hedge-rambles:

theoppositeofprofound:

Another thing I love about TAZ, they have (accidentally or not) turned out an interpretation of elves that matches the traditional Mischievous Unknowable Tricksters much more than the Tolkien elves that DnD usually ends up with. 

Taako is the foremost example because he’s the main character, but he’s this glamorous, prickly, powerful weirdo with his own specific and slightly off-center moral code. He’s rob a corpse but not a bank. He likes doing things purely to spite other people. He refuses to do what he’s told, and will sometimes do things no one expects for seemingly random reasons. Even more than the rest of the Boys, he’s a very chaotic but in a consistent way. And he feeds off of attention, he’s an entertainer at heart. 

Jenkins seems more straight laced, but by the end of his arc he’s a trickster as well. He uses his wits and magic to play a game and that game is called “steal things and kill people”. He makes convoluted plans and even though he has a steady job seems to enjoy the thrill of the “perfect crime”. Like Taako, he’s doing this because he’s bored. 

Same thing with the possibly elven Sloane. She’s a principled thief in it all for the joy of the chase. She runs illegal races because she enjoys it, and she clearly likes the attention a lot. She’s not high and mighty, she’s a storm of a person who comes in and throws everything off course. She’s unpredictable but does have her own logic- Hurley has a pretty good grasp of her psyche. It’s just not quite the same logic everyone else uses. 

Then you have Lydia and Edward, who might not actually be elves but are definitely playing off of expectations of them. Human twins in the forest running a weird magical death game? Suspicious. Dwarves doing the same thing? Super suspicious. But elves are strange and capricious and live for a very long time. Sometimes they just pull stunts like that. And Lydia and Edward definitely play up their garishness and glamour, they use appearances and bright colours and music and gaudiness to distract from what they’re really doing. Only in the final battle do we see them dressing down, they’ve finally put away the props and costumes and are playing for keeps. 

They’re a lot more involved in their world and as major characters we know them a lot better, but the elves of The Adventure Zone could easily slide into myths about strange and beautiful creatures who do everything for kicks and can’t be contained or understood. 

This is a really interesting take on it, but all I can think now is “Elves have a life span measured in centuries, and an attention span measured in seconds”.