Yeah, it’s largely why I shy away from high elves, as explained above. I don’t quite know how to deal with them, or what level of headcanon to take into account when involving them in an event.
The real slippery slope here is a community developing headcanon to the point it invokes the above issue in most interactions. Re. when you interact with a demon hunter, you won’t ever know outright if they follow canon lore, or ascribe to the “demon within” headcanon. Whether that headcanon is good or bad is not much the question as it is to have a different “base canon” to go off from.
The two blatant examples where this is a glaring issue is void elves and Calia Menethil. The latter hated OOC to the point that most characters - regardless of even knowledge about her or Forsaken politics - will have a surprisingly strong and formulated opinion on her that they’ll openly communicate.
It’s against forum rules to point fingers and I want to hold myself to it, but considering you were a host there I am pretty sure you’re familiar with that and other discussions / storylines I mentioned.
these forums have shown me the live example of why writers in the XVIIIth-XIXth century would just fight each other to the death over minor disagreements about russian literature
I’ll be fair here, there’s a lot of concepts you can shoehorn into the game with 1x argument, and destroy with another argument, both based on canon lore.
One example is whether the Horde fields dark magic users in battle nowadays. An argument can be made for the Mag’har darkcasters around Orgrimmar and the Horde lineaup in Ashran/Pandaria, another can be made based on past quests, the concept behind the Cleft of Shadows and the Horde’s general philosophy.
That’s just how things are. COUGH COUGH Kaldorei darkfallen COUGH COUGH
Because the term ‘officially canon’ is doing so much bench pressing sigma chuds on youtube shorts are using it as the backdrop to some random Peaky Blinders clip audio with ‘Drive Forever’ playing in the background, and a fraction of 10-25% of an entire kingdom being portrayed with about 30 characters at their main exodus city on a good day isn’t disproportionate.
They are looked down upon in city and social life and fielded happily in military life, Thrall and Garrosh and Vol’Jin and Sylvanas all had this outlook. It really isn’t that hard to understand.
i wish you left them and other bad concepts alone tbqh
do you think “problematic headcanon that I don’t know how to deal with” is an issue that only pops up in regards to high elf roleplayers? if you genuinely believe that then damn, don’t interact with other races because you’ll be very disappointed
in other words, there are ways of dealing with someone’s headcanon, at worst you can just disregard it and take it as a bad joke in character. unfortunately here your take on what is “headcanon” is quite false so really you’re just a really weird roleplayer
Even if we made a wild guess and said that the headcanon HE population (the RP characters) amounted to say, 200 elves, to be incredibly generous, and added that to the canon census, it would still be under threat of extinction. They really aren’t many and lore canon would not be affected by these numbers even if we tried.
