i’m not gonna talk about everything that was changed in the movie i just want to talk about the most outstanding thing w/ relation to garona and why she is half-human rather than half-draenei (bc it’s not just her being unaware, it is very carefully implied the exact reasons as to why she’s human) other than the fact that she was meant to serve as a connection between the orcs and humans.
so, in the film medivh exhausts himself placing a barrier of lightning between the gul’dan-aligned orcs and humans after they ambushed the meeting between durotan and king llana which results in the death of lothar’s son and it’s just this whole sad deal but medivh got knocked out from the physical exertion anyway and couldn’t do anything bc the dude is in some not great shape. so garona and baby khadgar take him back to karazhan.
khadgar leaves... for some reason, idk, can’t recall, and leaves garona to watch over him. garona and medivh have a chat about how garona is terrified lothar will hate her after what happened to his son as she is the one who pushed for the meeting between king llane and durotan. he kind of teases her about how lothar would be a good mate for an orc and she says she is no orc, but no human either.
medivh begins to explain how he always struggled to fit in with those he considered kin and traveled far in seek of both knowledge and that connection. he tells garona that eventually he found a noble people and a woman who loved him despite him being who he was. garona just seems generally confused and asks if he left his mate, to which he urges her to find lothar. as he’s forming the portal, he has her hold on to...basically magical energy in the shape of the flower and tells her this is his gift to her. she goes to see lothar and then great googly moogly it all goes to shit (not bc of that, but just in general because medivh goes all dark side.)
do you get where i’m getting at. maybe not lets continue.
earlier in the movie lothar, garona, and khadgar have a talk around the fire where they poke some fun at khadgar, garona says he wishes to lie with her but he would not survive the ordeal. humans have weak bones. lothar remarks that she doesn’t look much different from them and wonders how she survived. she replies that broken bones grow back stronger, alluding to her previous status as gul’dan’s slave. she talks about how her mother was burned alive for having given birth to her and that gul’dan gave garona her mother’s tusk to remember her. a gift from her mother, in a sense.
(less important to this, but khadgar then talks about how he was given to the kirin tor when he was six by his parents and has not seen any of his family since. lothar cries. i am just now realizing how similar these three are and how much i appreciate their friendship. probably my new ot3 i’m not going to lie? they all know too well what it’s like to have no one.)
basically, what i’m trying to get at, and what i believe the film is getting at is that medivh is meant to be garona’s father. which is really weird considering their relationship in game lore but there’s nothing weird about it in the movie? that interaction above is all they have directly.
i feel this is also held up by medivh’s last words to khadgar; “it’s the loneliness that makes us weak, khadgar.”
so, basically like: medivh opened the dark portal from azeroth because he was doomed to be a fuck up, met the orcs and by extension garona’s mother, fell in love, then bailed because he kind of had to.