#i just have been thinking about the bits in NOME about timeeeee

[vakarians-babe]

I'm always torn between the idea of Tolkien's elves being obviously nonhuman and then just being slightly nonhuman because both design choices emphasize different things and it just drives me into a spiral of thinking and thinking and thinking about the ways in which elves are weird.

And I think in some ways, it's more disconcerting to see this tall human(?) with pointed ears and androgynous features who COULD be just like you. You can't tell how alien they are from the way they look, just that they're ethereal and graceful, and maybe the dangerousness of elves as a whole falls to the wayside (because they ARE dangerous, they always have been). It's impossible to know just from looking at them that they experience literal TIME differently than humans, it's impossible to know that their minds conceive of reality differently, it's impossible to know just from looking at a single elf that they really are the closest thing to a cosmic being that a human might ever see.

So I love weird, ghostly, eldritch elves. I do. But I also love elves that are mostly human(ish), because it makes their alien nature that much stranger and more difficult to grasp.