Design & Development: Halflings [merged]

[Lizard]

Have you ever even met a highschool student?

No, I was born at the age of 18. (Actually, according to my mother and others who knew me as a youth, I was born a crotchety old man.)

Don't know about your HS crowd, but mine sat around plotting World Domination and what we would do after college, etc. Planning For The Future -- which had to be better than the present, which sucked -- was a major part of HS for me.

 

[Lizard]

No. In the 20th/21st century Western viewpoint, that's a very common way to live, IME.

It may be, but it doesn't have social approval. Up the ladder! The American Dream! My child's going to do better than me! Keep up with the Joneses! That's soooo last week! I wanna be class president/star quarterback/valedictorian! Etc, etc, etc.

Getting off topic, but "ambition" is built into modern society; those without it are considered lazy, shiftless, leeches, parasites, etc. Not going to argue if this is valid or healthy or not, but it is the way we are. Further, our modern take on history says the Happy Farmer In The Fields is an Imperialist Lie; the peasants were oppressed, miserable, wretches kept enslaved to the whims of their Cruel Feudal Lords, and often rebelled, only to be slaughtered.

Likewise, any human society which reached the point of hobbit-style agriculture was very hierarchical, whether benignly so or (usually) not. But Hobbits have no leaders; at best, they have a Mayor and some Sherriffs whose main jobs are to keep the drunks from getting too rowdy.

Sure, it's Tolkeins ideal fantasy of working-class life...but it's just that, a fantasy. It not only never existed in reality, given human nature, it couldn't. But Hobbits/halflings, being non-human, CAN make this society work -- for them. This gives them a very alien psychology, as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This gives them a very alien psychology, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't mean to be nationalist/ageist, but I think it's a lot more "alien" to an American born in the 1960s than, say, a European born in the late 1970s/1980s. It's not like Hobbits don't have ambitions (just look at the Sackville-Bagginses and their designs on Bilbo/Frodo's house), either, it's just that their sights are set fairly low, relative to the more extreme humans. To me, they seem absolutely like a subset of humanity, not at all an "alien" race, and I know that Tolkien would agree completely, particularly as they were based on a society he perceived as actually existing within Britain.

Just to be clear, Hobbits are not ambition-less, as you seem to be implying. Crappy ambitions is not the same as no ambitions, not at all. They're just archetypical human hicks (pre-mass media), who are unaware of and largely uninterested in the outside world. The defining characteristics of hobbits are all absolutely human characteristics, and not particularly uncommon ones, I'd argue. That they're as "alien" as Dwarves, I'd buy, absolutely, because like dwarves, they about human traits being played up.

 

[Voss]

And thus, alien, inhuman, and interesting.

Uh... its how the lower classes of British society (and others) were expected to behave for centuries. I won't speak for other people's definition of interesting, but it isn't alien or inhuman at all. Up to the second half of the 20th century, it was normal, and even now, it isn't uncommon, even in the U.S. I spent a lot of time with fairly low income rural Americans in December, and there are a lot of similarities. The world view of the group (about a 100 or so people) didn't extent much past the county line, with some exceptions, and the family pecking order was the limit of most ambitions, along with having enough money to get some beers that evening. The Sackville-Baggins and the Green Dragon Inn would have fit right in.