There’s also an interesting point of interest that we’re never told when the Nerubians of Azj-kahet started to go into decline.
We know that Nefress rejected the call to rejoin the Black Empire, but we don’t know if this was during any of the Old God ‘re-awakenings’, be it the Wrath era under Yogg’Saron, the Vanilla era under C’Thun, the Cataclysm era under the ‘united’ Old God front, or the latest, when N’Zoth tried and very nearly succeeded in reviving the Black Empire entirely.
I’m putting my money on either N’Zoth, which puts the Faceless One’s ‘curse’ on her at roughly 6 years ago.
The Arathai arrived and began settling in the Hallowfall cavern around over a decade ago.
I have a theory (a GAME THEORY!) that the Nerubians relied heavily upon the Hallowfall region for food to supplement what they could farm and hunt for in their ‘native’ level, but the radiance of Beladar made actually settlement there unpleasant in the short term and untenable in the long term. But as the Arathai arrive and spread out from their shipwrecks to create actual settlements, and with the Nerubians’ in decline due to their reliance upon using scent and tremor-sense rather than sight to hunt in a region lit by perpetual daylight, they were quickly pushed out of these new hunting grounds, and with a healthy population undimmed by war or being recruited into the Black Empire, and centuries of studiously avoiding the Earthen due to there being no reason for them to pick a fight with a race obvious in decline and unable to deviate from their ‘Edicts’, the Nerubians got caught with their carapaces around their ankles.
They ran out of food, as we saw in the cinematic. We’ve seen in game that the Nerubians are prone to at-times self-destructive levels of spite and self-interest, such as eating mates out of tradition and peer-pressure, actively sabotaging vital infrastructure for personal advancement or petulant grudges and producing sub-standard equipment and supplies to undermine a rival or hated superior, even as their society crumbled around them. Rather than undergo rationing and accept diminishment until the situation could be resolved, much of the upper crust of Azj-kahet turned inwards and against each other in internal feuds and spiteful displays of authority and connections despite the obvious damage it was doing to their kingdom and their society.
And Nefress was exhausted trying to keep things from spiraling further, raise her daughter to be a worthy successor if the many threats and plots against her own rule succeeded and trying to stabilize the kingdom enough to keep limping along, as we saw in the cinematic, while her daughter Ansurek was willing to let parts of their society burn if it meant turning this ship around and reclaiming dominion and authority from those who would continue the destructive downwards spiral, but lacked the maturity and wisdom to realise that the kind of power required to pull that off would never come without an equally potent price attached, assuming falsely that the Harbringer honestly did care about the Azj-kahet Nerubians and their plight.
Nefress looked at it all as ‘big picture’, that hundreds would starve but thousands more would live on once the population reached equilibrium with their food supplies, and in a few centuries more, enough of the Earthen would go permanently offline that the Nerubians could just bypass the Arathai entirely and start systemically taking over the Ringing Deeps and the Isle of Dorn without suffering grinding attrition.
Ansurek looked at it as ‘small picture’, that she could risk losing thousands of people in the conflict because the strong, the intelligent and the cunning would be left alive to revitalize the Kingdom of Ajz-kahet afterwards, since they’d wipe out all their rivals with the aid of the Harbringer and the Ascended Nerubians, and with no rivals left to compete with, the Nerubians could claim all the resources, mineral, organic and Titanic machinery alike, for their own survival.
They’re both compelling characters in their own rights, and it is foolish to think Nefress was a good or noble character, but she was a skilled politician and would have known trade and diplomacy would have served her better than open war if and when a superior foe showed up. Ansurek … she’s too naive, and too focused on ‘greatness’ and short-term gains, to have survived overlong as Queen once the Harbringer was done with her and left to pursue the next step in her plans for Azeroth’s World Soul.