The gaming/fiction disparity, or "Why are dark elves cliche?"

[rogueattorney]

Like others have said, the Drow come straight from Gary Gygax and G3. Adventuring parties come from legend well before D&D - Jason and the Argonauts, for example. Spellcasters memorizing spells from Jack Vance's Dying Earth and Eyes of the Overworld. Militants clerics from our own real world. Angsty brooding rangers = Aragorn, of course. Dragons have had all sorts of different qualities throughout myths of various different cultures. And so on.

That said, I could do without any and all of the above in the books I read, as they are just as cliched in my opinion as the drow. Fine for games, bore me to tears in literature anymore.

They're cool with Dragonlance or Song of Ice & Fire or Wheel of Time, but mention the Forgotten Realms novels and their first complaint is Drizzt and the dark elves.

Saying that the one is cliched and the others are not is pretty silly to my mind. They all represent fantasy of the most generic type in my view. But hey, different strokes...

R.A.

 

[BSF]

Maybe it's because they are so "D&D-ish". By which I mean they were invented specifically for the game. All the other potentially cliche things you mention have an origin outside the game (folklore, Tolkien, or another literary source or even history). I believe even color-coded dragons have SOME reference in myth and folklore, in that golden dragons are a chinese schtick and they're good.

But elves with ebony skin that live underground are original to D&D. So maybe they see anything that uses them as "fanfic".

Well, except for the Svartalfar of Norse mythology. Sometimes referred to as Trow, which when spoken can also sound a lot like Drow. Gygax definitely borrowed a lot of concepts from mythology and "dark elves" are not all that unique.

Sure, everyone wants to play a good drow. I thought of it myself way back when I first picked up G1-3: Against the Giants. (This was after the individual releases of G1, G2, G3, and well before the release of GDQ.) I'm thinking it was probably around 1982 or so, but I could be wrong. Still, it was long before Drizzt (sp?) came around. It's a neat character hook, somebody that has trouble in daylight and is trying to buck the trend for his or her entire race. You deal with prejudice, the questions of nature vs nurture, overcoming the bad juju you experienced while growing up to be a good person, and you get some nifty abilities if you can just convince your adventuring companions to go underground, or switch to a nocturnal schedule. There are the makings of some good stories there. The problem is that Salvatore got his published with a lot of success. Now, if you want to deal with those issues in a fantasy story, you risk being called derivative. Of course, if you want to write a large epic with flavor and depth, where somebody with a good heart is trying to single-handedly overcome the evil in the world, using nothing more than his purity, you are just derivative of Tolkien.

The real question is what is the point of your story? What adventure is there? What underlying message are you possibly writing about? Is a drow necessary to tell that story? What is your motivation in using a drow? Are you trying to address some of the issues that would come up including a character from that society? Would it be possible to do the same thing by not using that ready-made template of drow society? If so, why don't you create more of your own stuff? If not, why not?

I suspect the reason your players don't mind meeting a drow in game is because you weave it into the game in a transparent manner. You probably aren't tossing out a drow ranger that is just kewl and could kick their butts if they diss him. You probably make the NPC interesting to interact with. There is probably a reason for the NPC to be there, even if it is just to represent that the drow exist in your world and are interacting with it. Within the game, you want to have some of the implied baggage that comes with a drow. Ooh, there was a drow walking out of that shady jewellers shop in the alley in the bad section of town. Maybe there is some sort of *big bad plot* happening. But, those assumptionds don't work as well in fiction writing.

If you want dark-skinned elves to write about, find a new hook for the characterization. Or, create a new template for what they are, and what they are not. Or, find a different way to tell the story you want to tell. If you have a compelling story that you want to write about, it might not be that important if people who haven't read it think it is derivative.

 

[MissHappen]

In Germanic myth, there were light and dark elves. Some stories portray dark elves as being dusky-skinned, as well. There IS some mythological precedent for drow in that way; the svart alfar.

As for drow in fiction... well, it's been said before; overplayed, overplayed, overplayed. The drow should have stayed a nebulous, unknown sort of force, something to make players flinch.
And did you notice how tall they got? The original drow were almost never over 5' tall...

edit: ahem, sorry, somebody else caught that.

 

[billd91]

According to some sources, dark elves, complete with black skin, are out of Norse myth.
http://www.timelessmyths.com/norse/beings.html#Elves

So dark elves, whether they be misshapen dwarves living underground or black skinned creatures unlike their light counterparts, are not a purely D&D creation.

They are, however, a bit overused. Back in the mid-1980s, drow were pretty cool. They were still relatively new. The first few drow books were a decent read but by then, the novelty had worn off. I knew of plenty of good drow characters by then in various D&D campaigns. They saw a lot of play.
Now, like Polonius's speech to Laertes in Hamlet, they're pretty cliche through over use in sources, particularly in the Forgotten Realms.
I also find it interesting that most of us probably use orcs and goblins much more than we actually use drow and yet they don't seem as cliche or overused. They seem almost generic by comparison.

 

[mythago]

Bingo. "The most evil, feared, despicable people in my largely white campaign world (or fantasy novel) are black women." It was a bad idea when Gygax had it, and it's a bad idea now.

While I agree with you that gaming tends to be white-person-centric, drow are not black-skinned as in African, they're black-skinned as in black. I assume the contrast was meant to be to the Tolkien-style pale, fair-haired foresty sort of elf.

Svartalfar were not dark-skinned matriarchal fairies; they were more like gnomes.

As for the lingerie theory, I assume y'all know that a guy who did some work for RealDoll got paid in trade, and asked the company to craft him a World of Warcraft-style Dark Elf RealDoll. Yes, he put up pictures. No, I'm not linking to them.

 

[BSF]

Dark elves aren't just cliche in fiction, they're also cliche in D&D. Drow have become so overused that they're pretty much considered "the standard underdark villains" and are very commonly used in place of other underdark races such as duergar, kuo-toa, mind flayers, etc.

Yep! Those stereotypes bore me for my homebrew. No Drow exist. It is sometimes hard because I like Drow, and they are easy to drop in. But, they aren't necessary.

Of course, I also get tired of the stereotypes for other races. In my homebrew, I removed Dwarves and Elves because I got tired of trite character concepts. I have similar races, but I ditched the baggage of the "standard" dwarf and elf. This was enough to get my players to start paying attention to different aspects of the game.

But, that is a different conversation entirely.

 

[Dark Jezter]

As for the lingerie theory, I assume y'all know that a guy who did some work for RealDoll got paid in trade, and asked the company to craft him a World of Warcraft-style Dark Elf RealDoll. Yes, he put up pictures. No, I'm not linking to them.

I remember fark.com linked to those pictures a couple of years ago. I tell you, they were enough to give a guy nightmares!

Although, IIRC, it was an Everquest dark elf. World of Warcraft dosen't have dark elves (just night elves, which are 7-foot-tall purple-skinned elves with green or blue hair).

 

[jonesy]

d'oh!

I didn't mean to say "dark elf.' I meant to say "drow."

Take a look at (IIRC) the "Queen of Darkness" novel from the Villians series. It's got black skinned elves who don't like the gods and have unique magic.

Except they were a dying race of good elves.

 

[BSF]

Svartalfar were not dark-skinned matriarchal fairies; they were more like gnomes.

Granted. Trolls were also a bit more surly dwarves than the green-skinned fearless freaks we use in the game.

In some cases, I think there is a lot of cross-over as one culture correlates it's creatures with those of another. In other cases, it is bad research. And in other cases, it is using a cool sounding name as a basis and then changing things around for your game, which eventually gets put out as DnD canon.

 

[argo]

Overexposure is what had turned a lot of people off to them, plain and simple.

Personally, and I know fewer people share my feelings on this, I also find the concept of an "Underdark" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Journey to the Center of the Earth is one thing. Lost civilizations, degenerate races and forgotten elder things are all one thing. But the concept of a vast interconnected network of (relatevly) large tunnels and caves that spans the entire globe, has ready access to the surface in most places, and houses dozens of thriving intelligent civilizations (each with hundreds of thousands of members) which regularly come into contact with each other and the surface world (often manipulating events on the surface) just strains my brain a bit too much. It seems, to me at least, to be a major part of the "toss in everything but the kitchen sink and then toss in that too" mentality of FR that I dislike. And the Drow are typically the linchpin of almost all Underdark activity.