As the faction war has become increasingly black and white, a common concern that I’ve read around these forums has to do with the supposed dynamic that the Horde are being presented as the bad guys whereas the Alliance can do no wrong. I’ve seen this statement become more and more aggressive, with this sort of “how would you like it” attitude being thrown at Alliance posters who are trying to resolve the Alliance’s issue of being struck hard in the beginning, and then being denied satisfactory catharsis for that hit (typically accompanied by a series of denials and arguing-down when the Alliance poster replies that they would like “the villain bat” anyway, provided that they could actually hit back).
To summarize - the Alliance, or parts of it, may look weak (even if that’s a problem with the presentation doing an awful job of representing the canon) but AT LEAST they are the morally-pure heroes in this story, right?
Well, my participation in a recent thread on Quel’thalas got me thinking once more about a possible exception to this rule: the Night Elves, who I will argue often DO get villain batted in order to instigate or mold faction conflict. I see this taking place in three ways, either:
- As root causes for the conflict
- As foils for the “good characters”
- Through racial flaws
Before I proceed, I will say that not all of these developments I would call “bad” (although most of them are). Differentiating the bad from the good I would argue involves questions such as “are the reasons for this controversy understandable and explained?” If an actor takes an immoral action for an established reason that the audience can connect with, we can still recognize said action as immoral while having a believable tie to it. If they just do those things because the narrative needs them to do it on the other hand, especially if their reasons are not explained, we have a problem - and we’ll get into that later.
Causes and Contributing Factors - "They made us do it"
The first manner that Night Elves are villain batted is that they undertake some action that causes the Horde to want to come attack them. Examples include:
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Ashenvale: The Horde’s reasons for wanting to take Ashenvale have been repeatedly articulated throughout the game, but this notably evolved in Cataclysm into an argument that the Night Elves weren’t just denying the Horde lumber, but also letting them starve. What I want to note here is that while the Horde’s side of this issue is fully fleshed out, appearing in multiple instances of transmedia narrative and presented several times in the game itself, the Night Elves are never allowed to articulate their position. While this matter presents itself as a controversy here, the narrative itself doesn’t treat it that way.
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Quel’thalas: As I discussed in the Quel’thalas thread, the reasons for the Night Elves being in Quel’thalas are never articulated, because those reasons are not the point. The writer intent there was to have the Night Elves act as bad guys for the Blood Elves in order to underline the animosity between those two races and to get Blood Elf players to see Night Elves as their enemy. I want to also point out that Sylvanas mentions this historical animosity as a supporting reason for attacking the Night Elves in A Good War, and this animosity becomes a major motivator for Lorash in the same novella. While this event isn’t specifically represented there, it is just about the only straight-up conflict that features it - and the telling of it is one-sided in favor of establishing the Night Elves as being in the wrong.
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EK Inaction: One of the more substantial retcons that has taken place recently is the removal of the idea that Kalimdor and the EK largely didn’t know about each other until recently - with Cenarius’s confusion of the Orcs with demons being changed to secret Night Elven spies being aware of the Horde from Warcraft 1 and 2, and warning him on that basis. One of the things thrown in with that is the idea that the Night Elves disinterestedly watched things go to hell in a handbasket during the first two wars, rather than not knowing about them as had previously been the case. More than one character references this as reasons for hating them - once again, the Night Elf position is not made clear.
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Azshara: This one is more on the metanarrative side, but it’s also one that pits the trolls in particular against the Kaldorei but not against the Sin’dorei, even though the latter has more of a history with them. This is that Night Elves uniquely catch blame for the actions of Azshara and her empire, despite that they overthrew and replaced said system, and as the successor societies that tacked closer to Azshara’s way of doing things are largely spared the blame.
Narrative foils
The second manner in which Night Elves are often villain-batted has to do with their representation as the party that needs to be corrected by the hero figure.
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Leyara: I mentioned that during Cataclysm, the Night Elf position on Ashenvale largely wasn’t represented. Leyara is the closest that we could have gotten to a representation of their side of the issue, but the devs evidently thought that Leyara and the Druids of the Flame would make a better cardboard cut-out villain for the Cenarion Circle to have to put down. There’s no point at which this leads anyone among the Cenarion Circle to have to think about their position towards what’s going on in Ashenvale, or think about whether their role as protectors of nature is potentially compromised by working with a faction that is actively destroying a forest that they once would have protected. Leyara is simply evil, and the Cenarion Circle is good for putting her down.
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Tyrande, she who must be corrected - Faction War Edition: For some time, I have watched Horde posters salivate over the idea of Tyrande becoming a raid boss. Blizzard likes to wheel her out to verbally abuse (but not actually attack) Horde players, but more recently, through the theming of the Night Warrior paired with Blizzard’s typical penchant for making her look unreasonable, she was for a time presented as being on the wrong side of the Alliance’s moral direction, most notably with the confrontation in the Stormwind embassy over the peace treaty. While players can suggest that Tyrande is probably right, the scene paints her as being the “darker” disruptive figure as Anduin lectures her on why the path that she’s taking is wrong. In this patch, Tyrande appears to be getting her motivations lobotomized away in favor of “renewal”, but the Night Warrior previously existed to cast-as-evil the Night Elf cause of wanting to strike back over Teldrassil.
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Tyrande, she who must be corrected - Nightborne Edition: In Warcraft 3, upon encountering Kael’thas Sunstrider, Tyrande acted cordially and selflessly in order to assist the Blood Elves. In Legion, meanwhile, the character comes off as a jerk towards the Nightborne. Now we can argue as to whether her position could be justified, but the two elements I would again point out are a) the writers gave her or the Night Elves no opportunity to advance or argue for their position - it was simply cast as wrong, and b) the point of this seems to have been to paint Liadrin and the Blood Elves as the reasonable party. Again, I don’t care who you think was right here, my point is that the authorial intent again appears to have been to villainize Night Elves in order to elevate the moral standing of another party.
Traits
The final manner in which Night Elves are often villainized comes in the form of traits that they are stated to have.
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Pride/Arrogance: This is probably the one that bothers me the most because while the narrative insists that it exists, it doesn’t demonstrate how. We have victims of natural disasters justifying their own deaths on the basis that their arrogance somehow did this. We have Tyrande flirting with blaming her own pride for the War of the Thorns, which, what? I have to wonder if it’s pride or extreme self-consciousness, but either way, this item is used as an attack line on the Night Elves quite frequently.
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Xenophobia: Like Pride, I don’t see this one represented terribly often in game. As far as the recruitment of major races go, for example - Night Elves ran the table on welcoming races into the Alliance until MOP and simply don’t have a terrible number of stock lines or quest lines that suggest that they just hate foreigners. I wouldn’t mind seeing this trait of course - not all of the items listed are “bad” as I established before - but a) it’s simply stated to exist, and b) it continues to fit in the category of items being discussed.
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Anti-magic sentiment = Bigotry: I’m not sure how much of this has to do with the current cultural moment, but I have watched as concern over the use of arcane magic evolved from the four rules of arcane magic (remember those?), to the Night Elves’ prohibition on it, to arcane magic being described as having a global-warming-like-effect on the ley lines (where if overuse continued, Azeroth would suffer the same fate as the Netherstorm - this was the cause for the Nexus war) - to a rather significant pivot. The Highborne returning to Night Elf society could have been the springboard for some really good internal conflict (for notes - see Deus Ex: Human Revolution). Instead, Wolfheart painted those who didn’t like the arcane as murderous extremists, and while yes, Maiev’s actions got swept under the rug, the race in general picked them up, and did so in a particular way as noted earlier with the Nightborne. The thing I want to draw a line under is that arcane magic went from a power source that everyone viewed as dangerous to something resembling an immutable characteristic, at least in how it was framed, in order to make this attack line work.
What are the issues?
As I mentioned before, I don’t see all of these developments as bad, although most of them are. I should probably add here as well that no, these items do not reach the level to which the Horde has been villain-batted. But I do want to note something. When the Horde gets villain batted, we nevertheless get a lot of content getting into the reasons for why they’re doing what they’re doing - and some of that was on display here with the motives for Saurfang and Sylvanas going to war - leading to the “Night Elves deserve this” claim, as it intersects with those motives. There has been a consistent theme on the other hand with Night Elf villainization:
Blizzard doesn’t usually bother to explain it, or more importantly, let the Night Elves’ share their side of the story. Why do they feel so strongly about the arcane? We can point to reasons, but no Night Elf will ever be allowed to tell us in a manner that makes their concern look like the other side of a valid controversy. Why did the Night Elves feel strong enough to boycott the Horde in Cataclysm? We don’t know, they just did. Why were Night Elves in Quel’thalas? No one knows, they just were. Does Tyrande have a point about the Horde? Is Anduin potentially wrong? The framing suggests otherwise.
The point I am making is that Night Elf villainization appears to happen because the Night Elves are not agents in the plot. They largely exist, in this manner and in others, for the benefit of other races’ stories. That’s why their position on these things is almost never explained, and why in some cases it leaves people scratching their heads. For the Horde, they exist to establish a layer of justifiability for the Horde going to war, or at least enough to give the faction diehards a cassis belli. For much of the Alliance, they exist to provide the Alliance motivation for striking back, but also a contrast against the anointed good moral centers of the Alliance when Blizzard realizes that they need to wind the conflict down now. The end result? Well, to put it this way: people often underline the Alliance as the “hero” faction - who go out, fight the bad guy, and come out morally unstained. But Night Elves are an exception to this. They are never the heroes - they exist to make others’ heroic stories possible. Other than that? They are used as nothing more than narrative tools.