Depends on what you mean with half, but if you mean it in the literal sense of the word, they’re not half elves, they’re slightly elves.
Arathor was mostly humans with a few elves, its also why other then great kyron you hardly find any Hallowfall NPC’s that look like an actual half elf Arathor (belf baseline body)
They also do not consider themselves half elves or even part elves or even part human, they just consider themselves as the people of Arathi. They are basically a window in the future of what will happen to high elves should they never reconsile and stay with humans.
To be fair, I actually think there’s a decent amount of nuance to be found in the setting at times, even if it may very well be unintentional. There’s plenty of room for players themselves to fill in the blanks and/or come to their own conclusions as well.
Various tropes and characters resonate with any given individual very differently. For some, a character like Kael’thas or Arthas is completely irredeemable. For others, they understand exactly why both characters went off of the deep end and that it was all one big tragedy.
Context is important. Not to mention the simple fact that we’re dealing with a fictional setting with its own set of rules and elements that do not actually exist in the real world and so passing judgement purely based on modern day real world ideals goes as poorly as it does when trying to do the same to much older civilisations present on our planet who had a very different set of circumstances to wrestle with on any given day.
Even if we look at something like the Kobyss, which exist largely as fodder to cut down in quests, they’re a threat to be dealt with but still very much have their own established culture. From the perspective of the Arathi and even our morality in the present day they’re technically ‘evil’ but equally they can simply be viewed as being brutal and vicious in the same way as a wild animal. Nature can be very, very lacking in mercy. A crocodile will tear even a baby gazelle apart if given the opportunity. I tend to look upon the more violent races in the setting through that same lens.
They’re to be opposed as a threat when and where required and can even be loathed for their actions and behaviour but the setting is made richer for their presence.
I think they’d have been better served adding Naga as the scaly playable race. Not only are they inherently more interesting but they have deeper ties to the overall lore and have been a common request over the years. Not to mention they played a big part in the Blood Elf story back in the day and it would have been cool to have a group of defectors decide that they’d like to work alongside their descendants rather than continue to follow Queen Azshara to their doom.
The Dracthyr also suffer from being oddly proportioned. I liked the bigger variant of draconic humanoids present in the game and to Blizzard’s credit they did add a slightly bulkier option in the character creator which is at least something…
I’m just not really feeling them. Too many of them are just devoted to joke NPC’s who are portrayed as extremely naive and child-like. Which is a shame because Dragonflight did touch on some darker themes for them such as wrestling with the revelation that they were intended to be nothing more than throwaway experiments and that even the Dragonflights that they were expected to serve looked down upon them.
Now? They’re just sort of ‘there’. I think the last one I saw in-game was actually dancing at the outdoor disco in Undermine, actually.
All while they could be an opening for the players to see and take part in the internal draconic politics, power-games and such. Damn, do we ever see even one non-Scalecommander dracthyr NPC that seriously treat themselves as a dragonkin, not a mortal whatsoever? Someone who genuinely tries to find their own place amidst the dragonsflights as a full member? They can do it, they’ve all the right to, and any flight could use agents like them, but alas, it’d take a different game to explore the situation fully.
What was this meant to portray? Why do they have the exaggerated feminine hourglass meme as their actual bodyshape. Oh my goodness grrrrracious.
“Sir how should we design them?”
“You know that design where the female body is ribless and is suffocating because of its non-existent waistline?”
“The one everyone hates, Sir? Yes.”
“Yeah that one. Make them that one.”
“Sir everyone hates–”
“They’ll LOVE it Jerry!”
