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
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.
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:
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Moreover the children problem is easily explained by Teldrassil sheer size, if they come from shadowglen they will probably arrive later than every one else.
