World Of Warcraft’s Latest ‘Plot Twist’ Shows Why Fans Are Frustrated With The Current Expansion

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t pay the absolute 100-percent closest attention to World of Warcraft lore despite playing and enjoying the game. There’s a lot going on! I don’t have time to do every quest or wrap my head around where every single character is at any given time, who’s friends or enemies with whom, and who all is related. But I can usually stay on top of the big story beats and main characters, and can give you a basic rundown of the plot of the current expansion including our current goals, allies, and major foes.

But if you ask me a single question about the Haranir, I will immediately fall asleep.

Who are the Haranir? Hell if I know. Okay, I exaggerate a bit, but not much. The Haranir are a new race introduced in the last expansion, The War Within, that look like a sort of nature-themed troll-elf hybrid and are thematically quite similar to night elves (more on that momentarily). They used to live on the surface of Azeroth in ancient times, but eventually felt a call from deep inside the earth and went down into the depths of it looking for the source. But when they got to the deepest “roots” of Azeroth, whatever was singing the “radiant song” they’d heard was gone. Even so, they stayed deep down, protecting the roots of the World Tree, with their elders forbidding the Haranir from emerging. Obviously, in The War Within, someone disobeys that rule for the first time ever, and that’s how we end up meeting the Haranir.

Now, I think that’s kind of a cool story. I like the fantasy of a people that worships something with total devotion, discovers irrefutable proof that the thing they worshipped has effed off somewhere, and then finds a new purpose. But this is about where my interest in the Haranir ends. They were cool for a few quests. I thought that maybe the expansion, which took place literally within Azeroth, would see us actually go down to their home in the roots and hang out with them, but that never happened. Okay, sure, whatever I guess. Moving on.

Except we didn’t. The Haranir have become a playable race in the current expansion, Midnight, alongside gaining a far more sizeable role in the overall story. Their home, Harandar, is an entire major zone, despite it having no strong geographical connection to the rest of Midnight‘s areas and, frankly, very little to do with the themes of the expansion. I definitely completed several questlines through that zone, but my recollection is they mostly consisted of a lot of lore dumping via cave paintings and something about a big crack in the ground that drove people insane. The climax of the zone, from what I recall, was essentially the Haranir agreeing to help us with our problems on the surface only very, very begrudgingly, and not to any great effect. Once I finished the quests in Harandar, I never went back except to pass through to the single raid boss in the zone, whose purpose in the story I could not tell you if you pointed a goblin gun at me. Midnight, after all, is about the giant horrible ball of darkness looming over Quel’Danas, and the encroachment of the void armies led by Xal’atath. Anything else is pretty incidental!

So why is the WoW community making post after post about the Haranir right now? It’s because of a recent lore dump in the latest patch, 12.1, where we learn that the Haranir believe themselves to be the shared ancestors of the trolls and elves. This is treated as a huge plot point for several major characters. And…okay? Yeah? It’s dropped as if it’s some massive lore revelation, but we’ve known the elves and trolls shared a common ancestor in WoW lore for a long time, and honestly if I had to take a stab at who it was with no further context, the Haranir make plenty of sense.

A lot of players are expressing irritation over this apparent revelation, but for different reasons. Some people are poring over existing lore, claiming that this retcons past details about other ancestral groups like the Dark Trolls. Others aren’t so much annoyed at the claim as they just don’t get why everyone in the WoW universe is acting like this is such a big deal when all sorts of random NPCs have mentioned the groups being related before—it’s weird to make it a big, central plot point like this.

Another, more serious complaint is that the Haranir are being used to effectively “solve” race relations in World of Warcraft, a long-running and tricky subject for a game fundamentally about different races doing harms of varying severities to one another across generations and struggling to break those cycles and work together toward common goals. After all, the Haranir just showed up on the scene canonically like, days ago. They have absolutely no idea what the elves, trolls, and everyone on the surface has been through. In the scene above, you can see Orweyna trying to smooth over, what, hundreds? thousands? of years of violence between trolls and elves by saying “Guys, it’s good, we’re all related!” Admittedly, dialogue with some characters after the fact makes it clear that the stance the game is taking is not that this is a magical fix for everything. But I do think it’s interesting that Zul’jan (the Amani troll in the scene above) is being framed as the bad guy here for rejecting it. Granted, Zul’jan is very much on a road to villainy at the moment for other reasons, but his feelings about his people being driven out of their home and massacred by a nation with significantly more military power and support than his are pretty valid!

But I think more than anything else, people are chafing at all this Haranir business not so much for any of the particulars of it, but primarily because it all just feels sort of…aimless? It’s weird that after the climactic finish of patch 12.0, with the Sunwell cleansed, Sylvanas’ incredible Tuxedo Mask-style return, and Xal’atath still lurking, we’re mucking around with these guys? The Haranir feel like an afterthought, like maybe something that should have been in The War Within but didn’t quite make it in time. The writing in Midnight overall hasn’t been as strong as what we experienced in The War Within, and the Haranir are one major example of that. I think the strong reaction against the Haranir is emblematic of a growing malaise among the WoW community brought about by years of anticlimax, of anticipation for larger plot moments and resolutions that are still nowhere in sight.

Forget the Haranir, man. Has anyone checked on that giant sword sticking out of Silithus lately?