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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edena_of_Neith" data-source="post: 2628015" data-attributes="member: 2020">THE MODERN ELF  Wait now, I'm not done with the story!  The hundred year 'insanity' and 'love of war' and super-munchkinzing of the Elves of Haldendreeva is not the end in itself.  It is the means to the end.  It is why the Elves of Today are like they are.    This whole story is about why the Elves of Today are Haldendreevish, and what Haldendreevish means.  Haldendreevish is about the elven 'love of life' and the elvish 'insanity' - the 'corrupted love of life' - and how they coexist in the elven heart, contesting with each other constantly for dominance.  Remember how I discussed the Delrunian elvish 'love of life'?  Remember I said it was instinctual?  It was also magical.  It was quintessentially Elven.  It was a part of Delrunian Elvendom, as it were.  Back in old Delrune, it was a fundamental part of who and what the elves were.  Remember how I tried to describe (pathetic as the attempt was) how that instinct became corrupted?  The Elves of Haldendreeva loved life so much they insisted on Resurrection and disturbing the rest of the elven spirits in Arvandor, reveled in war and slaughter in the name of life and joy in life, and how they wallowed in the diseased and evil Great Grungy Swamp in the name of cavorting with the natural, living world?  That corruption lives on today in the hearts of all elves who are descendents of the Elves of Haldendreeva:  which is to say, a lot of elves  ... or, perhaps, all elves.  They could not engage, for a hundred years, in so much depravity and monstrosity, so much slaughter and bloodshed and evil, without leaving a permanent legacy of darkness for their descendents.  Haldendreeva is lost to the ancient past, disappeared countless millennia ago, and none today can name even the Crystal Sphere it once inhabited, but it's legacy still lives in the hearts of today's elves.  I must sidetrack briefly and discuss the original Delrunain elvish 'love of life' concept.  If I am trying to describe the corrupted 'love of life' concept, it is only fair I describe what the original concept was like, no?   The Delrunian elvish 'love of life' was an 'alien' concept.  It was a concept that falls apart logically if you look at it too closely (like all too many non-human concepts in sci-fi and fantasy, but I do not pretend to be a good writer!  I have referred to this as drivel, and do so again.)    The Delrunian elvish 'love of life' meant love of one's own life, a celebration of and cherishing of one's own life, an enthrallment with one's own life, and an ecstasy with just being alive, period.  It ALSO meant the same thinking concerning all other living beings and living things, with all that means - literally, implied, and metaphorically.  So Delrunian elves lived in cities of living trees and plants, surrounded by animals and birds, insects and arachnids, animals and parasites, and called it good ... even when much of that life was harmful to them.  Delrunian elves refused to cut down trees for cropland, growing crops only where trees (and even shrubs) had never been, going without food rather than destroying life.  They turned to the faerie instead, who helped them with magic to eat a complete diet.  Their clerics magically created food.  Rarely, they imported food (with discomfort, knowing trees had been removed to grow said food.)  Delrunian elves refused to build or live within homes made of anything non-living.  They would have retched at the idea of living in homes made of slain trees.  Delrunian elves had no politics as we know politics, because they figured politics was about hurting others, and thus lessening the lives of others.  Delrunian leaders were effectively the leaders of charity organizations, whose sole purpose was to give everything they had to the other elves of the nation.  Delrunian leaders lived rather austerely.  Delrunian elves had no mercantile system at all, since they saw business and profit as ways of enslaving others (both literally and metaphorically) and thus lessening the quality of the lives of others.  Nobody worked for a living on a 'wage' in Delrune, because that was seen as lessening the value of people by defining the value of people in monetary terms.  Delrune had an army, but it had never fought anything, and was as green as green gets.  It's weapons and armor were imported, since the elves would not cut down trees to power forges, or dig for coal to power forges and again have to kill living things in the process.  Delrunian bartering consisted of giving the other guy what he wanted, since it enhanced the other guy's life.  If Delrune's neighbors had not been extremely charitable and sympathetic (to what they saw as unsophisticated country bumpkins) Delrune would have sold the farm, as it were.  Delrunian elves were always friendly towards humans and other outsiders, cherishing their existence, and they never could understand what had gone wrong when humans - and even other elves - backstabbed them, as almost inevitably happened.  Delrune's neighbors came to Delrune's aid here, keeping watch on who passed through their countries heading for Delrune, turning the more darkhearted away.  Get the picture?  After the first war killed half of Delrune, that 'love of life' instinct was overwhelmed.  The behavioral patterns it induced were replaced by new behaviors in the elves.  That we know.  It MUST be understood, however, that the instinct was not lost, and it was ever, always, trying - endlessly - to reassert itself, to become dominant once more.  The reason it failed to reassert itself and become dominant again, is because the elves were repeatedly attacked, were never free from assault.  The constant assault on the elves kept the 'love of life' instinct suppressed.  After the Great Enemy was killed by Epic adventurers, and the Elves of Haldendreeva had slaughtered his legions and all their other foes (sterilizing much of the planet and Crystal Sphere in the process), they had no more enemies to attack them.  No further enemies were to come, either.  For some reason, the Elves of Haldendreeva did not carry 'War Eternal' out into the Multiverse, but stayed in their own Crystal Sphere, waiting for an enemy that never came.  The original 'love of life' instinct, no longer impeded by constant assault, won out over the insanity, the 'corrupted love of life', which had dominated the Haldendreevan mentality and made the elves over into what they had become.    When that happened, the elves began to slowly moderate and revert back to the kind of elves they had been originally, a process that went on for centuries before the elves became calm enough that we would call them 'sane' or 'partially normal' once more.  But as previously stated, that bit about consequences meant that the insanity, the corruption, could never be totally expunged.  The legacy of the past could not be undone.  The payment for a century of avid violence, evil, and depravity, was exacted, and is still being exacted, and always will be exacted, from the descendants of the Elves of Haldendreeva.  The insanity, the 'corruption of the love of life' will always live on in the hearts of the elves.  The Elves of Today have a constant tug of war, a constant internal strife, between their innate 'love of life' and the insanity, the 'corrupted love of life.'    The whole of modern elvish thinking and modern elven society, their whole way of life, is defined by this tug of war.  The elves know this well, and they refer to the word Haldendreevish to define both the 'love of life' and the 'corrupted love of life' parts of themselves, and the battle between the two parts of themselves, which is why they say that Haldendreevish IS Elvish, is the Heart of Elvendom, IS what defines what and who they are.</blockquote>

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