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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6526264" data-attributes="member: 4937">If I'm remembering correctly that's the canonical origin story of elves and dwarves in D&D, as presented in the first edition Deities and Demigods.  I could probably come up with more extreme examples.  One example cosmology I've seen has dwarves starting out as effectively brain parasites of the god of earth, spontaneously generated while she was sleeping, and they set up a kingdom in her head unaware that they are busily tunneling around in "mom".   She woke up with headache and shook them out of her ear.   Point is, these are fantasy worlds.  They aren't governed by genetics, evolution, and shared common descent.  Frequently, though Tolkien would be an exception, they don't even share a creator or an origin story.  The different races have as different of origins as the North American tribes believed each tribe to have a different origin (since each told a different story about itself and about the origin of the other tribes that made them unrelated to each other).  Again, this is a fantasy setting, so the first level assumption is not that scientific/realistic rules apply, but rather that fantasy rules apply.  In fantasy, dragons can breed with just about anything, and indeed, just about anything can breed with anything.   According to the Greeks, for example, the Minotaur got started when the Queen got infatuated with a bull and had intercourse with it.  By your scientific standards, that makes cows and people the same species (and dragons, and what not).On the contrary, in a fantasy story that the myths of the world's creation and ordering are true is generally taken as a given.  Those myths are literally true.  Zeus really did slay his father, fought a Titanomachy, and there really are Olympians.  Thor and Odin really are going to fight in Ragnarok against the frost and fire giants, and live on the other side of the Bifrost bridge.   Again, this is all science-y logic that ignores the rest of the setting screaming out, "There are half-dragon gorgons for crying out loud; there are 4 elements.  Conservation of Energy gets violated all the time.  Your periodic table is of no use to your here.  It's not science."Well, that's my hope.  But to get there, we have to be comfortable with otherness in a way that we are not.  Simply saying, "Oh, well, The Other is just like us in every way that matters", is not the same as being comfortable with otherness and is in fact rather it's opposite.</blockquote>

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