this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2026
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Fun fact: this comic introduced me to Pratchett! His following quote on Elves is why I tend to find them lacking in most TTRPGs
"Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad."
Me too! At 52 I had heard about Discworld forever and this comic finally got me to read Hogfather. Read the whole series twice, thrice soon.
I'm a little confused what this means, is it saying the fact that the positive attributes associated with elves is a twisting of the actual terrible qualities and that's why no one's ever called elves nice?
Discworld elves are basically fae, not Tolkien style elves.
This quote makes much more sense if you apply it to the glamoured up bastards who steal babies and enslave you if you give them your name.
They're also interdimensional parasites, which would also be an appropriate description for fae.
(For context, they appear in the book Lords and Ladies — third or fourth in the Witches series, depending on whether you include Equal Rites —, which is heavily inspired by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.)
Honestly Terry Pratchett just went back to the roots with his elves, elves and fae are basically a collection of minor spirits to gods in their own right on a mythological level they also run the mortality spectrum from the being downright nice like the green knight/green man to actively hostile to all humans. Similarly dwarves were seen as mountain gods/spirits, frankly pre-christian Europe and even post Christian Europe was so steeped in animism which is why you get so many things under such weirdly broad umbrellas.
All these supernatural things had varying beliefs attached to them in different times and places... So there's really a lot of choice as to what to attribute them in fiction.
Norse dwarves weren't necessarily small, elves sometimes were, both were often magical in some way - the words used were interchangeable in some ways.
*morality
Well the green knight/ green man is famous for having his head chopped off. But also I hate autocorrect.
Elves are constantly twisting the narrative about themselves, despite all the stories of how awful they are, people struggle to remember them that way. Grandma always said elves were… terrific.