>elves are arrogant bastards who consider humans to be beneath them!
Where does this meme come from?
I've always thought that elves view humans as their wayward children.
Elves might lose patience with humans from time to time and they might think that they lack refinement and culture, but ultimately they treat humans with kindness as long as the humans are respectful towards them.
Elves like humans and view them as allies against the forces of evil.
Because it's what we would be like if we lived thousands of years.
The origins of that meme are obvious. They hardly need to be stated.
But, there's millions of elves, in thousands of types and subraces, in hundreds of different games and settings, so you are free to decide whether they are seen as arrogant or not, whether they actually are arrogant or not, and whether it really makes sense to ascribe that kind of personality trait to an entire race.
I tend to view it as a very case-by-case concept, where while elves that actually are arrogant bastards are relatively rare, there will always be those sorts of non-elven miscreants in-game who will project their insecurities as the elves thinking they are better than them, when it's really just themselves believing they are inferior to the elves.
It stems from different interpretations of elves. If we're going back to Tolkien as source material, the where the peoples of Middle Earth could be seen to represent different social classes in some interpretations, the elves would be representative of the nobility and royal classes. In that context, snobbiness makes a bit more sense. Elves do act with some snobbiness and tend not to keep themselves removed and distant from other peoples, living in beautifully tended places, much like royalty or nobility.
Consider Galadriel, who is often treated with as much reverence as The Queen of England, especially since Tolkien was British himself. Even the Mirkwood elves, who can be seen as more backwards and simple than others, make wine and sell it to support themselves, which is still seen as a luxurious and acceptable venture for nobility. So they tend to represent nobility whose estate has fallen into decline. The elves as a whole are departing from the world, symbolizing the diminishing importance of royalty as the modern age came into its own.
Anyway, it's theory and interpretation of the books, but the parallels make sense in the context of Tolkien, a British writer who had seen war and times of great societal change and wrote a fantasy epic. I mean, writers don't write in influential vacuums, and Tolkien could have easily taken from his own historical, societal, and personal experiences to pour into his writing. Given how much these books are adored, I'd say he had to.
Anyway, tl;dr elves might take influence from snooty nobility and that's why they're many times pricks.
Tolkien Elves also see men as highly corruptible. Their short lives and the fact they are not slaves to destiny or nature make humans fascinating and adorable, but unpredictable and kind of scary. They are also quick to decision; when presented with two options, an Elf has done and seen both done in the past and thus would contemplate the decision for a long time and try to find any third answer. A human wants a choice in the next hour, and would rather take a gamble than wait for an option there may never be.
As a result, Elves like humans generally but prefer to stay isolated from them as a whole. Like grandparents not able to keep up with the kids.
Everyone who copied Tolkien preferred them to be snobby pricks as a quick explanation of the above.
Isn't Tolkien the guy who pretty much set the standard for elves in today's culture? Elves before him were the same as Greek fantasy; bunch of troublemaking faggots that do nothing good for humans.
Elves in Tolkien world are wise noble people, who are pretty much holier than thou against the angry autistic dwarfs and power hungry humans. They definitely look down upon other races, not so much like Skyrim elves or something, but still look at other people as misguided and prone to mistakes. So I don't see a problem with the two interpretations we get today: enlightened nobles who don't want to be around human affairs, or arrogant motherfuckers who want to conquer humans and put them beneath.
And I guess there's Japan too with elves are horny sex slaves.
Japs deserve a third nuking.
What about cute elves who'll sell you flowers and apples?
People who live a long ass time, have the best mastery of magic, have civilizations that have lasted longer than the entire history of some races, and tend to be masters of their preferred crafts? user that's not arrogance, that is well deserved self-confidence.
No. Japan made me like some elves again. That is saying something because I had a clusterfuck hatred for elves thanks to that shitty series Eragon.
Japan made me see that elves does not have to be like that and can be cute buddies or lovers.
On another note, do you think that if humans with a lifespan of 120 years managed to extend their youth to let's say to 80 years, relationships with Elves would be much more fun? Instead of 1 or 2 decades it would can last for 4-6 decades.
I mean after all the shit about "Fountain of Youth" or "Elixir of Life" you think some Alchemist in a fantasy setting you would figure this shit out and make a shit ton of money selling that shit to other humans.
Like almost every other bad medieval fantasy cliche, it comes from a bastardization of Tolkien's work.
>liking waifu fap bait elves
pls kill urself
kiss my feet loser
My god. You're so high up on the faggots charts they're having to add a ^ when comparing other faggotry numbers to yours.
Because Tolkien's elves were objectively better from humans at any aspect. So they could affort to be fatherly figures to wayward children - as the wayward children gave them respect as they guides in return.
When you take most of the elven advantages and reforge it into pure subjective superiority in some aspects, elves may and probably will, judge those aspects are most important, and fields on which they suck as unrevelant, thus still believing that they're superior race.
But contrary to the situation with objective superiority, here humans don't have to share this view, and most likely won't. So they won't treat elves as their betters and respectable guides. So elves have to respond to what they concieve as human willfull ignotance with scorn, arrogance and superiority complex.
>Where does this meme come from?
Decades of fantasy writers misinterpreting Tolkien.
>misinterpreting
Do you really think it was the goal of those writers to recreate Tolkien's setting in exact detail?
>Where does this meme come from?
Old people.
No, but I think they wanted to take the stuff from Tolkien they liked. They saw Elves, though they were cool, and threw them in without really paying attention to how they acted. They saw Fair Folk who live in trees and were smart and immortal. So that's how they made their Elves. Then other writers drew inspiration from Tolkien as well as those who he first inspired.
Then the LotR films came out, which due to the constraints of cinema couldn't give as much detail on Elves as Tolkien did, so we had a whole new generation of aspiring writers who thought Orlando Bloom was the pinnacle of Elfdom.
Make no mistake, I loved the movies. But ask any kid at the time who their favorite character was, and 9 times out of 10 it was Legolas
That's how, over half a century later, we went from Tolkien Elves to Tortellini's Elves.
>Make no mistake, I loved the movies. But ask any kid at the time who their favorite character was, and 9 times out of 10 it was Legolas
Man I hadthis phase
[/spoiler]It ended with realizing how stupid it was and then despising elves and being HFY as fuck in a reaction[/spoiler]
and now I'm again full blown tolkienboo who likes elven master race the most
You only really get detail on why the elves are the way they are in The Silmarillion.
The Noldor that Galadriel is a member of are the oldest elves in middle earth, having gone to live in valimar for several years ere their return to retrieve the silmarils. The Sindarin stayed behind and never went to Valimar. Elrond is actually half-human, but chose to live forever since half-elves are given a choice of whether to live forever or to die someday.
Elves trusted and loved men for many hundreds of years in Beleriand that was, and many elven kings took human sons to foster. But when the majority of humans marched against elves and the valar in the wars against morgoth and sauron, they were forever held in contempt. Numenor completely siding with sauron and attempting to attack Valimar didn't help matters either. As long as men are mortal, the dark powers can sow their misdeeds in their hearts.
>I've always thought that elves view humans as their wayward children.
Why?
That's pretty much how the movies depict them and only a vanishingly small part of the population has read the trilogy, far fewer The Silmarillion.
Not sure how or why it happened, but in my group's settings the elves have all taken on Jewish stereotypical characterizations...
."Hi, we're here to claim the reward of 50 gold."
."Forty gold? What do you need with 30 gold?"
>TFW I forgot how to greentext...
Nigger your taste is just shit. Calling someone a faggot won't change that.
You answered your own question, OP. Anyone who looks on a group of people that way is going to be resented by those people.
So I guess you resent your parents then?
>Because Tolkien's elves were objectively better from humans at any aspect
No. They were not. This is a big fat meme.
Let's start by saying that Men actually have free will and a afterlife. Then let's add that Eru all but got down to Middle-Earth and told the Elves "humans are my favorite now, get the fuck back to the West". THEN, consider the souls of dead Men will go to whatever Eru does after he's done with Arda, whereas Dwarves and Elves are bound to the world.
And even if they all went to the Undying Lands, they are now basically irrelevant to the rest of the fucking planet as Men are the ones in charge now.
Also, it wasn't precisely a surprise, the Valar knew that would happen literallly before Arda was even created and the elves knew it from them. By LotR they've accepted they're completely inconsequential
Dwarves aren't bound to the world. They die just like men. They do not go to the halls of mandos to await the end of the world.
More like they just got tired of life, and without the Blue and White rings, all their nice shit made to look like valimar will decay and lose its luster. So they said fuck it and finally went to Valimar, where they are not weary of the world ever.
What happens to Dwarves is not precisely clarified, but they definitely don't have the Gift of Men as they're not even counted as the Children of Ilúvatar. They're the result of Aule momentarily sperging out and doing shit without Eru's permission, letting them even exist was a big favor on itself
I don't have an English Silmarillion at hand for an exact quote, but the Dwarves did believe they'd end up in Mandos after death, although in a location separated from the Elves.
It was expicitly stated by Tolkien that neither fate of elves nor humans were "better", they were just "different"
And in mortal maters elves were
>physically stronger and more resilient
>wiser
>less prone to corruption
>immortal and thus able to accumulate experience over ages which further enhances their wisdom
>more beautiful
>having more talent in ANY art or craft
>having direct contact with the Valar and more of their favor And its hard to gauge favor of Eru himself as he never intervenes, at least, not openly, and each of events that can be theoretically atributed to such intervention doesn't seem to favor humans over elves in any way
Elves seem to have a white man's burden mentality though.
Immortality was only seen as a good thing by Men. Only Elves from the First Age are stronger than Men, and the very strongest and most skilled warriors in the setting are Men. Elves are not less prone to corruption in the sense that they stand more of it, they simply can't conceive corruption unless it's something like the One Ring influencing them
And everything on which they were once better than Men, including their crafts, gradually decayed to be only a pale shadow of what it once was
>tfw that is exactly how I usually play my elves' stance towards humans
Legolas is actually decidedly less elf than any of the Tolkien elves as people or individuals.
He's thought to be the youngest elf in existence, clocking in at only a couple thousand years old give or take a century, but calls all humans and dwarves children because he's kind of an asshole. He speaks a sort of more common pigeon elvish which though prettier than the language of men is thought by elves to be pretty guttural garbage, and he never bothered to learn proper high elvish, which is why he's useless at the gates of Moria. Tolkien got mad when people described or illustrated him as girly or generally slender like an elf, since he's explicitly described as being a bulky bloke. Galadriel's gift to him reflects this; a bow that's even bigger than the famed Mirkwood longbows. When the elves leave for their eternal magical homeland, they leave in convoys of beautiful elvish ships. Legolas decides he's going to carve his own fucking boat to sail there and bring Gimli with him. He fucking succeeds at both and Gimli becomes the first and only dwarf in the undying lands.
Basically, Legolas isn't Orlando Bloom as the movies made him out to be, he's elf Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Yeah, this made me laugh since i watch the movies forst and was expecting feminine boi toy orlando bloom, not hulk hogan with knife ears.
Much of the same can be said about the Elves born in Middle-Earth in general
Why is there no mention of the origin of the halflings in the silmarillion?
Because it happened really recently relatively speaking, and was already explained at the beginning of LotR
>Immortality was only seen as a good thing by Men
It were objectively good gain from perspective of "power gain" benefits, and i stated i meant this context.
>Only Elves from the First Age are stronger than Men
There weren't any indication they got weaker in any way. Thing is, most elves past third age that remained in Middle Earth were Nandor, just ruled by bunch of remaining Sindar and Noldor, and Nandor were always considered kind of hillbillies among elves. Still those hillbillies "surpased men as much as High Elves surpased themselves" or something like that.
>most skilled warriors in the setting are Men
Most exposed ones. There is no indication Turin was better than Fingolfin, Ecthelion or Glorfindel, even if they didn't get few chapters for themselves
>Elves are not less prone to corruption in the sense that they stand more of it, they simply can't conceive corruption unless it's something like the One Ring influencing them
If someone needs much bigger trigger to get corrupted, it basicaly means HE IS less prone to corruption
>And everything on which they were once better than Men, including their crafts, gradually decayed to be only a pale shadow of what it once was
[citation needed] and even if they were worse than they were before, still in late third age they still surpased men. And after third age, the setting ends.
The language of the Noldor, the High Elves, was banned by Thingol king of Doriath. Legolas would never have learned it, especially not so late into the third age.
>not hulk hogan with knife ears.
I FEAR NO MAN, NO BEAST, OR EVIL BROTHER!
Turin is fated to kill Morgoth, so it's pretty safe to say he's a lot better
And I don't know why I would need to give you a source when that is stated over and over and over again in the books. Everything gets worse the more time passes. Heck, even just the death of Feanor was a instant species-wide technology downgrade for Elves
>Everything gets worse the more time passes
Yet at the end of the third age elves, DESPITE compromising mostly of "lesser" wood elves produce goods and art still far beyond capabilities of men.
They're clinging to old knowledge that will eventually be gone anyways while not making any progress of their own. Meanwhile, Men eventually reach the modern world.
I can understand why they shifted his portrayal though. Mostly because they already had a gruff, no-nonsense guy in the form of Gimli. Books can parse out the actual differences in personality much better than movies.
The books are full of stuff which could never translate well into a film. Borimir is described as some fuckhueg Beowulf-looking dude. It took Aragorn, Gimil, and Legolas all their strength to lift him up and put him in a boat. Bear in mind all three far outmatch the physical capabilities of most people.
There's also stuff like Saruman's robes, or the fact Caradhras itself basically forced the Fellowship off the mountain and into Moria.
The movies overall are pretty good adaptations of the books. They manage to keep in the really important parts of the narrative while trimming the stuff which just wouldn't work in a movie.
Shit, half of the stuff in LotR wouldn't even work in a book if it were written by anyone else.
I'd say it's not because he's better, but because Morgoth fucked his family over so he gets the honour.
Aragorn is also xboxhueg, even more so than Boromir. He's described as being "tall as the sea-kings of old", so a conservative estimate would be around 7 feet
They're all beowulf style giants
While elves will be chilling with the Valar forevwer.
As I written, Tolkien expicitly stated that neither option was "better". Within the actual scope of the setting, elves never lose their edge over men. Elves were their better as long as they were a thing. After the elves dissapear, their mutual views and relations don't matter anymore
No it isn't. If he's fated to kill Morgoth, then all that means is that he's the one who will deal the final blow. Eowyn killed the Witch-King, does that mean she's a better fighter/warrior than Aragorn or Boromir?
Japanese elves are the worst. One-dimensional fap bait with no interesting lore or characters. Tell me about one interesting, japanese male elf. I'm waiting.
I know that there was another post that replied to you. Where is it gone?
On the subject of Tolkien, I actually want to explore a concept that's been on my mind recently.
If a fantasy author wanted to revisit the Lord of the Rings setting, instead of bastardizing the Silmarillion, they could invent an entirely new story based around something that's ultimately left absent in the LotR's conflict: the East lands where the Easterlings come from.
What's over there that could be interesting?
>four of the seven dwarven kingdoms
>numerous new lands and human cultures
>the "dark" elves who might REALLY hate orcs
>the ocean
>TWO wizards known as the Blue Wizards, Alatar and Pallando, who are best bros
Tolkien elaborated that the Blue Wizards were directed to sow chaos and disruption among the Eastern empires to stem the flow of reinforcements to Middle Earth and give Middle Earth a fighting chance against the zerg rush Sauron was ushering in. Initially, Tolkien figured that since LotR panned out the way they did, if he ever wrote of them they'd have failed their mission, but later in life he suspected they might have played a significant, if not crucial, role in winning the War of the Ring.
Could you imagine that story? Two wizards fighting on land and sea, alongside dwarves, "dark" elves, and renegade humans to cripple Sauron's supply lines for his war efforts. It's pirates and rebels and guerilla warfare in LotR. That'd be a fucking great book if it's written well enough.
>Japanese male elves
They simply don't exist, user.
Overall I think they did a good job communicating Aragorn and Borimir. Viggo Mortenson held himself like a natural leader, and they made him look more and more kingly as the trilogy went on. It helped he's a pretty tall guy. He almost died during filming of Two Towers, which unnerved Jackson because apparently Daniel Dey-Lewis was next in line to play the character. I guess he didn't relish the idea of an actor living on the Minas Tirith set for a year
Sean Bean likewise knocked Borimir out of the park. He's a big dude, and he looked like some seasoned warrior who was a cut above the rest.
Honestly the casting was pretty great overall. Elijah Wood was pretty young to play Frodo, but in the book Frodo spends like three decades fucking around in the Shire before he even starts his quest. That doesn't fly well in a movie.
Even Bloom worked, because even though he wasn't very true to Book!Legolas, he fit the common perception of an Elf to a T.
And this is the problem.
Even if you choose to interpret it that way, even being able to fucking HARM Morgoth even a tiny bit already gives him distinction. That would be ignoring his other individual accomplishments
I'm not seeing a problem.
Wasn't Turin the guy who knocked up his sister and killed himself?
Are you fearing male competition? Go back to your harem animes and your bland MC's that gets all the girls for no reason.
>he's a pretty tall guy
For you.
You mean doing something Fingolfin already did?
Túrin was a huge retard, so yes. He was also the guy that doomed Nargothrond.
Yeah, he's a pretty cool guy.
That's quite a bit of projection there, user.
Fingolfin manages to "fight" Morgoth by not getting hit on the first place, it's over pretty quickly once he can actually get his hands on him. It's like a max level tank vs a glass cannon one third his level to put it on slightly stupid terms
My post got fuckin deleted..
Is this all you got? Throwing around words you don't know how to use? Evading my ad-homs with your ad-homs? Telling me that I like the thing that I heavily criticise?
How about this: you tell me what's so great about japanese elves in comparison to western elves.
This does not change the fact that Fingolfin wounds Morgoth several times during the fight, and even manages to get in another blow after being struck down.
You just posted the best example I could give.
So that means you're right assuming you were right in your first post, congratulations
I don't know, one of my other comment is also gone. But meh.
As for japanese elves. They are still better than the elves in Eragon, who are annoying pretentious and act like their "culture" is superior than anything that ever existed.
Personally on traditional fantasy (ignoring the Japanese MMO stuff that they throw out these days), I would love the elves to be a species that is different with a unique culture and origin no better than the other species that exists and not a "better human" race that they are always shown these days. Like this picture.
Isn't that Korean though?
Eh, it's all the same shit to me.
Did elves in Eragon even have a culture? Outside of being a bunch of vegetarian hippies with a superiority complex.
That comic is very obviously tongue-in-cheek.
>I dislike elves because I read Eragon
I have heard this so many times. Read the Silmarillion, this thread thread should show you why.
Earlier Western fantasy-based animes (Lodoss, Slayers, Berserk just off the top of my head) have decent interpretations of elbs of both genders.
The problem is a more encompassing one, at some point anime just up and decided to pander wholly to the trenchcoat-wearing, dakimakura-humping, cropped hentai-posting crowd, leading also to brown slut elves and such.
Fucking elves
Eragon doesn't represent western elves you retard.
It's just High Elves that are the problem what with their massive ancient cities and superior biology whatnot that they have for no reason. Elves in general should have been kept as the weird little pseudo fey people living in another dimension, casually throwing around magic spells for laughs, and being arbitrarily helpful or harmful towards individual humans based on if they think that person is an asshole or cool.
PCs should at most only be able to be half Elvish and it should just grant them some extra nature magic or hiding ability. Like how Tieflings work.
In all fairness, Eragan is a poor representation of the fantasy genre in general.
Well if you say it like that then no. No they don't.
Now that I think about it the main reason they live so long is because of some magical union they had with the dragons. Before they used to live shorter lives than humans if I remembered correctly.
A lost opportunity there if you ask me. This could have made the story better and the Eragon Elves better in general. He could have gone with humans, who are not big magic users and tend to rely more on mechanical weapons and tools in war. Then there are the Elves who live shorter than humans but rely heavily on magic. Then the long lived Dwarves in the mountain, etc etc etc.
I'm not really down for hitting everything with a broad brush. There's nebulous stuff like Eastern interpretation and Western interpretation, but these can be done poorly or pretty well. Dark Souls is western mythology and legend/myth bastardized by Japanese people, but it's damned neat and well done. Some Japanese shit westerners do is just awful and doesn't do justice to the source material at all. Chinese porn cartoons (especially the literal porn kind) are naturally not too interested with a faithful portrayal of the fantasy traditions they're borrowing.
As with all things, quality and craftsmanship are the deciding factor, and we should generally ignore garbage or at least acknowledge garbage for garbage even when it's quite prevalent.
Try imagining this guy with knife ears and without 'stache.
So Legolas looks like this in book? No wonder Gimli quite liked him, looks manly as fuck.
Some of the "problems" with Elves are further exacerbated by how much was lost in translation between the Tolkien--the codifier--and the various works which built off his stuff and eventually inspired modern RPG tropes.
I think a lot of people read/watched LotR and got the impression Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimil were meant to be player characters. This is of course a wrong impression. No one in LotR is really a PC, except maybe the Hobbits. But even that wouldn't fly in a real game because no player wants to spend half hte campaign getting escorted around by three Beowulf-expy DMPCs.
Honestly Tolkien is so far removed from actual RPG conventions it almost feels asinine to compare it.
Neither Aragorn nor the hobbits were meant to be PCs because there were no rpgs at the time
They all are equally eligible to be ones. RPG conventions are wide
He wasn't quite Hogan-tier levels, but he wasn't the slender ladyman people portray him as.
He was pretty beefy. But still able to walk on snow like it was concrete.
Well, there was also a kind of understanding there. Galadriel giving Gimli three of her hairs won Legolas over when Gimli told him. Legolas knew the story about that asshole who asked Galadriel for a strand of her hair three times but got rebuked every time, and now the queen of the elves and most beautiful creature in Middle Earth gives three to a dwarf.
It's the point when Legolas begins to believe that dwarves and elves can, indeed, be friends after all, and their relationship changes to a more friendly competitive one. The movies does a pretty good job of playing too that, though while in the movies Legolas soundly beats Gimli in the kill count, the books don't actually mention them counting kills (that I can recall) and they're actually pretty evenly matched on the battlefield. I mean, their whole relationship leads to Legolas building a boat for the two so they can be best bros forever in the elf lands beyond the world.
I liked Eragon. I also likes the Elves in it. I thought it was a good and logical point that when you and everyone around you exists forever you do well to not accidentally give anyone cause to hold a grudge. Their overly polite mannerisms might be grating to us, but we didn't grow up with that as a thing and we also don't have centuries ahead of us to fill, or centuries behind us to give us patience.
Luthien wounded morgoth when the magic blade she was using to pry out the Silmaril from morgoths crown snapped and smote him on the cheek.
The raiment of flesh that vala wear is not impregnable, since it is but flesh.
I thought it was Beren that did this. Lúthien danced and sung.
>Elves before him were the same as Greek fantasy; bunch of troublemaking faggots that do nothing good for humans.
You know nothing about elves pre Tolkien, do you?
Not him, but weren't Pre-JRR Elves part of Nordic mythology? They were basically creepy ubermensch or something, right?
I don't know where he's getting this Greek thing.
What do you mean "we" and "us". I didn't grow up the same way as you did user and you didn't grow up the same way as I did. You are over generalizing here. There are human cultures were being polite is the thing. There are plenty of humans that are polite because they wish to avoid unnecessary conflict. You do not have to live for centuries to get this idea into your head. It is just common sense.
The problem with the Elves in Eragon is because of their annoying superiority complex believing their way is the right way. There is so many things wrong with the Eragon series in general but the Elves are probably the worst of the lot.
I dunno, the fact it was essentially a poor rewrite of Star Wars scared me off long before Tortellini described the Elves in any great detail.