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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6458932" data-attributes="member: 4937">A very good and interesting point.One of the big problems typically seen in fantasy is that we end up knowing a fantasy race through a single individual or culture and so it's easy to imagine that fantasy races are perfectly homogenous with a single culture or even personality that defines them.   But we'd really only suspect this to be reasonable if it was one of the tropes considered in imagining the race that they were more homogenous and prized individuality and creativity far less than humanity - simplistically a race based off our understanding of some sort of hive animal whether bees or naked mole rats might fit this trope.  The Drow are a terrible place to start, because they have consistently been described as highly CE while consistently being portrayed as LE.  But, if the base culture really is CE, it's not just likely that each break away counter-cultural sect is unique, but the parent culture is itself radically diverse and splintered into large numbers of competing traditions and cultures.  Each tribe would maintain its own rites, rituals, customs, and aesthetic standards.  We'd expect a profusion of dialects and sub-ethnicities.  We'd never expect to see conformity and uniformity held up as a standard.  We'd never expect what we see in the canon.With the Drow we might subvert this then, so that the evil cultures are highly diverse and the rebellious counter-culture is rebelling against this diversity and in favor of a universal objective standard of justice and compassion - and probably not quite succeeding, seeing as they have no prior basis for such a society and are continually having to try to assimilate new persons with their own unique ideas.  Or we might do what I've always found more logical, go ahead and accept that the Drow are the LE counter-culture of the core CG elven culture, and that there own counter-cultures would prize the diversity and individuality that they'd been denied by Lloth (here represented as a LE demigod, rather than a demon queen).  They might become a culture of avant garde artists, cloistered 'monks' practicing strange forms of self-actualization, and existentialist and objectivist philosophers, each busily trying to define their own identity (something that the Drow culture as presented in the books refuses to let its members do) in complete isolation from the influences of everyone else.   And of course, that might be just one meta culture.  Another group might practice vigilante vengeance against their parent drow culture, hunting down and assassinating them.   Another might seek to evangelize and redeem the drow.   Another band might become pacifists that spend their lives in acts of penance and mourning, taking on the collective guilt and shame of their race.   Another might lose themselves in sybarite pleasures.  And so forth.</blockquote>

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