On Teldrassil evacuation (Kyalin)

Lore Story Forum
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I am just sharing here the work of Kyalin who can’t post in SF :

This next topic is a little less heavy, but I read Elegy and A Good War instead of relying on secondhand information for my research on the Fascism topic - and it raised another question in my mind:

How successful was the evacuation of Teldrassil?

Page 88 of Elegy contains the following:

"The World Tree was more than a city. It was an entire land, home to countless innocents. How many Night Elves were elsewhere in the world? Far too few. Now, they were all that remained of their people.

Sylvanas Windrunner had committed genocide."

As many Horde fans are quick, and correct in pointing out, this is not a third-person omniscient viewpoint - these are the thoughts of Anduin Wrynn immediately after learning that Teldrassil had been destroyed. Anduin is not an expert on populations, nor is he familiar with every measure the Night Elves may have taken in evacuating the tree. For example, we know that some overseas evacuation had taken place due to the presence of refugees crowded on the decks of Rut’theran (Page 79).

The evacuations themselves began relatively early in the War, taking place before the stand at the Farfallen River, the attempted decapitation strike at Astraanar, and the time it took for the Horde to find a way to address the wisp wall. (Page 33) This had led to a situation where, in Stormwind itself "The flood [of refugees] spread to seemingly every surface of the city, continued down through the Valley of Heroes, and spilled out most of the way to Goldshire (Page 78).

Portals, however, are limited in their ability to transport people - perhaps being able to transport two or three people at a time, although that seems to be an acknowledgement of its nature as a physical bottleneck than a sort of cooldown effect. (Page 82 makes this clear)

So, how do we assess the capacity of a portal to process a line of people in travelling from one destination to another?

How about using air travel as an analogy?

Yes, perhaps it’s bad that I was thinking of CGP Grey’s video on boarding methods, but there are similarities in the problem. You can only put people through the gate or portal one at a time, and there is an element of expected delay built in with the problem of bags.

In fact, as I was researching this problem, I found out exactly how slow that boarding process truly can be, because Mythbusters did a segment on it:

Taking a look at the experiments performed, it took 200 people to board a plane under the following conditions, the following times:

Back to front = 24:29
Random with Seats = 17.15
Window, Middle, Aisle =14:55/15:07
Random no seats = 14:07
Reverse Pyramid = 15:10

Back to front therefore seems ridiculous, and I would add, not probable in the case of refugees who don’t have assigned seats and don’t need to hold up the entire line to stow a bag once they get to their seats. There are in fact, no seats at all and in theory they can fan out into the city. But for reasons of conservatism, let’s assume the structure. We’re going to toss out back to front because that’s a little too ridiculous, but let’s consider average “boarding” times of 20 minutes (to roughly average between the two most extreme values) and 15 minutes (which cuts closer to the “random, no seats” idea that I would expect from refugees being simply put anywhere, unless there was some gate agent in Darnassus that no one informed me about).

Presuming that mages work in shifts to keep the portals open - that’s 200 people every 20, or 15 minutes, for twenty-four hours in a day.

20 minutes: 200 * (60/20) * 24 = 14,400 evacuees per day
15 minutes: 200 * (60/15) * 24 = 19,200 evacuees per day

The books themselves depict the invasion in multiple instances of taking days, not hours, making specific provision to the problem of needing to eat and sleep. The prepatch itself also went for a few weeks. I think, given this, and my previous comments on the territorial size of the area we’re talking about, that two weeks is a reasonable timeframe for this analysis.

14,900 evacuees per day * 14 days = 208,600
19,200 evacuees per day * 14 days = 268,800

Page 36 establishes that the Night Elves are not a populous people, and that the primary concern is that Darnassus is a major city. To appreciate what that means by standards of the time, London would not reach that until between 1600 and 1650 [1]. Paris hovered around these values from 1300 to about 1600.[2] Prague wouldn’t get there until 1900 [3].

There’s one other thing to consider:

“Anduin had ordered that the portals be constantly open throughout the city, but the magi had to sleep and eat, as did every one of the stoic but emotionally wrung-out refugees.” (Page 69)

There were multiple portals in play, and while doubtlessly those maintaining them would have needed to take shifts, including instances where some portals for a time would need to be closed, they had the capacity to have several of them open. Increase our number of gates to two or three, and the number of evacuated refugees accordingly, doubles or triples.

None of this should be taken of course as an expression of admiration or hope for the story of course - nor should it be presented as a defense for Blizzard’s decision to have this happen at all, but I do find it to be interesting - as well as a strong basis to conclude that canonically, the species is far from over (even if it will never again be taken seriously and remains constructively dead).

Additional References:
[1] - http://www.demographia.com/dm-lon31.htm
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Prague

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I’m not quite sure on that assertion. It seems like third person description of things. Whereas actual thoughts seem to come in italics. For example.

But more room would not make a difference. The fire was too much, too fast, and it was no ordinary flame. It reeked of magic bent to a task so cruel, so utterly devoid of even a scrap of compassion, Tyrande could scarcely wrap her mind around it. Have I tempted fate with my arrogance, Elune? Is Sylvanas Windrunner beyond even your light, that she would burn Darnassus?

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Thank you for sharing this.

I really liked this part.

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Really interesting, indeed. I asking myself more why they don’t evacuated women and children first, no they evacuated all Gilnean first. I mean are you kidding me? And you wonder why women and children had to burn? I blame Tyrande for this crap.

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/tinfoilhat

This helps further explain how the night elves don’t have a burgeoning population - women and children last - is the status quo.

/tinfoilhat

More apropos of their society, they did have a strong matriarchal one, and may sincerely think the women (sentinels/priestesses) needed to stay due to being in those positions. I know their society has (unfortunately) become mostly equal.

I write “unfortunately” not because I prefer social inequalities, but because retaining hat trait would have made them more interesting - to me - and further retained their older cultural image, while also providing perhaps a means of exploring that kind of culture in modern wow.

Edit to add to the OP: basically if the Nelves evac’d like Southwest boards - and not like, say, American Airlines boards - they’d be able to save more. Very interesting read, OP

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It just seems insane that a ten-thousand-year-old civilization would have a majority of its population in a place that has only existed for a decade and change. It suggests an absolutely incredible effort to transplant huge numbers of people in a very short span of time. Massive swathes of Feralas, Ashenvale and Hyjal must have been depopulated in order to fill the stupid tree.

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Nothing makes sense here anyway

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I had never thought about that…

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When has logic in a Blizzard story ever held water even with word of god clarification?

It only happened because Blizzard wanted to use the word genocide and strap all that drama on the Horde.

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Another way to analyze how successful the evacuation was might actually be from some pictures that are in the physical copy of Elegy:

And the accompanying text about just how many Night Elves ended up in Stormwind and Elwynn Forest:

    The Stormwind night was alive with controlled chaos. Even in an evacuation, when the night elves could be forgiven for being terrified and out of control, there was no screaming, no violence, no crush of bodies crowding one another in a stampede to safety.

    The cathedral could hold no more refugees, not even in the darkest corners of its extensive catacombs. The inns had ten to fifteen in each room. Even certain areas of the keep were filled with silent, stoic kaldorei. The flood spread to seemingly every surface of the city, continued down through the Valley of Heroes, and spilled out most of the way to Goldshire.

Incidentally, I was also recently looking at artwork for Teldrassil that was presented in the announcement trailer for the Traveler series and was in awe of the scope of its size:

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A civilization where the population are splintered throughout all over Kalimdor and Azeroth and when Darnassus was built they finally have a place to be with their own people a nation they can call their own.

Here’s a real life example for you when this nation was formed it had a population of 800k and ten years later the population has risen to 2 miliion.

As that line from that movie goes “If you build it! They will come!”

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This analysis forgets to account for, the time it takes to get the mages organized, spread the word throughout the entirety of Teldrassil, and the inefficiency that would be brought on by streets of Darnasus being clogged with people herding towards the portals.

Using the length of the prepatch for judging numbers is also a rather bad idea, since Lore wise events happen a lot faster than in our real life time scale. Similar to how the Zandalri obviously weren’t missing bombs on the hauls of their warships for months.

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Is it bad that the first thing I did was look at the Night Elf men in that picture and envy their eyebrows+no facial hair look? >_> And then get angry that we don’t have that in-game?

But to the OP, it’s good stuff to think about. In terms of numbers, they will probably be fine, in terms of plot, well… ¯_(ツ)_/¯

And what Gavik said was always on my mind. Even with the building of a population centre, a complete drain on mainland communities is kind of hard to believe.

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To be fair, this poster took some fair numbers because at this point people could be a lot faster than people in an airplane and they could have a lot of portals, there is at least one in the mage sanctum in Elegy and the picture up there shows at least 5 more.

For the duration of war of the thorns, there is several moments in this novel which are descriebed as taking “days”, two weeks is a fair estimation based on these, the prepatch and the scope of Ashenvale, Darkshore and Felwood.

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How so? I mean the Devs I do believe even say that it took the horde some time to raid Darkshore. The reason some may think that it didn’t is because of the way videogames work.

If you played the events on time when they released you’d get a better feel for how long it took. However if like me you waited until the very last day due to real life and rushed through it as quickly as possible in order to earn your black feathered Hippogryph it would seem like no time at all.

It should be noted that travel times being what they are in-game vs. the lore are vastly different. It takes about 2 minutes to cross the Barrens by Zeppelin in-game but several weeks I believe in the lore. Just think about how long it took to go from Org to Undercity or Northrend or even southern Stranglethorn.

The Bombs under the ships does seem strange timeline wise but I could wager that you could chalk it up to the Zandalar being so proud of their navy they never thought to look under the ships should they ever have been inspected in that time. In the Cinematic it mentions agents being clear. So either the invasion actually did happen faster than so IRL, or they sent others to check on the explosives before their approach. Found that they were still in place. Then waited to get close enough to detonate.

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Also here is one exemple of the time it took :

Delaryn also ordered that the areas deeper in the forest be scoured as well, hoping to recover 
those who had been killed by the rogues who had sprung from the shadows… how many days ago? 
Delaryn had lost count. Too many, spent in fighting, snatching moments of sleep here and mouthfuls 
of food there, trying to stay a step ahead of the two most brilliant minds of the Horde and an army 
that outnumbered the night elves eight to one. More now, perhaps.

And this is only in Astranaar which is definetly not the end.

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Night Elves didn’t have that many children. The other problem was that all of the rest of Teldrassil was cut off from evacuation by the fires in Darnassus.

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They could save the children before that. They evacuated all Gilnean first. So all Gilnean could escape but the Night Elves had to eat that fire.

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I think the remaining Sentinels could have done that easily with hippogryhs.

Other than that I think 2 weeks maybe a little long for the time frame but I think the rest of it holds up. It was surely a tragedy but numbers wise they should be fine.

This is why I think it was relatively successful, despite Anduin’s third person. That city is flooded plus those that didn’t take the portals but the boats. I don’t know which is more lore accurate the traveler version of Teldrassil or WoW’s (probably the former) but they definitely didn’t get those portals everywhere unfortunately.

I think the evaluation would have went like this.
Gilnean non combatant women and children
Gilnean non combatant men
Gilnean combatant citizens
Kaildorei non combatant women and children
Kaildorei men
Kaldorei Sentinels
Kaildorei Priestesses that didn’t stay.

I added in the non combatant group before we’ve seen both men and women fight for Gilneans and that vast majority of the Sentinel and other forces of the NE army are women. Although it might be less relevant to the Gilneans.

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Unfortunately we saw at least two children still trying to make it through the portal when the tree burned, so I’m not sure to what degree they tried to evacuate the women and children first.

You bring up a good point about Sentinels and Priestesses of Elune, though. In Night Elf society women might not be seen as the fairer gender that has to be protected culturally.

No idea on the children, though. At best I could guess families wouldn’t want to be separated.

Tyrande wasn’t even on that side of the portal. The Priestesses of Elune and Mia were the ones directing people through the portals. Tyrande was in Stormwind organizing the arrivals. If anything, I credit Tyrande for his part:

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