Night Elves and Forsaken don't need new cities

Lore Story Forum
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The thing is, that’s probably not really attributable to their immortality. After all, the Zandalari aren’t immortal, yet they’ve remained largely unchanged culturally and technologically for far longer than night elves have even existed.

It’s just that in WarCraft - and on Azeroth especially, though arguably native Draenor too - the world’s ancient nations and empires all seem to be so dependent upon one magic or another to prop up their cultural centers and foci that said magic’s accompanying attitudes and observances are baked into everything, from the mystical to the practical, meaning their societies otherwise top off at a medieval stage of development and then just sit in that paradigm for thousands of years on end, only developing further if one of the more ingenuity-driven or the titan-forged “genius” races comes along and teaches them about new ideas and higher technologies.

So peaking and stagnating in one single era of focusing on mysticism, swords, bows and arrows is really just the norm for native Azerothian races, irrespective of racial longevity. Once they reach that point they seem to settle into it long-term and generally require either the discovery of “magitech,” the intervention of foreign ingenuity, catastrophic society-wide trauma or all three to push them over the hump into thinking outside that box and growing beyond what previously elevated them to prominence.

The night elves remaining largely unchanged for ten thousand years wasn’t really so strange as to call for an unnatural causal factor; basically most comparably advanced races didn’t change significantly that entire time, immortal or not, or before then. Only relative newcomers like humans underwent significant change, because they were starting from scratch as primitive offspring of the vrykul, and even the clans of their flesh-cursed vrykul precursors who didn’t go into hibernation remained mostly unchanged the entire time, despite their cursed lack of immortality meaning they would have undergone generational turnover and replacement throughout the millennia like most races.

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It’s a legacy of a destroyed kingdom.
The Forsaken represent what was made of it. The scars. The broken.

The living survivors who aren’t content with new lives elsewhere and the symbol other kingdoms still think of are the past.

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It’s kind of crazy the extent that humans have stagnated in WoW relative to their real life counterparts. Human civilization in WoW is about 2800 years old in WoW. They should be thoroughly industrialized by now.

Although the presence of magic could easily be argued to be a decisive difference in the trends of human development.

In fact, humans barely even seemed to war with each other over their history when even their Vrykul predecessors were fighting with each other all the time. I attribute this to the widespread adoption of Light worship among the humans, since part of human religious services seems to be the priest actually casting a magical blessing on their congregation that instills good vibes on everyone.

Development slowed down because social strife among humans in Azeroth was very rare compared to real life, because a defining feature of human society was regularly partaking in magical chill pills.

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Stormwind was once the legacy of a destroyed kingdom. In some ways it still is. But humanity rejected the idea that bad things are permanent, and that things can’t change, and through their actions changed their fate.

It’s the same with Lordaeron. Just because times are dark at one point doesn’t mean they always will be. This is why humanity often refers to their operations against the Scourge with terms like “the light of dawn.”

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Humans didn’t have magic until the elves of Quel’thalas shared their knowledge of Arcane magic with them and that was considered disastrous because humans are weak to addiction, too impulsive and too short lived that they didn’t care about the future they only cared about the present.

Elves recount that the worst thing they ever did was teach humans about magic, and considering what Medivh did, maybe they are right.

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Add me to the table, we get a nice rounded 4 man/woman group. Equal representation per faction too, which is nice so nobody can come here claiming Hurde/Alliance BIAS or any other nonsense.

Exactly my thoughts, I mean he managed to bring Erevien out of his RP posting (frankly, I think I´ve never seen Erevien post as seriously as that first post).

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:roll_eyes: :roll_eyes: :roll_eyes:

Omg Treng!!! I´m trying to make a case here!!! And that avatar looks too pink to pass for an Orc and too bulky to pass for a Belf too!!

Smh, most posters actually play in BOTH factions nowadays… I´m the weirdo that only bothers to play in one.

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So to reply seriously:
(I’m going to try and stay in the story concept and not go into game issues.)

WoW’s Azeroth really works on a very racialist approach. Thus the peoples are splitting themselves up like you say: appearance/politics/random alleged difference.

Starting with your Worgen example:
We have the old Human split into seven kingdoms. Thus they’re Gilnean first.
We have their leaving the Alliance of Lordaeron, creating a rift with the other kingdoms, and reinforcing they’re Gilnean first.
We have their own desire to separate from the rest of Humanity. Gilnean first.
Then we have them being afflicted with the Curse. Partitioning them as different from other Humans. As they can be in Human form, other people can’t tell when a Gilnean is afflicted or not, so they likely fear or doubt them all.
All these things reinforce this group as apart and different from, and with the Curse on top, other Humans are posited as further drifting away from them. With Anduin’s efforts they’re being accepted, and likely at times just tolerated, with the people of Stormwind.

Kul’tirans also went through that separation into their own Nation. Then setting themselves apart due to events, feelings, and politics.

The High Elves and Blood Elves I think are far more murky. With the limited Alliance side High Elves we don’t know how the politics functioned between the people, we simply don’t have meaningful knowledge to extrapolate population wide details from. I think it’s very hard to imagine High Elves feeling a disconnection from Silvermoon being repaired or lived in again. And so here we probably have a bad usage of the word race; where we have a people who evolved in exile as they used Arcane magic and then found the Sunwell. Some of whom, during a dark time, used Fel, but who are still the people cast out by the Night Elves. The Blood Elves would logically, after their own addiction issues with Fel, have issues with the Void magic source of the Void Elves and Alleria (after all, what happened at the Sunwell…).
The result is, I don’t think you can partition the divergent magic and politics of the High Elves’ descendants into races. They’re the children of Quel’thalas first, and while they can have disagreements and be different, they don’t have the partition the Humans do.

The Forsaken have been developed out. We assume from the story data that most of them are from Lordaeron and were Humans killed during the Scourging.
However, at this point, we know there were other High Elven banshees made. We know High Elven Rangers are in the Dark Rangers. We know Night Elves have been raised into the Forsaken. So, truthfully, the Forsaken are the first pan-Azeroth group.
The Humanity of the Forsaken is a thing that is there with the Before the Storm development of them. We can assume there are similar internal feelings in others who were raised as Forsaken.

It is important to remember the rejection the Forsaken suffered. Despite them still having feelings, they were rejected by almost everyone until the Tauren. With the background of them having feelings, and emotions, connections to what they were and who they cared for, that would have been incredibly painful for them.
They would have logically sought a path away from those rejections, and that is making their own way, their own place, in the world. In this vein, a new Forsaken City, where they cast off the old, would be a logical development the story can give currently.

Personally, I think this leaves us at them being cast into a race by the other peoples of Azeroth, not themselves.
They then ended up having to adapt and overcome the place they found themselves in on Azeroth.

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They suffered no meaningful collective rejection.

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In the eyes of the breathing branch, most defintely so.

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This is flat out incorrect.

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Where is the meaningful collective rejection? The closest there is are the fact that Sylvanas sent emissaries to Stormwind and nobody knows what happened to them.

And this is of course after the Forsaken had already collectively rejected humanity. The whole idea that the Forsaken were ever rejected has always been, at best, inconsistent. Usually it’s just straight up the opposite of what we’re shown, where the bulk of Forsaken interactions with humanity are the result of Forsaken aggression.

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In fact, the whole “the Forsaken were rejected” angle became a prominent idea in the community back in Vanilla largely as an attempt to post-facto justify them being huge pricks.

Similar to why it came up now. Everybody else is responsible for the Forsaken doing what they did. Everyone carries blame except for the Forsaken. It’s some teenage edgelord “nobody UNDERSTANDS me” crap.

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A faction of humans literally created the Scarlet Crusade just to wipe the Forsaken out.

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  1. Forsaken sent out diplomats to former colleagues. Collectively rejected in apparently the strongest of terms. The only positive was with a race they would have trouble even conceiving of, on a continent they had most likely never heard of. (Tauren)

  2. I think even the introductory mission wc3 for ‘forsaken’ has them fleeing from the scourge only to be impaled on pitchforks by humans. mission = save xnumber of undead. I mean I could be mistaken. It was a million years ago I played that game.

Whether they have showed adequately in game to everyones satisfaction, does not matter. This is the narrative that is presented.

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Just your head canon. Has zero relevance or credibility.

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Which colleagues? When? Where? Cite your sources.

This is incorrect. There was no such mission. In fact, the Forsaken weren’t even properly formed until the very end of their campaign after they betrayed the Alliance, which is something I always found pretty ironic. Sylvanas dubbed them the Forsaken even though mere moments ago it was them who did the forsaking.

You seem to have a very distorted memory of what narrative was actually presented.

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For reference, here is every mission where you play as the group that would eventually become the Forsaken:

There was a mission where undead chased down other undead to kill them, but it was the Forsaken chasing down the Scourge, and you played as Arthas defending yourself against the rebels.

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Your a laugh, I have to admit. The amount of head cannon you present and try to pass off as fact. I don’t have access to the sources but you do. Why don’t you look it up for yourself.

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