There's also the 7000-year-old Sumerian lizardfolk, which they apparently made dozens of figures of for some reason. They're especially weird, because the females are seen nursing babies who are also lizards... a distinct and unusual depiction to say the least.
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Fascinating! I had never heard of these. Perhaps I should dig deeper into Sumerian culture for ideas WRT dragonborn cultures.
Also, personally I think both sides rely too much on human characters.
Sure. Or even in works that do feature all or almost all human protagonists, you can get some genuine creativity in the non-human ones.
Animorphs, for instance, has very few "humanoid" aliens; the gedd and hork-bajir are the only ones we get to see "on camera" as it were, and Ax mentions that Worf looks like a female of an alien species he knows about (but they must have tails, since it's a well-documented fact in-universe that humans are
weird for being exclusively bipedal without tails). It's sort of like how every alien species you see in Star Trek uses an alphabet (rather than a syllabary or abugida etc.) and a decimal number system when that's not even the tiniest slice of the ways
humans have done things.
How is Eowyn not memorable? She killed the Witched King. I'd also say the Faramir is memorable too - but definitely Eowyn should count!
Yeah, I was gonna say that too. Her name was the first on my lips.
In the majority of serious fiction and video games (not cartoons) there are simply more elves, dwarves and other humanoids described than anthropomorphic characters. Beyond that, they tend to have specific tropes and paradigms. Which is not to say there is none, there is simply more with the "traditional" races and it tends to be a bit more consistent. So people want to play what they're familiar with. It appeals to them because there's some basis identifying with that race, and it supports a fantasy world view that they know.
Isn't this a bit circular? There are more of them because they were thrust into the public eye by the seminal work of high fantasy. Tolkien is responsible for influencing fantasy fiction
around the world at this point, in part because
D&D is. Would elves and dwarves be the force they are today if Tolkien had been a scholar of Arabic literature and sourced his work there? Or if he had been a scholar of Indian literature and had translated the
Mahabharata and
Ramayana, and based his work off them? We might have elephant-men and nagas rather than dwarves and elves, and be in exactly the same situation.
Why
these two specific things? Just saying they're more prevalent is like answering, "Why is Windows the most common operating system" with "because more computers use it"--it doesn't answer the question, it simply reiterates
that the questioned state of affairs is real.
As an example wen it comes to tortles they are either teenage mutant ninjas or a person that talks ... really ... slow ... ly. Doesn't really tell you much about what they are. So as a player you have to fill in most of the blanks, something not everyone wants to do. Even if you grew up with Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr Who there weren't a lot of cat people running around.
Unless you look to
Japanese works (or other cultures), where you have more variety. For example,
Final Fantasy XIV has the kojin. They don't talk slowly, and they aren't all ninjas; the red kojin are samurai, seers, and (occasionally) ninjas, while the blue kojin (which are actually green, because in traditional Japanese you use the same word for both,
ao) are traders, craftsmen, and entrepreneurs. Both are deeply spiritual and practice reverence of ancestors and objects as part of their continent's wider culture of revering the
kami, the spirits of things, ideas, and places.
Cat people are probably the most common, I grew up reading Larry Niven and his stories of Kzin for example. I didn't say they never appear, but if you have to go back to the early 70s to find an example from a cartoon, I stand by my words. Anthropomorphic people are less common.
Yes, no one is disputing that. We're asking
why there is this difference. Is it simply that Tolkien was that influential as a writer? Is there something special about them? The fact that elves remain incredibly popular while dwarves aren't so much (even with the Hobbit films presumably giving them a boost!) seems to indicate that it's a mixed situation. Hence, asking why.
Why have these things been more popular both with the ordinary public and, specifically, with people creating new works?
And, if you find that question too simple for your tastes, will this
change in the coming decades as a generation grows up seeing dragonborn and tieflings more often than dwarves in D&D?
