>Elves are slender and beautiful and civilized and so much better than humans
>But at the same time they live in the woods and wipe their asses with bark and hunt and don't have agriculture and don't do scientific research
What is this primitivist bullshit? Give me one reason why these woodland savages are superior to civilized humans. And don't give me that "muh lifespan" bullshit.
That bark comes from trees with the softest bark imaginable, carefully cultivated over millenia.
Elves don't have to wipe.
Way too tight assed.
Elves can be whatever you want, user. They don't fucking exist. You're just spouting the same tired meme bullshit that I was back when I was a teenager.
Make your elves long lived because of superior use of technology/magic/eldritch secrets mankind is too much of a collective bitch to be able to use properly. Give them a xenophobic/exotic fetishistic society to add tension against/towards interacting with the other races. Or, make them full on tribal innawoods savages with practices considered taboo by other races, like cannibalism, ritual sacrifice, or holding hands.
Be creative and shit. Nobody's holding a gun to your head saying "this is the one truth."
>don't have agriculture and don't do scientific research
Your elves suck. In my game, elves do that stuff.
>inb4 more butthurt lower-races spreading ignorance about elf society and culture
How soft is that bark? Is it superior to pic related?
...
Elves have agriculture, it just that it looks nothing like ours because they've been at it longer. We have domesticated crops, they've domesticated entire ecosystems.
You see elven settlements have those so called druidic elders who manage food production and keep their settlements in harmony with nature while being a magitech society.
They hunt for protein (who is stupid enough to believe that they'd only feed on nuts like squirells), sport, tradition and mainly to keep them selves from being pussified by a piss easy lifestyle.
That's actually a pretty intredasting interpretation. For the sake of the thought experiment, what would a domesticated ecosystem look like?
I actually think this is a really cool idea.
Ever been kissed by an angel?
Right on your asshole?
Trees magicd up to produce more nuts that serve as food for animals the elves prey on.
They use the unusable remains of hunted animals as dung for said trees.
Forrests grown into labirynths that serve as a natural ''dungeon'' compleete with plant traps to off unauthorized intruders.
(the druids built a wall and made the humans pay for the spell components)
>What is this primitivist bullshit?
Typically Elves will have a High Elf variety and those are the ones who are better than everyone else. You describe Wood Elves and Wood Elves are rarely put on a pedestal.
This is why Warcraft is best, as it has both elf types.
This.
It doesn't make any sense because everyone who copied Tolkien didn't have half the dedication and sense of world building he did and made shallow imitations of surface readings of his works. Elves lived in forests, and didn't seem to be doing the industrial thing, so lets go with that. Despite it being stated repeatedly that any craft man could do was but a pale imitation of what elves did, even smithing. It was literally magic that kept their forest societies running, or else the encroaching shittiness of the age of Man would drive them off to the Heaven because they were literally too perfect to live on the new, less awesome Middle Earth.
It doesn't make sense because it never made sense. The only time it made sense was when it wasn't like what people think it's like. And now we're coming around again and people are trying to find ways to make what never made sense make sense, when what didn't make sense was a misinterpretation of a vastly different idea to begin with. It's like trying to analyze the artist merit of that Jesus image that woman tried to touch up.
I won't dismiss the endeavor. This sort of arguing is the backbone of Veeky Forums. But it's important to know the history of a thing too. The history is why the stupid thing is the stupid thing it is. The arguing is wringing some usefulness out it.
Tolkien justified living in the forest in that elves didn't live on random forests, they lived on supernaturally benign enchanted woods. Them just taking care of the land was enough for it to start acquiring magical properties. The equivalent of modern science was the realm of orcs and corrupted Ainur, and elves preferred working with their own hands
Ah, the degenerate High Elf. Worse than their barbaric tribal cousins, High Elves show a great degree of sexual dimorphism. High Elf man hide in basements while their women fuck everything that moves like the Harlots they are. Who can forget the statutes of erect cocks taking the place of roadsigns, or the Elfin man's obsession with piss...
Everything like interlocking gears, like a forests designed by modrons. No predators that attacks them except the ones designed for the hunt. A highly complex waste disposal system made up of scavengers who eat the waste, then insects that eat their waste. They feed bugs so bugs can feed other animals and on up the foodchain, so they don't even have to specially feed their large animals because they're getting everything they need from the system. Birds and flying insects flock in different ways depending on what's happening in the forest, like signal flags, and every other creature understands these signals and acts accordingly, subconsciously, and other animals watch and take their ques from them. You only need a few people overseeing it. Like nature it runs itself, it's just more efficient about it. So efficient you can harvest everything you need and still have a bounty left over for whatever you want.
What about the Aen Sidhe and Aen Elle from the Witcher?
I cringed a bit, plese stop.
What's this? Elven /pol/ ?
Next we are missing the Yugoshit wood elves and Russian Drow.
All of these. We can stop now.
>In Soviet Russia, spider exterminate YOU!
The only wood dwelling elves in Tolkien were the Silvans, who WERE backwards primitives, by elven and most human standards alike. It's why they get their shit pushed in in both the first and second ages, because even after thousands of years, they cannot into metal armor or weapons better than hunting bows.
The actually advanced elves? The Noldor and Vanyar and Sindar? They build cities and castles and plant crops.
...
>It was literally magic that kept their forest societies running, or else the encroaching shittiness of the age of Man would drive them off to the Heaven because they were literally too perfect to live on the new, less awesome Middle Earth
It's a bit more nuanced than that.The elves in Middle-Earth were the edgelords who had repeatedly refused the summons of the Valar to the Undying Lands and the Noldor who went back to Middle-Earth on the First Age because muh silmarils. They went away because they had been unnaturally extending the beauty of their kingdoms with the power of the elven rings, and those stopped working when the One was destroyed. Middle-Earth going to shit is not the fault of Men, that's Morgoth's doing. The thing is that at least in theory Men aren't bound by prophecies, curses or even the music of the Ainur proper, so IN THEORY they're the only ones capable of at least delaying Middle-Earth's doom, whereas the Elves get to live on a place where everything is as unwithering as themselves at the cost of stopping being relevant to the world proper
Nothing is poisonous to you. Food is easily distinguished, easy and pleasing to eat, and nutritious beyond reason.
All animals like you. The ones that could take you in a fight are naturally subservient and/or protective of you.
The terrain is easy to understand and traverse, with flora naturally grown to indicate navigational data (all trees subtly signal north, certain plants flourish near dangerous terrain).
The climate you prefer is fostered, with shelter areas becoming ecological niches for beneficial creatures and repulsive to creatures you wouldn't bunk with.
Your waste is quickly and scentlessly converted to neutral substances by the decomposers of the ecosystem. The terrain forms natural septic areas filled with perfumed bacterial life. The nearest plants form load-bearing lattices of wood for ease of use over the pit, and nearby foliage is soft enough to use as toilet paper and easily recognised from a distance.
The "weeds" of the place are universally resource plants (i.e. ones easily used as cordage, tinder, paper, etc).
...
The Sindar don't even exist on the third age. The silvan elves are the result of the Sindar mingling with the Nandor. It's also not that they can't make metal, they don't want to. They refuse to do so much as cut a tree
Asshurt knife ear manlet detected.
Elven /pol/? Bah, that place is full of asshurt treebeards. Dwarven /pol/ is the place to be, and you can tell your Gnome masters the same, Leandril.
>knife ear
>manlet
Your headcanon is out of control.
Of course the Sindar exist. What the fuck do you call Thranduil and Legolas? They are very distinct from the Silvan, who are just descended from the Nandorin, full stop.
>It's also not that they can't make metal, they don't want to. They refuse to do so much as cut a tree
[citation needed]
Oh, and to add into that, the realms of the Sindar don't exist anymore on themselves because the fucking ocean swallowed them along with the whole of Beleriand after the war of wrath
Ah go fuck your self you dobule-beard of a dwarf.
The Sindar AS A PEOPLE don't exist anymore. Silvan royalty has mostly Sindar ancestry, but that doesn't mean they're a separate entity from the Silvans
The Sindar on themselves learned craftmanship from the Noldor, and the whole reason they were allowed to rule the Nandor was their superior knowledge and wisdom. So no, they aren't primitive, much less the Galadhrim who are ruled by an actual Noldor queen
This is especially ridiculous since you're painting them as backwater savages when it's remarked over and over how incredibly wonderful Lothlorien is and how it's the most "elven" place left in Middle-Earth
Imma repeat what I said over in the "why does tg hate elves" thread -
>elves in particular have been fucked over by moron after moron who doesn't know how to write elves except "forests, longevity, bows" and copypasta from previous moron.
So basically the cultivated forests of the middle ages and still today in quite a few parts of the world (where do you think truffles come from).
It isn't really anything particularly new.
>The Sindar AS A PEOPLE don't exist anymore.
Sure they do. Go look up the Appendix notes of the fighting in the War of the Last Alliance, and you have the Sindarin royal contingent described as being a very different fighting force than the Silvans that are along with them. And as you note, the two main "polities" of Silvans are ruled over by non-Silvans, with a Sindarin king of the Woodland Realm and whatever you want to call Lorien's government, since it's not clear whether the Noldorin Galadriel or the Sindarin Celeborn is in charge.
If you mean there aren't any Sindarin ethno-kingdoms around, sure, but you don't have that for any of the other Elven realms in Middle Earth either, given that there are all 4 of them left and they're all reasonably mixed by this point. So I really don't see what your point is.
>he Sindar on themselves learned craftmanship from the Noldor,
The dwarves originally, actually.
>, and the whole reason they were allowed to rule the Nandor was their superior knowledge and wisdom.
Their superior power and weaponmaking, which let them protect the Nandorin from the orcs.
Which, by the way, isn't the ancestry of the Sindarin rule east of the Misty Mountains. From Appendix B
>but before the building of the Barad-Dur many of the Sindar pressed eastward, and some established realms in the forests far away, where their people were mostly Silvan Elves. Thranduil, king in the north of Greenwood the Great, was one of these.
2nd age, not first.
>So no, they aren't primitive, much less the Galadhrim who are ruled by an actual Noldor queen
They quite literally and explicitly are described as such; it's their rulers, their non-silvan rulers, who do all the metal, stone, and magic work.
oocities.org
1/2
>This is especially ridiculous since you're painting them as backwater savages when it's remarked over and over how incredibly wonderful Lothlorien is and how it's the most "elven" place left in Middle-Earth
Which is solely due to the power of Galadriel weilding the elven ring. You don't see anything comparable in the Woodland Realm. And even in Lothlorien, we see border guards that can barely speak Westron, no evidence of usage of metal armor, stealth, misdirection, and trickery, rather than fighting orcs in open battle a la the Noldor or the Sindar usually did.
>elves
>pooping
Your first mistaken assumption. If that were true how would their boipuccies be as pristine as they are?
2.bp.blogspot.com
>elves are basically humans
WHEN will this meme die?
>Evidence of advancement
>Westron, metal armour, and being dishonest
So if the Fellowship wandered up to the border of the modern USA, and encountered honest, English-speaking people without metal armour, you'd read that as another set of barbarous cavepeople?
Post Eldar crystals nao!
Elves are Western culture and Orcs represent the cultural and enviromental impact of modernity.
>we see border guards that can barely speak Westron
Elves can learn languages faster than any human if they actually want to. They hadn't needed it for centuries
>no evidence of usage of metal armor
>no evidence of usage of metal armor, stealth, misdirection, and trickery, rather than fighting orcs in open battle a la the Noldor or the Sindar usually did.
You are literally pulling this out of your ass. Elves in the first age SPECIFICALLY refused to fight Morgoth openly if at all possible until Turin convinced them to take a offensive stance
>Sindarin ethno-kingdoms around, sure
That was literally what I was saying. Your redundant nitpicking doesn't mean it's wrong
Guys, where's the comic, I only have the first half and not the punchline
not even unlikely in the right cases.
Looking at LOTR cannon, elves never needed science being a species so close to the song that created the mortal realm. Anything an elf makes is kind of the best version of that thing it could be. Ropes hold fast or untie as the user desires they might, food keeps unspoiled for months through hell and revitalizes the body by the mere mouthful, swords light up with brilliance enough to repel evil as if they had taken levels as a paladin when forged. I mean, what an example of an excuse. When an elf craftsman in this setting decides to make something, it is going to be the best fucking version of that thing anyone has seen.
Then again they also weigh like two pounds, can't actually get drunk no matter how much liquor they down, and committed some pretty horrendous genocide in years long past.
Nice strawman there, user.
>Elves can learn languages faster than any human if they actually want to. They hadn't needed it for centuries
Which is less than the lifetime of normal elves. Every real Sindarin we've seen can communicate in multiple languages. Haldir's brothers only know Silvan.
>You are literally pulling this out of your ass. Elves in the first age SPECIFICALLY refused to fight Morgoth openly if at all possible until Turin convinced them to take a offensive stance
Have you actually read the Silmarillion? Because I'm starting to think you haven't. What is the Battle under the Stars? What is Dagor Aglareb? What is the 400 year long siege of Angband? The Battle of Sudden Flame? Nirneath Arnoediad? The Noldor Elves openly fought and stood against Morgoth for the overwhelming majority of the first age by length.
When did they start taking up guerilla style tactics? After Nirneath Arnoediad when they were all but wiped out. Something that the Silvans had been doing for FAR longer, because they were far weaker.
Elves are made to bully
I prefer to think of them as more of early adapters if bioengineering. Doing some magically enhanced selective breeding of trees to make wood of excellent quality and use, crops that resist blights and pests but also don't go nuts with overgrowing where they shouldn't, plants that do grow wild and produce fruits and other edibles that the animals of the forest eat that makes them agreeable to elves.
They see all this excessive metalworking industry and how it hurts their bioshit and get cranky about it. They tamed nature and made it clean and useful, but lesser species just oppose nature in brash and unsophisticated ways.
>That was literally what I was saying. Your redundant nitpicking doesn't mean it's wrong
Then by applying the same logic, there are no Noldor, and no Silvans, since we don't have ethnokingdoms of those either.
Lack of an independent political ethno-state doesn't mean that said ethnicity doesn't exist.
>see elf girl
flip her skirt
>see elf boy
establish dominance in masculinity
>afterlife even more full of spider!
gets me every time
I've seen jokes like this before, iirc it's that those crystals are Eldar turds.
The elves of Mirkwood got drunk during a party, that's how Bilbo and the dwarves got away.
Besides, their problem in the third age has always been numbers; an elf takes centuries to reach adulthood, while an army of orcs can be raised in a few short years, if not months.
Elven rope might be the greatest shit ever, but not when you have to wait 5 years for a length of it
I always saw D&D elves is being obsessed with beauty, to the point where Corellon isn't even Good in the D&D sense, and he hates orcs because they're ugly and not because they're violent.
Basically, the only way he's 'better' than Gruumsh is that he doesn't actively kill people who aren't orcs, making him Lawful as opposed to Gruumsh's Chaos.
Everyone knows that elves, like girls, don't poop.
Did you even read Lord of the Rings?
How to use them.
You wouldn't happen to have this doujin, would you?
Coughstillgetslaughteredbymore''primitive''racescough
Elves have curated forests.
In that they have modified the nature around them to be self caring farms which produce all the goods they want without them having to do anything.
Elves have effectively invented the industrial revolution, and then the robotic revolution, but with plants.
Corellon is chaotic good.
This seems like the thread to ask. When was it that elves stopped being fey creatures?
I know they were considered fey in 4th edition D&D.
For once, it's probably actually Tolkien. You get a bit of the elven alienness in the Hobbit, but by LoTR and the Silm, they have a human enough emotional range and do a lot of "normal" human activities like growing and eating food, making tools, building houses, etc; that they're really more Humans with modifications than something completely eldritch and strange.
The forests are just overgrown gardens. one of the Elf Kings was real into horticulture a few milennia back, but lost interest after a while. It was one of those things you really had to be there for.
The hunting is more a way to keep the archers fresh, and wizards do magical research.
Elves are sentient plants that can move and talk, they however cast a glamour on themselves to appear humanlike, or better.
They either rape or want to be raped, because they can harvest your essence/life force during the act of fornication.
The only way to truly kill and Elf is to burn it to ash, otherwise the elf core will continue to project it's glamour until you leave, in which it will scurry away and begin the ruse again.
If you dispose of them by throwing them away, what's the point of them existing? Surely they'd be a reusable resource that is better than toilet paper.
The point is that elves are just naturally better than humanity. Their baseline state is superior - human contrivances like "soap" or "plumbing" are crutches to compensate for what we do not have naturally.
That's the big thing about Tolkien. He never quite got that the "Dreaming spires" of Cambridge, or the idyllic shires were made possible by the black lands. The wealth and power of industry driving the British Empire.
....
Wait.
Wait.
Mother FUCKER. Just because there isn't a literal connection doesn't mean one isn't there. Fuck! I've been reading too many fucking shallow left wing writers. OF COURSE HE GOT THAT. That's why they end when the one ring is destroyed. That's why he as the elven rings, and indeed all magic in a sense, be tied to the One Ring. That's why everything changes and seems to get worse when they win!
Dang.
Campaign I am GMing has elves/corrupted fae as enemies, any tips on how to play them, how to make them scary?
I think it was best done in Sword of Shanarra - humanity was a fucked over race that had been the main baddie's puppets last time around, and due to that they fractured and never wanted a large government again, whereas the elves actually maintained a kingdom and a large standing army, though they were pretty useless without a good king.
“Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
Go unseen horrors world of darkness fae/elves route.
Isn't Sword of Shanarra a post apocalyptic earth? Elves aren't elves so much as the descendants of rich people who got genetically tailored to age well and be athletic/agile.
Elves are actually prudish Necromancers.
Pretty much, yeah, before post-apoc fantasy started getting so common today. But I don't know if the elves were genetic testing or just random luck - the dwarves were evolved, presumably trolls and goblins too.
I am totally stealing this, if I ever do a setting with elves.
Mirkwood elves are shitty, hillbilly redneck elves anyways.
Seeing how you can't really characterize an eldrich being, without humanizing it to some degree at least, that development was rather unavoidable.
Not casting Legolas as a hillbilly prince was another of Jackson's sins.
The Amazon, ca. 600 ya..
It depends on what kind of elf we're talking about. There are the "ancient high civilization" elves, the "like humans" elves and the "barbarian elves".
For example, in German DSA, you have the "barbarian" elves, while in D&D, you usually have all of them.
Poul Anderson published The Broken Sword in 1951, same year Fellowship came out. It takes place in England and Finland, with the elves, trolls, and other more spiritual creatures dwelling in faerie, which is invisible to mortals.
Anderson's elves were morally inferior to humans, soulless though immortal, and were turned away by the sign of the cross and the name of Jesus. They were man-sized and fought with axes on longboats.
Well, to be fair, he is of noble blood, not of Mirkwood blood proper.
Oh, and they were fiendishly powerful magicians and more technologically advanced than humans but not Norse gods as well.
The most underrated of posts.
Like everything else, the Victorians pussified them. This is where elves as tiny cookie and shoe making fucks comes from
Tolkien actually gave back some of their granduer
Not that it matters (because it's an argument thread not an ideas thread) but elves in my setting acruelly were one of the last races to pick up written language. Their long lives mean they usually had lots of time to memorize the sayings and wisdom of their parents. As such, elves are masters of song, poem and proverb but they aren't really the masters of civilization.
For the record, dwarves were the first to settle and discovered beer accidently when they started storing grain. (Just like real history but with dwarves.)
Humans were the first to develop written language and numbers.
Dwarves were the first to develop algebra and trigonometry.
Elves were the first to domesticate horses but humans were the first to weaponize them.
Stone axes were developed by orcs as was the notion of fire as a weapon of mass distruction/cooking.
Goblins were first to make simple coastal ships but dwarven trig was needed to navigate further reaches.
>Anderson's elves were morally inferior to humans, soulless though immortal, and were turned away by the sign of the cross and the name of Jesus They were man-sized and fought with axes on longboats.
Just how I like 'em: tall, morally deprived and unevangelized.
Also, The Three Little Pigs is a telephone-game version of the tale of the dwarves defending their first towns against an orcish tribe. The towns on the plains and in the woods didn't fare too well...
It's the dwarven version I tell to my kids at bed time.
Thats your setting brat
>Monster fairy tales are just human fairy tales slightly adjusted to better fit their new audience
It makes it more fun to tell the story. They have asked for three pigs no less than 7 mirrion times and I needed a way to imagine e the story that didn't make my head asplode.
So I researched peliolithic tech and made it work.
>pulling the feces out of your ass
the hell?
WHERE DO THESE ELVES COME FROM? I HAVE LOOKED FOR FIVE MINUTES AND FOUND BUT NOTHING.
>I HAVE LOOKED FOR FIVE MINUTES
Lurk more.