Why do elves always depend on the setting?

Why do elves always depend on the setting?

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Because people who like them can tolerate slightly more creativity and variation than the people who like dwarves can.

Great. It's not like we had a similar thread that died just some hours ago. It's not like this will actually help anyone that is interesting in roleplaying and getting more knowledgable in all the different settings. It's just another thread about nothing that legitimizes itself on Veeky Forums by putting the word "elf" in OPs post.

Then maybe Veeky Forums should've accepted the answer "depends on the setting" when you had the chance.
I couldn't beat you, so I joined you.

Because, Tolkien elves suck, and Tolkien dwarves rock. What's there to understand?

ps Aerenal best elves

The setting depends on the elves.

>Tolkien elves suck
Opinion discarded completely.

I'd have to speculate that it's because elves are based on many different myths where they fill rolls from Santa's helpers, to Forest sprites, to ancient humanity+, while dwarves are drawn mostly just from Scandinavian mythology, to my knowledge

It depends on the setting.

Because elves are fantasy fapbait, and so everyone customizes them to their own fetishes.

My fetish is manly elves.

That's kinda bull. Dwarves are just more standardized, honestly. There are plenty of fairytale dwarves around, and different cultures have dwarf-like creatures too.

>literally setting the bar at nature lovers and basket-weaving
Sure showed me.

>literally setting the bar
>literally

The real question is whats under the skirt?
Is there a penis?
Is there not a penis?
We'll never know until we lift the skirt!

I like to refer to elves as Schrodinger's fuccbois

So, you never read the Silmarillion? Because this only shows to me that you are completely uninformed when it comes to elves and the Noldor, and didn't read that one book that would eliminate 90% of all the elf-memes that plague this site.

Pffft. Yeah okay. Go ahead and tell me where any dwarf in Tolkien's work literally maimed the personification of Evil. Or tackled a fire demon off a fucking cliff. Or swore an oath so metal it fucked up his followers and descendants for millenia afterwards.

Because lots of completely different and unrelated fantasy creatures all got called "elves" by the English because they're lazy and so there's lots of "elf" material to pull from, whereas Dwarves are pretty much just small humans/trolls from Scandinavian and eastern european folklore.

Larger pool of inspiration, thus more options for authors.

They're setting addicts.

Because everything depends on the setting you dumb cunt.

Depends on the setting.

Because, like orcs, the tolkien deffinition that stuck was a lot less strong than say the archetype for dwarves.

Dwarves always are Short underground jew/norse/scots who like making things and drinking

Elves are always magical and pointy earned and may or may not be somewhat alien and may or may not have strong connections with nature.

Much less of a well defined thing so worldbuilders have a lot more gaps to fill.

From what I can tell, the elf in the OP pic is a girl, but that's only a half-answer, really. Citation: attached pic.

I think I have seen more artworks depicting this scene than any other historical or fictional scene

Citation as to why it's only a half-answer. I realized after I posted that was kind of confusing.

Why exactly, is a question for the gods to answer. All we know is it happens, a kind of rapid adaptation in which elves can adopt to a given environment in a matter of years and thus accomplishing what other species require generations upon generations to do.

The adaptations can be immense too, adjusting skin color to fit the environment, temperature adaptations, and in the most extreme case of the Sea Elves even growing gills.

But don't bother asking them how they do it, user, for they could no less explain something so natural to them than you could explain to them how we avoid doing as they do. Simply accept it, and be glad for the number of trade opportunities that just opened to you by learning just one language!

What do you mean why do they all speak the same language? Did I not just tell you to stop overthinking this?

For a good reason.

It's interesting seeing the variation

Certainly. Because it's such a great scene.

Because everything depends on the setting.

"Depends on the setting" is essentially telling you that your own magnificient or deviant or magnificiently deviant imagination is the limit to what your elves, dwarves, humans, gnomes, orcs, trolls, ogres, fae catboys and mushroompeople and whatever new stuff you can come up with may embody.

Each author is the sole sovereign of his work and thus is free to create, shape and twist any and all ideas he may conceive. This is true just as much for his own original ideas as well as ideas for which he may have gotten inspiration from other works, but decided to spin the tale differently just that tiny bit.

The only question is: Have you executed your ideas well and thus do they make a seamless fictional construct that doesn't demand too much suspension of disbelief or have you just plastered the first three ideas off the top of your head together and declared "Such is elf!"?

Because the latter is which will earn you ridicule on the web, while the former will earn you praise and maybe even other people honouring your work with the sacred words stealing this

I like running my campaigns a bit odd.

My Dwarves are the naturey druidic shaman living in the forests and boroughs.

Elves are militaristic Roman/Athenian esque civilizations.

And Humans are Nomadic Desert people or Sailors.

So...yeah.

That better not be Kirito being a genderswapped elf or I'm really starting to lose trust in my boner.

For the most part, the "elves" of a given setting are as much a part of the setting as the wall paper aesthetics it's molded on and often used to described or outline the "condition" of the setting as well hence the whole dying but proud noble race bullshit they are often saddled with or in some cases they are the up and coming race for the next generation or some such bullshit.

In general, they are everyone's special snowflake race that can be molded in such a way to their personal liking with whatever features they want.

As ashamed as I am to say, Kirito used heavy Bastard Swords, not Rapiers.

I searched for it user, it is not,
pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=43320520
It appears to be an oc for a freeform zelda rpg.

Notably NOT Tolkien's dwarves - they're based on jews.

I have dwarven former slaves who went full Spartacus. I also have racist xenophobic dwarves and dwarves who are known as "elf-friends" for allying with their elven neighbors over the ages.

Of the elves we have Italian merchant city-state ones. Then further north we have gypsy elves who settle disputes among the clans by an Olympic Games sorta event every decade. Then there are the elves that live nearer the true fey who are more crystal than flesh. Finally the elves who nicknamed their neighbor dwarves "elf-friends" live in a massive magically protected forest within a ring of mountains (which the dwarves live in).

Mind you my setting also has Spartan centaurs, a Holy Roman Empire on steroids, crazed Hun horse-riders who are sworn enemies to the Centaurs and the not!HRE, Norse halflings (and cut-and-paste hobbit halflings), a Catfolk empire based on the Ottoman Turks, and an Orcish not!Ummayad empire (which is subservient to the catfolk empire).

Because on one hand some writers use them as the enigmatic weird race of tall beauties, tolkien rip offs or scandinavian childeater monsters. On the other other hand they might reflect on the person's fetishes or depictions of a perfect being. On the foot they just want fantastical racism and thus make elves humans except they have funny ears and used to have a big empire.

Perhaps to a degree, but probably more indirectly.

Tolkien's races were more depictions of social classes more than they were ethnicities. That's not to say ethnicities are not in the picture (Easterlings spring to mind), but that the races of Middle Earth are more representative of societal classes.

Hobbits represent the common man, and live the idealized middle-class life. They're small of stature because they represent the small stature with which the common man stands among all the other great peoples, but they often surprise people with their common-man's courage. Dwarves could be compared to the Nouveau-Riche, the rising merchant class that grew out of the industrial revolution and Elves draw a lot of parallels with the Nobility (especially the British POV of nobility and royalty), and their leaving the world represents their decreasing relevance in society when they were once all-powerful. This also serves to highlight the differences in architecture as well; the Dwarves taking after Art Deco while the Elves take after Art-Nouveau.

If you're going to run standard fantasy races and just ignore what makes them what they are just call them something else

Dude, not even that user but the Simarrill ion was a boring piece of work; if you're going to shit on a dude's nerd cred, that one, at least to me, gets a by.

The simirrilion is pretty fucking great in my opinion, it's not a novel though, it's a history book, so if you aren't the sort of person who loves lore it's not really for you.

how extraordinarily petty

I know this elf.

Well the world is against you.

Don't say that last one like it's a good thing, Feanor was the most arrogant high and mighty greedy piece of shit. His entire family was cursed because he was a giant paranoid self-centered asshole and he knowingly condemned his entire family to death because his pride was hurt when Melkor stole the Silmarils. He caused the expulsion of most of the Noldor because the Teleri weren't going to let him doom his entire country for some shiny stones that he wouldn't even use when their doing so would have helped repair the Two Trees that Melkor destroyed before he escaped to Middle Earth, so he slaughtered them. He died after foolishly charging into Angband much like he lived, completely and utterly convinced of his own importance and deluded into that he could never be wrong. Fingolfin should never have let Feanor claim the throne of Noldor after Finwes death, he had proven already he was too arrogant and proud to be a responsible leader.

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>Not posting best version

Shame on you Veeky Forums

...

Because more people like elves and write more variation about elves. Even those brown sexy Japanese elves everyone on Veeky Forums hates help because they're simply something new. After a while you have an elf for everything.

Meanwhile nobody bothers with adapting the other races into something new. Dwarves are always short, hairy guys with a Scottish accent that love to drink and live in mountains. Halflings/hobbits/gnomes/manlets are always jolly fellows who are harmless and friendly but somehow magically attuned to... something.

In fact, I'd say elves are the least boring of all fantasy races.

Because it's a setting-dependent variable. Races fall under what we commonly refer to as a 'setting' in this context.

Like all fetish fuel they can be tweaked to taste.

You are one of the worst things happening to elves.

It's true, though. There's elves for just about every fetish you can think off. Waifu Elves, Muscle Elves, Trap Elves, Femdom Elves, Submissive Elves, Vore Elves, Pregnant Elves, Brown Elves, Blue Elves, Giant Elves, Futa Elves...

Not sure if that's just the obvious consequence of there being half a dozen varieties of elf in most fantasy settings already, or because elves are hot so people want to involve them in their fetish.

Most of them work with humans as well and things like muscles elves and also milf elves you didn't mentioned are a travesty that should never happened.

I'm aware that elves were pretty sexualized from the beginning. But then there are, even on Veeky Forums, faggots that have elf-folders which only contain animu girls. That only know this one side of elves. That bend and mold elves to their taste until there is barely anything elf-like about them left.

Because everything we talk about on here. depends on the setting. These aren't real things we talk about on this board, you DO understand that right?

It's fiction.
It's all made up.
It's not fucking real.

And as such there are no "rules" for anything even if you make D&D the base assumption for all questions ever because even D&D encompasses a widely varying series of styles by inherent design as a semi-generic fantasy system.
You need CONTEXT to answer very the specific questions that Veeky Forums asks, and since absolutely nothing in these things we talk about had context that we do not intentionally provide, short one-sentence questions without context are unanswerable questions.
In real life gravity's context is that it's not a function of large amounts of mass mass distorting space and time, while in a GM's setting if he says gravity's context is caused by dark energy generated by a trillion invisible unicorn farts in the upper stratosphere, then his statement is 100% accurate due to the nature of everything being made up.

Is this what elves should be like?
reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/4nt5og/question_a_question_about_female_elven_anatomy/
>I wanna apologize in advance if any of this sounds unprofessional or if I get some things wrong. I'm definitely not a genius on these things considering I'm male.

>So in my world, elves are slender. And when I mean slender, I mean the average elven body type is very thin (obesity in elves can happen though, along with bulking up and curving, though it takes more work than it does for humans).

>Now, one thing I noticed a lot in fantasy is the trend of making women as busty as possible. So, I wanted go reverse that in my elven population. Therefore, elven women are incredibly flat chested. There is substance enough to differentiate from boys but barely. Now, the breasts are important to us because they feed our children and are storages of fat that produce milk. We generally have 2-3 children within at least 10 years and after that we don't really feed anyone.

>Well, what if we only had 2-3 kids within a 10 year range of time—and then continued on living 200 years afterwards? I am trying to find a logical reason, other than just being designed that way, as to why elven women would have such flat chests. Is there? Or does none of that have any correlation to breast size at all?

>Edit: This is slightly related, but what about males? Is there any correlation of penis size to body fat? I'm thinking elven microdicks might've been the reason why breeding between humans and elves never took place in my world

>Therefore, elven women are incredibly flat chested.
>elven microdicks
>73 comments

Not you again. Fuck off.

Elves must be demi-fae, sharp-eared and slightly alien. That's all.

I'm just going to leave this here.

youtube.com/watch?v=3aB6CPyO0Ww

There is actually no correlation between breast size and ability produce milk. Having breasts of some kind is beneficial since it's easier for the baby to suckle from them than if the chest was completely flat, but big breasts are purely a secondary sexual characteristic.

I also gave the elves in my setting small breasts. Elves are supposed to be slender, so big fat titties would seem out of place. Although I did also give them Wakfu-tier hips...

Because fantasy is about imagining new worlds that can be however the fuck the creator wants. Of course there is massive variation between each work.

Just no.

>Elves are supposed to be slender, so big fat titties would seem out of place. Although I did also give them Wakfu-tier hips...
This setting gets my approval. Fuck everyone that thinks elves should have cowtits.

Tell that to all the anons posting threads in the format:
"Why do [fictional species that depends on the setting] always [gross generalization that's only true in D&D]?"
In seven years I have been on this site, they did not accept "depends on the setting" as the only answer anyone can give without lying.

So I give up. You win. Phrasing a statement as a question makes it true.
Why do you fuck your own mom? No, you can't say you don't fuck her, it's automatically true and you have to explain why!

Every race should depend on the setting, mate.

I like your tastes in korean calculator games.

Why do you have to use elves for your shitposting? Can't you leave them alone?

I'll switch it up when I run out of permutations.
>Why do dragons always have exactly five limbs, no more no less?

Why, generic stuff that's relatively same in most settings is nice.

How about trying to look at material in the context it's presented in as opposed to trying to interpret it through the narrow lens of your own existence?

I like Dark Sun dwarves. They're kinda neat.

Non-generic is also good, as long as it isn't dumb subversion and inversion for the sake of """"originality"""". Done right, everything goes.

2 wings
4 legs
1 tail

5... does not compute.

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Literally everything depends on the setting, dumbass.

People on this site make lazy threads, it's been about time you noticed.

The reason people answer "depends on the setting" when OP asks "why do dwarves always use pottery imagery in their tile patterns?" is because the actual answer "No they don't, here are counter examples" achieves nothing but list of other works at fiction, which at best gives the guy with a tile pattern fetish some new fap material. Lazy answers for lazy threads.

I learned that after maybe a month here, what took you so long?

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>fingolfin
>white or blonde haired

kekimus maximus

So are the Numenoreans because their language is Semitic.

Different user here.

I disagree with you.

Simirrilion was metal

There's more types of elves than colors on the rainbow & elements on the periodic table.

If saying "no they don't, here's a counter-example" acheives nothing of value, and saying "depends on the setting" acheives nothing of value, maybe they should stop making lazy threads.

>Silmarillion
>Elves fucking up: The Book

Back to /a/nal with you

Nobody else did the job until the Valar showed up.

PROUDLY THE HIGH LORD
CHALLENGES DOOM
"LORD OF SLAVES" HE CRIES!

A lot of misconceptions about Tolkien could be cleared with just one paragraph from the Silmarillion
>If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred; and if any change shall come and the Marring be amended, Manwë and Varda may know; but they have not revealed it, and it is not declared in the dooms of Mandos.
The whole point of the setting is that the world is constantly going down the drain and most of its beauty has already been destroyed, because the god of evil attempted to corrupt the works of all the other gods before the sentient races existed, and SUCCEEDED. The result is the universe as we know it. That battle has already been lost, the fighting is to prevent it from going to shit even faster

That's why Tolkien's elves worked for the setting. They were the fading memory of a mythical past, not the supreme master race.

Or just play regular humans only.

What about dragons that got wings that are also legs?

Why do humans?

That's fuckin neat.

Why not do humans.

Because people who need their perfect society of waifus can never possibly agree on what makes a perfection that truly touches their tralala, so they keep on trying. The fucking faggots.

What about the signing of the US constitution?

Not everyone is from burgerland user

Wat?

I mean, if someone's not from the USA, then where are supposed to live? In Canada?

Elves are part of the THE classic fantasy races along with Dwarves, Dragons, etc.

People get bored of standard Elves. They twist the formula to make it a little more interesting. It's as simple as that. Usually they fuck up and just make a bunch of dumbass mary sues but sometimes it works.

My elves are artificers much like Dwarves. They weave glass silk which they build their cities from and use magic-fueled chainswords and chainbows made of reinforced glass. Part of their schtick is that they're as industrious as my "dwarves" (which aren't even really dwarves in the first place), they just focus on aesthetic beauty whereas the dwarves are all about hilariously violent shit like dual-barrelled automatic explosive shotguns.

Well for one thing, Elves are a lot more popular than Dwarfs.

Secondly, Elves are a lot easier to do than Dwarfs, because mystical characters are easier than comedic ones. Comedy is involving and needs details and timing, while mystical aloofness is in many ways easier to write than an ordinary character.

Finally, Dwarves aren't as fuckable to most people as Elves are.

What would be the maximum level to keep a low-magic campaign consistent?

Wrong thread, sorry