Talk:Race (fantasy)

Merger Proposal
What should be done with Elf(D&D) and Dwarf(D&D)? Merge them into here or move them to a more appropriate title (like Elf (D&D), Elf (RPG))? I think they should be merged into this article.

Also, I think this might call for another "Wikipedia is not...": I've been seeing a lot of highly game-specific material that doesn't strike me as very encyclopedic (for example, games like Neverwinter Nights (see assassin (D&D)), StarCraft (see Damage Types (StarCraft)), Counter-Strike (see Counter-Strike console commands), and Pokemon (see Stage 2 Pokémon and the pages on individual critters)). Wikipedia is not a game manual or strategy guide. --Mrwojo 16:16, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * Also at some point one begins to infringe on copyrights. It would be useful have an article comparing "assassin" as a player type in RPGs in general, so you can see how games adapt/alter material from real life and popular conceptions. Stan 17:54, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * Yes I completely agree on both points. --Mrwojo 20:41, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Why the hell do we need this article? I think someone is just trying to pad their contributions list... - Lord Kenneth 04:17, Feb 4, 2004 (UTC)

Page moved
Per request on RFD, this page was moved. Please click on "what links here" and fix all the double redirects. --Jiang 07:50, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Social aspects of Race in Fantasy
This article can be used to discuss Fantasy Race in a literary sense; I've felt for a while that the convention of race in fantasy is often used as an iron-clad characterization. That is to say, where in the real world the statement "All of a certain type of people always have a certain quality" is often incorrect, any such statement in a fantasy story, such as "Elves are frivolous" or "Dwarves are greedy" is always true. In the case of incidental characters their racial stereotype will usually override their own personal characteristics.

This seems to go outside the real-world definition of race, and makes the fantasy race more like a cartoon archetype like those of Redwall. In these stories a timid character, rather than being described as mouse-like, is actually a mouse; hence, their characterization comes almost pre-written. Race in fantasy stories is a literary construction couched in a biological term, and tries to draw on a biological sense of predestined behavior and quality. - May 2, 2006

Link formatting
The link  was edited to   to avoid the line break. I've reverted the change because the underscored link displays incorrectly for readers who've configured their browser to render links without underline (a better way to do this would be, and I can't find any guideline in the MoS that indicates this is an appropriate way to format links. --Muchness 20:26, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Races and species according to J. R. R. Tolkien
Tolkien stated (unfortunately I don’t remember where) that elves and humans are one specie biologically. So elves and humans are different races (and half-elves exist in Middle Earth). As dwarves were created before elves and humans (and there are no half-dwarves), it is assumed that dwarves and humans are different species. As for orcs, the question is more complicated. Orcs were created from captured elves, assumingly by magic means, so they might be the same specie or they might not be. However, half-orcs are unheard of in Middle-Earth.

Species ala Tolkien
AFAIK, the only "half-elves" in LOTR are those like the line of Elrond who forsook their elven heritage to live among men. Thus, such offspring choose one lineage or the other and are not truly "half-elves" at all! In the Silmarillion, elves come from a very different source than humans and are clearly a different species, despite the ability to produce intermingled offspring. Of course, questions of species get somewhat complex when applied to mythologies where gods create beings....

24.240.209.230 22:33, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

Furries
In comics and other works of fiction that primarily use anthropomorphic, humanoid animals, the different species of animals are implied to be capable of interbreeding. Indeed, it is heavily implied that different species of animals in such works are related in a manner similar to the races of fantasy. I'm having an extremely difficult time explaining this, so you may need to examine individual furries to see this for yourself... --Luigifan 16:52, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Proposal Deletion: Race (fantasy)
The article Race (fantasy) appears to be an essay which treats fantasy races, a concept that exists in fiction, as if they exist in the real-world. Fantasy races are a literary construct best described as a category of fictional characters, such as Category:Fantasy creatures. My view is that this article should be deleted, as the premise it is based on is based on original research. The article does not cite any reliable secondary sources to support its underlying premise that fantasy races are real. Does anyone else have a viewpoint?