- Joined
- Jun 15, 2017
<general fantasy thread, not just elves>
Thread inspired by me getting offended on behalf of Small Miriam, in the tranny thread:
I'm Russian (well Soviet), we didn't follow quite the same cultural trajectory w.r.t. "global" (Western) pop culture. Fantasy in Russia started out as a very girly genre. Many early larpers (originating from the student backpacking movement) were women. The USSR had free higher education so vastly more women than men had medieval history degrees, and they made use of them and ran games based on the Crusades and the Templars and the Cathars and wars in medieval Italy. We immediately got female celebrity writers (pseudonymous but with female pseudonyms, like "Medeline Simmons"). Two women wrote a LotR fanfiction, got it published and built a Final Fantasy House-style cult around it. One woman wrote a Heroes of Might and Magic fanfiction and got it published; she prefaced it by a rant on why HOMM2 was better than HOMM3. Harry Potter is commonly thought to be for girls (people tell me it's mostly a boys' book in the West among normies). Apparently (I keep as far as possible from the "fandom" and from streaming both) a streaming service is making a live-action fantasy series, Russia's first fantasy series, based on a woman's yaoi cocktease books from the 00s.
What I'm saying is there's nothing about "mainstream" fantasy (excluding horse girl books or feminist reimaginings or reincarnated as a villainness isekai) that makes it more appealing to men, as if women must be either invading bullies who laugh at nerds and wreck their treehouse, or woke degenerates who piss on the ruins standing up. It's sad that beautiful ladies in fantasy are considered an embarrassing cliche rather than a time-honored tradition.
But back to Miriam's post:
This is not a "huge fucking cliché", this is just how life for D&D elves is. They're the uncontacted tribes of the Amazon, ancient survivors of a magical catastrophe, and they've learned to live self-sufficiently, hide, and shoot intruders on sight. Rangers are the courageous patrolmen and -women who shoot intruders on sight. D&D elves, once Gygax separated race from class and saw it was good, in their mindset were a lot like Eldar.
Goblins (not to be confused with hobgoblins) are vermin, locusts. They're stupid and primitive, they spawn, raid civilized settlements, either lose or destroy everything and run out of resources, and die off to starvation and infighting, and the cycle starts again. Often, an aspiring overlord would greatly enhance goblin fighting capabilities with his superior intellect and magic, or monsters without opposable thumbs such as wargs (highly intelligent evil wolves), and while bleeding-hearts might say goblins are "exploited", they really aren't, they'd raid all the same but get to have more fun with competent leaders.
Elves are much better warriors than goblins, but there are many more of the latter, and sometimes elves die. "Parents got killed by goblins" is to elves what "parents got laid off during covid" is to 2010s babies.
(3) is the natural outcome of people hating on (1).
tl;dr You had a great character. And snowy owls are awesome, I could just nom one, om nom nom nom marshmallow fluff.
pictured: marshmallow fluff
Vampires are cursed, which gives them a tired but internally valid reason to mope. Elves used to have a reason, but over time with many artists and no proper creative vision they drifted toward generic kitsch lazy-awesome, now best exemplified by AI art (but it happened way earlier). Now they're just fancy for fancy's sake but still mopey.
After I hit peak elf, I decided elven immortality sucked. It's best to win it under your own power. Steal people's lifespan, eat angels, reincarnate, jump bodies, ascend to godhood. These are all human stories, I love humans. But some stories you can only tell with elves.
Fantasy deals with fates of civilizations -- LotR certainly does -- and you play in a setting. Characters come with backstories and a place in the setting, and to have a stake in the fate of the elven civilization, you have to be an elf. Maybe you rage against the dying of the light, maybe you contemplate the bleak weariness of a dying race (grown hopeless of all but oblivion), maybe you want to retvrn (and for that, get your hands on the magics which caused the catastrophe, which other elves might not like), maybe you just fucking hate loud, smelly outsiders and want to go home to your tree friends, but there's a demon army invading and you're the elven representative in a party of assassins trying to kill the demon general and seal his spirit for another 1000 years, again (you went last time, too).
As a player in a cooperative role-playing game, you have to communicate to your fellow players who you're playing, very economically, because you don't have a narrator or an inner voice on your side. Racial stereotypes are very good at it. Sometimes you play in a GM-created setting, and racial stereotypes are the only thing that give your character interaction hooks as you all get acquainted with the setting. Your character is only as fun and interesting as your interactions. It's because humans are awesome and contain multitudes that in a tabletop RPG they might end up containing not much at all.
I didn't like Orlando Bloom, he looks like a prettyboi from a romance novel cover, really all elves in the movie look like rich larpers. Live-action high fantasy requires a courageous visual style -- no one would've given money for that.
(the black guy in KJ Parker's trilogy could've been a fantasy dwarf -- his wife got tired of the ambient sexism and wanted to wreck shit as a woman, so she cheats on him then snitches on him and gets him sentenced to death for making an unsanctioned toy for maybe-not-his child, he escapes and gives advanced military technology to a lesser race and engineers a genocide, all to get the child and his cheating wife back; they also try to make a cannon and it explodes and kills fucking everyone -- it's a very dwarven plot),
but the stereotype lends itself well to what used to be called "beer and pretzels" style.
Thread inspired by me getting offended on behalf of Small Miriam, in the tranny thread:
I'm Russian (well Soviet), we didn't follow quite the same cultural trajectory w.r.t. "global" (Western) pop culture. Fantasy in Russia started out as a very girly genre. Many early larpers (originating from the student backpacking movement) were women. The USSR had free higher education so vastly more women than men had medieval history degrees, and they made use of them and ran games based on the Crusades and the Templars and the Cathars and wars in medieval Italy. We immediately got female celebrity writers (pseudonymous but with female pseudonyms, like "Medeline Simmons"). Two women wrote a LotR fanfiction, got it published and built a Final Fantasy House-style cult around it. One woman wrote a Heroes of Might and Magic fanfiction and got it published; she prefaced it by a rant on why HOMM2 was better than HOMM3. Harry Potter is commonly thought to be for girls (people tell me it's mostly a boys' book in the West among normies). Apparently (I keep as far as possible from the "fandom" and from streaming both) a streaming service is making a live-action fantasy series, Russia's first fantasy series, based on a woman's yaoi cocktease books from the 00s.
What I'm saying is there's nothing about "mainstream" fantasy (excluding horse girl books or feminist reimaginings or reincarnated as a villainness isekai) that makes it more appealing to men, as if women must be either invading bullies who laugh at nerds and wreck their treehouse, or woke degenerates who piss on the ruins standing up. It's sad that beautiful ladies in fantasy are considered an embarrassing cliche rather than a time-honored tradition.
But back to Miriam's post:
This is not a "huge fucking cliché", this is just how life for D&D elves is. They're the uncontacted tribes of the Amazon, ancient survivors of a magical catastrophe, and they've learned to live self-sufficiently, hide, and shoot intruders on sight. Rangers are the courageous patrolmen and -women who shoot intruders on sight. D&D elves, once Gygax separated race from class and saw it was good, in their mindset were a lot like Eldar.
Goblins (not to be confused with hobgoblins) are vermin, locusts. They're stupid and primitive, they spawn, raid civilized settlements, either lose or destroy everything and run out of resources, and die off to starvation and infighting, and the cycle starts again. Often, an aspiring overlord would greatly enhance goblin fighting capabilities with his superior intellect and magic, or monsters without opposable thumbs such as wargs (highly intelligent evil wolves), and while bleeding-hearts might say goblins are "exploited", they really aren't, they'd raid all the same but get to have more fun with competent leaders.
Elves are much better warriors than goblins, but there are many more of the latter, and sometimes elves die. "Parents got killed by goblins" is to elves what "parents got laid off during covid" is to 2010s babies.
(3) is the natural outcome of people hating on (1).
tl;dr You had a great character. And snowy owls are awesome, I could just nom one, om nom nom nom marshmallow fluff.
pictured: marshmallow fluff
Eventually, though, elves would get nerfed hard, first to "not really immortal" (~3000 years, which is still a lot, but less cool), then to like 300 years or so and retarded, so the first 40 years of life are spent shitting eco-friendly diapers.
Vampires are cursed, which gives them a tired but internally valid reason to mope. Elves used to have a reason, but over time with many artists and no proper creative vision they drifted toward generic kitsch lazy-awesome, now best exemplified by AI art (but it happened way earlier). Now they're just fancy for fancy's sake but still mopey.
After I hit peak elf, I decided elven immortality sucked. It's best to win it under your own power. Steal people's lifespan, eat angels, reincarnate, jump bodies, ascend to godhood. These are all human stories, I love humans. But some stories you can only tell with elves.
No, not really, this is elf slander.
Fantasy deals with fates of civilizations -- LotR certainly does -- and you play in a setting. Characters come with backstories and a place in the setting, and to have a stake in the fate of the elven civilization, you have to be an elf. Maybe you rage against the dying of the light, maybe you contemplate the bleak weariness of a dying race (grown hopeless of all but oblivion), maybe you want to retvrn (and for that, get your hands on the magics which caused the catastrophe, which other elves might not like), maybe you just fucking hate loud, smelly outsiders and want to go home to your tree friends, but there's a demon army invading and you're the elven representative in a party of assassins trying to kill the demon general and seal his spirit for another 1000 years, again (you went last time, too).
As a player in a cooperative role-playing game, you have to communicate to your fellow players who you're playing, very economically, because you don't have a narrator or an inner voice on your side. Racial stereotypes are very good at it. Sometimes you play in a GM-created setting, and racial stereotypes are the only thing that give your character interaction hooks as you all get acquainted with the setting. Your character is only as fun and interesting as your interactions. It's because humans are awesome and contain multitudes that in a tabletop RPG they might end up containing not much at all.
Teenage me loved elves because they could sword and spell and the same time. I started with 1e AD&D. Games usually began at low levels. Fighters aren't very aspirational, but mages have a couple Sleep spells in reserve until they're needed, and then they're done. Being able to sword AND spell was just the greatest thing. And swords are cool. D&D 3E made humans the master race but gave elves sword and bow proficiency, so I could be an elven wizard, wear cool clothes instead of the traditional bathrobe, and carry a sword. inb4 "wear whatever you like" -- it's the act of carrying a sword that put me in cool clothes in other player's imagination, otherwise people would always picture a bathrobe.
LotR was when I hit peak elf. I hated the book (I read it before the movies were made) because I didn't understand it, and later in life when I would understand it, I'd hate it even more, a terminal case of Not For Me, total cultural mismatch. I hated Boromir's death (I'm not culturally Christian, we have different sins, Christian morality in e.g. Disney movies is grating -- I loved that Dragonlance went against it in the first trilogy) and I really hated that the badass human heroine (well not so badass, she should've killed Solzhenitsyn when he tried to rape her, she would've saved her nation, but I didn't notice the failed rape attempt on first reading), the only character who killed a boss on camera, not only didn't get the man but was cucked and humiliated by becoming a subject of her lazy pampered elf rival. I don't even like Aragorn, he and Gandalf are intolerably bland characters. But Eowyn was robbed. Fuck Tolkien.
I didn't like Orlando Bloom, he looks like a prettyboi from a romance novel cover, really all elves in the movie look like rich larpers. Live-action high fantasy requires a courageous visual style -- no one would've given money for that.
Yes, but not just that. The biggest problem with roleplaying is it's hard to find people to roleplay with who'd be into the same things -- many are irreverent, and the dedicated autists may be violently opposed to what you want. I'm not a Forgotten Realms autist, but there are only a few characters/factions in it that I'd consider helping (the hot racist elf, the hot evil priest, the hot ghost paladin, and the hot dark moon goddess pre-BG3 troonout). Most campaigns fizzle out, and investing in your character (any race) feels like a waste, you will never see your storyline resolved. But as a dwarf, you can always have immediate fun, just be stubborn and drink beer (ale, mead). This is not to say dwarves can't be complex characters
(the black guy in KJ Parker's trilogy could've been a fantasy dwarf -- his wife got tired of the ambient sexism and wanted to wreck shit as a woman, so she cheats on him then snitches on him and gets him sentenced to death for making an unsanctioned toy for maybe-not-his child, he escapes and gives advanced military technology to a lesser race and engineers a genocide, all to get the child and his cheating wife back; they also try to make a cannon and it explodes and kills fucking everyone -- it's a very dwarven plot),
but the stereotype lends itself well to what used to be called "beer and pretzels" style.
![LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]](http://uploads.kiwifarms.st/data/avatars/l/61/61177.jpg?1699571951){kind=avatar}
