This is the relevant excerpt from the Warcraft Encyclopedia:
Prince Kael’thas returned home and rallied all the survivors he could find: approximately 90% of the surviving high elves. He declared that these survivors would now bear a new name–the blood elves–in honor of their fallen people. The blood elves no longer consider themselves high elves, and they have different priorities and behaviors than their high elf kindred.
They don’t actually mention, anywhere as far as I can tell, how many of the original population was destroyed – only that Kael’thas was able to rally 90% of that number.
It could be that there were 200 survivors, it could be that there were 2,000. Unless someone can find some other source material, this initial number remains unknown.
and its not likely he wouldve travelled through out azeroth to find other high elves first. its the immediate area, the kingdom of silvermoon and city of dalaran, that would be a logical area of recruitment.
an example: the british isles hold the bulk of the british people, but there are conclaves of brits, scattered all over the world
The paragraph that precedes the one I cited above could be interpreted as only referring to the High Elves in Quel’thalas.
Which is why I don’t like citing to that thing, because not only is it mostly filled with general ambiguity but it’s as close to being de-canonized as something can feasibly be without being officially decanonized.
Sean Copeland, Historian Supervisor of Story & Franchise Development at Blizzard Entertainment, remarked that it shouldn’t be considered de-canonized but that numerous things needed updating to reflect changes they’d made to narrative in-game – and this was some time before February of 2014.
I should have specified. Its not to say i think their population is less or more, but without confirmation to include all High Elves or just the ones in the kingdom we have no way of knowing. I agree a lot of lore does needs a good rewrite to get everyone on the same page.
Tbh, I think itll be cool if they werent thinking of those in the kingdom. It does say Kael’thas got all the survivors he could. This would be the ones in the kingdom only. The rest were already outside against orders. They might be included in the count because they werent supposed to be there.
IMO I feel the Blue/Pink spectrum of arcane refers to potency at this point. The more pink, the more potent, hence why raw displays of arcane power are purple (like Vereesa channeling The Stars Fury and Valeera siphoning the scepter), Blue by itself the is a low level of arcane energy, almost passive.
But yeah, Blizz depiction of arcane magic is inconsistent at best.
btw, anybody happen to know why most of the aspects only use elven appearances? kalecgos half elf. ysera belf/nelf. alexstraza and consort belf. nozdormu nelf. soridormi belf.
I believe the given explanation for this is because the dragons are more familiar with these civilizations, given that they’re all extremely old – but really this is just flimsy backwards engineering of their story, because following this rationale the use of Troll or Tauren visages should be fairly widespread (and it isn’t, unfortunately).
Not as far as I know, but now with Vereesa and Thori’dal, it’s the second time that channeling raw arcane energy by an elf turns their eyes purple, so it might be a hint.
It seems that Wrathion is also a Half Elf if we go by the ears; so it’s interesting to have dragon characters using half elven models but no half elves using them heheh.
Well let’s roll with it for a moment, what would the implication(s) be if Blizzard did decide to drift towards High Elves having pink/purple eyes?
If we presumed that their connection to the Sunwell was cutoff, somehow, and that the pink/purple eyes were a vestige of whatever their solution to this issue happened to be – would this change anything about them? For better, or worse? Would it change anything about the Blood Elves? For better, for worse?
It would be extremely ironic if, in this hypothetical scenario, it ended up being the High Elves who were objectively dabbling in dangerous magic – that magic being “raw arcane”. As the Void Elves are adjoined to the Alliance, the faction already has this theme of being wildly open to largely unknown cosmic forces.
As an aesthetic choice that would have to be justified post fact, we could say that HE’s IDK, start wearing raw mana crystals after being cut from the Sunwell. Something to show that wtahever is giving them that eye color is “active” rather than blue which is “passive” -a leftover of proximity and usage of the arcane.
But tbh with how inconsistent Blizz has been about arcane representation, they could simply say that arcane just shows in that blue/pink spectrum, hence giving playable high elves an eye color range between blue and violet.
It would be the usual retcon NPC races get when made playable in terms of aesthetic choices (golden tattoos for zanalari, tattoos and fiery hair for DI, a whole new body shape for KT’s etc)
