I haven’t dived too deeply into Midnight spoilers, but I’ve seen enough screenshots to see that Silvermoon has been fully rebuilt, as have many of the outlying elven villages. On one hand, that’s AWESOME! It’s great to see the land healing, the elves regaining control over their lands in a true sense, rather than relying on others like the Forsaken to even have a basic military presence.
But I have to admit there’s a hint of unease about it. Part of what made the aesthetic of Silvermoon so epic was how big and spread out it was. You can see the city full of people, and with the wide streets, the broad spires, it somehow looked empty. And that made sense, right? Arthas wiped out 90% of the elven race, and of that number there’s been the High Elves who defected over the use of fel and allegiance to the Horde, the Sunfury who at least partially defected to the Legion (though I know many returned) and the Void Elves who were banished for their dark experiments. In short, there’s already a tiny fraction of the Sin’dorei left post-Scourge, and narrative evidence seems to have indicated that that number, if anything, has at least marginally shrunk.
It seems strange to me that in just a bit over 20 years of lore time, the Blood Elves have went from living among the ruins made vacant by the death of 90% of their race, to rebuilding and resettling everything, including doubling the size of the city and resettling most of the outlying villages. Do you think this will be explained in Midnight? It seems… bizarrely fast.
It’s been 20 years and people have been busy in other words these young elves? They are literally 20+ years old. We are talking about children and they have voice lines which are very young sounding as in the actors have youthful voices, and that means these elves are a very young lot and you see kids everywhere around Silvermoon meaning elves are making babies! Thalassian style!
Good story potential right there. Elves seeking out relations with other races due to the inbreeding type thing, with others looking very highly at the ‘purity’ their bloodline maintains by keeping their relations to other elves
Demographics don’t exist in Warcraft, they never mattered and, sadly, likely never will. Don’t forget the entire Horde Bilgewater population could fit in cages on Gallywix’s ship.
There will always be enough of X race to do whatever the writers want them to do.
It’s not and would probably never be talked about in the game, but I figure one of the bullet points on Kael’thas’s post-genocide propaganda drive was to get this race of house cats copulating. Funnily enough one of Silvermoon’s new locales is a daycare center; that 2007 blood elf child model gets some usage.
Its worth considering that when Arthas attacked Quel’Thalas, 90% of the Kingdom was slaughtered.
In other words, that statistic does NOT account for elves living outside of Quel’Thalas at that time. While plenty remained High Elves, it’s entirely plausible that some became Blood Elves as well. While the Void Elves are a defection, the Blood Elven population of Dalaran returned to Silvermoon after the Purge (and if they left to return in Legion, they likely returned to Silvermoon again now that Dalaran is destroyed). Add into that the return of the Sunfury, and I don’t think its so unusual. Certainly it’s been about 20+ years since the Third War, and we know elves mature at the same rate as humans, so a 20 year old Blood Elf is as physically, mentally, and emotionally mature as a 20 year old human.
yea but even if every elf had like 5 kids that still wouldn’t be all that huge a population boost, irl the populations effected by the two world wars still haven’t reached their pre world war levels.
People like to throw around the 90% thing, but they also forget that Blizzard has openly stated that races like Humans, Gnomes and Blood Elves have “enough” of a healthy population to prevent actual extinction and the risk of inbreeding.
People also forget that the Humans went through 2 back-to-back wars on par with extinction-level events, so the populations concerning the Humans should also be at huge risk of extinction and inbreeding as well.
People don’t forget it, its just such a copeout answer, they want the stakes of a big number like 90% but then they have to undermine it cause they don’t have the cahones to follow through with that story. Realistically speaking every race at this point would at best be bottlenecked genetically and barely functioning with the sheer amount of death that has happaned, but they can’t because blizzard wants to have the cake and eat it too.
Like i do understand why, but it is an incredibly copeout when they could just have easily not ballooned the threat and mortality levels so high.
I honestly think Blizzard should just retcon the 90% population loss tidbit. It was silly when it was first mentioned and its just as silly now. Rewrite the story so that Arthas’ march on Silvermoon was essentially a straight march to Silvermoon and Quel’danas Isle with very little to no distractions or detours.
Maybe something akin to “Sure Silvermoon and the towns/villages in Arthas’ direct path were devastated, but there were countless other towns and villages that were relatively untouched by the Scourge.”
My problem isn’t even with the number, the scourge was an undead hivemind that showed no mercy to anyone, the 90% number makes sense, it just isn’t really possible to come back from that huge a loss with ought permanent consequences for your races future. it would take far longer then 20 for the population to climb back up to pre scourge rates even if you somehow got everyone to get along long enough to spawn.
People are over blowing the bottleneck issue. You only need about 1000 people of child bearing age to maintain a viable gene pool. We have no idea what the population of Quelthalas was pre third war, but even if it was as low as 100k, that would leave 10k elves alive. Even if only 1/10 of those 10k were able to have kids then you have a viable population. Issues with inbreeding are likely the least of the elves concerns with trying to repopulate their kingdom.
90% is a pretty crazy number, to put that in perspective the largest a nation to ever loose the largest amount of people was Paraguay during the War of the Triple Alliance that was 60%. Second was Belarus during WW2 that saw a loss of 25%.
