Why do elves have so few children compared to humans? Assuming they fuck as often as humans do...

Why do elves have so few children compared to humans? Assuming they fuck as often as humans do, that they remain fertile for hundreds of years, and that no one has yet invented birth control, even if their pregnancies are ten times the length of human pregnancies they should each have many times more children than humans. Yet they do not.

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They don't fuck as often as humans do.

Their impregnation rate is massively, massively lower.

Tolkein was going for a whole dying race thing. Later fantasy authors just ape his tropes without understanding their purpose or modifying them to fit their own stories.

Why do pandas have such low birth rates?

Wasn't Legolas the youngest known Elf? And he was still several millennia old?

It's this. But does it happen so often? I don't recall much more dying race elves.

Because elves take fucking forever to grow up.
Imagine a culture where 300 is considered a juvenile. Their babies probably take at least a century to fully mature which means mommy and daddy elf have to deal with waking up in the middle of the night, changing diapers and potty training little El'endrill who, canonically takes decades to fully grasp a concept. Yeah, I'm sure they'd want to sire more offspring after spending thirty years to teach a baby to not shit itself or stick its elven crafted toys up its nose.

Because they only go into heat once every 1000 years during a planetary alignment that makes everyone forget how to bump uglies.

Legolas' age is never given, but it's estimated to be at least a millennium, with 500 being the absolute minimum, and some guesswork placing him closer to 3000.

That's called a conception rate, not "impregnation rate" you deviant.

because people have to handweave why the humans +1 are not conquering the shit out of the regular humans

>Why do europeans have so few children compared to third worlders?

It's even explained within Tolkien's stuff. Having children is a very involved process for elven women, and if they have too many they can become too weak to mantain physical bodies. Having a powerful child is similar to creating a great work of art. Miriel's mother put almost all her energy in Feanor

There's also that elves are not so much dying as going back to the West

fpbp

I was going to write "Feanor's mother" before I remembered how she was called

>elves take fucking forever to grow up

Well, usually, it is said they have a low impregnation rate (like almost every other state), and in the Witcher-Universe, only "young" elves are fertile...

Elves actually have far more children than humans, they just have a rigorous eugenics program

>Legolas' age is never given, but it's estimated to be at least a millennium, with 500 being the absolute minimum, and some guesswork placing him closer to 3000.
By who?

Love it!

I like how the witcher elves work. They live long, but are only fertile in their youth. And the youth pretty much all join the scoia'thel and die trying to regain their former glory, with their elders unable to stop them.

Is this a joke?

Who would make this? Why?

Did someone roleplay this? In what game? Who even ran it?

I have so many questions.

You can also find art and self-insert fan fiction about the Columbine kids.

>You can also find art and self-insert fan fiction about the Columbine kids.
It never gets any better, does it?

they do, sometimes even more. but elv girls are only fertile once a year not once a month like humans. thas the whole problem.

>It always gets better, doesn't it?
ftfy

>It never gets any better, does it?

I dunno, if we want to go by D&D, then elves mature as fast as humans sure, but they're not considered adults (and as such not considered ready for parenthood) until they're at least a century.
And thanks to the Forgotten Realms, contraceptives do exist in the D&D multiverse, ranging from herbal remedies of varying effectiveness, to very cheap and affordable potions that prevent conception for a month..

Would you want to raise more than one or two kids if you had to deal with them for 100 years rather than 20?

Sure, elves typically mature at the same rate same humans, but (if I'm not mistaken) most of the time they're not considered adults until at least over a hundred.

For my setting I went with a cultural thing, not biological. They COULD flood the world with elflings but instead they chose not to. Their society is a decadent, crumbling, waste of intrigue thats also reactionary to the max, pining for the glory days to return while backstabbing those who actually do something for it in fear of losing influence. Some nobles came up with the bright idea of "merging" families by only having one children each, so they could merge their titles, followers and powerbase and it quickly became a very fashionable and logical thing to do, and the upper and middle classes were quickly aping it. Nowadays only the poorest forest dwelling elves(who are returning to their druidic roots) have more than one child and its a sign of being extremely uncouth or extremely poor.

Of course it came to bite them in the ass when they declared war on the humans over a percived slight and despite winning almost every battle they lost the war because they had no way to reinforce their superhumanly well trained, equipped and skilled legions of doom while the roundears could always just draft a new pike square.

As a person who just finished watching the LotR rings, I am well equipped to answer this. In LotR, elves are more like humans at a younger age - they'll have multiple children and sex in their first few hundreds years, but then as they get older they lose interest in it, Elrond for example probably hasn't had sex in thousands of years despite having a penis perfectly capable of pounding tight elven pussy to produce children. Also Elves definitely outnumbered Men for a long long time, but they kept fighting wars that cut down their numbers.

What the fuck even are elves? They are literally humans with pointy ears might as well call them pointy eared people.

...

You're being obtuse on porpoise, you know there's more to it than that. They're also long-lived, magic users, agile, fair etc etc. Nobody ever puts Elves into their settings because deformed ears are their fetish, it's because of the implications those ears have about the person wearing them and the very extensive history and mythology of those ears (and their owner).

Because they're supposed to stand for varied mythical civilizations and races and serve as the main shapers of events in the First Age of Middle-Earth, and as a foil to Men, among others

This is lost when most everyone but Tolkien does them without drastic changes

Tolkien ruined everything.

>diversified men are men
>tall diversified men are elves
>small diversified men are halflings
>smaller diversified men are dwarfs
>even smaller diversified men are gnomes
>white men are vampires
>green men are orcs
>blue men are merfolk, or Avatar: the greatest movie of all times

All stereotypes are now used, creativity:gone

>you will never have green smart men because they are immediately orcs

That's literally the dumbest thing I've heard all day. Tolkien is such shit.

I though the Sylvan folk in Tolkien's stuff were much less long-lived?

Fans with too much time on their hands.

Witcherverse elves also before the First Nilfgaardian War had a reputation of fucking pretty much anybody, even humans, so they could get children to resolve this problem. They weren't very romantic about it though; the nicer cases involved the elf seducing a human, getting knocked up/impregnating them, and then leaving as soon as they had the kid without a word of explanation as half-elves could have children with elves who were more or less fully elven.

Of course the practices like that probably are why the Aen Sidhe of the Northern Realms are so physically different from the Aen Elle after so long.

Nah, Elves are immortal. Their magical nature means they only die from despair or violence.

They might not be as fertile as humans. Even in the most ideal of circumstances, conception among humans fails 1 in 4 times. It could easily be lower among elves.

>and that no one has yet invented birth control

Bitch please, there's been birth control for ages. If nothing else, in the Forgotten Realms of D&D there's two naturally-growing plants that inhibit pregnancy or impregnation, one for females (nararoot) and one for males (cassil herbs). They're not even that magical realm; the Romans reportedly had access to a similar plant of their own but they literally drove it extinct from overfarming.

Can't speak as to most fantasy settings, but in D&D by default elves are physically adult at age 25, compared to humans' 15. This only isn't the case in Pathfinder's Golarion where elves really do take 110 years to reach the equivalent of a 15-year-old human. And also possibly DragonLance but who the fuck cares about Krynn.

But in every other D&D setting, elves don't age much slower than humans until age 25, at which point their aging slows down considerably.

Keyword being "physically". Elven society doesn't recognize them as adults until about a century.

relevant

Tolkien's orcs weren't green though. They also were the physically weakest and smallest race, more so than even hobbits

He also didn't have merfolk and if he had vampires they were nondescript evil spirits in Morgoth's armies, like werewolves. His Elves are extremely well fleshed out since half of the fucking Silmarillion is about them.

Tolkien's elves are literally immortal. The only distinctive is that the Nandor are the only pure "dark" elves who stayed in Middle-Earth and never saw the Two Trees at all, as opposed to the Eldar who went to the West and the Sindar (who are technically also Moriquendi) who saw some of their light through Melian the Maia

How is it dumb? Elves in the setting are immortal.

Ok, I'm gonna explain a bit because Lord of the Rings doesn't give the full context. What we see in LotR is basically after the fall of the Elven kingdoms. Once they were they most numerous and strongest race in Middle-Earth and until a series of wars which decimated them. After this, Elves lose much of their power (something to do with the world slowly becoming less magical, eventually it's supposed to become our own world where there is magic). The Three Rings, one of which is in Rivendell, basically lets the Elves keep their magic powers and immortality, but outside of these small pockets, the Elves are slowly dying or transforming into monsters.

Hence why they're so keen on 'travelling West'. West being the afterlife. Their entire race is basically committing suicide because the race is dying. Lord of the Rings is set during the final page at the end of the Elves' book. That is why they are not numerous, despite being immortal. Their time is over.

Oh of course there's always the Avari who downright refused to even try to follow Orome to the West since they were still scared of him, since Morgoth had convinced the original elves that Orome was some sort of evil fair folk-esque hunting spirit. But they all got kidnapped and turned to Orcs.

It's inaccurate to say they're dying. Mandos is on the West, but the Undying Lands are a physical place where the original great Elven kingdoms were formed in the first place.

Elves don't technically conceive; they steal the young of other races and turn the children into elves through certain arcane rituals known only to them. Normally they only steal babies, but occasionally a community will get desperate and steal older children. These older children do not often convert fully; these "half elves" will either be raised as elves or manage to escape.

Well, not literally, but thematically they are dying. Also yeah I know it's a physical place, but isn't it also the afterlife where all the gods dwell?

This is your (you). Treasure it.

Well, yes. The Undying Lands - Heaven parallels are pretty in-the-face.

I only now realize that the sinking of Numenor is just a mixture of Atlantis and the Tower of Babel

Elves are sterile until they undergo an arcane ritual that is their equivalent to a marriage ceremony.

so were are the red men, the yellow men, and the men with horns?

>so were are the red men, the yellow men,
Some moron thought it'd be smart to give them blankets formerly used by smallpox patients

Fantasy writers are unoriginal hacks, more at eleven.

The unhinged and deviant tend to idolize mass killers as being enlightened in some way because it mirrors the beliefs they themselves hold; the internet and the ability for anyone to freely share anything just brings more light to that. You know that sensation of walking into the house of somebody who has blatant mental problems, and how those problems manifest into every inch of space in their abode? We now have all of that at our fingertips. Well, it we do for now until greater restrictions start being leveled.

And I mean, Nazis are also quite 'moe' (as the hip children say it).

Maybe elves are less fertile?

Because the New York Zoo never realized that both of their pandas were male.
China has no problem breeding pandas.

Man, Errant Story was actually fucking decent. I'd forgotten about that.

>that image
wow, the japs did their meme research well

Elves only have sex once, just after they get married. It lasts several days, and is so satiating that they spend the rest of their unending lives in a stoned post-cloital afterglow.

>Why do elves have so few children compared to humans?

In what setting?

Why do you insist on applying this low birth rate meme to all elves in fiction?

Better birth control. They fuck like hyper-rabbits, but get pregnant essentially whenever they wish. With marriage not really being a thing for elves, families and clans are large and full of half-siblings. There is definitely an incestuous undercurrent to elven society like the bluebloods of royalty.

An elfs life is too long to be tied down to one partner for their lifetime. Relationships come and go, sometimes children are born from these unions.

Life is also too long to not fuck who you like. A male elf travelling among human lands likely leaves many half-elves in his wake.

>Two-time Bishie Queen of Frankfurt University
This has to be a joke.

I'm fairly certain if you make the women dickgirls you'd describe the royal elves from Breeding Season.

Why would I want to do that?

I'm just embracing folklore elves.

The only dickgirl elves may possibly be elves made in the image of Corellon Larethian.

What folklore is that stuff based off?

It depends heavily of the setting, but as a "default" explanation i would go for this:

>No one has yet invented birth control
I think it would be perfeclty fitting for the elves to know this. Of course, in different, more "natural" ways than what we call birth control today, but still effective.
But this leaves one question open. WHY would they do this? If elves low birth rate is disadvantage (it usually is) why would they do this? I think the answer is perfectionism. Elves are braincoded to fucking HAVE TO do everything as good as possible, whatever it takes. That includes upbringing children. So they usually deliberately concieve offspring in long intervals, which is aimed at having total focus on the child.
Additionaly, elves are generally less fertile than humans. Not awkwardly much, but still. Ovulatory cycle lasting 3 months instead of one, at example.
Additionally, elves grow asexual and no longer tempted by the pleasures of flesh as they grow old. 60 year old man may not have his parts really working, but he still feels lust. For 450 year old elf it is just a warm, nostalgic memories of his youth.

Slut elves ale literally the worst meme ever.
I wonder how race that was basically invented let's face it elves as "name" existed before but in their current shape they are purely tolkien's making, with only very vague inspirations in myths as centered on ideals and the ideal of one true love being one of most prominiently presented, into bunch of promiscous ever-horny pervs.

Well there's Norse folklore about them being incredibly beautiful, whether or not this standard of beauty is the masculine or feminine ideal. Also that they're often the lovers and spouses of divinity and royalty.

Then there is the later English and French folkore of elves being seducers, musicians, and even rapists are murderers. They would desire beautiful humans and try to seduce them or at worst rape them. Female elves would desire a fair man, and if spurned would curse the man.

This rather saucy ballad encapsulates the strange seductions and artistry of an elf.
youtu.be/d7rWcBwqbH8

More on the rapists and murderousness, Child ballad #4 Lady Isobel and the Elfin Knight.

youtu.be/EGFBzac-gKc

Simple, the ethereal, superhuman beauty of Tolkien elves got watered down to simply being really pretty on later media. From there it's just a few steps for someone to make them hot. And once they're hot and removed enough from their original concept as essentially miniature versions of angels, it's only a matter of time for someone to make porn based on them. Then people see the idea is appealing and copy the copycat's copycat's copycat to end up with a whole sub-genre of porn elves, which later bleeds out to normal media by people who were acquainted with the porn version first or very early

Japan additionally makes them brown to fit with local gyaru fashion

>Slut elves ale literally the worst meme ever.

They're also one of the first of elves. Tolkien neutered them.

>let's face it elves as "name" existed before but in their current shape they are purely tolkien's making, with only very vague inspirations in myths

And that's the problem. Elves as they are in contemporary fantasy suck ass. They're boring.

I refuse to believe that's real. It's incredibly easy to check if an animal's male or female. Sounds like a bunch of hogwash to me.

Senpai I'm betting people who do elf porn are more readily familiarized with d&d elves rather than ancient folklore. Which Tolkien also knew and used as inspiration for his work due to his studies and academic career as a philologist (which essentially was a mixture between literary analysis, history and linguistics) by the way

Tolkien Elves are not boring if you're actually reading Tolkien

>They're also one of the first of elves. Tolkien neutered them
What you are referring to actually coexists with elves in modern fantasy and is called fae. No reason to redo post-tolkien elved into watered down versions of those. Especially that making them sluts in the way described isn't nowhere close achieving this.

>Elves as they are in contemporary fantasy suck ass. They're boring
Not if you have good attitide towards them. The characters I most enjoyed to play were elves in campaigns centered around elves.
But making them shallow people with pointy ears by various means, including but certainly not limited to oversexualizing them, is exactly what makes them boring and dull.

So? Elves of japanese hentai get it wrong too. Elves are helpless waifs in that content.

Truth is the elf raped you. If they desired you they would have you. If they couldn't have you, you would likely be punished in some way like a curse.

Also,I maintain Tolkien's elves are boring. Tolkien's works in general are incredibly boring and dense to me. They don't fire my imagination like Robert E. Howard or Lord Dunsany does.

You're confusing two types of elf. There's fae, which are adressed by tolkien as the fictional version of elves made to estrange Men from them, and there's norse Alfar, which are mostly what tolkien elves are based off

Assuming you know myth better than Tolkien is rather silly

Also, I get how you may be bored by Tolkien if you like Howard. His pacing is almost consistently terrible and he doesn't pay much mind to the action side of his works in favor of world-building

>Be elf
>Feel a little frisky
>Spend a few decades crafting a perfect bed frame from the finest hardwood in the realm
>Spend another decade gathering down feathers of rare, exotic birds to stuff the mattress with
>Spend yet another decade or so breeding the perfect roses whose petals you'll scatter artfully about the bedroom
>Spend years cultivating grapes in order to produce the perfect wine and wait decades until you get a perfect vintage
>Spend the better part of a century writing love poetry until you finally create your magnum opus: a flawless poem that could make even goddesses swoon
>Wait years and years until the weather on the vernal equinox is at the perfect temperature and humidity
>Set everything up flawlessly and bring your fair elven wife to the bedroom
>Begin to recite your perfect love poem
>She stops you because she's not in the mood and leaves
>Your elven boner is killed and you return to your hobby of writing poetry about trees for the next millennium

An elf is an elf. One inspiration is no less valid then another. I prefer my elves more fey.

Again, why make elves fey if you already have regular fey in the setting?
If you don't have and basically call your actual fey "elves" that's totally ok. Few authors and settings did this and it was cool.
But adding some sliggt and shallowish "fey" traits to strongly watered down versions of tolkien elves achieves nothing. It is a half step towards fey on ten mile road, while taking few miles sideways in awful direction at the same time.

>Again, why make elves fey if you already have regular fey in the setting?

Because fey are a category, not a specific people. Elves are fey. Trolls are fey. Goblins are fey. Unicorns are fey..

because elves are hella gay.

>boy elves bumfun their centuries away
>fem-elves trib like there is no tomorrow

also.
"male" elves are about as masculine as "female" dwarves are feminine. so hetero-fem-elves don't want anything to do with their own kind, getting by fucking cross-species - which typically is non-productive. until the biological clock starts ticking around 6th century or whatever, and then they go to a clinic.

its not
>muh setting

its that guy elves are fruity batty boys, and are too busy sticking it in each other to even look at the gril elves.

>millions of heavily fertilised food babies everywhere in the elven kingdoms.
>anal splooge galore
>they aren't knife-ears, they're scissor-ears

impregnation rate -kek- up the bum no babies.

because
1: europeans think carrier>children
2: in europe , your children are not "directly" responsible for assuring your life in old age, (even though they are through taxes , but few realize. thats why we kinda need immigrants working here)
3: third worlders do it because they are dependent on their kids in old age
4: many kids= much pride
5: they dont use condoms and shit
6: religion tells them to
7: they are bored as shit , thats why they reproduce all the time

the list goes on

I always figured the youngsters tend to die off due to their paleo lifestyle. the "adult" citizens you see running around as lvl one adventures had to survive 100 years of that shit.

at least in DnD.

I've always assumed that most of the elves go through an adventurer phase and they got so burned out they become hyper-conservative amishes who just want to retreat into their perfect, unchanging little world and quaint hobbies. Sure, they can be competent as fuck but they are into birdwatching and whittling wood instead of raising kids or fighting.

>"male" elves are about as masculine as "female" dwarves are feminine
On what established setting to you base this notion? I'm pretty sure you can name a lot!

To paraphrase the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant:

>Life as a power or quality is a continuum. You can hold onto it more, such as with the long lived Giants or the eternal Elohim, but you therefore cannot pass this power on so easily. Short lived races such as men use up their lives so quickly, and so pass much of it on to their many descendants. The price of eternity is life without children, and that is no life for giants, who treasure our children more than gold and song.

Tldr: Life is a finite resource in the universe.

Man, fuck evolution, I want a do-over!

...

Evolution. Unlike humans the sluts wouldn't have proved the fittest for survival. Rather, those that had a natural frigidity would have prospered.

OR!
>You give up and find an okay looking human girl that doesn't smell too bad and produce a thousand half-elves.