I don’t think men are still allowed in the “highest ranks” of the Sisterhood of Elune. We learned in the Night Elf Heritage questline that Night Elf men weren’t allowed to get certain facial markings. Who knows what else they were forbidden from?
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The Kaldorei gender roles, at the root of them I sort of feel like they wanted to invoke the whole scantly clad amazon savage warrior woman trope in the RTS, but when it came time to make a RPG with even a more marginally fleshed out culture the concept became very difficult to carry forward without it also having some issues so… it got quietly rolled back a bit.
I think they finally cracked the code on making a stable and sensible matriarchal culture with the Maruuk Centaur.
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I don’t think I have seen a male priest of elune. I wonder if PC male nelf priests follow elune or the holy light.
Like I said before, there is one male nelf priest in MOP, but he neber mentions elune, and he seemed more lile a mage really.
Times change.
And remember this rule… if you can make it… it’s canon.
The ArchDruid of Alterac Valley was female… She was killed in the War of Thorns. The Archdruid who aids you in Northrend is also female. That should be clue enough that the Night Elves have updated their customs.
Those women didn’t become ArchDruids overnight.
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“Why? You were the one who blazed the trail for woment to become wizards. You’re one of the unsung heroes of Azeroth. You can you turn your back-” Jaina to Aegwynn
At the citadel, my favorite story was always the one about how you were chosen to be first female Guardian by Scavell, who was the first mage to see value of a female apprentice, and how the Guardians of Tirisfal applauded the choice and-Jaina to Agwynn
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Something interesting I’ve noticed is there have been loads and loads of female nelf druids but very very few male nelf priests.
Yeah, very weird and kinda gross on Blizzards part tbh.
I think it’s only priestesses of Elune that are supposed to be a specific gender. The rest is just Warcraft RTS game perception.
I disagree with this. At least as of BFA we see male/female ratio to be almost the same. And by that I mean if you go to Boralus you will see the Sentinel NPCs there can be either male or female depending on when you zone in. That leads me think at least for the Sentinels any gender disparity was removed.
Why would the WOTA books retcon anything? They take place before Malfurion/Tyrande reshaped Nelf society
There was/is a very strong dogma in the sisterhood that only a woman could truly understand the heart of the Goddess, and religious dogma is notoriously slow to change. We cannot say for sure but that may be dogma dating back to the founding of the sisterhood by Haidene, before there even was a Kaldorei empire.
Also, it seems as if Druids of the Moon in many ways are the male equivalent of a priestess of Elune.
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Legion showed Male Elunite Priests in Val’Sharrah
You’re telling me they had Kur’talos Ravencrest as leader of the resistance and Jarod Shadowsong as commander of the resistance army and then later decided “Hmm, yeah, nah, no men in the military.”
It makes no sense. In the same way it makes no sense that Tyrande personally knew Broxigar then had no idea what orcs were.
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I assume the Bronze did their thing and made it so Tyrande and co “forgot” who orcs were and only restored their memories around the time Rhonin and co came back from their time travel shenanigans to prevent any changes to the timeways.
Maybe that is the point. That sexism of any kind doesn’t truly make sense if you think about it hard enough. Maybe Tyrande went “hey, since the Sisterhood will be taking over the main duty of leading the people and since Elune clearly favors the female sex, maybe we should only allow females in the military?” or something to that effect.
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That has never been stated in the published material. The Sisterhood of Elune may field a group of warrior nuns, but that has never been the totality of Kaldorei armed forces. The idea of only women fighters is an absurd one.
We only have experience of the timeline before a trio of time travelers went and monkeyed with it. Also that it can be argued that to preserve the original timeline, the Bronzes may have played some tricks with memory. Broxigar is not an integral part of Tyrande’s memories of the time compared to those of the Stormrage brothers.
Except it was in published material as “mostly” female warriors and “the men are the druids”. The Warcraft 3 CE art book clearly states that “their warriros are mostly female” and “This race of mostly female warriors is strong and empowered and can defeat you handidly”. It was well established that their sentinel army were women in Warcraft 3.
It can only be assumed this was an evolved status quo after WOTA, but the author has a horrible, HORRIBLE, tendancy of turning every female character into a sexy damsel with sexual “countenance”. So it’s difficult to accept this is how it’s supposed to be when it contradicts their original source material.
I have always wondered if it was more the influence of Maiev and the Wardens at large that caused that bias to slowly form among the Kaldorei.
WC3 was always a little weird in retrospect because it seemed to indicate nearly every male was a druid which just makes no sense in terms of social dynamics. They were not working to build a fully fleshed out society then, though, so it worked.
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You’re talking about concept art for a game world vastly different than the one of the game we play now.
I would say screw the original source material. It has at best a tangential relationship to this world based on a very different game.
Right… so let’s just throw everything out the window? I hope they add Klingons in the next expansion…
No need. Klingons are just sci-fi orcs.
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I thought that was the protoss?