i think a lot of modern fantasy authors dont think they can come up with an interpretation of elves that is just as unique or distinct from tolkeins version or that doesn't get unfairly compared to tolkeins elves.

@freakrx2349

5 ай бұрын

Elder Scrolls on the other hand has one of the most unique takes on Elves (well Dark Elves specifically). There is a reason Morrowind is still beloved to this day

@dragoness777

5 ай бұрын

They can at least have different factions of elves, like what Warhammer fantasy did (High Elves, Dark Elves and Wood Elves). Most fae races are basically just a Celtic flavor of wood elf in a lot of books (elves being nature spirits in Norse mythology).

@000Dragon50000

5 ай бұрын

@@freakrx2349 Their designs for elves, particularly high elves, are freaking atrocious.

@000Dragon50000

5 ай бұрын

@@dragoness777 It's interesting that modern elves have ended up so strongly celtic considering their origins in Norse mythology. Part of that is tolkein but even he didn't commit to that that hard.

@rateeightx

5 ай бұрын

Well the easiest way to fail there is to not even try. Or if they're worried about getting compared to Tolkien Elves, Just don't even make Elves, Make your own race, Describe them however you like and call them whatever you want, People will be less likely to compare them to Tolkien's if you just don't call them Elves lol.

I don't think this anthropocentrism is bad on its own, some stories like Berserk are centered around humanity's relation with the magical. But yeah, many stories just default to humanity even if it's not always necessary Also, TLoTR has the excuse to be intented as a legendary origin to our own world, so other magical races being in decline and eventually disappearing is intented. Elves were the lords of the world, they just faded in the end

@gergokerekes4550

5 ай бұрын

yeah, and there are books of Tolkien that are focused on them, set in the first age. but by the LoTR books their time was done.

I could have sworn racist oppressive elves are an overused trope, guess not?

@yuvalgabay1023

5 ай бұрын

I swear elves have 2 mods: Nature loving, beautiful, Pacific Ans bdsm slavery and conquest My god elves are german

@robertfaucher3750

5 ай бұрын

@@yuvalgabay1023 that's a weird way to spell "Welsh"

@KateeAngel

5 ай бұрын

​@@yuvalgabay1023what about oppressed elves? Like oppressed by humans. There are many stories about it as well

@szymonlechdzieciol

5 ай бұрын

It seems like trope people dream about but that is not often used. Usually even if elves are xenophobic, and posh, and proud, they are also kinda isolationist - so they are racist in - "we don't want people in our forest" more than "we will raze cities of men to ground, and plant forest there to serve as Elvenlebenraum..

@friendlyheretic9103

4 ай бұрын

​@@KateeAngel Those most likely fall into the nature loving category and have a decent chance of being a bad analogy for indigenous americans

the intro song never gets old

@fairycat23

5 ай бұрын

I love singing along with the introduction song

@remuslazar2033

5 ай бұрын

Its not very good but its not too long ​@@fairycat23

@jazz-cat00

5 ай бұрын

@@fairycat23 I cant sing very good, but it's not too long

@fullmetaltheorist

5 ай бұрын

It's not very good but it's not too long.

@fullmetaltheorist

5 ай бұрын

It's not very good but it's not too long.

Make the Fae scary again!

@ShadowMage

5 ай бұрын

I 100% agree with that. Fae, in general, I feel have been so sanitized that they aren't even recognizable to their origins in European myth and folklore (I blame Disney for a sizable portion of this). Seriously though, what happened to faeries kidnapping children and swapping them out for changelings, or tricking people into becoming trapped in the otherworld only for those people to escape and find that they either find that decades have passed or that they immediately grow old (potentially dying)?

@marocat4749

5 ай бұрын

I think themost scary fae are " dark romance" and for the wrong reasons. Like edward cullen isnt bad, but way too romancised and excused, a lot of horny fae if you would agnowledge their violationsof consent, they could be scary.

@viettrungtran4500

5 ай бұрын

The Fae of the British Isles fit the bill perfectly. They are powerful dark gods with malice intent, but bounded by a set of rules from some ancient deal they make with human ancestors. Problem is, the human descendant have no idea what those rules are. It would make a great tense cat and mouse story.

@kurathchibicrystalkitty5146

5 ай бұрын

Sir Terry Pratchett already did.

@KateeAngel

5 ай бұрын

I kinda want them to be romantic, sexy and scary at the same time 😂

To respond to the critique of Tolkien's approach to fantasy races, while Lotr is somewhat humancentric, The Silmarillion is heavily focused on elves, and goes into detail about different kinds of elves and the conflicts between them. Also, with regards to the actual members of the fellowship in Lotr there are more nonhuman members of the fellowship than there human members.

@kathleensiemion5108

5 ай бұрын

Also, Lotr is specifically set in the time when Elves were leaving Middle Earth, so there is some justification for Lotr being less focused on elves than The Silmarillion is.

@araneljones

5 ай бұрын

Thank you! The Silmarillion was JRRT's heart and soul. LotR and the Hobbit were the ones that sold. The Hobbit barely even had humans.

I got quite a bit of pushback when I shopped my elf-centric novel about, both from writers' groups and publishing people. They all said that elves wouldn't sell, that they were too derivative to Tolkien, cheesy and that readers need a human POV. So I think current trends and expectations in publishing put writers off. But as it is my book got traditionally published and is doing alright so maybe things are shifting. Interesting video btw. Definite food for thought.

@AbelDuviant

3 ай бұрын

What's your book called? :)

@jlworrad

3 ай бұрын

@@AbelDuviant Pennyblade

the anime Frieren highlights a weird aspect of this for me. The main character's an elf, and elves here essentially live forever, but there's barely any of them left and they're dying out because... they just kind of want to die out? You see that all the time with elves, including the long living elves then having them be a tiny minority simply because nobody has children. Ever. Even though in a lot of settings they live pretty simple lives in the forest, where people normally end up having tons of kids.

@kabirarya5381

5 ай бұрын

it's mentioned elves have no reproductive drive and are thus dying out.

@ellie7252

5 ай бұрын

it's not that they 'want' to die out, it's just irrelevant if they do or not. since elves can live virtually forever thanks to not ageing, they don't have the evolutionary instinctual desire to find romantic or sexual intimacy; they lack libido or romantic feelings entirely. what changes if the last remaining elves choose to have children? nothing. life goes on, even if all the elves die one day, some from diseases, some in battle, some from tripping over a rock and having their head hit the concrete, it just doesn't really matter, because they lived. like, imagine if we were the last generation of humans. like, why does it matter? why does it have to be a good or bad thing? as long as we live the life we wanna live and have a good time IN our lifetime, that's fine.

@damiannguyen9195

5 ай бұрын

I don’t know how far you are in the story, but minor spoiler warning anyway. . . . . . About a thousand years ago, the Demon King order a genocide of an entire elven race. This is already implies in the anime, during the flashback where Frieren first met Flamme and her entire elven village is destroyed. Now, the species is about to go extinction because there’s so little of them left alive, and their indifference and unsympathetic overall attitude only adds to that. Up until the most current chapter, we’ve met a total of 3 currently alive elves, and Frieren herself also said she hadn’t met another of her kind for hundreds of years despite having been traveling around the continent.

@Dell-ol6hb

5 ай бұрын

What are you talking about? They explain why there's so few evles left, it's because the King of the Demons genocided them, we see this in the flashback Frieren has showing how she met her master, Flamme. So their low reproductive rate due to their general lack of desire to reproduce has only made their depopulation worse because now there's so few of them that elves go centuries at a time before ever even running into another one of their species and most humans and dwarves have never even encountered an elf before. Basically their low reproductive rate made perfect sense for a species with such ridiculously long lifespans, but that only worked because they had a sufficiently large population, now after the genocide they're going extinct because of it.

@AbelDuviant

3 ай бұрын

Frieren explains thag elves don't really *have* that desire to procreate in the way humans do, nor are they particularly interested in expediency- every single elf you see is a loner, wandering the world and just... Vibing with their special interests

The Elder Scrolls had a more diverse range of elves. Where they had dark elves, wood elves, high elves and even Sea elves, or tropical elves. So they did a good job of portraying other races besides humans Nords, Imperials, Bretons and Redguards humans arn't the default setting.

@wlot28

5 ай бұрын

Not just elves (which also included dwemer, falmer and ayleids), khajit and argonians too

@Janoha17

5 ай бұрын

And for the playable races, you have four races of elves, four races of humans, and the two beast-folk races.

@cheesi

5 ай бұрын

Yeah, I used to think it was impossible to put an interesting spin on the tried fantasy races before I got into TES lore. They're very alien and it has fun implications on their societies, I just wish we saw more of that in the recent games instead of everyone seeming so (relatively) normal and dull.

@rateeightx

5 ай бұрын

I also find it pretty interesting how they made the "Orcs" and "Dwarves" of the setting just different types of Elves, rather than a totally distinct thing.

@Dell-ol6hb

5 ай бұрын

the Wood elves, Bosmer, are the tropical elves. Valenwood is mostly jungle and rainforest

not watched this video yet but just want to say that fantasy authors should create there own races for their world. many author's don't add elves to their story as they believe it's too generic, but then don't come up with any new different races in it's place.

As someone else said, Terry Pratchett's Discworld does this very well. Other races are present and visible, and have unique attributes as well as long running feuds that causes problems for The Ankh-Morpork City Watch. We get main characters from all the main groupings - Cherri the first ever female presenting dwarf, Detritus the troll who runs anti-drug campaigns off his own back despite not being able to count, Angua the werewolf who works as their sniffer dog as well as being a very keen investigator when in human form, Sally the teetotal vampire who can explode into bats when required, & Captain Carrot - a human raised by dwarves who is so likable he's basically magic. Humans are the majority but they are kind of boring - while they are often the protagonist they get their baseline speciesism challenged hard.

i think in an effort to make fantasy seem more "grown up" and not nerdy, a lot of authors don't want to include a lot of other species like elves and fae and warlocks. also, having a bunch of different species and the adjoining lore is a lot of work i think most authors just looking to get a book deal don't want to do.

Reason 1: Fantasy races don't add anything beneficial to the story. If your whole reason for adding fantasy races is simply "it's a fantasy story", then you might not need fantasy races. Magical races may not benefit your gritty realism. If you want to focus on human interactions or parallels to the real world, fantasy races may be a distraction. If you want a low magic setting, magical races can run counter to that idea, and non-magical versions of those races are pretty much just humans with some minor genetic differences. Reason 2: For decades, various fictions have presented the idea that humans simply outbreed and overwhelm races like elves. Reason 3: If you draw from real world inspiration, then you might mirror the idea that elves and the like mostly reside in your story's version of Faerie.

@Karl.Zimmerman

5 ай бұрын

Fantasy is big on allegorical storytelling though. I mean, let's say you want to explore real world racism. You could mirror real history, and recapitulate white supremacy, but this risks being seen as sledgehammer-obvious and didactic. You could flip it and have a black ruling class prejudiced against white people but it's easy for folks to draw the wrong conclusion. Stick in elves though (or another fantasy race of your choice) and you can comment on racism without making explicit references to the real world. Hell, it's been done before many times. James pointed out in the Dragon Age universe humans are pretty damned racist towards elves, who occupy a position somewhere between Jews in the European middle ages and Native Americans, depending on where they live. I actually feel like non-human races should be a much more fundamental part of a fantasy setting than "magic." There's all sorts of issues that too much magic can cause within a fantasy narrative, but there's really absolutely nothing filling your setting with all kind of exotic, alien races takes away from in terms of story potential.

@BainesMkII

5 ай бұрын

@@Karl.Zimmerman I'd argue using fantasy races to tell racism stories is so overdone that it is has lost much of its meaning, and that it has far less impact than regular human-on-human racism stories because of that fantasy element. It can also get into dubious territory when there is a meaningful difference between the abilities of the difference races. As for fantasy races in general, ask yourself whether including abundant fantasy races would have improved or weakened some of these limited fantasy races stories. I doubt something like Game of Thrones would have been anywhere near as successful, or even as interesting, if the Dothraki were beast people, the Targaryen were elves, the Starks had werewolf ancestry, and Tyrion's mother was a mountain dwarf.

@Karl.Zimmerman

5 ай бұрын

@@BainesMkII I dunno. If you write a story where a protagonist needs to get over their prejudice against orcs, and discovers they are not stupid mooks, and have just the same spread of good/evil as anyone else, that says something, because the bias of the reader is to assume that orcs are stupid, evil, or some combination thereof. It plays against the fantasy tropes, and makes us question norms we've internalized from previous fantasy stories. If you just sub the orcs out for another human ethnic group, it's not really making any of the same metacommentary on fantasy as a genre. It might still be a compelling arc, but not as rich. Do I think Game of Thrones needed demihumans? Not really. Though I'd argue that, if you're talking about the books, the Targaryen features being so weird (purple eyes, white hair), along with their affinity to dragons and questionable morality meant they were essentially elf/fey coded. Anyway, as James alluded, properly thought out non-human races just make the setting more interesting. And as spec-fiction lovers, we presumably like an interesting setting. If we didn't care about setting we'd just be reading historical or literary fiction. We'd not want any magical elements because it took away from the underlying human drama.

@youraveragesinner5474

5 ай бұрын

@@Karl.Zimmerman oh god not this again... I hate hate hate hate HATE when fantasy does this stuff it's literally the WORST idea autors came up with. If I see another story where it's supposed to be a racism allegory but then the two "races" are so different from eachother they're basically different sapient species and one has superpowers or smth and the story tries to tell me that they're actually misunderstood or whatever I will make it my life goal to burn every copy of the stupid book ever printed. Don't you just love it when fantasy authors try to be woke or whatev by LITERALLY DEHUMANISING ACTUAL ETHNICITIES????? It's saying "y'know? the weird freaky creatures have feelings too!" You can have racial conflict while having only humans too, nobody is forcing you to take the real world ones. There's a ton of prejudice within peoples who basically look the same. We don't need another "Bright"

@tbotalpha8133

4 ай бұрын

Counterpoint 1: I include Fantasy races because I want Fantasy races in my art. I shouldn't have to justify my tastes as an artist. And surely that's half the fun of art - engaging with the specificity of an artist's voice and style. Counterpoint 2: The story I'm writing, and the world I've built, literally could not be told with just humans. Only in the broadest strokes would that be possible, and it would lose so much of its nuance in the translation.

I think part of it, with LOTR and even Warhammer 40k, is that the time of the elves is over, and the story takes place during the time of humans. Also, other races have associated tropes, and even if you don't use them, people will expect them. Humans have a lot more 'variety' to them without the same kind of baggage. Plus the whole 'write what you know' aspect. As with the dynamics in play, mixing it up sounds good, but sometimes you end up with the movie Bright. So sometimes people just follow the path of least resistance if they don't think making a group its own unique race is worth the effort. As for the fae, well... they want to have sex with people too. Or eat children. It depends on who's telling the story.

@anzaia2164

5 ай бұрын

Sex with humans, *and/* or eat children! Fae have a broad range of interests. Depending on the story.

@marocat4749

5 ай бұрын

And create slanesh 😊

@bencox3641

5 ай бұрын

The thing that just annoys me about 40k is the fact that the Eldar have been in space for MILLIONS of years, but somehow they didn't colonize the entire galaxy in all of that time. Even if they leave worlds that already have life alone, they will still colonize every other planet in all of that time.

@JimmyAgent007

5 ай бұрын

@@bencox3641 They were busy trying to orgy birth a god of chaos

@leopard2690

5 ай бұрын

​@@bencox3641eldar did Rule the Galaxy. But slaaneshs creation Killed the majority of them, leaving only the ones inside the webway and the craft world eldar that Ran away to the Edge of the Galaxy With their Planet sized ships. Now they Just try to stay alive After loosing Like 99% of their civilisation. The craftworld eldar Population is Limited by the amount of Spirit Stones They own and the dark eldar constantly Go around Killing

In defence of Tolkien, His stories are canonically set in the same world as ours, Just in the far distant past, And the elves definitely played a more prominent role in the first and second ages, The 3rd age (When The Hobbit and LOTR are set) is towards the waning of the power of elves, So it makes sense that there'd be less of them around as most had already left Middle Earth for the Undying Lands.

I have a mostly human setting. My personal reason is that I saw no reason to add many of these fantasy races, and wanted to keep fairly tight authorial intent on my world. So the few things I have had ideas to add are mostly my own creations.

@ellie7252

5 ай бұрын

with the first part I totally feel you, in my own writing i've kinda noticed that the more fantastical species I introduce, the harder it is to keep a tight leash on how the world develops and how those races interact with eachother. human society is already so complex, so the more variables you introduce to it, the longer and harder it takes to write.

@thejuiceking2219

23 күн бұрын

i decided for my fantasy setting that the main races are all technically humans, and the variations are basically no different than different breeds of dog

I personally think it has to do with not falling into racist stereotypes or utopian thinking. I think a lot people now a days are afraid of either generalizing humanity and that being seen as either white centric or discriminatory or propanda for a political party. Since it fantasy and people are trying to escape and not explore big question like sci Fi I think that why it is like that.

@tompatterson1548

5 ай бұрын

Humans are the only race capable of becoming ultra marathon runners? I read a nonfiction book that argues that. Humans could just have a lot of endurence, run far but not particularly fast. In ttrpg terms, humans don’t have as harsh a penalty for exhaustion, and can take multiple consecutive sprint actions.

I’m writing a fantasy story where none of the main characters (the protagonist and secondary protagonists) are human. Hopefully, it goes well.

@aintnoslice3422

5 ай бұрын

have their reward for completing their quest to be turned into humans. They've earned it.

@herddragon9215

5 ай бұрын

good luck

@t.k7five084

3 ай бұрын

​@@aintnoslice3422Why Though?

@aintnoslice3422

3 ай бұрын

@@t.k7five084 because they've earned it

while we are at the topic of sci-fi aliens do you ever bat an eye on how alien societies feel so homogonous like when you meet one you meet them all doubled down because they all live under one planetary government, tripled downed if earth is "unified as one".

Think both reasons for not writing nonhumans are accurate but not exactly for that reason. I dont think readers generally want characters they can't easily relate to or insert themselves into. You blame the authors, I blame the readers. Non-human characters are everywhere in children's fantasy but if you read it as an adult you're called a furry... unless its elves and then you might be called a... Anyway, you look at sales numbers for nonhuman books for adults and they aren't good. Especially if compared to some generic romantasy like Fourth Wing. Or books about dragons versus those about dragon riders. Though obviously you can have books about nonhuman that aren't nonhuman pov. If I knew an editor I'd ask if publishers want nonhumans or if focusing on nonhumans is book self die.

It's not hard to fix, but a lot of writers are lazy. A setting I've been obsessed with for 4 years is an RP called Ascension Academy. Humans are the most numerous and widespread, but it sidesteps some of the issues with explanations. For starters, the Elves explicitly have rival kingdoms etc within their lands, and the Dwarves have mostly disconnected holds across parts of the world with their own cultures etc. There are lots of other races in smaller numbers scattered around as well. But the justification for Humans being more wide spread is simply: Yea we're like, in the aftermath of your typical fantasy end of the world dark lord plot. Fucking EVERYBODY's population got nuked. Humans have the upper hand, for now, because they can rebound from that faster. It probably won't last forever though, and everyone knows it.

@TeddIdle34

5 ай бұрын

Yeah totally writers are lazy as they write 2,000 page books and more. Totally right.

@damiandasgnu4993

4 ай бұрын

Not hard to fix? Have you ever tried it? Human societies and relationships are complex enough if you want to be thourough.

@conflictt3224

4 ай бұрын

@@damiandasgnu4993 Did you just.... not ..... read the rest of the comment.... where I show the solutions used........????????

@damiandasgnu4993

4 ай бұрын

@@conflictt3224 But did YOU try them? Or did somebody else come up with that solution?

Um actually, you are correct. Star Trek is a lot of "aliens" that look like humans because of budgetary constraints and general laziness. This works in its favor a lot of times but also can hurt depending on the series. In TOS, the lack of effects helped Spock stick out and allowed them to save money for stories that require more effects. Look at an episode like A Piece of the Action, I think it works better because it's just a bunch of humans. Same with the Nazi planet episode. But TOS also had non-corporeal shit like Trelane and the Medusans too. So, the intent to do more has always been there. In TNG, they get a little lazy after a certain point. Too many just cut and paste Romulans or Klingons. Having something a bit more "alien" or more human allowed a new species or character to stand out. DS9 and Voyager get some creative freedom with the Founders and Species 8472. Lots of fluids going on there. Fluidic Space, liquid shape shifters, Kira romances, etc. That's more the advance in special effects than lack of creativity. I like that the Cardassians are different visually from other Space Nazis. But the Bajorans are just lazy. In "Nu-Trek", they try to change it up a bit but still have mostly human-like species. It helps in Discovery because that's the YA show and you need Burnham's alien boyfriend to be cute. With Strange New Worlds, they're going for an updated throwback feel. So the lack of budget helps keep that 60s look. Even the Gorn are still just guys in suits or puppets. Lower Decks is animation and they use it well. We see all kinds of species with various body types on that show.

@randomusernameCallin

5 ай бұрын

In stargate, they cut that off by saying humans were spread around the galaxy and is related to an older race.

@legathar8558

5 ай бұрын

TNG invented the Bajorans to serve as backstory for Ensign Ro. The reason they look so human is that the producers found the actress they got to play Ro Laren really pretty and they didn't want makeup to ruin that, which is a weird reason, but shockingly common in Star Trek (it's also the reason for the Trills' redesign). Basically, as far as the Bajorans go, it's not really DS9's fault, since they didn't invent the Bajorans

My D&D setting doesn't have humans. It made a odd challenge to develop things when usually fantasy races are defined in contrast to humans

@sylphanscribe6492

5 ай бұрын

I did the same with my own worldbuilding, honestly I've grown to like the approach a lot.

@KajtekBeary

5 ай бұрын

I have one setting that exclusively has different variations plant people. We've played one campaign in it using pf2e, everyone needed to be either something-ardende (pathfinder has versitile heritage, something like a subrace that every ancestry (race) can pick up, ardende are wood elementals), leshys or ghorans. It was fun af.

@dragoness777

5 ай бұрын

I have multiple worldbuilding projects like that to varying degrees of un-humanlike. It's indeed a challenge when most fantasy races are basically "human, but..." and the most human word you can use realistically is "person" or an equivalent of "inhabitant".

@Graycata

5 ай бұрын

The D&D session has a world with very few humans, now that im thinking about it.

@mistereiswolf70

5 ай бұрын

I have humans as planetless space nomads in my scifi project after earth got taken over by super capitalist space insects. The humans here are the least common people and I like it that they cant outnumber anyone.

TBH, while I'm not inherently against multi-species settings, I think you can get plenty of diversity with just human cultures in a world. However, I wouldn't mind seeing fantasy species based on other hominins that we used to coexist with, like Neanderthals, Denisovans, or those short-statured hominins that used to live on Flores in Indonesia. Also, I'm fond of the lizardmen in Warhammer Fantasy, even if they're arguably not the best representation of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures (due to being savage carnivores, of course).

As a writer who's currently writing a fantasy book, my reasoning for writing about humans is that the part of the world it takes place in is the mainly human area of the world. Beyond a specific mountain range are various beastfolk, to the north are shapechangers, etc. At least in my mind, for my first book, I don't want my story to start "too weird"

When I was making my own fantasy setting for TTRPG, I kind of noticed the situation with fantasy races, and decided to turn it around a bit. There, humans are the minority compared to nonhuman races like dwarves, halflings, beastkin. But, humans are also the "long-lived magical species" that have managed to oppress others for centuries before.

I avoided non-humans for my different cultures because I wanted to draw from many world philosophies and cultures without creatively limiting myself to fantasy race essentialism and to avoid ethnic stuff. I still have magical elements to my world but it's more like avatar where different cultures have an affinity with different magical elements which slightly impacts their culture. But more in a top-down way where only the 1% who can do magic have these traits and culture trickles down rather than a bottom-up way where like ALL dwarves are somewhat greedy & stubborn. Or all orcs or Klingons are battle / victory obsessed. I also don't want to write human like characters but call them non-human. Tolkien's elves & dwarves are great but they are basically still just humans people. I like when non-human characters are truly alien. Why not just have them be humans. Unless you want to do some weird essentialism. Or life span differences, but then you can just have long lived magical group of humans.

@Karl.Zimmerman

5 ай бұрын

You can draw from real-world cultures while doing non-humans though. Like my "halfling" race is built up in part on the Romani (including having some Romani conlang).

My series takes the approach that elves take 10 times longer to reach each developmental stage and thus that elves are much more at risk of infant mortality than humans. Elves are also insanely restrictive about allowing other races into their dominions because they have to engage in extreme degrees of control of their environments to maximize odds of their children surviving to adulthood. Humans are fairly commonplace because they were the historically preferred slave race due to their inability to use magic, relatively quick maturation rates, and better dietary flexibility (orcs have faster maturation rates and greater strength but require a more expensive diet to be able to survive, they require a much greater ratio of meat to plants in order to survive, and also orcs unlike humans are capable of using magic). The primary focus of the story is the founding and functioning of the human kingdoms that were carved after a successful slave revolt in the barren regions the other races didn't want. The way I wanted to discuss the history and politics of the humans was a weird mix of Maroon Caribbean cultures of escaped slaves in conjunction with a mix of Spartacus and Exodus style tales of how they fought and escaped to gain their freedom while exploring quasi HRE style politics that government their regions now and how differences in biology and culture between species shapes the economics and politics of their interactions with others.

@projectjupiter5523

5 ай бұрын

this sounds incredible, I love your creativity and how well thought out your story is. good luck with writing the series and please let us know when it can be read!

@rogersmith258

5 ай бұрын

​​@@projectjupiter5523 Thanks! If I ever get far enough along in it that I think it's worth seeing the light of day I will most definitely let folks know lol. At present it is better to see it as a series of interconnected short stories in a common setting detailing different parts of history than a proper piece of narrative fiction. If I ever decide to release it there will be a metric crap ton of rewrites needed.

@herddragon9215

5 ай бұрын

nice

I have just one word for you: Discworld. Pratchett does an amazing job with variety (in many of his books, anyway)

I think for a long time and still to this day, authors assume a human character/main characters are needed for "relatability". I notice more indie authors are willing to write more non-human races, even having them as the main character sometimes.

Look, the kind of folks that would draw up 58 different original races and make a flowchart of relationships between humans and all the other races are not the kind of people who have books published.

@tompatterson1548

5 ай бұрын

They’re the kind of people who never even get halfway through writing their book because they get too busy with worldbuilding.

Surprised you didn't bring up Elder Scrolls: Despite a central and fairly dominant human empire, there's multiple types of elves and beastfolk, plus four types of humans (one of which are basically half elves) with long histories and varied interactions. Morrowind is the standout: the majority of the NPCs in that game are dark elves, with humans being a distinct, though powerful, minority. Also have to signal my love of the 'humans are space orcs' micro-genre.

1. It is obvious didn't read LotR. The whole elf situation is explained in detail and makes perfect logical sense. If you say the elves aren't the focus, you only watched the movies. 2. D&D has: Gold Elves, Silver Elves, Copper Elves, Green Elves, Wood Elves, High Elves, Silvanni Elves, Valley Elves, Dark Elves, Drow Elves, Sun Elves, Moon Elves, Space Elves, Shadow Elves, Fire Elves, Water Elves, Sea Elves, Earth Elves, Air Elves, Ash Elves, and finally, HALF-ELVES. BTW, If I start listing the HALF ELVES, which include Half Demon Elves, Half Human Elves, Half Dwarf Elves, Half Dragon elves, etc etc etc... I gonna be here all night. 3. Many of your examples seem to be: Make someone else the default, but That wouldn't be different, that's just a re-skin. 4. The primary reason elves get shit on is because of the default elf. If you follow things to their logical conclusion, they are going to keep winding up in the same spot, over and over and over. 5. Most fantasy follows the Greek myths. Gold age, Silver age, Bronze age, steel age, blah blah blah. Things were better in the past. Things are crappy now. Things are getting worse. WHY? BECAUSE PEACE IS BORING. If you follow the typical setting, you have an age of wonder (elves) things go bad due to (Hubris, bad luck, communism, Magic goes haywire) and then humanity, being more adaptable, steps in. why? BECAUSE SPECIALISTS USUALLY DIE OFF WHEN THE ENVIRONMENT CHANGES. "A jack of trades, master of none, is often better than a master of one." Elves are specialists. They do great in their preferred environments. ALL FANTASY RACES ARE SPECIALISTS. Humanity s the one generalist. We are, "good enough" at everything, that we wind up everywhere. If you change it so Elves are the generalists, and humans are specialists, guess what? The humans become ELVES with a reskin and the elves are just humans by another name. If you create a setting where specialists are better than generalists, it won't make sense, and people will know something is wrong. They'll go, "But Why? That doesn't make sense." Nothing would change. The elves could be oppressing the humans Guess what? They did, in 90% of the cases. Why? because they saw humans as pests. It's part of the whole cycle. I heard you say you find it all boring, but I also didn't hear a single idea that wasn't: Change the names of the races around, but keep the characteristics where they are, OR do the setting in a different era. There is nothing new under the sun. The only way to do something different under your conditions is to write the story so it isn't logical. Writing a story BADLY isn't new. Look at The Last Jedi. Well... it sure was NEW, but It wasn't GOOD. (I would argue it was so bad it was funny, but not good, because lord knows I laughed my ass off, but not for the right reasons. I admit, putting in a HARDWARE WARS reference was cool, but that doesn't a good movie make.)

Dragon Prince is an interesting setting, 6 races of Elves, and they are quite common. They even were dominate over humans for a long time.

The fantasy series I'm working on has a lot of Elves and the biggest city is a primarily Elvish series. The main character himself is a half elf. I love elves. At first I felt like I had too many, but I guess not by comparison. Lol

@thegreatmarondraith8741

5 ай бұрын

Elvish city*

I found this one interesting interpretation of elves in “the once and future nerd.” Due to their immortality, the elves essentially control the narrative of history, setting themselves up as the emissaries of the light and guiding the human society towards the “correct future”. Also, orcs and humans are pretty similar, but the elves set them up as the forces of darkness because of the grey skin/red eyes

Star wars is an interesting case because human centrism is kinda a pillar of the meta-narrative. It's the driving for the empires fascism. The republic allowed humans to rise to the top, and the empire to take over, leading to every alien race being stripped from the Senate and only be represented in the rebel alliance

@szymonlechdzieciol

5 ай бұрын

Correct. Alas Palapatine using species-tensions to divide and conquer get no nearly enough screentime.

Tbf for Tolkien, the elves are on decline in the Hobbit/LotR. Their golden age is chronicled in Silmarillion and the histories

You may need to go back to older books to find other races as main character protags. One book remember reading was Pride of Chanur series by C J Cherryh. There is a human, but no one can understand his language and he is not the main character. It is scifi so it takes place on other worlds with distinct races/species.

It sounds like you'd really enjoy Dungeon Meshi. One of the most interesting and well developed classic fantasy settings I've seen in a long time. It gives so much time and material to other races that the race that would normally be called "Humans" aren't called that, they're called Tallmen, and the other races just consider them an unusually lanky variety of "Human", which is the catch-all term for all of the races that are capable of interbreeding. Tallmen, half-foots, dwarves, elves, gnomes, and ogres. With Orcs and Kobolds being distinct species even beyond that. Tallmen are a rising power, but hampered by their lack of a cohesive kingdom, while the real powers are the Elves on one side of the map and the Dwarves and Gnomes on the other. It's shockingly well built for a series about a party who have to figure out how to cook and eat monsters because they're too poor to buy rations.

Check out the book Orcs. It’s told from the perspective of orcs, 99% of the main characters are orcs, and the main antagonist is half human, half…..something else

I say realism. There's only that many intelligent species that can evolve on the same planet with massive numbers (hence why sci fi is different). For a second reason: Elves tend to become race allegories and that becomes messy really quickly.

@PlatinumAltaria

5 ай бұрын

That isn't true though, there's nothing preventing more species from developing intelligence, except that having a giant brain isn't all that evolutionarily optimal.

The second there's elves in an IP it's automatically sorted into the dreaded "tropey" category

The Parshendi/Singers aren't human, they're magic crab-people. They're as fantasyesque as Elves. Plus there are other non-human races in the Stormlight archive. Granted, the humans are the default and have conquered the world by the time the book starts, but that's literally the point of the series

@martinsriber7760

5 ай бұрын

You are arguing against something that hasn't been said.

All those "HUMANS FUCK YEAH" stories feel like huge circle-jerks for our species. I'm supposed to believe we're capable of conquering space-faring civilizations with our "unyielding spirit" alone?

@a.dennis4835

4 ай бұрын

It also doesn't help that their worldbuilding tends to be very poorly thought out. I remember one that has the premise that all space-faring species are herbivores, with the exception of humanity and the token evil species. They make a big deal about how the herbivore species can't understand predator species thus are easy prey for the token evil species. The thing is, the herbivore species presumably would have dealt with predators at some point in order to the point where they could be advanced enough to build spaceships. Did their planets have no predators what so ever?

Already by that title I can tell you haven’t read manga. We’ve got some good elves this year.

My sci-fi setting project has a lot of human-descended species, known collectively as phylohumans, due to Humanity being the first to start colonizing planets. So there's a lot of Star Trek style rubber foreheads, but the setting does not revolve around the squabbles of humans.

I crave a fantasy setting where dwarves are the protagonist species

I think the 1st age of middle earth is a good example of what your asking for.

It's sci-fi not fantasy, but I am currently reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time which features sentient spiders as some of the main characters. I think a lot of authors assume that readers will only relate to human characters, hence why they are everywhere, but I'm definitely routing for the arachnids in this story. But then I write books where all the characters are cats, so maybe it is just me.

@smergthedargon8974

4 ай бұрын

I love Children of Time so much. I actually _prefer_ non-human protagonists.

Dragonlance and Warhammer fantasy have very interesting and diverse elves i highly recommend them both

@some_condiment

5 ай бұрын

elf-thing is weak-meat, we all know who-who is the most superior-best race in the Olde Worlde!

@tompatterson1548

5 ай бұрын

One of those is D&D. D&D has probably too many kinds of elves. Most of them also taken from Tolkien, yes, Tolkien does mention sea elves in a random line in the hobbit.

Best efforts I've seen in telling stories with fantasy races have been with anime/manga: (1) Interspecies Reviewer: it's all about a group of guys adventuring brothels in a fantasy setting, its hilarious and the author puts a lot of effort into how interspecies sex would work, and theres like 30 different races in this series, very fun I recommend it. (2) Delicious in Dungeon: It has just as many races as IR, but this focuses a lot in their culture, their body anatomy and way of thinking. It starts as cooking comedy series but it gets progressively serious as it continues on.

This is just convincing me to continue to delve further into my world-building

In my story, elves, dwarves, merfolk, centaurs, etc are just different species of human. In fact, my dwarves also existed IRL! They're homo floresiensis.

Heres an idea: why not have large populations? I mean, it greatly annoys me that not enough authors realize this and try that angle.

I can relate to a pale squid that has to deal with a yellow sponge and pink star than humans

@nicovelardita8619

5 ай бұрын

I mean, SpongeBob characters are mostly just fishy Americans

My favorite fantasy series/series of books in general remains Warriors: The Prophecies Begin. Clans of cats make a great fantasy setting

Human is the default for the same reason White and Male are the default: author self-insert.

I think terry pratchets diskworld books don’t suffer from this. We follow all different perspectives from dwarfs to gods to witch’s and vampires. They are great and you should check them out.

I would argue that prior to Tolkien, human worlds were the norm. Like, Newhon's Ghouls were certainly mentioned a few times, but they were almost always a faraway wonder that most people talk about but never see. Elric knew of a race of winged people, though the only one he met was wingless (and he himself was of a race often deemed nonhuman, but that seemed to be mainly a cultural perspective). I think that having numerous nonhuman races active in a world was very much a trend of imitating Tolkien, or imitating D&D which itself had imitated Tolkien. I dont really think the fantasy genre is losing anything by that trend dying down. It's one of those things that can serve a purpose to great effect, but gets pretty stale when it's done just because it's the done thing.

They have so often been written as humans - but better. Christopher Paolini took that trope to eleven in Eragon. But the major reason is probably that using them is a sign of lack of imagination "Elves? Really? Couldn't you come up with something of your own?" What I don't see enough is the uncanny nature of elves - they are almost like humans + the mystery surrounding them. If done right one could use to make into excellent horror stories similar to vampires. Vampires drink blood - but unless portrayed like infectious zombies they don't want to destroy their food source. Elves on the other hand will see the civilization as a threat to nature and will not have such limits to their actions.

As someone who does like to wrote some fantasy, I do a lot of alternate races/species, but I will say in terms of the title, not elves. Dwarves and sentient dragons and mermaids aren't too hard to pick a specific trait and then customize the other parts of it. It's hard to call a race "elves" in high fantasy without basically just copypasting the Tolkien vibes into it. (Though also I'm not really certain I'd call the humans default in lotr, they are regularly not the primary characters except in the just lotr books themselves when the age of the elves is actually ending, but maybe that's just my perspective?)

@tompatterson1548

5 ай бұрын

I mean, originally “elf” and “fairy” meant similar things. It’s either that or copy Pratchett. Or you can do the good old stealing babies and replace it with a changeling story.

I think this is why I really like the Anbennar setting in the EU4 mod. Every single race has many different countries with wildly different cultures.

This video really reminds me of that quote "And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bike!" Like this is a really bad way for him to state his preference. This is literally 15 minutes of James telling people they're not creative if they don't add nonhuman races to their works. And citing LotR to support that point is really misinformed. A fantasy book doesn't need nonhuman races, just like it doesn't need magic. Remember kids, don't let people on the internet tell you there are wrong ways to write a story, and especially don't let them tell you that you are dumb for not writing to their tastes.

My fantasy story started out as modern fantasy with just humans, but then I added elves and fairies. That made me realize the story would fit better in a more traditional fantasy world which led the story to become an otherworld story. I want original races, but I realized it's hard to create something unique that fits with the classic races. My humans, elves, and fairies don't have separate kingdoms. When I decided to incorporate other races into my story, I changed some of my formerly human characters to be either elves or fairies. Both of which are human size and mortal. I do have one race in my story that is mythical. The reason for this is because they are hunted for their magical properties. However, I would like my own original fantasy race that might be less common than the others, but still common enough. I wouldn't want to have to many races because then I need to incorporate it into my cast and fit it into my already established worldbuilding.

Warhammer Fantasy did it right You have super Powerful high elves, Humans Empires, human sized Rats With guns, dwarves, dark elves, lizard people, a bunch of undead factions, Demons and a Whole Lot more. All in a wild roughly the size I earth

@smergthedargon8974

4 ай бұрын

LIZARD GANG

James, watch Sousou no Frieren, it's an incredible show with an elf protagonist (Frieren). Humans are still the default and most of the characters, but the other races like dwarves, demons and elves are really basilar to the plot and worldbuild. The plot actually revolves around how Frieren lives way longer than humans and how it shapes her attitude, feelings and relationship with them. I strongly recommend the show.

Every now and then I have the urge to make a story where humans don't exist. Either from thousands of years of evolution, extinction, or them never existing in the first place.

@KateeAngel

5 ай бұрын

I would love that, especially if the main characters were bird-like sentient dinosaurs!

Despite the fact that I'm writing a novel defined by the main character (and others) becoming and being non-human for a good portion of the time, I'm strangely finding my worldbuilding skewing in this direction :X I've got a few different species, with their own ways of acting and viewing the world, but they're all essentially human offshoots that were magically altered somewhere down the line. I've been tempted to make them a bit more distinct, but given that I'm trying to put a lot of emphasis on the transformations of the main characters being unique, I was worried that might dilute the impact. Still, this video was a good reminder that I need to make sure they have variety and unique identity in themselves, and not just in how they contrast to humans.

I believe that elves and other races, in general, are so intertwined with existing stereotypical themes that it is challenging for both authors and readers to break free from this clichéd perspective.

This is elven propaganda if I ever saw one.

To be fair, Tolkien did write one book that focused on Elves and their politics (Well, one book and three collections of notes compiled by his son), the Silmarillion. James probably read it, but I recommend it to anyone that hasn't

I've recently started making videos to explain the lore of my setting to my players (of my D&D game) that they can go back and reference, and I'm currently working on a mini series exploring the old elven civilisations when the elves were the dominant species of the world before a magical apocalypse destroyed their empires. In the main section of the setting's history where my campaigns take place, humans are the dominant species in some regions but not all. There's three whole continents where humans barely exist and one of them is the most advanced civilisation on the planet.

You might check out Anne Bishop's 'The Others', first book is 'Written in Red'. While it's not elves (it's vampires and shifters), its a very interesting flip (imho) on the standard power dynamic between humans and other fantasy races. It's somewhat urban fantasy but I'd consider it more of an alt-Earth premise where humans are not the dominant species on Earth. Humans are around and have quite a bit of civilization, but rather than just expanding to take over the entire world, the civilization development has been limited to major hubs.

The Silmarillion (which is easy to bounce off of, so I don’t blame even hard core fantasy fans who can’t get into it) is great from this perspective. All the kingdoms once we get to that part of the book are Elven kingdoms. Humans show up as a nomadic band like halfway through who ally with the Elves but aren’t major players until the Second Age. First Age is the huge war of attrition between Morgoth and the diminishing Elven Kingdoms, which ended up at 4-5 max at the start of the war.

I don’t hate elves, dwarves or orcs as a concept, however in most fantasy series they are just the exact same thing ripped off from Tolkien, with 0 inspiration from mythology or unique traits. I want to see original takes on these creatures. Something new, a breath of fresh air. Make elves steal children again, make dwarves insectoids since in mythology they were created from literal maggots, pull a Warhammer on the Orcs and make them something special. Or, even better, TAKE LESSER KNOWN sapient mythical creatures and make them into a race. There’s so many mythologies and creature types to choose from. Otherwise it’s just boring and uninspired.

I think this is where Warhammer Fantasy (and its sequel with Age of Sigmar) have an advantage, since there are multiple factions and subfactions for every race in the setting.

Another thing is that humanity in these stories, whether they’re oppressed or not, represent a very optimistic view of humanity with no racism and a sense of industriousness that gives us a leg up on other races that have objectively better powers. Even when there are evil humans they are usually defeated and there is a sense of hope in the end. Even so, most of these (good) stories have interesting and new ideas of how this came to be.

02:39 Valyrians are High Elves.

@Dell-ol6hb

5 ай бұрын

true

Yeah, I hate this trend. I wish fantasy races were more popular in literature. They seem to be doing a bit better in video and tabletop games, but I want more books about non human cultures. Also humans playing the role orcs usually play in a story's setting is a great idea.

Elves often do have a bad wrap for all the wrong reasons

Anyone seen Smallfoot? That's a movie which uses the "humans are a myth" premise.

I completely agree

Read the Silmarillion, Tolkien's backstory to Lord Of The Rings. The Elves had seven different countries (Doriath, Ossiriand, the Falathrim, Nargothrond, the Hithlum, Gondolin, and the Feanorians) on the western coast of Middle Earth. And then the Dark Lord Morgoth (to whom Sauron was but an apprentice and lieutenant) crushed them all, one by one, in just sixty years of attrition warfare.

I wrote a short story about some desert people... someone asked how humans could do all that... I never said they were humans.

The part about sci-fi reminded me of that graph that compares sci-fi/fantasy settings to themes. I think that character-centric fantasy-typical stories just tend to have less world building bc of the nature of the themes and plot, whereas fantasy with sci-fi themes like Discworld will have more of this interesting worldbuilding

The lord of the rings movies sparked the publication of books about the fantasy races - mostly in the german speaking realm. The elves - berhard hennen (german) The dragonelves - berhard hennen The dwarves - markus heitz (german) The albae (dark elves) - markus heitz The dragons - julia conrad (austria) The orks - stan nicholls (uk) The goblins - jim c. Hines (us) Just some that i remamber.

Why? Well to quote John Crichton: "Because humans are SUPERIOR!" But yeah the Elfslayer series has some interesting elves and dragons, the former having enslaved humanity and the latter being greedy but largely neutral shapeshifting pseudolozards. But theres never enough dwarf focused stories. Hell half-orcs too.

i hate elves because they aren't ever properly realized for what they really would be like if they could actually life thousands of years, in my opinion humans would be seen as sub human to elves in the realistic fantasy world elves would see human as short lived tools/slaves

i like dwarf fortress's interpretation of elves, they are usually neutral with humans, but dwarves usually hate them for big cultural differences, mainly nature vs technology. its implemented in a way that makes it fun to interact with but also makes sense logically and would work in other fantasy settings/genres/mediums, which of course i wish was explored more often. and of course, dwarves are the main characters, but since the world is randomly generated, the majority race is random, it usually ends up being elves or dwarves due to their.... fertility... but not always.

We have an "Elves" series here in Germany, by Bernhard Hennen, currently 17 books. Sadly from what I saw on the internet its only partially translated and split-up in the English translation. Also your assessment if Tolkien seems rather off, when considering the Silmarillion (and other expanded stuff beyond that): Noldor, Teleri, Vanyar, Sindar, Nandor and Moriquendi and Avari, humans not even being a thing for the first half of the books.

Another reason for the ending of fantasy races in the genre is that settings have become less mythical in their telling with a desire for more realism in the setting. Putting realism on humans in an alien world is much easier than putting realism into a creature that doesn't exist in a world that doesn't exist

I think the reason why this isn’t happening in sci-fi is that it could “technically” happen. We can’t invent magic, but we can invent bigger and better spaceships. Also, in the context of space we understand how small humans are. Other aliens being just as advanced or more so just makes sense.

This is one reason why when i was writing my scifi novels, i made the main characters non human, one is a bird alien and one is a frog alien. Humans themselves are near extinct and rare, cus i dont like how numerous they always are in scifi and fantasy, when it makes no sense being commonly so weak compared to every other species

I think in the hobbit Elves are to an extent more the default. They’re the only race that gets two countries!

I love fantasy races, elves and dwarves, elves especially since I'm a bit more of an elf simp. However, I just realized, while large concentrations of elves do exist in my setting, they're always 'over there' and not 'here'. I think this was a subconscious bias I picked up without really considering it.

Make them more inspiring vs relatable Marvel is more relatable while DC is more inspiring

There is a norwegian fantasy series called ”Korpringarna” that follows a lone human in a fantasy world that doesnt believe in humans and she therefore has to hide her identity, etc. I was tio young to remember if it was any good, but i remember it being very weird. Would be fun of you checked it out

Warbreaker is set in a universe with other species. Just not on that world. Sanderson chooses really carefully when to include different races. Mistborn and Stormlight are great for that. His other series are more human centric but I think that’s because their themes focuses on other conflicts over species conflict You mention Way of King and the later books really bring the Parshendi (Singers) to the forefront. There’s also the Spren which play a huge role

I think one aspect of this is how "realistic" you want your fantasy to be. There was a point in time when there were multiple species of humans running around, but homo sapiens rose to dominance and either out breed or killed off all the others many thousands of years ago. If you are writing a world in which some form of evolution, or slow development of species over many millions of years, took place, then having more than a single sentient species living in the same area, using the same resources, becomes unrealistic, and therefore maybe avoided by authors aiming for "realistic" fantasy.