Someone forgot Grom and his unaliving of Cenarius is Warcraft III.
Grom was not in charge of the Horde though, Thrall was, and if I remember correctly (havenât done the Orc part of WC3 since before WoW was released) Thrall was not happy about that.
Thrall didnât know about it until it was too late. Grom attacked some humans as soon as he found them and Thrall sent him to gather wood as punishment for starting a fight. By the time Thrall found out about Gromâs war with the NEs, Cenarius was already dead.
To add to this post, hereâs an article describing them being added to the game. They were always designed to be the alliances woodsy elf, and are credited as being the reason why we didnt get lotr trope-elves instead.
pastehttps://www.pcgamesn.com/world-of-warcraft/night-elves
Hereâs an excerpt:
âWe wanted to make Night Elves,â longtime Warcraft artist Samwise Didier tells us at a recent Warcraft summit. âNight Elves had never been, to my knowledge, seen before, ever in fantasy. We came up with them. Theyâre purple skinned, theyâre seven-plus feet tall, with long blue and green hair. All we really did is go, âwhat if we combined a wood elf and a dark elf?ââ
Take the darkness and moon themes of D&Dâs dark elves, put it with the nature reverence of Tolkien-esque wood elves, and Didier says âBoom, we had Night Elves. And then we made them purple for some reason.â
But within Blizzard, âthat was a really hard sell. The world accepted Night Elves better than most members of the team did. Because people were used to the Legolas types, the elves that are your typical elves â blondish, brownish hair, while we were going blues and greens and purple. Thatâs radically different, but it really took was a picture to help sell that.â
The Horde made a pretty bad first impression on the Night Elves when Hellscream lead the orcs to cut down their trees and killed Cenarius. I donât think they were going to get along any time soon, outside of the immediate Burning Legion invasion.