The Story Team will Troll the Night Elves

[Zahirwrite-farstriders]

@Mara-kelthuzad

Is what Tyrande says after her merciful judgement. We know Elune is kind of incompetent and useless now after they threw her under the bus for Sylvanas, so her reason for saving Tyrande would probably only be because she liked Tyrande, not really for anything in the future because she doesn’t seem to be any kind of prophetic goddess.

I hope Elune can still be saved from the tragedy of bad story that is SL.

[Mara-kelthuzad (Mara)]

Yeah, I’m really upset with how they handled Elune. Should have just kept her mysterious, but everyone is getting sacrificed on the alter for Sylvanas this expansion, it’s sick.

[Zahirwrite-farstriders]

@Mara-kelthuzad

Yeah, I’m really upset with how they handled Elune. Should have just kept her mysterious, but everyone is getting sacrificed on the alter for Sylvanas this expansion, it’s sick

Elune can be saved. To be exact, it won’t be easy, but maybe the aspect of the night warrior has a downside for the goddess, too, which is why she can’t perceive everything as usual.

It’s still stupid somewhere, but it would explain her partial blindness toward the events in sl. It is hard to look at the events from the distance when you are a omnipresently being and you experiencing the momentum from the point of view of a single mortal bearer of the blessing, and become a part of their expirience , for a limited time.

@Zahirwrite-farstriders

Philosophically - if you understand the history of the night elves as a whole - they are the chosen people of the gods who fell. Created in a source of pure power by a deity - a life titan - who took them as her children. Born with a supernaturally strong talent for arcane magic, high skill, great physical strength, high discipline, timelessness, yes, you can say as a culture…a monster or a god, it depends on the perspective. The case can be divided into three parts:

The first case, was the fall, the WOTA was this, the fall from the sin of arrogance, when the whole world had to bleed for it for the arrogance and blindness of a few, but first and directly the night elves themselves suffered from it the most. The world paid the price, but no culture was more affected from the wota, then the night elves themselv.

The second fall was the selflessness fall. The sacrifice of their immortality for the good of the world to atone for their original sin, and to banish the shadow with their own power, which they give up, knowing that it will harm them, for the good of all.

The third case is the case of weakness. BFA, the Night Elves have been gradually weakened by the many wars, a people that once dominated the world unchallenged, as no people before them or after them will ever do of mortal origin, have gone through so much suffering, loss and sacrifice that they have reached a point where they still had some strength, but their “possibilities” were so limited that they could only bring this strength to one point, and could no longer act as originally in the whole world.

Well, the question is now, does this case of weakness also still have a positive effect for the night elves? They now have all three cases, another case they could not survive as a species…so you have only one way…back up…but how?

To analyze this one would have to divide the entire Society then into three parts

Culture (Social&Religious)
Developement in the Future
Military

Culture

The old ways are failing, the old rules that applied for millennia are history. The Horde poses a challenge to the night elves that they cannot simply solve with a “we’ll destroy you”. But that should not stop them from trying, this is not a call for “the night elves should slaughter the Horde” but it is a cultural development, the young tasted the taste of ashes, this gift … they will return. I expect - even if Tyrande herself takes a different path - a devotion to the night warrior aspect, away from the classic symbol of Mother Moon, towards militarization out of fear that something like that could ever happen to one’s children or oneself again. Nature is less important than one’s own survival, nature failed one, one’s own deity failed one, but at least it gave the strength to strike back, this deep desire for retribution - embodied - by the Night Warrior aspect, should divide the Night Elf people, and yet also one. For this deep theme of loss, pain and grief…is also what unites the night elves.

Developement in the Future

Creating a clear difference between young and old. Justice or revenge? This is not a concept that applies here anymore, it is not about such simple concepts. It is about the concept of weakness, and its impact. The insecurity that is Teldrassil’s true poisoned gift. It is drive great ambition but also will be drive great suffering. I think the night elves should turn away from the path, they were the chosen of the goddess, but they were also guardians of the world, both they have lost somewhere and with it their true nature. Taking care of others has only cost them more and more, now they are in no position to continue it. Nature, arcane magic, Elune, all that is still a part of them, but their own role with regard to the world itself is no longer the same. They should return to their roots, kinda, but instead of living in extremes, as development, a pragmatic course between the very old, the old and the new life.

Simply taking back ashenvale will not solve the issue here. insecurity will grow.

Military

Where military used to be the night elves’ last resort, it now acts more as their first resort, or at least that should be the evolution.

And as i explained here, even the night elves can be solved…it will need time and effort, but it is possible. i don´t beliefe it will happen, but it is possible.

[Mara-kelthuzad (Mara)]

Didn’t Elune send the night elf souls to the maw before the night warrior ritual took place? I’m sure you could explain Elune here as being weakened because of maybe the barrier between life and death is almost broken, maybe that could be a reason for it. I could see the night warrior power being a reason she doesn’t intervene afterwards, because that’s her wrath, but before the night warrior ritual takes place?

It could explain why when her power was being used in the SL she had no idea about the night elf souls, but then you would have to answer how she was able to take the power away from Tyrande to save Sylvanas, she has to have some connection to to the night warrior and control over that power.

[Zahirwrite-farstriders]

@Mara-kelthuzad

Didn’t Elune send the night elf souls to the maw before the night warrior ritual took place? I’m sure you could explain Elune here as being weakened because of maybe the barrier between life and death is almost broken, maybe that could be a reason for it. I could see the night warrior power being a reason she doesn’t intervene afterwards, because that’s her wrath, but before the night warrior ritual takes place?

The arbiter went offline a few weeks before the WOT, the drought did not start immediately. You must remember, Legion in its entirety lasted exactly one year, BFA as well. When Elune sent the souls away, no drought was likely yet, but the arbiter was already offline and the manifestation of it started to establish itself.

in my own mind, this could explain it, the drought didn´t manifest, but the arbiter was offline and the sl crisis started to ettablish itself. The night elves were the first big push for the maw…so it was likely shortly after the Arbiter went offline and no one knows what was going on.

[Mara-kelthuzad (Mara)]

Yeah I guess I can see what you’re saying here, that the souls were sent after the Night Warrior thing because that’s when the drought would be happening. That could explain it, but would it really explain the night elves getting raised and working for their victimizers, but it could help.

[Zahirwrite-farstriders]

@Mara-kelthuzad

Yeah I guess I can see what you’re saying here,

Not quite. The souls were sent before the drought manifest itself, before the crisis broke out. Because the drought did not happen instantaneously after the arbiter went offline, that took some time to develop. In the chaos - where only the Oribos guys knew anything - the WOT happened. Even the WQ, nor Bastion nor Maldraxxus already knew something. Only Revendreht because of…yes, well, Denathrius.

[Elathaah-proudmoore]

@Danask-stormrage

That’s a very dramatic headcanon you have going on there. We don’t have any hard numbers for how many souls are still in the maw vs. obliterated, so this is 90% speculation. Since it is all a made-up story I will wait for them to definitively define how many Night Elves are left and how many souls were saved (while acknowledging that they will probably make it up as they go along, like they did with the supposedly near-extinct Blood Elves)

The numbers of souls seen in the quest mean nothing. Nothing Blizzard does has any sense of scale.

[Mara-kelthuzad (Mara)]

Well what you are saying is it needs to hinge on the night warrior draining some kind of power or consciousness from Elune. So for that to work Elune sending the souls to the maw would have to be taking place sometime after Tyrande gets the power in 8.1 and the night elves that are raised and serve the people that murdered them.

[Zahirwrite-farstriders]

@Mara-kelthuzad

So for that to work Elune sending the souls to the maw would have to be taking place sometime after Tyrande gets the power in 8.1 and the night elves that are raised and serve the people that murdered them.

No, just not. Elune sent the souls away after the WOT, convinced that the arbiter is not damaged. That the Arbiter is damaged, nobody knew at that time except the bad ones. So no Winterqueen, no Bastion-Heini, no Primus, absolutely nobody, only the bad guys and well, honestly, the Oribosgang.

And Elune’s power is affected by the Night Warrior, but I don’t think in the sense of “she loses so much power” but in the sense that her own distance to look at the events of the universe from “above”…when creating a Night Warrior changes drastically and she is forced - by the Blessing itself - to see the events through the eyes of the Blessed. She was in Tyrande to an extend after the Blessing, the entire time period.

[Mara-kelthuzad (Mara)]

They would have had to send out their “cries for aid” as in the drought was manifesting at the time she sent them out, and elune would have heard those and sent the “cascade of souls” so there was a problem at the time of the sending, they didn’t know what though. And if she was in Tyrande (and was able to stop the night warrior power) she would have known that the souls got sent to the maw, so condemning them to the maw wouldn’t have been news to her.

The night warrior is just one of the faces of elune, not elune herself. It would actually just make the night warrior power even worse if that was elune, tyrande and malfurion failing to stop nathanos.

[Zahirwrite-farstriders]

okay…thats true…you´re right, i forgot about this part

[Kagehiro-zuljin]

I’m pretty sure everything re: Tyrande and Elune are desperate knee-jerk attempts to placate the Night Elf community who are extra spicy about the story taking a dump on them. It honestly feels like a meta conversation happening, every new scene attempting to explain the plot holes in the previous.

[Thadeus-caelestrasz]

Witnesses to what?

If she had to kill witnesses, more likely than not she did it cover up wrondoing on her part.

[Mara-kelthuzad (Mara)]

Oh yeah, that is what I felt it was since 8.1, they even changed 8.1 on the PTR because they were surprised by the backlash of how bad it was. Then obviously their “Tyrande got her revenge for the night elves” in 8.1 tells me they had no actual plans for the night elves after the warfront so they just shoehorned Tyrande into shadowlands and she serves basically no purpose and doesn’t impact the story, other than in the prologue she gives Sylvanas an extremely merciful penance.

But yeah it seems like it was there to kind of placate night elf fans while really just making it worse for them and they were trying to react on the fly instead of actually planning anything out for this.

[Ellinia-zuljin]

@Danask-stormrage

…by making Sylvanus save all the souls left in the Maw, which (gasp) is why Elune wouldn’t let Tyrande kill her.

Is misspelling Sylvanas like that a meme I don’t know about? I see it a lot.

[Kagehiro-zuljin]

I’m also a huuuge fan of these deific entities being omniscient and prescient until they conveniently aren’t.

Elune didn’t know what was going on in Ardenweald but she stopped Tyrande to spare Sylvanas because the souls she didn’t know were in the Maw could be rescued by Sylvanas and to save Tyrande who was going to die if the Winter Queen didn’t happen to intervene. It all makes so much sense!

[Drahliana-earthen-ring (Drahliana)]

@Thadeus-caelestrasz

Witnesses to what?

If she had to kill witnesses, more likely than not she did it cover up wrondoing on her part.

Sylvannas did not want stories of reconciliation to flow back to the Undercity. She did not want her people raising hopes of reconciliation with the Alliance. That would lead to doubts of the Forsaken’s loyalty to the Horde and she believed the only thing that would lead to would be the isolation of the Forsaken from both factions and a swift decimation of her people by the Alliance.

[Mara-kelthuzad (Mara)]

lmao yep, they hope that people don’t think about it while they have the characters talking slowly with inspirational music playing while the characters make sad expressions to try to lead you into believing the scene is powerful or makes sense, rather than having the story make sense.

It just feels like they haven’t cared about consistency for a long time. It’s like the idea of the new lore always trumping the old lore because they like to retcon so much they can’t really be bothered to think too hard before implementing something, so it’s like “just because Elune didn’t know the souls were sent to the maw doesn’t mean she didn’t save Sylvanas so she could recover the souls from the maw!”. It doesn’t matter what happened before, the only thing that matter is what the writers are saying now.

[Kagehiro-zuljin]

Yeah. I think the art and cinematic and music department could use a break from doing all the heavy lifting for so long. It boggles the mind that they supposedly concept these expansions years in advance but still have to play it by ear.