I pulled out an old game guide from the original battle chest and this image was in the section about Night Elves. Does anyone have a clue about this artwork? The ears are like the old anime style, fluffy and off to the side. I’m actually surprised Tauren didn’t get any neat horn decorations like this.
Colored version I found online from the original classic manual:
Not really. It all boils to the artists’s own individual style
I thought that might’ve been the case, but wasn’t sure.
Maybe just the ears. They’re the only part that appear fluffy, while the rest of her skin sans eyebrows and hair is bare.
Looks like a human girl with anime ears.
I admit I do not understand all the lingo the kids use these days, but fluffy? She does not look particularly fluffy to me. I also am no student of art, but the only difference I see is her ears are turned down. Does having elvish ears turned downward equal fluffy in this day and age? I figured fluffy meant some fur or fuzz or maybe chubbiness.
A little ear hair on a gal might have been an artistic choice…
Trolls, canonically, have short, soft fur. Night Elves are just one Well of Eternity-induced glow-up away from Dark Trolls. I imagine some do sport the occasional atavism, such as fuzzy ears, as seen here.
Remember that Night Elf males can be heavily bearded, and they all have those crazy eye-brows. I imagine variations in body hair distribution, but in all but the rarest cases, probably not actually fuzzy.
Fuzzy/furry elf ears (note the jagged edge on the lower side meant to depict fur, shadowing indicates it covers the ears and is both front and back) were an uncommon but not unknown artistic choice from the 80s to 00s in anime. In some ways it predicted the rise of kemonomimi and monsterfolk and seems to have been completely supplanted by them now. They also strongly preferred the horizontal long elf ears, which I’ve never seen in anything western except for Night Elves.
Often in cases like this, an artist is hired not being familiar with the source material and is given little direction, so their own flourishes show up.
The book artwork done in those days was as accurate and consistent as the average cover you find in a sci-fi paperback.
Yeah, I didn’t mean fluffy like large. It wasn’t any sort of “kid lingo” (???) but I was directly referencing the fuzzy ears. I agree that it was probably just a personal touch from an artist that didn’t entirely follow the source material.
Artistic liberty I’d assume: this book references Darnassus, so by it’s existence they’d already been in wc3 for multiple years.
If you look at the original concept for night elves before they were fleshed out more, you can see that they were portrayed as more feral and also as more natural shapeshifters as a race, with each night elf conceived as having their own totem animal. The old night elf assassin art shows her with bird claws, for example.
Might just be a holdover from that, given how old the art is. The tauren isn’t really accurate in design either, that said, so it likely just came down to pure stylistic choice.
Blue eyes?
P.S. originally Blizzard were planning Night Elves to be like this:
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/wowpedia/images/5/5e/Night_Elves_-_Concept.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20180611235656
That’s neat to learn. Thanks for the cool posts!
that is so much cooler than what we got
No.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMDZlMDE0ZTEtNGVkNS00OTY2LWExMDctMjE2MGZkYTBkNzgyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjExODE1MDc@._V1_.jpg
Presumably they decided to reserve that decidedly shamanic hat for the tauren.
I have always been half convinced that was stolen artwork that someone just recolored because of how strange it is. It doesn’t have any basic symbolism of WoW, the Tauren is just random Minotaur, the Night Elf has fuzzy anime ears, the obvious magic when Night Elves didn’t really use magic at the time, the weird as heck weapon in her hand being some sort of double bladed thing, the armor not matching WoW… And then, you know… The “Wearing an bra that is seen over the shirt and is half off” thing.
Flexing my trusted level for everyone.
Also another #savage nelf concept art from before WoW defanged and watered them down.
Also some savage and also strange Nelf concept art from Warcraft 3.
It is weird because, Blizz added a lot of cool lore to the Night Elves between WC3 and WoW… Then just undid it all before WoW even launched.