Well, “Night Elf fans being upset” is a safe bet in any new lore announcement.
Night Elf fans are like Goldilocks from “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” - if Goldilocks was a keto gluten-free vegan who needed proof that her food and bedding were sourced responsibly and fair trade certified, as she randomly enters the residences of bears.
So you say as you enter the residence of the bears to spite them.
No one is trying to spite you. Threads like these have been made over and over again for years. People are tired of the doom and gloom. They have every right to post their opinions in here, it’s a public forum. If you’re tired of giving the same reply over and over then you can just not reply. You’ve already made your point and it’s there for everyone to see. If you’re tired of repeating yourself you don’t have to.
If it makes you feel any better, apparently there are “rogue Sylvanas loyalists” to be slain/routed in Gilneas. Being Horde- being a Sylvanas-loyalist Forsaken myself- makes this yet another “rescue Baine” quest while I slaughter numerous of my own people/kind, but for the ALLIANCE. LOL, what a JOKE.
Then don’t?
Really? The screen shots I’ve seen just show dead Scarlet Crusaders, leaving it rather vague if we killed them or simply found them. It’s lead to the theory that we’re reclaiming Gilneas from the Crusade,
I really find it funny how easily Gilneas has traded hands because Blizzard just cannot stick to who owns it.
First it goes
Gilneans - Pre Cata
Forsaken - Post Gilneas questing
Alliance - Post Silverpine questing
Black Dragonflight - Legendary dagger questline
Forsaken - MoP
Alliance - BFA via mission table iirc
Forsaken - post BFA for some reason
Scarlet Crusade? - Dragonflight for some reason
Gilneans - End of Dragonflight.
And yet somehow the Black Dragonflight is not the most crazy faction in that list.
Pre-Teldrassil (before WoW) Hyjal and Moonglade were NE controlled but now we lost them to Neutrality.
Darkshore is destroyed
Felwood feltainted
Winterspring is more Goblin land than NE
Azshara given to Goblins to destroy
Ashenvale is “retaken” but not really when even after the “defeat of the Horde” and later stated in books the same Horde still holds the eastern side.
What are we left with?
Val’sharah. There’s a few villages there, and possible after six or so years the Dreamweavers hopefully cleansed the corruption of the Nightmare and maybe rebuilt Shala’nir. I’d argue that in the five years that Darkshore was at least rebuilt or finishing it’s rebuilding. I don’t think they would just leave it there. The Kaldorei could also have retaken Azsuna. And there was some kaldorei going to Suramar to make a settlement somewhere on the outskirts of the city…
Sorry… I meant in Kalimdor.
People say we still have presence in Kalimdor but we are reduced to a couple dots in the continent with the Horde still actively holding parts of Ashenvale.
Well again, Darkshore was likely rebuilt. I’d imagine that during the events of Shadows Rising that there’s a few villages that popped up around Nordrassil in Hyjal since most of the Kaldorei left Stormwind and went back to Nordrassil.
To your point, and to address “low hanging fruit” criticisms:
While Teldrassil had only been around a short time, it was still situated near the ancestral lands of the Night Elves, including Ashenvale, Darkshore, Felwood, Hyjal, Aszhara (now a Horde territory), Winterspring and Moonglade, and to continue, Stonetalon (now Horde), Desolate, Ferelas (Tauren territory as well) and Silithus (now Sword territory). There is a lot of Night Elf going on in Kalimdor, though scattered. The Dragon Isles are nowhere near any of this. The Dragon Isles have literally nothing to do with Night Elves in any capacity. In fact, the Dragon Isles exist in a location where the Night Elves EXILED the Highborne. I honestly don’t care that steps were taken (keeping this vague for spoiler reasons). There is literally nothing Blizzard HAS DONE to make the Dragon Isles a palatable location for the new Night Elf home.
Blizzard could have solved this problem in multiple ways:
Have the Dragon Isles be on the West of Northrend, thus placing Amirdrassil near enough to Kalimdor. That would have solved most problems.
Use the Dragonscale Expedition to uncover a heretofore unknown connection between the Night Elves and the Dragon Isles. especially if we are exploring that the lore we understand came from the Titans, who purposefully “re-wrote” history to their benefit.
To this second point (which my husband, who does not play WoW came up with on the spot to address issue, because the first question he asked was: why would Blizzard put this new “home” someplace that has nothing to do with these people? Then said, why not establish there is a pre-existing connection, then?) This got me to thinking…what if…what if Blizzard had taken the big swing and re-contextualized the Night Elves?
Now, I know that the player base is breathtakingly salty about Shadowlands, and Blizzard is probably just as breathtakingly timid about trying to do that again (but, I mean, very little is worse than dumping the Night Elves into an obsolete expansion and basically defecate all over their lore, so if you’re going to do that, you might as well swing for the benches).
The one thing I noticed is that the denizens of both Ardenweald and the Emerald Dream have very similar ears as the Night Elves: long, slender and arced (current modifications in the barber shop notwithstanding). We also see, in Titan constellar art in Ulduar, actual Night Elves and trolls. So what if the Night Elves were not evolved trolls after all, but that Night Elves and Trolls both came from a progenitor race whose origin is in the Emerald Dream, and that it was the gateway in the Ohn’ahran Plains from which this progenitor species came from?
Again, just saying this as a total what if, not that this is what Blizzard intends (we know Blizzard isn’t thinking this). But here’s my crazy what if: When Eonar and Elune first decided to collaborate and carve out the Emerald Dream to be basically Azeroth’s “back up drive,” denizens of the dream, a two-legged species with long ears, came through to Azeroth to help. When Aman’thul intervened with the First World Tree, these beings were stranded on Azeroth, scattered and eventually started to succumb to the Curse of Flesh.
One group became the Trolls, another, who originally sought safety in the mountainous region of Hyjal and later found their way to the Well of Eternity, became the Night Elves.
With this one subtle change in the history of the Trolls and the Night Elves, The Dragon Isles would now have a legitimate connection to the Night Elves - and explain why the Night Elves are both the favored children of Elune and why the Night Elves are so inextricably tied to the Wild Gods. This also explains the Trolls’ worship of Loa. And in before, yes we know that Chronicles says otherwise, but we also know that Blizzard said that those books were from a “certain point of view” and that history of the Night Elves could very much be misinformation in an attempt to wipe out Elune’s involvement in the “ordering of Azeroth”
In this scenario, why the Night Elves would be favored and not the trolls? Perhaps because the Night Elves never forgot their love of Elune, whereas the Trolls forgot over time and forged their own myths.
Again, this is just a what-if scenario designed to point out that with a little bit of thought, Blizzard could have come up with something along those lines and presented it…anywhere…a Dragonscale Expedition quest chain, a lore book in a corner. Just some context to make the Dragon Isles a meaningful location and not the product of lazy development to be narratively glossed over.
But instead Blizzard just slams the Night Elves into a land that has nothing to do with them, and just leaves the players to form the worst assumptions. Or, Blizzard is fine basically “Trail of Tears”-ing the Night Elves and giving all of Kalimdor to the Horde, which IMO is profoundly distasteful and tone deaf.
The Broken Isles are probably why the devs thought it was ok to put Amirdrassil on the DI. Val’sharah was always more of an outpost due to its history before the Sundering, since it’s so far from Northern Kalimdor.
I don’t love it, and I only vaguely hate it less than Amirdrassil as it currently is.
it’s a VIDEO GAME dude, it’s not that deep.
bro, it’s a video game. if it bothers so much then just stop and go do something else.
Surely you mean Felwood right? Feralas is not in Northern Kalimdor.
this thing where each race has to have it “fair” is so dumb and bad writing
why cant lordaeron just get taken by the alliance and teldrassil stay burned
Yes. Thank you!
This has been discussed in other threads. Some Night Elves will move to Amirdrassil, but that doesn’t mean they’re all leaving Kalimdor.