Rethinking Elves pt 1: Why I'm not a Fan, and yet I keep working on them.

I don't like elves. There, I said it. I'm not a fan of their long ass lives and how it makes world histories really weird when you have to contend with a work where your PC's dad might have met Christ, your PC might have been around for the civil war, and I the GM might have to figure out how much they know compared to the humans; I don't like how they are generally written as supposedly mostly CG, one of the most ill defined and most prone to misunderstanding and stupidity of all the Good alignments in gaming, I don't like how they all tend to be said to be long view goodies but who are somehow also petulant feudalist who tend to have kings and courts and somehow seem just as short sighted as the humans, and in hate how all of them tend to be some form of idealized white beauty in art while being called, "otherworldly beautiful". 

It's all bad, and it's all so painfully redundant.

And yet, I can't get away from the fuckers. Players want to run them, they are usually a core species option in almost every high fantasy game out there, and people love to put on those dumb pointed ears and play Link, Zelda, Legolas, and the one from Mirkwood alongside their own OCs, and to a certain extent I can't blame them. Elves are staple to fantasy, and sometimes we gotta deal with that. And part of me finds parts of them interesting too. I think that near immortal life span thing is fascinating, mostly CG as a jump point could be cool, and I think otherworldly beauty mixed with an otherworldly long view of the world and our place in it is cool, so long as it doesn't just look like the courts of France in face or function. 

So, for years now, I've had this little problem cooking in the back of my head, turning it over and trying to figure out an answer that looks like elves and feels like Elves, but at the same time isn't, that takes what should be these really alien people and makes them alien again and fascinating all over. Makes me want to understand how their culture works, get excited to do some good old deep dive RP as them again, and get my players to want to too.

So, I guess this is the start, where I lay out my problems, and why, and what I like, and then slowly over the next few installments in this, start to work out what I do to make mine distinct. So, hold on, I'm about to get into the weeds, and God I hope y'all dig this.

Problems: Listed in No Particular Order

1.) Too White: I think this goes without saying, and newer authors have gotten better at this, but it needs repeating, and I feel the need to restate it here first, at the top, before it gets lost in the shuffle. Most elves are presented as like, white beauty at it's otherworldly peak. They are described like this in their write-ups as immortal, otherworldly beauties and then their art is fair skinned and blonde, their cultures look like European monarchies, and they court and live in monogamous hetero relationships. It presents with its subtext an idea that, the apex of beauty in their worlds, that others hey covet, looks suspiciously like something a eugenics treatise might espouse from the turn of the 20th century, with pointed ears. That's Bad. And that's something that needs to change. Faces with fuller lips, various skin tones, different life ways, queerer families, we need to see more of all of it. Now, I don't know if I can hit all of these myself, I don't think I should be the one doing all of these, but it needs to happen. You can't have this global species that has existed in all these biomes for potentially 1,000's of years and they all look like Legolas. That needed to be said, will address as I can, when I feel I can.

2.) It's all just Lord of The Rings: This one is easy, but it needs to be said, most elves in TTRPGs are just LotR elves, they are Legolas and Elrond, and all those others. To a large part, this is obvious and a no brainer. Gary Gygax and his game D&D are heavily influenced by Tolkien's work, and all of D&D's descendants are therefore often in large part influenced by that work, from Pathfinder to Warhammer and countless others...

 and it's boring. 

I'm sorry, part of this is my own shade, I'm not a big fan of LotR, never have been, for a variety of reasons, but where it matters here is that it's redundant, and a bad shadow to put yourself in. LotR is one of the most well known properties in the world, and copying them puts your work directly in it's shadow at all times. You don't want that, you'll always be compared to that work, fighting to get out of its shadow, rather than judged on its own merits. I don't want my work caught in other's shadow by constant comparison, and we shouldn't want our work caught in that either.

3.) Feudal Lords: For all this CG, individual, long view people, I'm always annoyed by how the most inventive writers get with elves politically is nobles, courts, Kings and Queens. God, I'm so sick of it, high fantasy has had a long history of being just nobilities, theocracies, and sometimes the errant democracies. But a lot of them are the same, the courts are the same, the kings are the same, the courts are the stately quadril. And that's tiring. Our world is FULL of diverse, interesting, strange, and unique ways to rule and govern the societies they exist in, and you're telling me all we can think of is to do this same court we've seen a million times, but with a court of people who can have grandparents who were alive before the Roman Republic and watched Caesar rise, fall, and talk or that time they met Ghengis Khan centuries later?! Come on, lets get crazy with it.

4.) Longview, but doing nothing with it: Longview is such an interesting idea, but one a lot of settings don't really do anything with. Like, elves are supposed to be this super long lived species that also thinks about the long term ramifications of not only their actions, but those of the other intelligent species around them. This is a cool idea in theory, but a lot of the time, this just appears as Elves don't like what you are doing. It's all reactionary in the narrative, and it doesn't really show how they do this and what that does to the world. I mean, elves are a people who live long enough that they could remember when global warming started and be alive when climate change really kicks off! And that's something cool to explore, and I wish more settings did something with that.

5.) Age & Time: Elves live a long fucking time, and I don't think a lot of writers really try to grasp what that means. In Pathfinder, the lowest random starting age for an elf is 114 and their max age starts at 350 and can go as high as 750! That means that if one of these aged seniors passed away this year in 2023, they would have been born in 1273 AD! That is a mind boggling amount of time to live through as an individual, and once you throw in that this isn't some massive age anomaly, but a slight improvement on the rest of their people's prodigious life spans, then it starts to do weird things to your histories. Like, even with average maximum life expectancies, an elf who lives to the average life max of 552 in 2023 would still have been born in 1471, TWENTY ONE YEARS before Columbus stable stumbles into America! He would have been alive to see Europe meet the indigenous people of the Americas, when the Atlantic slave trade started, the 7 years war, the American Revolution, The French Revolution, Napoleon, The American Civil War, WWI, WW2, the atom bomb, he would have been 129 when William Gilbert wrote De Magnete and we started to figure out electricity, 409 when RECORDED AUDIO happened, and 127 when people started to get interested in the William Shakespeare guy. 

That's insane,

And it gets even more insane once you factor in his parents and grandparents. Assuming they all live to the same average age of 552, you have a person who was probably alive and able to talk to someone who was born in 367 AD. That grandad was alive during the Battle of Solinicum, and when Korea made first contact with Japan. And I don't mean the know about it because they learned it in a class or read about it in a book they were there and heard people talking about it, the have a first hand experience that no human can replicate or fathom. Hell, we talk about Queen as classic rock, but to our first guy he spent his teens rocking out to the vihuela, the precursor to the guitar, and recorded music might just be after his time. Shit, he predates CAPITALISM AS WE UNDERSTAND IT by 305 years when Wealth of Nations dropped!

Think about how that changes up the mystery of the past when you have a whole population of potential eyewitnesses, and a how different a history written 2 centuries after an event happened is when an elf writes it vs a human. 

There is so much to work with there, and it's usually kind of ignored. Don't like that, needs to change.

Things I Do Like: So, despite all my complaints above, and probably more, there are things I do like, both as a writer and student of anthropology, that I think make them compelling enough to attempt to do something with them.

1.) Their Incredible Age: So, I just laid out why this is annoying, but it's also super compelling to me as a writer and anthropologist. Like, 2 generations ago, your grandparents, is a group who's born in like, the 1700's and their communities therefore have people who have direct, first hand experience of like the American Revolution or the indigenous people of North America pre the reservation period. That's so fascinating as a concept and fundamentally changes a world's relationship to history and time in a way that's difficult but fascinating to explore. Potentially giant pain, but also super cool.

2.) CG: So, I know the alignment tree is problematic and I agree, it's oft ill defined categories that are often more of a lens with which to see how the author views the world and their own bugbears and hangups than anything useful to the player or GM, and gets even worse when they get either vague in their descriptions in order to skirt controversy, or are written uncritically and all that person's foibles leak out into the game in a way that is toxic and unnoticed by the author. And I agree that this is an even bigger problem once you start making big sweeping statements with it, like that whole species are just inherently evil and then also draw on cultures that exist in our own world. 

All of that is bad, and we should avoid it, but in the case of G species I think it's still interesting. Most settings present humans as generally Neutral, but the idea that these other species, who have similar population numbers to their human counterparts is pretty interesting. This line of inquiry lead to some of my favorite cultural rehab writing I've ever done with the dwarves, and I think it's interesting as line of inquiry for Elves. And when you add that to the CG, a theoretically more individual, more inconsistent alignment, it creates an interesting path to explore how a people like that govern their communities, even when they might be completely ungovernable. And I think that's cool.

3.) Queer Fair Folk: This is one I've seen more recently in small press, but I like the alienness of the Fair Folk from folktales of old starting to come back to the elves, and getting them closer to the fey again, and I've enjoyed seeing some small press and larger start presenting elves as queerer when it comes to relationships, gender, and sexuality and I think that's a compelling line to work with. A species of long lived, low reproduction people who can remember the world before the industrial revolution who live with other sentient creatures who by contrast only live for a fraction of the time who the elves can have long passionate relationships with is super compelling, and their relationships to relationships has to be something truly unique and interesting.

4.) Nature boys: Of the big 3, humans, dwarves, and elves, the elves are the only option that has a real focus on wilderness and living in it consistently. Dwarves and Man urbanize spaces to make great states, but the great states of the high elves are usually presented as being wholly or in large part connected to nature, and this is even stronger in the TTRPG space. I think that's an interesting distinction, and something worth exploring further as a key component.

Alright, I think I've rattled on enough, keep an eye out, in the next entry I start to walk out some of this for building, starting with families and education and how they intertwine.