If You Want to Send a Message, Try a Palantír

"By Jove!" said Flambeau, "it's like being in fairyland."

Father Brown sat bolt upright in the boat and crossed himself. His movement was so abrupt that his friend asked him, with a mild stare, what was the matter.

"The people who wrote the mediaeval ballads," answered the priest, "knew more about fairies than you do. It isn't only nice things that happen in fairyland."
—G. K. Chesterton, The Sins of Prince Saradine

I'd been meaning to comment on this, but thought it would go away. God, when will I stop deluding myself? Anyway, people's unwillingness to admit how stupid Dragon Age is, has forced me to comment on the crappy, politically-correct fantasy stories nowadays, of which it is typical. Also, its elves suck, also in a typical manner.

Aside from how pathetic Dragon Age is, with its desperate attempts to be dark and edgy and grownup—like a foulmouthed twelve-year-old—it is also a lame-ass liberal screed from start to finish. Would you believe that they actually claim to have averted the Mary Sue-ness of elves? Yeah, except...they made them an oppressed ethnic minority. Oppressed by Imperialism, even! Why don't they just call it "Pointy-Eared Liberation Theology"?

Now, do not misunderstand. It's no better when right-wing BS creeps into fantasy—I have repeatedly implied, you may recall, that Terry Goodkind is a sexual predator. Admittedly that was 63% in jest (that's 7/11).

How about we all just leave our fricking politics at home, at least when we're writing about imaginary worlds? Fun facts: no system actually enfranchises the people, except mob rule, so the actual question is simply, "Does the elite minority making the decisions make good ones or bad ones?" It helps to have a code in place to ensure they make good ones, but whether it's noblesse oblige or a Constitution, it's really just an evolutionary selection-pressure on evildoers, rather than a deterrent. All systems suck about equally, because humans suck about equally—except really ridiculous totalitarian schemes, but those are relatively rare, like homicidal mania. The early Middle Ages was no worse than the Old West—actually the Vikings were nicer people than the Comanches, not that that's saying much—and the High Middle Ages was at least as good as the 1890s, minus a few material comforts. So shut yer mouths.

I had a story once (don't know if I'll ever finish it, or maybe re-work it into something else), a kind of Antediluvian, Conan/Lankhmar kind of thing, and I had a scene where a girl, who is a pickpocket, gets grabbed by her mark's slave. Her first reaction is, she gets angry that a slave laid hands on her. Because, in cultures with slavery, that is what the reaction would be. And I do not pause to explain that this is wrong; I do not assign her an elaborate, inaccurate, simplistic rationalization for why she feels that way; I simply say she is mad that a slave touched her. Because she is. Trust me, most of your assumptions about the world are no more rational than that: people get to do some things, and they don't get to do others, and most people simply assume the world works that way.

My other, indeed my main, point, though, is stop making elves into Sues. I even mean Tolkien: just stop it. They are not halfway between men and angels, like in Tolkien. Still less should they be the vehicles for AuthorFilibusters, like in Eragon. And making them "oppressed" is just as Sue-ish, only it's also got pseudo-Marxist victim politics—no thank you. Other attempts to "deconstruct" elvish Sue-ness are equally bad, and often show an attitude about women that is utterly vile—as in, "you deserve to star in a DJ battle between Vlad the Impaler and Elizabeth Bathory"-level vile. The glee with which the mouth-breathers talk about elves—especially elvish women—being enslaved and subjugated to humans, or orcs or trolls or other things, is the kind of thing that makes Joss Whedon's self-hating man-feminism look tenable.

Go back to the original stories about elves. You know who's the most accurate portrayal of an elf? Sesshômaru. Cold-blooded, fratricidal, "Aristocratic assassin"-is-the-title-of-his-debut-episode-forgodssakes Sesshômaru. Consider that "Elf" comes from the same root as "Albino" (it basically means "the pale ones"), and "Aes Sidhe" means "People of the Burial Mounds"—these are not safe people. At best, humans are pets to them. They're not nice, but they aren't bad, either, see—in the legends, far from being all lawless and crap like Yeats says, they seem to have a code that basically boils down to, "I don't want no trouble, but you bring me any, you don't go home happy." They do understand morality—they're not amoral—but it's not the same morality, because they're not human.

They aren't actually arrogant, either: they really have got the chops. In fact, it'd be more likely for them to fight the bad guys precisely because of their pride. It's something I wish had been in Harry Potter: where were all the pureblood wizards siding against the Death Eaters, precisely because Voldemort is a half-blood? Can you imagine the badassness? "You side with half-bloods!" a Death Eater yells. "You serve one," the loyalist pureblood says coldly, and then whips out the combat spells that, presumably, would be the only reason purebloods had any status to begin with (here's a fact, fact fans: aristocracies are never about bloodline, at first).

The Eldar (in Warhammer 40K, I mean, not Tolkien) are close, but they still have that BS arrogance and that tragic "dying race" thing. Tolkien did it a little better, but even his elves are "fading away". Only, why? Seriously, all this "Faery is retreating in the face of progress" stuff is just an unexamined convention from the Romantic movement. Question it. The best most of these idiots can do is say, "It is, and a good thing, too, because elves are scary"—which is true as far as it goes, but even it's an assumption. Why should the fairies be retreating in a modern setting, let alone a quasi-medieval one? "Oh, well, if they're still at their height," the half-educated say, "there's no reason for humans to be the dominant race." Really? How about, elves live in forests and inside hills, humans live out in the open? They're not competing for ecological niches.