Everything to do in the thread made to talk about a certain race of elves that got to exist inside the aforementioned story.
You complained about Blizzard “focusing in pointless plots” instead of “bringing anything fun or unique that the fans asked for like basically long time request”. And that buddy, in the Helfer thread, reads quite basically as “why is Blizz wasting time with Shadowlands instead of implementing the “unique and interesting” High Elves we have been demanding since Vanilla launch?”.
I just pointed out how those “High Elves” are NOT unique -like at all… they are the average way people uses them in fantasy franchises-. And yes they ARE boring when the most they can achieve in the story is to pat themselves in the back because of how “awesome” they are.
Also, you guys need to invest more time in actually paying attention to the current story instead of staying with you nose so far up the High Elf concept… cause while the execution is legitimately horrendous, I´m starting to see some hints to an actual “Campbellian monomyth” in SL´s narrative for the playable characters.
To put it in perspective, before this expac all the other expacs were basically the PC playing glorified babysitter / fireman and he/she preventing bad stuff from happening -mantaining the status quo-. The “neutral menace plots” always had a cosmical menace harrasing Azeroth, then the “heroes” of Azeroth dedicating some months to easily stop it and then back to status quo… only the flavor changed but the story has been the same since Vanilla and that plot got quite old after 15 years of repeating it ad nauseaum. Then the devs believed cracking tribalism up to 11 with “faction war plots” was the solution and oh boy, such a BIG mistake (cause a “war” that can never had a winner nor a loser is no interesting story, is just trying to suspend the belief of the players infinitely with no actual gain in sight).
The Campbellian monomyth is NOT about “saving the day” in it´s most basic sense, it´s about inner growth and balance and how that inner growth can and MUST be shared, so not only the hero evolves but the collective around him does. And only until Shadowlands we are starting to learn more metaphysical stuff surrounding the mortal races, not simply runing away to “stop” generil evil No. 2464164165 (and that´s why the “fireman” part around Zooval is so dull, cause it doesn´t match the actual severity of the consequences implied in the narrative. That´s why the important part around the Sylvanas cinematic wasn´t even her regaining part of her soul, it is about that permanent ??? mark surrounding the whole First Ones and Sepulcher stuff. The important stuff is about why the cosmos decided that a trial period is good enough to qualify the actual EONS of existence after mortals die).
The problem with Shadowlands is that such metaphysical and philosophical questions aren´t exactly easy to implement for something as material as a game… the result IS vagueness and players HATE when they can´t learn all the bits of the story in 5 minutes.
It depends in two things:
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How every person interpreted the Belves inside the story (we have people that merely looked at them as “edgelords” and some like myself that looked at them as actual “faulty” people with huge narrative potential).
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How the first point influences the implementation of the “darker turn”. One could argue the Velves were in a way a “return” to TBC Belves, but I´d say this would only work for the people that looked at them TBC Belves as nothing but edgelords for the sake of edgelording and liked them thanks to mere physical appearance (cause poor Velves aren´t allowed to aknowledge mistakes nor faults after joining the Alliance and becoming playable… and in that sense, they aren´t terribly different from the Helf artificial bubble and the boring “we are PeRfEcT” concept overdone in every fantasy story around the corner).
I´d say the Belves NEVER stopped being those “Darker” beings they were since TBC (I mean they were just fine with kicking the Nelves on their own turf for monetary / political reasons in the WoT, it was just business for them. They had NO problem seizing the Dark Animus even after the Shadopan warned them of the risks involved and so on), they just suffer from overexposition of their more “tame” characters like Liadrin or Lor´themar himself. But the race as a whole is waaay far from being goodie little two shoes Light worshippers who cannot do any wrong, noi, the Belves ALWAYS end up paying for their mistakes, and the narrative isn´t shy to portray this.
