So I finally got flying on the Broken Isles and of course the first thing to do was fully explore Suramar City, and if you hadn’t noticed, those elves like to eat.
So I thought I’d look around to see exactly what kind of cuisine I could find, both from vendors and just from food laying around, and categorize or make sense of their ingredients. Today I’ll be focusing on the various fruits you can find.
Around the city you can find whole fruit and sliced fruits of various shapes and colors.
I’ve narrowed down that there are five different fruit models, all shown in the above screenshot. Based on vendors, I could only find two names for fruit- arcfruit and nightpear.
However, we do directly reference one model during the vineyard world quest, and that is shadefruit, the blue and purple spiral fruit.
Shadefruit can be found whole or with slices out of it- the inside is presumably pink.
Next, by looking at the vineyard trees…
and vendors near the vineyard who sell fresh arcfruit, and this guy’s reference to the clickable bowls of fruit laying around…
We can identify the greenish-blue pear looking type as arcfruit.
Arcfruit as far as I’ve found is only ever found whole.
Now, three models are left unnamed, and nightpear probably matches up to one of them.
Even though none of them look quite like earth pears, two of them are internally more akin to citrus fruits than pears.
The round red fruit, when sliced and opened, look like this…
This is the only model to have two colors - interestingly, the different colors are only visible when the fruit is sliced open. Also, while the yellow version has the spots (water droplets?) on the outside and in some cases still appears round and nearly whole, the blue version looks to be sliced thinner and the outside colors correspond more with the bottom of the fruit.
The red and lavender-leafed fruit, when sliced, appears to have the same structure as a lemon/lime/orange except the inside is mostly blue, with some green and purple thrown in for good measure.
I would assume then that these two, the red spotted and the blue citrus fruit are not pears at all (unless the nightborne have a very different definition) and by process of elimination, the last remaining model, the orange and purple fruit, would be the nightpear.
Of course, blizz doesn’t necessarily have to put a in model of any named fruit, so this model could be something else entirely, but I think it’s a safe bet.
Under some conditions, this model even appears to be glowing - perhaps that is another indication of the name, as the pear might light up the night, but it could just be the texture.
And that’s all of the fruit models of Suramar, explained. In a later post I’ll talk about other potential fruits that don’t have models or are ingredients in the more elaborate dishes, so stay tuned.
Night elf
Artist: Glenn Rane
The Art of World of Warcraft, p. 25 (2004), this illustration also appeared as back cover of: World of Warcraft the Roleplaying game: Alliance player's guide (2006)
Lord Darius Crowley ! I'm completing my artwork collection of the Gilnean arc story :)
"Lord Darius Crowley was once a Gilnean nobleman. A pro-Alliance figure, he dissented with King Genn Greymane's decision to separate his people with the Greymane Wall. Crowley led the Northgate Rebellion that caused a civil war in Gilneas, during which he was imprisoned. When Gilneas was attacked by worgen, he was freed and became a worgen himself. Both Crowley and Greymane reconciled and joined forces against the threats Gilneas faced. He now leads the Gilneas Liberation Front which fights against the Forsaken along with the Bloodfang Pack and the 7th Legion. "
it just feels like half-assed world building that didn't come as a result of people thinking about what their culture would be like. of course a THESE ARE MY OPINIONS AND INTERPRETATION OF THE LORE BASED ON MY EXPERIENCES disclaimer before we start.
they're a matriarchy (nothing wrong with this. this is cool! i liked when the night elves were a matriarchy though they've been stripped of that now)
the centaur have a quote saying something along the lines of "may you be blessed with daughters" (reiterating the matriarchy)
all the living centaur khans are women, except for the evil one, who is a man. (iirc there's one dead male khan we see but there's also like eight dead female ones). this isn't a point about wahh misogyny, its more of just... pattern recognition. they didn't follow the matriarchal standards of the culture, which one would expect in a matriarchy, and not only that but the one male khan is the villain in the questing area, and it feels very out of place. why not just make a female khan and stick with the matriarchy? god forbid women do anything?
there's... gay male centaur who can get married? i mean i guess but this doesn't really feel like they're making any daughters for the tribes, which is apparently such a big deal in their culture that they are hoping strangers of a different race have daughters themselves. is it okay because they're men and cannot bear children? that's what i'm feeling out of this, but that may just be me. i know blizzard is on a gay kick so im willing to just accept it and move on.
there's a quest in which you are introduced to an orphan, and they make it pretty clear that this is a child, and they're referred to as non-binary with they/them pronouns. when you meet them, they have the second body type, aka a female. this is CONCERNING to me, because the cultural implications of a female in a matriarchy being referred to as "something other than a woman" we'll say, is that this child has been castrated and deemed lesser by society, a la many of gay men that had suffered in real life patriarchies. they weren't allowed to be seen as men because they were homosexual, and as someone who is both a transsexual and a homosexual, seeing this popped so many red flags in my head.
"but maybe they are just nonbinary!" i hear you saying. true, maybe they are. but the fact that it's being introduced in a tribal matriarchal society and that often when someone of the 'reigning' sex isn't seen as adequately filling their gender roles in such a scenario, they get castrated, it makes me concerned.
of course, i'm well aware that this probably wasn't blizzard's intent on this, but it just screams of 'we didn't actually give any thought to the culture as we made it' and that in and of itself is disappointing.
Agreed to the points above, but I also think that Blizz has shown us they like to throw the term “matriarchy” around with barely any thought as to what it means. It’s not necessarily a centaur specific problem, but also can be seen in night elves to some degree (why do night elf kids take the father’s name?)
I think the centaur would have been better off as an gender-egalitarian society but with visible female leaders. Alas they’ve created these lore plot holes and probably don’t even realize it