I now low key dread the Forsaken Heritage Armor quest that will inevitable come. I can see just the whole thing focusing on the Forsaken choosing the future over the past, while dealing with Sylvanas loyalists.
At the very least Dark Ranger Velonara is safe, since they made sure to have her appear at the Orgrimmar Embassy in the Warchief of the Horde quest.
I would say Velonara and Tattersail are probably safe? But I don’t expect either of them to actually get anything but bit screentime at best. Instead, because they are just the more moderate of the Old Guard, Blizz will devote their time developing characters like Delaryn, Faol, and Derek. Characters who actually were never Forsaken by anybody, and have lives to actually return to for the most part.
The only real way to even have a chance to make Calia work is by building up Voss (a character equally forced into her current role) as her equal counterbalance. With the former representing who the Forsaken were in life, and the latter representing who they have become in death. And to this notion, you can build up a support cast around them that reflects that. With the remaining Forsaken reps too.
But Blizz is really friggen lazy, and I am not convinced they truly aren’t just using Voss as a “steward of Gondor” here for Menethil. And if Calia does become soul leader of the Forsaken, you can probably kiss characters like Belmont, Feranell and Lydell goodbye. Building up both leaders would just take too much work for a Horde race. Its better to just make them convenient for future Alliance stories instead.
You have a very eloquent way of really dragging dread out of me, because I feel in the very core of my heart, I could see that coming to pass, and it makes me cringe to hell and back.
I’ve grown out of fan mentality period. I can enjoy material without getting into the tribal mindset that fandom demands. The people around here that are convinced that Blizzarrd is out to punish them for playing Night Elf characters… that’s fandom. And after my experience with Trek and Who fandom, I swore to myself that I’d never let myself get hooked up with that kind of near-religous obsession again.
If you’re going to act out, expect critiques of the performance.
Oh, does that mean you’ve stopped doing your tribal role playing posts on your Blood Elf alt?
For the most part, since they’ve been received so poorly by all and sundry, including you, yes. I’m simply not motivated that often to make the extra effort any more.
Count that as a win for your side if it makes you feel betterr.
Are you once again saying what can people opine/feel Amadis? Cut that crap already
Just ignore him, you can’t take seriously a guy that uses the term of “cultural appropiation” when talking about Zandalaris
Amadis is far from being the worst gatekeeper in this venue, but he does have his moments.
But again, I’ve been easing back on the effort I put into here so I do respond to feedback… eventually.
No one has stopped you from advocating this.
Yeah. They half-***ed it and didn’t have the Horde and Alliance push their advantage until they fully controlled their respective continents.
Nuts to Lordaeron City. It’s time to turn Undercity into a flying Necropolis!
The worst possible outcome…returning to the status quo.
No, I let people speak for themselves. Drahliana is openly not a Night Elf fan.
I still believe Drahliana mostly just likes to be contrarian, or at least is trying to champion “broader views” and so uses a Night Elf avatar as their soap box to stand on for that.
I do not believe I have ever used the term when talking about the Zandalari. But hey, I’ll take your advice and put you on ignore if you’ll do me the favor of putting me on ignore.
People do realize Blizzard is going to spend at least an expansion or two before they actually do anything about the situation? Earliest I expect it would be next expansion. We are due for another separate expansion hub anyway.
At this point the only realistic hope I have is that it will be addressed in the Heritage armor questlines. But I’m not holding my breath.
The Night Elves had their homelands invaded by the full force of the Horde, had their starting zone and capital not only destroyed but totally inaccessible(whereas Tirisfal still exists), had half their race destroyed and had innocents sent to the maw to suffer/be obliterated.
I don’t know what Blizzard was thinking having one side getting so much more shafted then the other. All the people saying “The Night Elves have to just take back their lands and they’re even” are insane. The only way to really undo the damage is to have 2 NE fanservice expansions in a row, massive reparations from the Horde and for them to strike a devastating blow to the Horde.
That’s overshooting and an unrealistic expectation.
-They got Darkshore back on a land invasion (where it is heavily skewed in favor of the defender),
-They lost no territory (Teldrassil was grown by Staghelm & co, Malfurion and co can just… do it again? If absolutely necessary?)
-They have a strong presence in the story with a prominent character roster of about four characters (Malfurion, Tyrande, Shandris, Maiev) as opposed to the rest of the cast for the other branches of the Alliance & Horde stories, ranging from 0 for the Forsaken (Lilian Voss doesn’t count, she’s not apart of the Forsaken political body, Calia is most assuredly not Forsaken.) to the highest of 3 for the Worgen and Dwarves (council of three hammers, Genn, Tess and Darius).
-Have extreme screen time and will even have a story conclusion for Tyrande where she doesn’t end up neck deep in the bad ju-ju like Grom and walks home with an acceptable ending to her strife. (and I promise you they won’t do anything negative to Tyrande for one very simple reason: Tyrande sells, and if any bad development happens to her, the fanbase will become nuclear. In a time where they have to play it very carefully after they royally botched BFA, they’re not going to do anything unsafe. Investors want their money, Blizzard will never betray them.).
They even get a conclusion story for the souls condemned to the Maw. Where everyone else got the short end of the stick, good and bad alike, they’re actively seeing an improved condition post-mortem.
You could not possibly ask for more in a setting where everyone else has been eating humble pie for awhile now, and their good developments still wane in comparison to the extreme shortcomings that still loom in the past. Wanting them to ascend from mortalhood to super gods that have no need for political alliances and single handedly purchase themselves a rise of another empire would make 0 sense as to why they joined the Alliance in the first place, and feel very disjointed from the platform WoW is built upon.
Yes, BFA was extremely unfair to the Night Elf story (and the story at large, but especially to the Night Elf story). It made no sense, it was destructive for the sake of shock factor, it went to Suckville, population: all. But they’ve hit a turnaround point and most of the damage that was inflicted has been given back and all of their losses were reclaimed and they’re effectively back to where they started, sans a population (that Blizzard doesn’t seem to care about, because statistics has never meant jack squat for any other purpose than to say a very specific message in a story).
No… I use the avatar because it’s my main. This forum used to be flooded a few years back by people who’d build level 1 avatars and use them to troll. I put my main behind my words for the most part. Unless it’s a class specific forum, I’ll use a class avatar so that people can look at my profile and check my character if I have a class mechanics question.
And I do believe a counterweight to the more insane extremists is needed every now and then.
Never said it wasn’t, but what Blizzard to the Night Elves in BFA is so ridiculous and unrealistic in its own I don’t see why they can’t just be unrealistic in the opposite direction.
Aka they had one bad thing done to them undone but not really because they still lost lives and infrastructure.
That’s not even faulty logic, that is a complete lack of logic. That’s like saying if I burn down someone’s house they didn’t lose anything because they can just buy/build a new one? By that (lack of) logic genocide isn’t bad as long as it’s not 100% thorough because people can just have kids.
Yeah sorry if you have to say, “our examples don’t count” then I get to say this example “Doesn’t count”
And the Horde didn’t? Oh I’m sorry does Sylvanas and Saurfang “not count” to?
Negative by your standards perhaps, do you really think Nelf fans will be happy if they Illidan her? Do you think they’d be happy if they did the same to Sylvanas?
What? No they didn’t lol, tens of thousands of Night Elf souls at the minimum were sent to the Maw, we don’t even save 100 in Shadowlands.
The problem is Night Elves didn’t eat Humble pie, the Horde ate humble pie, the Night Elves got humiliation/S**t pie laced with cyanide and asbestos while the rest of the Alliance got no pie to eat.
HAHAHA oh this is some top tier delusion
Oh right just don’t include the biggest factor to why they suffered so much.
Here’s the thing, Night Elves aren’t the only playable race in WoW who have suffered tragedy specifically genocide, High Elves, Draenei and Humans all have. But I’m not exaggerating when I say what the Night Elves suffered trump all of those 3 combined with some left over. I mean it’s hard to beat half your race being exterminated, and those that died being given a choice between being raised in a mockery of life state of Undeath serving the people who killed you, or suffering in horrendous eternal torment unless you were lucky enough to be obliterated.
The Night Elf story in BFA is what I expect some insane fan-fiction ‘bad ending’ a frothing Horde fan wrote without it going into 18+ territory.
I’m pretty sure these ‘rabid NE posters’ ARE the counterweight to Blizzard just going ham dumpstering them. Isn’t it confirmed that Blizzard was going to go absolutely off the rails pooping all over the Night Elves but the backlash made them pull back, even if only slightly?
Atrocity during warfarre is extrremely realistic. No army in the history of the planet is innocent of it.
The whole poiint of the War of Thorns was to serve a crippling blow to the Night Elves, and Saurfang was charged with making that happen. He totally flubbed the sacrifice of Horde soldiers who laid down their lives on some meaningless Honor twaddle when he spared Malfurion. Tyrande however is wrong in her belief that Saurfang’s death would have spared her Tree because of the reasons I’ve outlined.
If Blizzard had left out this whole Jailor subroutine out of the plot, we could have had a story where Sylvannas was driven to do something that would have made the Horde effort count for something after Saurfang deliberately let the main objective go.
Blizzard could have made a convincing story based on the idea that Sylvannas’ premises were completely true. And there would have been precedent dating back to the past actions of Greymane, Garithos, and Daddy Proudmore. That would have been a saleable narrative in a grey setting.
But in reality the only purpose for Blizzard stories is after all to set up the next set of Dungeons, Raids, and Battlefields. So we got what we got.
Despite the losses however, the Night Elves and the Alliance got a far better narrative story than the Forsaken who also lost their city and the Horde who had to back the Banshee Queen’s play (even those “Saurfang loyalists”. Things start off with Sylvannas massacring her own soldiers wholesale and they don’t get better from there.
I mean, yes. This is what insurance is for in the 21st century, in the event of forest fires, malicious intent of arson or otherwise. Things can be replaced. People cannot, which brings me back to the next point…
… they had a successful military campaign in Darkshore, in odds that did not favor them, and were active combatants in a war that killed a lot of people responsible for the act of aggression. Admittedly, it came at an extreme cost to the Alliance and they’re not looking much better than the Horde at the moment, but, if we’re talking about tit-for-tat, I can’t think of a more vengeful conclusion than that.
Sure, reparations might seem attractive as a cherry on top, but, in both the meta and historical angle, it was never going to end in any way other than one side being grievously wounded and the other being so exhausted of its manpower that it has no advantage to push for seizing reparations.
That is demonstrably false and I’ll prove it. Tyrande, Malfurion and Maiev are the face of the Night Elf story. They are the engine through which it is told. Just about every story that is relevant to the over-arching Night Elf story has them as a key component in which the story is observed and progressed. Shandris is actively part of that.
Calia was never, ever apart of the Forsaken story. Ever. Lilian Voss was created in the Cataclysm and immediately left the Forsaken after her introduction. To quote Benedikt, because he hit the nail on the head with this; “All Forsaken are undead, but not all undead are Forsaken”.
Saurfang is dead and the Orc storyline has only one character to drive the story forward: Thrall.
Sylvanas became an antagonist and the only story that she’s used to explore as a narrative piece now is the antagonist’s perspective. She doesn’t count for the Forsaken story.
Illidan her how? That she become the Warden of the Jailer? There’s only one path her story can go and it’s Grom’s, but, without any hardship and she is saved of the Night Warrior’s burden that could possibly tear her apart. The only "Illidan"ing you could get out of that is that she returned to her charge as a priestess and took a backseat in the story.
She won’t die. Nothing bad will happen to her. I’m willing to stake money on this, it’d be suicidal to the Warcraft franchise otherwise. Blizzard may listen to us every now and then, but, what they really listen to is the all-mighty dollar bill.
As for Sylvanas; nobody will be happy with Sylvanas’ ending, no matter what happens. I even liked Sylvanas before they ruined her character in BFA (much like Thrall and Saurfang, really.).
If she dies, I’ll roll my eyes and thank Blizzard for pissing away so many years of storytelling and not building up any other Forsaken characters to tell the story (and it has to be a character that is from the original foundation, to properly tell the story. You have to be where they’ve been to understand where they’re coming from, if you get what I mean).
If she lives and destroys the machine of fate or whatever and breaks the cycle of destiny for worlds uncounted (or, Kerrigan’d), I’ll even include a sigh.
Sylvanas’ story will, frankly, suck, no matter what they do with it. Nobody will be happy and that’s just a fact of life.
Tyrande is literally running around in the Maw in the story, right now, and doing jailbreaks. The only other person that’s doing it is the player character and we don’t really count, since we’re just a window to see the story.
Okay, again, BFA was exceedingly unfair to the Night Elf story (and, again, to much of the story at large, but, especially the Night Elf story). But really, take a step back and view the plot pieces at large.
Humanity has been on the backfoot and even their better moments (Varian’s return, Jaina earned her mother’s forgiveness, Danath’s political alliances paid off and now he has his Kingdom back), are still surrounded by the problems on the homefront (Westfall, Duskwood, Redridge, Kul Tiras having been divided for so long and only now rejoining the world stage, Stromgarde is a wreck and is still in its fragile infancy with only distant neighbors from Ironforge to help them.).
The Orcs have found a place in the world, yet their home is still denied to them (Outland/Draenor is dying and becoming less suitable for life. Demon blood still courses through their veins. The clans aren’t united beyond the Frostwolves and the Warsong, since the other clans are trapped in the clutches of the Legion). Much can be said about the Draenei, twice, despite the rejoining of the Army of the Light.
So on, so forth.
I’m not seeing anything missing, besides a tree that was never apart of the original design and a bad call by Staghelm.
I literally did, but, nothing is driving them to extinction beside the fact. They can have children, they can build their lives anew and despite the hardship, they can overcome it.
It isn’t the first time it’s happened, or the last time it’ll happen.
You didn’t get any (cringe inducing) Arthas vibes when Delaryn was raised? No familiar beats on a familiar story?
The “soul condemned to hell” bit I feel isn’t exclusive to the woes of the Night Elves, given that everyone, involved and uninvolved alike, suffered the same fate.
I can tell you the door swings both ways. Creeps will creep.