Recently, I started unlocking the Allied races, Void Elves and Nightborne stories were particularly interesting. Digging deeper into this topic, I’ve seen a lot of people criticizing Tyrande for her poor diplomatic skills. People are upset that a race who love magic and a lavish lifestyle has chosen their mirror image, the blood elves, instead of Kaldorei who are diffrent in almost everything, apart from their appearance. Even if Tyrande had used nicer words, I couldn’t see NB finding common ground with a race that has recently begun to tolerate any mages in its society.
On the other hand, Blood elves turned on their brothers simply because they wanted to better defend Quel’thalas. All Void research started to keeping their homeland safe. I understand concerns about Void, but ignoring it won’t make it disapear and stop pose a threat to BE. (As we see with Xal’atath.)
Lor’themar willingly allowed a group of powerful mages and a war hero with knowledge of one of the greatest threats to sunwell leave Quel’thalas, even leading to their recruitment by the Alliance. However, no one criticizes him for this when, in my opinion, he has made more diplomatic mistakes.
That is a complete oversimplification of the entire situation and why the Nightborne joining the Horde makes little sense, but w/e.
I mean, the majority of Blood Elven society is built around the Light, and then you see a bunch of radicals trying to find and use Void magic (the polar opposite and natural enemies of the Light) from the teachings of the biggest traitor to their society (Dath’remar). Exile seems to be a pretty valid thing to do given what was going on.
As for Alleria, she was the embodiment of the Void at that point. Although unintentional she did cause an attack on the Sunwell which would’ve had dire consequences for the Blood Elves. Why wouldn’t you punish something like that?
I’d also imagine there were political motives for kicking Alleria out. You don’t need someone coming in and causing internal issues when the factions are gearing up for war with each other.
Ofc’ there is the meta reason. Allied races were coming and Blizzard wanted to give High Elves to the Alliance without actually giving them High Elves due to a number of reasons. Which is why Void Elves came out of the blue and feel like a**-pull (I mean, they could’ve tied it into Tempest Keep at least but w/e), it was their compromise.
Isn’t that why they should learn as much as they can about Shadow and use that knowledge in case of a void attack? Banishing anyone who tries to understand this power is a terrible decision.
Exactly “unintentional” maybe she was the one who caused the problem but she was the only one who seemed to know how to close the gap. What would happen if, instead of Alleria, portal was opened by a random servant of the void? Would Rommarth and other mages know how to close it? It’s hard to fight something you know almost nothing about.
Neither Alleria nor Void Elves ever planned to corrupt Sunwell, they simply wanted to be better prepared for a possible threats.
If the void would not feed upon light it would be valid. But as void feeds on light, keeping them near is as intelligent as keeping the Zerg from StarCraft in closed cells for research. It whas shown often enough that they broke out and the consequences where devastating.
And if you do something often enough even if it is only with a small chance it will happen.
So no matter how good their intentions where, alone the fact that it could happen would mean that it would not be worth it.
Also they did not decided to study the void for defending the Sunwell against attacks from it, no they searched for a power similar to the Fel what they can wield for bringing devastation against their enemies.
And so as Lor’themar had before exile Highelves as they decided not wanting to integrate and become Blood Elves he now decided again to exile a group of researchers that threaten the integrity and peace of Quel’thalas.
Because despite needing power to defend and survive, now with the sunwell back and so the addiction problem being solved they now mainly need stability.
Of course the VEs shouldn’t make their research literally next to the well. Telogrus rift or even the Ghostlands are far enough to not threaten sunwell or the city. I think Lor’themar giving Umbric a small amount of land on the borders of the elven kingdom to investigate void threats would be a better move. At least he would have had a lot of control over what VEs were doing, letting them go only brought him big consequences.
The same can be said about Fel and Demon hunters. There is always a risk, but in their case it paid off. Thanks to them we defeated the Burning Legion. DH and Illidan have been collecting information and knowledge about Demons and the Legion for years, so this time we are able finally defeated the burning crusade
the whole situation to put the NB to horde made no sense because tehy were supported by both factiins, suramar was liberated by both.
They let tyrande act like an child/idiot, completly out of charakter, to leth them join the horde.
And mages are since cataclams again part of the N11 society- yes it not shown but its canon with wolfsheart.
and theyn you have the situation in the Nb alleid race quest where lor`theram in whothreaded alreira and insulut her…as as ambassador of stoomwind who speak on behalf on anduin, and even kciked her out after she helpd defending the sunwell.
all in front of the Nb who shoud normaly thing “are we sure we want join thos who insult one on a diplomatic mission and therated the ambassador, which inst better as the behavior of tyrande”
well, he sw them as threat to quel thalalss ebcause…voic is evil…which is a bit aburs because the b11 takes all means to ensure theri survial, liek in tbc Fel.
They use fel without hesitation but vois is too bad?
Study the Void =/= use void magic. There certainly should be labs with void specimen somewhere that research means of combating and resisting them. I mean, the Titans did a lot of that, a shame to let it go to waste.
But letting void casters run free, to - as far as anyone knew inevitably - run mad from the whispers of the void sooner or later? Yeah, no, that’s a hecking stupid idea. And no, it doesn’t get any less stupid, when it is the Alliance doing it, because Alleria plops up and claims to have a surefire way to get it under control that she got from some strange void ethereal.
But let’s face it, very, very, very, very little about the introductions of the allied races made sense. Either the whole race idea was a stupid and unlubed buttpull from the start, as it was for example with void elves and trans-dimensional Mag’har, they were basically already part of the faction they joined before, like the DI’s, or it made no hecking sense whatsoever, why they would choose to jump in a faction conflict at all, when they really had no animus against either side, and were under no threat.
We all know that they weren’t included because they made sense in lore, but because they sold well to players. And no matter how bad the lore excuses the devs came up with on the spot were, those were the ones that made it into the game. There is a limit how far you can analyse the details without it just becoming stupid.
You can say that but if we don’t have them in the game/lore they don’t exist whether we like it or not which makes VE the only ones who study this topic in depth. It is a pity that we hardly use the titans knowledge or technology to learn more abou Void. Let’s hope that Tyr’s return will change that. Maybe this technology too complicated for a mortal’s mind, but that’s just my weak head canon
Yes, it’s still dangerous just like letting Death knights walk free under the constant influence of the lich king or Demon Hunetrs who hold the soul of a demon inside of them. Or even warlocks who make a deals with all types of dangerous powers.
Without risk, there are no effects/they come too late. As we see in the lore, the Void elves are the closest race to completely resisting the whispers of the old gods. Every other group or cult fell into the tentacles of corruption rather quickly, but VE still maintains sanity. Of course, it still may be a delayed bomb, but time how long they resist the whispers shows that their methods work better than anything before.
…indeed. Which is why warlocks were originally an underground thing like rogues, and Death Knights and and Demon Hunters didn’t so much join the factions as have their own organizations that we could either fight with or against, and were treated as the lesser evil. Undermining that constantly to the point where you wouldn’t know it was a thing is one of the more outrageous worldbuilding missteps that Blizzard has shoved into our faces, to the point where demonic Eredar can join in a 5 minute questline. As far as I’m concerned, you are defending nonsense by pointing at different nonsense.
We tolerate Death Knights and Illidans because they go heavy on the rule of cool, not because their implementation was particularly well thought out. Creating a giant portal between Azeroth and the Legion home base after their invasion was just thwarted is awfully cool. But catastrophically stupid, if you don’t have writers making things work out somehow for you.
…not really, no. We still hear that they need iron will to resist the constant barrage of whispers that could overtake them any time, and void elves are a totally new phenomenon. How the everloving heck would you go judging the effectiveness of their methods, when there just wasn’t any time to gather data? They got themselves into an obvious trap, were snatched up by void servants and barely survived thanks to deus ex Alleria. Then they got what? A 6 months crash course, if I’m generous with the timeline? And that should make people trust them, because… taking very certain catastrophic risks for very uncertain rewards is a good thing? I just call that idiocy.
That’s the thing… As players we know that it can’t be that. Because they are playable. It doesn’t matter that it’s absolute cow poop that a group of researchers with more balls than brains randomly stumbled upon Alleria and her very suspicious super technique to deal with the void that only Elves seem willing or able to use, They can’t be proven wrong, because the player race can’t be removed. If they weren’t playable everyone and their grandmother would be speculating about when or how they would stab us in the back. But since they are, it’s obviously a good move to recruit them, and Lorte is an idiot for not seeing it!.. Ugh.
And thus the Void was totally defanged, because Alliance players wanted High Elves, and the devs wanted to put a random spin on it, before acceeding. Jay.
The Burning Crusade is to blame. By that I mean the very expansion that brought us Blood Elves as a playable race in the first place. They’ve been badly mishandled outside of Warcraft 3 to the point where anyone who is actually a fan of their initial portrayal has been screwed over immensely over the years.
Kael’thas was unceremoniously hit with the villain bat and turned into a raid and then dungeon boss. The race as a whole was treated as eye candy to try and boost player numbers in a faction that most people wouldn’t touch if not for the presence of a conventionally attractive playable race.
Lady Vashj was also unceremoniously hit with the villain bat despite the potential in-roads to a deeper relationship between the Blood Elves and the Naga tied to a shared heritage.
I fell in love with the Blood Elves to the point where I only tried out World of Warcraft in the first place because of their presence. The established narrative of a desperate group of survivors banding together to do whatever was necessary in order to survive and manage an addition to magic had so much fascinating potential. Especially with a ruthless edge and drive for revenge against those who wronged them.
It didn’t last. The Sunwell was restored, the Blood Knights stopped bending the Light to their will, Fel energy was shunned and the race became something completely different altogether.
Of course, with how deeply tied to many aspects of the story the Blood Elves were that meant that they could realistically stand front and centre against the likes of the Burning Legion and the Scourge. Instead, they always ended up playing the role of side-kicks.
I could go on and on but in general the common thread over the years is that the Blood Elves were never allowed to have a distinct, consistent identity. They were always artificially forced to be part of a faction that they didn’t really fit into even as they were sanitised to be more like the faction they weren’t allowed to align with.
Void Elves were conjured forth out of nowhere because the faction divide itself ended up being less and less valued but for whatever reason the development team decided not to take the obvious route by either making High Elves a distinct playable option or just biting the bullet and allowing Blood Elves to choose to defect.
Even the Blood Elf exclusive storylines such as the Purge of Dalaran never had a proper, satisfying resolution since the characters with blood on their hands on either side of the conflict never actually paid for their sins.
At the beginning of wow in Vanilla and TBC, of course these classes and their powers were considered a threat, but over time we learned that their use depends on who controls this power. After some time we learned to see that using them appropriately will allow us to win. Maybe the people of Azeroth did not accept these powers, but they learned to tolerate them In Bel’ameth, the most important place for night elves, there is a place even for DK and DH so world is constantly changed.
Many demonic eredar had no choice when Kil’jaeden and Archimonde sold their race to Sargeras. You serve or you die. Almost all the man’ari on Argus are still trying to kill us, so it wasn’t a change of heart for the entire race. only a small percentage wanted forgiveness and, as we hear, they risked their lives to meet Velen, so most of them are treated as traitors by the rest of their race.
I agree that opening the portal directly toArgus is stupid. I’m suprised they didn’t shoot us all out of orbit.
Yes, they’re a new phenomenon but they work better than everything before, of course they won’t magically become completly resistant in one day but they’re the only larger group that has not succumbed to dark manipulation. VE may have to use an iron will to do it, but the fact that in big group their will is enough proves that their methods work, every other cult practicing Void is almost immediately subjected to whispers.
Their existence shows that with the right approach there is a chance to use Shadow much safer.
I don’t know why a race that was specifically created as a counter to Void by Blizzard is already written off by many and called old gods spies.
Wait, Lor’themar really allowed not one, but two large groups of elves to leave the forces of Quel’thalas and even join the enemy? I forgot about that. Varian trying hard to recruit BE for years, but Lor’themar hadn’t even tried it with VE and the Silver covenant. He’s really bad at uniting the nation.
Which doesn’t really fit the corruption and madness lore that comes with these magics. If using these magics makes you go bad, it’s never just a user using a power, it’s always also the user being used by the power. Fel corrupting mind and body was a core mechanic, as are the maddening voices of the void for its users. So there were very, very good reasons for prohibiting these practices, and it wasn’t just that the people who tried it before were idiots, while we now had the great new idea of trying the same but with non-idiots.
Who is we? The authors told us so, but they certainly never gave an argument to explain why that would suddenly work, That’s why they only convinced me that they were wrecking their world-building here, and not that using Warlocks, Void Elves and friends openly was reasonable societal progress.
And then they were pumped full of demon magic, making them go all demonic, and thus pretty much beyond saving. That’s how it worked, until 5 minutes ago.
I’m saying that you have no basis whatsoever to claim that. I’m quite sure there were void users who resisted madness for more than a few months before,
…the Void Elves are all permanently subjected to whispers. Read their quests, talk to the npcs, they hear the whispers, they just aren’t swayed by them, because some space mummy gave them a cheat code that the devs didn’t bother to explain to us, and to our knowledge, the Velves didn’t explain to anyone. So I really fail to see how that would be a basis for trust in their abilites. They were accepted by the Alliance without having had any time to really prove their resistance.
Which they have because… oh, yes, because playable races can’t just go mad. Which means their ridiculous technique actually works, with minimal training, which means the void was defanged to give us more goth elves. But I’m repeating myself…
Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, the authors’ work is canon. I don’t want to discuss what the writers did wrong (we have to swallow it even if it’s terrible), but about the lore itself. I don’t like this argument - the writers did something I don’t like, so I will talk about them. We can (and should) talk about the problems of wow writing. However, in this topic I would like to focus on the world itself, not on its creators and blizz real life problems.
Of course there are, but VE seems to be the first bigger group that together managed to resist the whispers, not single individualists.
Again, a non-lore explanation. We know that Dar’khan studied the Void for a long time, and Umbric himself, who had his notes, seemed to have been in exile for quite a long time, must have been exploring the Void’s knowledge even before that. Alleria, fighting the Legion for thousands of years, must have encountered the Void from time to time, and probably after the merger with the dark Na’ru she also started looking for even more information about it. We cannot say that VE’s knowledge and his self-control appeared out of nowhere.
Tyrande’s attitude towards Thalysra was everything but out of character and I say that having Tyrande as my favorite character. The fact Thalysra used this discussion to go with the Horde and support its genocidal rampage is…another matter.
Sure, but what is your point then? “Considering Blizzard bend their lore to the point where Void isn’t really a risk now, Lorte was wrong to treat it as a risk, when the Lore wasn’t at that point”? Now that seems like a pointless argument to me. Ex falso quodlibet and all that, once you have true contradictions you can logically deduce anything from them.
…so what? I really don’t see how that changes anything. “One person can resist the void for half a year” and “these 50 persons could resist the void for half a year” pretty much tell us the same thing about the void. It can be resisted for a time. We knew that. That was never the interesting part. The question is always “For how long?”. The time we had was in no way helpful to actually predict stability in the future, and that’s what accepting them would have to be about.
…indeed, because the Lore follows the devs’ intentions, not the other way around. Since my point with this comment is how little sense all this makes, and how it undermines world-building that came before, it would be strange, if I argued that in lore.
For us players all of this nonsense came out of nowhere, and the devs didn’t give us the slightest bit of a lore explanation to help us suspend our disbelief. So… the disbelief that the depicted scenario brings up remains in full force. Azeroth isn’t a real place, it is created to be interesting to us. Giving us cosmos-encompassing changes without explanation certainly fails to do that. And yes, “The void can be resisted by following this easy 3-month-training program! Like and subscribe!” sounds pretty cosmos-changing to me. Or would, if I actually believed the devs would think the implications through…
She risked her life in warcraft 3 for kael’thas people. In Cata, she allowed the Highborne to return to Kaldorei society. But in Suramar she did everything to appear in a bad light. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Maiev suppose to be one who was send to help Nightborne instead of Tyrande but they accidentally switched the models
Sin’dorei were fighting for their lives after having being slaughtered by the scourge (the legion), them using arcane didn’t make them a threat to anyone specifically, only chaotic from a NE pov.
In Cata, Tyrande grow up but also Highborne who proved themselves worthy of her trust.
When she discovered the Nightborne, they just had signed up a new pact with the Legion after having abandoned the Kaldorei resistance to its fate.
Acting in diplomatic mission loke a idiot and compare her to elisande while then thalssra judge the WHOLE Alliance just by trynde, not the player who help or asking the kirin tor dor a second opinion while during the event un SM she let lor’themars behaviour towards alleria, who act the whole time diplomatic slide which made thalssra superficial in her decisions…
And as mentioned above, Tyrande was the first who wanted to help the b11 in wc3, AGAINST maievs advise, she even stayed back and sacrifice herself.
She even allowed back the highborn pre cata in wolfsheart as a gesture of if god will.
Then remember her behaviour in val’shara, that doesn’t fit all along, it was purely ooc just to give horde another god looking race.
Loreweise it was Bs
She still saw how many of the Nightborne rebelled against this decision and fought alongside them. Despite this, Tyrande probably sees the society of Suramar as the one that allowed the destruction of the world, but she didn’t allow herself to be completely carried by her anger. Comparing Thalysra to Elisande is stupid and I won’t defend it, but you don’t feel any anger from Tyrande, only worry and fear of repeating mistakes, which anyway has consequences in real politics and should not be visible.
On the other hand, Lor’themar immediately dismissive Alleria, who has just returned from the thousand year war, and openly disrespects Anduin. I would understand if he talk about Varian due to bad blood between them during his reign, but Anduin, like Lor’themar, is close to the Light and is a student of Velen, person who saved Sunwell.
I don’t have a link, but I remember that in an old interview where they talked about Varian-Tyrande Quest in Mop, one of the writers said that Tyrande was always impatient and hot-headed, that’s why she is presented this way. Her terrible portrayal in Val’sharah and Suramar makes me think that some writers just don’t like her, but at that time Afriasiabi and his gang still work in Blizzard so I hope in future they stop potray her in bad light.