I hate that elves live for a 1000 years. I don’t care if it’s the staple. It’s jarring.

Chaos_Sinner777

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Oh, Warhammer 40k elves... Or so I gather as an outsider.

You're biased by your puny human perspective. MOST magical creatures live past 300 years. Usually much, much longer. It's humans that are weird and weak for reasons that just plain old don't make sense.
I'm not especially into warhammer myself, so can't say how accurate that is to the Eldar. But that may be accurate.

Also, fantasy world humans could have longer lifespans! Totes. "Wait, you're five hundred years old?!! I wouldn't have guessed you at over forty!" "Ah yeah, my great grandpa found a magical radioactive meteorite when he tried to dig a well on his farm and now my whole family since has been mages, lived super long, or both."
 

Sabruness

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I never got why living that long was an huge advantage. Peoples memories aren’t good enough it’d really matter and how useful is ancient knowledge anyway?

“Ah I did electronics 50 years ago, I can help”

No you can’t, you’ll remember fuck all about it and are 50 years out of date.

“I studied the blade for 200 years”

cool you still die to a musket dipshit. Nobody uses swords anymore.
i've read a few novels where they've countered long life knowledge by making it such that the few super long living types either purge their memory of useless shit every couple hundred years or they just only remember very vague details of something that happened a thousand years ago but forgot the details.
 

corruption

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Imagine an elf wondering around, and goes to a city.
It seemed the last time he as there it was just a small village, and he left in a hurry, while owing the local tavern for a couple of drinks.
Well, compound interest on 3 gold pieces build up over 400 years, and they want their money!
 

Anonjohn20

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Sorry if I forgot to mention this in my first comment, but sexy elves exist to be bred. Just had to put that out there.
 

Tsuru

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We definitely need a law to ban elves from living so long!? Let's start collecting signatures for a petition!:blob_paint:
In my story they live 200 years max. No exceptions. You can’t tell me they control everything, The asari from Mass Effect are also guilty. The Krogan… they’re fine, but just as guilty.

Do we always have to make some species live past 300? Why?
I'm a vampire that has lived for 20000 years.
Elf : (beaten)
Vampire & Immortal Robots :
beating hiding Blank Template - Imgflip
 

theInmara

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In one of our novels, the narrator finally sat down and did the math on its own age, and discovered that it wasn't just centuries or a couple millennia old, it was over 130 millennia old. Which, though it was an AI Tutor and programmed to function that long, totally blew its mind. It hadn't been programmed to keep track of its age.

We imagine that would really annoy you, because it requires a computer system that can function for that long.

It was fun to write, though.
 

Gray_Mann

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In one of our novels, the narrator finally sat down and did the math on its own age, and discovered that it wasn't just centuries or a couple millennia old, it was over 130 millennia old. Which, though it was an AI Tutor and programmed to function that long, totally blew its mind. It hadn't been programmed to keep track of its age.

We imagine that would really annoy you, because it requires a computer system that can function for that long.

It was fun to write, though.
Hell, most PC's cant go a week without needing an update, which always causes some kind of issue, that needs another update to fix the mess caused by the previous update. And rinse and repeat. A computer working for 1.3 million years? Can't see it. I can't even imagine the amount of updates needed. I'd probably take a sip of arsenic before I clicked and waited for THAT update to complete.

And with how fast everything grows obsolete, people look at me strange when I tell them I'm using the same PC I've owned since 2017. It's only 7 years old, but you'd swear I told them I'm driving a Ford Model-T to work or something else equally absurd.
 

theInmara

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Hell, most PC's cant go a week without needing an update, which always causes some kind of issue, that needs another update to fix the mess caused by the previous update. And rinse and repeat. A computer working for 1.3 million years? Can't see it. I can't even imagine the amount of updates needed. I'd probably take a sip of arsenic before I clicked and waited for THAT update to complete.

And with how fast everything grows obsolete, people look at me strange when I tell them I'm using the same PC I've owned since 2017. It's only 7 years old, but you'd swear I told them I'm driving a Ford Model-T to work or something else equally absurd.
See, the problem is, just as CrimsonGenius is failing to consider that elves are not necessarily derived from humans and are magical so they don't have to follow any biological norms at all, you're failing to consider that in science fiction and fantasy, alien computers from an advanced civilization don't have to follow any of the conventions of contemporary Earth computers.

It's a mythical allegorical story, not a historical document.

Of course, we didn't give you the context in our original comment, so failing to consider that is slightly fair. But, really, when having a discussion about stories in general on a website where people are writing all sorts of things, none of us should be applying a single standard to every instance of writing.

TLDR: Authors can write whatever they want forever. Too bad, so sad.
 

Tyranomaster

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Elves long predate Tolkien. Look at the Alfar from Norse mythology, they've been using elves in fiction since before their culture started writing their stories down (also known as oral tradition).
As far as I can tell, it seems like he was the one to bring their modern form to the fantasy genre. He borrowed their concepts from a few different beings in folklore, for sure.

When people think of elves as a fantasy race, they either think of Tolkien elves or Santa's elves now a days. Tokien's elves blend multiple cultures ideas, but they aren't solely based on any one of those previous ideas. Most modern fantasy elves share more traits with Tolkien elves as compared to folklore brands of elves, so I think it's fair to say he pioneered the race in modern fantasy, with it's tropes.
 

LoneQuack

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There are way worse things than lazy lifespan, but I get what you're saying. As its already stated, cause they saw Tolkien and copied without understanding much after that.

Now, if it makes you feel any better, in my story Elves have pretty much the same lifespan with humans( a bit better than humans as it they leave more healthy and for the same reason dwarfs have the least.)
 

Golden_Hyde

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Everything needs realism in it, particularly the genre literally called fantasy
You're looking for a subgenre of Fantasy called Low Fantasy. Little magics being written, mostly political, swords shields and arrows, so on so forth, just like Game of Thrones (although they have dragons so they're likely in-between Low and High)
Now, if it makes you feel any better, in my story Elves have pretty much the same lifespan with humans( a bit better than humans as it they leave more healthy and for the same reason dwarfs have the least.)
So this is basically the original depiction of elves in Germanic folklore then
 
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georgelee5786

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You're looking for a subgenre of Fantasy called Low Fantasy. Little magics being written, mostly political, swords shields and arrows, so on so forth, just like Game of Thrones (although they have dragons so they're likely in-between Low and High)
I was making fun of the thread creator
 
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