Because you’re trying to make it about race when it was about their faction.
To her they were not innocent, to her they had actively played a role in the complete destruction of a settlement that resulted in the deaths of countless lives. She didn’t fight the Blood elves under some race crusade, she fought them because she felt they had betrayed their neutrality, and murdered many people in the process.
She just lost her husband, so yes she enraged, but it did not have anything to do with them being blood elves, it had to do with them being the Horde. Your idea makes even less sense with her wishing for them to join her on the alliance in the comic, or her efforts to join and defend Quel’thalas with Halduron.
And yet Vereesa refers to Quel’thalas as her home, and has no problem working alongside Halduron and his Farstriders either. Her efforts were clearly to defend Quel’thalas and their people from the amani tribes.
If it were only the Bell that were stolen Jaina would not have gone on her murderous rampage, nor would Vereesa be okay with what was happening. Both of them had experienced great losses that contributed to the events during the purge.
As I said in my response it was not about Theramore, but that could have had some bearing on why Jaina went off the deep end as well, because to her it would be another betrayal by the Sunreavers, which she assumed it was because it was set up to implicate the Sunreavers. But even if that was all that happened, Jaina would NOT have been okay with it. Yes Jaina was still PTSD over Theramore as was Vareesa over her husband dying there. But what set off the purge was the theft of the bell.
Because at this point they believed the Sunreavers had betrayed them, which cost the lives of many High elves in Theramore. While these individuals Silver Covenant members are described as especially nasty, the rest can be seen peacefully subduing Sunreavers within the sewers.
Peacefully subduing? With their weapons drawn on them or was that peaceful subduing when that SC member was holding a blood elf over the shark?
Yes, which is not something you wish, or hope for, within a group you supposedly despise or think little of. It shows that Vereesa doesn’t just indiscriminately hate Blood elves, but wishes for them to join her on the Alliance.
You have me confused with the other person claiming that she indiscriminately hates Belves. At one time I would agree with that. She hated Blood Elves because her own cousin (who was a total whack job) tried to siphon the magic from her boys (this is told of in Night of the Dragon book) and likely due to their joining the Horde. Prior to the fall of Quel’thalas she went from junior ranger to waifu arm candy of Rhonin. She formed the SC in response to the Sunreavers joining Dalaran during the Nexxus War. Now she did bring them to Quel’thalas at the request of Halduron during Cata to assist the Farstriders because Halduron’s own forces were too far away to be called in. So it wasn’t total hate, but there was a dislike. Then when Theramore happened and Rhonin died she was almost as much a shiny little ball of hate as Jaina. But after Garrosh’s trial she did calm down and then once reunited with Alleria became the ‘They can be redeemed by joing the Alliance’ girl.
Actually no they weren’t fully aware of what had happened, as the story they were given was from the Alliance. At this point the high elves at allerian stronghold were under the impression that all blood elves had thrown in their lot with Kael’thas and were no different than the blood elves they encountered at Firewing point.
They were no present when the original splintering occured, and were not given the appropriate opportunity to choose a side with all the facts at their disposal.
Again I didn’t say they were present when it happened. I said they learned of it later. And some returned home to Quel’thalas (like Auric).
A faction composed of, you guessed it, Thalassian elves. Because an elf did something she didn’t like.
So she fought them by betraying Dalaran’s neutrality and murdering many innocent people in their own home city. Jaina sure is high energy 240+ IQ and definitely not an insane hypocrite.
Clearly the answer is to slaughter dozens if not hundred of innocent people with husbands, wives, and children of their own even though most of them had absolutely nothing to do with Theramore or the bell.
When it’s a battle she thinks she can win. Meanwhile her sister died fighting for the city while she was away.
I propose a compromise next expansion Alliance gets playable High Elf Death Knights, Horde gets playable Night Elf Death Knights its a win win everyone gets blue eyes
Auric Sunchaser? The HIGH ELF representative? The one who is there to make sure High Elves get to see the Sunwell instead of being barred from entry by the Blood Elves? The one who is openly listed as friendly to Alliance and hostile towards Horde? That Auric?
You’re assuming inaction or apathy. Not even the elves in Silvermoon in BC were in direct contact with Kael IIRC. They went to outland looking for him then turned on him.
I guess since this world has Gods and all its not too crazy to have a fully formed race just pop outta nowhere… but I am disappointed we will never run into prehistoric blue “apes” with big old tusks now.
I think a time travel expansion would be neat, go back to ancient times when Azeroth was maybe a pangaea full of crazy ancient beasties~ I know Azeroth already has a lot of our ancient beasties on it like dinos and mammoths but I’m sure they could get creative, they are good at making weird ancient evils.
Actually… Since planets are “alive” do they still have crazy long lifetimes and all that or do they pop up already pretty much perfect with everything already in place? Full of metal people and trolls?
The Titans put the metal/stone people there to watch over her and eliminate everything if she became irredeemably corrupted.
What I wonder is… what happens to the planet when the Titan wakes up? Like, will she hatch like an egg? Will Azeroth the planet end up looking like Argus?
Personally, I think that would be an amazing jumping-off point for some version of WoW 2.0 (which I think should be an upgraded engine/graphics game but still let you bring the same characters over, it’s the only way to avoid the EQ/EQ2 population split) where Azeroth “hatches” and we have to bail to another dimension/world like Draenor with whatever population we can get through a portal.
I always imagined it would be a little like Argus or Outlands with just chunks of land floating thru space. An “Outland” version of Azeroth would be kinda neat, to see what survived and what didn’t etc.
It would be a good soft reboot too… have all the races, not just the Draenei, crammed in the Exodar and jump to some other random world, maybe we’d completely ruin a perfectly fine world with our squabbles or help have a potentially doomed one. Maybe some have to stay like the Lightforged did on Argus and they struggle to live in a suddenly hostile environment.
Leaves so many options whenever they are ready to hit reset.
I’m fairly certain if the Horde complained about it; we’d get it in a heartbeat. Its not hard to flip a switch and suddenly a whole roster of high elf customization.
the alliance don’t get these things because it takes effort; or needs to be some form of half-arsed attempt.
Also 100% false, since those of us who’ve played Sin’dorei since TBC have literally been asking for our lore-appropriate blue eyes since then.
Also? It’s a whole art set revamp. It’s not a switch. The eye colors are built into the faces. That’s why we only have like 3 faces with gold eyes. It’s not the most difficult thing ever, but it does require new art.
I think it’d be better if they just did a soft reboot…completely update EK and Kalimdor as a new land, but have the entire current world available via a portal somewhere (caverns of time?). The new world is just 50-100 years in the future, and our characters get frozen in stasis or something.
During that 50-100 years blizzard could even set Warcraft 4, maybe we could even import our characters as skins for the hero units. Or even better, if WC4 had an adventure mode, we could use it to create a hero, level them in WC4, and then import them into WoW to start at the soft reboot starting zones.
I think there’s just too many expansions and too much story and content for new people to wade through at this point. Make it all history and create a new experience that doesn’t require past knowledge to be enjoyed by new players, and they could even make oodles of WC4 money out of it at the same time.
I feel like my responses are overlapping across quotes a bit, so I’m going to try and consolidate my responses. Some nuance may be lost. My apologies. Quotes where included may be truncated to save space.
Are there no MMOs that pit “humans” against other “humans” and make it clear who one’s enemies are? There are no other visual cues besides race that players can use to discern friend from foe?
“Fair-skinned” in this case refers specifically to “fair-skinned human flesh tones”, agreed. “Human flesh tones” are across a spectrum, so High Elves can just avoid the “Fair-skinned” range, so if, as you say, “that visual identity plays the biggest role when players are choosing a race” we won’t have to worry about Blood Elves losing that distinction. If Night Elves represent the “fair-skinned”-to-middle of the “dark elf” spectrum, and Nightborne the darker end of said spectrum, there’s an opening to match an elf to the middle-to-darker human flesh tones, and story explaining why High Elves aren’t fair-skinned can be figured out since that’s seemingly not as important. Then we just make sure High Elves don’t have the same animations or stance, and then they’re not intruding on Void Elves or Blood Elves.
I re-reviewed the Blood Elf and Night-Elf skins in the character creation just so I could respond from recent memory. Blood Elves run from a pale ashen-white to a reddish color. Night Elves run from a bluish-purple to a reddish-purple, with one skin being a pale sickly green from what I can tell. I would say they’re working within a similar frame of reference. Night Elves don’t have a pure purple, a pure blue, and/or a pure grey and then their variations span from there. It’s purple base with a red to blue range within the “purple” spectrum, minus that one sickly-green.
But I think we can agree Nightborne need more skin tones. Three is definitely too few.
Night Elves did have it exclusively, until it was given to Nightborne. Whether or not it should only belong to them is beside the point, as Blizzard could decide it should or shouldn’t as easily as they made the decision that the fair human flesh tones can only belong to Blood Elves.
Also, so “Forest Elves” is the only “unique” theme Night Elves are allowed to have? They used to have a goddess, but that legitimacy has been called into question. They lost the prohibition to arcane magic, which made them unique as the only Elf group to swear off it completely.
Night Elf fans lament how they are not the savage warriors they fell in love with.
On Dying, the Forsaken, etc…
I do not deny the narrative of the Forsaken. However, part of the draw of the current Alliance is that connection to the original Alliance of Lordaeron. The current Horde might mostly want to forget its ties to the Orcish Horde that invaded Azeroth, razed Stormwind, and burned Quel’Thalas’ forests, but the current Alliance in many ways revels in its connection to that group that made a valiant stand shoulder-to-shoulder against the invading army and fighting to protect their world: Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, and yes, High Elves. Three of the four original Alliance factions were members of the Alliance of Lordaeron. The Alliance even got GIlneas and Kul Tiras back in the fold. Jokes about werewolves and fat humans aside, those are big nostalgia points. The only human kingdoms we’re missing playable now (setting aside Dalaran) are Stromgarde and the traitor-nation of Altarac.
The cultural identity of the Forsaken would have been developed in a relatively short span of time through conscious action on the part of the Forsaken. The argument from the “pro-HE” group is that there are groups of High Elves who have been distinct for longer than the Forsaken have been around (and there is at least one, discussed next). Even for long-lived races, distance and time apart would create differences. Are we saying that the Forsaken can completely change their culture in a few years, but the High Elves can’t in a few decades?
In regards to the High Elves that went through the Dark Portal with Alleria, 30 or so years fighting for survival on a dying planet floating through the Nether with no hope of returning home is going to change someone’s outlook, setting aside whatever physical impact such an environment might have.
The visual fantasy of Dwarves coming from generic fantasy tropes. Did he have any knowledge of those generic Dwarven tropes and did any of those appeal to him? If he’s never heard of Dwarves in any other fantasy context, then saw them in WoW for the first time and thought they looked awesome, that’s fair enough, but then speaking strictly on the visual representation vis a vis skin tones, I question if the Nightborne and Night Elves are distinct enough in that regard. Disregarding any lore, focusing only on the visual representation on character creation, what we have is “Dark” Elves and “Darker” Elves, when one contrasts their visuals with the “fair-skinned” Elves.
It’s not that I’m confusing them, it’s that I do not see skin color as a significant visual theme, If it can be considered a “theme” at all. Architecture? Yes. Livery? Yes. Preferred choice of mounts? Yes. Animations/posture? Sure.
Skin color? Inasmuch as it may be influenced by other more interesting factors like geography, environment, etc., maybe. The fact that a race is pale because it lives underground is more interesting than that it’s pale because an artist decided it had to be “distinct”, and would not suddenly become un-interesting the moment we ran into a race with a magical curse that makes them albinos. A human-flesh-toned Troll on the Alliance might be an interesting and “distinct” visual, in that it’s not the standard troll skin color, and it’s not on the expected side of the Alliance/Horde divide, but I don’t think many people (particularly on the Horde) would go for its existence even if the story and “visual themes” could be as distinct and interesting from Zandalari and Darkspear as the Nightborne are from the Night Elves.
There are much better ways, in my opinion at least, to visually differentiate “races” than mere skin color/tone, because that particularly differentiation disappears the minute you put a full set of armor on, and is harder to notice from across Arathi Basin.
Let me give you an example from another visual medium: the WIll Smith movie “I am Legend.” One of the “making of” documentaries talks about how they tried to make adjustments to his character’s mannerisms, for even simple things like how he holds his weapon after the Zombie Apocalypse when there’s little chance of him running into another person. And that change would’ve been in just a few years, not decades.
How does that relate? Again, even something as simple as posture can change visual thematics. That the Void Elves share the same stance as the Blood Elves could indicate that even after the Void ritual, the Void Elves mostly remain themselves. (Or, if one is cynical, it could mean Blizzard was too lazy to give the Alliance something visually “distinct”, just slapped a coat of blue paint on a Blood Elf and called it a day. Your pick.) Slouching/Hunching, standing at attention, or standing at ease, can all be visual cues for a race.
Going back to “not everyone pays attention to the lore” though…
Speaking only from the evidence of the work put into the ideas for bringing High Elves to be playable to the Alliance, it appears to be a request born out of a desire to make that connection with the lore, not merely the visual aesthetics, and since this is an Allied race we’re talking about, where hoops would have to be jumped through before they could be played, it would have to be. I’ve already mentioned how the current Alliance banks on that lore connection to the Alliance of Lordaeron. The people who actually want to play High Elves on the Alliance would have to be enthusiastic about playing Alliance characters to be spending their time asking for this, and how often do you really see forumgoers excited about playing Alliance? Every few threads we can find some remark about Horde bias, Blizzard hates Alliance, Blizzard isn’t enthusiastic about writing Alliance stories (and Blizzard doesn’t help itself with these perceptions, real or imagined), but here we have a group saying “Hey, we want to play on the Alliance!”
I suspect (and granted, I may be wrong, and the “pro-HE” group can tell me that I am) that Blizzard could’ve done absolutely nothing different visually, done one thing different story-wise, and this issue would’ve never arisen to the level it has. If Blizzard had said that these Void Elves were an elite cadre of High Elves that had come through the Dark Portal with Alleria, rather than a “crack squad” of Blood Elves that defected from the Horde, that would’ve given the lore tie to the Alliance that many are looking for and probably would’ve been enough to appease many,… as long as Ion didn’t then make the “the Horde is waiting for you” statement, anyway. At the very least, neither side could argue that they weren’t Alliance High Elves.
But alas, that ship has sailed, and now, Blizzard has very few if any choices with those High Elves that won’t anger someone, because the optics on the situation are that while the Nightborne feel like some ancient group of Night Elves that split off thousands of years ago with their own themes and motivations, Blizzard couldn’t be bothered to remember there was a perfectly good set of High Elves of indeterminate number that separated from the main group 30 years ago, who still consider themselves Alliance, and have direct ties to Alleria to draw the Void Elves from.
I never said anyone had to share my opinion. What’d be the fun if we all thought exactly alike and committed to the same ideas just because we were all humans
I do, however think that faction identity is important. I want people playing the Night Elves from Teldrassil to be excited about playing their Night Elves. I want
players who choose to be a Human from Stormwind to revel in culture of Stormwind. I want those who play Gilneans to enjoy their Victorian architecture and werewolves. I want the people who enjoy playing Forsaken to enjoy or lament their blighted Lordaeron. I want people to get to play Furbolgs, Ogres, Jinyu, Hozen, Taunka, Tuskarr, Sethrakk, Stromgardians, Frost Dwarves, Wildhammer, Sargerai (Legion-aligned Draenei from WoD), Arakkoa of either variety, Tortollans (make them another neutral “race” so both sides can get them), and yes, High Elves. Any race that has worked with either side, any faction of a race that has worked with either side, that could help people be excited about playing World of Warcraft after 15 years, if Blizzard has the interest, the inspiration, and the motivation to make a good story to make it happen, I welcome it. And if that inspires people who love Alliance to love the Alliance, and people who love the Horde to love the Horde, or gives a target for the PvPers who love to hate the other faction to help keep the PvP scene active for those who enjoy that, then all the better. Because I’m sure if High Elves were added to the Alliance, there’s plenty of Horde who would love to go out of their way take a few of them out.
Blizzard still controls the story with an iron fist. If players had that much agency in WoW, half the Horde players would’ve run off with Sylvannas at the end of the last cinematic and at least half the Alliance players would’ve told Anduin where to get off and followed Tyrande down the road of Vengeance, if the Forums are any indication.
Unless you mean Blizzard doesn’t want to see High Elves dancing naked on mailboxes, which… I can’t argue with, lol.
If you only see High Elves through the lens of the Blood Elves and not through their own lens, then yes, they would only exist to further the story of the Blood Elves. The same argument is made that the Alliance only exists to further the story of the Horde and/or vice versa. The High Elves should have more story than just opposition to the Blood Elves, yes. They don’t have to merge into the Void Elves though, which would just seem like a copout at this point, and they don’t need to merge into the Blood Elves, which if done within the lifetime of WoW would only be done at this point to spite those who want High Elves on the Alliance. Their story could easily be one of finding their own place as a political entity in the world. Just like the Argent Crusade expanded from an organization with the sole focus of combatting the Scourge to a land-holding political entity arguably representing the living heirs of the remnants of Lordaeron. They do hold a pretty big sway in what used to be the Plaguelands at this point. So too the High Elves could establish themselves somewhere.
As you have pointed out, however, WoW focuses heavily on the conflict between the Alliance and the Horde, so should it come as a surprise that the High Elf faction on the Alliance side should be antagonistic to some degree to the Blood Elf faction on the Horde side?
The same can be said about the Alliance and the Horde. They’ve fought, they’ve worked together, and there’s always someone trying to tell them to put aside their differences and join together.
I disagree that the issues that divided them are gone. The issues are dormant, period, because the crisis that brought them to the surface is currently over. People were exiled by the Blood Elf government over not sucking the mana out of animals and mind controlled over speaking out against that oppressive regime. The leadership can’t play that card and then expect everything to just go back to normal while they’re still in power. Are we supposed to assume that the High Elves have forgotten what was done by Silvermoon? Even if the High Elves did reunite with the Blood Elves, there should always be that sneaking feeling, wondering what the next questionable act they object to is going to cost them, when they would next be demanded to betray their principles or face exile. That alone would be enough for some to decide not to go back.
I’ll leave the last word to you. It’s been fun, but I doubt I’ll have time to devote to more of these lengthy posts right now. Thanks for the fairly civil discussion.
Good read, it’s nice to see a lengthy and thought out post that doesn’t fling mud
I’d just like to voice my personal opinion and say that I would’ve loved Void Elves had they been created from the Alliance High Elves. The fact that they’re purple/blue doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the fact that they were pulled from nowhere, or that they haven’t been given the attention they needed in the two years since they’ve been released
Also the schism between the High/Blood Elves isn’t just about Silvermoon forcing people into exile, it’s also that the Alliance High Elves (generally) straight up hate the Horde. The Silver Covenant, the biggest reason as to why a High Elf allied race has merit, is an anti Horde hate group, not a Blood Elf one. We’ve seen some desire for unification, but I for one love the tragic story that the High Elves may never be willing to go home so long as their kin are with the Horde, which as we all know, isn’t going to change
