Hot take: Haranir are dark trolls.
Blizz wanted initially to use Dark Trolls underground for the expansion but felt it would be redundant with Zandalar and Amani. So they added Haranir
Haranir male even uses the Zandalar skeleton as you can see from their standing animation
I doubt it. We have High, Void, and Blood Elves taking center stage in this expansion across Quel'thalas and Voidstorm. Having Amani and Dark Trolls across two separate zones would have enhanced the theme, and made Harandar's inclusion more thematically fitting, after they ripped it out of TWW alpha and stitched it onto Midnight.
In the beta, there was a book that detailed the origins of the Haranir race, but it's no longer in the game. It suggests that the Dark Trolls branched off into two different races. One group settled around the Well of Eternity and became the Night Elves, the other group followed the Radiant Song underground and became the Haranir. It never became canon, but it shows an early draft of an idea Blizzard had.
High Elves were not transformed by the Sunwell. This is even more crucial with the Skyborne than it was in the past. The Chronicles made it clear that their appearance changed because they had lacked a powerful source of magic for thousand of years. They became smaller and weaker, and their skin changed color. It seems to be a natural process for Highborne who didn't have access to some kind of magical source. A similar process changed the Skyborne.
Okay but why does the Skyborne need to stand like a blood elf all sassy and slanted? Did losing the moon well lose them the power of good posture or maybe blizzard just copy pasted blood elves
The -dorei part of each elf subspecies’ name for themselves translates to “born of” or “child of”. The way it’s written in Common is just supposed to be a standardized translation.
You could probably call Night Elves Starborne* if you wanted to, and that’s why the song Lament of the Highborne is called that despite it being a High/Blood Elf song.
According to the Haranir, this is true. From what we have seen, the Haranir magic we used to see the trolls and elves descending from the Haranir cannot lie, so this must be true.
But a Blizzard employee then came out and said "you can't be sure everything you saw was true" so idk, lol.
The only reason the link to the troll exists is because Orwenya makes the conjecture, that, because they can see Amani past events with their lore magic, they must be related, but there isnt really much objective truth.
Incidentally, Magical Candid Camera of your ancestors to directly move the plot along without all that pesky dialogue and other writing bullshit has never marked a downturn in the quality of a franchise. /s
It's become popular in the fandom to claim that the Haranir were the first race on Azeroth, but the game hasn't actually confirmed that. We only know that they all share the same ancestry, and we don't know what that original race was. People use the term "proto-Haranir," but it could just as well refer to proto-trolls.
The Haranir's first campaign mentions that they were hiding from Freya. Later, some of them followed the song underground and became the Haranir, while others followed the stars and became the Dark Trolls/Night Elves.
Zandalar Haranir and Dark Trolls might have all existed at the same time
Like how Night Elf HighBorne and High Elf existance sort of overlap at times. Theres small leftover groups of precursors, so it can be hard to tell what the flow of evolution really is
Trolls literally only have 1 "race" to choose from lol and I am not wanting a new race I want customization and more muscular and upright trolls like Zul'jin from HOTS.
This chart is wrong at the start. Correct order is:
Haranir>Zandalari>Night elf.
Them showing Trolls and Elves side by side is a cinematic storytelling aspect and in an effort to keep it short, it is a community misunderstanding that they separated into two distinct lines.
Also wrong, the Haranir have the same predecessors as the trolls, Owenya or whoever gave us that cutscene is an unreliable narrator and tells the tale from her perspective.
From lore we take that they all go back to a common ancestor which is not the nowadays Haranir.
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u/Ungestuem 1h ago
Okay I See: All eleves are mutated Trolls.