‘I SEE THAT YOU ARE HUMAN! THAT IS NOT AN ELF LIKE ME BECAUSE I AM AN ELF! OH HOW UNFORTUNATE THAT YOU ARE NOT AN ELF TOO!’ -Alleria
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Well take that up with Steve Danuser because that’s his quote not mine lol.
If he’s saying it didn’t change who she was, and who she was was originally a void elf, a child of quel’thalas, a quel’dorei, then wouldn’t it be safe to say that she still identifies as a high elf. I mean, she’s never identified as anything else as far as I’m aware of?
Thank you now I am not the only person to note this
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I’m an Elf despite saying “Orc”.
Even my armory has me as an Elf despite also saying “Orc”
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I’m just pointing out that you’re extrapolating in a way you can’t because he’s too vague.
I posted that quote here first by the way. 
What that post tells you is that if you ask Alleria what she is, she’ll tell you what faction she’s a part of and where she came from…
and a lot of that is because the race and group names are constructs for playability and that’s something he mentions.
Void Elf is a gameplay mechanic. "Race’ as used in Warcraft is a misnomer. Like, Draenei and Lightforged Draenei aren’t different races.
And that’s a problem in other fantasy settings too. Wood Elves and High Elves have different group names, but biologically…
I guess people might read it differently. Someone asked point blank if she was a void elf or a high elf and in this context since he said it didn’t change who she is, it would be safe to say she still identifies as high elf. Especially since he mentions the political views thing.
My presumption is that she views herself as a High Elf still.
Being affected by weird magic happens to a lot of people in Warcraft and they don’t typically presume to be a different race.
A high elf and high elves came from the Alliance originally, no?
Nah. High Elves came from Night Elves. They’re the Highborne.
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and they came from trolls right?
I feel like if we don’t stop this might happen:
I mean… The Well of Eternity is now a hole in the bottom of th-
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Don’t you dare
WOTC is actually tackling this issue atm with D&D and deconstructing races and ancestry. Which is pretty noteworthy because a lot of Blizzard’s conventions and mechanics are in some part influenced by D&D mechanics. (Thematically its more Warhammer influenced, but pretty much every RPG ‘structure’ is in some way essentially an evolution of D&D).
There’s a lot of discussions around how ‘race’ in a RPG sense is kind of archaic, outdated and doesn’t quite fit, and its heavily applicable to how Elves in Warcraft are interrelated and both see themselves and each other.
Yeah. Like you mentioned Warhammer.
Dark Elves, Wood Elves and High Elves are all literally the same race of people.
But they’re still like, “Choose your race!”
It’s just used as a misnomer for group.
I think we can probably blame Tolkien for all of this though.
Wood Elves and High Elves are particularly interesting because there’s a lot - and I mean a LOT of parallels between Night Elves and Blood Elves and High Elves in a number of different directions.
I mean it was fine as a literary convention, but then we turned it into a gameplay mechanic and it all became a little weird. >.>
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Oh hey, this disingenuous argument again.
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Yeah. Warcraft 3 did a good job by throwing a new twist on the Wood Elf idea from other games and settings…
and then they lored in that they were the same race of elves and one had shrunk. They use the term “cousins” a bunch. But there isn’t actually supposed to be such a large difference between them.
If you take the ten thousand years out of the equation, ‘they set up a miniature Well of Eternity (except with no dragon-blessed World Tree to sort of suck up most of the magic) and just sort of camped out for a while irradiating themselves in arcane energy, and it kind of mutated them’ does make a certain degree of internal logic.
But I think everyone gets kind of hung up on the ten thousand years bit, which is pretty meaningless when the average non-immortal Elf still lives anywhere from 3-6 thousand years or so.
Yeah. Everybody gets hung up on the 10,000 years bit. But they also used the word “Evolved.”
So everybody tries to throw in real world evolutionary knowledge into a setting with literal creationism and it’s directly contradicted by the fact that some of the Nightborne just were Night Elves and aren’t descendants of them.
It’s also ignoring the fact that not all of these changes are one way trips. Satyr’s have been transformed BACK into Night Elves before by Elune.
Just like Blood Elves stopped having glowing green eyes, on a long enough timeline Void Elves could very well return to “normal”.
“Over 10,000 years the Void Elves evolved back into crabs… Err. Pale Elves that don’t have Nozdormu’s blessing.”
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And eventually they all turn on each other. God, I must be Nostradamus…because I called this years ago.
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