I spend a lot of time on character creation screens when it comes to MMO’s, making my characters pretty or cute. Yes, I’m that kind of girl. So of course, when I started World of Warcraft, the first thing I made was a blood elf. Then I started creating Alliance characters, and that’s when I discovered that no matter what combination of faces and hair I tried, I couldn’t get anything close to my idea of “pretty” out of them. The face, hair, skin color, and whatever other physical extras weren’t the problem. The problem was the body, which players have no control over.
I gave my night elf female a cute and perky ponytail and an innocent face, but those things didn’t quite jive with the muscular body she was stuck with. My human female, which had a cute, pouty face and what I had hoped would be beautiful, voluminous hair didn’t quite end up as I had envisioned after seeing her move like a cow. Taurens look quite graceful by comparison. You know why? Because they are cows. A cow moving like a cow looks fine; a human moving like a cow, not so much.
Which brings me to why I think Horde has the prettier races. They are already “ugly” to begin with: hooves, giant troll feet, bones sticking out everwhere, unshapely…err…shapes, etc. If they move “ugly”, too, it doesn’t make them seem any more ugly. It all blends together into an illusion of grace and beauty.
This isn’t just the biased opinion of someone who is Horde most days of the week and Alliance some days every few weeks. Using this same reasoning of monstrous movement with monstrous looks to create beauty and elegance, I believe draenei are the second prettiest race in WoW. Or this could just be of movement in the game getting better, considering they are one of the “new” races. After all, blood elves and high elves don’t move like cows, yet they supposedly look mostly like humans.
