I think I might get back into Ghost of Tsushima again. I finished “Dawn of Ragnarok,” and while there are things I want to do in AC: Valhalla, in truth I don’t want to get too stuck in it so that I don’t move onto other games. I’m sure as soon as I do though, Ubisoft will drop new free content and I’ll get sucked back in.
We’ll see!
[There was going to be a Hugo Dyson joke, of the “Oh not the elves again!” variety, but I couldn’t think of how to work it in. So I’m putting that here.]
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Eldest, Elves, & Condescending “Wise” Characters
A lot of people quit the Inheritance Cycle after the second book because, unlike the first one, which is a straightforward if derivative fantasy novel with lots of action. Dragons! Sword fights! Monsters! It’s there. The second book is much less of that. A huge part of it is exposition and training montages, and a lot of people didn’t like it. But another huge part of why people didn’t like it was the elves.
Oh dear, those elves.
So in Inheritance Cycle, the elves are all immortal, as well as being stronger and faster and more perceptive than the other races, especially humans. We’re told that while they have more spellcasters than other races, they’re still a low percentage of the population, but I’m pretty sure every important elf character the reader meets is a magic user, so that falls flat. They in fact speak using the language of magic.
Because they’re so long-lived, and magically powerful, and also they’ve been bonded to dragons longer than the other races, they know a lot more about the world than everyone else. Which means that they like to talk about how much they know about the world more than everyone else. It’s told to us quite a lot that they’re right about seemingly everything, and in cases when it’s ambiguous (like the afterlife and whether there are gods), no one can really mount a persuasive argument against them.
Essentially, here’s a race of beings who are super powerful, condescending, and always right. The protagonist picks up on their culture and basically learns it as “This is the right thing to do,” right down to vegetarianism. They’re generally presented as being wiser and cleverer than all the others.
It’s especially aggravating because Eragon gets elf-ified in the story. It makes sense that the elves continue his education as a Rider. From a reader perspective, it’s a chance to flesh out a race that had only been described in the previous book. From a story perspective, they are the ones who have the most knowledge and power, and the deepest ties to the Dragon Riders, since they were the first ones to become Dragon Riders.
But Eragon, who is suffering from evil seizures from a wound he gained fighting a demonic sorcerer in the last book, gets cured of his disability (I have… thoughts about that too) by being transformed into a much more elf-like being. He was already going to be long-lived, if not immortal, and have pointed ears and magic, from being a Dragon Rider. But now he becomes stronger, faster, more magically powerful, and he’s able to perceive things that he couldn’t before. All of his struggles are now (at least, in this book) easily solved. Even the little puzzle ring he carries around he solves in seconds now, because elves are just better at puzzles I guess.
Readers did not like this. They didn’t like it at all. At least, a large chunk of them didn’t. I saw the elves of the books being accused of being an entire race of Mary Sues, and the mouthpieces through which Paolini is preaching vegetarianism and atheism. At one point someone on the Inheritance Forums suggested that Paolini was actually a nihilist, though no one took that seriously. They took up so much of the book and were received so badly that a lot of people started rooting for the Empire because they just hated the elves that much.
To be fair, later books do sort of walk back on some of this. Eragon is okay eating meat if he needs to, and starts to admit that maybe, just maybe, they aren’t right about everything else either. And Eragon’s ‘Elf Yourself’ transformation isn’t the win-all it seems like it will be in later books either, as we see him struggling with more opponents. I don’t know if this was always the intention, because it’s an aspect of Eldest that got a lot of criticism, so it’s possible that Paolini saw the critics and decided to do some course correction. Things did change from the planning stages to execution–the transition from a trilogy to a quartet proves that. But at the time, in Eldest, it often feels like this is a race meant to convey his ideas on certain topics and be the biggest kids on the block in the setting.
The thing is, elves aren’t always like this. People like to say Tolkien’s elves were like this, but they weren’t, especially if you’re familiar with The Silmarillion. The elves are far from perfect, and very often it’s shown that elves being more powerful actually means that the mistakes they make have bigger consequences and make things even worse for the world. So much trouble would have been avoided if there weren’t these centuries-long blood feuds and grudges, for starters.
I also think about the Obsidian Trilogy, in which the elves are seemingly perfect at everything, but while Kellen admires them, he’s also annoyed by them. When he’s told by an elder elf that humans just aren’t as good at making choices or thinking about things, he stays quiet, but his narration tells us he realizes exactly how condescending it is to be talked to like that. It’s also shown that they aren’t perfect–they’re stuck in their own ways of doing things, which the Endarkened take advantage of. The elves have perfected open warfare, so the Endarkened don’t face them in open combat and instead rely on raids, skirmishes, and ambushes through proxy forces.
These are much healthier balances to portray in fantasy fiction. You absolutely cannot have one be the fantasy race that is always right, always more powerful, and our protagonist (who is not of that race) has to emulate and become one of them in order to win. Your readers will assume you’re trying to thrust your views upon them and take it as terrible writing. And it’s sure as heck not great writing.
Unless you’re actually trying to write, say, deities or saints, from a religious perspective (and you need to be careful about that–I should maybe do a Note about that!), you shouldn’t be portraying any group of characters as being better and more powerful than everyone else in every way. It’ll come across as preachy, annoying, and will tune large chunks of your readers out who don’t want to be preached at with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
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