2 Years Later

Lore Story Forum
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Its seems you still have hope for the story and are interested in the possible future plots that could be planned after what happened and im glad that at least someone is enjoying themselves.

Look, for me its not feasible to get emotionally invested any more into any story in regards to my faction, i could maybe appreciate it from an outsider’s perspective just as i can see the plot of the horde’s narrative mainly as an alliance player, however after the last expansion i will never be immersed in the story as i was before, i will never believe “for the alliance!” from the bottom of my heart, I believe this game’s story has marched on and is just not for me anymore.

I began to play alliance since TBC and have enjoyed being a fan of the faction, for me Teldrassil burning was the event horizon, like in the case of black hole once you go past that there is no going back, your escape route is in the past, space bends in a way you can never escape, this is the same no matter what they do, no matter if the new stories can be interesting i cant get invested on as i was before.

You may think im overdramatic but whats the point in roleplaying in a story if you’re not going to get really invested on it? Vengeance is… just the compromise i would have to keep myself invested in the story of my faction, but as you can tell ive accepted that is not happening and im trying to enjoy wow for what it is now.

Lucky for me (or not) shadowlands is mostly somewhere else and we see little about the factions so i can still appreciate the stories each afterlives for what they are.

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(Clarification): What I meant by the speculated storyline of other Night Elven settlements, making contact, exploring their culture, etc… was not to create a new culture but to essentially place a magnifying lense over the various aspects of what makes up the collective Night Elven culture.

(Speculation): For example, let’s say there is a militant settlement of Night Elves on some distant landmass. They fight as the sentinels, with the tactics of the sentinels, the skills of the sentinels, the armaments of the sentinels. They can easily join the existing Sentinels, but for us as players, we have an opportunity to see not only the varying ranks and chain of command and tactics on a far more intimate scale, but also reconnect to that savagery from WC3.

(Speculation): Then, maybe there’s another settlement of Night Elves, one that is primarily Druidic. They have their own sacred forest, something like Ashenvale or Val’sharrah, but on steroids. The Wild Gods they commune with and learn from are actively a part of their society and culture (this might even enable new Druid form options for Night Elves). We see how this group functions. More importantly, perhaps we see how their devotion to nature supersedes their concern for themselves. This could be a vital window of opportunity for characters like Tyrande and Malfurion to see how they themselves might have gone too far with the Cenarion Circle, and why characters like Leyara not only existed, but ever amassed the kind of following they had.

(Speculation): Then we see other settlements. Maybe there’s an underground society of Wardens who devote themselves to their view of justice, who have prisoners of various races on this other continent, who are seen as these jailers or the worst of the worst, and how their duty is sacred and inviolate to them. Maeiv encounters them with Tyrande, see’s their zeal and discipline and perhaps that they haven’t been compromised by their emotions. Maybe she decides to learn from them, and they in turn see the ultimate Warden and want to learn from her as well.

(Speculative): Maybe there’s a settlement of Highborne who basically have a society that focuses more on knowledge rather than power, and serve as advisors and councilors to various other settlements, collecting and storage knowledge in a vast library. It’d be a chance for Highborne among the Kaldorei to see a vital service they can provide their people, a way to better fit into society.

(Commentary): I do think it’s a chance to rebuild what has been lost by not only getting in touch with the roots of the Night Elves, but also expanding on it vastly, building a powerful narrative, and especially in bringing in new characters. Say what you will about our modern writers, but when they’re allowed to make new characters rather than write pre-existing ones, they tend to do either okay, or very good.

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23

To be fair, that tree wasn’t supposed to really be there anyway.

This is a section of the forum where people who play the game can discuss the over all story. Playing on particular faction or race means nothing and gives no special privileges one way or the other.

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It did hold some nostalgia value though which I can understand. I’d feel the same if they suddenly decided to nuke all of Mulgore. Plus all the people who died is pretty tragic in itself.

That being said though, if Fandral Staghelm can grow a tree to reclaim their lost immortality then Malfurion Stormrage would be able to do it too just to create a new home.

If they committed they could likely get a new tree up and running faster than Lordaeron could be cleaned of Blight.

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25

I play night elves.

Y’all are worse than the “Garrosh did nothing wrong” crowd back in MoP. We get it, the game hates your race. Just like every other race. The players aren’t the ones who make the story.

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We should all be glad Varian died in Legion or else he personally would have retaken Darkshore.

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Outside of the mechanical element, isn’t part of this due to the general decline and end of “The Long Vigil”; and subsequently the race’s immortality? They essentially lived for 10k years guarding the second WoE. So much of their culture in some way revolves around both it and the once timeless nature of that task. Now time is moving a whole lot faster for them.

Though that could be the ravings of a crazy person who genuinely doesn’t believe, considering the context, that the Blessings (either of Nord or Teld) were meant as rewards for the NEs in any way. But more the Aspects feeling they needed to help clean up Kaldorei messes, just as they had with the WotA. The fact that the NEs benefited from that is irrelevant. They weren’t prizes.

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The Night Elf drama queens of this forum will give you tales of woe and deliberate persecution of Night Elf players by Blizzard as if it’s conceivable that a game company would deliberately take on a plan to intentionally piss off a significant segment of it’s player base.

If you’ve skipped BFA, all I can suggest is that you read what you will on the onsite novellas or the novels to pick up as much of the story as you care to, watch the cinematic and the shorts and decide on your own if you want to pick up the story in Shadowlands or not.

It’s not like there isn’t other games out there if you don;t feel motivated to move forward.

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Imagine a Darkshore Warfront that functions more like the Arathi one, with alternating forces and commanders.

A Little Patience 2, Varian claims the Valkyr kill, and two out of the three commanders for the Warfront are human and stormwind forces.

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Oh man, and then it all caps it off with Elune choosing Varian as her champion, just like Goldrinn did. Tyrande is all mad and doing her ritual, and then a massive beam of light rains down and lifts … King Chin three feet to her left up into the Air and makes him the Legendary Night Warrior. Tyrande looks up in rage and confusion, only to see written in the stars “Patience Tyrande”.

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I’m looking forward to Shadowlands simply for the rather minimal levels Horde vs Alliance drama the expansion seems to have. The only difference I’ve seen so far is Tyrande yells at the Horde player. Big deal.

That alone at least makes it worth a look.

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32

Night Elves still get their black eyes customization, but only because King Chynn chooses to share the power.

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I’ve been mulling over a thought for a bit now that the reason Teldrassil is so resonant, and produces such relentless anguish, is that it serves as the culmination of a long process - the inevitable denial of the Night Elf racial supremacy fantasy.

There’s something very enticing about the idea of this immortal, ancient, self-sufficient, divinely blessed, physically dominant, magically wise species. They were their own faction in WC3, and they’ve got a lot of lore pumping them up as these juggernauts of military, magic and culture. They beat the legion, the a’quir, the trolls… you name it, Nelves dunked on it.

Now, for anyone who has played WC3, the whole point of setting them up on such a high horse was to knock them right off it. Tyrande being poked off her perch was the point. But if you only look at it in a purely aesthetic sense, which WoW encourages, the narrative purpose of the Night Elves’ many blessings fades from a cautionary metaphor into pure hype. But that hype can never be cashed in, WoW’s story has no place for ‘Nelves As Advertised’. If you go looking for them you end up doing some rather grim accounting of how they aren’t living up to their incredible hype, and in fact kind of suck relative to their marketing.

Of course, that difference was the entire point. They thought of themselves as those who broke free of a decadent and corrupt precursor, only to end up as the same thing, resting on their laurels. That self conception ran face-first into a warsong axe and they spend the story recovering.

The point of ‘Ozymandias’, for comparison, wasn’t to think “wow this guy was really cool, sweet statue my man”. But if you were playing an MMO about peoples from old poems (for some reason) and the game told you all about how there was this sweet civilization that made the mighty of other peoples look on in despair, you might fall into that false understanding of what Ozy’s glamor stood for.

Night elves, within the narrative, were built. to. fall. They are a line of shining, purple dominoes, proud of how closely they can stand. It’s not exactly subtle. But… if you don’t approach them through that lens, such as if you have engaged them through a medium like WoW where there is meant to be a sense of equivalence and equal moral stakes, this doesn’t work. The format means that those metaphorical trappings get pulled away and the metaphorical becomes ‘material’.

Teldrassil broke a lot of brains because it was a stark adjudication that the Nelf self-conception as a superior people, unfairly held back, was never going to materialize. The glorious, implicit promise that they’d one day sweep clear the board in moonfire can never come true. If you’d invested personally in that, it’s easy to see why Teldrassil is such a monumental calamity, even though the story itself spent an unwholesome amount of time showering glory, heroism and pathos on the Nelves.

For my own health, I will not be responding to nelfposter (you know what I mean by this) replies to this post.

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Doing the scenario gives that customisation to all night elf characters for the account during BFA, but I think it became a standard option in Shadowlands along with the Teldrassil scarring.

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I agree.

After the Sundering, and the exile of the Highborn, and the way they were mean to Orcs in WC 3… as well as their ties to Fandral and the Old God machinations that spawned Teldrassil…

Night Elves do need redemption for their misdeeds. They are getting a tiny bit of blow back in relation to the trauma they have caused to Azeroth. Maybe if they patiently seek the redemption you suggest, they will stop suffering the consequences of their hubris.

You are level 10 with less than 100 achievement points. I wonder what such a Forum Posting Alt would consider to actually be a Night Elf Player, when anyone could create a new Night Elf and get to level 20, and be more of a Night Elf Player than your posting Alt.

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You’re not gonna make a lot of friends with that post I’m afraid, but … yeah …at least with some of the NE posters on here a lot of their ways of getting their “redemption” really do come off as rather arbitrary means to “reassert their dominence”. Like, it may just be a vocal minority, but seriously there does seem to be this expectation that the NEs alone must always be portrayed as being more powerful than the Kalimdor Horde at the very least; if not the entirety of the Horde faction as a whole. Which … is increasingly arbitrary.

I have no doubt that the entire Alliance could defeat and even destroy the Horde. The only reason they didn’t was that in their weakened state by 8.2.5 it seemed like the collateral damage it would incur wasn’t seen as worth it. I am far less convinced the NEs alone (or even with the Worgen) could do it anymore (they once absolutely could). Unless you’re using the Wild Gods, who have never in their history involved themselves in political conflicts between mortal races.

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Reading along, nodding. I sympathize. Blizzard really played a rotten trick on you…

Well, there went the sympathy.

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38

Everybody but humans and orcs got screwed over in BfA.

Night Elves: Genocide, crappy war front, largely ignored after genocide, absolute dead end after thought.

Draenei/LFD: Sorry we forgot about your space fortress. Def can’t use it, not the story we wanted. Also no Draenei forces helping defend Darkshore.

Gnomes/Mechagnomes: King is half dead, find out your cousins live in the dump, turn king into diaper baby.

Dwarves: uhhh, I guess dark iron are playable now? Got ignored.

Worgen: Overshadowed by Night Elves who themselves were pretty much ignored after xyz horrible things.

Void Elves: Void communist magister got angry at Gallywix once. That’s about it for memorable moments.

Kul Tiran: WOW Jaina. She’s just lordaeron with an achor tattoo’ed on the front. Even the main place we live and quest takes a back seat narrative to stormwind and orgrimmar

Tauren: Press ganged into a war they didn’t want. Their leader stood by and contributed troops to a massive bloody feud but only considered treason when Sylvanas tortured a random human sunk in the ocean for 20 years??? Like what? Thanks Baine, share another horn why don’t you.

Darkspear Troll: Hey, your leader died a while ago and someone whispered to him. Unimportant really. Focus on your patron god as he deals with fancy new trolls who are a plot contrivance to push this “morally grey” idiocy. Everything about your patrol god and core story line goes to the new trolls… but don’t worry you got “zappy boy”.

Blood Elf: “haha arthas is bad and the alliance (Read: Garithos) treated us poorly so we’re literally going to mirror exactly what arthas did to us to someone else and not have a problem with it” I guess them standing vehemently against necromancers sort of went out the window when they still stayed loyal after Sylvanas plagued and raised Horde soldiers caught outside the gate. This is a point for all the Horde, but specifically the Blood Elves. Huh, weird.

Forsaken: You lost your free will, you lost a leader, you lost your “morals” in imposing on someone else’s free will. I guess Lillian Voss’ whole thing about hating Necromancer’s and hunting them down doesn’t count if she considers them friends. And now you have Calia who should’ve remained alive and not some quasi undead thing that’s going to further butcher the forsaken story. What a mess.

Nightborne: “we don’t want to enter the world as conquerors!!!” Said thalyssra before getting mad at Tyrande and joining the genocide faction and having no issue with it. At least their leader is getting with Lor’themar.

HMT: Pretty much the same as the Tauren, just more largely ignored.

Zandalari: Took over Darkspear storylines, had their king killed in the same stupid fashion as Teldrassil, but with way less importance simply so we could have girlboss Talanji take over. Still took a back seat to Org politics.

Goblins: Just came out looking greedier with less of a reason for literally anybody to trust them. Gallywix throwing the world under the bus for a few $$$ just makes him look cheap and stupid. The Earthen Ring and Cenarion Circle both have told the factions the cost of mining azerite and yet… the goblins are the worst offenders of this. It’s not even comical greed at this point, it’s just stupid. “Stop doing that, the world is literally going to die.” “Haha money printer go brrrr”.

Pandas: what development other than they exist?

Everybody got shafted in BfA except for the NUMEROUS cinematic we got outlining how sad and tired humans are, and how noble orcs can still be!!!

Awful. I can’t wait for SL to depress me further.

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39

You guys killed a Val’kyr and won Darkshore. It’s all evened out!

Bleh. How sad is that. Imagine being such a one dimensional culture.

You guys should learn to be more like Ogres. Ogres have layers.

You should go to the moon. I heard you have, like, a god there or something.

To be fair, if it wasn’t intentional, then it was STAGGERINGLY incompetent,

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I knew when they delayed Shadowlands it would mean 10 or 12 more story forum threads about Teldrassil.

Originally I wanted Blizzard to retcon Teldrassil to make it like it never happened, but now I’ve grown rather fond of the whining Night Elf alts, I think me and my Plaguebat want you all to stick around for a few more years whining about the same topic incessantly. It will be like Taurajo only more petulant.

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