this would destroy whats left of the alliance, resolving down to npcs replacing the alliance player base, not because every alliance player wants high elves but because it would prove, definitively, that it was indeed malice to add them into the game for alliance but never letting us play them, even after substantial requests for making them alliance playable arose with every single expac, including vanilla.
we knew they could just modify a few things and they would look different from blood elves, but no one expected them to take them from blood elves. we expected them to take them from silver covenant or the quel’lithien (who the devs then killed off, turning them wretched, such an insult). on top of that, made them look sickly and twisted. be careful what you ask for, is all i got from that.
this move is now called corrupt-a-wish. we asked for lovely / handsome graceful elves, who we viewed as paragons of self-control and loyalty, and instead we got half mad, drenched, oxygen-deprived, dark circles under their eyes with worms sprouting from their skulls… its just, its really hard to view it as anything but contempt for their customers at the time.
at the time blood elves were introduced, there wasnt one race that wasnt an exaggerated caricature. all the races were tongue-in-cheek jabs at traditional fantasy races. the devs approached the whole genre with irreverence. blood elves, on the other hand, were modeled on real life fashion models. they had more realistic proportions than any other race in the game.
for example, night elf female hands, the size of dinner plates. male night elf waist to shoulder ratio, as if they were wearing secret corsets to give them impossible waistlines. gnomes. look at my character’s armory. her head is nearly as big as her body and her feet are like giant duck flippers. human females had ginormous bossoms, no wrists and ran/walked like men. same for female dwarves, in fact female dwarves bossoms dramatically bounced with every stride while running, yet they hoofed it like a guy. those were the alliance’s options when blood elves were introduced, and then they gave us the waggle. the waggle was attached to a demon torso.
I’ll avoid making the obvious comment about being concerned with realistic anatomy in a game where you have people living ten thousand years, magic space ships, dragons and magic portals allowing instantaneous transmission and instead focus on appearances on two fronts.
First off, the Alliance is the pretty people posse. You can argue about divine ratios to your hearts content but as compared to the horde races the alliance is much more in line with western standards of beauty then the horde has been.
Second: the decision for the Blood elves to join the horde is arguably one of the most important decisions that have been made in the game’s 18 year history and likely ensured that the game would survive as long as it has since horde numbers were dangerously low in vanilla due to a combination of their zones being incomplete for months after launch and that the Asian market struggled to maintain a player base due to their obsession with beauty as a concept.
The decision to add blood elves reversed this trend but beyond that it did something much more important to the game’s character: it added depth. Prior to this the alliance could be casually regarded as “good” and the horde “evil” based on the races that comprised each faction so a classically “good” race joining the horde forced players to reconsider what exactly the horde was and how this made sense and this then broadened their perspective of both the Sindorei and the setting at large.
And having High Elves who lost everything to remain true to themselves and their allies thus being made exiles of their own home by their Bloodkin is a compelling story as well.
its not an obsession with beauty, its the stress that discordant ratios have on the brain. its like playing a game where every race is a humanoid, and all their proportions are off kilter to varying degrees, causing visual discomfort. when we view a flower, it relaxes our minds because its ratios are rhythmically perfect, like the fibonacci sequence, found everywhere in nature. but if we mangle the flower so its discordant, viewing it again is disquieting.
the top models in the world are typically models where both halves of their bodies are perfectly symmetrical, including their faces. most people do not have this level of symmetry thusly why we prefer to view beautiful people, as they are visually relaxing.
Void Elves can literally open Void portals at will and summon Void creatures rather easily. We saw in bfa how one Void Elf was able to absolutely devastate the Horde in the Alliance story.
They’re the Super Elves of WoW and are only held back by maybe succumbing to madness.
I also know that it’s pretty hardcoded into character design and rigging because it makes it easier for the art department and they actually have to go and put in extra effort to make things asymetrical for players convienence.
My contention is that if you are at a point where you see say… a female dwarf and it actually causes you mental anguish you might just want to talk to a proffessional about the possible presence of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
A couple of trolls were able to do a ritual in drustvar where they obliterated a sizable force of Alliance composed largely of lightforged troops backed by an Exarch who would have had thousands of years of expierience duking it out with the Legion.
Is this plot armor or are 3 dark spear trolls (one of which has never set foot outside of senjin village) more powerful then hundreds of lightforged draenei?
