TotallyHuman
The witch of speculation
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2019
- Messages
- 4,129
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- 183
I was watching a dnd podcast, and there was a green text story about an elven girl who wanted to resurrect her lover, and she went to extreme lengths to do the smallest things, just because she had all the time in the world and it was her equivalent of us trying to reach the remote by crawling over the couch and barely nudging it with our fingers instead of standing up and getting it.
So, I decided that whatever elves (and other long-living species) I have written before, were written wrong now. I think of rewriting them.
Here's my revised general elf (insert long-living species) behavior guide:
Elves are very solidary, though it all is relative. They can be in the company of other creatures for many many years and decades and be (from a human perspective) the most loyal and loving and nicest people ever or the pettiest, nastiest, eviliest enemies you could imagine, but from their perspective, it's the same as attentively killing time by playing with cats or smth.
Especially when it comes to their interactions with humans. Due to how quickly humans get born and die, to them, humans are what a butterfly is to a human. Imagine being raised for 20 years by your adoptive elven mother, who is the bestest mother you could ever imagine and you love her to death, only for her to suddenly disappear one day after she went out to buy milk. You go to search for her and think that she was kidnapped/killed and make it your life goal to find her/avenge her. After grueling 20 years of searching and investigating, you find her and she doesn't remember you. All because she, in human terms, went out to play at her friend's house, found a butterfly on the way, played with it for 20 minutes, got distracted, lost sight of butterfly and then went on her way again, forgetting how the butterfly even looked.
Or imagine your acquaintance had an elven partner, and they had a very happy marriage and had, like two or three kids, and then the acquaintance died, and the elf left immediately, didn't even show a hint of emotion, didn't care about the kids. You meet them several years later, they don't even remember the acquaintance or the kids, not the names, not the faces, not where they lived. Again, playing with a butterfly.
In fact, elves don't have a strong sense of kinship or loyalty. They are a functional race, however, because they don't see a single problem devoting centuries of their time raising their young, just because it's nothing for them.
Needless to say, they are walking libraries of information, know more crafts and have more skills than entire human cities (countries maybe even combined) because they can devote human lifetimes worth of knowledge in obsessively and singlemindedly pursuing mastery in whatever they want, because for them it's like us picking up a hobby and trying it for a week and then dropping it if we don't like it anymore. Though they don't have a civilization of their own and generally dress like beggars and live in the woods without even a roof over their heads.
Elves aren't beautiful. Most are emaciated walking skeletons with dried out skin tightly wrapped around, because eating and drinking every day, or even every month is too frequent for them. They mostly persist on magical regeneration.
Elves are generally disastrously bad at tasks that require strong focus on short-term tasks such as holding a conversation with a human(or lifespan equivalent races), or planning a meeting, or having a fistfight.
A conversation with an elf would be very difficult for a human (unless they are paying a lot of attention in their butterfly observation mode), since their conversation partner would either not talk for very very long and you don't even know if they listen, or they talk for far too long, going into depths that could be written into books.
When elves agree to meet, it's possible for them to come decades apart to different the same place and still meet, because the first elf will wait those decades.
No human(lifespan equivalent race) wants to have them at their service. Who needs an advisor who could draft up a plan that would ensure a thousand years of prosperity but appears only once every 3 generations of Kings and Queens and not even remember the Kings and Queens in question?
In fact, if you have an elf in your adventurer party, they need constant supervision by some babysitter-role, because an elf is just too unadjusted to the high pace of human life.
Measuring elven intelligence or wisdom in human terms is... unfruitful. They are unreasonably stupid from some points of view, unreasonably smart in others. They are just too different.
But nobody wants to mess with elves. They are stupid hard to kill, their magical regeneration good enough to fuel their lifespans to many thousands of years, making them basically slightly nerfed fantasy Deadpools, and the single-minded devotion to a task they can show can be very very frightening when it is directed to malice. Even a country will fall when a mildly inconvenienced mf who's older than your civilization tries to destroy it in more and more imaginative and creative ways. Though, again, their ideas of malice and benevolence are much different than ours. They are pretty unemotional if you look at them from a scale befitting their lifespans, but on a human timescale... they can be literal angels or demons.
And, of course, they can go on epic quests for the smallest of things. An elf heard that on the other side of the world, some beautiful flower had bloomed. They will walk on their feet across continents. Swim on primitive drafts or even with their bodies alone across oceans and by the time they'll go to where the flowers once bloomed, the entire flower species will go extinct. And they'll feel that it was a shame and eh, whatever.
They will grow an apple tree instead of buying an apple.
They don't have a civilization of their own. They don't value kinship and an effective government consisting of elves would just not work, since that's too fast paced. If a kingdom of elves did exist, it would have a giant territory, a super small population, and every question concerning laws would have probably involve every elf in the country and have drawn out and long debates. They would build some ridiculous superpower though. With most people being homeless because they can't be bothered to build a house or some have built a house but haven't visited it in long enough that it's probably been swallowed by the earth by now.
If an elf battles, they will either force you into a very drawn out war that will slowly chip away at you until you are dust, or they will nuke you with a super-powerful spell, or they will go away for years and literally discover radiation on their own, then design and build a nuke to nuke you.
A friendly banterish fight between two elves goes down in legends of short-living beings. In fact, individual elves are often worshipped as Gods in even mighty large cultures (most those elves were very motivated butterfly botanists. Like raging bonkers for butterflies), though elves themselves don't really experience the same existential difficulties as humans and don't really get the concept of god or religion.
So, I decided that whatever elves (and other long-living species) I have written before, were written wrong now. I think of rewriting them.
Here's my revised general elf (insert long-living species) behavior guide:
Elves are very solidary, though it all is relative. They can be in the company of other creatures for many many years and decades and be (from a human perspective) the most loyal and loving and nicest people ever or the pettiest, nastiest, eviliest enemies you could imagine, but from their perspective, it's the same as attentively killing time by playing with cats or smth.
Especially when it comes to their interactions with humans. Due to how quickly humans get born and die, to them, humans are what a butterfly is to a human. Imagine being raised for 20 years by your adoptive elven mother, who is the bestest mother you could ever imagine and you love her to death, only for her to suddenly disappear one day after she went out to buy milk. You go to search for her and think that she was kidnapped/killed and make it your life goal to find her/avenge her. After grueling 20 years of searching and investigating, you find her and she doesn't remember you. All because she, in human terms, went out to play at her friend's house, found a butterfly on the way, played with it for 20 minutes, got distracted, lost sight of butterfly and then went on her way again, forgetting how the butterfly even looked.
Or imagine your acquaintance had an elven partner, and they had a very happy marriage and had, like two or three kids, and then the acquaintance died, and the elf left immediately, didn't even show a hint of emotion, didn't care about the kids. You meet them several years later, they don't even remember the acquaintance or the kids, not the names, not the faces, not where they lived. Again, playing with a butterfly.
In fact, elves don't have a strong sense of kinship or loyalty. They are a functional race, however, because they don't see a single problem devoting centuries of their time raising their young, just because it's nothing for them.
Needless to say, they are walking libraries of information, know more crafts and have more skills than entire human cities (countries maybe even combined) because they can devote human lifetimes worth of knowledge in obsessively and singlemindedly pursuing mastery in whatever they want, because for them it's like us picking up a hobby and trying it for a week and then dropping it if we don't like it anymore. Though they don't have a civilization of their own and generally dress like beggars and live in the woods without even a roof over their heads.
Elves aren't beautiful. Most are emaciated walking skeletons with dried out skin tightly wrapped around, because eating and drinking every day, or even every month is too frequent for them. They mostly persist on magical regeneration.
Elves are generally disastrously bad at tasks that require strong focus on short-term tasks such as holding a conversation with a human(or lifespan equivalent races), or planning a meeting, or having a fistfight.
A conversation with an elf would be very difficult for a human (unless they are paying a lot of attention in their butterfly observation mode), since their conversation partner would either not talk for very very long and you don't even know if they listen, or they talk for far too long, going into depths that could be written into books.
When elves agree to meet, it's possible for them to come decades apart to different the same place and still meet, because the first elf will wait those decades.
No human(lifespan equivalent race) wants to have them at their service. Who needs an advisor who could draft up a plan that would ensure a thousand years of prosperity but appears only once every 3 generations of Kings and Queens and not even remember the Kings and Queens in question?
In fact, if you have an elf in your adventurer party, they need constant supervision by some babysitter-role, because an elf is just too unadjusted to the high pace of human life.
Measuring elven intelligence or wisdom in human terms is... unfruitful. They are unreasonably stupid from some points of view, unreasonably smart in others. They are just too different.
But nobody wants to mess with elves. They are stupid hard to kill, their magical regeneration good enough to fuel their lifespans to many thousands of years, making them basically slightly nerfed fantasy Deadpools, and the single-minded devotion to a task they can show can be very very frightening when it is directed to malice. Even a country will fall when a mildly inconvenienced mf who's older than your civilization tries to destroy it in more and more imaginative and creative ways. Though, again, their ideas of malice and benevolence are much different than ours. They are pretty unemotional if you look at them from a scale befitting their lifespans, but on a human timescale... they can be literal angels or demons.
And, of course, they can go on epic quests for the smallest of things. An elf heard that on the other side of the world, some beautiful flower had bloomed. They will walk on their feet across continents. Swim on primitive drafts or even with their bodies alone across oceans and by the time they'll go to where the flowers once bloomed, the entire flower species will go extinct. And they'll feel that it was a shame and eh, whatever.
They will grow an apple tree instead of buying an apple.
They don't have a civilization of their own. They don't value kinship and an effective government consisting of elves would just not work, since that's too fast paced. If a kingdom of elves did exist, it would have a giant territory, a super small population, and every question concerning laws would have probably involve every elf in the country and have drawn out and long debates. They would build some ridiculous superpower though. With most people being homeless because they can't be bothered to build a house or some have built a house but haven't visited it in long enough that it's probably been swallowed by the earth by now.
If an elf battles, they will either force you into a very drawn out war that will slowly chip away at you until you are dust, or they will nuke you with a super-powerful spell, or they will go away for years and literally discover radiation on their own, then design and build a nuke to nuke you.
A friendly banterish fight between two elves goes down in legends of short-living beings. In fact, individual elves are often worshipped as Gods in even mighty large cultures (most those elves were very motivated butterfly botanists. Like raging bonkers for butterflies), though elves themselves don't really experience the same existential difficulties as humans and don't really get the concept of god or religion.
