Black Elves are describbed in the Edda as being blacker than pitch iirc lol, and some of the Norse gods are described and understood in folklore to be darker skinned
It’s like Greek Persephone, some sources describe her skin to be the color of the earth.
That’s why I added the word “necessarily.” Sources don’t agree on exactly what they are.
IMO that’s just -ism in academia, similar to how a lot of those vikings tombs of warriors across scandinavian and germanic territory are now discovered to be women and a lot of people refuse to believe women could have been warrior queens in tribal leadership positions in viking society lol
Actually it was being cut off from the Second Well that caused the change over generations of time.
should probably point out there ARE black elven characters in the lore, its just a group that was introduced and then forgotten in BC.
They are called the Felblood Elves (ie the ones from magister terrace). Now granted, their skin color varies from red to pale ash to various forms of brown.
Elves skin color is based upon whatever magic they are juicing on.
For NE - the well of eternity.
Nightborne - nightwell
blood elves - sunwell
void elves - the void
Druids of the flame - ragnaros/old god magic
Each group of elves with a different skin color was influenced by the magic they partake in.
The question is, does it make sense for the felblood elves to join the horde or the alliance? maybe the alliance, afterall they accepted the void elves. but the horde? Considering how irked they got over void elves potentially contaminating the sunwell and the legion trying to do the same in BC it would not make any sense to me.
Because black blood elves never existed. I asked for an explanation because the skin tone made no sense (yet) since elves aren’t related to humans one bit. I got attacked by being incensitive/racist by a working blizz dev. Ignorant af. Literally every elf eye color/skin tone means something in wow. Like where the F does she work at? How is she a quest designer? I really wanted to see them integrated this with logic and a fitting theme through the sunwell. Heck even the closest kins to the highborne could be these new chocolaty elves. Anything because to me LORE matters. I 100% doubt we will get any discussion towards the color because everyone up there is beyond PC woke at this point.
I’d find it fitting to see a Black Blood Elf who’s actually an uncorrupted black dragon (Having more diverse characters + black dragons would be nice) .
I liked the concept someone gave about the lore with darker skinned blood/high elves stating they’re a rare mutation within the race that’s considered a blessed birth of sorts (Like Night Elves with their newborns who are Golden-Eyed), of which I feel the Black Dragonflight would find a-kin towards given they too are a rarity.
One could also tie in the rare-seen time to time characters for a come-back when the customisations roll out. 
This is entirely different. The Felblood elves are the way they are because of corruption and fel magic. They are withered husks of their force selves. That is not the equivalent of black and brown skinned elven characters that were both with said skin tone.
While I don’t really feel strongly one way or the other about having black skinned elves, the obvious answer would be that elves don’t have brown tones of skin as a particularly common trait. It is the same reason we don’t have any white orcs. We don’t have any purple skinned humans either.
I am all for diversity but it isn’t really logical to force it for the sense of diversity. Diversity works best when it is naturally inclusive. Even with skin tones included, the races of Azeroth operate quite different to how we do. A black skinned human and a white skinned human would have almost no cultural differences outside the seven kingdoms since pretty much all humans come from the seven Kingdoms. The closest allegory we have in game would be High/Blood Elves and Night Elves. Both are elves but differ in appearance and culture.
Blizzard has basically stated that the lack of skin tones was an OOC oversight, and they’re retconning the lore to say that humans/elves/dwarves/gnomes have always had these skin tones. That’s the canonical explanation, “They’ve always had them, we just neglected to put them in.” Within the context of Azeroth, nothing will have changed, thus there’s no additional explanation needed.
Also…
Actually… Maybe the ren’dorei, but that doesn’t rhyme. Plus, ren’dorei are derived from Thalassians, not the other way around.
Ion has specifically said “this is a retcon”, at least in regards to humans. However, retcons get a much worst rep than they deserve. They are a tool that can be used for good purposes, especially in something as big and old as WoW. Sometimes, decisions made 15 years ago just aren’t good ones.
In this case, yes, it’s a good one. Rather than trying to hamfist some lore-explanation of why chocolate elves now?, they can just say elves have always been vanilla, chocolate, and caramel. Of course, it then leads the glaringly obvious point of this post…
To which I say… Ehh… Retcons can swing both ways. Using it to smooth bumps? Sure, good thing. Using it to uproot entire characters? Eh… There’s gonna be some head turns if Liadrin is suddenly black. They’ll need to make new lore-significant, PoC characters - elves, humans, and shorties. Frankly, I doubt they’re doing that in Shadowlands, since most of the focus characters are either Shadowland-native species, or dead lore characters. So, unless Shadowlands takes a detour patch back to Azeroth, I’m wagering we’ll have to wait til 10.0 for that.
Good one! I was trying to think of the name of that elf. All I could remember was that she was the apprentice of Kalec, I think. I think back when the novel came out and that was discussed most people assumed the dark skin was a result of her having human ancestry somewhere down the line, though she was never called a half-elf.
She actually is rather pale in her Night Elf form. Bleached skin and white hair.
and yet not white, as happened to the High Elves, which you left out of your quote lmao
Hey, I think that’s an easy fix! They can just put Liadrin in a cinematic, she’s black now, meeting with Lor’themar to go over plans. He looks perplexed, she cuts him off:
Citation needed
Elves skin color and eye color is tied to the magic they consume.
If Blood Elves turn green eyed with small fel consumption and red skinned with a lot of fel consumption, and Blood Elves already have golden eyes due to Light-Sunwell, just say the black skin is due to a lot of Light-Sunwell. There’s no canon to what happens to Blood Elves after extensive Light consumption.
Boom.
Literally that easy.
Citation granted.
https://www.wowhead.com/news=316853/city-guards-and-civilian-npcs-will-receive-updated-diverse-appearances-in-shadow
One of the things I’m really excited about in the new customization features is how its sort of allowed sub-races of a sort to get in, like Sandfury trolls and Wildhammer dwarves. And then those purple trolls who may be dark trolls or Shatterspear trolls; it’s not clear. But I wondered: it reminded me, in the pre-patch to Cataclysm they added little questlines explaining some of the new race/class combinations. Would there possibly be something similar about, like, Sandfury trolls or high elves in the Shadowlands pre-patch?
There are no specific plans along those lines in Shadowlands. Though I think we are planning on just broadly incorporating the range of character customization options for NPCs as well as players just across the world.
I think, in some ways we’re frankly viewing this as a bit of a retcon. Like, we’re not going to change existing named, established characters and make them look different. But, walking around Stormwind, walking around other parts of the world, you will see guards and random civilians that have these looks as if they’ve been there all along. Because frankly I think we see this as correcting an oversight on our part over the years, as well as just trying to improve representation more broadly. We are custodians of a fantasy universe and a world that we built, and we don’t want to not do the right thing because we feel shackled to a decision that was made creatively in a different era that was fifteen-plus years ago.
Now, as for details of troll clans and dwarven clans and the rest, I think as we have opportunities to do things like racial heritage lines or other race focused questlines, that’s a fun opportunity to explore those areas. But we don’t have any specific thoughts for Shadowlands right now.
I don’t know. I think trying to correlate elven evolution to specific applications of magic…
Okay, I’ll give them Fel magic turned blood elf eyes green. Fel is historically green, so that makes sense. But, a lot of people in this thread are trying to split hairs on Well of Eternity v. Nightwell v. Sunwell. I don’t think there was that much thought into the underlying mechanics of how each font drove those specific changes. Just “different font = different elf”, however the devs wanted that “different elf” to be expressed.
Then again, if my argument is that “fonts of magic arbitrarily assign traits to elves”, then your argument could work. However… Then why do ren’dorei get the new colors? They aren’t exposed to the Well, not like the sin’dorei.
Personally, to me, it feels a lot smoother to say “they’ve always been there, we just did a bad job representing it”. It’s an earnest answer, and admittance to fault. I’ll appreciate them owning up to it, so long as they make new characters.
They correspond to High and Blood Elves “joining” the Void Elves. Eventually I imagine they will turn blue skinned and spooky eyed.
Man that’s dumb. Though I’d say “bit of a retcon” isn’t a meaningful phrase. Things either are or aren’t. Unless he thinks “new lore” that fills in gaps in knowledge or that develops an undeveloped idea is a retcon.
Really dumb they won’t change character skin tones though. A lot of us read Taelia’s skin tone as “meant to be a Brown girl but customization options don’t allow it”, and the Liadrin dark skin idea would make sense given her eye change (while Lorthemar is still green)
I’m just trying to imagine this from an RP perspective… Alright. I got a chocolate sin’dorei. What’s more natural for me as an RPer?
Plus, option 2 kinda condemns all PoC players to admit that their character, which they might want to be of a different skin tone to match theirs, was more vanilla at some point?
And, fine, let’s say that all dark-skin ren’dorei were just sin’dorei or quel’dorei that happened to get dark-skinned. What about dwarves? Gnomes? Humans? Nothing like that to suddenly make them darker, without a retcon.
My Dark Liadrin argument only applies to elves, who are the eevee evolutions of WoW where magic changes their eyes and skin with a modicum of ease (e.g. Highborne to High Elves to Blood Elves to Felblood Elves/Illidari)
All humans, gnomes, and dwarves come from Titan constructs affected by the curse of flesh. Grey metals turn white, brown or gold metal turns black/brown spectrum skin tones. Easy enough.