The sad part is that I don’t really think it’s Horde Bias rather than Humans/Anduin/Sylvanas obsession.
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At least, addressing the general theme of this…
That’s a valid point. It really doesn’t fit with any Night Elf thematic we have. So while the World Tree is very obviously going to be in the Dragon Isles, I have to think that the idea that Night Elves are going to be separated from Kalimdor isn’t the direction they are goin.
The World Tree might be for something else. It would actually pretty much have to be, because it’s basically saying “We’re just going to get rid of Night Elves”. And I don’t mean that in the doom and gloom oh woe is blizzard hates us me type.
I mean it literally. We know what happens to mortals with prolonged exposure to dragons and the dragon Isles. They turn draconic. The Centaur avoided it because they didn’t interact with Dragons. The Night Elves are, arguably, the closest thing to peers the dragons have among the “mortal races”. Friendships, regularly taking shapes, interaction and friendship that predates the War of the Ancients. Pacts dating back thousands of years.
Like, from that stand point… I absolutely see the point in the Dragons helping and hosting the Night Elves. The Dragons and Night Elves have a fairly strong relationship comparatively speaking.
But it undermines every other aspect. No forests? No ancestral lands? And probably most damning of all, nothing to stop the Horde from taking the Well of Eternity.
It’s basically a reset for them not just narratively, but thematically.
And look, that has it’s perks.
I’m not really so doom and gloom that “they’ll be shunted off to dead expansion” really matters all that much. That isn’t really different than any other major city.
And, I kind of have a feeling something big is coming with how the world works anyway. The underground zone removing loading screens is fairly huge, because it means they could in theory integrate the tech between all the continents.
Brand Recognition, the most powerful cosmic force in this franchise.
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It seems to be exactly what they are going for if the night elf home is on the dragon isle. It’s closer to EK than Kalimdor and the night elves aren’t any kind of sea power to be able to get over to Kalimdor, their actual home. I would be fine if the shadowlands suicide seed grew into some world tree they didn’t live in and they made their actual home on Kalimdor, not on some island in the middle of nowhere. And maybe they are going to explain why they used night elves the most as the representatives for the evil elementalists, and I don’t think they have given any explanation as to why that is, only speculation.
If they were just doing another narrative reset on the night elves, why not just make a new allied race at that point? The race mo
But if there home really is just going to be locked away in an irrelevant expansion (and let’s be real the only actual important places are EK and Kalimdor, that is why you continually go back there as opposed to any other little island, and everything expansion really starts from there), just so blizzard can quickly move on from that story plot after leaving it lingering for way too long, even with the night elves being homeless in stormwind even now in Dragonflight.
Sure this could be something different, but this is looking extremely grim for the night elves to just be locked away on an irrelevant island so far away from Kalimdor, stormwind might even be close, it has at least an established sea route there.
I mean, unless there is current content that actively takes place on Kalimdor, there really isn’t any reason to go to Kalimdor for Alliance period.
Using MoP as an example however, they have used old zones for current content.
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I mean I like Humans but every now and then I would like to atleast ether A have a united alliance of races to be in the storyline which is more screentime or just a break away from Humans and actually focus on races that haven’t gotten the spotlight like dwarves, high/void elves, a night elf story that actually finally gives them a better chance at reclaiming and peace for the night elves, worgens finally gaining their lands back, and etc.
So far I really don’t see that kind of unity within the alliance other than just Humans of SI 7, Paladins, and etc.
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I want that as well. All this nonsense of story has made me cringe everytime I hear the word “Alliance”. I may not be Horde but I’m starting to hate this faction.
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Yes, every place is irrelevant that doesn’t use current content, but current content happens a lot on either EK and Kalimdor, like Silithus/Uldum/Darkshore in BfA basically all pre events, cata revamp, there is the new DF dungeon in EK etc. It’s like you go off on an adventure for 2 years and then go back home to EK or Kalimdor and then launch the expansion from them again. These are basically the homes for most of the races and the most important areas in the story, the thing that the story revolves around. So now locking away one of the core races (the only original race to be sent off) onto some irrelevant island far away from anything is one of the worst thing they could do.
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Ohh nice! I have a feeling that this storyline might indicate a Night Elf heritage set to be the cherry on top of that narrative.
Thinking about it, a world tree is all about NE heritage, and how they can restore that. Plus, the speculation about 10.2 being Emerald Dream related also ties with NE lore by proxy.
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I’m hoping for Heritage Armor that resembles their Sentinel/Elune side more than another Druidic Set. I main a Druid but I have tons of tons of xmogs with plants and leaves.
I’ts time to see the other aspects of Kaldorei Society.
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I’m personally hoping for something like we see in Darkshore’s BfA event NPCs - the iconic set that the Night Elf wears in the classic cinematic.
Of course, it can’t be exactly what those NPCs wear because the quality needs a certain improvement (3d assets, good textures, etc), but it is a nice foundation to work on, and it can fit more than just druids.
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I will disagree slightly, the emerald gardens do suit the Kaldorei. And they do seem to be trying quite hard to give things a good outcome within the confines of what they can do. I will note they had touched Darkshore and Teldrassil exactly two times. Cataclysm, and then BFA. Outside of those times its sat largely disused. And honestly, Teldrassil barely saw changes in Cata so it was mostly vanilla material. The idea the kaldorei would be any more forgotten landwise than they have been anyways is silly.
As long as it looks night elven, feels like wood elf night elf fantasy, and actually gives a much better questchain than what I have been seeing with the alliance as of late. I’ll atleast be happy but I’m hoping my breath until then.
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I ultimately find myself torn on how I feel about this and the implications that Night Elves might be relocating to the Dragon Isles.
I think that it is ultimately a shame this wasn’t encrypted, but beyond that.
I can give a hundred reasons why this is a potentially a bad idea. As I said in a post above, the reality is this move would pretty much reset the Night Elves from a cultural standpoint. They would lose their homes, their significance, the "from woods to living on in plains.
But the reality is, I’m honestly not sure that isn’t a good thing. Because Blizzard has kind of diluted Night Elf thematics too much, either through poorly thought out ways to tell their story, or through dissemination of thematics.
Like, Night Elves are certainly tied to Elune, but she is a cosmic being at this point. She’s going to tie in with Zandalar trolls, with Nightborne, and with the Horde in general.
Druidism is now a core part of Tauren identity, the Worgen and the Kul Tiran also share their own version. The Cenarion Circle just isn’t really a Night Elf group anymore and realistically hasn’t been since Vanilla.
They aren’t the fierce warriors, because they haven’t won a fight in ages. More specifically, they aren’t the fierce warrior who are tailored for forest combat. Because they’ve been outflanked and ambushed multiple times.
And sure, the implication is that it’s some stroke of luck. That these people who beat them used whatever tactics that just weren’t used. The reality is, it means Night Elves don’t really even have that niche.
And that’s it. It’s the core problem with Night Elves. It’s why Night Elf fans are so upset so often.
Literally every single niche they’ve ever had was stripped from them leaving a jumble of thematic misfires. Druidism? Definitely not. Elunite? Shadowlands fixed that, but even Legion did before hand with the Nightborne having so many elunite relics around Sauramar. Woodland warriors? Not really. Even Warden were stripped to make them available to the Horde, and the iconic set is being given to both factions of any race.
And I don’t mean that as a whine or a complaint. I mean it as the reality of what has happened.
We are now on the cusp of having Night Elves take on a role closer to the concept of renewal. And by that I mean life springing from death, instead of life itself. So much so that their new tree is implicitely touched by death.
On one hand, it really sucks that what made people interested in Night Elves has essentially been diluted.
The other hand, I see the need for a rebranding, because you can’t unring the bell of giving away all their stuff.
So I can either be unhappy about something that just isn’t ever going to change.
Or I can be excited about the prosect of a new direction, even if it’s a direction I don’t exactly agree with.
Frankly, I play WoW to have fun with friends. I don’t like being upset or irritated with the game. I’ve not played just for the lore in a long, long time.
So I may kvetch about it, but I’ll ultimately say “I think that the potential shift of Night Elf thematics is a positive development needed to realistically even ground the Night Elves into Azeroth at all anymore”
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I do still debate that plains bit a little as they would be bordering the Emerald Gardens, which is just one big forest region, but I agree that our thematics have been… substantially weakened. I think a lot of it was a gross overuse of The Worf Effect to the point they have become an ineffective punching bag simply because they are closest to the Horde’s main seat of power.
That is part of why I am sort of happy about the idea of a new home somewhere far away from anyone who wants to beat our face in to show how big and bad they are. My face is tired of being smooshed, thanks.
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But all it does is reinforce the idea that we are in fact weak and unable to defend ourselves to the point where we are forced to flee and seek protection from other beings.
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I don’t see what is so bad with setting up shop with dependable allies in the Greens. The Alliance has shown itself as not dependable, and right now a new start kinda sounds nice to me. It isn’t like we’d be abandoning what little land we have left anyways which is what… Darkshore? Ashenvale has reverted to simply contested from solidly Horde territory as it was during part of Cataclysm and much of BFA. We have not held most of what was Kaldorei lands since WC3.
Its just not putting your eggs in one basket, so a guy in red spiky armor can go stomp on it when he forgets that paving roads with skulls does in fact make him the bad guy.
While recognizing gamescale as a factor, I don’t really see Emerald Gardens as a forest region. It’s more of a Grove. But beyond that, it should absolutely NOT be a grounded part of whatever the new direction theoretically is.
Because here’s the thing. That grove is very specifically tied to the Emerald Dream. You can see Druids of the Claw working around inside the Emerald Dream. The green dragons are there. It most certainly is a central theme of Druids… And it’s also filled with Tauren and Trolls and other Druid races.
It is, right off the bat, saying the new Night Elf thematic direction is co-opted by all the Druidic races. It is, right off the bat doubling down on the idea that Druidism is all there is, and the very tree blessed by Elune and her sister ends up just being… a standard druidic thematic. It arguably cuts Elune and the Winter Queen out of the picture entirely.
And I know people will say “Ok, but the Winter Queen is just druidism anyway!”. But that really couldn’t be further from the truth. She is arguably the anti-thesis to anything we would recognize as Druidism in WoW. There is a sheen of similarities in forest critters and such, but she very much is a Death God. It just tends to be “Death nurtures life”. Like, these great Wild Gods only come back to life because the very essence that Death works off of, Anima, is funneled into these Wild Gods… And it requires a constant stream of souls to keep that working.
Without some sort of counterbalance to that, having the Night Elves or new world tree interact in such a fundamental way as to have that be part of hteir new forested home kind of feels like it’s counter to the duality the new World Tree is supposed to represent.
Ultimately though, that’s an issue with the World Tree itself.
so, spiritually speaking, she’s the ‘rot, mulch, and compost’ side of druidism?
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I’d argue this isnt a Kaldorei specific issue, but a larger systemic one for all races. Allowing everyone to be everything means there is no uniqueness to be had.
I would argue that ultimately that the Winter Queen and Elune are two sides of a cycle. Winter and Summer, Death and Rebirth. They didn’t do the best job depicting that, but it was the overall intention.