Editing World of Warcraft (section)

===Alliance===
[[File:Elfbutt Gnome.JPG|thumb|right|300px|The main draw.]]
The Alliance are portrayed as the "more-civilized-than-thou" faction in the game. While they have a lot of the same bigotry as the Horde, Horde bigotry leads to threats and murder while in the Alliance its segregation and insults. Despite this the Alliance remains the more united faction, and the general theme is races trying to reclaim what was lost (always at the hands of the races of the Horde, leading to the question of forgiveness or justice as the way to move forward). 

====Humans====
Your bog-standard humans. As far as it's known, humanity worships a vaguely defined entity comprised of collective will called the Holy Light (which may or may not be an actual sentient being). Pre-WoW continuity was basically Catholic, later continuity made their faith extremely vague with suggestions that they had a polytheistic background that became godless. Humans originally came from 7 kingdoms, although by the time of WoW all but two (one of which is comprised of Elves and Gnomes as well) have been destroyed with very few survivors. Humans are descended from robots created by the Titans, which later became fleshy viking Giants who started giving birth to tiny and softer-skinned children that were the ancestors of mankind. Apparently, many humans share a sever case of inward directed victim blaming. Thanks, Chris.  Other species like to complain about humans not doing enough for them, humans like to be a hero wherever possible, and they're kinda like sand in an Anakin Skywalker way.  Given this, you won't be surprised to learn the humans created the first paladins in Azeroth.
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====Dwarves====
They're [[Dwarf|Dwarves]]. They like shooting with guns and hitting stuff with hammers. They've also perfected steam technology, bringing tanks onto the battlefield for the Alliance. Dwarves come in three subraces; Bronzebeard Dwarves, Dark Iron Dwarves, and Wildhammer Dwarves. This mattered a great deal early on in Warcraft, but after a series of events all three have finally united into one race again. Originally a race of robots designed to keep the world being shaped into the designs decided on by the Titans, they gradually turned fleshy until going dormant and waking up not knowing who or what they were while in an underground cavern. The city they turned the cavern into became their holiest site, Ironforge.

They are ruled by three major clans:
* '''Bronzebeards:''' The primary playable and standard Warcraft Dwarves that neatly fit the standard Dwarf archtypes, save for their love of technology (especially ''guns'') and archaeology. As the name suggests, they have a tendency towards brownish-gingerlike beards although all beard colors are found in the commonfolk of the Bronzebeards. They used to own Ironforge and ruled it alone until Cataclysm, when King Magni accidently turned himself into a giant living diamond and in the power vacuum the Dwarf Council was formed with the two other clans, uniting the Dwarf race for the first time in most of recorded history. These guys are the clan that actually has alliances with the rest of the Alliance; the two others are mostly just in it with them. Their current leader is Muradin Bronzebeard, Magni’s brother. 
* '''Wildhammers:''' Aesthetically knock-offs of [[Slayers]] from [[Warhammer Fantasy]] although it can be argued that Wildhammers have even more development than their inspiration, they are barbarian dwarves that fly griffons into battle, wield Stormhammers (a WARCRAFT DORF version of Mjolnir), and they also get cool blue tattoos. They are so Scottish their accent actually is fitting, and their homes resemble Hobbit Holes. Their skin tends to be ruddier and they have a fair amount more red hair than the other Dwarves. They live in a mountain carved like an eagle, and are not fond of staying inside mountains, weirdly. The Dorfs got Shamans when they reconnected with the Wildhammers, who have a more natural affinity for the world around them. Their main emissary is Falstad Wildhammer - they might not actually have leaders per se.
* '''Dark-Irons:''' Once the token EVIL dorfs, they used to scurry inside Blackrock Mountain and were controlled by [[Archomental|Ragnaros the Fire Lord]]. These days many of them are reformed and are part of the Alliance with the rest of the dorfs, and during the Draenor expansion they show that they are pretty cool people (even pranking Yrel). They like magic and even teach new dwarves how to be Warlock and a Mage (or at least used to, until the players learned to do that by themselves). They have [[Salamanders|charcoal-black skin and burning red eyes]], giving them a sort of demonic look. Their leader is Moria Thaurissan, once a Bronzebeard princess who was thought to have been kidnapped by the king of the evil Dark Irons Dagran Thaurissan. Turned out she actually went of her own will and was legit in love with him... Kinda sucked that we killed him, then. Moira is technically regent, ruling until her infant son can take the combined Bronzebeard/Dark Iron throne. When evil they tended to be dirty slavers lead by a refined aristocracy and insane cultists, the ones who have sided with the Council tend more towards aristocrats and tradesmen. 

There are also many varieties of Iron Dwarves, the pre-flesh robot form of Dwarves scattered throughout the world. Some have personalities and cultures, others are mere robot slaves to their programming. 
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====Night Elves====
Purple-skinned [[Elf|elves]]. Their ancestors were [[Troll]]s, who discovered a massive source of magic - the Well of Eternity - and lived near it so long that it turned them into the first Elves. The nobility became hedonistic assholes who suckled the arcane magic, while the peasant classes tapped into the magic of nature and the priesthood that worships the moon goddess Elune discovered Light magic. Their [[Morathi|queen, Azshara, became drunk on power and hubris]] and hatched a plan to tap the Well of Eternity for enough mojo to wipe out the other races. Drawing all that power drew the attention of the Burning Legion, who started sweet talking Azshara into letting them in to do the job for her. Azshara accepted, and she would become infatuated with the Legion leadership, deluding herself that she was betrothed to Sargeras.

The rest of the Night Elves, who were still sane and also seeing that they weren't on demons' "do not kill" list, united with the other races and started a civil war, which would later be known as the War of the Ancients. The leaders of the sane side were: a young elf named Malfurion Stormrage, a student of the demigod Cenarius and the first Druid; Tyrande Whisperwind, the high priestess of Elune, and Malfurion's lover; and Illidan Stormrage, Malfurion's brother and a magic-addicted douchebag mage.  Despite fighting for years against endless hordes of daemons, the Azerothian races realized they would need to invade the old Night Elf capital and destroy the Well of Eternity to beat back the daemons permanently. In this time, Illidan would defect to the nobility's side; originally it was due to his magic addiction/obsession and envy of his brother, then [[retcon|he was trying to bring down the Legion from the inside as a double-agent without telling anyone, then the latest retcon merged the two; he went to join the Legion for real out of envy and addiction but had a last-minute change of heart and worked to bring them down]].  In every version Illidan also wanted to close to the Well of Eternity to bottle some of its waters to keep for himself.  Eventually the Azerothian side reached the well, and a climactic fight between Malfurion and Azshara ended with the spellworks summoning in the demons to implode and cause a chain reaction which was going to destroy the Well.  The Azerothian forces fled for as long and as hard as they could before the Well exploded, ripping the world into four continents and leaving a gaping hole in the planet in the middle.

As for the nobility, during this time they'd been slowly whittled down by the war, but were relatively untouched enough that they evenly divided into three general groups. The first group had realized that Azshara was well and truly fucking everybody with her vanity and hubris, and defected to the other side; after the war, their views on aristocracy and the commons - plus their addiction to arcane magic - would force them to split with the surviving elves again, and they sailed East and would become the ancestors of the High Elves. The second group would be founded by Xavius, Azshara's chief mage who was killed and resurrected by the Legion as a demonic Satyr, and he would seduce Azshara's other minions into Legion service exclusively and corrupt them into other Satyrs. The third group was lead by Azshara, who survived her duel with Malfurion, but refused to abandon her palace as it survived the Well collapsing and started to fall into the new ocean. Azshara got a bit of divine help again, but from an old god who refused to see her potential go to waste, so kept her and her followers alive as the Naga.

After the war, the Azerothian side split into separate peoples again, and the Night Elves opposing the Legion would form their own society in the forests of Kalimdor. Illidan - who survived and managed to get back into his brother's good will but not off the shit list - took three of the vials from the Well of Eternity and dumped them into a lake to try to remake the Well.  While having the Well in the first place is what drew the demons, Illidan said they would need arcane magic again should the demons come back (and while he did kind of have a point, everybody could see that the bigger factor in his decisionmaking was that he was a junkie trying to get his fix, which was even clearer when he killed some of the people who tried to stop him). For being an idiot, a murderer and a traitor, they put Illidan in jail for an Eternal Sentence.  Not letting a good catastrophe go to waste, the Night Elves and the dragons planted a tree over the new well as a means of protection, making them immortal again so long as the tree stood. In the new society, the male Night Elves became druids who would go into hibernation to protect the spiritual side of the world called the Emerald Dream (more accurately, they did this when needed and most recently was hundreds of years ago, not millennia), while female Night Elves became rangers and clerics who stayed behind to guard the world (meaning staying in their forest doing nothing and then attacking humanity for trying to save the world purely because they believed only Night Elves can do that among other nonsensical reasons). Because this state of affairs wasn't friendly to MMO character creation, it was eventually retconned that gender roles weren't so strict or segregated, and only all the male Druids went to hibernate, while everybody else stayed awake to watch over their ass.

The first time they appeared in WarCraft III, they were a more hardcore version of Amazon/Celtic [[Wood Elves]], to the point that Grom Hellscream was delighted in fighting them due to their savagery and determination (and got something of a WhyBoner watching them kill his men). Yes. [[AWESOME|The Night Elves used to be hardcore, savage, moon-worshipping, druidic elves with bitchin leather, cool weapons, sweet powers, and would royally obliterate your ass with nature's wrath if you so much as sneezed at a tree in their home that is Ashenvale Forest]]. 

As of Battle for Azeroth's War of Thorns, the Night Elves' tree house burned down by the superweapons of an undead edgelord and humanity welcomed them into their homes.  Then many elves went to retake their lands and Darkshore along with their Gilnean allies while complaining about Stormwind doing nothing to help them (rather purposely ignoring the fact that they were well busy fighting the Horde on other battlefronts).  They still manage to have a presence in other battlefields, though.

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====Gnomes====
[[Gnome]]s are basically shorter, more agile dwarves, with voices as if helium was their only source of air. They're Alliance's resident Tech-heads, being paired with their more drunken brethren responsible for the faction's overall technological progress, often tending towards weird Science-esque inventions like shrink rays, death rays, mind control helmets, [[what|robot ostrich mounts]], and [[awesome|spider tanks]] [[fail|which you never get to use]], as opposed to more practical steampunkish shit their dwarf relatives pack. Blizzard is notorious for sweeping Gnomes under the rug, leaving them with next to no lore or culture besides standing in the shadow of other Alliances races, metaphorically and literally. 

While they get to appear quite often, its almost always just for a tech-related fetch quest and little else. [[Derp|That might, JUST MIGHT be due to all the tanks, walkers, attack choppers armed with actual machine guns and missile launchers, bombers and a freaking power armour that these guys make in no small quantities, which the Alliance NEVER use against the Horde (or anyone else, for that matter, other than making VERY occasional short cameos in some quests and cinematics), FOR SOME REASON.]] Because magic beats technology - tanks, machine guns and power armor aren't effective against beings who can summon volcanoes (shaman), tsunamis (mage), or meteor showers (mages and warlocks) at will. Well that is until the plot needs technology to beat magic and then a laser or supertank tears through everything in its path or some device basically just materializes whatever's needed just like magic.

Anyway... in yon olde days of classic WoW, gnomes were the power-gamer PvP choice.  They had a racial root breaker, and they were short enough that they could literally hide in the underbrush in Stranglethorn Vale like short, cute Vietcong before hitting you with a PoM-Pyroblast and making half your health disappear in a second.  
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====Draenei====
[[Draenei]] are squid-faced, holier-than-thou hippie space goats who worship angel-equivalent aliens made of pure light called Naaru. Technically called Eredar, two thirds of their race joined the Legion as Manari (corrupt) Eredar and became the leadership of the Legion after Sargeras' "death", the Draenei (exile) Eredar have been fleeing from the Legion and trying to combat the forces of evil in between ever since. Have been slaughtered by just about everyone they've met in their history. The exception was the Alliance who welcomed them at the behest of the Night Elves, making them extremely eager and friendly members, though they had to clear up a case of mistaken identity since many Eredar serve the Burning Legion. Speak in vaguely Russian accents. Technically the most scientifically advanced race who can produce electricity, holograms, instant communication, teleportation, and even what can generously be called computers using their crystal magic technology (all of said technology is actually magic and so doesn't remotely count as scientific advancement), although they've lost so much over the many holocausts they've suffered that little of it remains. You'd think this would give them plots with the Gnomes, but Draenei are the single most forgotten race in Warcraft to the point that a story involving a meeting of all the racial leaders of the Alliance left out the Draenei completely, which Metzen later had a good laugh about and added references to it later. 

Confused?  Okay.  The reality is that the Draenei are a fantasy adaptation of the Protoss aesthetic from Blizzard's other franchise ''Starcraft''.  They'd had Eredar and Broken as far back as ''Beyond the Dark Portal'', but they'd never fleshed out a visual style for their stuff.  All their technology, buildings, weird crystal shit, etc, is pretty much just Protoss in a "I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens" kind of way.  

One should note that [[neckbeards]] get [[Slaanesh|ROCK HARD]] over [[Monstergirl|Draenei]] [[-4_Str|women]], and would give up all of their [[dice]] and their favorite [[40k]] army to fuck one. Often said to possess [[Dickgirl|massive horse cocks]], but these rumours tend to originate from [[/d/]] (in particular the MASSIVE amount of futanari porn that has been produced for them, which was probably inspired by the fact that they have hooves instead of human-like feet).
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====Worgen====
Cockney [[werewolf|werewolves]]. While the image of Michael Caine transforming into a dire wolf sounds awesome, it's more along the lines of Dick Van Dyke's chim-en-ney sweep with some fur glued on. Formerly humans of Gilneas, their kingdom was ravaged by a bunch of werewolves, then conquered and occupied by the Forsaken of the Horde being warmongering assholes, causing them to join up with the Alliance, after the successful reclamation of the capital city of their nation resulted in Sylvanas killing the king's son and shit-bombing the entire kingdom with so much of her New Plague that it has made the place uninhabitable even by Forsaken standards. Taught to connect to Druidism by Night Elves to control their werewolf side, they've reclaimed their monocle+top hat and blunderbuss+hound ways and even enlisted feral Worgen into their faction as well as some remaining human populace of Silverpine and Hillsbrad - apparently being a Big Bad Wolf with little to none shortcoming, strong enough to rip orks to pieces and beat his tauren friend to death with the meaty chunks, and nigh immune to the Plague of Undeath is quite an enticing idea when you live in a country infested with undead who'd like nothing more than to test some of their new and exiting stamms of chlamydios shit on you only to raise you from the dead for their army when you finally die. Currently, full speed ahead on becoming furry Night Elves themselves, at least culturally, embracing druidism and often abandoning the Church of Light altogether in favour of mixed Elune and Goldrinn worship.

Their king, Genn Greymane (named thus back in the days of Warcraft II, when worgen did not yet even existed, ironically), formerly one of the loudest decriers of the Alliance of Lordaeron, has become one of the most stalwart supporters of the Alliance of Stormwind (basically during the course of a short story and some of the books) and, due to the aforementioned events, is not at all fond of the Forsaken and especially the Banshee Queen (to be fair, Sylvanas did kill his son and mock him about it).  Since then Genn strived to ensure Sylvanas' timely arrival on a date with Arthas in that special place in hell/the Maw, ever more vehemently with Varian's death and the Burning of Teldrassil, quickly earning the admiration and ire of the respective fanbases (sorta, even Horde players fantasize about brutally torturing Sylvanas to death for being a total fucking monster).

 [[/d/|'''The''' most popular characters of shorstories involving any sort of befriendment of female elves (even surpassing the previous holder of that title that were the orcs).]]

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