I’ve been thinking about birth rates in this game, which I know is ridiculous because no one at Blizzard seems to put any thought into this kind of thing, but I’d be interested to know what people think.
I don’t have sources, but I recall reading that orcs and goblins have rather high birth rates and mature rather quickly to compensate for their reckless lifestyles. We can assume humans to be like irl humans. But what about the long-lived Night Elves? I don’t know if I ever met a Night Elf that wasn’t at least 10,000 years old. The only instance of a Night Elf grandparent I knew of was Fandral Staghelm, but even if an elf needed 1,000 years to reach sexual maturity, that’s still enough for 10 generations. How long does it take?
The question also applies to the Nightborne and Blood Elves. I noticed Suramar had an unusual amount of children running around for an elf city, but I wonder if some of those kids are older than me. If no one dies of old age, the population in Suramar should have reached crisis levels after 10,000 years of being cooped up. Why did they suddenly decide it was a good time to have kids when they did?
If you were a writer for Blizzard, how would you answer these kinds of questions?
It’s been a while, but wasn’t it at one point implied that Night Elves’ long lifespan also had the unfortunate side-effect of significantly reducing their ability to actually have Children? I seem to recall Tyrande is actually infertile and Malfurion was suffering from eyesight deterioration.
I’m pretty sure Elves mature at the same rate as humans do, they just stay 22 years old for like 1000s of years. Sylvanas I believe became a farstrider at around 18 so she was obviously considered mature.
That’s a terrible disadvantage for the race, then. Each death is even more costly.
Childhood must happen in the blink of an eye for elves. Weird that we saw so many kids in Suramar, as if having a baby suddenly became fashionable 10 years ago so a lot of women decided, all at once, that that was the time in their ridiculously long lifespans to get pregnant.
There’s a lot of interesting interactions that come along with such long lives. I think a lot of the Elves’ history of choosing isolation over diplomacy can be chalked up to the fact that they didn’t see any point in building relationships with these people who would all be dead in what’s the equivalent of a week for them.
I’d imagine that Elves go through menopause at some point in their lives much like Humans, whales, and other long lived mammals. Maybe it’s just the younger women who are having some kids in Suramar?
I didn’t consider the possibility that their bodies could even age enough to reach menopause, so now I am wondering when it’s too late for an elf to have kids. We know Vereesa has kids, so it’s got to be older than Vereesa.
The answer, as well all know, is one expansion pack. That is how long it will take for any notion of the Night Elves having a depleted population to disappear from the story and never be mentioned again.
Which is good, because again: the notion of a 10,000 year-old empire having somehow relocated a majority of its population onto a <20 year-old tree is mind-crushingly stupid.
“Family photo! Everyone get on the tree! Now squeeze in there. Tighter… tighter… About 800 of you still aren’t in frame. Tighter… Okay, that’s good. Now say cheese!”
I don’t remember reading anywhere where she was infertile she just felt her age more with the world trees blessing gone. But if she was that would make pretty much every other night elf woman also the same for those who have been alive as long as her. you have to remember her chosen mates pins years and years asleep so the odds of her ever having kids with him are very low to begin with. She has her adopted daughter and that’s about it. Still she’s an elf in all else I have extraordinary long lifespans I doubt she’s infertile I just think someone can’t get the job done
There are a huge number of Withered outside of Suramar City proper. I’m fairly sure that’s now they kept their population numbers in check and were still having all the children they wanted.
Why? what makes you think that the Night Elves had a overly large population? The Interior of Teldrassil was a region the size of Tirisfal Glades. It had several towns and villages besides Darnassus and individual homes scattered in between. The Tree probably housed a population equivalent to that of Lordaeron when you accounted for the Firbolgs and Harpies in addition.
Tangentially related to this thread, I would like to complain again that we still don’t have Night Elf Children models, and while at least they’ve stopped trying to pass off Blood Elf Children as Night Elves, the Nightborn Children models pretending to be Night Elf Children is still corner cutting I don’t appreciate.
I believe there was a partial model for one night elf child in Astranaar as there is a small quest series where you search for herbs to cure her of a fatal disease.
She could be 100 years old and still be considered a child to most Night Elves, but since the men were all asleep until recently she’s probably a teenager.
It honestly doesn’t even make sense that Malfurion and Tyrande are already experiencing age-related physical problems; there’s no good reason that they shouldn’t simply start aging from where they left off 10,000 years ago, and at that time neither was old enough to start becoming decrepit.
Otherwise, if all of the pre-Sundering night elves are plummeting into some sort of idiotic accelerated aging, then Shandris and Jarod should both falling apart just as fast as they are, because they’re also over 10,000 years old.
The whole “night elves are mortal now” thing has just overall been handled very sloppily, as when it comes down to it, given that the entire race only recently began to age naturally after being frozen in their physical primes for millennia, most of them should be decades if not centuries away from showing any signs of becoming old by their race’s standards.
Instead they’ve beaten us over the head with this idea that despite basically being kept in their physical twenties, losing the World Tree’s blessing has somehow caused boatloads of them - irrespective of their ages before becoming immortal - to suddenly start smashing into senior citizenship even faster than the short-lived races, including the other elves.
Really it all just reeks of the night elves since WoW began being increasingly chucked into the generic and stereotypical fantasy trope of elves as a fading race whose time in the world is coming to an end.