At least some of WoW’s voice casting is pure kid’s morning cartoon, be it villains or heroes. Then you have more nuanced performances by people with many years, games and shows to their name. Then you have legacy characters where the same person did the character for 20+ years regardless of quality.
Crow’s that first category. Second tier is things like Garrosh and category 3 you have tyrande’s uniquely portuguese accent (though she does emote well) and malfurion’s overly theatrical flair, emotional except where it’s decidedly not.
The quest in val’sharah with the infamous noooo is immediately followed by an impatient remark that he’s wasting time before flying off and ysera saying that he’s lost in his rage and must be saved from himself. If anything he sounded mildly peeved.
And lest we forget once more; two separate instances of xavius’ forces calling druids droids! I know some peculiar forced inflection can mess with how you pronounce something but it’s memorable.
I could probably draw out something satisfying if I were forced to Explain Elune - something like an echo of Azeroth, born from the original night elves absorbing the well and then morphing to their faith into a unique entity, hence why she uses both arcane and light magic - but the longer she’s a mystery the better
Regrettably, that breaks immediately when you remember the Shadowlands lore that there were a bunch of Night Warriors on other planets that aren’t Azeroth, and existed before Night Elves were around.
(remember when they weirdly retconned the Stonewright to be a Night Warrior out of nowhere with the flimsy excuse that “oh renathal was wrong about her being an original venthyr”? lol, lmao)
Starshade’s Third Law: Any retcon or lore development that happened specifically in Shadowlands makes the story actively worse and should be decanonised except when absolutely necessary
To recall night elf complaints that I heard during Legion:
Ugh, I can’t believe that Malfurion is such a helpless buffoon who gets captured in an instant and that Tyrande is such a helpless waif who can’t do anything without her man.
Ugh, I can’t believe that Ysera, the Aspect with the strongest connection to the night elves, ended up being killed in such a lame way.
Ugh, I can’t believe that some of these night elves have such inappropriate voices unsuited for such an ancient, elegant and esteemed race.
Ugh, I can’t believe that so many night elves end up being corrupted by the Legion in this expansion, they’re meant to know better.
Ugh, I can’t believe that this expansion involves so many dead elves, clearly whoever wrote this stuff has a fetish for killing elves.
Ugh, I can’t believe that the nightborne aren’t more sympathetic towards the night elves and that Tyrande was written as being so hostile towards them for no reason.
Ugh, I can’t believe that the nightborne end up siding with the Horde instead of the Alliance, this is ridiculous, they clearly have more in common with night elves.
I mean, both Tyrande’s inexplicable hostility towards Thalyssra and her earlier inexplicable friendliness towards the Shen’dralar in Cataclysm both stem from the same source: gameplay-driven lore.
The suits told them to make night elf mages playable, so they added a flimsy lore justification.
The suits told them to make nightborne Horde-exclusive, so they added another flimsy lore justification.
Nightborne going Horde wasn’t a given and the developers had debates on that; they could have gone either way. Personally I would have preferred them becoming a neutral race like pandaren, but back then, the official party line was that neutral pandaren were a mistake and they weren’t doing any more neutral races ever. We know how that worked out.
I mean, all (deserved) dunking on The Typical Night Elf Rant Posters aside…
There are some valid points in there, I feel?
Although no more than the usual ‘This sort of thing could be avoided if the Writing Team wasn’t operating on a wing and prayer on a good day’, and that particular axe falls on all and sundry, so…
Eh, not to me, or at the very least the way it worked out is entirely acceptable.
Nightmare is good against Malfurion/Ysera? Good, it being especially potent against nature-dudes is thematically+narratively appropriate. Decent historical precedent for it.
‘Bad’ voice? Man some people have bad voices (and it definitely ain’t limited to just NElves). I’ll comment on it because I might not like it, but that’s just the way some things be. Not everyone can be Prince Renathal
NElves getting Legion corrupted? I mean if the tauren can, anyone can, but it’s probably pretty easy to forget that the Night Elves in the WotA were the resistance in the minority. The majority of NElves were on Azshara’s evil side. Ain’t like they’re perfect. Since NElves were so prominent in Legion, of course they’d have prominent enemies too.
Tyrande botching diplomacy is just her vibe (were the Night Elves ever good at it? doesn’t seem like it), and the Nightborne arc as written was basically a carbon copy of the Blood Elf arc, right down to their magical well of power that sustained them. No surprise they sided with hottie Lor’themar over meanie Tyrande.
I postulate: Nelfposters didn’t want Nightborne. They wanted Suramar.
Some of them are valid points, some of them aren’t, but a combination of overexposure to complaints from night elf fans and the more ridiculous nelfposters has left me a little jaded.
It’s basically been seven years of night elves being in the spotlight (or spotlight-adjacent) and their fans expressing displeasure about it. While a lot of those complaints do have merit, it’s become increasingly easy to tune it out as “oh, night elf fans complaining again about being one of the only races that regularly gets attention from Blizzard, great.”
I accept that this doesn’t invalidate any of the complaints and it’s more of a character flaw than anything else, but there was a similar situation at the end of Warlords of Draenor. I mean, how many of you were absolutely sick to death of orcs and never wanted to hear about them again by the end of 2016?
Oh no. We’re too late. These people have already been infected. They may look fine now, but it’s only a matter of time until they turn into night elf posters!
Mists of Pandaria was the Garrosh Hellscream show and from the Horde perspective, focused almost entirely on how he was turning it into an orc supremacist war machine.
Cataclysm definitely featured the orcs as the most prominent Horde race by far, with Forsaken as a distant second on the Eastern Kingdoms. Also, there was Thrall playing the part of Green Jesus and serving as the main character.
Wrath of the Lich King had a whole bunch of orc focus, with the Horde Expedition being distinctly orcish, with Thrall and Garrosh serving as the representatives of the Horde and with Saurfang avenging his dead son and all that. In comparison, the Forsaken almost vanish completely from the expansion after Wrathgate, despite the expansion revolving around their arch nemesis.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Burning Crusade was orc heavy, considering that it was based on the shattered orc homeworld.
Prince Renathal 