Out of all three Windrunner sisters I’d say she’s the least offensive but personal preference leads me to still dislike her mostly not due to anything she did, per se, so much as the writing surrounding the Void Elves.
As someone who was lured into investing in the setting due to the pragmatic nature of Blood Elves and their willingness to do whatever was needed in order to defend their people and homeland in the face of nearly being wiped out by their various enemies, it was bitterly disappointing to see them moved away from dabbling in darker magic…
They were shunned by the Alliance in large part for doing that - out of necessity, no less - and yet now the Alliance is all buddy-buddy with the Void Elves who wield an even more dangerous type of magic.
On the plus side, we at least have the survivors of Suramar now firmly allied with the Sin’dorei. I always liked the respect shown towards the Highborne on the part of the Blood Elves so I’m glad they tapped into that more heavily, at least.
That’s mostly because she’s had the least time to do stuff tbh.
Also she ate a naaru. Yeah it was a shadow naaru and naaru (regardless of radiance) are probably evil but cannibalising a sentient being is still normally looked down upon, for icky-sake if nothing else (even though Stormwind has a history of eating murlocs).
Like if I started chomping on Tyrande’s leg to get some of her Night Warrior power there’d be some raised eyebrows, but 'cos it’s a floating chandelier Alleria gets a pass? That ain’t right.
Technically the blood elves never managed to siphon from M’uru, he gave willingly due to that one prophecy. He was playing 5D chess to move the Blood Elves into the eventual Army of Light via his own sacrifice and renewal of the Sunwell.
Indeed, it was generally seen as a ‘dark’ moment for them, characterised as them being morally compromised due to necessity (or making excuses to do so, with the veil of ‘necessity’ as a shield). Undermined somewhat by the last minute “actually he let you do that :)” stupidity but oh well, TBC shooting itself in the foot is no new ground I shall tread, merely a well-worn path.
For Alleria’s cannibalism, it’s forgotten. Barely a blip. There was no moral outrage from her sister, despite the High Elves objection to consuming creatures for magic that caused the Silvermoon schism. There’s no objections from the draenei about how L’ura could have been returned to the Light (as D’ore was) instead of eating them.
The moment was treated with weight of What does this mean for Alleria? (“Will she fall to Void Corruption?” - apparently not she says she’s got complete control after the dungeon) without ever having anyone else comment on it. Or, in other words:-
TBH, the Nightborne from the Expedition is probably the least offensive to me. Partly because out of the introductory questlines, her part was the least annoying to me (that’s not to say it wasn’t, the entire ‘who’s this handsome sorcerer?’ was very ).
Alliance-side introductory quests are painful. Funnily enough, only now when I actually tried looking at the quest I realised that maybe Pathfinder Jeb was y’know, actually training people with climbing and not random people somehow nearly fell down the wall. Cogs and sprockets!
I hope that TWW won’t swing to the other extreme considering we went from MoP to WoD in a rather similar way. I’m begging Blizzard to never do another #justwarlordthings ever again.
It´s the general issue of void elves, they´re a race that doesn´t belong to the Alliance but was added because Blizzard didn´t want to give copy of blood elf model to the Alliance. Which means that everything they do, are and represent is kind of ignored by everyone else, otherwise the story would inevitably have to ask the question: “Why the hell are we working with these guys?”
A military foothold in the Eastern Kingdoms when they didn’t really have any, offering vital support to the Frostwolves in Alterac, and I expect part of it was Hamuul wanting to steer them towards being better natured than they might otherwise fall to if left to their own devices.
Their narrative is largely reminiscent of TBC right down to “it’s a means to an end and this power will benefit us as a people” but they’re good this time because some trollop who no one has seen in ages said they’re chill and the mind-rot magic is fine actually.
Blizzard were simply cowards for not adding the Outland High Elves as the playable people tbqh.
If realpolitik was the goal you’d tone down the Honour talk before sending people eastward to assist the kingdom of cannibal zombies in their latest mass killing, slavery and/or bioweapons testing on PoW’s…
It´s kind of insane that all the narrative beats that blood elves got to build them up as race that fits into the Horde ended up getting stripped one by one as time progressed, turning them into a race that would nowadays perfectly fit into the Alliance, only to then add the TBC blood elves (but much less stable and way more corrupted) into the Alliance.
Of course, I expect some big changes to how playable Thalassian elves work in Midnight, so all of this might be moot quite soon.
It ties into the (at the time) vision of the Horde as scrappy underdogs who were forced together partially out of necessity. Sure, the Forsaken didn’t really gel with the rest of the Horde cultural-wise, but they needed each other to keep the Alliance in check from wiping one of them out.
You can’t really say the same thing about the Alliance inviting the Void Elves in. The thin blue line would be doing just fine without them.
And throwing them out of the horde goes against blood elf history of enthusiastically diving into dangerous magics for their greater benefit so let’s just agree it’s all nonsense.
Worst thing is that void elves could have worked in the Alliance.
Option 1 would be to add them during the war, because then it would be more understandable for Alliance to take in people they otherwise wouldn´t, to bolster their numbers.
Option 2 would be to have void elves be former high elves (perhaps even majority of the race, so the “why no high elves?” issue gets resolved in terms of lore), transformed during Void attack on some big meeting to decide future of their race or something. This way void elves wouldn´t be some new random people, but already members of the Alliance that got cursed and are kept in because they´re actually loyal and have been friends with the rest before their transformation.
Instead we got blood elf researchers who followed Dar´khan´s research. Truly one of the stories of all time.
Technically they weren’t thrown out of the Horde, they were exiled from Silvermoon for practicing magics that were expected (and then proven) to be a danger to the Sunwell. #RommathWasRight
They were allowed to leave with supplies which they used to set up in the Ghostlands to do their research apparently with no further harm or hassle from Silvermoon, for what seems like years. There’s no indication they would have been unwelcome among the Forsaken. They just weren’t allowed to play with their Void Toys next to the Beacon of Light (and arcane).
They voluntarily chose not to go hang out with the Forsaken shadowcasters, due to Umbric’s general dislike of the Horde.
I absolutely believe that using the Outland HElves getting corrupted would have made more sense. It’s not as if Outland didn’t have a bunch of void stuff going on with it already.
“We’ve been researching the Void to see how we can slow Outland’s decay”->“Oh no something went wrong”->“We’re all corrupted now, and need the resources of the Alliance proper to help us stay sane+stable, so we’re leaving Outland.”
Well, yes - for various reasons and I was very vocal back in the day in regards to how poorly the Blood Elves were treated. Not in the least due to desecration of Kael’thas’ character alongside Lady Vashj and Illidan also being hit by the villain bat and unceremoniously killed off despite the vast potential they would have had.
Ironic that the writers later went back and had the player work with them to various degrees, right down to adding playable Demon Hunters.
That doesn’t make sense. The Blood Elves were driven to the brink of extinction and the Alliance were an active threat to their well-being, including sabotaging the equipment ensuring that the survivors would not succumb to the effects of magic addiction.
So Lor’themar took extreme measures to ensure that those seeking to sabotage the tentative pact with the Horde were dealt with. Was it shady to brainwash and banish them? To a degree - though it’s still better than hunting down civilians in the streets and allowing them to be tortured and fed to sharks.
I despise both the Alliance and the Horde. Both factions have caused more harm than good to the playable races I enjoy, especially the various Elves either by being treated as fodder to kill en masse or having unique elements eroded away and given to human heroes instead despite being entirely unearned.
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