Friday, May 3, 2019

Weird Revisited: Anti-Elves

This post first appeared in 2017...

Drow as "elves but evil" has been done. Let's take a cue from Otus's ink-blot, living shadow rendition, and say that they are the arcane Evil Twins of elves. Maybe not quite Bizarro World duplicates, but close. They look like photographic negatives of some elf, somewhere, sometime. (It is quite possible that if a specific elf and anti-elf come into contact there will be an explosion, Or, they will untie into a single, transcendent being and leave this plane. In an explosion.)

Anti-elves live underground in ultra-controlled, industrial, technolgical environments because they hate nature. They want replace it all with a machinery hellscape like Apokolips. The only reason they haven't yet is because they hate the sun, too, and are forced to live underground. They're working on that one.


Anti-elves are profoundly unmagical. All those magical abilities listed in a drow stat block have a technological basis. No surface creature can steal a anti-elf device and make it work because their bio-energy polarity will just disrupt it and make it nonfunctional after a use or two.


Ant-elves don't believe in gods, meaning they accept the existence of tiresome things other races call gods, but they think them ridiculous impediments to their own purposes and would never worship them. All sacrifices you might see them make are strictly translactional. Any temples are really just fanclubs--an anti-elves are the sort of crazy, obsessive fans that are very likely to progress to stalking and murder.

5 comments:

Logan said...

Cool - and very logical - idea! Love it! :D

JB said...

While I don't think I can go quite all the way with this line of possibility, I think Drow as "negatives" is a lot better than some of the ways they've been pictured over the years, and the idea of elves and anti-elves exploding upon contact with each other makes me snicker out loud.

bombasticus said...

Another great one. If the elf has evolved recently the shadow moves too so it's good to have a way to reflect that. Only thing I would add is that elves often love the sun and anti-elves would rather put something else (or nothing at all) at the center of the sky.

Anne said...

I like this interpretation.

(And like JB, I love the idea of elves and anti-elves exploding on contact. That's one way to defeat the drow queen! And what if someone truly evil made an engine powered by elf-anti-elf annihilation?)

Monsters & Manuals suggested that orcs could be anti-elves. I somewhat like the idea of them magically concealing normal doors, having a paralyzing touch, maybe being able to put others to sleep?
https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2017/07/tolkiens-drow-bizarro-orc-and-corrupt.html?m=0

Trey said...

@Anne - Excellent additions!