Study the Indian caste system sometime and you’d understand why it’s exactly the opposite. The Night Elves if anything were even more stratified.
But in short relationships between castes… simply wasn’t done. and if discovered met with harsh punishments.
I dont recall anything about caste system, is more lile the highborne group that was close to azshara got influenced by her, but other highborne groups have seen to be quite chill.
But being better at magic granted you status, Illidan could climb the ladder to become a noble eventually I think?
Not really retconned more like “so, attract the damn demons. Do these demons have a death wish?”
At this point its more of a who cares, we are powerful enough to wipe out the Legion.
Learned another interesting fact.
Human brains don’t finish their development until about age 30, Female brains about three years earlier.
With that perspective, a century of maturation along a lifespan of 300 to 700 years, sounds like a bargain.
Essentially the highborne was powerful/noble families that were part of the same sect that performed eugenic breeding programs upon themselves to maximize magical potential, and then during Azshara she solidified them into a higher caste of society. She really enforced something that was kinda already there. And the rest of nelf society hated them for their decadence etc, although they still loved Azshara. Access to the well of eternity was a thing cut off from the lowborn, only allowed to the highborne for example, but most elves in the empire knew some amount arcane magic even if little.
Either way, you could not become highborne, it was something you were simply born into.
You could certainly get status by being good at magic/golden eyes, but not to the point of a highborne. The moonguard is specifically a group of highly skilled and trained lowborn that serve Azshara.
Ravencrest is a noble family for what the family did during a war vs the earthen, but it’s explicitly stated that they’re also not highborne.
First of all, the idea that marriages were banned in NE society is essentially head-canon. There is no evidence for it.
Also, in India, Marriage was prohibited. If you think this put a stop to all breeding you are fooling yourself. If you re referring to the genetic studies, they wouldn’t be able to detect interbreeding below a certain level.
Also, you are assuming zero inter-mobility between the NE castes. The presence of Illidan, and the fact that he rose to be in charge of other mages, say this is wrong.
Though perhaps the most interesting thing is that given immortal nature of the NEs, there is no “breeding”. Which goes back to my original point about Blizzard making NE immortal without anything implications of this.
The people who were around (and related) before the royalty and caste system was set up would have been around during it.
Thats pure speculation at best, headcanon at worst.
We have seen time and time again that the night elves built families, lost people to fights, and everything in between those 10 thousand years, they not dying of old age doesn’t mean they stayed locked in a time bubble.
Which is just another example of the Blizzard not thinking it through.
With a population that can’t die of old age, you only need to overcome accidental/unavoidable deaths to have a growing population and with the magic that Night Elves have that wouldn’t be hard to do.
Combine this with their zero-generations needed capacity to evolve/adapt to their environment and you have a race that should have fully overtaken the world. That they didn’t indicates some kind of population growth restricting mechanism is in place.
We dont have numbers to make any educated guess, we dont know how many Kaldorei made their bulk when they became immortal post WOTA, we don’t know how many of them existed during WC3, we dont know how big Kalimdor actually is, birthrates, death rates, It is all speculation.
The only thing we can say with any certainty is that a majority of them died at Teldrassil.
Unless that gets retconned too.
The majority of the Teldrassil population died, if Teldrassil was the majority of kaldorei population, I am not sure, i dont recall that ever being said, but I recall they managed to help every Gilnean and other races out of Teldrassil first, so no casualties of other races in the tree.
Andiun says it explicitly in the novella that after Teldrassil there were too few NEs left in the world.
It really does.
“Breeding”, as in changing the nature of a population, requires a generation (several practically) to replace the original generation.
The magic that suspended their aging probably also inhibited procreation to some degree. Those who moved far enough from the Tree i.e. the settlements in Silithus might have not been affected either way. They might have become mortal and resumed normal procreation while they were down there. Until they were wiped out by the bugs.
Malfurion regularly changes his physical form. That’s going to wreak havoc (DH pun for people) on his joints.
Arthritis… the number one scourge of Feral Druids.
Yeah but we have canon sources which clearly show elves reaching adulthood much earlier, around 18-20 years.
Edge of Night, the short story written by Dave Kosak has a flashback of Sylvanas’s past written into it that says the following:
Without warning, a vision filled her head. A memory. She found herself in a warm, sun-drenched bedroom. Shafts of golden sunlight spilled through the window, illuminating aimless motes of dust and casting ornate patterns on the floor. This was her room. A lifetime ago. She had not yet seen her twentieth autumn, yet already young Sylvanas was the most promising hunter in her family. She pulled on her thigh-high leather boots, carefully measuring the laces and decoratively tying them.
She had not yet seen her twentieth autumn, yet already young Sylvanas was the most promising hunter in her family.
But if that’s not enough, here’s another example written into the canon lore:
Valeera Sanguinar is described as ‘young’ by multiple people including Varian Wrynn. The Warcraft Comic, which remains canon, shows her as a child surviving in a world wracked by bandits and the Scourge, while her exact age is not specified, given that she appears as a fully grown adult in the events of Wrath of the Lich King, which is set 7 years after the Third War, she would need to have been around 12-13 years old when her parents were killed.
Taerenar Sunstrike, a blood elf Paladin that we are introduced to during the Cataclysm where he ventures with Gidwin Goldbraids alongside Fiona and her Caravan claimed that he ‘snuck into the Ghostlands to fight undead in his youth’ but that region did not earn its name until the Third War, which happened in Year 20.
While his age is, much like Valeera, not specified, he describes himself as young when we first meet him, so he would probably be in his early to mid-20s if he was a youth hunting undead in the Ghostlands since the events of Cataclysm happened 8 years after the Third War which gave the Ghostlands their name.
So no. I think it is very safe to claim that Elves mature at the same rate that humans do, they just live longer.
Plus the mentioned Illidan book that describes that an adult night elf look means someone is from 20 to thousands of years.
And it is also implied that the new druids of the flame that will be present in 10.2 are made of a lot of younger kaldorei that never were immortal, so post Hyjal born.
And the night elf heritage questline shows an adult kaldorei male that also stated to be born post WC3 events.
Arguably, Taerenar is far from mature. By elven standards he’s impulsive and childlike in his behavior.