What's a Bit of Eye Color? Golden-Eyed Blood Elves

The truth is that in the Warcraft universe, eye color has real significance, and particularly for elves.

Night Elves have a tradition that an elf born with golden eyes has a great destiny ahead of them. Azshara had gold eyes, as did Illidan. Granted, that could be coincidence, like the fact that a ton of US Presidents have been left-handed (assuming there's not some secret society called "Manus Sinister" that's puppeteering all of us, that is! (satire)) after all, Malfurion and Tyrande didn't have gold eyes, and they've both achieved quite a bit. Also, all male Night Elf characters (save Death Knights and Demon Hunters) have golden eyes, and we can't all be special.

For the inhabitants of Quel'thalas, eye color is actually a pretty clear code. The High Elves have had blue eyes, perhaps linked to their use of arcane magic through the Sunwell. When the Sunwell was destroyed and Kael'thas renamed his people the Blood Elves, that didn't change. It was when Kael'thas allied with Illidan, and the Betrayer taught the Sin'dorei to siphon off demonic fel magic to sate their magic addition that you started to see green-eyed Blood Elves.

There's actually a bit of an interesting conundrum in the lore here - it's not clear why the very few remaining High Elves (which, other than this, is primarily a political designation rather than a physiological one) have not become Wretched - some clearly have, but Vereesa and her Silver Covenant seem fine. Did Dalaran hook them up with a fix?

Now, of course, this whole problem with the Sunwell is actually a long-solved problem. At the end of Burning Crusade, Velen uses the remains of M'uru to spark the reignition of the Sunwell into a font of not just arcane, but also holy magic.

We know that the Lightforged (mostly Draenei but also Turalyon) get golden eyes after getting saturated with holy magic. Indeed, we start to see Illidan's arcane tattoos light up with... the Light when X'era tries to forcibly Lightforge him.

Now, I imagine Lightforging a person is way more intense than the kind of gradual exposure the Blood Elves get from the Sunwell, but I wonder if, after so many years, that's starting to have an effect on the population.

In BFA, Blood Elves will get some new face options that change their eyes to gold, rather than green. I'm curious to see how they deal with that in the game's lore, if at all.

Eye color has been such an oddly important distinguishing feature for the elves of Quel'thalas. With the Ren'dorei, aka Void Elves, we've gotten a kind of void-purple/blue look for some of them. I'm willing to take for granted that they're no longer powered by the Sunwell now that they're using the power of the Void, but there are interesting questions all around with this, like whether High Elves like Vereesa might also get golden eyes, if they're just as connected to the Sunwell as the Blood Elves are.