2 Years Later

Lore Story Forum
41

I don’t think it’s that, and I don’t agree with their post.

Night Elves aren’t just salty because they’re not being worshipped, but because the faction got clumped in with another faction. Which, on its own can be problematic, but not necessarily badly handled. The Horde’s a lot of things jammed together, but it mostly works. Mostly.
The Night Elves got jammed in with the Human faction, and while they’re not a background race for Anduin/Varian/Jaina like most Alliance races, their role is arguably worse - they get their moments, but those moments have nearly all been “get victimized by the Horde so Varian can save them”.

If you do low level Night Elf quests, they’re pretty much all “these guys used to be our allies but they went crazy now kill 12 of them”.
And it brings up another point: why make a race whose only purpose is to suffer?
The most imaginative thing they can come up with is “what if we make them suffer more, but make it more extreme?!”
That’s just lazy.

Just because there’s reasons to be annoyed with Night Elf posters doesn’t mean they’re flat out wrong.

Edit: Also, I don’t think the empire comparison really works because the playable NEs are the ones who rebelled against that very same empire 10,000 years ago. I’m pretty sure that Azshara played a bigger role in carving out an Empire from the trolls than Malfurion or Tyrande. Whether you love or hate the race, it doesn’t make sense to clump those different factions all together, especially since some literally became new races like Satyrs and Naga.

14 Likes
42

Just to clarify, I don’t think NE players want to be worshipped, I just think that the themes and narrative construction of the Night Elves, from even before WoW, dooms them to never live up to their own fiction-internal expectations, which also betrays player expectations. I agree, they got pooped (need a word the censor likes) by being in the Alliance, they got pooped by having all their ancient allies turn on them, they got pooped taking a background role. We agree on all of that.

But all of that is a consequence of the narrative position they were written into from the WC3 days. In that original story, it didn’t matter so much because the other species coming to their rescue and banding together at Hyjal was part of a narrative that every player engaged with on all sides - they were never written to stand alone, they were written, with Tyrande as the avatar and figurehead, with glaring flaws that they worked out over the course of the WC3 story alongside others doing the same. But just like Orcish warmongering and Forsaken scourgeness, that all returned by necessity and archetypal/thematic destiny in WoW. Nelves just got it worst because their narrative function was always to be taken down a peg. But if you come into the story as a fan of them, which is reasonable, you end up with very different expectations… that the game can’t accommodate. WoW’s writers do not have the dexterity to find a more interesting way out of this bind than just retreading it. Retreads are kind of their shtick.

Keep in mind, as a final thought, that arguing that the Nelves can’t be compared to the Highborn because of in-fiction logistics kind of misses the point. My statement is made in a meta-narrative context, I’m not assigning blame or even agency to any fictional character or device, this is a comment on the structure of the text. And in that capacity, the Nelves got a double dose of cruddy writing because their WC3 story (re: third war) was about being a decadent empire in decline who find their feet again (all the males are literally sleeping and their racist high priestess almost gets them clapped out of paranoia, I mean, come on), but then when they get their flashback to the war of the ancients their themes are so well-entrenched that they are… a decadent empire getting clapped for their arrogance. And then we might the Nightborne who… are… uh…

Yeesh. Like I said, when you look at the story as a structure and examine things in terms of their narrative function, Nelves were always tightly packed pins at the end of a tragedy bowling alley.

Edit: As before, in light of perfectly reasonable concerns I will not be responding to replies from nelfposters, and we all know what nelfposter means.

13 Likes
43

Did you see what they did to Saurfang?

:pancakes:

1 Like
44

We got to look at him in HD a lot, so that’s something!

45

Not to point out the obvious, but the NEs did not rebel against Azshara because of what she did to the Trolls. There are living members within their ranks, including Tyrande and Malf, who lived very comfortably in the Empire she built upon their corpses. It also should be noted, that outside of the Horde (and only really within BfA), the NEs aren’t portrayed as weak by any metric; and are largely dealing with mistakes and shadows of their pasts.

The primary points of conflict outside of the Horde Faction have been: The Satyr’s (and Xavius); the Nightmare (which the NEs accidentally created); the Legion (where they are shown holding several lines solo); and the Firelands operating with a once Archdruid Staghelm who was out for revenge. In each of these instances, the NEs are shown struggling, but ultimately overcoming absurdly powerful forces … or those that should be natural kryptonite to them.

The only real exception to this is their conflicts with the Horde, which at its core has always been a resource war. Or, at least it should have been. And it does make some sense to some degree that the explosively growing and (more importanlty) adaptive Horde is quickly bridging the gap of power on Kalimdor that the NEs do almost nothing to maintain. While the NE culture has begun to change in other areas, their military is almost deliberately culturally stagnant.

6 Likes
46

Already told you that’s not me, but I don’t even mind at this point anymore since you seem so convined and want it to be true.

47

I agree. Maybe it was a community that was established prior to Azshara’s reign.

I think that the Nightborne may want to be involved. But their continued affliction with the horde wound greatly sour their reception. Not to mention that they have history working against them too. It wouldn’t be a total rejection but I don’t see a close bond either.

2 Likes
48

You also said Blizzard stated that Sylvanas is getting redeemed, which wasn’t true.

:pancakes:

49

I didn’t have time to really address this beforehand because I had work. They lived in Teldrassil for all of 15-20 years. Teldrassil was a monument to their vanity and arrogance, and ultimately their failure. Because the goal was to become immortal again iirc. Teldrassil has as much ties to their identity as any other tree. This one was just bigger.

Kalimdor is their homeland, and the Greater Hyjal region is where they originate from. Darnassus is the nice summer home they built just off the coast. No race has really come out of WoW’s history with all of their identity in tact… except for the races that get zero screen time.

Oh, I understand that completely. It was one of my favorite zones and one of my favorite cities. It was mildly upsetting to see it go. But I was a bit preoccupied with the stupidity that was the War of Thorns in general. But it can still be accessed.

Blizzard likes to hit the same notes. Yes. It is lazy. This time they decided to hit two at once.

“What if the Horde was misused and manipulated into attacking people again?”
“How can we make NE’s more miserable outside of ignoring them?”
It’s like the whole Reese’s candy thing, about getting chocolate in their peanut butter.

… And I’m oh so glad people are still using all of this as an excuse to act like pricks on the internet.

10 Likes
50

We should have done more to the night elves. In fact we should have not let any of them survive. (Jk although i feel bad for night elf players right now tbh)

51

Varain wouldn’t have stupidly rushed into Lorderon. He would have went straight for Orgrimmar with Sylvanas thinking Lorderon was his target.

This is fair. The internal faction expectation is huge. You don’t expect to be superior to the rest but at least not as the constant victim, or more often the victim than the others in the faction. I don’t think anyone expects the Night Elves to remain in their exact W3 narrative, the end of the gane pretty much established that. But at the same time a lot of what made them unique has been eroded away or not featured at all.

3 Likes
52

Wouldn’t that have allowed Sylvanas to go straight for Stormwind? Sylvanas has never cared about Orgrimmar.

:pancakes:

53

It was true though. Yes they haven’t said that she’s getting redeemed 1:1, but they have said that she isn’t evil, won’t die, won’t be a raid boss and that her haters will change their minds about her when she reveals her plan.

54

Except it isn’t. We have the quote posted in this thread that you are interpreting and it says none of that.

As stated in a different thread, you’re being over dramatic and misrepresenting things. And it’s practically beat for beat with another well known NEFPA.

:pancakes:

3 Likes
55

How? She’s evacuating the entire city in preparation for an attack with a force standing by. An assault on Orgrimmar would send ripple effects through the whole faction, you honestly think she wouldn’t care?

56

(Commentary): I mean… yes? Her goal was never the welfare of the Horde. It was to kill as much as possible. Makes you wonder why she evacuated her own city to begin with.

2 Likes
57

To be fair, Sylvanas (banshee queen) had only ever really been shown to care about 2 things; Herself and blighting Stormwind to raise its people into undeath.

:pancakes:

58

Can you imagine if sylvanas gets kerrigan’ed? personally ill have a laughing fit and i think darana would implode with smugness.

gd will explode.

59

It’s funny, because I think they both want and don’t want it to happen.

On the one hand, they’d be right and will rub it in people’s noses for a while.

On the other hand, it means the story went in a direction they, supposedly, didn’t want it to.

:pancakes:

3 Likes
60

True. But I doubt she’d want to be on the kidding side or even outsmarted in the process. She’d need that army to keep the killing going and if the war ended because Orgrimmar got hit by surprise then she gave to find a war to regroup on her own. The horde like the Forsaken are “arrows in the quiver”. What does she do without those arrows?

It really does. Maybe she needed to keep up appearances.

But she can’t evacuate Undercity, Defend Orgrimmar, and hit Stormwind all at the same time.

1 Like