Giving blood elves a black skin tone is a bit lazy

Nobody says it cant, Neoyoshi. Not trying to pick on you, btw and sorry for the very long post :slightly_smiling_face:.

The whole point of this discussion was Blizzard could have set this up properly and have it make sense, adhering to the rules of the world they had created so it doesn’t break the ‘immersion’. Some people argue that - let’s use the example everyone had been referring to - ‘nothing in the lore says that Blood Elves can’t be black’. I remain unconvinced as that was not what we know from the lore, the art, the short stories. They are fair skin (Blizzard had never released any stories or statements lore-wise to support the opposite YET, maybe they will). I am not talking about them being ‘tanned’, I am talking about them having a totally different skin color due to interracial marriages or relationships. Lore-wise, elves have been around for a long time, they barely have children (because they live for so long so don’t think they need to have too many), and don’t intermix (interracial marriages I mean). That is their flaw we know that from the lore (it was set up as a story device). So when Alleria Windrunner (an elf) married Turalyon (a human) in the lore that was a big deal. Now, to us (humans in real life in 2020) that is nothing. But in that world in that setting (remember, they are trying to immerse you in that fantasy), it would have been (referring to how it used to be back then in medieval times, interracial marriages we rare because people were much more close-minded, didn’t travel or intermixed much because of life’s hardships).

We know Night Elves to be purple (different shades of purple, yes), but they can’t be white. Same as Orcs can’t be but green because they drank the blood of Mannoroth (yellow-green, darker green,…etc) unless they are from Draenor, which means they are brown (because they did not drink the blood). All of this was set up by Blizzard, and you don’t see people going around asking why are orcs brown. Blizzard had already explained why in the lore. I call that not lazy writing.

People also say ‘I want to play a character that resembles my own look in real life’, right so as a Blood Elf, do you have pointy ears, opaque eyes in real life? The point is you are playing ‘a character in that setting in that world’ with the rules Blizzard had already set up and that is perfectly fine. For me, if I want to play a dark-skinned character (I have, by the way, being darker skin myself), I would choose a human for reasons that I had explained in my original post (humans being casualties of two wars in the lore so they had to inter-mix and marry to continue the human race,…etc). It plays within the fantasy of the world and makes sense.

So, there are two things Blizzard could do:

  1. I asked this many times before: If the Azeroth map (as we know it from the game) is the entirety of the world, then realistically (to ground the fantasy in some sense of real-world reality) Blizzard needs to come up with a way to populate it with characters from different ethnic backgrounds, darker-skinned characters, different races that resemble the ones from real life and so on, and have it all make sense. Uldum, for example, being a desert having people with darker skin or different features. Again, you make sense of the geography to resemble ‘somewhat’ the real world.

  2. If the map of Azeroth is not the entirety of the world (it is the northern hemisphere for example) then Blizzard can set up that to be a story device and new lore can be created where we can go to those other exotic locations ‘down south’ to meet characters from those different ethnic backgrounds, different colors,…etc and have them join the Horde or the Alliance. Like what they did in Pandaria with the introduction of the Panadern. That way it becomes a ‘natural’ fit into the world of Warcraft.

What I don’t like is when you start throwing things all over the place.

Bottom line is: You can do it. It could have been handled much more elegantly and beautifully, without it being just a ‘blunt counter’ to the fairer skin models. You just need to make a bit of effort and awesome writing.

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