Yeah, that’s really the key takeaway.
Now if it were Jaina writing it and being racist against trolls and lusting after the ‘superior’ Night Elves that’d make sense. We all know about her…predilections.
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If intelligence is defined by the ability to learn, understand and reason then I think the scholarly path is probably a sign of intelligence. That doesn’t diminish the other paths of life, but it does underline its strength, in my opinion.
You know what they say about the smartest people making the biggest, dumbest mistakes.
Objection denied.
So warriors have high intelligence because they’re good at learning battle techniques, yeah?
What’s the difference? Why do mages get to claim the high intellect spot because of arcane but the hunters who have an encyclopedic knowledge of the wilds don’t? Is it not intelligence of a different form?
Why then would arcanists have any claim to be more ‘intelligent’ than any other pursuit?
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Because it’s PR.
If I walk into a room and say Khadgar is smarter than Jaina, I don’t mean Jaina is some oaf who can’t finish a full sentence. But we’re talking about generality here.
If there’s a room with a representative of all classes inside, and someone has to be the smartest, then I’ll bet its the mage most of the time. Just like how, usually, the Hunter will probably be the one with the best eyesight. Or the warrior the one with the most raw strength. Or the warlock the one with the most forbidden knowledge.
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I’d add that I wouldn’t consider mages or the Kirin Tor as being more intelligent than warlocks, shaman, druids or evokers, purely due to the fact all of them have representatives ranging from 4D chess playing geniuses to dumb dumbs. The Gorian Empire had magi, they learned how to use the arcane yet 99% of ogres are portrayed as oversized monobrow brutes.
Not that either Elves or Trolls have been described as being smarter than the other races. The only one I can think of are admittedly gnomes, whose schtick is that they are intelligent and innovative to the point of being hazardous. It’s more a tendency than a general rule.
What is the difference between being “the smartest” and having “the most forbidden knowledge” in the context of “being scholarly”, exactly.
Unless it was changed weren’t their mages:
- rare mutants with two heads which made them smarter
- all the smart ones killed off and the dumb ones bred as shock troops and heavy labours by the old horde prior to the invasion of azeroth.
Although I think you are nitpicking at this point, I do think Mages and Warlocks are probably quite close on their level of intelligence. Many mages became warlocks, after all.
I think you understand my meaning, though. Every class has their tropes. They can be good guides for writing and roleplay, and they can be diverged from when welcome.
Yes, they can be? How does that tie into what I wrote?
More wondering if that was changed.
because I am not sure anymore.
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That’s still a thing as well as the Shadow Council using the Altar of Storms to artificially create more of them.
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Yes, but you don’t understand mine.
Mages are book nerds. They’re good at books. This is a focus of their intelligence.
That doesn’t mean that they’re more intelligent than other classes (nor that arcane is linked to intelligence, nor that trolls are more/less intelligent than NElves), just that other classes have the focus of their intellect applied elsewhere (or the same place, but different books, in the cases of warlocks).
Typically, when we think of ‘intelligence’ in the abstract we associate it with book learning. But that’s a narrow (antiquated) view of what intelligence means and represents in the brain.
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Down at the pub with Khadgar and he comes out with this belter;
“Aerilen old pal, what do you call a troll on the Blue Lady?”
“What?” I replied.
“A good bloody start.”
Belter.
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An antiquated view on which the idea of intelligence in warcraft is likely based on, mind you.
But let’s go back to what Khadgar says here. I think it likely that he bases this view on his own capacity as being a mage from Dalaran, where the ‘book intelligence’ is the norm. From that point of view, you could understand why he would say that the elves were/are more intelligent than their ancestors (I assume he’s talking about the Dark Trolls here).
I assume this is 100% because they want Wrathion to be “grown up” and don’t really care about the implications of overpopulation or, as others have stated, the absolutely wild and frankly hilarious mortality rate of dragons if this is true.
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I’m not saying the characters are badly written for being wrong, just that players shouldn’t take a character’s thoughts as gospel.
It was kinda implied previously. Awbee was a whelp in UBRS Vanilla. They were a full grown dragon (not even a drake!) in UBRS WoD, a scant ~6 years apart. Wrathion was still a wee whelp at the time, so he’s just inheriting that time progression.
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Of course they shouldn’t. It’s expressly an unreliable narrator here. But you could see where he comes from.
My problem is not that it contradicts established facts (it technically doesn’t), but that it completely changes the theme of the night elves’ backstory.
Turns out their dark troll ancestors were not explorers and trailblazers who made a groundbreaking discovery, they were mom’s favorite kids who were given that discovery on a silver platter by divine intervention.
Which I wouldn’t have a problem with if that was the story they wanted to tell from the start, or if there was any hint that this recontextualization was intentional and had a narrative purpose (like teaching how historians might be missing the big picture because they don’t know the whole story). But knowing Blizzard, the writer probably just wrote it in on a whim, and I’m not going to act like it’s okay for them to change the theme of an entire race’s backstory without thought or reason even if they file the right codex paperwork.
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I see where you are coming from, but it doesn’t change it that much, in my opinion. After all, these Dark Trolls would have had to decide to follow this strange woodland creature. That in itself does speak for a streak of adventure and exploration in their culture. Bilbo Baggins isn’t any less of an adventurer because he got convinced by Gandalf.
This rings even more true if you look at their lore as fledgling Night Elves, expanding their knowledge of the world, of magic, or spirituality.
Edit: That said, having read the excerpt of this specific passage, apart from Khadgar writing Faerie Dragon as Fairy Dragon, his source is “legend”. I wonder who’s legends these are, though, seeing as both elves and trolls have denied any evolutionary relation.
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