I’m not saying that it’s only an issue for you; I’m asking why is it an issue for you that Blood Elves are being retconned to have dark skin as a possibility.
It’s not a hard question nor it is my intention to pass judgement. If your answer is “it’s just not how I imagine them” that’s fine, I’d hope that would change in the future.
Draenei got heavily retconed as uncorrupted eredar, so my issue here is why this retcon seems to affect people so much when it has little repercussion to the lore.
the same people who both embrace and refuse lore to refuse us alliance high elves. the same people who say we shouldnt be so hung up on lore, because diversity, whilst simultaneously denying void elves most skin colors in the game and use lore as one of the many excuses for why we shouldnt be diverse.
How is it a retcon?
Nothing in lore says they cant, and in the comics, there were dark night elves.
Getting a tan doesnt require lore nor does it retcon it
and there’s dark blood elves on isle of quel’danas, in magister’s terrace and in the sunwell plateau.
Does it matter if it is a retcon? To me, it doesn’t.
Look it like this; there are different levels of retcon, in one extreme we have “Draenei are actually Eredar uncorruopted” on the other “Actually Blood Elves have darker skin”
The first one outright contradicts previously stated facts and replace them with new ones, the later expands the facts without necessarily contradicting anything.
Retcon is not a bad word; most of WoW lore is retcon, like making the Broken Isles gigantic and full of people, or making Kul Tiras huuuuge as well and implying they are not just human. And so on and so forth.
I mean retcon on the specific sense of being retroactive continuity; we had never seen elves with very dark skin before in any official art, so by technical terms it is a retcon. But again, it does not mean a bad thing.
i dont think it is. i view it like i view silver covenant half elves. the devs just never got around to differentiating it. the current blood elves lost some of their darker skin shades when their models were updated in…either cata or wod. they werent as dark as felblood elves, but it was closer
I wouldnt consider it a retcon purely because no lore or story is being corrected.
Again, retcon is not a bad word or something negative and we had never seen this skin tone for Blood Elves in official artwork and sources before. That’s a retcon, and it’s not a bad thing or makes the decision less legitimate.
It has not been said that the SC elves are half elves, but if it were? It would be fine, but it would be a retcon because it’s expanded something already presented, yet it doesn’t have to outright contradict anything.
Indeed, most retcons aren’t contradicting, they expand previous presented material beyond the initial intention:
Like Elves originally in Warcraft; they weren’t intended to be descendents of Night Elves when created, that was only added on Warcraft III, years after they were introduced. It expanded the lore beyond what was initially intended, that’s a retcon, and again, it’s not a bad thing.
the argument could be made that some normal belfs worked too close to the fel crystals in quel’danas and it changed their skin to be more like felblood. but purifying the sunwell only corrects the eyes, not the skin. i mean the devs have never said skin color is changed to lighter shades by the purified sunwell, have they
As I just said in this post:
Basically any expansion of lore beyond an initial intention is a retcon. It’s not a bad thing, the word retcon gets a bad rap when it’s such a necessity of an evolving lore such as those of comic books and MMO’s
isnt arator on the sc? non modified half elf.
Indeed, but then you have the question if his model is representative of his actual appearance or if it’s the closer choice given the available assets; Sylvanas used to have a NE model even though she wasn’t one, nonetheless, that’s what she used. The rest of the thalassian elves all used altered NE models as well until an specific model was created for them.
That Arator looks like a High Elf doesn’t mean that’s his definitive appearance, not does it mean Half Elves look like that in lore. -it doesn’t mean the opposite either- So again, if we are told that half the Silver Covenant was half elves, it would be a retcon, and that’s not a bad thing.
Also AFAIK Arator isn’t part of the SC.
i saw them on wowhead datamining stream, they probably posted them minutes after my post lmao
I doubt they’re going to redo Demon Hunter customization, but we can hope!
Nobody says it cant, Neoyoshi. Not trying to pick on you, btw and sorry for the very long post 
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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:
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.
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.
They have been. Quoting myself.
Cow palidins and teddy bear death knights…
THANK YOU! THIS IS WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR! So they DO exist as far back as 2012. It’s a lot less needed for an explanation as to why their skin is dark, then. Personally if that’s the only instance, I’d like to know if It’s a unique trait or not, especially since her wowpedia says It’s not known if she exists in the main universe.
I really appreciate that!
Blood elf are no true elf, they are Half elf, that is her dark secret. Otherwase i don’t understen whi the have a dark human skin color insted of a unique dark elven skin color; a reddish one? o a purple one as a rare resesive gene of his ancester nigth elf? the nigth elf have a blond hair, never seen before, but it makes sense, after all, they are the biological ancester of the high/blood elven. Whay they can’t no have a a rare dark/grey purple skin insted of the no sense dark human skin?
Oh it’s fine, no worries. i don’t necessarily disagree. 