D&D General So how do Half-Elfs feel different to Elfs?

[Charlaquin]

When I first got married, my wife wanted to go out to dinner with a bunch of her friends and have me tag along. When I arrived, I was the only husband there. I need to stress that I knew these women and they didn't say anything or behave in any way that made me feel unwelcome. But I was literally the odd man out and I couldn't help but feel a little awkward.

I think people hear outsider and they think the worst. i.e. Oppression, experiencing prejudice, etc., etc. Sometimes it's just being different.

That is an incredibly different experience from having mixed heritage…

 

[Charlaquin]

I find the premise of half-elves (and the relationship between an elf and a human) to be ridiculous on its face. I don't remember who talked about it somewhere that I read... but basically the Human lifespan to an Elf is like a Human's lifespan to their pet dog or cat. You go into this relationship knowing that you are only going to have only a small amount of time (probably like a decade or so) before you lose that creature, and that you are most likely going to "replace" said creature who knows how many times over your life once each of them is gone. So there is a certain detachment you have to have in that relationship, knowing its going to be so short (not to mention the fact that you are quite likely to have three, five, who knows how many more similar attachments like this over the course of your lifetime.)

As a result, I find it exceedingly unlikely just how many Elves across all these game worlds knowingly get into romantic relationships with these Human people who are ostensibly aged like pets... knowing full well the relationships will last only 1/8th of their lives... then having children with those Humans that they know for a fact will only live like maybe a quarter of their lives if they were lucky. All on a numeric scale that is just ridiculious.

I could accept the rarest of occasions where this might happen... where some rare singular Elf just can't help but fall in deep with their Human pet to actually have a romantic relationship with them... but based the sheer number of half-elves that live everywhere in every game setting... Elves apparently are the most sociopathic a-holes ever. Bedding whatever number of Humans they want, knowing they are going to watch them grow old and die... and having multitudes of children with them that they are also going to watch live, grow old, and die numerous times over throughout their 800 year lifespan. And apparently be completely okay with that based on how often these relationships happen across every single game world. Cause it ain't like half-elves are a rare species like Aasimar usually are.

The problem is... we humans just cannot conceive of what living an 800 year life actually would be like. So all this stuff we write about is us treating all these things from the perspective of what we know of Humanity. We don't write Elves like what an 800 year old creature would be or experience... we write them like they were Humans. Elves act like Humans act, even though they would do the same act over 8 entire Humans lifespans for their singular one. Cause we don't understand what any sort of actual reality for that kind of creature could be. The same way the history of the Forgotten Realms can be written as being "over 10,000 years old" and yet we still write it stuck in this perpetual faux-medieval landscape that has not evolved over hundreds of decades. No technical advancement... no magical advancement... just the same thing millenia after millenia after millenia. Because we can't conceive of how else it would be.

And that's exactly why I don't put any stock in the actual necessity of half-elves, nor treat other species within the game as anything more than Humans with Silly Hats. Because that's all we know as humans and we have no way of actually conceiving what it means to truly be "alien" on that sort of scale.

I imagine most half-elves would be born of a pretty young elf’s first relationship with a human. I mean, going by that dog analogy, I’m sure any of us who have had dogs can relate to that first dog’s death being the hardest. Even if you know, intellectually, that it’s only going to last a very small portion of your life, it’s hard to really grasp if you’ve never gone through the experience of losing one before. Sure, maybe the centuries-old elves who have seen generations of humans come and go would caution their younger kin not to get too attached to the humans they know. And the younger elves probably say they understand and know it’s only temporary. But, I can easily see elves that are physically mature (which in D&D is specifically said to happen at the same rate as humans) but not yet old enough to have outlived the humans they grew up contemporaneously with, getting carried away in their emotional attachment to a beloved human, thinking no human could ever possibly replace this one, and making the immature decision to take this special human as a lover. I don’t expect this would be common, but nor do I expect it would be unheard of.

 

[Maxperson]

So in top 3 playable species poll I noticed a couple of people voted both Elf and Half-Elf, which got me thinking in terms of actual playability what is the difference between an Elf and a Half-Elf, is there anything that actually distinguishes one from the other? or is it just the choice of mechanics?

I can see how Drow might be different to standard Elf, but cant really think of anything other than the contrived "feels like an outsider" to differentiate Half-Elf (but most monsters ought to feel that way).

Anyway I am genuinely interested to know (even if -in all honesty- I dont like Elfs)

To me half-elves are of two worlds, not just human or elf. A human in elven lands is a complete stranger. An elf in human lands is a complete stranger. Half-elves are not strangers in either, yet don't fully belong to either one.

 

[DEFCON 1]

emotions aren't logical, people don't 'choose' who they fall in love with, elf or human or otherwise

also, it's not like we humans as a whole just abandoned taking cats and dogs and mice as pets because we know in ten years or so they're going to end up dying, we do it anyway and cherish the time we have with them.

But we humans do not fall in love with our pets, form "lifetime bonds of marriage" with them, nor procreate with them to product children that we know are also going to die 50 years before we do. I mean if a person knew that every single child they were going to produce in a very specific relationship outside the norm was going to pass on after merely a decade... I personally have an exceedingly hard time believing the sheer numbers of people that seem to get into these relationships to produce the massive swathes of half-elves that exist in every setting.

As I said... the one isolated Elf out of hundreds of thousands who take the plunge and willingly dive into this kind of relationship with a Human that is going to end in heartbreak several times over just due to the passage of time? Fine. I'm right there with you. But to have hundreds of thousand of elves forsake other elves to marry and have children with all these short-lived humans in the massive quantities we see in all these D&D worlds where half-elves are like the third or fourth most populace species in the land? Nope. I don't buy it.

But if others do... that's cool. People can accept and go along with whatever they want, and my opinion has no impact on that.

 

[MGibster]

That is an incredibly different experience from having mixed heritage…

That wasn't really the main point of my post. The main point was you could feel like an outsider even when you're not experiencing overt or subdued bigotry.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

That wasn't really the main point of my post. The main point was you could feel like an outsider even when you're not experiencing overt or subdued bigotry.

Stay gold, Ponyboy.

 

[MGibster]

Stay gold, Ponyboy.

That is a deep, deep cut, my friend.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

That is a deep, deep cut, my friend.

IDK it was on broadway like a year or two ago.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

I'm depressed your reaction was anything other than "well, duh".

buddy, there's a difference between knowing about an age difference and seeing a detailed example of what a family of species with that age difference would look like.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

buddy, there's a difference between knowing about an age difference and seeing a detailed example of what a family of species with that age difference would look like.

Oh man, that reminds me.

As much as I personally want to think of half-elves as a proxy for children of loving and consensual mixed-race marriages, the fact is that elves and humans have an extreme age gap and IRL we do find that to be problematic. Consider also the power dynamics between, say, a highly developed and urbanized elven civilization with things like consumer magic and supernatural healthcare, and a human whose highest level of education is "don't eat those berries" and whose day to day involves hunting, gathering or subsistence agriculture.

How is that any different from a rich 80 year old American man having a mail order teen bride from a deeply impoverished part of the global south?

I know this particular line of thought, sometimes problematic, is actually really prominent in communities of mixed Asian and White parentage who have a lotta issues (not all necessarily justified) with "WMAF pairings", and a half-elf could also be an interesting way to explore this concept by proxy.