First off, no, Lady Liadrin absolutely does look like a woman and people saying she doesn’t are out of their mind. With that said, she looks wrong and I want to break down why she looks wrong. And I wanna preface this by saying I firmly believe that there are two departments at Blizzard that almost never do a poor job, those being the Art and Sound teams. So saying this, I consider this a very rare miss from the art team.
I would argue that 90% of the problem with the cinematic and why it looks so so so wrong is the eyes.
ELVES DO NOT HAVE WHITE SCLERA (The whites of the eye for those who may not hear that word often) AND DO NOT HAVE BLACK PUPILS!!! Looking at the cinematic the first immediate issue is the eyes. This stands out and just looks incredibly wrong no matter how you try to justify it.
Nowhere has this ever been a look for the elves to have eyes like this. Her official Artwork does not…
Her in game model does not look like that…
Heck, even the horrible looking Warcraft Movie Elves at least got the eyes right!
In fact no official artwork of Elves have ever been depicted with Black Pupil and White Sclera and by comparison to the TBC intro cinematic it just looks absolutely wrong and Human instead of Elven.
Yeah, she has a defined pupil but its not black, it’s green like the whole of her eye! They are magical, arcane (or fel or holy) infused fantasy creatures so why on earth do they have human eyes in the latest cinematic?
The Eyes are what are unique to the elves! In fact even Night Elves don’t have black sclera.
Their eyes are unnatural and should have not just a glow but fantastical anatomy that is different from a Humans or many other races.
This is the crux of the problem with Midnight’s opening cinematic and Liadrin looking off. Because nowhere else in any artwork, concept designs, nothing have full blooded elves ever had eyes like that. Not just blood elves, but even High Elves and Void Elves don’t.
The other 10% I would argue is that, yes, she looks a little angular but even in her original concept art I showed up above she is a bit angular. I think the problem is that the High and Blood Elves were always depicted as being the peak of grace, elegance, and beauty even among their warriors… and yet more and more there is a push in the industry to make them more “realistic”… We have so many human characters… orcs… trolls… there are so many other races to make “realistic” in terms of facial structure and design. The Elves should not be one of them.
We are playing a fantasy game, we are allowed to have unrealistic body standards for some races. That’s not a crime or sin! Compared to the TBC Blood Elf depictions, Liadrin looks just way closer to being a human than an elf.
Again, I think the art team kills it 99% of the time but this cinematic really feels like it was outsourced to the same people who did Warcraft III Reforged and gave Naga human ears at first, before fixing it…
It makes me think this cinematic was outsourced and/or whoever made the character references phoned it in because they do not look like Blood Elves at all.
Does she look like a woman? Absolutely. Does she look like an Elf? Not even close. Slapping pointy ears and big weird eyebrows on someone does not an elf make them. There is much more to the anatomy and I would argue that beyond the ears the eyes are by far the BIGGEST distinct feature to them.
