Yes indeed it is a fantasy world and yes the laws of nature don’t exactly apply 100% of the time. However this should not be used as an excuse to hand wave things into existence without proper world building.
That’s why you have authors like Brandon Sanderson who creates worlds with strict magic systems and world building for the different people and nations that occupy his world.
And you have authors like Terry goodkind who uses magic as a convenient easy explanation to solve a problem or move the plot.
Why can the main character do this? Who cares its fantasy. don’t worry about it.
I don’t much care for those stories. Its a clear disdain for the genre and to be fair Terry Goodkind was notorious in trying to disassociate himself from other fantasy authors even though his books ended up in the fantasy shelves.
I never said all elves are white or should be white.
You don’t think someone should be embarrassed for requiring a justification for the existence of black people, but not requiring one for white people beyond “they are white”?
Okay so vicarious embarrassment is a form of cringe. In this case, it should be pretty clear as to why I’m cringing at his belief that people of color need an explanation to exist in a fantasy setting. That has origins in prejudice and white-normative society.
It’s frankly absurd to demand that the narrative in any sort of media suddenly does a dead stop and explains in depth that the brown elves are different, others, from a different place in some long-winded five paragraph essay format.
There is. Its what we have now.
I made a few examples of other stories doing this better than Tolkien and when introducing their elves they added that diversity from the getgo with their world building.
And frankly you didn’t really answer this stance either. I demand lore justification for cisgender heterosexual white people in the game I play. NOW NOW NOW!
Heterosexual relationships don’t need lore justifications just as gay relationships don’t need justification.
But it will be interesting to write a society in a fantasy setting and their stances towards relationships between different genders, social classes and even races (fantasy or otherwise).
Anyways since you seem to be genuinely not familiar with what world building is let me link you an article so you can read up on it.
I get the impression you are completely misunderstanding what I am saying. https://screencraft.org/blog/the-craft-and-rules-of-worldbuilding-in-science-fiction-fantasy/#:~:text=Worldbuilding%20is%20often%20defined%20as,Sometimes%20those%20worlds%20are%20fictional.
Again, as there are more elves than just the Noldor, where is the worldbuilding that all the elves in Tolkien’s work are white? And what makes that one feature important to the world building? Is there anything that would be broken if there was a wider range of elf skin tones than is assumed? What features require extra world building? Do we need an origin story if elves have a non-standard eye or hair color? If it doesn’t play a big role in the story is the non-inclusion of information on skin color important, or just something that can be filled in later as it’s just description and not important to the plot?
I have answered your question and I know what I am saying.
You are just projecting what you think you want me to say.
What are these arguments you are making? There is no scientific explanation requirement why high elves should be white. Blizzard decided to present all their elves as white until a few years ago and then they added more color variety. Honestly we could have used some lore explanations for the different color tones… like idk more exposure to the sunwell.
Honestly Blizzard could have made high elves dark skinned from the get go and if they added white elves later they have to do the world building to explain their presence. Otherise they would just be there… why are there different shades and differences? Welp… who knows! it just is.
Imo thats kinda boring and lazy.
I’ve been writing fantasy probably longer than you’ve been alive. I’ve designed entire worlds, including world maps, documentations for city-states, religions, etc. The longest RP campaign in a homebrew setting I designed and developed from scratch, whose world encyclopedia was over 200 pages in MS Word, single spaced, times new roman, 12 point font, lasted 8 years, with several hour long sessions for those years. I designed over a hundred unique recurring NPCs for that setting
All the elves we have seen so far in LOTR are described and shown as white.
If all the white ones are from Noldor then the show runners should tell us where the other elves are from. Nothing wrong with that. It makes the story more complex and interesting to me.
Or are these from Noldor too? If so why do they look different? What happened? did they believe in different gods? Live in different zones? eat different foods? What?