Two part question for you:
First of all, what comes to mind when I say the word ‘elf’?
Are you thinking graceful androgynous features? Long hair and long lifespans? Longbows? Forest cities? Pointed ears? Maybe you’re thinking arrogance and ancient wisdom. Maybe you’re thinking harps and wine. Maybe you’re thinking a more along the lines of Sten’s immortal and sarcastic answer from the first Dragon Age: “a lithe, pointy-eared people who excel at poverty”?
But whatever the case, I expect there are some common strands here, whether you’re thinking about Middle Earth’s elves, or Faerun’s, or Azeroth’s or Thedas’ or Nirn’s or basically any other fantasy setting with elves in them.
Which brings me to the second half of that question: why?
“Tolkien”, some of you might say, and you’d be right, in a way. The elves of Middle Earth are very much the cultural touchstone which all other modern high fantasy elves draw off of, either as a direct inspiration, or as a subversion. Yet not everyone who’s familiar with the archetype of the fantasy elf is necessarily a reader of Tolkien’s works. In fact, I’d bet that a large number of people who are well-aware of that archetype aren’t even aware of what popularised it. To them, the image of the fantasy elf is one that seems almost inherent to high fantasy – if a work exists in that certain genre, it will have elves, and if elves exist in that story, they will look, act, and speak a certain way.
That’s what we call a genre convention.
To be more direct, a genre convention is a worldbuilding or storytelling element which is taken for granted as inherent to a given genre by anyone familiar with it. I used elves in high fantasy as an example, but I could have just as easily used evil sorcerers in heroic fantasy, starships in space opera, or powerful and borderline abusive men in romantasy. When you present one of facets of these elements to an audience who knows what genre they’re in, then they will be able to intuit the rest, the same way that you might assume the driver’s going to want to get paid if you hail a taxi or that food’s going to be hot if you pull it out of a working oven.
So, why do we do this? It’d be easy to dismiss this kind of thing as a cliche, or a trope, something which makes the setting and story unoriginal or predictable – but that’s exactly why we do this. People like a degree of originality in their stories, but they also want to understand the stories which they’re being told. When it comes to fiction, those stories will inevitably exist in a world which is many ways different from our own. This is especially the case for science fiction or fantasy which exists in a world which very definitively isn’t our own. Logically, these worlds will be different in almost every way: different aesthetic languages, different cultural assumptions, different ways of thinking, ways of moving, and ways of communicating any of this. Even our own real-life planet has cultures made up of completely normal humans which take a lot of time and effort for an outsider to understand. Open the floor to fiction, and we’re talking fictional societies and terrains which are entirely alien to our own, and which would need years of study to understand, let alone create.
That’s why we have genre conventions, as shortcuts, as ways for a creator to make an audience understand wide elements of the narrative and setting by telling them that a given society or part of the world or character is similar to how they are in most of the rest of that genre of fiction.
To go back to our original example of elves. Tolkien very famously spent years and years creating his, writing their histories, their politics, and their culture – all based on constructed languages. He in turn leaned heavily on Northern European mythology and folk culture (a subject in which he was one of the leading experts in the English-speaking world at the time), so not even he created his elves out of whole cloth. However, the sheer amount of work he put in to create a textured and nuanced group of cultures in turn allowed those who followed him to use the work that he put in and the visibility which his work achieved to use the basic archetype of Tolkien’s elves as their own shorthand, one which is reinforced with every published work which uses it, and has now become so heavily entrenched in the understanding of most fantasy fiction readers that it’s become universal.
Okay, so far so good, right? Genre conventions act as a shorthand to explain parts of the setting and deliver context for the plot effectively and efficiently, so you should use them all the time, right?
Well, here’s where things get complicated.
As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of people have been inspired by Tolkien’s rendition of elves. However, whereas Tolkien’s work was inspired by the fruits of an academic career which spanned decades, many of those who come after him are primarily inspired by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien – and just as Tolkien had to condense and flatten and conflate a whole lot of decades of study of hundreds of years of the history of millions of people into a format which could fit into several extremely large books, his successors tend to flatten and conflate and condense a whole lot of his work to fit into their own, and those that follow them in turn condense, flatten, and conflate as well. With each link in the chain, the roots are lost and the original complexity of the subject gets reduced more and more so it can fit in very different kinds of fantasy. The result is that our modern understanding of the “fantasy elf” as a genre convention is less Tolkien’s direct work, and more a sort of simplification of a simplification, used by creators who often don’t understand where the conventions they use are coming from – which is a problem because if you don’t know where your conventions come from or why they’re the way they are, you can’t use them correctly.
Tolkien’s elves are (at least, by the time of The Lord of the Rings) a dying society, one which has given up on Middle Earth and is slowly letting go of the mortal world to retreat elsewhere. These are tragic figures, letting go of a world which no longer finds them needed or wanted. A lot of the way which Tolkien’s elves act and speak and interact with the other societies around them is founded in this fact. They’re torn between getting the younger races to do what they consider the right thing and leaving the inhabitants of a world which they plan to set free to their own judgement. They are the way they are because they have consciously made the choice to leave the world and all of their history within it.
That’s all well and good – the problem is that if you take away that fundamental aspect of Tolkien’s elves – that they do not plan to stay and that their wisdom is one rooted in regret at their own past mistakes, then the whole framing of their behaviour changes. Elves which behave (at least superficially) as Tolkien’s elves do, while showing every intention to stay and continue to boss around the younger races for the rest of their immortal lives don’t come off as reluctant tutors to their inevitable successors, but kind of just colossally arrogant dicks. What was once a final attempt of a dying society to make sure its successors don’t make the same mistakes it did becomes the imperialist paternalism of a species which will insist it will always know better and will always be around to enforce its judgements – the difference between a dying parent imparting last words of wisdom to their children, and a controlling parent who refuses to allow their children to grow up.
When convention is divorced from the context that originally created it, then that convention needs to be changed to match its new context, otherwise you get disconnects which are likely to mean that your audience will interpret your story in ways you probably weren’t intending, even if they do understand what they were meant to be.
And that’s not even the worst thing that can happen with conventions applied badly.
Let’s take another example from high fantasy: the orc. I’m sure you have the imagine in your head: a physically imposing, brutish-looking figure with a flat nose and a heavy jaw, armed with crude weapons and armour, perhaps speaking in grunts and bellows, living in huts or buildings with a lot of spikes on them. They might have green skin or black skin or grey skin, but they’re almost always seen as part of some kind of horde, an almost stereotypically antagonistic force with just enough intelligence to pose a material threat to the heroic protagonists.
That’s how they were codified after all – again by Tolkien, but also by his successors – and if you’re using them the way Tolkien used them, as the almost faceless instruments of some dark lord to make up the numbers of that antagonist’s army, an ontologically evil race of beast-men who exist mostly to get stabbed, that might work for you.
Except…
In a lot of ways, Tolkien’s worldbuilding was a product of his time. Although he himself consciously tried to position himself as an anti-racist, he still inherited a lot of the assumptions of the empire he grew up in, and sometimes those assumptions bled into his work. The characterisation of the orcs, and the “Men of the East” was one of those ways. Under normal circumstances, we’d be able to simply accept that these were perhaps products of their time, and that based on Tolkien’s correspondence, he almost certainly didn’t intend to create parallels between his antagonistic “dark hordes” and the way which very real imperial policy framed their enemies in the lands which the British Empire had appropriated and colonised. After all, Tolkien has been dead for more than half a century, it’s not like he’s still putting out work which reinforces those implicit biases.
But then again, other people are, because that bit of worldbuilding wasn’t just unique to Tolkien’s own work. It codified a genre convention which persisted into popular high fantasy for decades afterwards, even into today. Orcs, and other “greenskins” are still positioned as ontologically evil minions of darkness with no civilisation, no culture, and no will of their own except for destruction and plunder: fodder enemies to be cut down, to the point where Ukrainian troops use “orc” as a derogatory term for the very human invaders of the Russian Army.
The creators who perpetuate this convention didn’t do so because they really think that certain cultures or groups of sapient people (and fantasy orcs usually are, how else do they create the weapons and equipment which they are so commonly depicted with?) are ontologically evil and fit only to be stabbed to death. They do it because it’s a convention that already exists, and they committed no effort to interrogating or analysing it. Yet it isn’t hard to see how the uncritical use of this convention could lead to unintended and often harmful implications when built into a setting, especially one where the creator doesn’t want to imply that their heroes are locked in a race war against a culture or a society which unironically deserve annihilation.
None of this means that a genre convention with unfortunate implications needs to be thrown wholesale into the trash. What it does mean is that a creator should consider the implications of the conventions present in the genre they’re working in, and consider whether it’d be better to use them unaltered, or to find a way to alter, challenge, or revise them to fit better in the themes and tone they intend in their own work.
In the end, that’s what all of this can be summed up as: be curious about the conventions you’re working with, figure out where they came from, why they worked originally, and why they became a genre convention in the first place. If they don’t work for the story you’re writing, or don’t reflect the kind of writer you are, then interrogate them, challenge them, alter them. Make sure to leave enough to let the audience know what you’re starting from, and you should be able to take them all kinds of new and interesting places with them.
Simple as that.
Paul Wang 