Similar enough genetics too. Draino-orc hybrids, orc-human hybrids, according to some very crazy people, even a draino-orc-human hybrid!!
And while not the same animal species, they do have remarkably similar ones, whose meat is edible and non-toxic to species from every world.
All very convenient.
All too convenient…
Imo, that sacrifice was good and embracing mortality and adapting in the world is great storytelling. I wouldn’t want to undermine that sacrifice by giving the NE’s mortality back, and would instead write stories embracing it and them growing to accept change within themselves AND their homelands.
You know things are trouble when you hear the dreaded cry. …
Do not get me on my soapbox for that. It is an echo of a much older trope across literary history that makes no sense to me. I am pretty sure it comes from the same root of myth as the tendency for mythological species to have hideous males and supernaturally beautiful females who inexplicably have a thing for humans. Did I mention its usually a guy writing this stuff.
I’m tired of storylines being about Night Elves trying to get their immortality back. Been dealing with that since Pandaria, and now had that be the new Druids of the Flames’ motivation. It’s not really believable that people would give up on re-obtaining immortality, so I’d rather the Night Elves just get it back to move on from that story beat.
“Embracing mortality” has never meant anything since Warcraft III. It was noble to be willing to sacrifice it, but there’s never been any “growth” from being mortal. For all practical purposes they’ve been the same without it as they were with it throughout all of WoW.
At the very least I’d like for Amirdrassil, being a bridge between the Emerald Dream and Ardenweald, to take dead night elves and bring them back to life in a cycle of life and death.
I am not sure how I feel about that idea. The dead should remain dead, I think. They already ignore the normal rules by being wisps instead of going to the great soul fueled machine in the sky… to just return after death is a wild god thing, to me.
I mean, it’s not JUST that regaining immortality has been one of the core driving principles of Night Elves for the duration of WoW. That isn’t a singular discussion, because it’s also coupled intrinsically with the notion of “embracing mortality” and “adapting” and “moving on from their isolationist ways”.
But here’s the thing. As it stands now, two of the core races were introduced through the Night Elves, Worgen and Draenei. For all the guff of Fandral planting the World Tree to be an isolationist, from moment one more sane heads prevailed, established a post to the mainland, allowed diplomatic ties to not just the Alliance, but places like the Argent Dawn. The entire race learned languages to communicate with the Alliance.
A cross continental dock was built to establish trade and relations.
Gnomes and Dwarves, not just as visitors, but as researchers and explorers, came to Darkshore to dig and look up Titan relics. Arcane was adapted. Gender roles were abolished (And this was a thing as recently as the Night Elf heritage quest, but we’ve seen Male sentinels since I think at least Cataclysm.) Let mages and arcane users back in.
Like, “Stagnant and slow to change?”. Inarguably, the race that has changed the most from WC3 in cultural ways, not just Blizzard’s portrayal of them, has been Night Elves.
Why, after 20 years, are we still on about Immortality and needing to change when by and large the Night Elves have changed multiple fundamental aspects of their initial appearance in order to fit into the Alliance. And I don’t mean that in the “Curses, Blizzard, you homogenized again!” way. I mean it in the "They actively let go of old prejudices and moved on to the point that harping on it is almost laughable considering every problem point has been addressed multiple times and stressed even in game to not really be a thing anymore.
All those changes are true, and good things. But change has nothing to do with being mortal or not for the races in Warcraft. Pandaria was stagnant with none of its races being immortal.
Change can be a response from the world (and even universe) around the Night Elves changing and adapting to that. No credit needed to being mortal.
The growth through mortality is the fact that you don’t have the same single generation hanging about for 13,000 years. That’s the exact opposite of progression, it’s stasis.
Which isn’t the case with Night Elves. It’s mentioned in several books that most of the Night Elves who are that old are rare. I think Tyrande mentions in either Stormrage or Wolfheart that she can count the number that old.
There’s an idea that Night Elves couldn’t reproduce very fast, but that isn’t actually (to my knowledge) stated anywhere.
I.E. Immortality didn’t stop Night Elves from dying. It stopped them from dying of old age.
The bronze blessing made them timeless aka they do not age. The red blessing made them impervious to disease and toxins. Pretty much the only way to kill them before the third war was through violence. Some died in the War of the Satyr, and some in The War of the Shifting Sands but otherwise there is no major noted conflicts they dealt with for the duration of the Long Vigil. Makes you wonder how few survived to begin with that so few remain of that era.
I mean, no noted conflicts vs no conflicts are different things. The Night Elves and Tauren had issues with each other, as per the Scepter of the Shifting Sands. And while CDEV did say that Maiev was exaggerating about exterminating races, they did say they had gone on campaigns of Total War, and the Satyr were just one example.
In addition, the War of the Satyr would have been doubly draining, not just killing Night Elves, but then turning them into Satyr. Triple dipped, if you count the plague of Worgen that resulted from the Pack Form. You also, as you said, have the War of the Shifting Sands, which was also a continent spanning war.
Then you had the 3rd war itself, where the Burning Legion marched through Ashenvale.
While it’s a myth that all the men in Night Elf society were druids and were all asleep, even with a male population to reproduce with, they’d been in 3 potential apocalypse level wars that we know of.
It’s not really that surprising there aren’t that many when you remember every one of the major conflicts we DO know about was the type of “If they lose, the world ends, so they can’t lose”
Like, it’s no a stretch to say those wars were on a similar level of some of the expansions, and some of those wiped out an entire generation of Orcs.
EDIT: I will say, I think it’s exceedingly messed up that Blizzard acknowledges Night Elves are ready and willing to participate in Total War, but then never show them doing it against the Horde in Ashenvale and beyond. It would have really made the whole Night Elf/Orc conflict feel a bit more grounded when the end result of picking a fight with Night Elves is they do a little bit of war criming.
Not all the druids either since Fandral was the lead figure in the Sands war.
True. I think there was a source somewhere (I honestly don’t recall, and if there was it might have been RPG) that said the Druids slept in cycles. Some awake, some asleep, and they only actually slept a few hundred to thousand years at a time.
But I’m honestly not sure.
Virtually every major race in the setting is lol. Dwarves had a more radical cultural shift with the Wildhammers after Modgud cursed Grim Batol than humanity seemed to have over 3,000 years. Races like Tauren, for all this talk of the cycle in their lore, seem to have only changed insofar as having Thunder Bluff, but otherwise aren’t that different from what they’ve been for like, 10,000 years+
Alexstrasza restored her blessing through Teldrassil in Stormrage.
I enjoyed seeing this but one thing that has been nagging at me at the back of my head is how does the Druid order hall tie in to this. If the PC is an Archdruid then are they the Archdruid of Archdruids or are they retired? I’m very confused
Druid was one of the classes that didn’t become the defacto leader of the class. We just became Arch-Druids, which is a pretty lofty title.
It’s the highest rank a Druid can obtain, as per A Timeless Question - Warcraft Wiki - Your wiki guide to the World of Warcraft
Sorry, still not used to posting Warcraft.wiki.gg
Remember what I’ve said about multiple continuities running parallell? This is an example.