1. Dwarves
Dwarves eat gold. They need it to be healthy and fertile; those who don't eat enough to at least be fertile are viewed as un-marriagable. Also, they're not that much shorter than humans.The moral associations of up and down are reversed. A dwarf who gains money or status is moving down in the world. Military leaders are called the deep command, not the high command.
2. Elves
Elves were cast out of faerie eons ago. Or fled a disaster. Or perhaps are descended from faeries who interbred with humans. Nobody's quite sure. Faeries are polite to them, if condescending.Their exceptional lifespans make for intense inter-generational conflict; imagine if your parents grew up back when only white male landowners could vote. Elven teens would probably love Twisted Sister.
3. Orcs
Orcs breed at a prodigious rate; they get pregnant more easily, and usually give birth to twins. Orc populations can quickly grow out of control unless an iron-fisted government enacts strict population control measures.
As they become more overpopulated, orc societies are usually compelled to turn first to raiding for supplies, then invasion of neighboring territory in a desperate grasp for arable land. Some orcs justify this, but many view it as a tragic necessary evil.
Orcs grow up faster than humans, reaching full maturity around 15-18 years old. Contrary to popular belief, they're not less intelligent, but usually less educated and have less life experience due to being younger. They tend to be more aggressive, but whether that's due to genetics or the pressure of living in an overpopulated environment is anyone's guess.
4. Goblins
While not a hive mind, goblins are extremely group-oriented, and view the group rather than the individual as the basic unit of society. They place little value on individual lives, even their own. That's why they're willing to engage in all sorts of borderline suicidal experiments and military tactics, but also why they tend to flee when they start losing a battle: they don't mind some people dying, but can't stand the chance of the whole group dying.
This gives them a sense of ethics that seems alien to many races. Goblins would view inflicting a modest amount of suffering on a whole village as worse than murdering one person, for example.
5. Dark Elves
Descended from Unseelie who rebelled against the growing decadence and sadism of the Unseelie court and were cast out. Cruelly, rather than lauding their integrity, the surface races hated them for their Unseelie associations (light elves most of all!) and drove them into the underdark. After generations of the moral compromise necessary to survive in that environment, drow became what they are today.
Also, their skin is mottled in different shades of grey, and their hair is usually grey as well. This provides some camouflage against most cave walls, at least at a distance.
6. Halflings
Just like in Tolkien's books, halflings tend to be peaceful, friendly, and adventurous. They mostly avoid conflict if at all possible.
Since they tend to be neutral in most conflicts, halflings are often entreated to serve as mediators in disputes or to host peace talks, much like Switzerland in real life.
7. Lizardfolk
Lizardfolk are almost completely devoid of emotion. They're extremely rational, but have trouble understanding other, more emotional races. They're not sentimental and really can't understand why eating people who were dead anyway is such a big deal.
Their lack of emotion skews their decision-making in an odd way; lizardfolk are great at evaluating the likely outcomes of a course of action, but terrible at weighing how good or bad an outcome would be. It might not be obvious to a lizardperson that losing an arm is worse than losing a horse, for instance. They're smart about pursuing their goals but often pick odd goals to pursue.
I read one that this is how emotional intelligence works. I think it was the book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, but I don't remember at this point and how no idea if it's true.
8. Dragons
Every dragon is unique. Dragons hoard treasure for two separate reasons.
First, they hoard valuable treasure as an evolutionary fitness signal. The more treasure they have, the more and stronger adventurers will try to take it from them, the tougher they must be to still be alive. Their ability to survive with a target on their back proves their mettle to potential mates.
Their long life spans mean that dragons eventually have a hard time remembering everything. They collect unique items as mementos to anchor their memories. Dragons value these items mainly for the memories so anchored, not the item's inherent value. Thus, a wooden toy may be more valuable than a silver statuette, which in turn may be worth more to the dragon than several thousand identical gold coins.
9. Beholders
Artist: Luciano Komorizono |
Like dragons, all beholders are unique, with their own mix of magic eyestalk powers. The beholder race is becoming more corrupted by mutation with every generation. This is why they seek to kill beholders who don't look like themselves; they wish to save their race by purging it of mutation.
Of course, this isn't how heredity works. By culling their gene pool of diversity, beholders ensure that they will become more inbred with every generation, hastening the very extinction they seek to prevent.
10. Illithids
Like it says in the book, illithids are created by implanting a larva into a humanoid, turning it into an illithid. An illithid larva implanted into a human will create a more human-like illithid, one implanted into an elf will make an illithid more elf-like in its personality, and so-on. Combined with their psychic powers, this gives each illithid a great understanding of whatever race it was made from.
Illithids were originally created by a vast hive mind organism to serve as traders and diplomats. The organism did not understand humanoids, but wished to get along with them, and it believed that its creations would make ideal emissaries. Unfortunately it completely failed to anticipate how horrifying this whole process would seem to a race of individuals, or indeed why kidnapping and murdering individuals would be seen as more than a minor annoyance. It was destroyed by an alliance of humanoids, and the surviving illithids became the mind flayers we know today.
ooh, I like the take on Illithid backstory. Between that and the Goblins there's a trend towards examining morality at a non-individual-centric level I can absolutely get behind. But you're missing out on the other half of the discussion: a species that views US as the "hivemind." something that, say, recognizes a unique soul in each cell of a human body. a species that would rather kill one hundred-pound man all at once than kill two hundred pounds worth of human flesh spread out across a thousand different humans. idk what that species is but I'm tempted to make it some sort of elf. or maybe a centaur? just fuck centaurs up, make them completely alien even compared to elves. fuck it.
ReplyDeletealso, man: your take on orcs is just not good. an aggressive, uneducated race that breeds prodigiously and aggressively attacks and conquers neighboring peoples? and you illustrate it with a picture of a Black-looking savage? I know it's just fantasy, but when your fantasy carries the message "people of color need an iron-fisted government and population control or else they will outbreed every other race and overrun their lands," man, that's just eugenics. you're literally just making a case for eugenics targeting populations of color. I really, really hope this is just ignorance on your part. But when even fucking Wizards of the Coast is realigning its depictions of orcs to be less in line with racist stereotypes, your shameless leaning into them is tremendously disappointing.
Tell you what Crowbar, I'll take away the orc picture if it bothers you that much. I thought she looked white honestly, but I didn't notice the hair so I see how you could take it that way.
DeleteAs to the rest of it, I don't see fantasy races as representations of real-life ethnic groups, and I think trying to make them such is a really really bad idea. I'm curious though- if you see fantasy races as necessarily being representations of human ethnic groups, which real-life ethnic group is your centaur idea supposed to represent?
Ok, first of all: I absolutely agree with you on the fact that deliberately saying that "the Orcs are Black, the Hobbits are Central European, the Elves are Asian, etc." is an awful idea and should never be done. There's a fundamental difference between explicit parallels and subtle coding in fiction.
Deletefantasy races can obviously be coded in endless ways or not at all. Tolkien's original orcs were coded in a far more "yellow peril" way, involving a lot less specific anti-black racism than just general xenophobia. meanwhile, Warhammer 40k's Orks moved in a different direction entirely by becoming specific parodies of British soccer hooligans. Of course, any race can end up being coded, intentionally or not-- just look at the Goblins in Harry Potter-- but Orcs are often singled out because of how closely their associated tropes match up with racist ideology.
I would like to think I haven't accidentally coded my centaurs as anything-- they're just a body shape and a philosophy in their current form. neither would I say any of your other races here are really coded as anything, although obviously Hobbits have always been somewhat coded as fairly WASP-y. but that's neither here nor there.
I'd write more if I had more time. As it is, I'd just like you to ask yourself: "if this fantasy race was real, would it slide super-neatly into real-world racists' beliefs about any real-world race?" and if the answer is yes, ask yourself what role fiction like that-- fiction that implicitly asks, what if racists were right?-- has in the world today.
If orcs were real, I'm sure humans of all ethnicities would be prejudiced against them. That, sadly, is human nature.
DeleteYour "what if racists were right" question still presupposes that fantasy races are a metaphor for human ethnic groups, which is the very proposition I'm disputing. In fact, you go further by suggesting that if orcs were real, they'd still be a representation of some human ethnic group or another. If orcs did exist, then their behavior would at most prove something about orcs, and only orcs.
And furthermore, I'm honestly not worried that racists are going to become fans of my writing. I don't think there are a whole lot of racists where I've been getting my readers from, and if there are then hopefully they've been put off my all my Trump jokes.