiracial rogue organisation that badly wanted to be SI:7 but didn't go anywhere and the Warsong, which were solid. Reuniting the clans would require the clans to be pertinent to the Horde, but the narrative never pretended this to be the case. Most of the Clans are absent in WC3, the Blackrock are always hostile and there's no actual weight to the Horde quests going after the Dark Horde - you're just killing some random dude in Rend, making no effort to go after his clan and the like. In trying to escape the stereotype of a fantasy orc it was neutered and weak, functional in the RTS because of its limited screentime and clear arc but incapable of serving a long-term two faction narrative. Slowly readding the earlier orcish elements and recontextualizing everything from Thrall's relation to the orcish people to Durotar as an actual livable area breathed life into the main Horde race where before it was the third wheel to WC3's SC1 reenactment.
The other issue with the WC3 Horde as a long-term storytelling basis is in your last sentence. Yes, trolls are great, I love trolls, but the Darkspear's founding gimmick, their only distinguishing gimmick in fact is that they're not like those other girls trolls. They don't practice cannibalism or blood sacrifice, their appeasement of spirits is long term. Sen'jin wasn't a character and neither was Vol'jin until Cataclysm, because then he was opposite Garrosh and the Darkspear and orcish goals were finally apart. The trolls and tauren in WC3 were never more than an addendum to the Thrall-era orcs as what was essentially underdeveloped versions of them with a different aesthetic and so unsuited to carrying on any kind of narrative on their own. They became their own players in Cataclysm when the orcs regained enough of their cumulative WC2 era characterization that they could exist apart from the orcs.