#skymagpie

I just had to share this because I'm losing my mind over how beautiful this piece is!!

it makes me DISSOLVE whenever i remember one of the biggest reasons he asked lothar to recruit turalyon, was because turalyon was his age and khadgar WANTED A FRIEND 😭

Blizzard doesn't like elaborating on death knights ever and often times forgets nearly every aspect of death knights, so there isn't exactly this clear and concretely stated event for this, it's more of just "this is how it has to be because that's the rules of the world they made."

Because there's Domination between The Lich King -> Subordinates and there Domination between Death Knights -> "lesser"-intelligent undead (specifically thinking of Lurid, Thassarian's skeleton here), it's basically necessity to extrapolate that Domination is enforced by hierarchy, and how it makes no sense that it would be only The Lich King that would Dominating everyone, especially because some death knights were under Kel'thuzad's command (some specifically ONLY under Kel'thuzad's command, such as the Four Horsemen), and Kel'thuzad has a wide berth of Domination skills and he consistently does it to the living in all three of his raid fights.

Per the Chronicles, Darion was the right hand of the Lich King, which makes him out to be in a position equal to Kel'thuzad. That is a position that I doubt he could have and maintain without a power level equal to Kel'thuzad, and as such, Darion had double the health as every racial leader in Wrath of the Lich King. And, as such, with Domination working on a hierarchy, and Darion having control of an entire citadel and those who work out of it, it is far more likely that Darion was personally enforcing the Domination of the death knights.

That's not to reduce the role The Lich King plays, as he is constantly whispering in your ear in the Death Knight starting zone, but there's no way that he has the time to micromanage every ghoul when he has an army with tens if not hundreds of thousands of undead that needs to be reined in.

In the Death Knight manga, we see Thassarian's point of view of the second Battle of Light's Hope, where he is very much still in the position of "The Lich King is good" while Darion and The Lich King fight. Considering how Darion unwaveringly pledges all his knights and everything turns out fine from this without any discussion between the knights, the most simple answer is that Darion manually freed them all and was vehemently keeping them free. From We Ride Forth:

Thassarian's questline in WOTLK also sheds some light on this, as The Lich King says this upon seeing him:

this sentence makes no sense if The Lich King still had some control over the knights, and the death knights largely aren't capable of resisting him, considering that even Darion, the strongest death knight period, without his righteous anger, can't stop a Bolvar who has never exercised this power from Dominating his body, again from We Ride Forth.

They also probably think they’re really clever for using the most obvious (lazy) foreshadowing in the world in the last two expansions. “Ooooh see where we made him say he’s old and gonna die soon??? Well he did!!”

But I’m kind of assuming it’s a fakeout situation due to how vague it is. There’s no word of a big death scene where we see him die die in the cinematic or anything.

OWNING CATS??? Yeah the two genders, owning cats and owning dogs...wow people really out here with the coldest takes it will stop global warming

i went and found that post since you doubted me