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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8162295" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Fascinating! I had never heard of these. Perhaps I should dig deeper into Sumerian culture for ideas WRT dragonborn cultures.Sure. Or even in works that do feature all or almost all human protagonists, you can get some genuine creativity in the non-human ones. Animorphs, for instance, has very few "humanoid" aliens; the gedd and hork-bajir are the only ones we get to see "on camera" as it were, and Ax mentions that Worf looks like a female of an alien species he knows about (but they must have tails, since it's a well-documented fact in-universe that humans are weird for being exclusively bipedal without tails). It's sort of like how every alien species you see in Star Trek uses an alphabet (rather than a syllabary or abugida etc.) and a decimal number system when that's not even the tiniest slice of the ways humans have done things.Yeah, I was gonna say that too. Her name was the first on my lips.Isn't this a bit circular? There are more of them because they were thrust into the public eye by the seminal work of high fantasy. Tolkien is responsible for influencing fantasy fiction around the world at this point, in part because D&D is. Would elves and dwarves be the force they are today if Tolkien had been a scholar of Arabic literature and sourced his work there? Or if he had been a scholar of Indian literature and had translated the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and based his work off them? We might have elephant-men and nagas rather than dwarves and elves, and be in exactly the same situation.Why these two specific things? Just saying they're more prevalent is like answering, "Why is Windows the most common operating system" with "because more computers use it"--it doesn't answer the question, it simply reiterates that the questioned state of affairs is real.Unless you look to Japanese works (or other cultures), where you have more variety. For example, Final Fantasy XIV has the kojin. They don't talk slowly, and they aren't all ninjas; the red kojin are samurai, seers, and (occasionally) ninjas, while the blue kojin (which are actually green, because in traditional Japanese you use the same word for both, ao) are traders, craftsmen, and entrepreneurs. Both are deeply spiritual and practice reverence of ancestors and objects as part of their continent's wider culture of revering the kami, the spirits of things, ideas, and places.Yes, no one is disputing that. We're asking why there is this difference. Is it simply that Tolkien was that influential as a writer? Is there something special about them? The fact that elves remain incredibly popular while dwarves aren't so much (even with the Hobbit films presumably giving them a boost!) seems to indicate that it's a mixed situation. Hence, asking why. Why have these things been more popular both with the ordinary public and, specifically, with people creating new works?And, if you find that question too simple for your tastes, will this change in the coming decades as a generation grows up seeing dragonborn and tieflings more often than dwarves in D&D?</blockquote>

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