On Atlantasia you will NEVER find a half-breed elf (if a female elf was ever raped by another race she would commit suicide).
Which I think is probably something that didn't even need to be said. If you don't want Half-Elves in your game… just don't have them. There are no half dog-cats or monkey-horses so if you say these races can't interbreed, there it is. Easy. On the surface this just seems like an insensitive statement that deserves criticism.
But why would the author feel the need to put something like that in his game? Why word it like that? Well, it seems that this isn't an original idea - it actually comes out of Tolkien's Middle-earth:
The Elves view the sexual act as extremely special and intimate, for it leads to the conception and birth of children. Extra-marital and premarital sex are unthinkable, adultery is also unheard of and fidelity between spouses is absolute. Yet separation during pregnancy or during the early years of parenthood (caused by war, for example) is so grievous to the couple that they prefer to have children in peaceful times. Living Elves cannot be raped or forced to have sex; before that they will lose the will to endure and go to Mandos. [Judge of the Dead and the Master of Doom]
So they just die.
I'm not sure if the author of Atlantasia misinterpreted Tolkien, or if he just has a different idea about how things should work… but the result is pretty much the same. And if you have problems with one I think you'll have problems with the other. If you have issues with the concept (as opposed to the wording) then the issue is really with Tolkien.
Now personally I think the entire topic is one that I'd have been omitted altogether in the interest of make the game as fun for as many people as possible. But it does suggest something else about the way most fantasy media seems to have lost sight of the very alien nature of things like Elves in a Fantasy setting.
In Tolkien the Elves were not human, and you see this reflected more in the early years of RPGs with Tolkien inspired elves in them. But in the 30+ years since they've been increasingly humanized (much like Vampires). Now they are just people with pointy ears (and Vampires are people who sparkle) and they're written and played more or less like any other human character.A lot of Elf characters in current media could lose the pointy ear prosthetics and just be a person. There's really very little that makes them feel that different.
The otherworldly inhuman nature of Elves and other magical creatures is something you see throughout folklore. Here's an old Irish Fairy Tale about a mermaid (not the half-fish kind, this is basically an Elf that lives in the water):
One spring morning, fisherman Patrick Gannon stood upon the seashore as the sun rose. "Lovely morning," he sighed to himself. He puffed on his pipe, for nothing could bother Patrick this day.
Except one thing. He wished he could share his pleasure with a wife.
"Ah, a wife would be fine on such a morning," he sighed again. Just then, he spied a rock upon the shore, upon which sat a beautiful young woman, combing her sea-green hair.
Patrick looked down at the sand. He knew this was a mermaid, a sea fairy. Beside the maiden sat a red cap with a feather - a magic cap, that is, the sort the mermaids wear to find their way home beneath the sea.
Patrick ambled down the shore toward the rock. "Hello," he said, startling the mermaid. "Don't be afraid," he said. "I came only to say how pretty you look this morning."
When she blushed and looked away for a moment, Patrick grabbed her cap.
"What do you want?" the mermaid asked.
"Mermaid," Patrick said, "I want to marry you." The mermaid accepted.
So Patrick put her cap into his pocket, for a mermaid will lose her memory without her feathered cap.
Now Patrick and the maiden returned to Patrick's cottage. They had three children, and no one was happier than Patrick Gannon. However, one day he forgot to hang up his fishing nets.
Mrs. Gannon was cleaning that morning, and she spied the fishing nets that Patrick had not put away. When she lifted them, she found a hole in the wall, and in that hole she found her red cap.
The moment she found it, she put it on, and she remembered her father and mother and longed to see them. She walked out the door, turning once to blow a kiss to her sleeping children. She walked to the shore and dove into the sea.
So Patrick lost his beloved mermaid. Every day he walked to the shore, hoping that his wife would return, but she never did. Still, he never forgot her, for he knew that she had truly loved him.The Elf in this story is not human and acts in an inhuman way - just like Tolkien's elves. Real people don't lose their memory when you take their magic hat, or walk away from their own children when they get their magic hat back. Humans have more compassion than that. They don't lose the will to live when faced with tragedy either. What makes humans human is that they're stronger than that.
Perhaps part of the problem is we've gotten so used to characters who are alien on the outside but human on the inside that we've forgotten about ones who are the other way around? Or who have an alien exterior as a visual symbol that they are not human and think and act in not human ways. When we take story elements and ideas from older media (like Tolkien) this is where we run into problems with confusion about how humans are depicted and how non-humans are intended to contrast with that.
Maybe we've had too many pointy eared humans in our media and not enough Elves?
18 comments:
Really good post, I've felt the same way a lot actually. One of the games I play and post about fairly often (High Valor by Tim Kirk) had an awesome take of Elves....they were flighty in personality, in tune with a particular element or aspect of nature, and over the years would slowly take on traits (both personality and physically) until eventually they became an elemental themselves. I wish we saw more of that and less "you're prettier than humans and have one cool trick. Oh, and you rock the bow."
Where do I sign up for a monkey-horse?
Great post. I too have noted the trend towards pointed eared humans and I've been struggling with how to make elves more inhuman recently, as I put together my ideas for a new campaign in the coming year. My solution so far is to make them more fey, more lacking in empathy. Perhaps even having Seelie and Unseelie elves buts all still in it's formative stages.
Great post. There really should be differences between humans and the other races. This is a whole other debate but it makes the old school "Race as Class" thing make more sense.
I'm actually torn between making elves less human and making them more human.
As for this Atlantasia thing: I haven't heard of it or of any uproar about it... but maybe the bit about half-elves is meant sarcastically. A couple years ago, there was a raging thread on RPGnet about half-orcs being left out of (if I recall correctly) 4e. The stated reason by the publisher was that half-orcs imply rape; however, half-elves were included. The publisher's unspoken assumption, then, was that it was impossible for humans and orcs to marry or even love each other, unlike elves and humans. What was interesting about the otherwise stupid thread was how many people openly agreed with that assumption, once it was expressed, and even got angry when people suggested it might be possible to have a half-orc who was a product of love, not rape.
Half-elves and half-orcs are just in the game for no other reason than that they appear in Tolkien (don't believe anything EGG said while staring down the barrel of a cease and desist order). Where are the half-dwarves dammit? My dwalflings, my goblodytes?
Anyway, allowing halfbreeds sends you down that garden path of maddening hyper-customization that gives you demi-dragonkind planetouched prestige burglars.
By the way, in my game half-orcs are humans arrested halfway throgh the orcification process.
What's funny is how widespread the desire for elves to be little more than humans with pointy ears is. When I posted descriptions of the elves in my Dwimmermount campaign to my blog, I caught a lot of flak from people because they were "too weird" and, in their minds, unplayable. I took the "too weird" thing as a compliment, since I wanted them to be unlike their boring gaming brethren -- but "unplayable?" Nah.
@Roger:
By the way, in my game half-orcs are humans arrested halfway throgh the orcification process.
"It's a fair cop, but society is to blame."
@Roger: Agreed. The thing is that a Half-Elf in Tolkien isn't a one-parent human, one-parent elf sort of creature. Similarly I'm not sure (please correct me if I'm wrong) that there's a clear explanation that Tolkiens Half-Orcs have mixed parentage instead of just looking like a cross between Men and Orcs.
@James: I wonder if this comes from the approach to RPGs where the person wants a power fantasy avatar for themselves in the game world. If required to play a character which is very alien in mindset if they choose an Elf (etc) it means they can't play as themselves with pointy ears. "Modern" Elves are a desirable wish fulfillment race in the same way that Sparkly Vampires are - eternally youthful, beautiful, healthy, athletic, smart, gifted, magical, etc.
"Modern" Elves are a desirable wish fulfillment race in the same way that Sparkly Vampires are - eternally youthful, beautiful, healthy, athletic, smart, gifted, magical, etc.
It had not occurred to me before, but this may very well be why my players (who came to the game during the 3E era) despise the idea of elves so much...but once they met my own (alien) version of elves they have begun to warm to them.
I agree they shouldn't just be pointy-eared humans. I could go on about how you could lay a lot of blame for that on the Race and Class system of AD&D onward but I wont. Also, I alway thought it was weird that Tolkien refered to Elrond as "half-elven" but then I re-read LotR or the Silmarilon and realized he's half-elf, half-god. Anyway, You've inspired me to finish a post i've had laying around about elves: http://builtbygodslongforgotten.blogspot.com/2011/12/elves-of-invisible-moons.html
The whole race as class thing with elves used to bother me. I don't care how a game does it; either elves as a race that can be certain classes OR elves as a race that is essentially a class, but the Old School idea of elves as distinct 9along with Dwarves, etc) seems to make more and more "psychological" sense to me.
I really appreciate this post, because so much of how people tend to play elves and other humanoid races is just like a human being with cosmetic differences, as you pointed out so well, Stuart.
Psychology of races is the key to making them fantastic and different... game mechanics are secondary.
Jeff
Oddly enough, I mentioned Elves briefly in a fairly long post on my blog today too. Must be something in the air.
"Modern" Elves are a desirable wish fulfillment race in the same way that Sparkly Vampires are - eternally youthful, beautiful, healthy, athletic, smart, gifted, magical, etc.
This is really well put. I know I played that way often in my teens.
The current 4E hack game I am running has seven players, and their PCs are: 1 human, 1 dwarf, and 5 elf variants.
Great post! There is definitly something in the air, a few days back I wrote a post about how to get the alien aspect of Elves back into the D&D game on my blog (using Tolkien in the argument, too!):
http://the-disoriented-ranger.blogspot.com/2011/11/elves-are-no-mammals-goddarnit.html
@sylvaeon, I don't think game mechanics are secondary. On the contrary, it might be the only way to enforce an abstract idea in any rpg! If you, for example, have a reasonable explanation for race as class or level restrictions in the rules, you don't have to explain your reasoning outside the rules. It sticks nonetheless. And even when forgotten, the rules will apply at some point in the game and so will the alien aspect. With time the rules will do the work for you.
The same thing could be said about goblins, orcs and other humanoids, who nowadays mostly seem to just be some kind of "tribal" species and not genuine monsters.
As for the half-elves, I like the idea that instead of being half-breeds, they could be changelings: human children abducted and raised in the elven way of life, like Skaflok in The Broken Sword.
"There are no half dog-cats or monkey-horses" What about owlbears, then? ;-)
One thing about Tolkien elves is that their decisions can have a direct impact on their physical being. Elrond and his brother had to actually choose, when they came of age, whether they would be elf or human. Elrond chose elf, his brother chose human.
For an elf who is well over 100 years old (in AD&D at least, it's explicit) the world around them is flying past compared to how a human of 20 some years sees it. Someone who ages the way elves do is very likely going to be uncannily patient, yet frivolous at the same time. The idea of 'wasting time' would probably be entirely foreign to them, and that's likely just how humans would see them - preoccupied timewasters.
Excellent post. BTW, your example Irish story is really about a Silk and and fisherman. Read how I married a silky, and the tragic outcome here...
http://www.bookemon.com/book-profile/silver-rose-tales/26937
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