Fel is both corruptive & addictive.
The usage of the fel-crystals to power their city had given off a radiation that perpetuated throughout the city and gave denizens within its vicinity an emerald hue in their eyes due to such radiation — whether or not they fed from its power.
Lore-wise speaking, there could had been Alliance ‘High Elves’ who were around fel energies in Outland who got green fel eyes.
Keep in mind, Silvermoon was crafted by magic itself.
It’d make sense to have forms of magical energy to sustain the architectural pillars of the kingdom after the fall of the Sunwell.
Oh no, that I agree with. Such is seen with Kael’Thas experiments with siphoning the twisting nether itself, as a substitute for other forms of power.
They tapped into various sources of magic – However caution was advised & more common methods were pressed – as per Rommath’s bent teachings to the original.
I’d argue it’s a last-resort.
As mentioned – Fel is highly addictive. Those who over-indulged into the Fel became Felblood Elves, and those who over-indulged period had become wretched.
As stated though both by yourself and others – Blizz tend to be a bit messy with their own lore & unfocussed to the schemes, deeper meanings and connections to their own stories.
Personally I think the lore added for siphoning from other magics was a wise one, given you could argue (speculatively) that it was to prevent their people going full-throttle into the fel — or simply becoming attached to its power.
I acknowledged all three of your examples and even allowed for more. The point you’ve missed - the rule - is that “draining magic from demons is by no means characteristic of blood elves in general.” The few blood elves who drain magic from demons would therefore be exceptions to that rule.
It’s rather poor form to debate me on an article you’ve not even bothered reading. Nowhere in the encyclopedia is the eye colour shift mentioned, nor is its purpose to explain away the visual differences between H and B elves, not even in the section dedicated to differences between the H and B elves.
I don’t think you understand how this works. If you don’t acknowledge the encyclopedia’s validity, you have to disprove it. I don’t believe the NPCs you’ve sifted the wiki to produce quite manage that.
That’s really not the angle Chronicles and its beefy “why the blood elves turned against Kael’thas” subplot took, but clearly I’m not going to change your mind throwing any more passages at you.
Don’t be a weasel, now. It’s not vague. “Draining magic from small mana-bearing vermin is a far cry from draining magic from demons.” What mental pole vault took you from that to “the small mana-bearing vermin were demonic”?
Kael’s troops on Outland were aware of his pact with demons and quaffing down fel juice. Kael’s citizens on Azeroth were unaware of his pact with demons and generally weren’t quaffing down fel juice. That is, or was, a pretty significant distinction.
The Magisters used fel magic to rebuild their city. That’s what those spooky green crystals were for. By and large, however, they weren’t eating the stuff. That was the distinction we were given.
I feel like this is the heart of our disagreement. You believe the blood elves were completely indiscriminate in their magical appetites and drained everything from mana wyrms to demons. But they did discriminate - the better part of Silvermoon’s faction stuck to draining “mana-bearing vermin” and mundane mana crystals because they weren’t down with fel.
Do you love this word or owe it money? Where was it ever stated that the Sunfury, or even Kael himself, “gorged” themselves on fel magic? According to Chronicles, Kael “very cautiously” consumed “small portions” of fel that rotted his brain incrementally. He was already a nutcase by the time KJ upped his dosage.
No, my “idea” was that despite informing their aesthetic in TBC, the blood elves’ relationship with fel magic was both vague and contradictory, and went bizarrely unacknowledged in their questing zones, to the point where Blizzard’s CDev department twice clarified the issue. We’re only having this discussion in the first place because the topic is so inconsistent they retconned it again.
…not characteristic of blood elves in general… …not characteristic of blood elves in general… …not characteristic of blood elves in general…
Well, what would change? The only mention of fel in the entirety of Quel’Thalas is in Duskwither Spire, where a disgraced magister relates his failed attempts to purify it for consumption… only to conclude that even purified, it’s an unfit supplement to the elves’ arcane diet. Kind of a weird sentiment if they were all eating it raw on the regular, eh?
I’m very sorry you don’t like the TBC storyline and find it inconsistent. That must be very hard for you. But it’s hard to go through the starting experience and really pay attention without getting the impression of Belves siphoning Fel being a thing. You can say otherwise all you want, it’s just true.
The argument was never about how much fel they were siphoning, just that they were.
Glad we agree, though.
Tbh, the ideas and traits we associate with the concept of ‘fel’ now didn’t exist until way later.
Legitimately, the only thing we knew about fel at this point was taking enough of it turned you into a demon.
Where it came from, how it was different from arcane/regular magic, wasn’t something explored until Chronicles came out.
Don’t think anyone here was arguing that the Belves of Quel’thalas only siphoned fel magic.
My argument was always that they used fel magic during the periods between War3 and TBC, along with any other magic they could get their hands on.
Draining magic from demons, specifically.
Not siphoning fel magic, from say, fel crystals.
Not really, you never said anything about the Magisters or the quest I gave you as an example of Belves using fel to sate their addiction.
I was referring to your other source, the one from the Q&A on the eyes thing.
As for the Encyclopedia post, the one talking about some Belves taking a moral objection against fel magic, I tackled that too.
It is valid.
But nowhere does it state anything about Belves in Quel’thalas not using fel magic.
Which we literally see in-game.
I’m sorry, but in most cases I’m going to go with what we see in-game rather than a source that Blizzard themselves scrubbed off any official site.
It takes 2 seconds to walk through Silvermoon, find the Magisters, and watch them use the old Mana Tap animation or Lifesteal anims on these crystals.
Hell, literally walk down to where the Warlock trainer is and you’ll see several Belves sitting around a crystal sucking magic from it.
Mana literally could refer to any kind of magic.
I didn’t even specifically say fel in that case.
‘Vermin’ is also incredibly vague. You could consider literally anything vermin.
Mana-bearing virmin is vague, sorry you can’t help but headcanon a specific idea onto that general term.
Would you say a Grell would count? Maybe a Mana Wyrm…
What would/wouldn’t count as a mana-bearing virmin, exactly?
I think you misunderstand.
All I’m saying is that the Belves in Quel’thalas used fel, along with many other sources of magic, as a means to sate their addiction.
‘Quaffing down’ fel juice is very different than using it as just another source of magic.
How is that so hard to understand for you?
No, that’s the distinction you came up with based on whatever you believe is ‘logical’ extrapolated from the Behind-the-Scenes TBC DvD and some talk on the Encyclopedia about Rommath not liking fel.
Nothing there says the Belves of Quel’thalas didn’t use fel to sate their addiction.
Again, we literally see some of them do this in Silvermoon first-hand.
I was referring to felblood Elves there.
As for Kael specifically, yeah, that could’ve been the case.
Doesn’t mean that every Belf who consumes fel is going to go insane.
Like I’ve said many times over, fel has always been inconsistent in how it corrupts.
Fel as a concept wasn’t even specifically pinned-down until Chronicles.
Oh, and you’re making an assumption here that just because Kael went slowly mad from consuming fel that somehow means every Belf would have the same happen to him. What you’re not getting here is that when I use words like gorged I mean that he gave-in to his addiction…
Perhaps you remember his lines in Tempest Keep?
Something about… needing power? Being addicted to power…
That’s literally him giving-in to his addiction.
Not to mention that if we take the idea that Kael using fel only a tiny bit made him go completely insane and extrapolate that as a general side effect of using a tiny bit of fel magic…
Would mean that every Warlock would be insane.
It’s contradictory when you assume things about the Belves’ relationship with fel based on a few lines meant to better expand upon why Belves have green eyes and why the Belves split from Kael, and Rommath’s personal feelings towards siphoning magic from demons.
I don’t think Blizzard needs to specifically explain every single thing to the player in-order to understand the implications of what’s going on in Quel’thalas during TBC.
Funnily enough, TBC Quel’thalas was one of the few times Blizzard made pains to portray things without overexplaining them, allowing the player to figure out things for themselves.
They never explicitly say during the questing process that the leadership of Silvermoon is corrupt, or that Silvermoon has adopted fascist strategies of keeping their citizenship in-line. They give us subtle examples of this throughout the questing process and eventually you come to see that message.
Same thing here with fel, they just never spoon-feed these obvious signs to you.
It really isn’t any more inconsistent than anything else Blizzard writes.
The inconsistencies here come from three different things.
The fact that Fel or ‘Demon magic’ as a concept was entirely different in TBC than it is now.
The fact that most of what we know is incredibly vague, which leads people to assume a lot.
The fact none of this stuff has been touched upon/expanded upon in any real capacity since 2006.
But hey, if you want to say this is a retcon, you do you I guess.
It really doesn’t change anything significant, and if there’s really any retcon here it’s whatever narrative you believe was put into Warcraft Encyclopedia or whatever they changed about Kael in Chronicles… Because from what we’ve seen in-game in TBC, the Belves were definitely using fel magic and siphoning it in Quel’thalas.
I.e. not their only source of power.
Not even their main source of power.
Just a source of power.
Huh… interesting…
Y’know in that questline they never make any specific mention of fel magic.
Rather, they mention that he simply failed to come up with a method to ‘filter corrupted magical flows’…
The reason we turn off the power sources within the spire isn’t because of anything relating to fel, but because the spire failed in its purpose of purifying ‘magical flows’.
No mention of fel here, at all. Just vague ‘corruption’.
Corruption that attracted arcane creatures to it, for whatever reason.
Well we see them doing it all over Silvermoon, so apparently that sentiment has nothing to do with fel.
I’ll sleep on another quote war, but I do want to agree with you here. There was definitely a sinister undercurrent to Sunstrider Isle (literally; “a strange power grips the isle”), but between unreliable quest givers (“oh, those spooky crystals? don’t mind them, they were always there, there’s nothing queer afoot…”), contemporary lore that downplayed the fel, and the immediate abandonment of the plot thread, is it any wonder people asked the devs for clarification?
Any answers Blizz would give ruins the mystique they set up and is likely going to be disappointing.
Not to mention that because this story has been handed off to so many different people, it’s better to just move on and write new things than to go back and try to have someone new try to reinterpret something old.
The only reason people would want clarification is because they want strict rules and guidelines for how they want to see the lore. Which Warcraft never was. Warcraft’s lore has only ever been a loose framework for the narrative, which is why it’s so ‘inconsistent’ or often changes. Why Blizz ever pretended like they had a specific idea for it, I’ll never know.
Also, the ‘immediate abandonment of the plot thread’ didn’t really happen.
It was simply resolved by the recreation of the Sunwell.
The Belves using fel was just another facet of their magic addiction, which was resolved. There’s really nothing more they could have done with it than what they already did.
Yeah, they definitely utilised it; albeit in a conspiracy sense – It appeared to be a rare practice, and most likely advised against & leaned towards other siphon-methods.
Eh ~ Fel has always been a ‘corruptive’ and enhancing power to some extent, as per the orcs & the demon blood, Gul’dan, Illidan etc.
However yeah it was kind of messy & came across indecisive.
Such is also seen with the Twisting nether –
First it was a mysterious energy, encompassing across & through all realms, connecting worlds via intricate pathways & magics.
As per the above, due to such powerful energies it attracted demons & other horrors to feed upon its energies. Such power could be used to rebuild their bodies around their spirit.
Towards more along the lines of – “Nah the nether is evil and filled with demons, it’s their birthplace & home.”
Personally I liked the nether when it was mysterious and wasn’t necessarily evil or good, but just was – A magical, scientific and spiritual realm all merged into one.
Alas, the nether is another subject
Apologies — I usually have to argue against such cases with the High Elf nutters who state Blood Elves are named such because they heavily feed on fel and only fel and blahblahblah etc.
But yeah, they fed on magics of various sorts – whereas others in Outland, or the high ranking / taboo elves also fed upon fel more freely, along with other sources as their disposal.
Elves discovering methods of feeding upon energies hasn’t gone well in the past though either, as per Cystalsong Forest. lol
I just assume everything outside current expansion is retconned to a degree. like an unreliable narrator.
it works really well in my opinion. I don’t really care about a million retcons anymore.
it doesnt work in shadowlands though, that still made no sense even when it was current content.
‘Madness’ seems to be a side effect for some, while others have no problem with it at all.
100%
The only reason they change things like this is so they can add further rules to the narrative their crafting. Changing the Nether into what it is now was simply a side-effect of needing an excuse to bring back recognizable demons in Legion and WoD.
I see people mention these ‘crazy’ Helf posters all the time but I’ve yet to find one.
I don’t know if you mean on the forums or in-game, but I’ve yet to see anyone who claims this.
Regardless though, the idea that Belves fed only and heavily on fel is wrong, that would be Felblood Elves in that case. So the people saying that just don’t understand the distinction, I guess.
This is p much the mentality you have to have with Warcraft.
The lore of Warcraft has always just been loose framework, which Blizzard changes constantly to fit whatever story they want to tell at the time.
People will often say ‘oh, the old lore was so much better!’ but it really wasn’t at all. The only thing that made it better was that there was so little detail and so many grey bits you could just fill it in with headcanon and there’d really be nothing to stop you from assuming that.
When the writers sat down and created Chronicles, all they really ended up doing was shooting themselves in the foot. Creating that book series was Blizz’s way of saying ‘No, we have rules and specifics in our game, really guys!’… When in fact, they never did, and never cared to stick to any of this. So when they go back or reference past events in new content, they always invariably end up being inconsistent with something they’ve previously written.
People often thump Chronicles like it’s some Holy Bible of lore that can never be questioned and is the highest source on everything, when even back when it first released Blizzard barely stuck to the concepts they wrote into it.
That’s why, when it comes to things like this, it’s best to just assume that everything enters a ‘grey zone’ when not actively happening. Where the details of what happened are blurry, and not fully reliable until something new comes up.
When people say ‘retcon’ there’s the implication that Blizzard purposely goes back and changes certain things, just like what OP was speaking about in this thread. But honestly, most of these ‘retcons’ are just new writers creating quick recaps or retelling something already told and not doing it 1-to-1. There’s no real purposeful effort to retcon, in this case Goblins, it’s just someone retelling a story.
Treating the story itself as an unreliable narrator allows for more creative freedom in this world anyway.
It was a volatile & dangerous power, that worked in different ways – but all of them on the borderline or pass ‘Grim’ results.
Could be easy to change it back.
They could just state:
“The Twisting Nether has countless layers & realms. A few of them are where demons are reborn, or reside … Others are where no demon dares tread. Some are even divine in nature & connect realms beyond what mortals or even the Legion have knowledge of …”
Given that’s kind of (ish) how it worked before.
Just essentially say the Demons & the Legion are simply the ones most famous for using the Twisting Nether to their advantage, throughout & against the cosmos.
I see it quite a lot, however I mostly see it from the poster named ‘Emet’
He claims this literally all the time, despite how much times the lore has been educated, cited and word-for-word quoted to him.
As I’m sure you’ve seen from other threads, some people feed off their own head-canon & display it as ‘truth’ rather vehemently to others … Even if it goes directly against established & strengthened lore that most are fond of.
I mean, I find you both sort of right in this regard.
I feel the lore was solidified in the series of books ‘Chronicles’ — To which at the time, Blizzard stated was the “Concrete lore” of the Warcraft Universe, that wouldn’t be changed …
— Then they literally retconned MASSIVE, disgustingly huge amounts of the lore in the Warcraft universe with ‘Shadowlands’ and their woefully-terrible villain ‘The Jailor’.
I feel if they kept Chronicles as the concrete canon and just added on to it, without butchering it – It would’ve been far better … However, lore without the Shadowlands version of cosmology & all its links to the Jailor alone would’ve been far better for the Warcraft universe as it is too.
Now we need one smart Goblin to convince the Steamwheedles to join us again like in old times. Not like we don’t have enough cool Horde aligned Goblins.
Elves discovering methods of feeding upon energies hasn’t gone well in the past though either, as per Cystalsong Forest. lol
