Ah but, are they classified as dragons?
(which is what my point was, if I write a story saying X is a dragon than X is a dragon because dragons are a fantasy creature and the author can call what they like a dragon in their stories)
Honestly, the people going , for instance, Smaug isnât a dragon because the movie portrayed him with having no frontlegs and more like a wyvern are just being pedantic for the sake of being pedantic.
Slicing across europe known by germanic people and celts.
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Is how you win at facts and logic.
Precisely my point.
Its not even being pedantic, its literally a fantasy flying lizard that breathes fire.
Or whatever the author of that particular story says is true to their dragons and people need to stop with the âcorrect dragonâ crap.
They did get the âdragonbloodâ subtype which allowed them to qualify for feats/magic items/etc. that required being a dragon, and made effects that targeted dragons affect them.
SoâŚkinda??
I think the suggestion is that the popularity of D&D and Tolkein has resulted in a huge number of copycats flooding the fantasy genre. A consequence of this is that fantasy has become so formulaic that a lot of people think that elves, dragons and other fantasy staples have to adhere to a certain set of rules in order to be âtrue elvesâ or âtrue dragons.â
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Because of what was said above. People will reject original ideas or whatnot because âwell, orcs and elves are that because of Tolkienâ, because Tolkien is That Big Name. D&D has managed to compete with him as well when people talk about fantasy, though theyâre probably pretty related in fantasy too. And what Taxania said, because I was slow.
Sure, but the game draws heavily from Polish mythology (because the books did), which isâŚslavic. The folklore spreads and takes different forms elsewhere.
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When put like that , yeah I can definetly understand what you mean. People do seem to have certain ideas about how fantasy-races should be ( Dwarves being beer-swilling, axe&hammer-swinging smiths etc) , and if one would deviate from that, it would probably upset many people. Itâs why I honestly find the Wildhammer dwarves a fresher take on the dwarf-race since they live in the outdoors and are more in tune with nature, despite Blizzâs usual taking from other places and making it better.
You wonât hear me deny that. Even Gaunter was from a Polish story I believe!
Got free 30 days of WoW game time as a limited time offer, thanks to Zyretha sending me an invitation.
And now, looking at AA events, Iâm faced with a choice.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/742781979522629700/990629914392821810/Untitled.png
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Took me an embarrassingly long time to realise what Gaunter OâDimmâs initials spelled
The big problem with Tolkeinisation in fantasy is that the man himself took a bunch of racial stereotypes from the 1900s and put âdwarfâ and âelfâ over them (easy example, LOTR dwarves intentionally have a lot of comparison with Jews) and decades and decades of fantasy writers have copied these tropes without examining them
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Nordics(And celts) 
Estonians
Having their elves turned evil by christianity
You can have the weird spotlight norse culture for some reason has in games, made worse by the same 5 stories being recycled and a certain group of people making it VERY racist.
I loved witcher going for mostly slavic myths, because those are very cool and very funky
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I will admit, maybe I am too dumb to see it with the dwarves how theyâd be like jews, or well, I never really thought that much about it. Unless it is that they work alot with gemstones and are made out as only caring about gold while the rest dies at times?
In hindsight though perhaps it is a bit iffy that all people of color seem to serve the Enemy ( the Easterlings and the Haradrim).
100% this. It leads me nicely into another thing I was going to mention since this reminded me of the most annoying conversation I had in a class.
In an art class, we were tasked with designing fantasy weapons. Me, being somewhat of a firearm enthusiast, wanted to design a Dwarven arquebus. Things were going rather smoothly until someone noticed what I was doin and gave me a lecture on how âyou canât have guns in fantasy. Guns only exist in scifi.â
And I was completely baffled, especially since I had recently read the first entry in the Powder Mage trilogy.
While this doesnât crop up often in more nerdy circles, there are still a lot of people who donât engage with fantasy or do so in very limited amounts and think that it can only be one thing.
Donât get me started on this, I wrote a dissertation on migratory folklore and Iâm not afraid to write 8000 words describing how Vikings invading Britain influenced fae lore!
But yes, thatâs a big true. Lots of cultures have their own version of The Wild Hunt, for example. The premise is generally the same, but the entities that comprise The Wild Hunt will differ depending on the nationâs folklore.
Itâs always cool to see different takes on Dwarves in particular. Mentioning Wildhammers was a good call since, for young me, it was a cool way of shattering the idea that Dwarves could only be miners. Iâd like to see some variations on Elves too, so if anyone has any recommendations for Elves who are ahead of the curve on technology instead of living for 10,000 years in cultural stagnation Iâm all for it.
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Warhammer dwarfs have been gun slinging for eternity!
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More than three decades after publishing âThe Hobbit,â Tolkien spoke about the Jewish-dwarvish connection during a BBC interview.
âI didnât intend it, but when youâve got these people on your hands, youâve got to make them different, havenât you?â said Tolkien during the 1971 interview. âThe dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldnât you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic. The hobbits are just rustic English people,â he said.
According to Tolkien scholar John Rateliff, author of a two-volume âHobbitâ history published in 2007, Tolkien drew inspiration from Hebrew texts and Jewish history when developing the dwarves. As craftsmen exiled from a bountiful homeland, the dwarves spoke both the language of their adopted nations and â among themselves â a Hebrew-influenced tongue developed by Tolkien.
Itâs more clear in The Hobbit, which is about a group reclaiming their homeland after the greed and goldlust of their former kings stoked resentment, drawing in a hostile threat which displaced them. which, you know, uh
uhhhhh
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Nerâdorei.
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children of the locker
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Good lord, imagine if the night elves spent those 10k years on progressing their civilisation both technologically and culturally. And they were already the biggest powerhouse on Azeroth back then. Theyâd probably rival the Draenei ( Though by now the Draenei shouldâve already been in the Star Trek age if they too progressed at similar speed).
Yeah when put like that, the connection canât really be denied. To which I can only assume it is because Tolkienâs just a product of his time, like, I doubt he did it out of malice, right?
Thatâs fair. Tolkien himself admitted that his dwarves take a lot of cultural inspiration from Jews.
What about his elves, though? From what Iâve read about them, theyâre pretty much a culture of his own creation.