Capital City was only one part of Lordaeron, a kingdom which spanned a subcontinent. Furthermore, plenty of Forsaken didn’t live there in life and simply moved there in death, and what’s more, they didn’t even live there because they chose to, but for the same reason that the living Lordaeronians fled: They had been coerced by violence into those circumstances.
And there are plenty of people who were coerced by violence into fleeing who not only are the same people who had been living there before the Scourge, but have actively retained their culture and humanity besides.
You are advocating that essentially all that matters for land claims is who can hold the land physically, and that’s a valid argument but it’s beyond the purview of phrases like “more Lordaeronian” or “true people of Lordaeron” which are abstract cultural identifiers.
I’d also like to analyze the assumption that someone getting killed and raised by the Scourge and ending up, through circumstances completely out of their control, as a follower of Sylvanas Windrunner automatically makes them “more Lordaeronian” than someone who was chased out of their homes and lands and ending up, through circumstances completely out of their control, a refugee in foreign lands.
Neither of these people chose this or had any meaningful agency in what happened. The entire thing was pure dumb chance. But apparently one of these random strokes of fate invalidates the individuals heritage but the other doesn’t?
This was actually Calia’s realization at The Gathering in BtS. Everyone involved was just a normal person dealing with something that happened that they couldn’t stop.
Lets to the math. World of Warcraft reveal trailer the narrator states “Fours years have past since the mortal races have banded together and stood united against the Burning Legion.”
So we have 4.
Chronicles vol 3 places the Battle for Mount Hyjal at year 21 ADP. Thus we know WoW starts at year 25 ADP.
We know from the 2013 Blizzcon Iron Horde spotlight, the Iron Horde is only about 2 years old, placing the WoD cinematic at roughly -2 ADP, which we know was 35 years ago from that same cinematic. Meaning between the opening of the Dark Portal and WoD was 33 years. WoD happened in year 33 ADP.
33-20=13
Already we have 13 years between WoD and The Battle of Mount Hyjal.
We know in Legion from a quest in Azure post that it had been 4 years since the Cataclysm, and from the Legion spotlight at Blizzcon, 10 years after Illidan’s death. Using the 13 number we discovered before, we can determine approximately how long these expansions lasted.
13 - 4 (The numbers of years between Hyjal and Classic), we know 9 years between Classic and WoD.
Since we know it has been 10 years since the end of TBC and Legion, we now know the WoD lasted somewhere between 2-3 years (Depending how ling TBC lasted). Regardless, WoD and Cata together lasted 4 years, which we know for certain.
So between Hyjal and the end of WoD was 15 years give or take 1 year.
(I gotta run, Ill add to this later, but already more than 10 years without including BFA or SL)
You can take it up with Chronicles, which explicitly lays out the timeline up to Cataclysm. TFT (when the Forsaken seized control of Lordaeron) was in year 22. World of Warcraft was in year 25, Cataclysm in 28.
Chronicles doesn’t go as far as BfA obviously, but in BtS we see that it takes place around the year 33.
So from the moment the Forsaken took control of Capital City to the moment they became the sole major power in Western Lordaeron was 6 years. They were the sole powers in western Lordaeron until they were kicked out in BfA for approximately 5 years. In total, they controlled large parts of Lordaeron for 11 years at most, and that ignores the time that it took for them to consolidate their control between TFT and WoW.
That’s a pathetically short amount of time to be trying to claim some kind of long-standing blood and soil national heritage.
Especially since Lordaeron was part of the Alliance from its formation in year 4 to its final fall in year 22.
Lordaeron was under absolute Alliance control and was the Alliance’s political, cultural, religious, and economic heartland for 18 years. It was under absolute Forsaken control for half that amount of time, even less if you start from Cataclysm when they fully conquered the area.
(Yes, this is an astonishing amount of stuff that’s happened in such a short amount of time but that’s always been a flaw of the timeline.)
How about a compromise than. The Lordaeron everyone’s talking about effectively ended when Arthas tore it down and raised it’s civilians as soldiers for the scourge. And the forsaken lost it during BfA
Maybe my Google-fu isn’t as strong as it used to be but I can’t find anything by googling “Chris Metzen Forsaken Lordaeron.”
I remember in one of those books or sources about the development of World of Warcraft Metzen’s initial idea for the Forsaken was that they would literally be humans with skin conditions and be more like lepers than undead but that’s obviously not what happened.
Edit: I’ve been searching for this quote for an hour and have come up empty, but I did find a funny thread from 2003 complaining about the TFT storyline and how the sudden shift in focus from Scourge and Humans to Blood Elves and Forsaken sucked
I’m still genuinely interested in this quote’s source. It sounds like it’d be a game changer so it’s odd that I haven’t heard about it or that Deathisfinal or some other ultra-Forsaken fanboy hasn’t brought it up before.
Chrinicles can say whatever it wants, math is math. When you do the math from the sources given, it is impossible that the time between WC3 and WoD is less than 14 years.
If he was 8 that is still 14-15 years after tft. If he was much younger than that then he would of had to age more than 10 years between classic BtS. Are you saying he was like 14 when WoW began? and everything from classic to SL is like 5-6 years?
Math is hard, dude. I get it. It’s not everyone’s strength.
Anduin is 18 years in the events of BFA. Also every expansion of WOW according with the source we have was 1 year. I know it sounds stupid, but it is what it is.
As much as i hate it, i reckon each expansion being only one year in Azeroth… Which cause a big mess considering that there is no way that the world could survive all those apocalyptic event in such a short time but it is what it is.
In fairness, the time between expansions isn’t as hard-coded as the implied duration of the expansions themselves. TBC overlaps somewhat with the end of Vanilla and the beginning of WotLK, but there seems to be at least several months to possibly a year or so between the end of each expansion thereafter and the start of the next.
While it’s still a ridiculously rapid succession of global calamities, at the very least it provides some grounds for the factions and nations of the world to have most of their standing armies and champions recalled home again by the time the next major conflict erupts instead of, say, still being scattered all over Northrend when the Cataclysm happened.
It’s also worth remembering that events don’t necessarily occur in the sequence that zone/dungeon levels and raid tiers suggest; just as the Horde campaign from the west and Alliance campaign from the east occurred roughly at the same time in Northrend, there are likely to be numerous cases in every expansion of multiple dungeons and raids (and therefore the associated narrative conflicts of their surrounding zones) being assaulted at the same time by different players and/or armies, with only certain ones absolutely requiring from a story standpoint that everything prior to them was taken out before they were engaged.