Voranzovin
Explorer
The PC I'm playing right now is actually mildly bigoted...against his own half-elvish ancestry.
The campaign takes place in Sigil, so the DM gave us a fair amount of leeway to construct the prime material plane we come from. I thought it would be interesting to subvert some of the common tropes about Elves. In this world, they're not a proud and magical elder race--they're dirty hippies who spend all their time in the forest getting high on trees, and humans do not like them. In the popular human imagination they have a lot of the worst connotations of the Fair Folk, including, among the most bigoted, the (entirely false) belief that they steal human babies to create new elves.
Imagine you met a homeless person in a modern-ish city who was almost supernaturally beautiful, speaks like Legolas--the trees and the grass do not now remember them: Only I hear the stones lament them: deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us, but they are gone, they are gone, they sought the Havens long ago, probably has unknown magical powers, and never sleeps, and you might get some idea of why humans regard them as alternately pitiful, dangerous, or insane. Humans being what we are, this turns very easily into hate.
My character's father probably intended to stick around and be a good dad by human standards, but he got distracted and whoops, a decade and a half went by and his son grew up without a father. Felix is not happy about this. He's also not happy about having to deal with anti-elvish bigotry, which paradoxically assumes both that he must be a conniving and untrustworthy fey mastermind and that he must be an incompetent wastrel who only graduated summa cum laude from a magic academy because his fey ancestry gave him an unfair advantage in magical studies. (It didn't. He learned to be a wizard the hard way, just like everybody else). He went through a period as a teenager of idolizing his elvish heritage, and was then bitterly disappointed by the actual elves he met. The result is that he both suffers from anti-elvish bigotry, and engages in it, distrusting other elves on sight. He learned elvish because one must do so, as a wizard, to decipher some ancient magical writings. He primarily uses it to tell anyone who wants to talk to him about the melody of the light on the leaves of the mallorn tree to **** off in their own language (which was itself something of an achievement--it actually takes quite a lot of linguistic acumen to figure out how to swear in elvish).
Now that he's in Sigil where elves are treated very differently by the society around them, he may get something of an awakening about this. But the campaign hasn't really gone in a direction that would force him to come to grips with it yet.
The campaign takes place in Sigil, so the DM gave us a fair amount of leeway to construct the prime material plane we come from. I thought it would be interesting to subvert some of the common tropes about Elves. In this world, they're not a proud and magical elder race--they're dirty hippies who spend all their time in the forest getting high on trees, and humans do not like them. In the popular human imagination they have a lot of the worst connotations of the Fair Folk, including, among the most bigoted, the (entirely false) belief that they steal human babies to create new elves.
Imagine you met a homeless person in a modern-ish city who was almost supernaturally beautiful, speaks like Legolas--the trees and the grass do not now remember them: Only I hear the stones lament them: deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us, but they are gone, they are gone, they sought the Havens long ago, probably has unknown magical powers, and never sleeps, and you might get some idea of why humans regard them as alternately pitiful, dangerous, or insane. Humans being what we are, this turns very easily into hate.
My character's father probably intended to stick around and be a good dad by human standards, but he got distracted and whoops, a decade and a half went by and his son grew up without a father. Felix is not happy about this. He's also not happy about having to deal with anti-elvish bigotry, which paradoxically assumes both that he must be a conniving and untrustworthy fey mastermind and that he must be an incompetent wastrel who only graduated summa cum laude from a magic academy because his fey ancestry gave him an unfair advantage in magical studies. (It didn't. He learned to be a wizard the hard way, just like everybody else). He went through a period as a teenager of idolizing his elvish heritage, and was then bitterly disappointed by the actual elves he met. The result is that he both suffers from anti-elvish bigotry, and engages in it, distrusting other elves on sight. He learned elvish because one must do so, as a wizard, to decipher some ancient magical writings. He primarily uses it to tell anyone who wants to talk to him about the melody of the light on the leaves of the mallorn tree to **** off in their own language (which was itself something of an achievement--it actually takes quite a lot of linguistic acumen to figure out how to swear in elvish).
Now that he's in Sigil where elves are treated very differently by the society around them, he may get something of an awakening about this. But the campaign hasn't really gone in a direction that would force him to come to grips with it yet.
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