When I set up my Twitter account, engaging with Warcraft was the last thing on my mind. I after all quit at the end of Warlords of Draenor. I wasn’t thrilled about giving Dave Kosak an entire expansion of Night Elf lore, my friends didn’t see the point in it, and the PVP changes didn’t look fun to me. My (now mostly dormant) Twitter account wasn’t even personal - it was explicitly professional. I worked in a small public accounting firm at the time, and the Journal of Accountancy proposed that the best way to really move up in my career was to try and get clients for the firm. I followed people in finance and tech, I retweeted stuff about the local economy, I linked back to my LinkedIn account - etc.
So, you might be surprised to know that I learned about Battle for Azeroth through Twitter, because despite being well and truly out of the franchise, Blizzard’s marketing department deigned it appropriate to, one Friday afternoon, rush into my office (via Twitter at least) cackling with glee about their latest story development. Obviously the friends that I kept in touch with heard about it too. One at least cried over the news.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/sylv-burning-down-the-tree/988563/4
I bring this up and am raising this thread over something that was posted in my discord this morning. We have a number of people, including people who used to post here, who left the franchise for one reason or another. The person in question, like me, can’t bring herself to play her characters in the current environment, but still plays Hearthstone. Today she posted a screenshot of the game in the channel with the comment of “Yeah, well, screw you too, Hearthstone team -_-”.
http^s://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/620017801557442590/850393286019121152/unknown.png
I don’t play Hearthstone myself, but I understand that “Forged in the Barrens” is the latest expansion to it. My understanding of the expansion is that it’s a celebration of the Horde that, again, takes place in the Barrens. Saurfang’s VA acted the marketing piece for it, which suggests to me that it should have taken place before this and largely not involved Night Elves, and certainly not Teldrassil. Regardless, the team seems to have taken the opportunity to once again antagonize Night Elf fans about their decision to destroy it.
This of course is just one example of Blizzard reaching out into the wider world and trying to remind everyone, subscribed to Warcraft or not, about how they constructively destroyed (and please do recall the definition of that) a playable race. Examples include:
- A playable race getting a joke line explicitly about the event.
- A community dev reacting to a question about what the Night Elves have at this point with “A Nice Pile of Ashes”
- Developers including Christie Golden and Steven Danuser posting to their Twitter about Teldrassil well after the event.
- In the same vein, a Blizzard-hosted “Autumn Party” that appeared to have been centered around a Burning of Teldrassil centerpiece that was part of the decorations.
- A children’s book with a pop-out feature that was intended to transform Teldrassil from being the way it was to being on fire.
In WoW itself, they also went out of their way to establish that those killed in the burning went to the Maw - that was in the marketing materials. Which, okay, fine, it happened after the events of Legion - but that means everyone went to the Maw, not just the Night Elves, and yet here again we have continuous focus on the event. Is it of the sneering, jerkish nature that I described with the other examples? No, but it’s a further demonstration of the full court press that Blizzard has persisted with concerning this event.
Finally, I haven’t just been linking these posts to illustrate that there are mean people on the internet (Not all of these are even mean). Each of these came from posts that were either posted or updated in the last two days on General Discussion - which consists of a large population that isn’t anywhere near as plugged in to the lore as this one. It’s also pretty indicative of how communities tend to act if they’re aware of WoW in other places such as Reddit, Discord, etc. I call it the “voice of the people”, and that voice tells me that it is still very much present, and it’s an item that Horde players in particular like to throw in our faces quite a bit, even to this day - an item we have no recourse for because Blizzard has decided that Night Elves aren’t allowed to meaningfully hit back.
“Game Experience May Change During Online Play” and all that. Given that this is partly a social game experienced with other players, that absolutely matters.
So, this leads me to the question that I want to ask in this thread. There is a community here that just doesn’t want to hear it when it comes to Night Elf issues. They accuse us of somehow having everything, of invading every topic, of wanting the world, and of taking things too seriously. Most of these are exercises in bad-faith hyperbole of course, and generally those people aren’t worth talking to because they are advancing tribally-driven opinions that have more to do with helping “their side” than they do with improving the overall health of the game and its playerbase.
However, there’s an undercurrent, an implication, spoken or unspoken that Night Elf fans in general should just forget about Teldrassil. Given what I just laid out, and the trends we have in the story then, I’m curious. How do you propose that we do that?
