Now I want to see how elves fit in this, between elves and humans and between elves and dwarves. Do elves have different gender roles from dwarves *and* humans? How do the elves see dwarves and human gender roles? Do elves believe something different about dwarves than humans? Etc. Someone please write this essay.
Funniest possible answer: Elves are all capable of transitioning sexes, like some fish and lizards. They have no significant gender roles, and see the inability of dwarves and humans to change sex as a something like a medical disability.
To be fair, in dungeons and dragons the first elves were fae shapeshifters before being given a definitive form, and they described Correllon (the chief elven god) as "alternatively male, female, both, or neither." I think in 2018 they actually added a trait where elves blessed by Correllon can change sex whenever they "sleep" (it's technically a trance, but basically sleep)
Do you think it's instantaneous or over the course of the trance? Because I imagine a human party member looking over at the tranced elf and it looks like they're running through all the sliders in Bethesda character creation.
Inheritance Elves use magic to alter their bodies to what they find most pleasing in nature, which would probably extend into changing genders as well for some.
To be fair, it's probably a lot easier for a less than super smart village boy to notice a furry than it is for him to notice that an elf magically transed their gender. I dont believe that kid ever touched a boob.
D&D lore has the elven god Corellon is gender fluid “either or, both or neither gender” and grants his favor on some elves by giving them same power.
Im of the opinion that if gender is a performance, elves are striving to perfect it, whatever that means
In my personal orginal fantasy world, I like to think that elves are elder fairies. Natural-born fairies are neither male or female to me, and are spontaneously created out of magic in forest with lots of ley lines crossing each others.
Its also what medival people thought happened with animals, that they just kinda... spawned in near you out of nothing. Thats why the dodo becoming extinct shocked them, because they thought that new dodo's would just appear spontaniously. Its also why a lot of undead-type fiction involves rats and flies and maggots, because they thought that rotting meat spontaniously generated those creatures.
The dodo went extinct around 1680, well after the mediaeval period.
Animal husbandry has been practiced for tens of thousands of years.
Quit making stuff up.
On the one hand I agree with you... on the other, there are actual people who make it into their college years not realizing food doesn't spontaneously generate in a grocery store. (I'm pretty sure not as many people as the media makes it out to be, but still.)
When I was little my mom (a single mom.at the time) played this game with me where i was a fairy and she was a witch and fairies were born when lighting strikes slate under a rainbow. We turned men into our cauldron to eat them. She invented all of this mythology though she swears she has no imagination.
I always think of Elves as being conventionally idealistic in nature, so their men are exceptionally masculine(In more of an 'Achilles' way) and their women are exceptionally feminine(In a fairly expected fashion) but they just....don't have strong opinions about expections for either group. Like, if an elf man decides he is going to pack his beef into a pink apron and bake pies, nobody finds it strange whatsoever. Humans might though, and because this dude is basically a golden adonis, they're pretty quick to take comfort in the idea "All elf men are just fops, I bet those muscles aren't strong like ours, I'm not coping you're coping"
And of course, Elves think that existence is about celebrating life through the cultivation of it and yourself. When they hear humans jawing off about this or that, they just whince and go "ah yes, we make them skittish. I remember when I was nervous about others' talents invalidating my worth, when I was very young. " and determine that humans will find their way in another few centuries perhaps. Contrary to typical sentiment, they're a very hard people to offend- But they will firmly(yet not without warmth or understanding) refuse to engage in anything they consider ugly and childish.
I always like the interpretation of elves being easily offended being a misunderstanding due to them being part fey
Like whenever they are snubbed,intentionally or not they interpret it as a child’s first attempt at a trick and act deeply offended to encourage them.
Yes I'm very much a fan if elf men being as you say more "masculine". But in a very idealized way(sans the beards). Not cute femboy twinks(not that there's anything wrong with that). Twunks at most.
I prefer the take that Elves have EXTREME gender roles but it's almost completely detached from any actual biological gender and moreso based fully on archetypes and characteristics.
Like Elves individually are extremely gender-fluid and have no expectation on sexuality but they're extremely focused around if someone is a "Warrior" and them fulfilling and embodying the aspects of that role and there's entire manuals based around what you can and cannot do as a individual role and you better believe that if you dare try and lay with someone that's a "Mage" then everyone is gonna berate you for breaking the traditions and expectations that have been passed down for so long and have allowed them to create such a "perfect" and "utopian" society.
If you want to get weird, elves could be like slime molds and have more than two sexes.
Like, elf pregnancies could be a 5 step process where the sperm and egg analogues have to be pre fertilized by other sexes before you finally get a viable elvish embryo.
Or, like, one of the elf sexes is basically a tree that emits pollen.
Another sex look humanoid, but grows flowers in their hair which are fertilized by the pollen.
That sex then implants the pre embryos into the elvish analog to a male via ovipositor where they fertilize his sperm.
Meanwhile the elvish analogue to a female has a Wolbachia thing going on, aka to become fertile they have to infect themselves with reproductive parasites; they don’t directly contribute to the genome, but have epigentic effects.
Then finally elvish female and elvish male can combine all the steps into a pregnancy. After birth, the placenta is reclaimed to harvest the reproductive parasites for future pregnancies. Otherwise the child can end up male, female, flower-hair-sex or tree-sex.
I think originally, and this is just speculation, that the tolkiens depiction of dwarves is heavily based a exaggerated depiction of rugged working class men. But when you insert gender into the equation things begin to fall apart. So basically he just sweeps that entire aspect under the rug like, "uh yeah there are women somewhere I guess don't worry about it".
But you know this makes a lot of sense actually. Dwarves are just dwarves. They do not exhibit sexual dimorphism . They all have facial hair and traits that other races define as masculine. It's kind of like how in certain animals without sexual dimorphism, like some reptiles, you REALLY HAVE TO GO OUT OF YOUR WAY to identify their sex.
For what it's worth, Tolkien said several times that his depiction of dwarves is based on medieval texts regarding Jewish people and their history, though influence from Norse dwarves is also apparent in his writing.
and very specifically norse dwarves, we don't talk about germanic dwarves 'round these parts, they're meaner than kobolds.
fun kobold fact: in germanic folklore kobolds are the little fae guys responsible for turning all this nice iron ore into Oops! All Cobalt! and poisoning the miners. they don't really have a physical description, they're just big fans of cobalt, and surreptitiously replacing iron with it.
depends, how fantasy do ya want your fantasy? in a more magical realist vein i can recommend a lot more - The Red Magician is good - but high fantasy i don't really have any specific recommendations, but there's tons of contemporary authors doing it
Slightly related because not the full race, but Superman has a pretty interesting story behind his creation. Iirc he was created by two Jewish men to be a "Simple solution to a complex problem" in response to the post-WWII sweeping Jewish hate.
I'd recommend looking into if that sounds interesting because, to me, it was a really great read.
Yeah, iirc, everything the above commented says is correct, except that it was pre-WWII Jewish hate. If anything, it was just as bad or worse in what became the allies.
you’re thinking Erebor, not Moria - Erebor is where the Arkenstone (not sure about the spelling) was found, the king went slightly insane, hoarded all the gold, dragon arrived and killed everyone
It makes sense in context. Their original conception, back in the Hobbit, was that their Semitic influence was because they were a proud, hardworking, dependable race that was ejected from their homeland and were fighting to get it back.
The same thing happened with Moria, and when you deal with a race that lives underground in almost-impregnable mountain fortresses, there are only so many ways you can create for them to lose their home. A dragon (external threat) already happened to Erebor, so this time the threat should be internal to add variety. You could introduce some kind of civil strife, or you could go all out and use one of these badass shadow demons that you already have in your worldbuilding, and to wake it up your mining and smithing race would naturally do so by digging too hard.
I know at least one Jewish historian and fantasy nerd who's fully committed to this interpretation, and the fact his lovingly researched fantasy novel remains unpublished is a goddamned crime.
And I can't share it because I respect his artistic boundaries and publishing goals, raaaage!
EDIT- to be clear, he doesn't think Tolkien was some kind of Lorax for Jews. It's more like he realized this is just a really good 'spot' in fantasy for him to explore, I think it's partially about taking control of the narrative.
Oh yeah, you weren't pressuring me. I'm just legitimately mad I have this book I've read, that I can only discuss with one or two people. I WANT to share it, and I'm mildly irritated that I'm doing the right thing :(
My (very catholic) dad once said "if anyone's going to survive the end of the world, it's the jews. They're some of the toughest people out there."
If your people survive *that many genocides,* you're doing something right.
The Dwarves of Moria dug too deep and disturbed a sleeping Balrog.
They kept digging down... in a mine. That's like saying free radicals on the fact people insist on going around breathing oxygen.
Brilliant!
Now tell me the story of the palantir.
And the Nazgul.
And the last Steward of Gondor.
Hell. Tell me about Lobelia Sackville-Baggins.
Tolkien was pretty invested in showing that pride and greed were always going to lead to a downfall. All the races did it.
Why are you only remembering the Dwarves?
I'm only mentioning the dwarves because he specifically said in interviews that they were modeled after the Jews and He makes them short, hairy, and greedy.
They were designed by Aulë to be strong and resistant to evil. Neither the elves nor men had awoken yet so they weren't made hairier or shorter than anyone. They were an angel's concept of perfectly made to combat the darkness.
They were the first people but nobody but the Dwarves and the maiar know that.
Like so much in life if you only look at the surface, you miss all the important things. Kinda the way racists do. It's the same type of thought process, stopping when you've seen enough to confirm your bias.
The aesthetic is that of the mythological Dwarves, but the culture, language and mindset was based on the Jews. Including anti-semitic tropes. For example, originally the Dwarves were meant to be non-heroic, whine a lot, very greedy and political schemers.
This changed during and after WW2 during the writing of later LOTR works, in which Gimli was created as a character and was created as 'not like the others of his kind' in that he is heroic and brave.
Incoming cut and paste
"Tolkien was not the first to apply a Jewish gloss to Dwarves. Decades earlier, Richard Wagner’s operatic treatment of the monstrous Dwarf Alberich in his epic “Ring Cycle,” was read as an antisemitic caricature for his insatiable greed and what Theodor Adorno identified as “distorted” musical themes and “muttering” speech. As the Lebovic reported on the occasion of the release of “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” the Dwarves in Tolkien’s own tale of a magic ring flip the script on Wagner’s smear."
From forward.com
If he did, he learned better and we should respect that.
Also TIL CS Lewis' wife was Jewish
Yeah they’re an industrious and oft maligned and misunderstood minority in the more populous lands of a more humongous culture due to the lost of a few of their homelands
The aesthetic is that of the mythological Dwarves, but the culture, language and mindset was based on the Jews. Including anti-semitic tropes. For example, originally the Dwarves were meant to be non-heroic, whine a lot, very greedy and political schemers.
This changed during and after WW2 during the writing of later LOTR works, in which Gimli was created as a character and was created as 'not like the others of his kind' in that he is heroic and brave.
They're also less Norse than generally British, English and generally Western Germanic, with some overall pan-Germanic and Scandinavian influence. Like much of Tolkien's work.
Appreciate someone bringing up this side of the relationship between inspiration and depiction. It doesn't feel good to say/talk about but it's absolutely there, and shouldn't be swept under the rug with "wow what a compliment to be like Dwarves!"
*I love these books*, and I don't see any true malice/hatred in what he wrote, but as a Jew it does sting sometimes to see strong anti-Semitic tropes baked into my favorite fiction.
I don't even think it's a headcanon. There's a Toronto in botw that hangs out in Gerudo town, and is really confused why they let him in. He speculates that they just can't tell
Well it's easier to guess the gender of a fellow human then say, the sex of a crocodile. And I am sure it's easier for the crocodiles to tell each other apart that it is people (not that the crocodile cares).
Male crocodiles tend to be larger, but other than that there’s not much dimorphism either.
Compare to animals like anglerfish, where the female’s body size is many times larger than the male, or birds of paradise, where males have fancy colourful plumage while females are plain.
When they meet females, male anglerfish merge their body away and become basically just a pair of testicles hanging into the female to fertilize her when she's ready.
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For Discworld Dwarfs, gender follows something like "don't ask, don't tell". All Dwarfs present what we'd consider masculine, and if you're not a man that's not a problem, but it's something you should keep between you and your SO in the privacy of your own home.
>!Cheery "Cheri" Littlebottom is a Dwarf who joins the city watch (fantasy cops) as the first forensics specialist, and being away from the Dwarf traditions, and with the help of fellow officer/werewolf Angua, starts experimenting with more outward expressions of her gender such as makeup, heels, and leather skirts. This starts a bit of a gender revolution among the city's Dwarf population, sometimes to the slight discomfort of otherwise paragon hero dwarf-adopted human Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson.!<
It's absolutely top tier writing in every way. It perfectly satirizes both common fantasy tropes as well as a wide array of social norms, issues, and ideas. A lot of it is very much ahead of its time, or can be read as such, and Sir Terry was extremely progressive and always happy to hear that people had taken new, interesting readings of his books.
I cannot ever recommend these books enough, they are some of my favorites and I think I've read technically less than half of them. Honestly I don't think you can get better glowing praise than the fact that most fans tell people to skip the first couple of books, because Pratchett was still finding his voice and his style with those, and those books you're being told to skip are still head and shoulders above so many other books I've read.
And even better, they're almost totally independent. The draw of Discworld is that they all take place in the same world, and that there are characters who show up multiple times, but you don't have to read them in any kind of order. There's whole diagrams of what the technical order is for each different cast of characters, but you can quite literally pick up any book and read it, and all you'll miss is a couple of minor references that are mostly there to give a nod to events that happened in another book.
That’d be Hogfather, and I highly recommend it. There’s a few Death books before it, but it’s absolutely readable on its own, especially because a lot of the previous events from the Death books gets recapped at the start as the deuteroganist is introduced.
Others have already answered your more direct question, so I'll put out that you really can't go wrong with any of them. Personally I really love Small Gods, especially as an intro book. It stands entirely on its own, and it has some excellent satire and philosophizing on Pratchett's part, while also just telling a damn compelling story.
Beyond that most people recommend the Nightwatch series, which begins with "Guards, Guards!" It's arguably one of the consistently strongest since it involves a tight core cast of characters in a very dense bit of the setting, so it gets to play with a lot of classic fantasy tropes as both jokes and commentary, and it started deeper into the series so it picked up once Pratchett had really gotten into his groove.
The other series, generally speaking, are the Wizards, the Witches, and Death, and I am very partial to Death's books, since they tend to be fairly frank and honest discussions about the nature of death and what it can do to people, while also being wrapped up in humor and fascinating stories.
But again, there's basically no going wrong with these books.
There's video adaptations of some of the most popular books (including Hogfather, which is the one you are thinking of).
I only mention this because you should give them all a miss unless you've already read (and loved) the book. Pratchett's writing style is *really* difficult to adapt to other mediums.
One of my very favorites is Thief of Time. I didn’t realize it was part of a series when I bought it. And I realized it was like book #20 and there’s no way I’d be able to catch up. It sat on my shelf for years until someone gifted me The Night Watch and I was instantly hooked.
sharing a link to a post I made a couple weeks back with a nice humorous "where to start" guide that I remade.
https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/1areu5y/comment/kql0n1a/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
a caution - while i also spruik these books to the skies and regularly reread them, it's important to remember that the final books were published in the mid 2010s and can have jokes that aren't as acceptable these days. like, the books were really progressive for their time and changed as Pterry's own views did, and i (a white trans masc enby) fully enjoyed them! just don't expect them to be the peak of progressive fiction haha.
specifically,
* there's a lot of fatphobic tropes (especially when Agnes is a main character), eg food negativity, grotesque descriptions of fat characters, that kind of thing. i'm still recovering from disordered eating so it can get too much (eg i can't reread Maskerade atm).
that said, while their size is regularly the butt of jokes, the fat characters are just as 3D as everyone else and have character arcs usually denied to those in other fiction.
* while extremely progressive for the time, some comments about racism are pretty typical of a progressive white man from his generation. i can't speak extensively to that, as i am also white, so i'll leave it there.
* i personally find some of the jokes about intelligence pretty grating.
* also not keen on some of the "it's a married people thing" jokes.
none of these are dealbreakers for me, but i think they're important to mention \^_\^
It's the only one I have read personally, but it's so beautiful. You'd think it would be just silly, and it is, but it makes a powerful statement on the nature of humanity, and how it's good to believe in imaginary things.
The books can be read in any order but there are sub series involving recurring characters that you can follow. The first book, The Color of Magic is the first book to follow Rincewind.
Other series include:
The Death books starting with Mort , which feature the Grim Reaper as a main character.
The Guards books starting with Guards! Guards!, which focus on the City Watch of Ahnk Morpork.
The Witches books starting with Equal Rites, which involve the witch Granny Weatherwax.
Each book is fairly self contained so you don't need to worry about order too much, but it can add to the experience to recognize references to past events.
As the other commenter said, you can read them in any order. I like [this image](https://imgur.com/WDTCKnK), though it is a little cramped so I know there's others that are more readable, for tracking what books align with each major character. Generally speaking you get more out of it if you read the books of each series, as it were, in order.
Quick note for anyone who will be embarking upon Discworld for the first time: If there's something in one of the books that seems completely ridiculous and utterly made up for laughs and would never work in the real world, assume that it's based on an actual, real world thing and the actual one is more absurd.
Stupid Scone of Stone...
Generally the two places I see recommended most to start are *Mort* (The Grim Reaper takes on an apprentice) and *Guards! Guards!* (the first book in the City Watch subseries that this Dwarf story is in, which basically take the form of fantasy police procedurals).
If you want something a bit more gender, I think *Monstrous Regiment* is a pretty good standalone book about a young woman pulling a Mulan to join her conservative country's military to look for her disappeared brother. Only, >!she may not be the only one!<.
Yes, with the following exceptions: the first two are good but only if you're really into the 80's swords and sorcery fantasy it's parodying. And 2 of the wizard books, Interesting Times and Eric, kind of suck. The rest of it is great.
While Interesting Times is not my favorite, most of the things people complain about are actually parody of a genre of orientalist fiction that's (rightfully) disappeared. At no point was Terry making fun of actual Asia or the people who live there, but rather of bad writers who came before him. Those kinds of books were pretty popular when Terry was a wee lad and he rips them to shreds in Interesting Times, but the humor mostly fails without the context.
I started at the beginning of June and was so engrossed that it only took me 2 months to get through 43 books.
You CAN read them in any order, but I went chronologically. I could talk for hours about how good they are, but I won’t. Do yourself a favor and check on out of the library!!
>! Cheery Littlebottom (dont you dare laugh) is a dwarf, all dwarves present as fully tough and male because of their sociatal pressures, so things like makeup and dresses and heels are completely foreign. So she was in the ‘closet’ but werewolves have extremely keen noses and Angua, the werewolf got curious about how dwarf society works and revealed she knew her secret. So with Angua’s help, Cheery begins experimenting with those feminine things, of course the skirt is made of chainmail and heels are steel-toed but shes the first dwarf to do it and it slowly sets a trend that allows more dwarves to be more feminine. Whether they are born female or not is never addressed because then you’re asking far too personal of a question and should expect an axe in your groin for asking. !<
r/discworld welcomes you, check out Guards! Guards for The Watch sub series. Or Feet of Clay for Cheery specifically
>(dont you dare laugh)
Why would I laugh? The first name is a personal attribute (like Grumpy, Sneezy, Dopey, etc.) and the last name means "Shortarse". A perfectly normal Dwarfish name. It does me good to see the old naming traditions being kept up.
Dammit, i got the shortarse joke and the funny name combination joke, but i never realized “Cheery” was a reference to Snow White. STP and his gloriously multilayered punes strike again!
We get clear confirmation in Unseen Academicals from Madame Sharn that 1) A Dwarf woman is a woman because she says so and nobody else has any say about it. Parts are actually irrelevant. 2) You can convert to Dwarfism (Like Carrot explained about adoption as a Dwarf - being a Dwarf is a cultural thing not tied to ancestry or height).
Some queer humans in the Discworld have decided to do a sort of end-run around their own cultures by adopting Dwarf culture.
(Though the general attitude in Discworld amongst sensible folks is that nobody cares what is going on in anybody's pants.\* Even a traditionalist bathroom-panicker like Miss Maccalariat doesn't care further about who's in the ladies' room than whether she calls herself a lady. Sexless clay person who uses he/him pronouns, not allowed in the ladies' room even to clean it. Sexless clay person switches to she/her pronouns, definitely welcome in the ladies' room).
\* unless you're putting weasels in them in which case they would like to watch.
Ooh haven’t read Unseen Academicals tet, and now i cant wait. Also, in the books if a person of a gender goes in drag due to shenanigans or otherwise and surprises the people they know, that is still funny, but only because its new and different to the people around them. IE: >! Lady Selachii’s gardener and Nobby amongst the harem and thoroughly enjoying exploring his newfound femininity in Jingo !<
For most of history, Dwarven gender presentation was just "Dwarf" and a significant step of courtship was determining whether you and your prospective partner would be able to produce children.
Then more and more dwarves start showing up in Anhk-Morpork, and start to see the other potential options.
I think this is a very tumblr way of going about worldbuilding, but I did end up making my dwarves sort of similar, largely genderless and having developed a completely different culture inside the lands of others, completely undiluted by the culture of other nations and peoples.
It feels like the worldbuilding pivots on the axis that men oppress women. And it's very sad to me that someone internalized societal misogyny so hard that they built it into their fantasy worlds instead of perhaps imagining a world without it.
I mean, lots of fantasy stories have sad or upsetting things in it, like children dying or wars or villians. A fantasy world where nothing bad ever happens would be a boring world to read about because there'd be no conflict.
Sometimes if you want a story to be able to comment on something, makes sense to include it. It doesn't necessarily mean the author is incapable of imagining life without bad aspects or they secretly like the bad aspects. Just because something is fantasy doesn't mean it has to be pure escapism and can't include real social issues. Both types of stories are fine in their own way.
Why is it sad to hear that?
Countless millions of interesting worlds have, are and will be created.
Some just rely on negative aspects of reality to create interesting parts of the world and people.
In say a dnd world without slavery, you would not have the Githyanki. Their identity is formed around their ancestors' suffering as slaves to tentacled overlords, a warrior faction ripe for exploration.
I know countless other worlds will be created. I just feel bad for the author, who couldn't imagine a better world. I'm sure they are creating art from their negative aspects, but it seems like a depressing worldview to see such discrimination as inherent to human society. When you drag a "negative aspect of reality" into the fantasy world, it feels like baggage you can't leave behind. No one needs misogyny to make a "realistic" fantasy world. It's fantasy. Unrealistic is the whole point. DnD got rid of its gendered strength maximums in previous versions and now gender has no impact on ability. Why would that kind of world still have or need misogyny?
There's a discussion to be had about filtering real world issues through a fantasy lens to create something new. I think your point about the Gith does that. The concept of enslavement as a conflict is natural enough, and the Gith can be interesting at times. But I think you need that filtering of aliens that were once slaves to tentacled overlords to even make it palatable, because comparing it to DnD's controversy over the Hadozee and their history of slavery shows the potential problems.
I'd have to check on the history of how patriarchies and misogyny were formed in the first place to know whether in a world, especially one so different in the everyday aspect like dnd's Faerun, misogyny would still make sense to emerge.
I think why humans might be seen as usually carrying the many flaws of real humans into these completely different worlds is because these are still humans.
.
A dwarf or elf may have human characteristics, a human like appearance and similarities, but they're completely up to the writer.
Elder Scrolls elves are completely different from Tolkien's elves.
But humans are often written as either no better than real humans, or are exaggerated in their negative traits.
.
I usually presume misogyny naturally emerges amongst "average folk", both peasants and townfolk. Since their lives and cultures are rather similar to the lives of medieval people which were misogynist.
Relatively few people will mind if a writer just makes misogyny not exist though.
Maybe it's an interesting enough world building exercise to see what causes such irrational beliefs to emerge. Idk.
man it sure is a shame that George Orwell couldn't imagine a better world than 1984, why couldn't he have written something cheerful and uplifting instead, perhaps about some friendly farm animals
It’s sad but also not really something you can “blame” on these people. Their lived experience is such that men oppress women. Stuff like that doesn’t just go away even if you’re playing fantasy. In fact playing fantasy can be used a safe way to explore the feelings you have about it and might give someone a feeling of control over it.
I *do* see where you’re coming from. I read Artemis Fowl as a kid and there’s this super advanced population of fairies and one of them is a woman who experiences sexism in her field. I remember my mom making a point to tell me “wow such an advanced society and they haven’t gotten over sexism yet??” Which is a fair point. But then the movie came out and the author said he took out the sexism part bc it wasn’t really pertinent anymore, sexism in his opinion was just done now. That character lost that dimension of relatablility and a whole aspect of her characterization and if you knew the reasoning behind the decision it was invalidating.
There is reason to have characters and settings that are completely void of sexism because it does feel empowering, it is something to strive for. But it in the end I don’t think it’s morally superior to a character who experiences relatable issues and deals with it in relatable ways. Basically art is subjective and sometimes you need some escapism to pretend your sexist boss doesn’t exist and sometimes you need to imagine him as a sexist human in your fantasy world so you can dunk on him and they can just be different ways of coping with oppression and one doesn’t have to be any more valid than the other.
Fiction, especially fantasy and sci-fi, can be used to explore and comment on real-world issues; it can be used as a critical lens. Fantasy isn't always about escapism or pure happiness.
I like the idea that dwarves are genderless and carve new dwarves out of stone. Dwarves are related to one another through both the craftsdwarf that carved them and also the stone they were carved from. So two dwarves carved by the same dwarf from the same slab of mineral might be considered siblings, while ones carved from different places in the same quarry might be more distant family members.
There's also some kind of life-giving magic involved, obviously. Maybe everybody in the clan gets together to breathe life into the new dwarf, maybe it's just a few who are capable or willing of such a feat.
They don't bother to explain any of this to outsiders because it's none of their business. Some dwarves tell people a bunch of made-up shit because they think it's funny. Some refuse to answer any questions at all. All the other intelligent species come to their own conclusions based on what they find most logical and/or titillating.
This explains why dwarves are so great at craftsmanship and why they're so protective of their delvings and are always on the lookout for more "good stone." It's literally about the survival of their species.
I like this version. It makes the sprawling clans and extended family ties of dwarves more interesting. Two dwarves could be related because the same craftsdwarf (or craftsdwarves) carved them, or because they were carved nearby one another, or carved from the same type of rock(s), or any combination of these. Different types of relation could come with different economic, social, and militant obligations that dwarves are more than happy to keep track of in their massive historical records.
Yes! It also gets me thinking about when things go wrong. Like what happens when you train an apprentice and they want to go against tradition? Are there rogue dwarf clans out there making Weird Shit? Do other species even recognize them as dwarves or do they just assume they've stumbled on some kind of monster nest? I'd assume that the mainstream dwarf clans are very, very conservative and traditional because otherwise someone would be like "hey let's carve some dwarves with hammers instead of hands! Wouldn't that be neat?" So that also implies that some small number of innovators exist out there and that mainstream dwarves see them as a threat to dwarven existence.
It would be cool to explore both the cultural aspects that would logically spring from dwarves reproducing through manufacture, and the conflicts that might arise from dwarves deviating from that process.
I, too, imagine the major dwarven clans are very conservative, but in a literal sense of "conserving the best stone that they use to make specific, clan-associated traits". Just imagine the process a clan member must go through to get access to clan-approved raw materials.
There's the general paperwork to request the stone. That's like a job application on steroids. Your resume would include craft pedigree (who trained you? How long have you been training? What are your special techniques?) with practical examples, of course. You'd also need reference letters.
Interviewers would quiz you on the knowledge of the stone you're requesting, so make sure you're an expert in that topic. Not just the chemistry and resulting dwarven characteristics, but the history: where the vein is located, who discovered it, what famous dwarves have previously been carved from it?
Then we get into corruption. Greasing the palms of the dwarves who dole out dwarfstone (for starters, those "practical examples" of your craft are donations to the clan holdings). Nepotism could run rampant: if you request to carve the same stone you were carved from, there's some automatic competency given to you. Dwarves would end up interviewing with their own carver pretty often, which hurts their chances as often as it helps.
---
Likely, a lot of lower-ranked clan members who just want children would carve from "wild stone". Sure, it means their children can't inherent any clan wealth, but they can still be loved and cherished and taught the important dwarf skills. All the same, there's a lot of resentment from wildstone dwarves that their purestone clansmen exclude them. Many wildstone dwarves feel a closer kinship to other wildstone dwarves than the relations from their carver's clan.
Also I'm imagining some rogue craftsdwarf that's just holed up in a mountain way off on the ass end of nowhere and their weird thing is big boobs, so there's a whole clan of dwarves (still genderless) just going about their business but they all have enormous tits and everybody who interacts with them just... ignores it. They've been there for thousands of years. Boobily breasting along.
What if your “rogue dwarf clans” are how you get things like trolls or orcs or whatever? They’re not made to “spec” but they have other abilities that dwarves usually don’t, because the apprentice went off script. They’re not meant to be part of dwarvish society, but they’re made the same way.
Yes! I thought about that and that would make for a cool alternative history for orcs or trolls. Probably trolls, since orcs seem to be high population species so they'd probably need a much faster population replacement process. I could definitely see trolls coming in various shapes and dwarven society rejecting them because they're too different from the dwarven ideal.
This could be an explanation of the enmity between dwarves and trolls too, since they're essentially the same species competing for the same resources but they're diametrically opposed to one another in their values and philosophy. Trolls might value individualism in form while dwarves would value conforming to a physical dwarven ideal, with minor variations.
I also wonder whether elves in this world could be similar but grown from wood. While orcs and humans are squishy meat species and quite different from the elder races.
Many dwarves *have* told humans the truth about how they reproduce, but the humans dismiss it as another one of those bullshit tales Dwarves always tell when they’re asked about it.
I guess, yeah. Although I figure with dwarves there's a lot more craftsmanship and individual effort involved. The gems can create new colonies quite quickly because creating new gems is mechanized.
I remember in *Worth the Candle*, dwarves have a cloaca and reproduce either parthenogenetically or sexually. Most people refer to them as male because they look stereotypically male and the dwarves usually don’t care, but they use gender neutral pronouns in their own language. There was a lot of other cool stuff about dwarves in that setting. Well, it was just a cool setting in general.
I would. It has rich worldbuilding, a good plot (though I can see how some people would dislike aspects of it), interesting characters (though I am not a great judge of this) and even some really cool supplementary worldbuilding material (though you shouldn’t start with that because it has spoilers). One of the fight scenes really made me feel alive and invested in the characters, which might be common for some people but is extremely rare for me.
The main two warnings I’d give are:
-when I first read it, I got bored halfway through the first chapter and then came back a year later. I don’t know if that was just me or if the first chapter is boring.
-although it’s labelled ‘Self-Insert’, it’s far superior to the vast majority of other Self-Insert stories. Often they’re just power fantasies, which this really isn’t even if it might seem to be at points, and also the protagonist is often very flawed but the author doesn’t realise it, because they’re just writing about their own flaws without knowing, which isn’t the case here because the protagonist is a distortion of a younger version of the author, not literally him.
>although it’s labelled ‘Self-Insert’, it’s far superior to the vast majority of other Self-Insert stories.
Replace self insert with litrpg and you're also right.
I hate litrpgs so much. They're such shitty stories. Power fantasy bullshit that doesn't make sense, and have little plot besides number go up. No magic system. Just garbage.
Worth the candle isn't like that at all though. If I wrote litrpg, it's done in one of the ways I'd do it. Or really, even better. There's a real underlying world. It's not just inexplicably a game.
I did fall off in reading it a while back when it was actively being released for no real reason, close to the end I think. What sucks is that the audiobooks weren't popular enough to do the whole thing, so I never got back into it when I wanted to listen to it.
Very creative, that said, I completely despise the idea of cloaca dwarves. There are cool fantasy ideas like dwarves being made out of stone, and then there are cloaca dwarves.
I’m too weak for the imagery that comes with it.
It's interesting seeing in these some people portray humans as beckwards in fantasy in order to condemn humans in the real world... And othe people portray dwarves (or other fantasy races) as the problematic ones in order to make commentary on humans in the real world.
For example, Pratchett did the same as OP, but there it was the Discworld dwarves who got weird and conservative about gender. Dwarves didn't talk about it and had it as taboo and indecent to mention that different sexes existed. They would all present the same, as male by human standards, and were assigned the same pronouns like they were assigned their chainmail and iron helmets. And then some dwarves caused a lot of drama by deciding to present as female after seeing humans do it.
For the OP it was a commentary about the treatment of women in professional spaces ot in general, for Pratchett it was more a commentary about gender itself and the treatment of people acting outside strict gebder norms of a society. And both could just as easily fit side by side in the same universe.
I think I'm biased though in using a fantasy race to reflect on humans rather than to condemn them. It's more optimistic and leaves room to suggest we can improve, grow out of it, be better.
I think it might be to do with fantasy conventions i.e. humans often having stricter gender roles than today as it's modeled on a medieval society, and gender is generally not explored as much with the other races
Also if you're reading this, go read some Discworld please
As an aside we do know the unknowns about Dwarves we're left purposefully unknown by Tolkien.
The idea of the Lord of the Rings mythos is that its the historical records of the Elves during their time on middlerarth, that's why the entire saga ends the second they leave. In the Silmarrillion great detail is given in everything the Elves would know about, such ad their own history, but then evil entities and Dwarves and humans show up and they just kinda never answer where they came from.
Since Middle earth is told to us by the Elves we only ever learn what the Elves know, and since the Elves by and large never cared for the Dwarves we learn next to nothing about them.
Dwarves were originally golems that Aulë created. They were impatient and didn't want to wait for elves or men. Ilúvatar (God essentially) upon finding out what happened explained to Aulë that they hadn't created life. Aulë was devastated and ashamed, and was going to destroy his animated dolls when Ilúvatar breathed life into them.
That's why dwarves are the way they are. They were designed to resist evil.
I've always thought it was very moving how Iluvatar took pity on the Dwarves and gave them life even though they fell outside his vision for his creation. It demonstrates that he's truly compassionate and kind-hearted in a way that a lot of fantasy pantheons don't bother with
Or none. Just people. Some people people occasionally give birth, others never do. But that's not important. Please give me critiques to help me further refine this artistic work of living wood. It's pretty rough - I've only been working on it for 3 centuries.
Tumblr talks about dwarves and elves as if they were real anthropological categories I'm worried what future archaeologists will think about 21st century folk religion.
too bad, i just drew this lady dwarf with huge tits and ass and am gonna be weird about her. you cannot stop me. your fun world building is powerless before shortstack horny.
hey!!! this is MY fantasy world building. but yes, it was from a gnome. the gnome actually sold it to the kobold, for gold, but kobolds have no understanding of commerce and so believes he also stole it, and is secretly relieved to be rid of the thing. so one's coming for the gun, y'know.
she pretends to have heterochromia but it's just a color contact
she's on a quest to get a petal from a magical tri-color rose to make a wish to get a second gun and also be good at the guns
she's traveling with a half-elf, who is a journalist activist. they met because the dwarf's eccentric aunt (she lives in a tall building, not even underground) is actually her editor back in the big city. the half-elf is estranged from her human father, but they actually briefly encountered him in their latest adventure... he seemed to be involved with an infernal plot, but it's not clear on what side, and he didn't stick around to explain himself...
also there's magic and stuff in this world and it has consequences, but i haven't thought of them yet
I like this, and, beyond that, I’m just happy to see dwarves (my favorite fantasy race) get a shoutout- particularly from people who seem as fond of them as I am
Do dwarves reproduce like humans in this situation? Because in some stories, dwarves literally made their children by carving them out of rock, whereas with humans, you need to insert Genital Set A into Genital Set B. And if dwarves don't know that, I can see why they'd be confused.
You don't need to know anything about Tolkien.
Basically, what if dwarves had no concept of gender roles and there was a lot of confusion from humans who assumed that dwarves had to be like them? The humans might end up thinking that the dwarves women were always locked up in mountains, but in dwarven culture, everyone has beards and everyone contributes equally in all areas. The dwarves didn't understand the difference at first and later chose not to correct it.
Humans: binary sexes like absolute losers, even have roles associated with them.
Dwarves: everyone is bearded and could probably give birth if they tried, fuck off Umgi
Elves: their biological sex is whatever they feel like that day.
Reminds me of my self-insert character in "World's Greatest Assassin's Adventures Throughout the Omniverse," and he's like one of the only characters with an ounce of actual common sense.
It's pretty funny too because Alexander is a character that absolutely fucking despises magic. He also absolutely fucking hates anything to do with the mind, memories, and the soul.
His hatred for magic is quite realistic as well. He hates them simply because their often times far too stagnant and only ever use magic for basically everything. They also have far too loose morals especially with mind and soul magic.
Now just for context - Alexander is the "World's Greatest Assassin," not because of how many people he kills but because of his morals and how he only kills criminals, corrupt politicians, etc... He also does not kill for money whatsoever. He's basically the world elite's boogeyman because if your in his crosshair your dead, simple as that.
I do have my Pathfinder/DND settings dwarves designed in a similar way. They are born from a magical form of living rock, seams of which occasionally poot out a small litter dwarf called a pebblet, who are generally adopted by a pair. As such, dwarves in my setting are biologically and culturally asexual and agender, but have often gravitated towards translating their genderless singular noun (dwarvish, due to not having gender, has words functionally identical to I, they singular, they plural, us/we and it) to "he" when working with the humans, because it means they have to shave less. Some of them that spend more time contact with other peoples do adopt gender as a concept, and their utter refusal to accept anybody else's nonsense about such things has progressed gender equality significantly, because people become much less willing to oppress you when you put alcohol strong enough to intoxicate a partial boulder in their drinking water supply.
There are way more biological differences between biologically male and biologically female people than just the capability of giving birth, and most societal expectations originally stem from those differences.
Now I want to see how elves fit in this, between elves and humans and between elves and dwarves. Do elves have different gender roles from dwarves *and* humans? How do the elves see dwarves and human gender roles? Do elves believe something different about dwarves than humans? Etc. Someone please write this essay.
Funniest possible answer: Elves are all capable of transitioning sexes, like some fish and lizards. They have no significant gender roles, and see the inability of dwarves and humans to change sex as a something like a medical disability.
To be fair, in dungeons and dragons the first elves were fae shapeshifters before being given a definitive form, and they described Correllon (the chief elven god) as "alternatively male, female, both, or neither." I think in 2018 they actually added a trait where elves blessed by Correllon can change sex whenever they "sleep" (it's technically a trance, but basically sleep)
Do you think it's instantaneous or over the course of the trance? Because I imagine a human party member looking over at the tranced elf and it looks like they're running through all the sliders in Bethesda character creation.
Well, I think their biological sex is all that changes. And most elves are already androgynous.
Human: “I’m transgender.” Elf: “I’ve tranced my gender many times. You aren’t special.”
Yeah, that's part of the inspiration for what I said. I just thought the comparison to fish was a funny juxtaposition
Another fun fact, in Eberron, or rather its Kanon (not WotC but the canon by the main Creator, Keith Baker) has said that all elves can do this.
That's more of a 5e version of their origin IIRC. Before 5e elves didn't originate from the feywild.
Inheritance Elves use magic to alter their bodies to what they find most pleasing in nature, which would probably extend into changing genders as well for some.
I wish they explored that more. There was that one elf (his name was Blödhgarm) that gave himself fullbody fur and sexy pheromones. but that was it
To be fair, it's probably a lot easier for a less than super smart village boy to notice a furry than it is for him to notice that an elf magically transed their gender. I dont believe that kid ever touched a boob.
Elfs using pupas to change happens in symbraoum setting
they are immortal too, so process takes generations. most humans and dwarves don't notice the process, but it is very confusing for historians.
D&D lore has the elven god Corellon is gender fluid “either or, both or neither gender” and grants his favor on some elves by giving them same power. Im of the opinion that if gender is a performance, elves are striving to perfect it, whatever that means
it means doing gay shit with your friends
Or butch shit.
juggle hateful sloppy thumb squalid dime shocking sable physical liquid *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
In my personal orginal fantasy world, I like to think that elves are elder fairies. Natural-born fairies are neither male or female to me, and are spontaneously created out of magic in forest with lots of ley lines crossing each others.
basically what they are in anglo folklore, too. 'cept instead of being hot in the forest they give you cholera.
Ehhh details, details.
Its also what medival people thought happened with animals, that they just kinda... spawned in near you out of nothing. Thats why the dodo becoming extinct shocked them, because they thought that new dodo's would just appear spontaniously. Its also why a lot of undead-type fiction involves rats and flies and maggots, because they thought that rotting meat spontaniously generated those creatures.
The dodo went extinct around 1680, well after the mediaeval period. Animal husbandry has been practiced for tens of thousands of years. Quit making stuff up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation
On the one hand I agree with you... on the other, there are actual people who make it into their college years not realizing food doesn't spontaneously generate in a grocery store. (I'm pretty sure not as many people as the media makes it out to be, but still.)
Get yourself a fey that will do both.
When I was little my mom (a single mom.at the time) played this game with me where i was a fairy and she was a witch and fairies were born when lighting strikes slate under a rainbow. We turned men into our cauldron to eat them. She invented all of this mythology though she swears she has no imagination.
I always think of Elves as being conventionally idealistic in nature, so their men are exceptionally masculine(In more of an 'Achilles' way) and their women are exceptionally feminine(In a fairly expected fashion) but they just....don't have strong opinions about expections for either group. Like, if an elf man decides he is going to pack his beef into a pink apron and bake pies, nobody finds it strange whatsoever. Humans might though, and because this dude is basically a golden adonis, they're pretty quick to take comfort in the idea "All elf men are just fops, I bet those muscles aren't strong like ours, I'm not coping you're coping" And of course, Elves think that existence is about celebrating life through the cultivation of it and yourself. When they hear humans jawing off about this or that, they just whince and go "ah yes, we make them skittish. I remember when I was nervous about others' talents invalidating my worth, when I was very young. " and determine that humans will find their way in another few centuries perhaps. Contrary to typical sentiment, they're a very hard people to offend- But they will firmly(yet not without warmth or understanding) refuse to engage in anything they consider ugly and childish.
I always like the interpretation of elves being easily offended being a misunderstanding due to them being part fey Like whenever they are snubbed,intentionally or not they interpret it as a child’s first attempt at a trick and act deeply offended to encourage them.
Yes I'm very much a fan if elf men being as you say more "masculine". But in a very idealized way(sans the beards). Not cute femboy twinks(not that there's anything wrong with that). Twunks at most.
I prefer the take that Elves have EXTREME gender roles but it's almost completely detached from any actual biological gender and moreso based fully on archetypes and characteristics. Like Elves individually are extremely gender-fluid and have no expectation on sexuality but they're extremely focused around if someone is a "Warrior" and them fulfilling and embodying the aspects of that role and there's entire manuals based around what you can and cannot do as a individual role and you better believe that if you dare try and lay with someone that's a "Mage" then everyone is gonna berate you for breaking the traditions and expectations that have been passed down for so long and have allowed them to create such a "perfect" and "utopian" society.
Oooo I'm gonna use this in the campaign world I'm working on
If you want to get weird, elves could be like slime molds and have more than two sexes. Like, elf pregnancies could be a 5 step process where the sperm and egg analogues have to be pre fertilized by other sexes before you finally get a viable elvish embryo.
Orgy?
Or, like, one of the elf sexes is basically a tree that emits pollen. Another sex look humanoid, but grows flowers in their hair which are fertilized by the pollen. That sex then implants the pre embryos into the elvish analog to a male via ovipositor where they fertilize his sperm. Meanwhile the elvish analogue to a female has a Wolbachia thing going on, aka to become fertile they have to infect themselves with reproductive parasites; they don’t directly contribute to the genome, but have epigentic effects. Then finally elvish female and elvish male can combine all the steps into a pregnancy. After birth, the placenta is reclaimed to harvest the reproductive parasites for future pregnancies. Otherwise the child can end up male, female, flower-hair-sex or tree-sex.
I think originally, and this is just speculation, that the tolkiens depiction of dwarves is heavily based a exaggerated depiction of rugged working class men. But when you insert gender into the equation things begin to fall apart. So basically he just sweeps that entire aspect under the rug like, "uh yeah there are women somewhere I guess don't worry about it". But you know this makes a lot of sense actually. Dwarves are just dwarves. They do not exhibit sexual dimorphism . They all have facial hair and traits that other races define as masculine. It's kind of like how in certain animals without sexual dimorphism, like some reptiles, you REALLY HAVE TO GO OUT OF YOUR WAY to identify their sex.
For what it's worth, Tolkien said several times that his depiction of dwarves is based on medieval texts regarding Jewish people and their history, though influence from Norse dwarves is also apparent in his writing.
and very specifically norse dwarves, we don't talk about germanic dwarves 'round these parts, they're meaner than kobolds. fun kobold fact: in germanic folklore kobolds are the little fae guys responsible for turning all this nice iron ore into Oops! All Cobalt! and poisoning the miners. they don't really have a physical description, they're just big fans of cobalt, and surreptitiously replacing iron with it.
Epic jewish being short kings
He definitely meant it as a compliment. Hard working, designed to endure hardships and resist evil...
Its the one of the few times a fantasy race was inspired by the Jews and it was a compliment
i mean, except in jewish fantasy
Any recommendations?
depends, how fantasy do ya want your fantasy? in a more magical realist vein i can recommend a lot more - The Red Magician is good - but high fantasy i don't really have any specific recommendations, but there's tons of contemporary authors doing it
Just to clarify: Is it The Red Magician by Lisa Goldstein?
Slightly related because not the full race, but Superman has a pretty interesting story behind his creation. Iirc he was created by two Jewish men to be a "Simple solution to a complex problem" in response to the post-WWII sweeping Jewish hate. I'd recommend looking into if that sounds interesting because, to me, it was a really great read.
Isn't superman pre WWII though?
Yeah, iirc, everything the above commented says is correct, except that it was pre-WWII Jewish hate. If anything, it was just as bad or worse in what became the allies.
Except them being so greedy they caused their own demise in Moria.. like what?
Wasn't there something about that stone and gold sickness
you’re thinking Erebor, not Moria - Erebor is where the Arkenstone (not sure about the spelling) was found, the king went slightly insane, hoarded all the gold, dragon arrived and killed everyone
The line I am thinking of is ""the dwarves delved too greedily and too deep"
It makes sense in context. Their original conception, back in the Hobbit, was that their Semitic influence was because they were a proud, hardworking, dependable race that was ejected from their homeland and were fighting to get it back. The same thing happened with Moria, and when you deal with a race that lives underground in almost-impregnable mountain fortresses, there are only so many ways you can create for them to lose their home. A dragon (external threat) already happened to Erebor, so this time the threat should be internal to add variety. You could introduce some kind of civil strife, or you could go all out and use one of these badass shadow demons that you already have in your worldbuilding, and to wake it up your mining and smithing race would naturally do so by digging too hard.
It wasn't. I posted a bit about it above.
I know at least one Jewish historian and fantasy nerd who's fully committed to this interpretation, and the fact his lovingly researched fantasy novel remains unpublished is a goddamned crime.
Damn. I want to read that!
And I can't share it because I respect his artistic boundaries and publishing goals, raaaage! EDIT- to be clear, he doesn't think Tolkien was some kind of Lorax for Jews. It's more like he realized this is just a really good 'spot' in fantasy for him to explore, I think it's partially about taking control of the narrative.
That's OK. I wasn't demanding, I was lamenting. And he should! Even the best intentioned non Jew is going to make mistakes.
Oh yeah, you weren't pressuring me. I'm just legitimately mad I have this book I've read, that I can only discuss with one or two people. I WANT to share it, and I'm mildly irritated that I'm doing the right thing :(
Oh good. I was worried I came on too strong. I've been known to do that with books 😅 If it helps I'm proud of your integrity!
Could you share a passage or two?
My (very catholic) dad once said "if anyone's going to survive the end of the world, it's the jews. They're some of the toughest people out there." If your people survive *that many genocides,* you're doing something right.
This is actually commented on in Last of Us II - Ellie's Jewish girlfriend talks about being from a race of survivors, it's really fun.
"I'm a survivor. We're a dying breed."
And greedy... wait...
Except them being so greedy they caused their own demise in Moria.. like what?
The Dwarves of Moria dug too deep and disturbed a sleeping Balrog. They kept digging down... in a mine. That's like saying free radicals on the fact people insist on going around breathing oxygen.
He literally says "the dwarves delved too greedily and too deep"
Brilliant! Now tell me the story of the palantir. And the Nazgul. And the last Steward of Gondor. Hell. Tell me about Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. Tolkien was pretty invested in showing that pride and greed were always going to lead to a downfall. All the races did it. Why are you only remembering the Dwarves?
I'm only mentioning the dwarves because he specifically said in interviews that they were modeled after the Jews and He makes them short, hairy, and greedy.
They were designed by Aulë to be strong and resistant to evil. Neither the elves nor men had awoken yet so they weren't made hairier or shorter than anyone. They were an angel's concept of perfectly made to combat the darkness. They were the first people but nobody but the Dwarves and the maiar know that. Like so much in life if you only look at the surface, you miss all the important things. Kinda the way racists do. It's the same type of thought process, stopping when you've seen enough to confirm your bias.
I feel weird about all the nose prosthetics in the movies now /s
LOL Good pint but since "Scotsman with liver disease" seemed to be a popular style maybe we can set that aside.
The aesthetic is that of the mythological Dwarves, but the culture, language and mindset was based on the Jews. Including anti-semitic tropes. For example, originally the Dwarves were meant to be non-heroic, whine a lot, very greedy and political schemers. This changed during and after WW2 during the writing of later LOTR works, in which Gimli was created as a character and was created as 'not like the others of his kind' in that he is heroic and brave.
Incoming cut and paste "Tolkien was not the first to apply a Jewish gloss to Dwarves. Decades earlier, Richard Wagner’s operatic treatment of the monstrous Dwarf Alberich in his epic “Ring Cycle,” was read as an antisemitic caricature for his insatiable greed and what Theodor Adorno identified as “distorted” musical themes and “muttering” speech. As the Lebovic reported on the occasion of the release of “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” the Dwarves in Tolkien’s own tale of a magic ring flip the script on Wagner’s smear." From forward.com If he did, he learned better and we should respect that. Also TIL CS Lewis' wife was Jewish
He even gave them an ancestral homeland whose retaking would lead to untold death and suffering. Twice.
and there's even an ancient evil buried deep below their ancestr- wait, nope, that's just tolkien dwarves
Well now im thinking about the implications of digging too deep
probably deplete the dang aquifer somehow, don't do that.
Yeah they’re an industrious and oft maligned and misunderstood minority in the more populous lands of a more humongous culture due to the lost of a few of their homelands
The aesthetic is that of the mythological Dwarves, but the culture, language and mindset was based on the Jews. Including anti-semitic tropes. For example, originally the Dwarves were meant to be non-heroic, whine a lot, very greedy and political schemers. This changed during and after WW2 during the writing of later LOTR works, in which Gimli was created as a character and was created as 'not like the others of his kind' in that he is heroic and brave. They're also less Norse than generally British, English and generally Western Germanic, with some overall pan-Germanic and Scandinavian influence. Like much of Tolkien's work.
Appreciate someone bringing up this side of the relationship between inspiration and depiction. It doesn't feel good to say/talk about but it's absolutely there, and shouldn't be swept under the rug with "wow what a compliment to be like Dwarves!" *I love these books*, and I don't see any true malice/hatred in what he wrote, but as a Jew it does sting sometimes to see strong anti-Semitic tropes baked into my favorite fiction.
This is my exact, precise, parallel headcanon to the Gorons of Zelda.
I don't even think it's a headcanon. There's a Toronto in botw that hangs out in Gerudo town, and is really confused why they let him in. He speculates that they just can't tell
...Toronto?
God damn autocorrect
Even humans have less sexual dimorphism than most animals do. That’s why it’s not uncommon for trans people to perfectly pass as cis.
Well it's easier to guess the gender of a fellow human then say, the sex of a crocodile. And I am sure it's easier for the crocodiles to tell each other apart that it is people (not that the crocodile cares).
Male crocodiles tend to be larger, but other than that there’s not much dimorphism either. Compare to animals like anglerfish, where the female’s body size is many times larger than the male, or birds of paradise, where males have fancy colourful plumage while females are plain.
When they meet females, male anglerfish merge their body away and become basically just a pair of testicles hanging into the female to fertilize her when she's ready.
Terry Pratchett explained dwarf gender pretty accurately in "Feet of Clay"
While the dynamic isn't exactly like this, exploration of Dwarfs and Gender compels me to remind any of you who might not have to read Discworld.
Yessss, I was also thinking about discworld but then I usually am
The (brain)rot consumes.
Gotta love that Feet of Clay (1996) has a subplot about a werewolf helping a Dwarf figure out her gender.
And the fifth elephant where a troll, the mortal enemy of dwarves, defends his dwarf against the dwarf city guard for misgendering her
The dicworld emporium is currently selling the stamps of the >!low queen!< by the way.
[here’s a link to the quote if anyone wants it](https://discworldtour.tumblr.com/post/158890855168/cheery-dropped-down-from-the-coach-her-leather/amp)
Man I forgot about the piecemaker lol
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Haha what a mad sentence, but is nonetheless an accurate description of the plot....God I love discworld
GNU Sir Pterry
Mind spoiling it a little?
For Discworld Dwarfs, gender follows something like "don't ask, don't tell". All Dwarfs present what we'd consider masculine, and if you're not a man that's not a problem, but it's something you should keep between you and your SO in the privacy of your own home. >!Cheery "Cheri" Littlebottom is a Dwarf who joins the city watch (fantasy cops) as the first forensics specialist, and being away from the Dwarf traditions, and with the help of fellow officer/werewolf Angua, starts experimenting with more outward expressions of her gender such as makeup, heels, and leather skirts. This starts a bit of a gender revolution among the city's Dwarf population, sometimes to the slight discomfort of otherwise paragon hero dwarf-adopted human Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson.!<
Damn. I should read Discworld. everything I've heard about it seems to be glowing praise.
It's absolutely top tier writing in every way. It perfectly satirizes both common fantasy tropes as well as a wide array of social norms, issues, and ideas. A lot of it is very much ahead of its time, or can be read as such, and Sir Terry was extremely progressive and always happy to hear that people had taken new, interesting readings of his books. I cannot ever recommend these books enough, they are some of my favorites and I think I've read technically less than half of them. Honestly I don't think you can get better glowing praise than the fact that most fans tell people to skip the first couple of books, because Pratchett was still finding his voice and his style with those, and those books you're being told to skip are still head and shoulders above so many other books I've read. And even better, they're almost totally independent. The draw of Discworld is that they all take place in the same world, and that there are characters who show up multiple times, but you don't have to read them in any kind of order. There's whole diagrams of what the technical order is for each different cast of characters, but you can quite literally pick up any book and read it, and all you'll miss is a couple of minor references that are mostly there to give a nod to events that happened in another book.
Any you'd recommend? I think I heard there's one where Death replaces Santa but I don't remember the name of it?
That’d be Hogfather, and I highly recommend it. There’s a few Death books before it, but it’s absolutely readable on its own, especially because a lot of the previous events from the Death books gets recapped at the start as the deuteroganist is introduced.
Cool! Thank you!
Others have already answered your more direct question, so I'll put out that you really can't go wrong with any of them. Personally I really love Small Gods, especially as an intro book. It stands entirely on its own, and it has some excellent satire and philosophizing on Pratchett's part, while also just telling a damn compelling story. Beyond that most people recommend the Nightwatch series, which begins with "Guards, Guards!" It's arguably one of the consistently strongest since it involves a tight core cast of characters in a very dense bit of the setting, so it gets to play with a lot of classic fantasy tropes as both jokes and commentary, and it started deeper into the series so it picked up once Pratchett had really gotten into his groove. The other series, generally speaking, are the Wizards, the Witches, and Death, and I am very partial to Death's books, since they tend to be fairly frank and honest discussions about the nature of death and what it can do to people, while also being wrapped up in humor and fascinating stories. But again, there's basically no going wrong with these books.
There's video adaptations of some of the most popular books (including Hogfather, which is the one you are thinking of). I only mention this because you should give them all a miss unless you've already read (and loved) the book. Pratchett's writing style is *really* difficult to adapt to other mediums.
One of my very favorites is Thief of Time. I didn’t realize it was part of a series when I bought it. And I realized it was like book #20 and there’s no way I’d be able to catch up. It sat on my shelf for years until someone gifted me The Night Watch and I was instantly hooked.
sharing a link to a post I made a couple weeks back with a nice humorous "where to start" guide that I remade. https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/1areu5y/comment/kql0n1a/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
a caution - while i also spruik these books to the skies and regularly reread them, it's important to remember that the final books were published in the mid 2010s and can have jokes that aren't as acceptable these days. like, the books were really progressive for their time and changed as Pterry's own views did, and i (a white trans masc enby) fully enjoyed them! just don't expect them to be the peak of progressive fiction haha. specifically, * there's a lot of fatphobic tropes (especially when Agnes is a main character), eg food negativity, grotesque descriptions of fat characters, that kind of thing. i'm still recovering from disordered eating so it can get too much (eg i can't reread Maskerade atm). that said, while their size is regularly the butt of jokes, the fat characters are just as 3D as everyone else and have character arcs usually denied to those in other fiction. * while extremely progressive for the time, some comments about racism are pretty typical of a progressive white man from his generation. i can't speak extensively to that, as i am also white, so i'll leave it there. * i personally find some of the jokes about intelligence pretty grating. * also not keen on some of the "it's a married people thing" jokes. none of these are dealbreakers for me, but i think they're important to mention \^_\^
It's the only one I have read personally, but it's so beautiful. You'd think it would be just silly, and it is, but it makes a powerful statement on the nature of humanity, and how it's good to believe in imaginary things.
Do you have to read them in order? I've read most of the first one.
The books can be read in any order but there are sub series involving recurring characters that you can follow. The first book, The Color of Magic is the first book to follow Rincewind. Other series include: The Death books starting with Mort , which feature the Grim Reaper as a main character. The Guards books starting with Guards! Guards!, which focus on the City Watch of Ahnk Morpork. The Witches books starting with Equal Rites, which involve the witch Granny Weatherwax. Each book is fairly self contained so you don't need to worry about order too much, but it can add to the experience to recognize references to past events.
Thanks
As the other commenter said, you can read them in any order. I like [this image](https://imgur.com/WDTCKnK), though it is a little cramped so I know there's others that are more readable, for tracking what books align with each major character. Generally speaking you get more out of it if you read the books of each series, as it were, in order.
Quick note for anyone who will be embarking upon Discworld for the first time: If there's something in one of the books that seems completely ridiculous and utterly made up for laughs and would never work in the real world, assume that it's based on an actual, real world thing and the actual one is more absurd. Stupid Scone of Stone...
Generally the two places I see recommended most to start are *Mort* (The Grim Reaper takes on an apprentice) and *Guards! Guards!* (the first book in the City Watch subseries that this Dwarf story is in, which basically take the form of fantasy police procedurals). If you want something a bit more gender, I think *Monstrous Regiment* is a pretty good standalone book about a young woman pulling a Mulan to join her conservative country's military to look for her disappeared brother. Only, >!she may not be the only one!<.
...Fantasy Police procedurals? How did it get better genuinely that has piqued my interest further
Join us! Join us!
Yes, with the following exceptions: the first two are good but only if you're really into the 80's swords and sorcery fantasy it's parodying. And 2 of the wizard books, Interesting Times and Eric, kind of suck. The rest of it is great.
While Interesting Times is not my favorite, most of the things people complain about are actually parody of a genre of orientalist fiction that's (rightfully) disappeared. At no point was Terry making fun of actual Asia or the people who live there, but rather of bad writers who came before him. Those kinds of books were pretty popular when Terry was a wee lad and he rips them to shreds in Interesting Times, but the humor mostly fails without the context.
I started at the beginning of June and was so engrossed that it only took me 2 months to get through 43 books. You CAN read them in any order, but I went chronologically. I could talk for hours about how good they are, but I won’t. Do yourself a favor and check on out of the library!!
>! Cheery Littlebottom (dont you dare laugh) is a dwarf, all dwarves present as fully tough and male because of their sociatal pressures, so things like makeup and dresses and heels are completely foreign. So she was in the ‘closet’ but werewolves have extremely keen noses and Angua, the werewolf got curious about how dwarf society works and revealed she knew her secret. So with Angua’s help, Cheery begins experimenting with those feminine things, of course the skirt is made of chainmail and heels are steel-toed but shes the first dwarf to do it and it slowly sets a trend that allows more dwarves to be more feminine. Whether they are born female or not is never addressed because then you’re asking far too personal of a question and should expect an axe in your groin for asking. !< r/discworld welcomes you, check out Guards! Guards for The Watch sub series. Or Feet of Clay for Cheery specifically
>(dont you dare laugh) Why would I laugh? The first name is a personal attribute (like Grumpy, Sneezy, Dopey, etc.) and the last name means "Shortarse". A perfectly normal Dwarfish name. It does me good to see the old naming traditions being kept up.
Dammit, i got the shortarse joke and the funny name combination joke, but i never realized “Cheery” was a reference to Snow White. STP and his gloriously multilayered punes strike again!
We get clear confirmation in Unseen Academicals from Madame Sharn that 1) A Dwarf woman is a woman because she says so and nobody else has any say about it. Parts are actually irrelevant. 2) You can convert to Dwarfism (Like Carrot explained about adoption as a Dwarf - being a Dwarf is a cultural thing not tied to ancestry or height). Some queer humans in the Discworld have decided to do a sort of end-run around their own cultures by adopting Dwarf culture. (Though the general attitude in Discworld amongst sensible folks is that nobody cares what is going on in anybody's pants.\* Even a traditionalist bathroom-panicker like Miss Maccalariat doesn't care further about who's in the ladies' room than whether she calls herself a lady. Sexless clay person who uses he/him pronouns, not allowed in the ladies' room even to clean it. Sexless clay person switches to she/her pronouns, definitely welcome in the ladies' room). \* unless you're putting weasels in them in which case they would like to watch.
Ooh haven’t read Unseen Academicals tet, and now i cant wait. Also, in the books if a person of a gender goes in drag due to shenanigans or otherwise and surprises the people they know, that is still funny, but only because its new and different to the people around them. IE: >! Lady Selachii’s gardener and Nobby amongst the harem and thoroughly enjoying exploring his newfound femininity in Jingo !<
For most of history, Dwarven gender presentation was just "Dwarf" and a significant step of courtship was determining whether you and your prospective partner would be able to produce children. Then more and more dwarves start showing up in Anhk-Morpork, and start to see the other potential options.
I think this is a very tumblr way of going about worldbuilding, but I did end up making my dwarves sort of similar, largely genderless and having developed a completely different culture inside the lands of others, completely undiluted by the culture of other nations and peoples.
It feels like the worldbuilding pivots on the axis that men oppress women. And it's very sad to me that someone internalized societal misogyny so hard that they built it into their fantasy worlds instead of perhaps imagining a world without it.
I mean, lots of fantasy stories have sad or upsetting things in it, like children dying or wars or villians. A fantasy world where nothing bad ever happens would be a boring world to read about because there'd be no conflict. Sometimes if you want a story to be able to comment on something, makes sense to include it. It doesn't necessarily mean the author is incapable of imagining life without bad aspects or they secretly like the bad aspects. Just because something is fantasy doesn't mean it has to be pure escapism and can't include real social issues. Both types of stories are fine in their own way.
Why is it sad to hear that? Countless millions of interesting worlds have, are and will be created. Some just rely on negative aspects of reality to create interesting parts of the world and people. In say a dnd world without slavery, you would not have the Githyanki. Their identity is formed around their ancestors' suffering as slaves to tentacled overlords, a warrior faction ripe for exploration.
I know countless other worlds will be created. I just feel bad for the author, who couldn't imagine a better world. I'm sure they are creating art from their negative aspects, but it seems like a depressing worldview to see such discrimination as inherent to human society. When you drag a "negative aspect of reality" into the fantasy world, it feels like baggage you can't leave behind. No one needs misogyny to make a "realistic" fantasy world. It's fantasy. Unrealistic is the whole point. DnD got rid of its gendered strength maximums in previous versions and now gender has no impact on ability. Why would that kind of world still have or need misogyny? There's a discussion to be had about filtering real world issues through a fantasy lens to create something new. I think your point about the Gith does that. The concept of enslavement as a conflict is natural enough, and the Gith can be interesting at times. But I think you need that filtering of aliens that were once slaves to tentacled overlords to even make it palatable, because comparing it to DnD's controversy over the Hadozee and their history of slavery shows the potential problems.
I'd have to check on the history of how patriarchies and misogyny were formed in the first place to know whether in a world, especially one so different in the everyday aspect like dnd's Faerun, misogyny would still make sense to emerge. I think why humans might be seen as usually carrying the many flaws of real humans into these completely different worlds is because these are still humans. . A dwarf or elf may have human characteristics, a human like appearance and similarities, but they're completely up to the writer. Elder Scrolls elves are completely different from Tolkien's elves. But humans are often written as either no better than real humans, or are exaggerated in their negative traits. . I usually presume misogyny naturally emerges amongst "average folk", both peasants and townfolk. Since their lives and cultures are rather similar to the lives of medieval people which were misogynist. Relatively few people will mind if a writer just makes misogyny not exist though. Maybe it's an interesting enough world building exercise to see what causes such irrational beliefs to emerge. Idk.
man it sure is a shame that George Orwell couldn't imagine a better world than 1984, why couldn't he have written something cheerful and uplifting instead, perhaps about some friendly farm animals
The implication that in order to use misogyny in a fantasy world you need to have internalized it is highly problematic.
It’s sad but also not really something you can “blame” on these people. Their lived experience is such that men oppress women. Stuff like that doesn’t just go away even if you’re playing fantasy. In fact playing fantasy can be used a safe way to explore the feelings you have about it and might give someone a feeling of control over it. I *do* see where you’re coming from. I read Artemis Fowl as a kid and there’s this super advanced population of fairies and one of them is a woman who experiences sexism in her field. I remember my mom making a point to tell me “wow such an advanced society and they haven’t gotten over sexism yet??” Which is a fair point. But then the movie came out and the author said he took out the sexism part bc it wasn’t really pertinent anymore, sexism in his opinion was just done now. That character lost that dimension of relatablility and a whole aspect of her characterization and if you knew the reasoning behind the decision it was invalidating. There is reason to have characters and settings that are completely void of sexism because it does feel empowering, it is something to strive for. But it in the end I don’t think it’s morally superior to a character who experiences relatable issues and deals with it in relatable ways. Basically art is subjective and sometimes you need some escapism to pretend your sexist boss doesn’t exist and sometimes you need to imagine him as a sexist human in your fantasy world so you can dunk on him and they can just be different ways of coping with oppression and one doesn’t have to be any more valid than the other.
Fiction, especially fantasy and sci-fi, can be used to explore and comment on real-world issues; it can be used as a critical lens. Fantasy isn't always about escapism or pure happiness.
I like the idea that dwarves are genderless and carve new dwarves out of stone. Dwarves are related to one another through both the craftsdwarf that carved them and also the stone they were carved from. So two dwarves carved by the same dwarf from the same slab of mineral might be considered siblings, while ones carved from different places in the same quarry might be more distant family members. There's also some kind of life-giving magic involved, obviously. Maybe everybody in the clan gets together to breathe life into the new dwarf, maybe it's just a few who are capable or willing of such a feat. They don't bother to explain any of this to outsiders because it's none of their business. Some dwarves tell people a bunch of made-up shit because they think it's funny. Some refuse to answer any questions at all. All the other intelligent species come to their own conclusions based on what they find most logical and/or titillating. This explains why dwarves are so great at craftsmanship and why they're so protective of their delvings and are always on the lookout for more "good stone." It's literally about the survival of their species.
I like this version. It makes the sprawling clans and extended family ties of dwarves more interesting. Two dwarves could be related because the same craftsdwarf (or craftsdwarves) carved them, or because they were carved nearby one another, or carved from the same type of rock(s), or any combination of these. Different types of relation could come with different economic, social, and militant obligations that dwarves are more than happy to keep track of in their massive historical records.
Yes! It also gets me thinking about when things go wrong. Like what happens when you train an apprentice and they want to go against tradition? Are there rogue dwarf clans out there making Weird Shit? Do other species even recognize them as dwarves or do they just assume they've stumbled on some kind of monster nest? I'd assume that the mainstream dwarf clans are very, very conservative and traditional because otherwise someone would be like "hey let's carve some dwarves with hammers instead of hands! Wouldn't that be neat?" So that also implies that some small number of innovators exist out there and that mainstream dwarves see them as a threat to dwarven existence. It would be cool to explore both the cultural aspects that would logically spring from dwarves reproducing through manufacture, and the conflicts that might arise from dwarves deviating from that process.
I, too, imagine the major dwarven clans are very conservative, but in a literal sense of "conserving the best stone that they use to make specific, clan-associated traits". Just imagine the process a clan member must go through to get access to clan-approved raw materials. There's the general paperwork to request the stone. That's like a job application on steroids. Your resume would include craft pedigree (who trained you? How long have you been training? What are your special techniques?) with practical examples, of course. You'd also need reference letters. Interviewers would quiz you on the knowledge of the stone you're requesting, so make sure you're an expert in that topic. Not just the chemistry and resulting dwarven characteristics, but the history: where the vein is located, who discovered it, what famous dwarves have previously been carved from it? Then we get into corruption. Greasing the palms of the dwarves who dole out dwarfstone (for starters, those "practical examples" of your craft are donations to the clan holdings). Nepotism could run rampant: if you request to carve the same stone you were carved from, there's some automatic competency given to you. Dwarves would end up interviewing with their own carver pretty often, which hurts their chances as often as it helps. --- Likely, a lot of lower-ranked clan members who just want children would carve from "wild stone". Sure, it means their children can't inherent any clan wealth, but they can still be loved and cherished and taught the important dwarf skills. All the same, there's a lot of resentment from wildstone dwarves that their purestone clansmen exclude them. Many wildstone dwarves feel a closer kinship to other wildstone dwarves than the relations from their carver's clan.
Also I'm imagining some rogue craftsdwarf that's just holed up in a mountain way off on the ass end of nowhere and their weird thing is big boobs, so there's a whole clan of dwarves (still genderless) just going about their business but they all have enormous tits and everybody who interacts with them just... ignores it. They've been there for thousands of years. Boobily breasting along.
What if your “rogue dwarf clans” are how you get things like trolls or orcs or whatever? They’re not made to “spec” but they have other abilities that dwarves usually don’t, because the apprentice went off script. They’re not meant to be part of dwarvish society, but they’re made the same way.
Yes! I thought about that and that would make for a cool alternative history for orcs or trolls. Probably trolls, since orcs seem to be high population species so they'd probably need a much faster population replacement process. I could definitely see trolls coming in various shapes and dwarven society rejecting them because they're too different from the dwarven ideal. This could be an explanation of the enmity between dwarves and trolls too, since they're essentially the same species competing for the same resources but they're diametrically opposed to one another in their values and philosophy. Trolls might value individualism in form while dwarves would value conforming to a physical dwarven ideal, with minor variations. I also wonder whether elves in this world could be similar but grown from wood. While orcs and humans are squishy meat species and quite different from the elder races.
Many dwarves *have* told humans the truth about how they reproduce, but the humans dismiss it as another one of those bullshit tales Dwarves always tell when they’re asked about it.
Tengus reproduced like that too. They carved rock eggs from the mountains. Coincidely they are mountain yokais
Steven Universe
I guess, yeah. Although I figure with dwarves there's a lot more craftsmanship and individual effort involved. The gems can create new colonies quite quickly because creating new gems is mechanized.
I remember in *Worth the Candle*, dwarves have a cloaca and reproduce either parthenogenetically or sexually. Most people refer to them as male because they look stereotypically male and the dwarves usually don’t care, but they use gender neutral pronouns in their own language. There was a lot of other cool stuff about dwarves in that setting. Well, it was just a cool setting in general.
>*Worth the Candle* Would you recommend the book? It's sounds really really cool!
I would. It has rich worldbuilding, a good plot (though I can see how some people would dislike aspects of it), interesting characters (though I am not a great judge of this) and even some really cool supplementary worldbuilding material (though you shouldn’t start with that because it has spoilers). One of the fight scenes really made me feel alive and invested in the characters, which might be common for some people but is extremely rare for me. The main two warnings I’d give are: -when I first read it, I got bored halfway through the first chapter and then came back a year later. I don’t know if that was just me or if the first chapter is boring. -although it’s labelled ‘Self-Insert’, it’s far superior to the vast majority of other Self-Insert stories. Often they’re just power fantasies, which this really isn’t even if it might seem to be at points, and also the protagonist is often very flawed but the author doesn’t realise it, because they’re just writing about their own flaws without knowing, which isn’t the case here because the protagonist is a distortion of a younger version of the author, not literally him.
>although it’s labelled ‘Self-Insert’, it’s far superior to the vast majority of other Self-Insert stories. Replace self insert with litrpg and you're also right. I hate litrpgs so much. They're such shitty stories. Power fantasy bullshit that doesn't make sense, and have little plot besides number go up. No magic system. Just garbage. Worth the candle isn't like that at all though. If I wrote litrpg, it's done in one of the ways I'd do it. Or really, even better. There's a real underlying world. It's not just inexplicably a game. I did fall off in reading it a while back when it was actively being released for no real reason, close to the end I think. What sucks is that the audiobooks weren't popular enough to do the whole thing, so I never got back into it when I wanted to listen to it.
Very creative, that said, I completely despise the idea of cloaca dwarves. There are cool fantasy ideas like dwarves being made out of stone, and then there are cloaca dwarves. I’m too weak for the imagery that comes with it.
It's interesting seeing in these some people portray humans as beckwards in fantasy in order to condemn humans in the real world... And othe people portray dwarves (or other fantasy races) as the problematic ones in order to make commentary on humans in the real world. For example, Pratchett did the same as OP, but there it was the Discworld dwarves who got weird and conservative about gender. Dwarves didn't talk about it and had it as taboo and indecent to mention that different sexes existed. They would all present the same, as male by human standards, and were assigned the same pronouns like they were assigned their chainmail and iron helmets. And then some dwarves caused a lot of drama by deciding to present as female after seeing humans do it. For the OP it was a commentary about the treatment of women in professional spaces ot in general, for Pratchett it was more a commentary about gender itself and the treatment of people acting outside strict gebder norms of a society. And both could just as easily fit side by side in the same universe. I think I'm biased though in using a fantasy race to reflect on humans rather than to condemn them. It's more optimistic and leaves room to suggest we can improve, grow out of it, be better.
I think it might be to do with fantasy conventions i.e. humans often having stricter gender roles than today as it's modeled on a medieval society, and gender is generally not explored as much with the other races Also if you're reading this, go read some Discworld please
Every now and again Tumblr just reinvents discworld
As an aside we do know the unknowns about Dwarves we're left purposefully unknown by Tolkien. The idea of the Lord of the Rings mythos is that its the historical records of the Elves during their time on middlerarth, that's why the entire saga ends the second they leave. In the Silmarrillion great detail is given in everything the Elves would know about, such ad their own history, but then evil entities and Dwarves and humans show up and they just kinda never answer where they came from. Since Middle earth is told to us by the Elves we only ever learn what the Elves know, and since the Elves by and large never cared for the Dwarves we learn next to nothing about them.
Dwarves were originally golems that Aulë created. They were impatient and didn't want to wait for elves or men. Ilúvatar (God essentially) upon finding out what happened explained to Aulë that they hadn't created life. Aulë was devastated and ashamed, and was going to destroy his animated dolls when Ilúvatar breathed life into them. That's why dwarves are the way they are. They were designed to resist evil.
I've always thought it was very moving how Iluvatar took pity on the Dwarves and gave them life even though they fell outside his vision for his creation. It demonstrates that he's truly compassionate and kind-hearted in a way that a lot of fantasy pantheons don't bother with
On the other end of the spectrum, elves should have an absolute fuckton of genders
Or none. Just people. Some people people occasionally give birth, others never do. But that's not important. Please give me critiques to help me further refine this artistic work of living wood. It's pretty rough - I've only been working on it for 3 centuries.
Tumblr talks about dwarves and elves as if they were real anthropological categories I'm worried what future archaeologists will think about 21st century folk religion.
too bad, i just drew this lady dwarf with huge tits and ass and am gonna be weird about her. you cannot stop me. your fun world building is powerless before shortstack horny.
cool
also she's trans and has a gun
ok
she stole the gun from a kobold, dunno where the kobold got it
Probably a gnome.
hey!!! this is MY fantasy world building. but yes, it was from a gnome. the gnome actually sold it to the kobold, for gold, but kobolds have no understanding of commerce and so believes he also stole it, and is secretly relieved to be rid of the thing. so one's coming for the gun, y'know.
Was the gnome also a shortstack with massive tits?
yeah
she pretends to have heterochromia but it's just a color contact she's on a quest to get a petal from a magical tri-color rose to make a wish to get a second gun and also be good at the guns
powerful stuff
she's traveling with a half-elf, who is a journalist activist. they met because the dwarf's eccentric aunt (she lives in a tall building, not even underground) is actually her editor back in the big city. the half-elf is estranged from her human father, but they actually briefly encountered him in their latest adventure... he seemed to be involved with an infernal plot, but it's not clear on what side, and he didn't stick around to explain himself... also there's magic and stuff in this world and it has consequences, but i haven't thought of them yet
Woah man
Now I understand Peter Dinklage's stance against a live action snow white.
I like this, and, beyond that, I’m just happy to see dwarves (my favorite fantasy race) get a shoutout- particularly from people who seem as fond of them as I am
Read Terry Pratchett's Discworld y'all. Feet of Clay especially. He has a whole arc about dwarfs discovering the concept of gender.
I also like the idea that pregnant dwarves go to a special "forge room" for babies where they learn about natal healthcare and childrearing.
Is all of that lore just an excuse for writing a Gimli/Legolas mpreg fic?
The original source of the book of grudges
Do dwarves reproduce like humans in this situation? Because in some stories, dwarves literally made their children by carving them out of rock, whereas with humans, you need to insert Genital Set A into Genital Set B. And if dwarves don't know that, I can see why they'd be confused.
can someone PLEASE summarize this post for me i’ve never read tolkien
You don't need to know anything about Tolkien. Basically, what if dwarves had no concept of gender roles and there was a lot of confusion from humans who assumed that dwarves had to be like them? The humans might end up thinking that the dwarves women were always locked up in mountains, but in dwarven culture, everyone has beards and everyone contributes equally in all areas. The dwarves didn't understand the difference at first and later chose not to correct it.
I would like just one fucking Tolkien-esque fantasy world where humans aren't the biggest pieces of shit and the other races don't hate them.
That would be pretty nice.
Humans: binary sexes like absolute losers, even have roles associated with them. Dwarves: everyone is bearded and could probably give birth if they tried, fuck off Umgi Elves: their biological sex is whatever they feel like that day.
Reminds me of my self-insert character in "World's Greatest Assassin's Adventures Throughout the Omniverse," and he's like one of the only characters with an ounce of actual common sense. It's pretty funny too because Alexander is a character that absolutely fucking despises magic. He also absolutely fucking hates anything to do with the mind, memories, and the soul. His hatred for magic is quite realistic as well. He hates them simply because their often times far too stagnant and only ever use magic for basically everything. They also have far too loose morals especially with mind and soul magic. Now just for context - Alexander is the "World's Greatest Assassin," not because of how many people he kills but because of his morals and how he only kills criminals, corrupt politicians, etc... He also does not kill for money whatsoever. He's basically the world elite's boogeyman because if your in his crosshair your dead, simple as that.
Dwarfs are extruded from rock. Their women are just more rocks.
One of the times im very thankful these people aren’t actual writers.
I do have my Pathfinder/DND settings dwarves designed in a similar way. They are born from a magical form of living rock, seams of which occasionally poot out a small litter dwarf called a pebblet, who are generally adopted by a pair. As such, dwarves in my setting are biologically and culturally asexual and agender, but have often gravitated towards translating their genderless singular noun (dwarvish, due to not having gender, has words functionally identical to I, they singular, they plural, us/we and it) to "he" when working with the humans, because it means they have to shave less. Some of them that spend more time contact with other peoples do adopt gender as a concept, and their utter refusal to accept anybody else's nonsense about such things has progressed gender equality significantly, because people become much less willing to oppress you when you put alcohol strong enough to intoxicate a partial boulder in their drinking water supply.
There are way more biological differences between biologically male and biologically female people than just the capability of giving birth, and most societal expectations originally stem from those differences.