I've already said how much I dislike tropes — not specific tropes, just the recent fad of playing Tropespotting as a substitute for literary analysis. Today I'm going to talk about reinventing them.
Since Tolkien, orcs have been given short shrift. In most depictions, orcs are cruel, barbarous, and irredeemably evil — a cannon-fodder race that the heroes can thoughtlessly slaughter in order to appear Manly and/or Powerful. Orcs are basically stuffed target dummies that the brave knights can mow down without having to dwell on the uncomfortable realization that they're mass murderers who kill dozens of sentient beings before breakfast. After all, it is common propaganda in warfare to be told to think of one's enemies as subhuman animals, unworthy of moral consideration, bereft of human rights, immune to all forms of humane treatment. Orcs are merely a personification of wartime propaganda, the enemy every reader can hate.
Tolkien did a great deal of work behind the scenes, as it were, building a society for his elves. After all, somebody had to write those moon-runes and craft the starlight-reflecting riddle on the Gate of Moria and build Rivendell and design all those boats at the Grey Havens and forge the Three Rings of Elvenkind and and write all the silly songs that they sing in the forest. You don't get those things from a race consisting of archer-warriors.
This explains why Gerene has such insecurities. The pressure to conform in elf culture, the burden of parental expectations, is incredibly high. Her mother decided what she would be, before Gerene was even born.
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