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“As fas as I’m concerned, you are no different from the Lich King” -Garrosh Hellscream

With a new World of Warcraft expansion coming out, there’s been whispers here and there of Sylvanas Windrunner coming back, and how apparently she used to be a cool and interesting character, who then eventually became annoying and allegedly overused.

This got me thinking about the concept of fantasy elves, who can’t seem to catch a break. And lets just cut to the chase, the reason for that is Tolkien.

Part 1: You guys are insecure little shits

See, Tolkien established the elves as objectively better than humans in every single way. They’re stronger than you, they’re faster than you, they’re smarter, they live longer, their magic is more powerful, and their steel is unbreakable. The age of men didn’t even come about until the elves got bored and left. And fantasy writers and fans alike have always had a huge bug up their ass about it.

If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll start to come around to the idea that people aren’t all that complicated. They’re stupid. So, racism, when you boil it all down, simply amounts to an inferiority complex. The primary fear in a bigots mind is to be made obsolete.

If you’ve ever listened to the type of guy who watches the worst shit on YouTube, it turns out anti-Affirmative Action and anti-DEI policies are simply just about keeping more qualified people from taking jobs from mediocre white people, in other words, them. I mean, if they truly believed in the bootstraps meritocracy they claim to champion, this probably shouldn’t bother them.

White people will invent paranoid delusions like “the great replacement” where they’ll present this idea of non-white people, you know, existing, will eventually lead to white people getting genetically bred out of existence. And have you ever noticed how The Right has a deep, morbid obsession with cuckoldry? They keep fantasizing about their milquetoast wives being stolen by better men.

Racism, therefore, isn’t the belief that they are superior, but it's the fact that they’re not. White Supremacists will often present themselves as the bringer of civilization to those backwater savages, but that’s not what they believe, it’s what they tell themselves to quiet the things they do believe, that they are weak, and everybody else is coming for them for easy pickings.

Hey, remember when this post was supposed to be about elves? Funny how this was all born out of the simple fact that their only crime was evolving first and living longer. And Legolas seeming haughty.

Part 2: Rival Blue

Alright, so, I’m going to present to you this idea that seeming pompous isn’t the end of the world.

To use an example, there’s this whole debate in the Pokémon fandom surrounding this idea of the friendly rival versus the mean rival, however, I have never interpreted Rival Blue as being a mean rival.

Red and Blue have always seemed to me like they were really close friends. His dialogue always comes across as good-natured slagging, they’re obviously completing with each other, but it’s in a fun way. I have no problems believing that these two have been friends.

You know which character archetype Rival Blue falls under? It’s the same one as Sonic the Hedgehog. Because it's the 90s! Weeeeee~!!

Fact of the matter is, internet dwellers are often just extremely touchy, especially when it comes to the idea of someone else acting like they’re better than them. They treat arrogance like it’s the single worst sin imaginable.

Part 3: Humans

Alright, so, I think you can understand on your own that elves can actually be pretty interesting when they’re not being subjugated for all eternity, but where does that leave humans? Well, they’re boring. They’re so frequently the worst and least interesting in any fantasy game.

See, the ability to insert yourself into a fantastical world, also involves being able to insert yourself into a culture that lives and breathes in that world.

Hey, do you see where this is going?

Dwarfs aren’t all that complicated. People like dwarfs because they live underground, they drink, they mine stuff, they might literally be made of rocks, and they’re all short, bearded little scottish guys.

Elves generally have two modes. They started out as otherworldly twinks who are so long lived that they have surpassed everything else on the planet, but in every other piece of fantasy media, they’re subject to genocide after genocide because nerds are fragile little crybabies who think making friends is hard.

Humans on the other hand are omnipresent, they’re the most widespread, but they’re also an underdeveloped, culturally devoid vacuum who are at best defined by nothing, and at worst being a hater. There will be plenty of humans, yes, but they’re all lone wolves.

Let’s be honest, humans are just the race you play when you want to ignore all of the game’s mechanics. They’re good at everything, they can master everything, and have no restrictions to classes. But this makes humans the ultimate blank slate, a race that has nothing to them.

Wait a minute, have you ever seen humans in real life? There’s tons of culture fucking everywhere! Where is all that culture that exists on planet Earth?

Let’s just cut to the chase, a lot of white people don’t really have things like community or a culture of their own, in spite of the fact that their family may come from England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, the Ukraine, basically all over Europe. But white people on a conceptual level, it’s just kind of vague.

I jokingly called it “being a hater” earlier, but the fear of ethnic minorities is the closest to a consistent culture white people have ever had. So, when you sit down and create humans in a fantasy world, they just end up being “white people” and therefore devoid of culture. Because cultures are something else.

And you can’t be better than me because you’re... something else. Any presence of a real culture for humans would make them... something else. Fantasy humans aren’t allowed to be, likely for similar reasons why you aren’t allowed to be in real life, because it would make you something else.

But hey, at least something is better than nothing. You don’t even get to have the fun of being the bad guy. You could be having way more fun... being something else.