Our Elves Are Better/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

*** That and if you had both a low fertility rate and your kids took a century or so to grow up... personally I'd keep em in a freaking fortress til they were old enough to defend themselves. Ever wonder why elves are usually an endangered species?

** [[The Other Wiki]], of course, has a [[wikipedia:Elf (Middle-earth)#Life cycle|discourse on Tolkien's Elves' life cycles]]. Yeah...

** I think it's because [[Most Writers Are Human]] and we like to think of ourselves as pretty much the ultimate in intelligent species, compared to which pretty much everything else (other than ''maybe'' some divine entities) must necessarily be flawed in some way. (This is reinforced by the fact that thinking up a species that we might actually ''accept'' as 'better than we are' rather than dismiss as a bunch of [[Mary Sue|Mary Sues]] is genuinely hard.) Having the gods create us and then keep creating more new species even though they have us already kind of goes against that because it suggests that we are after all merely the flawed first shots at something better.

** Actually, there are a few writers I know (currently unpublished, just in my circle of acquaintances), who are writing fantasy stories where all of the other Humanoid races split off from humanity as a result of magically-enhanced Microevolution. Think of it as Radiation turning Bruce Banner into the Hulk, only for an entire race, over the course of a few generations, and without the crippling social and psychological problems... It explains why they're so similar to humanity, but on various extremes of the human spectrum as far as physiology and psychology go. Heck, there are even 'sub-races' of these humanoid derivatives who split off in a slightly different manner! BTW, yes, we are still looking for more ideas on this subject, if The Troper Groupmind has any...

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