I like it when elves are given more innhuman anatomical traits.
It always kinda bugged me that they’re like, an entirely separate species, but you’d think they’re just pointy eared humans if you look at most works.
Give them long arms. Give them an entirely different facial shape. Idk SOMETHING
If we were to take their fantasy traits and convert it into physical/anatomical traits, then elves would be the fantasy equivalent of chimpanzee/lemurs.
Live and construct houses high in the trees. Strong arm and legs to climb and swing from trees. Large eyes to see things from great distances, large ears to pick up signs of enemy. Slightly elongated arms for shooting bows. Shorter foot length to minimize tracks left on the ground, plus walks in tiptoes.
You can still do all of that without much design alteration tho
Because it's boring, duh. Back then when we used the word 'elf' we meant 'otherworldly race that humans can barely hold up in everything, be it beauty, wisdom, grace or knowledge'. But recently fantasy elves has degraded to 'just human with longer age and pointy ears that you can disguise easily by wearing hood'. I'm not saying we should reinvent the wheel with elves or something, but just make them more distinguishable than human; that will add a lot of things to exploit in world-building, story telling, and so on and so forth.
Back then when we used the word 'elf' we meant 'otherworldly race that humans can barely hold up in everything, be it beauty, wisdom, grace or knowledge'. But recently fantasy elves has degraded to 'just human with longer age and pointy ears that you can disguise easily by wearing hood'. I'm not saying we should reinvent the wheel with elves or something, but just make them more distinguishable than human; that will add a lot of things to exploit in world-building, story telling, and so on and so forth.
Like fairies and imps? Imo, that old elves sound more boring. And again, you can still do all the story telling, world-building and all with todays elfs if you're creative enough.
