Roddenberry was infamous for putting in some very stupid restrictions on the writing staff, the big one being “Our crews have no conflicts or sex.” and “All alien make up has to leave the actor’s face recognizable.” He made David Gerrold change his big Bad for “The Trouble with Tribbles”, because his original choice, a rival agriculture company “made capitalism look bad.”
Point is… sometimes lines need to be crossed. Just like DS9 crossed many of Roddenberry’s lines because he was no longer around to enforce them.
There isn’t a single line in WoW’s lore that comes anywhere close to what you just described. All you’re defending is laziness and a lack of imagination.
How could this be happening? How could the Horde have gotten so far, and how—in Elune’s name, why?—had the Horde chosen to burn the World Tree? This was more than war. More than cruelty. This was madness and genocide and hatred so extreme that Astarii could not understand it.
Sylvanas Windrunner had committedgenocide.
Ion: This is an armistice. This isn’t holding hands and forgiving and forgetting. You know, there’s a large portion of the Alliance that are like, “Hey, literally you just committedgenocide against a portion of our group.” We’re not just gonna put bygones- to say bygones are bygones and move on from there.
As bad as the Burning of Teldrassil is in universe, it does need to be taken into perspective.
The Burning of Teldrassil was not the Armenian genocide or Hiroshima bombing. It’s the Snappening. It’s the Death Star blowing up Alderaan. It’s the fall of Reach. It’s a moment played for darkness in drama in a franchise where having 90% of your species being wiped out is better known as Tuesday.
So yeah, I can totally see how you can acknowledge the Alliance is totally justified in being ticked off at the Horde while still making jokes about Teldrassil… because at the end of the day, it is just a game and nobody seriously thinks the folks at Blizzard promote actual genocide, right?
No one seriously thinks they promote genocide. But anyone who thinks they have any ounce of respect for Night Elves or Night Elf Fans is fooling themselves. You can see the tweets in Fae’s post above if you have any doubts.
This was me eleven years ago at a midnight release party in San Francisco for Wrath of the Lich King. Blizzard had commissioned an ice carving of a literal Frozen Throne (and yes, it was cold, even with that seat cover they had).
I think your Death Star blowing up Alderaan analogy is correct. As people didn’t think Blizzard was promoting tyranny and genocide and personal violation by celebrating the throne Arthas sat on at this party. It is just people celebrating the video game they created.
Yes, it is dark humor of having a fire going under what’s supposed to be Teldrassil. But if you think about it hard enough, the humor is just as dark in the photo above for what Arthas did to Lordaeron and Quel’Thalas.
If they hated Night Elves that much, Malfurion would not have been the big ending hero of the original Warcraft RTS.
Even in this venue, the Night Elf leaders are getting a lot more than most of the other racial leaders when it comes to quality screentime.
So this fixation of yours that they have it “out” for Night Elf fans is more than borderline on the obsessive, it’s nearly pathological. What they do have is an agenda that’s not sympatico with yours.
A compeltely different story team that was headed by Metzen who’s said that Malfurion is one of his personal favorites.
If you consider being made to look weak and incompentant against C Tier forsaken characters then sure. Personally I don’t. I know you’re a Blizz Drone, Drah but even you should be able to look at Nathanos 2v1 Malfurion and Tyrande, something Sylvanas herself said she couldn’t do, and recognize it as not being a positive experience for actual fans.
And again, I will point out since the whole purpose of that sequence is to introduce the Dakrshore Warfront, that story HAS to end in a stalemate, not a decisive victory for EITHER side.
And the Burning of Teldrassil was an event made to kick off the faction war, which HAS to end in a stalemate, not a decisive victory for EITHER side - but it was still written as crushing defeat for one side. The in-game event didn’t even have the “at least you got highest DPS in your lost BG” cushion the short story provided.
There were a lot of ways the Darkshore intro could have gone, but I think it picked one of the weaker ones. Especially if the patch was supposed to be the night elves’ last hurrah before fading out of the playable part of the expansion.
Teldrassil was a story event that ended the War of Thorns quest series . It did not start the warfront, Tides of Vengeance did. Not the same situation at all.
The Burning of Teldrassil closes a chapter, Tides of Vengeance opened one.
I will acknowledge that while I can come up with things like the Valkyr being empowered by the Jailer or that in the Alliance presentation Nathanos could not land a single hit on either Tyrande or Malfurion, no, that Nathanos could hold as long as he did and that we were just forced to watch the Undead Night Elves be raised as a scripted event that we could not interact with was not satisfying in any way whatsoever, no.
Only of the first Val’kyr went down as well and the second one sacrifices themselves for Danuser.
I mean Nathanos.
This bit of knowledge was not available, and probably didn’t even exist, when we experienced 8.1. Including it now as a “Yeah but” statement means literally nothing. The presentation of the Tyrande & Malfurion vs Nathanos fight presents us with “One shooty bow boy and his gothic side chicks is equal to the power of the strongest Mortal druid alive and a High Priestess empowered by her goddess, both of which have over ten thousand years of experience.”
