(Obligatory mention: Thrall definitely has intentional parallels to Superman, for better or worse, although not specifically the scene or movie you’re describing.)
I’ll accept the phrasing of the Elune cinematic and assume that Elune was not able to stop Teldrassil from being destroyed. That the best she could do was send the souls of the dead to Ardenweald, where they could be… I dunno, I don’t think Night Elves work like Wild Gods. Maybe they’d just become denizens of Ardenweald? The thought that Night Elves can all be killed and reborn again just like Cenarius seems wrong.
Presumably, Elune has no influence over the Arbiter, and yet she was able to send Ysera to Ardenweald to be reborn. This would indicate Elune has some capacity to bypass the Grand Design and send souls directly to her sister’s realm. Otherwise, the souls would need to filter through the Arbiter as normal, which would necessarily mean Elune can’t decide where souls go. But, the Arbiter being broken is what condemns souls to the Maw. I’m left wondering why Elune wasn’t able to bypass it. It would have been a way to alleviate the sting of the situation a bit. It leads me to believe that the Narrative Team somehow managed not to anticipate how much hate Teldrassil was going to elicit, and all of this Elune/Ardenweald stuff is a panicked rush to try something, anything to salve.
Here’s where I’ll depart from most of the Night Elf players, I think. Teldrassil happening was not inherently a bad bit of storytelling. The building blocks could have been arranged in a way that didn’t put everyone off. They weren’t, obviously, and I’m not going to focus too much on that. As it relates to the Night Elves though, what was more important than The Burning itself was the followup. You just tilled the soil and sowed the seeds, but forgot to water them (“You” as in the writers). Instead of the Alliance players following an intense storyline about the Night Elves pushing the Horde out of Ashenvale, Wild Gods rampaging in response to the sacrilege, or marshalling forces to exact justice… we focus on Anduin telling Tyrande “get over it” and follow Saurfang to Orgrimmar to watch The Sylvanas Show some more.
Anduin (as big a narrative black hole as Sylvanas, let’s be clear) sucked all of the oxygen out of the room (which would have been handy to stop the fire) and commandeered where the plot could have gone in… y’know, the expansion that was supposed to be about the faction war and faction pride. Maybe giving the Night Elves an in-game march instead of just assuring us it happened off camera would have at least been worth exploring?
The Night Warrior, Teldrassil, Elune—all bundled up into a disappointing dead end. Elune lent Tyrande her power to kill Sylvanas—vengeance, according to the game—then yoinked the leash at the moment of truth. Sylvanas escapes, Elune and the Winter Queen have a chat, then she says Tyrande must choose vengeance or renewal. What? She chose vengeance like 10 minutes ago and you CUT HER OFF haha! Even dumber, she wouldn’t let Tyrande die WHILE SHE WAS IN ARDENWEALD, where she had just sent thousands of her favored children.
I’m tellin’ ya, it’s just kneejerk bandaids. I seriously think they are caught off-guard by how much players hate this stuff. But I agree it probably can’t be fixed. That’s partly why the appeal of a time skip and soft reset of some sort seems to be building up steam around here.
Back to Horde Player Investment:
There is no question Blizzard views characters as vectors through which “faction development” is achieved. By extension, players are forced along for the ride (because we aren’t the ones writing the story or designing the game). Using your own example with Tyrande, being “so thoroughly vandalized that there were widespread calls for her replacement…” Green Jesus Thrall circa Cataclysm was so insufferable that people still hate Thrall to this day; Baine “I-Heart-Anduin” Bloodhoof is viewed as more sympathetic to a faction we’re at war with than his own people; Varok “Let Me Die” Saurfang who wanted a teenage human to do his dirty work. All of this is to emphasize that the Horde playerbase hates the focus being on the characters.
The way you feel about Tyrande and Malfurion in your example is how we feel about Sylvanas and Saurfang (I know I don’t speak for everyone, but there’s enough historic sentiment to inform a plurality). We want the noble savage Horde, rough around the edges and willing to fight to the bitter end to survive in a world that can’t let old grudges die. It’s why there’s been so much pleading for the Alliance to be allowed to be in the wrong, for the Horde to stop being unjustifiable aggressors, to return to that original place that drew us to the game to begin with. We don’t want WoD to tell us we didn’t need Fel Gatorade to make us genocidal. We don’t want to “fight for the soul of The Horde” again, because we already know what it is. We don’t want whatever the hell this council of peaceniks is about. We just want to be The Horde again, Warchief and all.
I’ll push back on The Forsaken being nothing without Sylvanas in terms of player buy-in or faction identity. While it’s literally true that The Forsaken would not exist without Sylvanas, she bears surprisingly little resemblance to the rest of her supporters. The macabre, gallows humor and propensity for a Frankensteinian blend of mad science is notably absence from the Banshee Queen herself. Taking Sylvanas out of the picture doesn’t change those elements, it just snips away their deification of their dark messiah.
Speaking of Sylvanas, while there was plenty of mustache-villain comparisons, the bulk of the outrage in BFA was centered around the Horde being complicit or out for lunch while another genocidal Warchief took the helm. Heroes and armies that fought alongside Vol’jin when he rebelled against Garrosh were given no voice when the intercontinental catapults rolled out. In fact, there was a sort of spiteful pact that emerged within the Horde community to support Sylvanas unequivocally to the bitter end as a form of protest against the writing—we were intended to hate Sylvanas, so they deliberately threw in with her out of spite for the rancid storytelling.
To sum up what I’m getting at is that the player buy-in to faction identity happened before the character driven chapters of WoW. Warcraft’s Narrative Team chose to begin exploring their stories through characters instead of peoples. This meant that if your favorite race was getting screentime, it was through someone like Garrosh/Thrall, Jaina/Varian, Tyrande/Malfurion, etc. When those arcs disagreed with the players, they expressed contempt for the arcs of said characters. That doesn’t mean they divested from faction identity, it just means they’re responding to the way Blizzard chose to express their stories.
because theme of informal-ish family-alike bond was what the horde started with.