Can you believably make your fantasy race elves without giving them elven ears...

>Dwarves

You're the idiot. I BTFO your smug remark. Get out.

They are called dwarves and explicitly follow all the traditional tropes for dwarves, so yes, they're dwarves. Just not short.

>2 threads about elves up, one which is on autosage
Some faggot: >:(

>blue elves
Djinni. Rub their lamps and ask for a wish.

Okay, jokes over. No one could possibly be as stupid as you are pretending to be. You broke any suspension of disbelief right now, and you might as well stop, because you're not going to bait out any more replies out of me by just acting so incomprehensibly idiotic.

Nice try

You don't have to fly into a frothing rage over getting BTFO over one dumb remark. Just leave the thread.

If you need elves with long ass ears to make them visually distinct from humans, you're not very creative. Or smart. And you haven't consumed much fantasy at all. In fact, am I responding to bait?

I mean, I'm not saying that it's good, but it's a pretty tame situation by Veeky Forums standards actually.

>muh bait :(((((

>one which is on autosage
I believe this is exactly why we got this new one. And yeah, two isn't much, but we have at least one every day and most of them are really stupid. No idea why OP needs to make elf threads on a constant basis, elf threads aren't getting better via this.

I have absolutely nothing to do with that other thread, believe it or not. I keep hearing the notion that elves are somehow something other than humans with funny ears, and it's time to end this delusion once and for all.

OP

>They are called dwarves
They're not short. They don't seem like dwarves to me.

They are called dwarves though, are they not? The problem with the term dwarf is that it also has a meaning outside of fantasy. Elf doesn't really mean anything other than "mischievous spirit"

>replying to an idiot troll who just wants to argue

C'mon now. You're not saying anything he doesn't already know.

You're the idiot troll. You've been told to fuck off several times, and yet you linger. Kill yourself.

>I have absolutely nothing to do with that other thread
Let's see
>always female elf in the OP
>always at least somewhat stupid, at most really baity question
>never based on any setting or lore
Yeah, high chance just some fucktard from /v/ or /a/ thinking this is the elf shitposting board where you don't need to ever have played a traditional games to make threads.

Protoss.

You can start with Tolkien. To this day peolle argue whether they had pointy ears or not. Yet, nobody will not call them elves. Also Melniboneans became inspiration for later elves, who weren't described having pointy ears as well. The whole elven idea encompasses a whole set of tropes and myths that all don't hing on the ears thing.

Pretty much. Extra long ears were basically just popularized by videogames because they had to deal with shitty low res graphics.

Are you sure about that? Elric is constantly depicted with pointy ears.

Yes, "depicted", but what about "described"?

>by videogames
By comics and manga long before 3D games were a thing.
Long ears are good.

Glorantha has a folk called elves and they kinda sorta inhabit a similar niche.
But they are humanoid murder trees so there is that.

Pretty sure they wouldn't just put pointy ears on him out of the blue.

Melniboneans are descendants of the Eldren, who actually are described as having "tapering" ears. So yeah, they're typical elves.

Alright, case closed.

hello

Long ears are dumb and inferior to short ears. This is true not only for elves, but also for Batman.

It's a universal touchstone. From long eared Elves to short eared Altmer to Vulcans, everybody knows that if your species looks like humans but has pointy ears, they're basically a bunch of long-living, pretentious assholes that could kill everybody else if they weren't too busy contemplating some archaic mystery of the universe.
So you can do elves without pointy ears, but what's the actual benefit?

This, honestly. Ears and height aren't the end-all be-all of elves and dwarves, but it's universal. You don't gain anything from removing them. You might say it's to move away from tropes, but clearly labeling them for what they are and giving that frame of reference will help people compare it to the standard cliches, and will help them identify and maybe even appreciate the spins you put on them.

Tolkien described elf ears as "more pointed and leaf-shaped". He even refers to Hobbit's pointed ears as "elvish." All the arguments against elves on Arda having pointed ears are retarded in the face of this.

>leaf-shaped
I can get behind that description.

Well, I'm afraid you just have bad taste.

>Tolkien described elf ears as "more pointed and leaf-shaped"
He didn't, he described hobbits ears as that. And then said hobbit ears are "elvish" without explaining what this means.

How are Protoss elves?

You know, there isn't only one kind of leaf.

I concur. Not all long ears are equal.

Nope, those are two separate descriptions. The description of Hobbits is as such:

>ears only slightly pointed and 'elvish'

The description of elf ears is as such:

>The Quendian ears were more pointed and leaf-shaped

Elves have pointy ears. Stop being silly about it.

>his elves don't have palm leaf ears for thermoregulation

Cosplayer's name?

He described them as pointed and elvish in the same sentence, and there are no attributes of elf ears in folklore beyond being pointed.

Remember, Tolkien didn't invent elves. He based his elves on elves in folklore.

The real question is, why would you do this? Elves have had pointy ears for hundreds of years, most to associate them with nature - pointed ears are reminiscent of certain plants and animals.

If you're going to make a fantasy race and you don't want them to look like some variation of humanoids with long ears, why bother calling them elves?

>"Elves and Men are evidently in biological terms one race, or they could not breed and produce fertile offspring..."
>"The existence of Elves: that is of a race of beings closely akin to Men, so closely indeed that they must be regarded as physically (or biologically) simply branches of the same race."
You know, leaf-shaped and pointy actually means nothing, since humans can have pointy ears as well. If the difference was actualyl so great that you could tell a human from an elf apart by looking at the ears.

>If you're going to make a fantasy race and you don't want them to look like some variation of humanoids with long ears, why bother calling them elves?

Because OP's a faggot.

>most to associate them with nature - pointed ears are reminiscent of certain plants and animals
Is this autism?

Elves can be told apart immediately, and people being biologically the same race doesn't mean they can't have distinguishing features. Different human ethnic groups are biologically all of the same race, but they're pretty easy to tell apart.

>Elves can be told apart immediately
Not by the ears. They were humans in the Silmarillion that he described as could have been mistaken for elves. But not because they had remarkable large ears.

They're called dwemer and are a subrace of mer. The were called dwarves by giants, who call everyone dwarves because they're fucking giants.

Genies in arabic folklore do have a niche similar to tolkienian elves, to some degree.

>explicitly follow all the traditional tropes for dwarves

Were they ever described as blue in the folklore?

You're right, Tolkien elves did not have huge floppy anime ears or giant Warcraft stalks, but they clearly were identifiable by their more pointed, leaf-shaped ears. If it wasn't a recognizable trait of these, Tolkien wouldn't have mentioned it.

I didn't know the dwemer suffered from rampant alcoholism

Enslaving and mutating their refugee cousins then using the bonus labor to help build a titan out of sound not!magic that they transferred their entire race's souls into is a dwarven trope?

I prefer elves to be dead and killed

And to gtfo of my Northern Realms

Do Tolkien's dwarves?

I am legitimately triggered by long ears on non-elves.

>but they clearly were identifiable by their more pointed, leaf-shaped ears
But they weren't. There was never any mention in one of his stories. Nobody in his stories recognized an elf by the ears.
>If it wasn't a recognizable trait of these, Tolkien wouldn't have mentioned it
Yet he didn't, he never said it was a recognizable trait. He also said that physically there is barely to no different between elf and man.

>Enslaving and mutating their refugee cousins
That's not a ubiquitous dwarf trope, but also not unthinkable. Duergar and Chaos Dwarfs love slavery.
>build a titan out of sound not!magic that they transferred their entire race's souls into
That's not one, but two dwarf tropes. High technology and self-destruction by hubris.

Yes.
You know damn well Gimli is the only archetype for dwarf that has been relevant for half a century

Tolkien never actually describes his elves as having pointed ears, and yet they've been the ultimate iconic elves for the past two generations.

>Inb4 that one letter... They're not totally canon and few read them

>But they weren't. There was never any mention in one of his stories. Nobody in his stories recognized an elf by the ears.

But they recognized elves as elves, and in his further materials he stated that elves have more pointed, leaf-like ears. That beautiful humans can be mistaken for elves at a glance is irrelevant.

>He also said that physically there is barely to no different between elf and man.

He said that BIOLOGICALLY there was barely a difference, as they could have children and therefore must have a similar biology.

It's also brought up in The Lost Road and Other Writings.

Note that I'm not saying that elves are only identifiable by their ears, or that their ears will always immediately identify them as elves. Just that, according to Tolkien, elves do indeed have ears that are more pointed than humans. If you inspect any elf from Arda, they will have pointed ears.

Spot the elf.

He never describes elves with pointed ears in The Hobbit or LotR because elves = pointy ears predates him by several hundred years and everyone reading his books knows that elves have those features.

Tolkien was writing at a time before there were a billion subtypes of elves from thousands of videogames and TTRPGs to differentiate between. If you were reading The Hobbit in 1937, you knew full well that elves had pointy ears. The fact that he mentions it in his letters and manuscripts further indicates this.

>>"The existence of Elves: that is of a race of beings closely akin to Men, so closely indeed that they must be regarded as physically
>physically

>or that their ears will always immediately identify them as elves
This is actually exactly how you describe it, like saying that since Noldor have black hair you should be able to tell them apart via their hair. We don't know exactly how pointy they are supposed to be, if we want to believe these little snippets that somewhat get contradicted elsewhere. They might as well be only so pointy that a human could have the same pointiness, but most of the time their ears are rounder.

This is a really dumb argument

Nice selective quote. Here's the entire thing:

>"The existence of Elves: that is of a race of beings closely akin to Men, so closely indeed that they must be regarded as physically (or biologically) simply branches of the same race."

>This is actually exactly how you describe it,

It really isn't. I'm just saying that pointy ears is one of their traits. It may very well be so minor that you only notice it by watching carefully, but it's still a universal trait of elves.

This is a bait argument. I'm sad that there's still people dumb enough to fall for it and to genuinely think people are actually stupid enough to say this shit.

Nut off, round ears! I'm taking the bait and running off to silveryglade!

The one on the right. The ears are easily noticeable.

>everything I don't like is bait! when people tell me I'm wrong is bait! everything is bait! baitbaitbaitbaitbaitbaitbaitbait!!!
I'm not sad there are people like you, Im angry. Kill yourself already, I don't know how many times I have to tell you this.

They're not even practical. They would freeze off as soon as they went anywhere frigid.

5e has a special sjw paragraph about that for players that think the DM shouldn't have any say about the world they created.

Maybe that's the point. Maybe they evolved in a hot climate and use large ears for thermoregulation.

To be fair, elves are usually written as having some kind of mild resistance to the elements. In tune with nature an' shit.

Super long ears still annoy me though, save in certain instances. Lorwyn elves do it well.

I have both. There are old mystical pale fey-like forest dwelling masters of magic, and then there are average Joe elves who are just pointy eared humans with a different culture.

Of course. The true staple of elves is long living because of magical energy sources. Tolkien elves used that magic tree, warcraft elves use magic wells etc. The pointy ears are just a cosmetic part of them that varies

The middle one has pointy ears too.

What about the one on the left?

This entire thread is illogical. White skin was naturally selected in cloudy/cold climates. People covered their ears in the winter. You're all assuming that elves are too stupid to cover their ears.

For fuck sakes, look at moose ears.

Well if they boil down to being humans, perhaps you are playing elves wrong.

Tolkien elves aren't tied to a tree. They're tied to the world and live as long as it does.

haha XD Epic to the Win HFY XD upboated

Well, I mean they had long-ears but my elves had a bunch of other non-human features.

The key elements of elves to me are:

1) Living harmoniously with nature.
2) Mystical

As long as you meet those criteria you have an elf race.

While horribly executed in the Game of Thrones TV show. The Children of the Forest are an example of elves without pointy ears.

How does Dwemer even follow traditional dwarves tropes?

not him, but they do live underground, have beautiful craftsmanship, love gold(en) metals, as scientifically advanced (at least compared to other races), are not terribly religious, and hold disdain for (other) elves.

Also they have amazing beards. Possibly more amazing than most fantasy dwarves. All that's lacking is a strong alcohol culture.

>Live underground.
>Expert craftsmen.
>Reliance on tech over magic

You're only a scottish accent away from being a full dwarf at this point.

>tech over magic
Their tech is magic in all the sense of the world, since it’s reality bending and is essentially the same as the Nord’s shouting and Redguard sword singing