High Elf Allied Race Megathread (Continuation)

[Lumineus-whisperwind (Lumineus)]

Yes, I read it. It’s full of half truths, outright lies, old as dirt information lifted from Warcraft Encyclopedia that has since been deprecated by Chronicles, rereading it is a complete waste of my time, and it’s already overlong so quoting it for rebuttal purposes would just result in TL;DR.

But what the Hell. I’ve got time.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

1: “High Elves are different enough from Blood Elves!”

This is the point I see posted the most. No, sorry. They aren’t. The High Elves went through no mutation,

Blood Elves DID.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

no physical change, no evolution or otherwise genetic alteration

Neither did Kul Tiran humans.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

lso false, given the recent golden eyes of the Blood Elves, it doesn’t appear that tapping demons’ magic to sate the elves’ magical addiction did anything cosmetically permanent

I’m not sure how Paladins and Priests tapping Mu’ru’s corpse to further mutate themselves makes them LESS altered, or how this explains the persistence of the Fel corruption in Lor’themar’s new model.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

2: “Blizzard did Pandaren for both sides, they can do Blood/High Elves on both sides! How could it dilute faction identity more than Pandaren?”

-snipped COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT RANT about the low engagement numbers for Pandaren-

Also, Blizzard regrets doing Pandaren as a Neutral race (evidenced by a remark Ghostcrawler made while at Blizzard),

This is a lie, Ghostcrawler was already working for Riot when he made that Tweet. He also doesn’t speak for the entire dev team any more than Ion does. Less so, perhaps, because he was systems lead, not design lead or creative director.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

3: “High Elves’ lore and history is rich enough to stand alone!”

Except any High Elf history is also Blood Elf history.

Appropriates Dalaran and Farstrider expatriate lore as belonging to Blood Elves. Dismisses the fact that the volume of lore about Vereesa Windrunner alone trumps the entirety of the Blood Elves’ light novel contributions, and the manga which featured them most was largely dedicated to the exploits of two dragons and a human paladin. #JoradMaceRepresent

@Lydon-emerald-dream

4: “Nightborne are just Night Elves, so we should get High Elves even if they’re just like Blood Elves!”

Nightborne spent 10,000 years in arcane isolation from Night Elf society

So did Night Elf Druids.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

(which is the same amount of time the Night Elven Highborne under Dath’ramar Sunstrider took to transform into High Elves).

This is so wrong it’s comical.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

5: “High Elves chose not to feed on demonic magic! They sated their magical addiction through other means! Their culture is so different!”

If I make myself a ham sandwich and offer you one, but you tell me you don’t like ham and would prefer a turkey sandwich, I wouldn’t turn around and call you culturally different from me.

Reductive and disingenuous. I suppose she considers cannibalism to be a random dietary choice as well.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

The tapping or feeding off living creatures or demons is a storyline that ended fully within TBC

That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen! Also they’re still using Fel crystals in Nazmir, and the Blood Knights seem to be cool with it.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

6: “We can make High Elves different enough from Blood Elves! Look at all these tattoos and tribal motifs we made! Void Elves are not what we want!”

Re-imagining the High Elves to all look like extrapolations of the Warcraft 2-Era ranger unit isn’t solving the main problem.

Opinion. An unwelcome one, I might add.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

7: “You say there’s not enough High Elves left, but there’s even less Void Elves, yet they are an Allied Race!”

Let’s start with basic stuff. Actual NPC numbers, towns, factions in WoW, etc, do not represent canon numbers. WoW is a representation of a multi-game IP. Example: The canon number of people in Goldshire is somewhere in the thousands, where as in game, I don’t think you can find more than 30 NPCs.

Grandstanding. Contradicts earlier argument that other High Elf settlements are irrelevant. Reminder that she tried to use player Pandaren numbers as an argument!

@Lydon-emerald-dream

The point being, we don’t know how many High Elves are left, but we do know it’s far less than Blood Elves. 90% of High Elves died, 9% of the surviving 10% renamed themselves Blood Elves, and the remaining 1% were left as High Elves in one splinter group or another.

Redacted by Chronicles. Never made sense in the first place. Only ever referred to Silvermoon remnants (as it’s based on the also-redacted WC3 lore that all of rural Quel’thalas fell to the Scourge), which would make Stormwind’s high elf population alone eclipse the blood elves.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

8: “High Elves were there in the Nighthold cut-scene! They represented 1/3rd of the forces there!”

True, per the in-game cutscene. Spends the next paragraph flailing around in denial. Curious how this matter now but it didn’t in #7 above.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

To add to this, zero (0) High Elves enter the Nighthold or take part in the raid. Tyrande, Liadrin, Khadgar, Thalyssra, etc, are all present both outside and inside the Nighthold during this insurrection, with even minor Nightborne like Aruelle and Victoire present at the end. Veressa and her High Elves are not. They are never mentioned or seen again until we we Veressa and Alleria meet up on Argus.

… what in the name of Thrall’s Balls does this have to do with anything? Does the fact that they apparently left in a huff after Vereesa’s bedroom exploits were insulted mean they were never there?

/looks at poorly made retroactive excuses for TBC blood elves’ poor life choices

Oh, right.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

9: “Blizzard reverted their stance on Classic Servers! If we make enough noise and cry enough, they’ll cave on High Elves!”

No, definitely not, and if this is the reason you keep arguing about it, please stop.

Confrontational and dismissive.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

The lack of Blizzard Classic servers was causing unauthorized private servers to pop up and recreate this experience, and Blizzard has to protect their IP, so they shut them down. However, they realized there was more of a crowd/market for this than previously thought, so they announced official Classic servers to cater to this demographic.

But having to revert a record number of suspensions for TRP model edits says nothing, apparently.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

10: “Ion doesn’t know his lore. Ion isn’t listening to us! Ion should be fired!”

He should be fired regardless because his ideas are terrible and he’s running the game into the ground with his contempt for deterministic loot and obsession with catering to no-life basement-dwelling Europeans. That said, this isn’t an argument, it’s mockery and schadenfreude.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

11: “If Blood Elf is the High Elf Fantasy, then NIghtborne is Dark Elf Fantasy, and Horde are getting those! They look just like Night Elves!”

I would say no here. Nightborne were isolated for 10,000 years from Night elf society. That’s as long as it took for Night Elves to transform into High Elves after their exile, leading to the creation of the Sunwell, and those two are obviously different races.

Imagine being so garbage you have to repeat the same point to fill space in an essay of already-titanic proportions. See #4 above.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

12: “High Elves being barely different from Blood Elves is just like Lightforged Draenei being barely different from Draenei, or Highmountain being barely different from regular Tauren!”

Yes, of course. But unlike High Elves, Draenei and Tauren are not crossing faction lines.

Neither. Are. High. Elves.

@Lydon-emerald-dream

13: “All the reasons Ion gives for not allowing High Elves could be used to exclude Void Elves!”

The reasons he gave, which I will repeat here for completeness, were “too few, insufficient holdings, and unclear identity as a people.” Void Elves check the first two in spades, they have one lore character, and their cultural “identity” could fit on half of one side of a postcard.