We’ve seen high elf looking void elf npcs now as of the recent patch, so i think is fair to say that the playable void elves are just that, void elves.
But I think alleria being in charge of the silver covenant is an interesting development.
This is good to see. Do you know where she says this? Or even have a screenshot?
…now I wonder if she moved to Silvermoon also. Like her nephew did.
I saw the dialogue on an alpha stream a week or so ago but I can’t remember for the life of me the exact place it took place, been scanning all the vods to try to find it again, I’ll keep ya posted
Suddenly struck me that it be clever of them to use this as a way to set up Vereesa having spent TWW restoring Windrunner spire and the village. Perhaps as a High Elven hub, even.
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“I know I set up a militant anti-blood elf hate group and I may have gotten a bit carried away in purging Dalaran, but can I please live in Silvermoon?” - Vereesa, maybe.
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Quite. Golden might have tried to reimagine Vereesa as the Windrunners’ “peacemaker” and all-around sweetheart in recent years, but playing through remix reminded me how unearned that shift in portrayal was.
Don’t know about that one, chief. Theron wasn’t willing to lead a divided kingdom even before the Horde and Alliance were factors. I can’t imagine what would compel him to permit Vereesa, of all Windrunners, to literally divide his kingdom. Her merely showing up to fight the Amani caused a scandal.
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I was hoping she was dead. She’s the most superfluous of the Windrunner siblings and has inconsistent characterization.
How many Thalassian rangers do we actually need anyway? Lor’themar, Sylvanas, Alleria, Vereesa, Hauldron.
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Is it bad that I like Noggenfogger more then Gazlowe?
I still think it was dumb that BFA was set up the way it was with all the Alliance characters responsible for atrocities save Twinbraid surviving MoP, while the Horde ones died.
At least with Varian being Blue garrosh for a time, he had a legit change of heart before dying.
tbf that was when they were dealing with an existential crisis and a couple bad days away from annihilation. I can kinda understand why he didn’t want there to be violence in the streets over mana draining when they were pushed to a tiny corner of Silvermoon, or even elves going withered en masse because the only solution they had on hand was rejected.
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Well if the leader of the Alliance can casually chill in Silvermoon City itself, this is not that much to ask given the Windrunner lands were way out in the ghostwoods and still abandoned as of Shadowlands. They are reuniting the scattered elven tribes, so that is a bullet that they are going to have to bite.
And she is… sort of the only windrunner left. Alleria is a living hazard to the kingdom and Sylvanas… yeah… she called them and the rest of the Horde garbage and then team rocket’d off to begin a campaign of multiversal omnicide.
I’m worried that, in a potential rush to give high elves a location in Midnight that will add them to the elven reunification group hug, this kind of story objection will get ignored or steamrolled over.
I’m fine with ending up at reunification, but my worry is that much like in DF, the story will reach it merely by saying ‘we need reunification; isn’t friendship grand?’ over and over in lieu of actually displaying the need for and the merited struggle toward achieving it. And any character who disagrees will be portrayed as either a) an evil villain who must be overcome, b) a misguided fool unable to let go off negative emotion, treated as either mean or pitiable and not a valid choice, or c) a character patently designed to suddenly ‘see the light’ and reverse course in a scene too heavy-handed and theme-based rather than character-based to come off as earned.
I’d like to see some kind of reckoning over Vereesa and the Silver Covenant’s role in the Purge - if nothingg else, so that we players can get some firsthand accounts of affected Sunreavers (who don’t get turned into villains for it) and finally get hard lore on how long the captured Sunreavers were held in Dalaran and how well/badly they were treated in custody. I just hope this reckoning gets treated with authorial respect towards all the characters involved - as in, treating them as characters who exist in the world and reached their decisions by logic, however biased and information-limited that logic may have been, rather than treating them as just a face stretched over a concept/idea/theme that has to be instantly proven right/wrong.
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Mending the bridges between high, void, and blood elf doesn’t mean it has to include every single individual, just the groups.
Vereesa is highly questionable. People can write of Jaina as just teleporting civilians to the Violet Hold if they want, but Vereesa straight up sent the Silver Covenant after civilians who were just trying to get their things out of a bank or to kill Dragonhawks to prevent escape.
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I really hate the fact that a “everyone was wrong, lets just not dwell on the specifics and be fwends!” plot is potentially on the table.
I don’t think the Belves should be portrayed as saintly perfect innocents, but at the end of the day they’ve been canonically trying to reach out to the helves since they got the news Kael died. Whether Lorthemar’s decision was correct or rash, he committed to trying to rectify the consequences the second the blood elves weren’t on the razor’s edge and had room to breathe. And Rommath was entirely correct regarding the Void elves being a massive danger to themselves and others.
Ideally the purge actually gets addressed in a way that’s not just beating the Alliance player over the head with “wow, you suck” like they’ve done with post-Teldrassil npcs and Horde PCs.
Vereesa having to come to grips with the fact that she personally is seen as no better than her void/death corrupted sisters in her homeland and made many innocent families go through the same pain she felt would be a good side arc, I think.
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A bit of a rant, here.
This is one reason that I’m sad that the Silver Covenant has eclipsed and absorbed the entire set of ‘high elf’ representation. The Silver Covenant has its own particular alignment and goals, but they were just a Dalaran-based group of high elves and not the whole set.
Personally, my main view of high elves was built on NPCs like Fiora Longears in Aubeerdine, Elsharin the mage trainer in Stormwind, Alleria’s rangers in Terokkar, and the nameless Theramore high elves. Just random individuals who stuck with the Alliance allies they were with when their homeland and people were suddenly wiped off the map.
I really liked that kind of blood elf/high elf division as a split between ‘the inheritors of Quel’thalas’ versus ‘the orphans of Quel’thalas’ - the blood elves as the ones who viewed the utter devastation of their lands and people and Sunwell, got up, dusted themselves off, and vowed to rebuild and grow stronger; the high elves as the ones who mourned the loss of nearly everyone and everything to do with their homeland, chose to build a life with their new allies rather than try to sculpt the ashes of their past into a facsimile of what it had been before, and who viewed these new ‘blood’ elves and their methods as something strange and foreign to that shared past.
I felt that was a much more interesting philosophical and political divide, with more room to explore how they diverge and disagree without having to constantly set them against each other. The Silver Covenant formed an interesting subset of that, as high elves stuck in proximity to blood elves and dialing that distrust and repulsion up to 11, but I don’t think the SC mindset works as the total representation - it’s just so narrow. But, since the SC appeared in Wrath, they seem to have taken over as ‘the’ high elves.
I am pessimistically expecting the SC to be the only high elf representation in Midnight, because there’s a lot of elf factions to cover. But I am sad that we probably won’t get the kind of philosophical debates I was hoping for about what makes up a culture, the sort of melancholic reflection of what must have changed due to the simple math of 90% of a nation - its people, its lands, its culture, its infrastructure - getting wiped out and being rebuilt by the 9% who had different traits to survive and adapt to the new, changed world.
Now, that’s my preferences, and probably too slow for most players to enjoy. But I’d love some story between a blood elf and high elf going through the ruins of old Silvermoon and reflecting on how both of them are now so different to the people who once lived there - their habits changing because the blood elf needed to do something else to survive in the Scourge-filled aftermath and the high elf had adopted aspects from their new adoptive culture, both viewing each other’s new habits as strange. None are wrong, they don’t even have to disagree or dislike each other, but they just share a sad moment of reflection that time marches on and even the reclusive, self-assured people of Quel’thalas-that-was could not hide from it in the end.
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I definitely feel that.
Alleria probably should have been more of a peacemaker since being introduced and represent the class of Helves that stuck with the alliance but not out of grievances. But she really hasn’t been shown to care all that much about the Belves or going through recent history, so idk.
Since the Nightbourne recruitment chain was a thing, we know that helves that weren’t involved with the purge were free to come and go from silvermoon, so hopefully that distinction matters and they’re not all considered followers of Vereesa. They wouldn’t really have an established rep to point to for the way Blizzard usually does stories now, assuming Alleria will be at least temporarily a villain, but they could always make one.
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They are in a weird spot with the purge because the silver covenant’s reaction was based on content that got cut. If the divine bell actually was used in Darnassus and killed a lot of civilians it at least would of been less cartoonishly out of proportion for a reaction.
As the change was last minute they only really had time to make a few minor tweaks, mostly to Jaina.
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I think Auric Sunchaser, one of Alleria’s rangers met in Terokkar and later the NPC used to represent high elves in the Quel’delar quest chain, is just recognizable enough to fit as a representative of non-SC high elves. He’s a very minor character, but has appeared across a few expacs and a few stories, so he has a bit of history already to build on.
Also, during the Quel’delar chain, he apparently praises blood elf questers and refers collectively to the ‘children of Silvermoon’, so he could be used as a foil to Vereesa’s anti-blood-elf sentiment to show the disagreements within the high elves.
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Captain_Auric_Sunchaser
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I get that, but this unification (yuck) should probably come before the exiled leader of the blood elf hate group is restored to land and honors in the blood elf kingdom.
Also, assuming Silvermoon’s noble houses followed the same pattern as its royal one, Alleria and Arator are first and second in line to its Scourged estates now. I forget if Alleria’s disinheritance in the Sylvanas novel extended to the family lands as well as titles, but regardless, Alleria at least still retains some “goodwill” with Lor’themar despite her, uh, eccentricities. Her baggage doesn’t include a blood elf massacre.
Really, if I were Theron and this setting still lent itself to political intrigue, Arator is the guy the regency would install as House Windrunner’s head. Strongly connected, chill with the blood elves, respected in Silvermoon, an avowed knight of the Silver Hand, no history of conflict with QT or its allies…
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I am legit unsure how they plan to address things and unite the elves when they can keep grudges for literal multiple human lifetimes. I half way expect them to just sweep inconvenient things under the rug. It is a classic Blizzard move.
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