Just wanted to do a short appreciation for one of my favorite newer WoW characters.
Apart from her nuanced personality and cool design (even down to small details like the glowing fingers and slight reverb in her voice), one of my favorite things about Thalyssra is her drive. Note;
Elisande preparing to give the Burning Legion some magical gifts? Rallies a coalition of her friends and attempt to stop the plan… even if they had to destroy the gifts.
Former friend backstabs her and helps roll out the welcome mat for the Burning Legion? She builds a rebellion from the ground up to free her people and overthrow corrupt leaders, even reaching out to outsiders despite 10,000 years of no experience dealing with non-Nightborne. She even finds time to work repaying her former friend’s treachery into her plan.
Finds herself wanting Lor’themar? Gives him invitations to visit Suramar, and even convinces his lieutenants to be her wingmen… to the point of teleporting him to her personal palace.
I am a fan of Thalyssra. Her voice acting is pretty awesome, which is important.
I was glad when she decided to join the Horde. I thought Tyrande had a good point about the Nightborne, but she was a total shrew about it. Liadrin was at least understanding and supportive, so she made a good case.
I really liked how in BfA, Thalyssra was eager to show the worth of her people. She makes a great Horde Mage, because she sort of stands out from the typical fire/ice stuff. She is a bit different from the rest. It is cool that she plays a support role, with barriers.
She got a lot of hate for cowering from a fight with Jaina - but I think it was understandable. And their conversation at the gates of Orgimmar is a nice call back to her respect for Jaina’ s abilities.
And so, they participated in the genocide of their cousins and go full war. Just awesome writting.
Tyrande even with her suspictions, she helped during the whole insurrection campaign. Sending kaldorei to the front-line, confronting personally Elisande. But whatever she was “rude”.
She’s got a way about her, for sure. Round up a bunch of former citizens and use them as your own personal meat shield, without anyone thinking badly of you.
I really like the conversation between Jaina and Thalyssra at the Siege of Orgrimmar 2.0. Something about mutual respect between mages talking about thier craft, plus it made BfA pass the Bechdel test.
Justification aside, it’s valid to see rudeness or lack of empathy as a critical character flaw. Tyrande did not see the Nightborne victims of Elisande as well, she just saw them as enemies with which she made a temporary alliance.
Lack of empathy makes Tyrande seem honestly incapable of seeing reason over petty venegence.
It’s one thing to be like “addiction is wrong” and still realize why people are addicts, than just being like “I don’t care if your withdrawl kills you.”
Tyrande was the latter.
I don’t know how anyone could go through the Runas the Shamed questchain and still not have empathy for the plight of the withered.
But, I suppose Mana addiction is one of those topics in WoW that continues to divide people.
Granted Night Elves have an entirely different position on this topic to Blood Elves and that’s what it boiled down to between Tyrande and Liadrin.
Because the Nightborne were the haughty aristocrats who cowered behind a shield when Tyrande and her low-born allies fought against the Burning Legion and drove them back at great sacrifice. Instead of eating cake, they paid the blood price to keep Azeroth safe.
Its extremely easy to see why Tyrande and the night elves mistrust them, even when you ignore the fact that Blizzard despises her character and only lets her into the spotlight to make a fool of her.
One problem with magical addiction is that it provides luxurious power-ups. Narcotic drugs will relieve pain as much as possible, no?
Are there any sympathizers for the killing dope? No, bad comparison … Luceferius? Flicker (“Arcane”)? It’s a pity that this is fiction.
In reality, there are no harmless drugs with a severe withdrawal syndrome?
I’m not convinced. Liadrin’s never been presented as the type to spin falsehoods to achieve political objectives. Her biased retelling of high elf/night elf history might have been wrong, but she almost certainly thought she was right.
You are right, I’m not saying there are not massive cons to mana addiction and Tyrande is right on a logistic level.
But, the whole thing about Thalyssra and the Nightborne is that they learned the hard way that the Highborne were wrong, but they still deserve dignity and a shot at redemption and that’s important.
Tyrande specifically distrusted Thalyssra. She asked her how she would know that Thalyssra wouldn’t become the next Elisande or the next Azshara. It seems she still hates the arcane, and Thalyssra is a powerful mage. She’s okay with Jaina, though. Night Elves distrust elven mages, but are okay with their allies using arcane magic. Maybe the returning Highborne should have joined the gnomes instead.
Hating on the Arcane used to be a unique trait of the Night elves until the Cataclysm retcon where Magic stopped being a Warp analogue from Warhammer that lead demons to Azeroth. Its very easy to say magic=bad when using it lead to demonic possession or an invasion.
This change was ordered by Tyrande, but lots of people like to pretend she had no part of it so they can call her prejudiced.
In fairness, elves do also seem to have evolved to be prone to physiological dependence upon arcane magic, while the magical “addiction” of other races is just a matter of the generic lure of power.
So the night elves trusting their non-elf allies with it while initially maintaining their ban made sense; elves in general are outright proven to be at greater risk than anyone else of becoming hooked on the stuff and then outright turning into different people either from overindulgence or when they suddenly can’t get it.
Like it or not, they’ve got an inherent genetic risk that other species on Azeroth don’t have, so it stands to reason that they’d have been extremely hesitant about letting their people start cavalierly indulging in the arcane again.
This is still technically the case to varying degrees. It’s never been explained why it seemingly stopped being a persistent problem (maybe the Third War publicly letting the Burning Legion cat out of the bag led to places like Dalaran and Silvermoon engaging in their own official demon-slaying policies, since the latter’s runestone defenses were wrecked by the Scourge and neither stopped using magic all the time), but heavy use of arcane magic in a concentrated area was still attracting the Legion’s attention and allowing demonic incursions as recently in history as the First War, and is still canonically what led to the creation of the Council and Guardians of Tirisfal.
As I observe above, a lot of the corruption/addiction stuff is also still in place. It just seems to be very particular to elves, who become outright biologically dependent upon the energies while other races only seem to sometimes become “addicted” to being so powerful, depending upon the individual’s personality. And even then such individuals as often as not give up the arcane for something more potent or forbidden like fel magic or necromancy.
In fact, iirc, David Kosak made a Twitter post which was essentially “everything (he) dislike about Tyrande” (and this is a guy who shilled Sylvanas).
Plus, most of Tyrande’s grievances were reasonable and she still went out of her way to aid Thalyssra’s rebellion. The Nightborne joining and staying with the faction that burned down Teldrassil, killing thousands of night elf civilians in Battle for Azeroth indirectly made her concerns correct, and made Thalyssra’s reaction to Tyrande’s criticisms - as much as I like Thalyssra - seem petty and childish.