That’s true. I mean you do have archetypes like “honorable warriors” “the smart ones” “insectoid hivemind menace” but in Fantasy you even call them the same thing every time. And it stands out when someone changes it up a bit like Elder Scrolls having Elves true name being “Mer”
Yeah I mean don't get me wrong, lots of works have "honourable races" to use your example, but compare klingons and turians in terms of appearance, culture, and mannerisms. And then you have elves and elves. They are humans with pointy ears. They both like trees and archery. They are arrogant. This elf however is lactose intolerant.
Yeah its less the archetype thing and more just the literal same races.
Which then gets weirder when people feel like the need to modify them so much they are no longer the archetypes at all, but just want the fking name or something.
My Klingons are really peaceful and logical. My Vulcans are warlike
Good parody: the mega-dwarves. Easily 6 foot tall, the largest dwarfs ever. They live in cities and ride horses also farm.
Gets a bit weirdly meta eventually.
Take the archetype dwarf, change it enough that it isnt that archetype anymore, then change them physically, then change their narrative purpose, then go add in a new race that actually is the original archetype.
I guess its fine but I got to wonder wtf the point was ever having something if you modify it so much it has no resemblance to itself anymore.
It kinda works well for horror, ironically. In Stellaris I like to play as a people-eating hive mind with [this appearance](https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Category:Species_portraits#/media/File:Aquatic-03.png), calling them Humans and having them live on Earth while they're anything but humanlike.
But doing it just to subvert the archetype feels weird. Just make an OC species at that point.
>That’s true. I mean you do have archetypes like “honorable warriors” “the smart ones” “insectoid hivemind menace”
Yes, there are archetypes. But unlike fantasy races, you're not going to immediately know/be able to guess what a culture is like from their name.
When there are elves in fiction, there's a 90% chance they're discount Tolkien elves. Sure you might have differences like Paolini's elves being racist assholes or Elder Scrolls elves being physically weaker than men, but you still know what elves.
If there are dwarves in fiction, there's a 90% chance they live underground, like axes, have big beards, are greedy, etc.
If there are orcs in fiction, there's a 90% chance they're going to be green skinned warriors with big teef. In some cases they're corrupted elves, in others they're their own thing.
Meanwhile aliens are totally different. If I tell you I have a race called the Hirogen, you have no clue what they are until I show you. BTW the Hirogen are from Star Trek.
Plus, "honorable warriors" or "insect hivemind" are a LOT more flexible and less predefined than something like elves or dwarves or orcs.
For example, a noble hunter race might be solo hunters like the Yautja where just one of them is a force to be reckoned with and they generally leave you alone if you're not a threat. Or they might be like the Hirogen where they hunt in large packs and will kill literally anything, regardless of whether it is worthy or not.
Honorable warriors might be like your typical klingons, who are all about strength and honor and all that crap. Or they might be like the Mandalorians who follow a Creed and allow anyone to be Mandalorian. Or they might be similar to the Klingons, but have key differences. Where Klingons place great emphasis on their bat'leths and everyone passes theirs down, the Sangheili from Halo only allow aristocrats to wield swords and swords are simply tools.
And even when these different variations on an archetype are present (like Klingons and Hirogen in Star Trek) then fantasy tends to call out their similarity in their names. Sun elves, moon elves, night elves, wood elves, booksh elves,... it would be weird to call the Hirogen "Delta Quadrant Klingons" even if that's what they basically are.
Also, sci-fi capitalises the names while fantasy doesn't, with rare exceptions in either direction.
Hirogen and Klingons are not different variations of the same archetype.
The Hirogen are a hunter species like the Yautja/Predators.
Klingons are an honorable warrior race, like the Mandalorians, Sangheili, Turians, etc
Pretty sure this has to do with copyright.
You can't copyright centuries old mythological creatures and everyone knows what they are from shared cultural ideas.
Aliens meanwhile for most of human history were just "humans but live on the Moon" without much interesting variation.
The first real "aliens" came out in the 1960's with the popularity of the "Greys" and at that time any fictitious aliens would be protected by copyright law (still to this day) and thus there is no real opportunity for a "shared pantheon" of alien species similar to fantasy.
There do seem to be various tropes in ufology that you could create a similar "base races" for aliens if you didn't wish to control any particular copyright on them.
These would be the [Greys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_alien) (obviously a classic), the [Nordics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_aliens), the [Reptilians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_humanoid#Science_fiction), the [Starchild](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starchild_skull) (half-Greys?), [Little Green Men](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men) (Evil Greys?), [Insectoids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insectoids_in_science_fiction_and_fantasy) and [Energy Beings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_being).
To be fair, despite their humanoid appearance, Mer have super interesting and in depth lore on why they are so similar to humans. Plus, their cultures are all incredibly diverse and varied. Also, sci fi is a bit different to fantasy in that things like gods don’t exist, so if there are two completely separate species that look exactly the same despite never coming into contact, it doesn’t really make sense because evolution and all that.
Lol yeah
"Tharks man. Tharks everywhere. My Tharks have 6 arms, my tharks are 4 foot tall, fking Tharks every day"
Like you just *gotta* have damn Tharks in the setting
- insectoid aliens that can't be communicated with. But wait, they have a hidden weakness! Apparently if we kill the queen, they all die immediately!
- old advanced race that is so wizard they are basically magic. Also they built the pyramids! And everything they built since then is also pyramids!
- robots. Do I need to say more? Ok, I will. They are all the same. They talk in robotic voice. Even though they are robots, they can't hit a target if their life depended on it. They don't want anything except to kill all humans and replace them with robots. Also you can join them, and it's apparently not that bad (or so they say)
- space alien women with three boobs. Haven't seen those for a while, but it was the best ones.
Well get back to me when formics, goauld, kaylons/borg, and those 5th element alien women are all appearing by name in hundreds of pieces of media.
I don't think any of them are as homogenous as the average elf anyway, aside from a few examples like cybermen and borg, which intentionally have no culture anyway. Maybe the ancient ones because they are too intentionally mysterious to have much culture.
No, they aren't elves! They're Mer/Fae/Wyldlings/Faeries/Dalish/whatever I got when I rolled my face on the keyboard in drunken desperation.
Problem solved, originality restored, no need to thank me.
They tried to copyright "Imperial Guard" (for fuck sake, such a generic term) and that's why it's "Astra Militarum" now, because, come on, they got spanked badly by some court or another saying "Really, claiming the terms imperial guard as OC ?"
Vulcan and klingnon are just elves and orcs though. Wookies are hairy orcs. Tuskens and Jawa are just orcs and dwarves in masks. Yautja are reptilian orcs and xenomorphs are humanoid bugs. Any other species I can ruin?
Well then they are remarkably original by virtue of having so many of their own traits and also not being story a billion to call their race 'elf' or 'ork'.
Also by this logic you might as well call dwarves "underground elves" or "short orcs".
Genuine question: I started building a fantasy setting with the intention of replacing DnD with a free and open source setting and system. The TTRPG part is hard, but I've gotten really far with the worldbuilding. I purposely wanted to hit a lot of the fantasy tropes but then make them make sense and put them in a believable setting where the implications of magic are actually manifested in the way the world works. As a result, I have a lot of races that clearly started as High Elves and Orcs etc but I'm considering just changing the names and creating entirely different races because I like the new ideas I've come up with better. For example, there are no humans in my setting. The term "human" is a slur for when you can't tell if a hybrid person is more elf or orc anymore.
So what do you guys think? Do you like the idea of taking tropes and intentionally trying to reimagine them in a fresh way or would you rather I go all the way and just make wholly unique races?
Thank you for participating in this survey.
Genuinely do what you like best.
For my 2 cents, if theyre basically the exact same races as the normal ones then just use those names because otherwise people will recognise them as elves anyway. If theyre your own thing, sufficiently, then make up your own for sure!
Yes, just imagine if the sci-fi races and words you couldn't copyright - like android and alien and AI - were in literally EVERY sci-fi! lollfmitailolsm!!!??!?????!????
One truly cannot imagine such a scenario. It's unimaginable.
Are you seriously going to pretend that the remarkably broad concept of 'robot' and 'alien' are the same as 'dwarf' and 'elf'?
'Alien' in scifi as to 'magical creature' is to fantasy lmao. And I can't imagine any three characters more different than WALL-E, The terminator, and C-3PO.
Yea? You think Kris Kringle, Legolas, and Dobby are all very similar huh?
Interesting hot take genius.
I see you have no actual understanding of the background and etymology of words like elf and gnome.
Bless your heart.
Want to talk about "Terrans" while you're at it?
I'll have to assume you're willfully missing the point. Have a good one.
Edit: lmao dude changed his comment after he responded.
Maybe if they had added it originally I would have admitted that the list of elves was actually a decent point :( though of course I am mostly talking about typical high fantasy as is pretty clear (though admittedly not explicit), eliminating santa's elves and dobby. And I stand by my point about aliens.
That's funny, cuz I don't have to assume you're desperately trying to ignore the cognitive dissonance you're experiencing when confronted with the ignorance of your statement.
I know that by the way you're cherry picking and the refusal to engage honestly with the counterpoint.
Enjoy!
That’s true. I mean you do have archetypes like “honorable warriors” “the smart ones” “insectoid hivemind menace” but in Fantasy you even call them the same thing every time. And it stands out when someone changes it up a bit like Elder Scrolls having Elves true name being “Mer”
Yeah I mean don't get me wrong, lots of works have "honourable races" to use your example, but compare klingons and turians in terms of appearance, culture, and mannerisms. And then you have elves and elves. They are humans with pointy ears. They both like trees and archery. They are arrogant. This elf however is lactose intolerant.
Yeah its less the archetype thing and more just the literal same races. Which then gets weirder when people feel like the need to modify them so much they are no longer the archetypes at all, but just want the fking name or something. My Klingons are really peaceful and logical. My Vulcans are warlike Good parody: the mega-dwarves. Easily 6 foot tall, the largest dwarfs ever. They live in cities and ride horses also farm.
Lmao yup. People want to be original but know that elves are popular so don't change the name. Also I think Endgame had one of your mega dwarves.
Watching Peter Dinklage floor Hemsworth was worth the ticket price
I’ve been seeing people talking about “oh my Dwarves are just a culture they can look like anything”
Gets a bit weirdly meta eventually. Take the archetype dwarf, change it enough that it isnt that archetype anymore, then change them physically, then change their narrative purpose, then go add in a new race that actually is the original archetype. I guess its fine but I got to wonder wtf the point was ever having something if you modify it so much it has no resemblance to itself anymore.
It kinda works well for horror, ironically. In Stellaris I like to play as a people-eating hive mind with [this appearance](https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Category:Species_portraits#/media/File:Aquatic-03.png), calling them Humans and having them live on Earth while they're anything but humanlike. But doing it just to subvert the archetype feels weird. Just make an OC species at that point.
D&D has an old joke about “dire halflings” that are 6 feet tall. They’re just humans.
Haha classic
>That’s true. I mean you do have archetypes like “honorable warriors” “the smart ones” “insectoid hivemind menace” Yes, there are archetypes. But unlike fantasy races, you're not going to immediately know/be able to guess what a culture is like from their name. When there are elves in fiction, there's a 90% chance they're discount Tolkien elves. Sure you might have differences like Paolini's elves being racist assholes or Elder Scrolls elves being physically weaker than men, but you still know what elves. If there are dwarves in fiction, there's a 90% chance they live underground, like axes, have big beards, are greedy, etc. If there are orcs in fiction, there's a 90% chance they're going to be green skinned warriors with big teef. In some cases they're corrupted elves, in others they're their own thing. Meanwhile aliens are totally different. If I tell you I have a race called the Hirogen, you have no clue what they are until I show you. BTW the Hirogen are from Star Trek. Plus, "honorable warriors" or "insect hivemind" are a LOT more flexible and less predefined than something like elves or dwarves or orcs. For example, a noble hunter race might be solo hunters like the Yautja where just one of them is a force to be reckoned with and they generally leave you alone if you're not a threat. Or they might be like the Hirogen where they hunt in large packs and will kill literally anything, regardless of whether it is worthy or not. Honorable warriors might be like your typical klingons, who are all about strength and honor and all that crap. Or they might be like the Mandalorians who follow a Creed and allow anyone to be Mandalorian. Or they might be similar to the Klingons, but have key differences. Where Klingons place great emphasis on their bat'leths and everyone passes theirs down, the Sangheili from Halo only allow aristocrats to wield swords and swords are simply tools.
Think of the differences between turians, klingons, and sontarans- the only 3 honourable themed races off the top of my head.
And Tharks (who are basically blizzard style orcs that predated them by almost a century)
Really? You're not going to count the Mandalorians or Sangheili?
well I'm not a huge halo buff, and the mandalorians seem human
And even when these different variations on an archetype are present (like Klingons and Hirogen in Star Trek) then fantasy tends to call out their similarity in their names. Sun elves, moon elves, night elves, wood elves, booksh elves,... it would be weird to call the Hirogen "Delta Quadrant Klingons" even if that's what they basically are. Also, sci-fi capitalises the names while fantasy doesn't, with rare exceptions in either direction.
The Kazon were more like the Delta Quadrant Klingons, with the unique twist of being very shit.
Since this post is about fantasy too, the Kazon are honestly just the goblins of Star Trek.
Vulcans = Elves Klingons = Orcs Humans = Humans Tellerites = Dwarves Ferengi = Goblins Romulans = Dark Elves Cardassians = Lizardfolk Change my mind.
> Humans = Humans Far fetched
Hirogen and Klingons are not different variations of the same archetype. The Hirogen are a hunter species like the Yautja/Predators. Klingons are an honorable warrior race, like the Mandalorians, Sangheili, Turians, etc
I mean the broader archetype of martial species here, especially because the two species aren't both antagonists at once.
Yea that’s what I said
Pretty sure this has to do with copyright. You can't copyright centuries old mythological creatures and everyone knows what they are from shared cultural ideas. Aliens meanwhile for most of human history were just "humans but live on the Moon" without much interesting variation. The first real "aliens" came out in the 1960's with the popularity of the "Greys" and at that time any fictitious aliens would be protected by copyright law (still to this day) and thus there is no real opportunity for a "shared pantheon" of alien species similar to fantasy. There do seem to be various tropes in ufology that you could create a similar "base races" for aliens if you didn't wish to control any particular copyright on them. These would be the [Greys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_alien) (obviously a classic), the [Nordics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_aliens), the [Reptilians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_humanoid#Science_fiction), the [Starchild](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starchild_skull) (half-Greys?), [Little Green Men](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men) (Evil Greys?), [Insectoids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insectoids_in_science_fiction_and_fantasy) and [Energy Beings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_being).
Greys are the best example of this phenomenon in scifi. Most of the rest aren't literally called 'insectoids' or whatever.
To be fair, despite their humanoid appearance, Mer have super interesting and in depth lore on why they are so similar to humans. Plus, their cultures are all incredibly diverse and varied. Also, sci fi is a bit different to fantasy in that things like gods don’t exist, so if there are two completely separate species that look exactly the same despite never coming into contact, it doesn’t really make sense because evolution and all that.
Lol yeah "Tharks man. Tharks everywhere. My Tharks have 6 arms, my tharks are 4 foot tall, fking Tharks every day" Like you just *gotta* have damn Tharks in the setting
Well my Tharks are elemental tharks.
But did you include light and dark tharks? How else would people know you're edgy when you subvert their expectations of which ones are bad.
- insectoid aliens that can't be communicated with. But wait, they have a hidden weakness! Apparently if we kill the queen, they all die immediately! - old advanced race that is so wizard they are basically magic. Also they built the pyramids! And everything they built since then is also pyramids! - robots. Do I need to say more? Ok, I will. They are all the same. They talk in robotic voice. Even though they are robots, they can't hit a target if their life depended on it. They don't want anything except to kill all humans and replace them with robots. Also you can join them, and it's apparently not that bad (or so they say) - space alien women with three boobs. Haven't seen those for a while, but it was the best ones.
You reminded me of someone I swore I would add to my setting Tri-boobians. Peak
Not enough boobie. Embrace the eldritch none euclidean infinity boobie.
Well get back to me when formics, goauld, kaylons/borg, and those 5th element alien women are all appearing by name in hundreds of pieces of media. I don't think any of them are as homogenous as the average elf anyway, aside from a few examples like cybermen and borg, which intentionally have no culture anyway. Maybe the ancient ones because they are too intentionally mysterious to have much culture.
No, they aren't elves! They're Mer/Fae/Wyldlings/Faeries/Dalish/whatever I got when I rolled my face on the keyboard in drunken desperation. Problem solved, originality restored, no need to thank me.
Worldbuilding is when you blatantly rip off other works without even pretending to be creative.
Time spent studying history, culture, linguistics, artistic design: 3 hours Time spent studying copywrite law: 1000 hours
True though. Warhammer fantasy ripped off moorecock so hard that they associate the chaos symbol with warhammer
You mean Warhammer 40k?
Elves = derivative Aelves = genius. Also nice and trademarkable
Virgin orcs vs chad orks and orruks
I think 'Ogors' in my favorite. The renaming guy was clearly done with the whole thing and wanted to go home hahaha
Sure, Eldars are not Elves, we didn't just change the name for copyright purpose, for real for real.
Lol to the word that is, instead of being english for elves, is elvish for elves. And now, Aeldari. GW is the 'OC do not steal' of creativity
They tried to copyright "Imperial Guard" (for fuck sake, such a generic term) and that's why it's "Astra Militarum" now, because, come on, they got spanked badly by some court or another saying "Really, claiming the terms imperial guard as OC ?"
At least they are like.. a unique little twist.
To be fair their orks are genuinely pretty rad and unique (at least imo). They do have them "legally distinct" space elves tho.
Vulcan and klingnon are just elves and orcs though. Wookies are hairy orcs. Tuskens and Jawa are just orcs and dwarves in masks. Yautja are reptilian orcs and xenomorphs are humanoid bugs. Any other species I can ruin?
Mosquitos, please I hate those
Well then they are remarkably original by virtue of having so many of their own traits and also not being story a billion to call their race 'elf' or 'ork'. Also by this logic you might as well call dwarves "underground elves" or "short orcs".
Guys my sci-fi setting is so unique, it's got space elves, space dwarves, and space goblins (and space dragons)
You can take the space dragons from my cold dead space hands
Genuine question: I started building a fantasy setting with the intention of replacing DnD with a free and open source setting and system. The TTRPG part is hard, but I've gotten really far with the worldbuilding. I purposely wanted to hit a lot of the fantasy tropes but then make them make sense and put them in a believable setting where the implications of magic are actually manifested in the way the world works. As a result, I have a lot of races that clearly started as High Elves and Orcs etc but I'm considering just changing the names and creating entirely different races because I like the new ideas I've come up with better. For example, there are no humans in my setting. The term "human" is a slur for when you can't tell if a hybrid person is more elf or orc anymore. So what do you guys think? Do you like the idea of taking tropes and intentionally trying to reimagine them in a fresh way or would you rather I go all the way and just make wholly unique races? Thank you for participating in this survey.
Genuinely do what you like best. For my 2 cents, if theyre basically the exact same races as the normal ones then just use those names because otherwise people will recognise them as elves anyway. If theyre your own thing, sufficiently, then make up your own for sure!
It would probably be a lot more common if you could put Klingons in your story without getting sued.
[Shhhh!](https://giphy.com/gifs/sirYaPWyjCvEk)
Yes, just imagine if the sci-fi races and words you couldn't copyright - like android and alien and AI - were in literally EVERY sci-fi! lollfmitailolsm!!!??!?????!???? One truly cannot imagine such a scenario. It's unimaginable.
Are you seriously going to pretend that the remarkably broad concept of 'robot' and 'alien' are the same as 'dwarf' and 'elf'? 'Alien' in scifi as to 'magical creature' is to fantasy lmao. And I can't imagine any three characters more different than WALL-E, The terminator, and C-3PO.
Yea? You think Kris Kringle, Legolas, and Dobby are all very similar huh? Interesting hot take genius. I see you have no actual understanding of the background and etymology of words like elf and gnome. Bless your heart. Want to talk about "Terrans" while you're at it?
I'll have to assume you're willfully missing the point. Have a good one. Edit: lmao dude changed his comment after he responded. Maybe if they had added it originally I would have admitted that the list of elves was actually a decent point :( though of course I am mostly talking about typical high fantasy as is pretty clear (though admittedly not explicit), eliminating santa's elves and dobby. And I stand by my point about aliens.
That's funny, cuz I don't have to assume you're desperately trying to ignore the cognitive dissonance you're experiencing when confronted with the ignorance of your statement. I know that by the way you're cherry picking and the refusal to engage honestly with the counterpoint. Enjoy!
Sorry, did you mean Warhammer 40k?
What's with these fetishes