I get the point, but I’m not sure I agree.
How many people actually like Void Elves as Void Elves? Anecdotally, it doesn’t seem to be that many. They were panned by the playerbase when they first launched as a “lorelol race” (a description I tend to agree with). I’ve also noticed, and again purely anecdotal evidence, that most Void Elves I see on forums tend to have fair skin and normal hair. The ones that actually have the blueberry customizations on their characters tend to stand out as a minority. Similar experiences in-game too.
I do agree that High Elves wouldn’t take away from Blood Elves in terms of population. I certainly wouldn’t go Blue Team if they were added. That said, I don’t think the introduction of High Elves will lead to Blood Elves being written as Blood Elves.
Ultimately, Blood Elves lost a lot of their characterization with the conclusion of the BC Storyline and the restoration of the Sunwell. The recklessness? Gone, it was stolen by Void Elves. The desperation? Solved.
There’s a reason characters like Liadrin (Who might as well be a generic Human Paladin in terms of characterization) get pushed to the fore, while characters like Rommath are sidelined and presented as unreasonable when they do appear. It’s a deliberate choice.
This doesn’t effect just Blood Elves, mind you. Orcs have obviously been deliberately written in a certain way post-MoP, and frankly, the entire Horde has had Baine Bloodhoof shoved down their throats as our intended moral compass (yuck!) for ages now.
Playable High Elves could reinforce Blood Elven identity through contrast, but it would require a company willing to write Blood Elves as Blood Elves, and it really looks like Blizzard is deliberately choosing not to.
I do have to say that I disagree with this entirely. The fact that Night Elves are supposed to be everything Haranir are, but are not is a problem. It’s a problem you don’t solve by inventing some boring race that’s about to bring a couple of retcons to the story.
It’d be far more preferable to just let Night Elves be Night Elves.
By keeping Night Elves as this paradoxically underpowered and overpowered punching bag (Malfurion is practically written as a demigod, but the Night Elves are notably lacking their WCIII roster and have no real diplomatic inroads with neutrals that should be natural allies for them. We should see Mountain Giants, Faerie Dragons, deeply indexed Green Dragons, Furbolgs, etc. with the Kaldorei), and just taking their “defining traits” and plastering them onto something new, you end up doing a disservice to both.
Let me put it this way, Orcs are my favorite race in Warcraft. If Blizzard continues down the arc of “All Orcs are Thrall, and if they’re not, they are only allowed to be aggressive or militaristic in a campy, non-threatening way” and then introduced some just-invented-yesterday race that has all the traits that Orcs were supposed to have, my response wouldn’t be to race change, it’d be to unsubscribe.
