How can i make my dark elves in my setting not edgy ripoffs of the melniboneans?

how can i make my dark elves in my setting not edgy ripoffs of the melniboneans?

Don't put dark elves in your setting.

By making them something else? It's not hard, OP; use your brain for once.

Don't put dark elves in your setting.

If you don't have a role for them why put them in?

What's wrong with melniboneans?

Morrowind did a pretty good job of it, but it depends on what role you want them to fill in your setting. Don't put them into your setting just because DnD has dark elfs or whatever.

I ended up kinda unintentionally ripping off the Fallen Houses from Destiny and the Ayleids from Elder Scrolls when I made Drow for my setting.

>Race used to be asshole elves that ruled a huge empire with their magical prowess.
>Race becomes too decadent and their civilization starts to fracture into infighting and instability
>Their slaves, and outside races that feared their growing empire use this opportunity to attack and their society collapses completely.
>They flee underground to survive
>The infighting still continues and what's left of the civilization devolves into warring houses, even further destroying anything they have left
>Skip ahead to present day and their once great civilization is now nothing more than warring clans, each thinking their houses are the heirs to a long gone empire.
>Still consider themselves superior to all the other races even as they're forced to survive as raiders and scavengers and slavers hiding underground, a shadow of their former glory, still playing at nobility they lost long ago.
>The houses each have their own unique ways of surviving and bits of old forbidden magic. They might actually be a threat if they ever unified, but the houses hate eachother almost as much as they hate the "lesser" races, even as they're all in the same sinking boat.

How do you propose to out-edge the Melnis anyway?

...

Look up Shadow Elves from Mystara. They're less Melniboneans and more Fallout Vaulters

Have elves be tied to the seasons, and they're the fall/winter 'winter court.'

Dunmer are slightly turned down drow who use more than one kind of arthropod. Hell, they still even have a spider goddess of sex and murder.

Make them edgy rip offs but make them tiny, no bigger than a foot high. That way their edginess is hilarous.

its the reason why the dark elves are edgelords

here is the lore of my elves


>they are more mischievous than being cruel and they are less edgy
>just like the other elves in my setting they are created from the blood of one of the gods in the elven pantheon
>they have the usual physiology like the other elves but they have more body hair, males have less feminine features, sharper teeth, glowing red eyes and their skin color is dark gray skin,they are nicknamed by the other elves hobgoblins or pseudo goblins due to some of their features less elvish and more goblin
>the father/god of the dark elves was blamed for the death of the father and leader of the elven pantheon despite the lack of evidence and it led to a war that sundered the elves and their gods known as the Pantheon War

Ironically, by making them drow.
Drow are a lot of things, but aside from being evil and cruel they aren’t much like Melniboneans.

Ironically this dude was in talks to BE Elric at the time he was in this film.
Too bad, he would have made a fantastic Elric.

Their name.
You gotta admit, Melniboné is a shitty name, it just doesn't roll off the tongue, no matter how you pronounce it; and this is coming from the guy who used to roleplay an Elric ripoff in World of Warcraft because I loved him so much.

>If you don't have a role for them why put them in?
/thread.

do what I do and make all underdark societies be savage and small, as only makes sense given the enivronment

vermin-utilizing savage elf vampires (maybe not literally, but effectively)

>un-ironically enjoys Destiny

Perhaps it's difficult to say "Melniboné" in English but it fits better to French.

Make them elves with skin, then make them entirely different from traditional dark elves. People call them dark elves simply because they're elves with dark skin

All my elves are plants. “Dark” elves are carnivorous plants.

I had an idea about a setting where the "star elves" were once the seers and priests of their race as they split away from the fae invasion. After the elven principalities were defeated and mostly absorbed by a human NotRome, a large conclave of them gathered on a far-off isle to try some crazy ritual to contact the gods.

After decades of waiting,the not-high elves sent an expedition to check what was going on, and they realized that the star elves had fallen to demon-worshipping and were mostly batshit insane. Most of their bloodline is very susceptible to possession and similar effects, and most pledge themselves to a patron - if nothing else, to protect themselves from something else.

Basically, my idea was to make them pseudo-drow, which could also be tied to aberrations,fae or other outsiders.Some of them went to the underdark, invading dwarf territories and pushing some clans to the surface.

I wasn't trying to make them not edgy, just to refresh their place.

Easy. Just port melniboneans into your setting wholesale, that way they won't be ripoffs.

But bringing them in wholesale means Elric is in your setting too. And if Elric is in your setting, that means Stormbringer is in your setting. And if Stormbringer is in your setting, your setting is fucked.

Just put it during Sadric's reign. Or you want to go full nuts? Tehrali, the Green Empress or the reign of her son.

Be a super radical motherfucker and actually GO BACK TO THE SOURCE before you subvert the trope.

In Middle-Earth, dark elves are simply elves who never traveled west to Valinor, never dwelt near the Two Trees and witnessed their light, never developed the magic the high elves wielded upon their return to Middle-Earth etc. The "dark elves" either rejected the call to pilgrimage or started on the great journey but did not finish it. In a sense they are "lesser" than the high elves - those who had completed the journey and literally seen "the Light - but many came to be ruled by them anyway, and inherited some of the wisdoms and skills that originated from across the sea. Mirkwood's probably the only remaining settlement of nothing but dark elves in Middle-Earth, though Lothlorien contains a lot of them even if it's ruled over by a high elf; Galadriel (Celeborn however is not a high elf, he's a Sindar; a tribe of elves who never completed the journey.)

Just make them not edgy

Their an entirely fictional race, you can do pretty much anything you want with them, if you want your dark elves to actually be half naked desert dwelling tribals who all carry around magnum revolvers despite not even being able to speak go ahead.

Why not just use Tolkienesque Dark Elves? Semi-barbarous by other Elves' standards, they're probably the most savage and Man-like of the various branches of the Elvish family tree, both in technology and mindset.

Because that's wood elves these days

>calling Tolkien's dark elves the source
>not mythological dokkalfar/svartalfar
>implying modern dark elves even have anything to do with Tolkien's
Tolkien himself would be disgusted by you

Are you saying that the idea was for Prince Nuada to be Elric in the script, or that Luke Goss was considered for an Elric role in an unrelated movie?

fpbp

Do not put dark elves into your setting.

It doesn't roll of the tongue for Anglos. If you pronounce the vowels like their IPA counterparts it sounds fine.

Mel-ni-bo-nay
EzPz, scrub.
I'm not even French either

Make them edgy ripoffs of the Numenoreans

In my setting the dark elves are a result of a disastrous elven expedition into the sea below the world. They're basically pirate-slavers now.

You don't. You would have to go sideways to do that, and most people couldn't handle that level of weird.

nu/tg/pol/ can't handle any kind of weird, they'd freak out if you tried to do the world of flesh or a detailed description of a Black MtG planeswalker's personal sanctum nowadays.

So basically Elfquest.

Tolkien dark elves are either Avari, which are far north-eastern wood elves that never left the elvish homeland to migrate to the well lit continent of the Valar, or two individual elves, Eol and Maeglin, who were creepy incestuous dickheads that were great metallurgists.

I unironically like the way anime does them. They're elves, except they're brown.

>nu/tg/pol/

Has nothing to do with us mate, you lot wrecked your own comfy board with inbred, snide wank all by yourselves, how very grown up of you.

by not having the entire race have a single culture. give them a few different civilizations with a few different cultures that all reflect a vague core concept of the race

First question: What do you need the dark elves to do?
Second question: Can this be done by any other race/people/culture already in your setting.
Third question assumes the previous question is answered 'no': Can you write a powerful, thrilling, interesting enemy out of elves without falling back on murder, rape, misandry/misogyny, evil gods, or intense infighting?

If you cannot answer yes to the last question, you cannot write non-edgelord dark elves.

that is a setting that could definitely use ripping off more often

>IT'S
>THE
>NU/TG/POL

>muh originality
kys, cuck

You could nullify the edginess by making them fetish fuel. Drow aren't too far. Just tone down the cruelty, make the males smaller and submissive, turn up the BDSM stuff instead of outright torture/realistic slavery. Bam, definitely not Melniboneans.

>frenzied aussie awakes from his slumber

what's wrong with edgelords?

Make them a secret society. Draw on the Dimir from MtG, and look up /pol/ Jew theories and go from there.

I'm going to attempt to power attack the Aussie with my greataxe.

Bronze skin / blonde hair is truly the most aesthetic combo

>elves with skin
>not having a race of skinless elves

You seem to have completely missed the point of the post there user

why would you not want that?
They are the second best Dark Elves.

Right after Dunmer.

So i just answered your question there N'wah

>They're elves
Barely, they are also complete shit.

Actual or approximated cannibalism. So intra- or interspecies.

Extreme obsessions with honor-bound violence. Such as stalker-level pursuit of duels for minor cultural slights. Not necessarily to the death, but to mutilation. An eye for an eye to the illogical extreme.