But played as if they're all hunting dogs by most people.
That's the irony here, imo. "I want to play something totally different, that has an intrinsically different personality from humans, and could never be mistaken for humans....who makes a living going into dungeons, killing monsters, and taking their stuff. Which nobody, not even humans, would ever do IRL."
It occurs to me that one of the reasons elves and dwarves and humans and hobbits are so distinctive in Tolkien is that he has a very detailed multi-thousand year history for them. And their longevity means that a lot of that history is personal for a lot of them. (He even makes indirect reference to this: the most cheerful and least "Dwarvish" of the Dwarves are also the youngest.)
In my experience, a lot of other fiction that does NOT provide that kind of backstory and context the distinctiveness of the races either overly relies (perhaps unintentionally) on the tropes established by Tolkien, or tries to do something different and falls flat because the backstory isn't there. The stories really could have just been written with only humans.
Right now I'm thinking about the Witcher tv series (I never read the books): I'm not totally following the story, but "elves" have some grudge against a bunch of humans, and are treated as second class citizens, at least by some humans. Oh, and they seem woodcrafty and use bows. /eyeroll. But, really, they could just be humans who look a little different, and that would both work with the story and be pretty darned realistic.
Another example: in the PJ movies none of the context is there for anybody who doesn't already know the story, so to give the audience something to latch onto he relies on coarse, unimaginative archetypes such as Dwarves drinking a lot and having Scottish accents, and Elves being all uptight and playing sonorous music on harps.
