i wanted to write a little baby thing about single-race civilisations specifically in fantasy cuz i like fantasy and im a nerd.
the idea of having multiple races of humanoids existing simultaneously i think is a really awesome draw of fantasy and other sort of like fiction genres. i think the kind of John Fantasy idea is that oh this is the elf kingdom of elves, oh this is the dwarf kingdom of dwarves, oh this is where the humans live etc etc.
because the language we use is “race” rather than “species” it Does unfortunately wrap it up in a bunch of real-life connotations that are not good at all. this is why dnd has switched to using the word species in newer editions (but also because elves, dwarves etc were never races to begin with, because that implies they’re of the same species, which they’re obviously not)
i would like to pose an idea for fantasy writers. i’ve been on an anthropology binge recently and learned about homo floresiensis, an extinct human species of little 3ft tall dudes who lived on the island of flores until about 50,000 years ago. they’re literally called hobbits.
so it got me thinking… do humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes and whatever share a common ancestor somewhere. and if they did, what made them evolve to become the humans/elves/dwarves/halflings that they are now.
dwarves are fairly easy. they normally find civilisation in mountains. so boom, they’re stockier, more muscular. they grew shorter so that sustaining their far more muscular bodies was easier on less food.
the other ones are tricky though. my personal headcanon for elves is that their ears are that shape because magic just makes the body react weirdly, so higher magic in the body just kind of gives you pointier ears. halflings or hobbits are also kind of weird.
halflings could be like homo floresiensis where it’s a case of insular dwarfism, which is when species grow smaller over time with less resources, normally when stuck on an island. so maybe halflings got cut off and lived on an island somewhere for ages. idk man.
oh and there’s also like. the gods. that can intervene whenever you can’t explain anything. the raven queen’s fall made the shadar-kai for example.
dnd kind of has this evolution angle with elves. where the elves of today outside of the feywild are like that because of how long they’ve been outside of the feywild, whereas eladrin are their ancestors or closer to their ancestors so they’ve got more feywild fuckery going on. oh and astral elves, elves in space. cool stuff.
regarding single-species society, if you categorise them more like different species of the same genus, then i’d say predominantly elven societies or dwarven societies make more sense because they’d have to be together and separate long enough to evolve in certain ways.
but!!! fantasy societies tend to be as modern as they can be, therefore it does not make sense that they’d be entirely single-species. but if you think from this framework, of where they came from and how their societies built from there, you can have far more interesting takes on how these peoples will be interacting with each other.
interacting with other species on an intelligent level is something completely unknown to us humans. all of the other humans have gone extinct. so it’s fun to immerse ourselves in worlds where we’re not all alone. anyway yeah i think treating fantasy “races” like species in the same genus is way more interesting than just mystically othering them. this does get quite dangerous when you bring in real cultural inspirations though. be tasteful, guys!! :)
