Night Elves and the Alliance

Lore Story Forum
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As I wrote the title to this thread, which I regarded as a quite neutral title that wasn’t necessarily speaking about whether the Night Elves should be in the Alliance (it merely puts the two terms in the same sentence), I noticed that my topic was considered similar to More Night Elves abandoning the alliance?, Alliance doesn’t care about Night Elves, and Night elves being Alliance was a mistake.

So clearly we already have a read of the room.

To clarify…
I don’t believe that Night Elf inclusion of the Alliance was necessarily a bad idea, at least in theory.
I don’t believe that Night Elves interacting with other Alliance races is a problem, at least in theory.
I don’t have a problem with multiracial organizations in which the Night Elves take part, at least in theory.

But as you may have guessed, I’m not here to talk about theory. I’m here to discuss what I believe happened to get us to where we are today, and what I believe the current problems are.

A “mostly” ideal world

Vanilla didn’t spend a terrible amount of time explaining the world that it was trying to get you to explore. The world still had plenty of mystery to it, and one of these mysteries was how the Night Elves came to join the Alliance in the first place - which I frankly think didn’t really matter much because as much because Vanilla’s presentation did an excellent job of portraying the Night Elves as unique, independent and capable. There was never this feeling in Vanilla that any one part of the Alliance really held sway over the others. I mean, maybe you could make an argument for the Dwarves being this party, but from my view they didn’t really direct or dictate anything.

This is why I don’t necessarily have a problem with the Night Elves being in the Alliance. Vanilla gave us something close to an ideal state for an MMO. That doesn’t make it flawless, but Vanilla did let you do your own thing without larger events, or institutions, screwing with the racial fantasy that you picked. It would carry that on for a while until Blizzard changed its storytelling style to fit more of an RTS, single-player, narrative focused story revolving around the exploits of a handful of NPCs as they made the sorts of massive, flashy changes to the world that you could only really get away with in a single-player story, where the people and the locations - unless a major character is involved - are really just collateral damage that no one is really supposed to care about.

But, let’s put a pin in that, and return to it later.

Story über alles

I will be (and have been) referring to this style as an “ubernarrative” - an all encompassing story that is marked by its scale, its focus on a small cast of NPCs, and its insistence that everyone be dragged into caring about it. This was going to be the way that Blizzard was going to tell stories, and this was the vehicle that they rammed the faction war into.

It didn’t start off completely terribly. In Wrath of the Lich King, when all of this ubernarrative stuff really got started, Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream were sort of introduced as counterparts to each other - both just as aggressive, and both likely just as wrong about each other, both driving their respective factions to war for what they saw as understandable reasons. You could probably put them on a Warcraft 2 box. Remember this?

That could have actually been a decent basis for the faction conflict - an evenly matched fight between two sides that can’t claim a monopoly on justification, but probably think they can. Sadly, it was not to be.

Wrath of the Warcraft 2 Fans

Cataclysm was derided during its heyday on these boards as a massive Horde party against the Alliance concocted by meathead Warcraft 2 fans in the guise of a Warcraft 3-style “finding yourself” narrative (because, well, it was). It set off a backlash that came to a head in the 2011 Blizzcon. Dave Kosak wrote a Dev Watercooler post where he dodged the faction bias question by establishing that Warcraft was necessarily an unfair because unfair situations create heroes (i.e. establishing the Alliance = Good, Horde = Evil dynamic that we have to this day). Corpsegrinder spewed homophobic slurs against the Alliance next to the grinning dev who invited him in the first place. Chris Metzen was awkwardly shoved into an Alliance sweatshirt, and as Theramore was released, a weary Alliance playerbase was being promised a “fist bump moment” that would ultimately never come.

It was equal parts in-your-face-disregard coming from the Warcraft 2 dev crowd and damage control coming from the steadier hands that were on their way out. I believe that the former agitated for something resembling Cataclysm because this was the crowd that straight up wanted Forsaken because they thought they were playable scourge. This was the crowd that spent a lot of time building up the Horde as a brand and fashioning it as this metal-album cover entity that didn’t really jive with where Metzen had taken the concept in Warcraft 3, and Metzen wasn’t far away from retirement. He was already transitioning to those newer hands.

But, reality was staring them in the face - they overreached and now they had to do something for the Alliance. There was just one problem - they didn’t like writing about the Alliance! These people have made no secret that they just find the concept boring - which is the example that you’ll find if you open the encyclopedia and look for “self-fulfilling prophecy”, but, this was a problem, and we see that problem in the “solution” that they came up with to mollify a faction that was upset about watching its lands taken and its constituent peoples’ humiliated in what was supposed to be a balanced, bifaction MMO. This, you see, was all going to be solved by the “Trials of the High King”.

You’re the king? Well I never voted for you.

We know how this went down. Questions of whether this created a human led empire were quickly raised and just as quickly clarified with the High King position nominally being regarded as a Supreme Allied Commander. The questline itself was only partially realized, with Blizzard taking the hatchet of human potential at the Night Elves first in a patch that featured them failing repeatedly all over two continents (including in their own capitol city - and I yearn now for the days where this was as bad as it could get).

I know from experience that the Night Elf community already wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but this is where we start to see the dynamic that I feel I’ve finally meandered my way to - which is consistent of a) establishing the humans and specifically the Wrynns as the center of Alliance storytelling, and b) bringing down the Night Elves for their benefit. The genesis of this I don’t feel is a mystery in either case. A) Came about because again, the developers don’t like writing for the Alliance, and so they went with the easiest, safest route that they could think of - “Some strong King Arthur guy with a sword - medieval aesthetic - yeah, let’s just do that”. Regarding B) - getting the devs outside of Samwise and Metzen to even accept them was revealed by the former as having been a “really hard sell” (http^s://www.pcgamesn.com/world-of-warcraft/night-elves) in the first place - but the other issue was that a quasi-independent race like the Night Elves threatened the simple, unified image that they were going for. This would upset Night Elf fans, but let’s be honest - if the last ten years have taught us anything, it’s that they don’t mind if we quit.

The Outlier

It’s here that we nevertheless see a massive disconnect in the Alliance. Blizzard nominally wants to sow pride in the institution, but because they have framed the relationship between humans and Night Elves as one where the former suffers for the benefit of the latter, resentment springs up instead. They set up Teldrassil which allows the Alliance to get some hits in against the Horde - but only humans are allowed to do this, and only in areas and for objectives that they care about. I think they sort of leaned in to this, but they appeared to be trending into a Leyara-like direction with Tyrande until, as we learned recently, her whole stint with the Night Warrior in regards to what it was intended to do turned out to be completely pointless. I expect now to hear from Tyrande and Shandris that they will be forgiving the Horde and potentially a redeemed Sylvanas - and I expect them to become reviled characters for this.

This also brings up another disconnect - one having to do with Alliance morality. Remember when I asked you to put a pin in the idea that in a single-player story the destruction of locations and peoples is often collateral damage that people aren’t expected to think about? That gets more complicated with an MMO. Because we aren’t playing as Tyrande or as Anduin - we’re playing as avatars of a given playable race, we form investments and attachments to locations and people - and you can see this all of the time in the sort of faction and racial identification that accompanies commentary not just here, but on just about every forum where WoW lore may be discussed, including places like General Discussion and Twitter, where you would expect to encounter more of the “normal” playerbase. This is a kind of roleplaying, and a pretty clear sign that an MMO developer needs to be mindful of how they are treating the roles that they have on offer - just as an aside.

But, what does this mean? It means that regardless of a character’s progression, the players’ interests are ultimately couched in what happens to the things they see the most, and the things that they’re actually invested in. In the Night Elves’ case, those things were destroyed as collateral damage for the faction war by the Horde, and left unavenged because the developers were too focused on seeing the Alliance as humans, and because they are trying to tack the game to one human’s concept of what is moral. Why is this failing? In part because this entire direction flies against the investment that I just talked about for Night Elf players - which deepens division, especially as the broader Alliance is established as a sort of mouthpiece for this phenomenon. This will also not change if Tyrande is turned into a Baine, as appears to be taking place. If characters turn against the interests that I just talked about, they start to become reviled - and if you ask me: a reviled character that is continuing to do damage is far worse than a dead one who stuck to their guns and went out believing in something, even if that thing is horrifying. It’s for this reason that I increasingly think that this should be Tyrande’s last expansion. I don’t want her coming back if she’s going to be a Baine - and by all accounts, she’s failed as a leader anyway.

But, in conclusion - we have a scenario where the Night Elves, and its fanbase for the most part, is encouraged to be deeply estranged from the rest of the Alliance, as well as in rejection of the messages that Blizzard is trying to get the playerbase to accept.

How do we fix this?

Those of you who know me know what I am going to say next. Something about the ubernarrative being bad, something about racial balance in an MMO, a wild claim about how Dave Kosak created COVID-19, that sort of thing. Now that you know about those, let me introduce one more.

Blizzard needs to stop fighting gravity with the Night Elves. They have teased vengeance, they have teased catharsis, and they have teased more independence only to yank it away because that interferes with the story that they want to tell. They need to stop doing this, and with respect to the Alliance, they need to acknowledge and call out these abuses in lore (because they absolutely exist in lore) and then find a way to mend them. More specifically, if and when Anduin returns from the Shadowlands, he needs to be confronted with the damage that’s been done with the trust that was placed in him. I’ve suggested a PVP scenario - some people have asked what Anduin would do in response. He’d likely object to the Night Elves becoming more aggressive, at which point I think he needs to have his entire ideology thrown right in his face.

“We sent an army to Silithus because YOU thought it was important. We relied on YOUR faulty intelligence that YOU were so damned sure about. YOU didn’t have a plan if we got attacked. YOU got our people killed. YOU refused to help us take our lands back because YOU used the tragedy as justification to get things that YOU wanted. No, we won’t sign your treaty - we’re in the firing line, YOU are not. YOU left people in power who wanted us all dead. We’re going to get attacked again, and we are not going to be sacrifices for your insane pacifism, which you only feel secure about because YOU are an ocean away. We want nothing to do with YOU.”

Is that unfair? Is that personal? Oh yes - and it should be. It should also be the hill that Anduin has to climb to regain the Night Elves’ trust and their willingness to help the Alliance against whatever array of threats they have to face in the next expansion. Most crucially, this should not end with the Night Elves simply being wrong and Anduin being right - the overall concern should be treated as legitimate, and the resolution of such should finally answer the question of why the Night Elves are in the Alliance in the first place - not the origins of it, that doesn’t actually matter - but why the Night Elves would actually choose to continue to be in that coalition. Why does it make sense for them to be there? Fundamentally?

… and don’t forget. It’s the players, not some malleable NPC, that you have to convince.

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That’s easy. It’s a 2-faction game.

:pancakes:

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Kyalin, a couple of things before I give a proper response. First, good job on your analysis. Second, while your arguments are good I really wish you could learn to be more concise.

Onto the proper response.

The issue of putting the Night Elves into the Alliance has always been a contentious one and I agree with your analysis of how it began and how it developed into its current state. I disagree with your assertion towards the end that the origin of the Nights Elves joining the Alliance in the story doesn’t matter (partly for personal reasons as I am working on such an origin but keep getting distracted by life) but I do agree with how you propose to fix the situation in the story. The Night Elves choosing to break from the rest of the Alliance is a believable and potentially interesting story idea. It could also tie into a larger potential story idea of many the core races leaving both the Alliance and the Horde with players assisting in reuniting their factions (leaving that idea aside for a different thread).

The biggest problem that I can see with achieving this goal is not in my opinion the writers past or present. The biggest problem is how to balance the different wants that players look for, hope for, or expect as a given in the story. What Night Elf players in particular look for (and please correct me if I am wrong) is to have their preferred race be a power that can stand on its own. This is not a bad thing and certainly not an impossible thing in Warcraft but it can be problematic when the writers are seeking to create a two faction game instead of a three or four faction game. What Night Elf players tend to hope for (from my observations) is that their preferred race receive a significant amount of spotlight and that there be an option to not share that spotlight with any other group. Again, not impossible but it does raise the fact that if the Night Elves are to remain a part of the Alliance they will need to share the spotlight with others or have it focus on others. Now what Night Elf players look for as a given in the story (which I agree with completely) is that Night Elves be shown as competent and strong in the story; something that every playable race should expect as a given.

Since you ask how to convince players that the Night Elves should remain part of the Alliance and not the Night Elves in the story then the presentation is key. Players should be shown that the Night Elves benefit from being a part of the Alliance not simply because of the Horde or some villain of the week but because it is in their long term interest. Players should be shown, not merely told or talked down to, that the Night Elves are better off as part of the Alliance and that the Alliance is and will actively work in the Night Elves favor.

I also present a counter argument Kyalin for yourself or anyone to consider. If the Night Elves did chose to leave the Alliance why should the Alliance want them to stay? What benefit does the Alliance gain from having the Night Elves?

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Me too. I do feel that the development history and how it built to some of the issues that we’re dealing with was important though. At any rate, sorry for making you plow through a novel.

I disagree with this because that’s effectively what we had in Vanilla, and the subsequent additions of races were only bolting on to that formula until BFA decided that it would be cool to blow up cities. The Night Elves were the flagship for the Western Alliance, and through a combination of allies, unique abilities that acted as force multipliers and geographic advantages, they could hold down their area of the world. The same was true for the Forsaken. This model worked just fine from a balance perspective and can be returned to without difficulty.

I’d push back on this as well. Night Elves actually get a ton of spotlight, but spotlight isn’t a good thing when it’s used to showcase the race being eroded or beat down. The content that we need now is content to reverse the impacts of that treatment - which isn’t a quantity question, it’s fundamentally a question of quality.

Past that, there’s a reason why I held up Vanilla, where there was next to no Night Elf content apart from the standard questing that everyone got, as a kind of gold standard. What’s important is that the lore establishes them as unique, capable, and reasonably independent - not that it checks in on them all the time.

I’m just quoting this to say that you’re on point here. So is the paragraph that follows this.

Geopolitically, Stormwind benefits from that Alliance because whenever the Horde wants to come after them - like it did in BFA, the Night Elves are an effective check/bulwark against them. The Horde cannot proceed against Stormwind without risking an attack from the North, and on paper they can’t progress North to deal with that threat first because the rest of the Alliance will intervene. In geopolitical parlance, it’s called a “divide and rule” tactic, where you freeze regional conflicts and tie up potential opponents by arraying other powers against them. The United States for instance does this today against China with the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or “Quad”, for instance.

The problem is that in BFA especially, while the Night Elves held up (and suffered for) their end of the deal, Stormwind left them hanging so that it could take territory in Lordaeron, Arathi, and Dazar’alor. Then they left the threat opposing the Night Elves, one that has waged war as an attempt to exterminate them multiple times, in place after the war. Whether you argue that this is due to ability or intention is immaterial - it dismisses any reason the Night Elves may have had to contribute - because either way, Stormwind won’t be there to hold up its end of the deal.

Going back to the Quad, let’s say that China invaded Taiwan, kicking off a response from the Quad. India, Japan, and Australia end up holding the line, and the US decides to use the commotion to take over Cuba and a few other South American states that it argues are either communist or potentially aligned with China. What possible reason, assuming that some of these states even survive that war, would they have after that to trust US security guarantees in that hypothetical? We’re in a similar situation here.

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I still think the Worgen, Draenei and Night Elves should’ve been their own faction. And I get the NE have been mistreated by blizzards bad writing, but soo many just forget the worgen and other races are in the same boat. Only way to fix it is by demanding better writing, not living in the past and deleting the other races because some people want to go back to the vanilla era :wolf:

Go play WoW classic if that’s what you want.

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No worries, compared to some of the other readings I’ve had to do this last year (short version had to do with boiling down current US politics in a way that wouldn’t offend anyone in a High School) it wasn’t so bad :slight_smile:

Fair enough. The issue then is if the Night Elves in the current story can be shown to interact with the rest of the Alliance in a similar vein. I agree that it wouldn’t be difficult in most instances but it does depend on the story being told.

If the gold standard is vanilla than I am not certain it is possible to go back to that without a full world revamp (which I will happily write for Blizzard for free; slight allowance for food). That being said, the idea of reversing past treatment would likely be a long term goal since it took a while in the story and game to get to this point it would likely take a similar or equal time to reverse it.

I agree that that is a key benefit (please forgive me for not including the real world comparison). Another key benefit would be the experience difference between the Night Elves and the rest of the Alliance. The Draenei aside, the Night Elves are the eldest playable race on the Alliance. That is a massive advantage to have for peace or war.

To give an answer for why the Night Elves should remain apart of the Alliance (aside from the Geopolitical reason you presented as it equally works in the Night Elves favor even if they need assurances from their allies) would be similar to another real world example; the Columbian Exchange. For reference sake the Columbian Exchange occurred when Europeans began their exploration/conquest of the America’s. In essence it is the exchange of goods and ideas between two continents. For example, while a harvest season ends in one region leading to a potential famine a growing season or harvest season would start in another allowing more food to be grown and a larger population to be sustained. In other words by remaining apart of the Alliance and having ready access to a similar exchange the Night Elves would be able to grow and sustain their population to a larger level.

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There are a few reasons why I don’t find this reason to be all that compelling.

  1. This system doesn’t work in the same way that say, globalized trade would go on to work from the 1800s to today. The colonies usually couldn’t trade with each other, or with another colonial empire, and the system was set up to allow wealthy Europeans to become wealthy off of the back of enslaved local populations. The Europeans generally did not approach the peoples of the Americas to set up mutually beneficial trade, they usually either drove them out or used them as free labor, as especially Spain did. Both the mercantilism (which Stormwind would have to find some way to enforce) and the element of Europe effectively using the system as a means of extraction rather than real trade make it something that couldn’t apply here.

  2. I bring 1 up, because in that exchange, Europe didn’t have to think of something that their counterparty would actually want, which isn’t the case here. With the Night Elves, they’ve never had trouble feeding their population, and they can grow and build practically any of the finished goods that they might need with druids and wisps. That really only leaves “high tech” implements - for which they have options if they wanted to use them. They could trade unilaterally with the gnomes or the Draenei, or, in the event that Stormwind was somehow able to enforce a pan-Alliance mercantile system that the gnomes and the Draenei agree to (good luck with the Draenei especially), then they could offer something to the Steamwheedle cartel. That being said, that’s a small category of goods.

  3. Trade without a mercantile system does not require a military alliance. Again, for that to come into play, Stormwind would have to impose rules stating that member nations of the Alliance aren’t allowed to trade with the Night Elves now because they’re not in it. I’m not sure if everyone would go along with that, and even if they do - we’re again talking about a very narrow product band.

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I didnt read but I am guessing kyalin ignored the whole allying with people who hate the same people you hate is like a basic human thing in real life

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The relationship between the Night Elves and Stormwind should be an alliance of conveinience. Y’know, to help maintain control over Kalimdor, while they bring their dark plans into fruition.

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To be friends with someone only because of mutual hatred of a third person? Yes, of course, good … But why does it feel like the Alliance doesn’t hate the Horde very much? Regularly forgives, supports the internal squabbles of the Horde, resists the desire of the night elves to continue the war. “I’m on your side,” shouts the Alliance as the Horde pummels the night elves. The Horde slipped and fell, the night elves swung to strike, but the Alliance barged in between them: “They do not hit the lying one.” Is the Alliance a friend to the night elves, or a hindrance to the destruction of the Horde?

Thank you for the “simple” vocabulary, now it is not so inconvenient to interfere in the conversation of smart people.

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All good points. I tried to avoid the more nuanced points about the Columbian Exchange because I was focusing more on how a simplified version of it might be presented in WoW. I also chose to use it as an example instead of Globalization in large part because of debating someone else who would throw a tantrum about it even being mentioned and I apologize for adding that instinct onto a conversation with you.

I admit to having some difficulty in finding a compelling reason for the Night Elves to remain in the Alliance without manufacturing some problem they would need help with. A big reason why I suggest trade is that it allows the Night Elves to have a flexible status within the Alliance without taking anything away from the Night Elves or another member state of the Alliance. And, to get to your last point, mercantile systems often lead to or require military systems in order to protect and/or project the mercantile systems. In fact this could lead to some interesting story telling by allowing the Alliance to be more aggressive in the world due to a desire for expanded trade.

If something like the above were to be used the question then is how to make it compelling in an MMORPG. Perhaps have players escort ships that would be regularly attacked by pirates, Naga, and/or others and Alliance ships make a difference in the effort.

Moving away from trade another compelling reason for the Night Elves to remain apart of the Alliance (and one that would focus more on the Dwarves and Ironforge than Stormwind would be discovery and perservation of Night Elven ruins. Such ruins have been discovered world wide on Azeroth and almost certainly still hold treasures, writings, and history that the Night Elves would be interested in either retrieving or maintaining. With aid from the Alliance such places could be reached, secured, and either excavated or maintained far more easily than the Night Elves could be by themselves.

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Cause sylvanas left the horde and the alliance wants to go after her. The alliance did fight the horde, they beseiged org, they destroyed the horde navy, they destroyed the horde army.

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Yeah, no. The explorers’ society has done enough harm as it is

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I dislike Vanilla because it felt like it was barely an Alliance! Barely even saw difference races interact. Heck, Stormwind was the most cosmopolitan city of the Alliance and yet I don’t recall too many quest there involving multiple races sans maybe a delivery quest here and there.

Aside from Alterac Valley we barely saw any interaction with the Alliance forces. There is a reason I think Blizzard keeps coming back to Alterac Valley even for “spinoffs” like in HoTS(and most likely Hearthstone is getting an Alterac Valley expansion at the of the year). Because I think it was always what they want the factions to be at their best, everyone working together(usually) against the opposite faction.

It has been years but as I recall the Corpsegrinder event forced the CEO of Blizzard to apologize. As for the devs, it was their biggest event, and as awkward as the whole thing was they have no choice but to smile and try and to keept it going. I doubt most of them realized at the time how far the Corpsegrinder thing would blow up/realized too late.

Kosak didn’t dodge the question. He literally told us what would happen in Warcraft. That Warcraft story did(inievitably) turn its focus on the Alliance. As for the fist bump, they though it was suppose to be us kicking the Horde out of Dalaran(yes yes I know they ended up back tracking on that later). For the most part, I think many did enjoy abit of payback against the Horde while still being able to justify the event(I certainly did)

While I am sure Metzen always preferred the Horde, Blizzard is literally composed of hundreds of developers and we have see them make narrative that does tug at the heartstrings of Alliance players

Or you know they bring down whatever group they want just because they think it advances the story. Or do you forget Stormwind was once strong enough to fight the entire Horde alone before it ultimately fell in Warcraft 1, thus forcing it to actually find new allies?

This is obviously a horrible take. The night elves suffer because there forest happen to be bordering 3 of the major Horde races and they have things the Horde wants.

THe humans(and the rest of the Alliance) have been sacrificing for years to try and make sure Ashenvale remains in the Night elves hands. Saying also only the humans get the ability to hit at the Horde ignore the fact the Night elves actually were pretty competent and managed to having some wins in Elegy/the War of Thorns.

If you thought Tyrande was going to be Leyera and not end up just being saved I think you were smoking some strong stuff. There was little chance the devs would hit the night elves again and kill Tyrande/villain bat her(although the fact players felt this way means they were doing their job). If anything I expect Tyrande to be more like Jaina in the future. She never forgave Garrosh but she did learn to move on and actually try to build something better for herself.

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Temporarily, and it was also the Horde commiting genocide, and Horde shamans fanning the flames to kill as many innocents as possible.
Also, they destroyed the Horde army so well that the Night Elves couldn’t even get their lands back, and couldn’t even bring a single Horde member to justice.
Even Saurfang was killed by Sylvanas, not even by the Night Elves. They lost everything so that the Alliance could deal a few minor blows to the Horde and then forgive the Horde, rewarding them with land and a heroic speech while the Night Elves were entirely ignored.
That was also around the time when Tyrande and the Night Elves completely vanished from the universe, being neither present in Nazjatar, nor being in the process of fighting against the Horde.

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I was wondering when you were going to show up.

I mean, that’s one way to put it. The way I prefer is that my racial fantasy wasn’t being crushed by the ubernarrative. I’m sorry that me having fun is at odds with your objectives.

Para 3: You’re missing the point about why Corpsegrinder was mentioned.
Para 4: Yes he did dodge the question of Horde bias. He also, as I stated, in that dodge, managed to establish the Alliance = Good, Horde = Bad dichotomy that has screwed over the faction war.
Para 5: Tugging at the heartstrings is not the unequivocal mark of good video game storytelling. You need a broader calculus than this.
Para 6: Your reply is a non sequitur.
Para 7 & 8 can only be made if you ignore other parts of my post, which it appears you did.
Para 9: Given that you’re a proud member of the “wait and see” crowd - those eternal optimists who kept telling us that things would get better after this piece of bad content or that one, who then move the goalposts when that doesn’t happen - if I’m smoking something, then you’re coming at me from somewhere deep inside of Scarface’s desk-mountain by comparison. My predictions may not always be exact, but a) I admit when they’re wrong, and b) I’m not losing to the broken clock for how many times a day that I do hit the mark.

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Yea, they only hit them in several other ways. For example by having their souls tortured in the maw (this was new information we received in SL after things were already terrible in BfA), by obliterating their souls in the maw, by giving Sylvanas and Anduin yet again all the screentime and letting Sylvanas get away with it and painting the Night Elf genocide as no big deal, by ruining Elune and the Night Warrior and by Tyrande giving up on justice and focusing on renewal for the anima left behind by her obliterated people in the maw.

And more…

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Everyone’s souls is being torture, by all accounts soul obliteration is not just a night elf problem and the souls of everyone can be obliterated, they are not letting Sylvanas get away and do not potray the night elf genocide as “not a big deal” and considering Tyrande is clearly getting a cinematic during the Ardenweald portion of the quest means Sylvanas/Anduin are not getting all the screne time(not to mention her story will probably continue long after SL while Sylvanas will end and I think Anduin will end up in the back burner for a while).

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Yes, but the narrative is only really only racking the victim points for once race in particular and pointing it out so that everyone has to be reminded of it - and no, on no planet is that a good thing for fans of the race that’s being singled out.

For the upteenth time: Presentation > Mere text

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Well, besides those of the Zandalari Trolls, which were saved by their Loa… something that a goddess could’ve done for the Night Elves if they had one.
Furthermore, while a few members of other races might be in the maw, the entire night elven race was in the maw.

Oh they very well are. So not only did they let the Horde get away, they even let the one that took all the blame get away.

Totally not, that’s why they’ve been sweeping it under the rug and trying to hide it from people. They also had you free a few souls to distract from the fact that most of them got obliterated.

Eh yeah, maybe one of those ingame ones.

And the cinematic is about a negative thing happening to Tyrande, Ardenweald and the Night Elves

Uh no? Why do you think that Sylvanas story would end? Not only does the story suggest otherwise, the writers outright stated it won’t end and that she’ll be getting away with everything. Did you see that 300 page genocide glorification book coming up ?