Was The Teldrassil BBQ A Genocide?

Lore Story Forum
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It was the complete destruction of a city, but the NEs have many other cities and there’s still 9999 NEs in Darkshore in 8.1.

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This will bring only darkness and ruin.

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The G word has been said. Get in the bunker! :skull_and_crossbones:

grabs popcorn :popcorn:
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This was partially created as a containment thread, since this topic is devouring several other completely unrelated threads.

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:thinking: :popcorn:

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In all seriousness, it seems really odd that every night elf in Ashenvale would have fled to Teldrassil. There’s other directions (Stonetalon, Felwood, probably certain parts of Azshara). Or just holing up in parts of Ashenvale where the Horde army WASN’T.

Darkshore was never described as particularly heavily populated or important to night elves (that’s Ashenvale), and the tree’s less than 20 years old. So even assuming a lot of refugees flooded in from Ashenvale and the tree WAS fairly populated, as far-flung as night elves are, the big G word seems a bit hasty.

Granted, it was an attack almost entirely on defenseless civilians, since most of the night elf combatants were elsewhere. So maybe it wiped out a lot of craftsmen and families. Still. On Kalimdor alone, there’s night elf populations in Stonetalon, Winterspring, Desolace, Feralas…. Moonglade, Hyjal… And probably a few more I forgot.

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It was a war crime, by any modern standards. Mass murder of civilians.

As for Genocide?

It killed a sizeable chunk of the population, but arguably more to the point, it forced a migration and disrupted a cultural center in a way that will change the survivors’ way of life for the worse for the foreseeable future. By some definitions, that is enough to qualify.

It would be helpful to know what the Kaldorei civilian populations look like outside of Teldrassil; many of their other settlements seem to be predominantly military.

All told, I think we can use the word, under its modern definitions, but I don’t think the night elves are on track for extinction.

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wasn’t the kaldorei army out while a few guards were defending teldrassil?

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To place it into realworld perspectives. Teldrassil was not just Darnassus, it was the a large landmass with multiple towns and villages within the Tree. The more accurate real world equivalent would be the destruction of say…the entirety of Honshu/Hokkaido (not just bombing but completly destroying the islands until there was nothing left) and asking if it was a genocide of the Japanese people.

Whether it is called a genocide or not, Blizzard has used the term through their NPCs to illustrate they considered it to be at that level.

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Might as well say it’s the equivelant of bombing the entirety of Australia since they’re both islands… Was it anywhere near the size of Honshu? I doubt it.

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You know this is going to be a good time when it took us only eight posts to get to Japan, so WW2 and atomic bombs can’t be far behind.

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In terms of actual sale sizes? We can only guestimate based upon visuals, it is obviously massive.

I was more trying to illustruate that it was not just a city, but a much larger landmass as an example. Its easy to think of it as just darnassus, but it was soo much more than just that.

@Jellex, well I was trying to use a large contiguous landmass of a single ethnic group where I could then draw an equivalent analogy, BECAUSE hiroshima and nagasaki are NOT good ones in and of themselves.

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All this thread does to me is conjure images of Trần Lệ Xuân clapping her hands as screaming Pandaren and Night Elf monks get pelted with fire boulders.

I don’t know why i’m laughing, but I should probably call my psychologist.

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Would you say it was a city and it’s surrounding towns?

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I mean, its the functional and spacial equivalent of Elwynn Forest… or if they destroyed the entirety of the Tirisfal Glades (the entire zone not just the scar). So yes, in a sense, but given that spacial design in WoW is…Wonky… and it is large enough to dominate the skyline of Darkshore from its distance (and the entire kerfufule that was SUPERpults firing 6+ miles away to hit it)…eh?

You could make the argument Taiwan is more accurate in terms of gross scale, Japan was more to illustrate the size+ethnic aspect.

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Oh, yeah I acdepted that you weren’t talking about land size. Im just trying to pin down how much more it was. We know the tree took up most of the island and the land was just an extension of the tree according to Wolfheart. So I think your talking about the fact that there are various settlements in the tree? That the tree is more than just one city?

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Exactly so.

Edit: Its easy for us to try and fit the destruction into events that we have had human experience with (such as the destruction of an individual city). What I was trying to relate that the scale of devastation was beyond that which we normally can comprehend with our normal reference points.

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Firstly, *attempted genocide.
It wasn’t just Teldrassil, it was the entire War of Thorns. Sylvanas made it clear that her goal was to cripple the Night Elves so they could never pose a threat on Kalimdor again. Did that involve eradicating every last one? Likely not, as that is not an efficient way to wage war. She just meant to break their backs and their spirit as a people.

However, after Saurfang’s troops had taken areas and moved onward, it was Sylvanas’ Deathstalkers that were going into civilian population centers (i.e. Astranaar) and wiping out any living elves. She saw any living elf as a liability, clearly.

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Blizzard said it was and the characters in the game think it was, so what is there to argue?

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Threeslot, you’re running really dry on material, aren’t you? Maybe you should take a break.

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