I was recently reading another blood elf vs void elf aesthetic/theme thread where someone linked a behind the scenes of the blood elf creation and it made me wonder why the blood elves changed so much and so quickly.
We weren’t the run of the mill fair skinned high elf maybe because we had some demonic magic, darkness, edge and that gave them a unique flavor.
This would all of course change rapidly over the very expansion the Sin’dorei were introduced. We seemingly regressed closer to the idea of Quel’dorei rather than Sin’dorei. The re-ignition of the Sunwell brought a big theme of the light which is very tightly related to the Alliance.
I believe this change of identity challenged our Horde identity.
However the old Sin’dorei would have a bit of a resurfacing after the acquisition of the Dark Animus and the many times it would appear.
When we have discussions of the old Sin’dorei it is often based around the conversation of not going back but I mostly want to know why the change happened in the first place.
Could it be a victim of BC writing, regret of their initial portrayal or was this how it was always supposed to be?
The Blood Elves’ arc was perfect: quick and nicely wrapped up. And that’s what we should want. The problem is that we’ve just been conditioned to expect all lore to be fed to us at a slow drip, through constant nothing-burger revelations that don’t actually advance the plot at all, in order to facilitate the never ending MMO format.
We used to expect lore to actually move along at a real pace in the RTS days. Now nothing ever happens, and everything we’re given is inconsequential so that the game can keep going forever, like Destiny’s abysmal and totally stagnant lore.
Because that’s the deal: succinct and rich, lore-dense stories… or Destiny.
The darkest, most power hungry members of the blood elves sided with Kael and died in agony at the Sunwell Plateau.
The dumbest, most shortsighted members of the blood elves thought that huffing void farts was a good idea because their races’ greatest traitor’s research said to.
The modern Blood elf nation is what it is because those two groups were filtered out.
Does slightly spooky blood spells really count as doing anything like the forceful light extraction when they aren’t like, doing it Dragon Age style on actual people?
Also the their arc in TBC involved anyone but the Sunfury largely not knowing about the actual fel magic being used to replace the Sunwell as a battery for their buildings. Mana tap wasn’t exactly this dark thing compared to all the stabbing, burning and freezing done on a regular basis. Fel magic was mostly used by the returning magisters to quickly rebuild everything and keep stuff running.
Dark magic wasn’t much of a theme for the Silvermoon faction as much as doing things in a range of questionability to survive. The Blood Knights were the primary edge lords, with the seeming majority siding against Kael’thas and the legion (while some are still fought in the dungeon).
The whole point of the Blood Elves as a playable race in WoW was to get Alliance players to switch to Horde OP. That’s why they come off as an extremely confused Alliance race.
Blizzard made Blood Elves Horde to clean up faction balance and at the request of Korean players. I’m not making this up, it’s from that WoW behind the scenes book that was released a couple years back.
The Blood Elves thematically and aesthetically clashing with the Horde isn’t some fringe idea either. When they were announced to be Horde back before BC the reaction was a mixture of confusion and protest because of how bizarre a choice it was.
And yet, the last real interaction the Alliance had with them pre-WoW was the alliance gunning for their extermination as a race. Hell, even in Vanilla, there’s horde friendly/alliance hostile elves.
They were perfectly fine forgiving the Orcs and Trolls that had killed plenty of blood elves previously. And before you say those trolls were amani not darkspear, I remind you that Garithos was from Lordaeron, not Stormwind. The blood elves forgave that as well when they allied with the Forsaken(teh true Lordaeronians). They came crawling back to the Kirin’tor as well, twice.
The first time the Kirin tor begged them, the second was during the literal apocalypse, and being proud and refusing to work as a collective would have been really stupid and counterproductive *cough*Jaina*cough*
Too an extent I feel like the Blood Elves’ initial arc was solved too quickly. The major issues that placed them in the position they’re in by BC was solved within the expansion, with seemingly nothing more to significantly worry about going forward; at least as far as the writing is concerned.
I imagine to some extent their arc was more or less always meant to end up the way it did. A lot of the darker, edgier things they did were in response to the present issues plaguing them at the time and how it affected them as a people. With that said it does at times still seem like what little spotlight they’ve gotten after wants to paint them as if the darker stuff never happened.
It feels to me as if the devs didn’t have a plan for the Blood Elves’ development after BC. The Sunwell’s restoration was seeming the endgame for them. While there are likely plenty of things that could be focused upon they simply aren’t. If the initial arc were drawn out a bit, like if the Sunwell’s initial cleansing didn’t stick or if it’s condition was merely improved instead of being entirely fixed, there might still be an impetus for perpetuating the darker aspects of the race so many people liked them for. Extending their initial arc admittedly shouldn’t really be needed for that, but perhaps it would be better than the stagnation/erosion their racial identity currently suffers.
