on elves

i've never been terribly fond of how elves are depicted in fantasy stories.  idealistic, nearly perfect, incredibly intelligent, talented, and long lived...  and yet, somehow, always in decline.  all of the persecution complex without any reason to actually be persecuted.  but besides that, there's a few things that i just never quite got.

first, there's the forests.  with the exception of maybe old nordic legends, the elves always live in forests.  this isn't really so bad, except the one major feature that almost all elves share is their fantastic eyesight.  these two just don't seem to fit together so well with me; in the sort of thick, overgrown forest that elves so often inhabit, you don't get to take advantage of that kind of eyesight.  being able to see ten miles means nothing if the trees keep you from seeing more than a few hundred feet.  why are these two features almost always found together, when the one cancels out the advantage of the other?  why wouldn't they live somewhere their incredible sight actually helps them?

the second thing that bugs me is the 'peaceful guardians of nature' thing.  granted there are a few precious (and notably better) examples of this, but for the most part, elves are depicted as being reluctant to go to war or fight, excessively defensive of the sanctity of their forests, et cetera.  i've never liked this sort of view of nature, as some sort of ideal state.  nature isn't strictly a thing of beauty; it's senseless death, terrible tragedy, and heartless self-serving survivalism.  the young and the weak die, the strong take advantage of the weak, and only the luckiest, craftiest, strongest, savagest, and most desperate survive.  i've always seen civilization as an opposite to nature strictly because it tries to change this: a place where the young and weak are protected, the strong protect the weak, and the drive for individual survival is replaced by a drive for communal survival.  nature doesn't have, or need, guardians; nature simply exists.  if the forests wither and die, that is how nature progresses.  if species go extinct, that is how nature progresses.  but, that's an entirely other topic of an entirely different gravity.

the third thing about elves that i don't like is their long lives.  most fantasy and sci fi lores fall into the problem of not properly handling long-lived species.  humans can see four generations for 90 or 100 years; if elves mature at around the same rate, that could be 20-40 generations.  the alternatives are that they take a long time to reach adult size (a 60 year old child), have absolutely absurd gestation periods (2-5 years), bizarre reproductive physiology (only capable of breeding every hundred years), or some other disadvantage that would probably preclude their species from advancing past a few generations.  even worse, without any of these things, they live long enough that any significant reproductive rate would quickly see them spread across a world in great swarms.  now, i could see how this could make for a good source of ancient ruins (spread like wildfire, quickly occupy the entire world, wars break out as overpopulation sets in, war leads to massive rapid technological/magical development, eventually a weapon is developed that virtually wipes the world clean of the race)...  but that creates an extinct civilization, not one that's in decline.

haven't had much spare time the past few days.  had a tire glow flat (had to replace it), worked long shifts this weekend...  and admittedly, played a fair bit of borderlands 2.  the mechromancer really kicks ass.