Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="PsyzhranV2" data-source="post: 8349890" data-attributes="member: 7015332">I am sick to death of trying to convince people "representation matters" when I might as well be talking to a brick wall. I see some people are still fighting the good fight, more power to them. Instead I'm going to focus on this point in the quote.The dominant cultural perception of elves, dwarves, halflings, etc., is "lumpy humans". They're visually distinct in one or two key ways, they each have a few innate abilities that humans don't have, but otherwise they're pretty much human. I'd argue that's what most people first bring to mind when they hear "elf" or "dwarf" or whatever, and going too far from that in your work may cause parts of your audience to be turned off because of the mismatch in expectations.There are exceptions, usually by taking inspiration to existing mythological and religious ideas such as the Fair Folk, but in those cases they're usually either the bad guys or an inscrutable, unknowable force. And in games, both tabletop and roleplaying, those kinds of demihumans don't tend to be playable, both because they're too difficult to casually roleplay for somebody who isn't a master of the Stanislavski Method, and because they don't tend to be likeable and relatable in a way that most people want from their viewpoint characters.As for making demihuman more visually inhuman as opposed to mentally inhuman, well then it becomes a case of the Ship of Theseus. How much of a thing can you change before it is no longer the thing it originally was? How unique can you make your elves before they're no longer recognizable as elves? If your "elves" are insect people with four arms and four wings with a eusocial social structure, and do not resemble Tolkien or Warhammer or Warcraft elves at all, I have to wonder if "elf" is really the best name for them. At that point, I'd say that they're a new type of creature entirely.</blockquote>

Verification