good to know the landlord class was in power even then
Oh no my quirky history has awakened the proletariat; please sir I’m just a purveyor of 19th Century curiosities leave me out of this guillotine talk!! 
guiwwotine-chan is hungry for bwood :3
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DyLilQBX0AAuHGt.jpg
No. We already get enough comparisons to humans.
If Dark Skinned elves are so necessary give them their own lore and make them their own race.
Don’t just slap blackface on Blood Elves in the hope it’ll score some woke points.
2 Likes
This thread is a gift.
Every now and then someone appears randomly, having only read the title of the thread, to say “Hey, I’m almost certainly white.”
and they’re always on a blood elf character for some reason
8 Likes
Yes, please. Quing Dynasty preferably, I know very little about it!
1 Like
(You insert 1 gold coin into the “Qing Dynasty Fact Generator”)
With pleasure my friend! 
“The fall of Yangzhou to the Qing (otherwise known as the “Manchus”) in June 1645 seemed to suggest their conquest of China was nearing its successful conclusion. Unfortunately, days later, a high ranking Qing officer issued a directive that would prolong hostilities for decades. All Chinese males had to demonstrate their allegiance to the new Qing Emperor by adopting Manchu dress & hairstyle. They had 10 days to comply” (page 426, “History of China” by John Keay)
So now you know - and knowing is half the battle!
1 Like
My favourite part of the thread is still the mental gymnastics that people will go to to claim that blood elves aren’t physically just pretty humans with long ears. Edit the ears in any high/blood elf art and you’ll get a green-eyed human (except in the plentiful art where they even have human eyes).
2 Likes
My favourite depictions of elves are those where they have huge, almost alien eyes. Ears that twitch for sounds you can’t hear. They move and bend in ways that would be graceful if they weren’t so strange. Sometimes they stand still, just existing, for hours or days at a time because urgency has no meaning for them.
You know, rather than the early fantasy depiction of Aryans With Ears.
Dragon Age is probably one of the closest depictions of this, especially in 2 (and using Irish and Welsh voice actors to represent an oppressed Celtic-inspired culture trying to recover its roots after a brutal oppression and genocide is Good).
When I wrote elves for a setting, they were apex predators. Large eyes and ears and a lithe build for speed, living in the trees because it allowed them to ambush prey from above.
5 Likes
They are sometimes described in the books as looking really otherworldly. I wish they went deeper into that, making them look off, more alien and inhuman - unnatural to a human’s eye.
Or to fit it better with WoW lore: make them look more like trolls. 
(And give them Jamaican accents!)
Gods how I hate Bioware for massacring this depiction in Dragon Age Inquisition.
Inquisition killed a lot of the epic aesthetics DA2 established. Elves, Qunari being the front-runners.
https://divinityoriginalsin2.wiki.fextralife.com/file/Divinity-Original-Sin-2/elf.png approaches you
1 Like
What hellscape from the Nightmare of Mensis did you find THAT from?
Those are the elves in divinity original sin 2. They’re in some ways typical (nature lovers) but also they’re cannibals who eat other humanoids, and gain their memories and abilities when they eat the meat of others. Doesn’t even need to be the brains. Eating an arm or a foot is just as good.
Also they’re being brainwashed by a tree. That’s just how it is in this butch of an earth…
oh, so probably where GW2 got the idea of Sylvari from?
Possibly the reverse. Not sure when Divinity’s elves were conceived/fleshed (heh) out since it’s a really old series (started in 2002) but only recently got ‘rebooted’* and expanded in with the Original Sin games.
*it’s not strictly a reboot but apparently DOS2 changed some of the canon, so it’s a murky area. Most people just know the DOS games though rather than the originals.
I don’t know much about Divinity so didn’t want to assume which came out and conceived the “tree brainwashing” thing first.
EDIT: I spell gud guiz.
The elves in Divinity 2 os are good. Love the weird looking creepy cannibals.
1 Like
I think this is how it’s meant to be depicted, they sit in uncanney valley for Jaina or Arthas - I can’t recall at the moment - in that they seem to ethereal to be real. The bit in question goes on about how they’re like some legend/painting come real.