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Comments
Admittedly I made half that shit up for my own amusement. All I really remember was being an asshole elf to some dudes who varied on the scale of deserving-ness (is there a word for that?), and my last victim giving me a big Screw You Elves speech.
Did you become an arrogant character in fiction?
Inasmuch as dreams are fiction, yes.
Honestly? Between the aforementioned Inheritance Cycle, those asshole Nazi Elves in Skyrim and most recent cliche fantasy fiction? I have had it with goddamned pointless elven smuggery. Any race that claims to be inherently superior to humanity can stick glass shards up its collective anus.
Does anyone else feel this way?
Bah. Anti-Elven attitude these days has become more cliched than Elven superiority.
Perhaps that's a good thing, though.
What about energy lifeforms, living metal organisms, etc.? (Granted, the only such example I can think of right now are the Decepticons)
Leave them be. The Decepticons are fucked enough as is with that asshole Starscream running around.
Gotta go.
If grief comes by you as a result of reading this series you kinda have it coming. :V
But for real, that's what clichés do, brah. Wouldn't it be better to seek out fresh (or, if not historically new, then inventive) fantasy?
I find "humanity fuck yeah" to be a much, much, much more annoying attitude.
I'm fine with elven superiority when it's not actually superiority at all.
Tolkien's Eldar were "superior" in that they did not suffer disease or old age, and whenever they were killed, their souls were reborn in newer bodies. Which makes sense, given that they're supposed to be man before the Fall, before eating the Apple of Knowledge. But at the same time, this deathlessness means that they can never be as attached to the world as man is, and in time just fade away into "Heaven" or become all but invisible because they just can't give a shit.
Octo: I agree, the only time its acceptable when its "Fuck yeah For the Emperor!"
http://solomongrup.com/products.php?cat=1&code=
>Naburo, the Next Generation of Naruto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCPGs5pylRc
Lovely.
My favorite is "One Peace".
Hah, yeah, but only if you don't take that all too serious, and treat it as part of the 'over the top' aspect of the setting. Unfortunately, too many WH40kers do seem to take that too seriously.
On the flip side, though, as Octo is saying, anything claiming humanity as inherently superior to anything can just like... go jump off a cliff or something.
equality for all woooo, i guess
I can't help but support anti-elven attitudes on the basis that elves are everywhere. In most fantasy works, elves are basically superficially different people that don't really need to exist. Same goes for dwarves. If there's some major plot point or theme that benefits from a humanlike species that isn't quite human, then elves and dwarves and whatnot are a fair call. For the most part, though, works of fantasy include them (and a whole lot of other things) because how can you have fantasy without elves?
Which is a major shame because the same fantasy works tend to ignore or be ignorant of other things in history and foklore that were just as cool, or way cooler. Like how it's likely that the adoption of an otherwise exclusive martial art in the 15th century by the HRE was a major element in retaking Vienna from the Hungarians in 1490, following the establishment of the new Landsknechte units of foot soldiers. The Brotherhood of St. Mark, a fencing guild, was given exclusive rights to appoint military rank on fencing students in 1486, and the Landsknechte were formed in 1487. Hans Talhoffer is thought to be one of the founding members of the Brotherhood, and he was a student of the Liechtenauer tradition of martial arts. Liechtenauer himself was a 14th century knight who traveled Europe in search of fencing masters, and he ended up collating a bunch of different techniques into a single system -- the second-oldest complete system known to us insofar as Europe is concerned.
So, you know, that's pretty much a martial arts siege warfare story that actually happened. The film adaptation almost writes itself!
That's a terrible reason to support the attitudes, especially when the attitude is actually encouraging authors to add them just so that they can rail against them.
(also i am writing a work with elves in it so ner)
It's an awesome reason, as elucidated on after that sentence. If elves are in there just because, then it's indulgence for indulgence's sake via a terribly overused cliche. Any work that wants to be taken seriously has to implicitly provide reasons for having the content within it. In the Discworld, elves are antagonists that prey on human insecurities and weaknesses; in The Witcher, elves (and dwarves) are part of an oppressed minority that allows the books to examine racial discrimination with a neutral frame of reference; in The Lord Of The Rings, elves are symbols of a fall from grace, where their alleged perfection didn't prevent them from making enough mistakes that they now have to leave Middle-earth.
These are all really good reasons to use elves. 'Cause there's a point in each case, at the very least. But just having elves for elves' sake is too big a sign of indulgence for me, or lack of creativity, or both. But this all ties up into how fantasy has to trim its fat in general.
It's really not, though. It propagates a particular type of sentiment and it's not the one you're after.
It's fine to feel that elves are overused and need to stop being crammed in, but that's not what anti-elven attitudes are in this context, as you should know very well.
I wonder if I will ever be able to create an IJBM thread in which people don't insult me.
Nobody insulted you in this one!
Wait, Formaldehyde did. Bleh.
As far as my experience goes, anti-elven attitudes exist exactly because they're put where they're not needed so often. I don't think anyone dislikes elves just because. A significant part of the fantasy audience is just fed up with how homogeneous fantasy is as a whole, and elves make an excellent posterchild for that sentiment.
No, they generally exist because many fantasy authors were playing elves up as superior than humanity, with or without justification, and it grew annoying very quickly.
The best example of such, as already brought up, is in The Inheritance Cycle, but it's not the first, not the last, and most definitely not the only example.
Yeah, but that's not how the views came about, and it's generally not the primary complaint leveled against them.
That complaint is usually done in more general terms- not "Ugh, elves are so overdone" but "Ugh, this book uses elements that have been done to death."
Alex, you're in a major confusion of two levels of argumentation; what TVT calls Watsonian and Dickensian. From a Dickensenian (out-of-universe) point of view, yes, Elves are overused. The solution to that is to not use them at all. Using them in a certain way in-universe is the Watsonian approach, and not only does this confuse the two levels, it doesn't even help your approach! It isn't even deconstructing a cliché: That's why I said that anti-elven sentiments have become maybe even more cliché, so it's just aiding another cliché at this point. I think at this point, things like the Inheritance Trilogy aside, pro-elven sentiment is the actual contrarian attitude by now!
Also:
Hence, not fantasy.
Oh, and also:
I actually think humanity fuck yeah is worse than elven superiority. Because most writers (rumour says all) happen to be human themselves. Writing such glorification (or, more bluntly, wanking material) of the own race is just arrogance. On the other hand, the various fantasy and sci-fi races don't actually exist. Hence all their attributes have only meaning in comparison to humanity; they are as such a reflection of sorts of human attributes and attitudes. So if a race is somehow superior to humanity in reality that's not so much a glorification of them (because in reality they don't exist), but a criticism of humanity. Whether intentional or not, it's the author saying "this or that is wrong with humanity". And an author pointing out issues with humanity? Well, that's just literature. Now of course, this can be overdone, but hey, bad literature exists, too. In general, though, for this reason, I think elven(-like) superiority is far more acceptable than "humanity fuck yeah". The latter is just stupid, boorish arrogance and nothing more.
It depends entirely on the execution. "humanity fuck yeah" as cultural posturing against other fantasy races is a tad trite(unless overdone to the point of parody à la 40k, like most of the /tg/ threads), but in measured doses à la early Star Trek it is refreshingly optimistic. I find the other side of the coin("I'm ashamed of my species") much more grating to read. When criticizing humanity, give me philosophical discussions on the concept of what it means to be human that only fantasy/sci-fi allow & humorous commentary on odd behaviours of our species à la Discworld any time over angsty pessimism.
Of course, human superiority translates to 'criticize rival human ideology by slapping it on a species of hats', so there's that too.
I see what you're getting at, but they aren't mutually-exclusive viewpoints. My stance is basically:
Don't use elves, dwarves, or other such things unless there's a significant point to their inclusion. The Dickensian and Watsonian views aren't the only valid ones, or the only ones that exist; they're tools for assisting in understanding external and internal narrative as separate entities. In reality, Dickensian and Watsonian perspectives today aren't set in stone, but represent parts of a continuum of viewpoints. In a word, they're frameworks.
It might be getting this way in terms of novels, but fantasy fiction is finding more people today through video games than it is through the written page. Fantasy games without elves are notable exceptions, and while game balance is a thing, elves typically have advantages in what are considered more sophisticated skills and gameplay mechanics. Usually, things like magic and archery; leave brutish things to humans, and especially dwarves. So you can see how this kind of thing creates a negative frame of reference for other species/races in fantasy games.
I think we need some "humanity fuck yeah" from time to time. While recognising human error and our collective failures is important, excess criticism on the matter suggests to me that human beings are necessarily going to do evil, or have a net result of "doing evil" in general. One book that proclaims this notion is Lord Of The Flies, wherein Golding presumes to tell us all exactly what human nature is and how it works -- as though any individual person has the capacity, data or research to do so.
The popular criticism against humankind on literature has been pretty heavily discredited by sociological research, in any case. As a rule of thumb, what data we have suggests that human beings prefer altruism to selfishness when the former is possible and reasonable. That doesn't mean that every person is an altruist, or that those altruistic actions are highly significant. What it does tell us, though, is that selfishness is the exception, and that the more likely cause of many of the world's ills is ignorance.
The conclusion I draw is that human beings are, more than anything else, diverse. The concept of a singular, solid "human nature" has always seemed premature to me, because objectively measuring whatever "human nature" is would require a huge body of data, and be subject to age, culture, gender, socio-economic status and other factors. While the idea that humans are flawed is absolutely valid and something to keep in mind, I think it's also important that human beings believe in what they can be at their best, too. The pretentious, absolutist judgements on human nature that have been popular throughout much of history don't really help with that. They're deterministically negative.
I would just like to see like one fantasy work where a person's character is not determined by their species.
Usually you get the entire species acting one way and then one or two "rebel" characters who actually act like multidimensional individuals.