And more than 90% of them since The Third War are dead.
We don’t really generally have age breakdowns in that respect at the moment. No one knows what the average age actually is. I was just correcting one specific fact.
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Until the land isn’t back in troll hands the issue is not solved and all elves need to be shipped back to Kalimdor or Najzatar where they actually belong.
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Yes, that is part of the problem. The idea of writing races to be evil is controversial and even Tolkien’s (who at least lived in a different time) Orcs has endangered discussion.
But Blizzard seems to extend this. In one of the remix scenarios, we hear Moria talking about the Frostmane trolls the way you would talk about rats and other pests, talking about how they “breed” up in the mesa’s. And Jaina’s story arc was about hating every member of the trolls races, with she just skips away from.
And I don’t know how many times a race was causing problems and the quest was to just kill random members of the race until you think out the numbers.
And yes, one can see why fans of the Amani would be worried about them being used as an “evil race”.
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Dazar’Alor is likely my second favorite city in WoW after Suramar.
It is sort of funny how Silvermoon kinda cannot help but feel like a pale echo trying to imitate what the old imperial cities were.
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Well since you’re asking, the warcraft encyclopedia states this.
Finally the exiled elves reached a region whose forestland reminded them of their distant homeland in Kalimdor. They drove out the resident Amani trolls, founded the kingdom of Quel’Thalas, and began calling themselves high elves. They also crowned Dath’Remar as their first monarch.
And the troll compendium also states this. So it quite explicitly states they drove out Amani trolls living there.
I’d like to remind everyone that there’s not a single source that say the area that was built on was abandoned/empty, if you know of such a source then please give it to me as I’d love to read it.
It is just stated that there was the ruins of an ancient amani city that was sacred to the trolls.
What’s important here is that just because something is ruined does not mean it’s abandoned, it could very much have been a place of ritual, think a church or a place of pilgrimage, people tend to get quite angry if some randoms break into one to squat even if people don’t tend to live in churches.
However another point is that it might even had trolls living in it, since we see trolls live in some of their ancient ruins all the time across wow. It’s not a far reach to say that it’s possible in this case as well, especially since both the warcraft encyclopedia and troll compendium stating that they drove out resident Amani trolls.
Since it was important place it’s also not crazy to think that there would have been settlements around the sacred place either.
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Well… The trolls pretty much started attacking from the moment they saw the elves first trying to make a home on the coasts what’s now known as Tirisfal. Both sides quickly were KoS for the other. I am not honestly sure the elves would of even cared if they had to forcefully remove trolls after a thousand years of generation after generation of troll raids before they even reached Quel’danas. Both sides had looong stopped seeing the other side as even people.
The core issue with the Amani, as I see it, is that Blizzard formulates them as sympathetic in their views. But then oddly never truly engages with these views.
I’ll admit, I’ve certainly memed the “All Land Is Troll Land” bit. It can be fun in a visceral kind of way, in the same the faction conflict can be fun, to forgo nuance and full throatily turn legitimate points into propagandic sloganeering. I don’t actually believe it would right or fair for the Amani to displace or destroy the Thallassian people, who by this point have lived on that land almost as long as the trolls have.
But from the very start Blizzard has put sympathetic words and motivations into the Forest Troll’s mouths. Half of Zul’jin’s dialogue is, if vicious, understandable rhetoric around displacement and conquest. But these words are…well. Nothing is done with them. The oddest part is, they’re not even refuted. I can’t think of an example in game where anyone has seriously engaged with the Amani’s narrative, not even to argue against it. They howl it into the wind, and then we’re told to kill them.
A genuine negotiation and settlement that allows both peoples to live peacefully in the same space is what I think the moral thing is to do. But it’s just so baffling that these sympathetic arguments are said, and just said, with nothing else.
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There should be some kind of peaceful resolution with the Amani and many of them should be welcomed into the Horde. With a faction of stragglers refusing to join and remaining an enemy.
Amani defense squad assemble!
Well step one would involve the Amani trying any sort of diplomacy. Which they typically don’t.
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Ben had a good outline for how the Amani side of this might look; Zandalari-brokered negotiations, with the Revantusk speaking for the Horde, could coax halfway reasonable Amani chieftains to the table with the right blood elves, even as it incites the ire of Zul’jin types.
For the elf one, maybe have a guy like Halduron Brightwing, who explicitly specced out of Racial Enemy: Troll and struck up a rapport with Vol’jin, take a retrospective on the Amani-elf war and concede their Highborne ancestors did maybe earn the grudge their race has bled for ever since. Foil that shift in thinking against some old school WC2-era Farstriders who have not and won’t, ever get over their hatred of the “barbaric, evil” Amani and you’ve got the skeleton of a quest chain there, replete with mobs to beat a peace deal into.
It’s worth bearing in mind that per Sylvanas, the modern conflict was less “high elves vs Amani” and more “Farstriders vs Amani,” to the point where Average Joe’dorei was completely insulated from it. Even Silvermoon’s council of lords viewed them as no more than a nuisance to be ignored, contained, or led away by their new orc friends in the hope that they’d bother the humans instead. The Amani do deserve a more nuanced portrayal than a race of Ereviens, but to get there they’ll have to make some significant compromises, for better or worse.
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Are both very old and have been contradicted by the Chroncles, which has the following to say:
The high elves had built their new kingdom — a kingdom centered on the Sunwell, the heart of their new culture — atop ancient Amani ruins, ruins still considered hallowed ground by the trolls.
Ruins, as in, not inhabited. Retcon it may be, but it is the most recent lore we have on the matter.
While that may be true, there is nothing to indicate it was being used as a place of ritual, either. We have no lore for the ruins other than that they were there, and the elves built their city over it, and the passage describing that does NOT indicate any natives being displaced in the process.
I see it a bit as a situation with certain posters on the forums. You hear the same innane rhetoric over and over, knowing full well it’s nonsense at best, headcanon at worse, and you just stop paying attention to it at all. Why argue with a group that won’t listen? It’s an exercise in futility.
Isn’t what the Amani have wanted (per Blizzard’s writing). That could change, but the narrative has been clear for a while.
This doesn’t sound like it contradicts the encyclopedia or troll compendium. A place lying in ruins isn’t a synonym for being uninhabited, especially when trolls living among ruins is how they’re commonly depicted.
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It doesn’t confirm the compendium/encyclopedia, either. Keep in mind, while some trolls live in ruins, the Amani weren’t a ruined empire at that time. We have no indication that the ruins were inhabited.
They aren’t contradicted. First, only the initially settled areas are noted as ruins. Secondly, you can inhabit ruins.
Pretty clearly displaced per the lore.
They drove out the resident Amani trolls,
Like this is the lore.
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Absence of evidence isn’t evidence though, especially if nothing’s contradicting the older source. A lack of reiteration of a detail shouldn’t mean something previously known becomes unknown again.
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The older source doesn’t note that the High Elves settled over ruins. Seems a fairly conclusion retcon when you get down to it. Again, if the High Elves were displacing residents, why wouldn’t that detail have been included in every iteration or mention of these events ever since?
It doesn’t strike me as a retcon at all? The encyclopedia says the helves found a place that reminded them of their former home, and drove out the Amani who lived there. A later source calls them sacred ruins. That only changes (or adds to) the description of the taken land, not its occupancy.
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Amani just want their land back. Eredar destroyed planets. Guess who got their redemption first?
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Step one would be to get both sides to see each other as people and not “the enemy we have a five thousand year old blood feud with”. That will require both sides to be put in a situation where they need to find common ground to survive.
The last chance would of been the scourge, which inexplicably just ignored the Amani, so they felt they were in a position of strength to strike at the elves. Xal needs to whip up a threat comparable to that, and then force both sides onto the defensive.
It’s a hard sell to tell the amani they have to give up on an ancient sacred site they have fought so hard to reclaim, particularly as it is now ALSO the most sacred site of Quel’dorei culture they will never hike off.