That’s actually a really pretty and awesome drawing. Shame blizz didn’t stick with it
Had to make us fit the Alliance
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You say defanged and watered down, I say made more visually palatable.
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Tbh the visual changes I don’t mind but I would say they did water them down on a cultural or ‘vibe’ level.
Like lets be real, even in minor ways they sort of indirectly screw with their fantasy. Like, this is an extreme example, but given the previous depictions of Night Elves and Wisps… Kaldorei were so hardcore in service to Kalimdor, they’d blow their own spirits up in service to it. The severity of that devotion just isn’t really presented in WoW: especially given how many chose to be Undead and harm their own kin in service to their murderers, rather than blowing up on them.
With the focus WoW has on making hippy jokes with them rather than depicting women so skilled and savage that Hellscream admired them, it sounds like a joke to even really bring up their devotion or warrior traditions they used to have (or at least the lens akin to a warrior culture that we viewed them through originally)
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Night Elves in WC3: “I will end your bloodline over this spruce.”
Night Elves in WoW: “Oopise Daisy… Looks like you plagued your way through our forests, slaughtered our kith and kin, and set fire to the World Tree that fortifies the surrounding forests with Nature’s Blessing and the source of our increased vitality… That’s okay UwU. I am sure you are really, really, super sorry for real this time.”
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I really feel like someone at Blizzard was determined to not have high elves playable at the Alliance, while others were not fully on-board with this decision. The ‘hole of a missing piece’ from a standard Eurofantasy melange ended up getting night elves shoved into it, both from conscious leadership choices and less rigorously checked minor quest and NPC design elements. This became noticeable in Wrath and really bad in Cata when the entire team was stretched very thin.
When I say I don’t really care for night elves, I really mean from this period and on.
Every time a culture in WoW was conceived with significant deviations from what their broader real-world implementation says about them, they eventually regressed to the broader implementation.
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