Are elves Facists?

Greetings all Lords and Ladies of Illyriad.
I've recently joined the Illyriad team and I've been tasked with helping the development of the Lore, Background, and History of Illyriad.
Now I have quite a few years experience as a fantasy reader, roleplayer, and, although unpublished, as a writer.
I have been pondering what direction to take the elves in. These directions are of course generally speaking, my proposals aren't to say that all alves are the same or even think the same, but more a stereotypical, overall description of the elves. These are all raw ideas and places of inspiration and nothing of it is in any way "set in stone".

Since gaming in TSR's Forgotten Realms and in Shadowrun I've come to love the idea of elves as a very elitist, racist, and at times, almost facist race. Its true that they love the idea of prancing around in their treeinfested woods or lollygagging through the landscape with their animals, and for some of them that's all they do. But a lot of them are dedicated to holding off the foreign invaders, ie. anyone cutting down as much as a single tree within 100 miles of their forests.
In the Forgotten realms the woodelves would shoot any man, usually hapless farmers, who's family had been involved in clearing forests to make room for farmlands, this being because the elves are longlived and remember vividly what happened 100 years ago while the "innocent" farmer has no, or very little clue as to why an arrow is suddenly protruding from his chest.
The high elves are usually secluded from the rest of the world and let very few foreigners in, even elves must in some cases ask for permission to come to their cities. And they all have a sense of being "purer" and better than the other races because they have been around the longest and understand nature instead of just pillaging it.
In the shadowrun world, the elves have taken over Ireland and have secret police to eliminate "enemies of the state" and most non-elves find them selves as second rate citizens, there's even a practice where if they leave Ireland for vacation or work, then when they try to get back to their country they find that the rules has been changed and that their citizenship have been revoked or is suspended. All in the name of ridding Ireland of the "unpure".

Ok, that was were my inspiration comes from. What I want to know is this:
If I take some or all of these very raw and very early ideas and suggest to the Illyriad team that they be incorporated into the game, as background and history, maybe even as behaviour for some of the elven npc faction not as a mandate that you play them this way will you "revolt", object or in any other way take offence?
I will of course also love any variations of these ideas or interely new ideas to be proposed by you, just don't ask me to read a ton of books .

Sincerely Gromsh.


Edited by Gromsh - 24 Aug 2010 at 06:54

I totaly suport your opinion of the elves mentallity. That's the way I immagined them myself.

I agree totally.

I support your vision 100%.  One theme in some fantasy fiction that I've read is the idea that there has to be a balance between good and evil and that even too much good is a bad thing.  This is the way I think of elves.  They are the epitome of good, but they take it to such a far extreme that it is a bad thing.  It makes them as you say racist and facist.  Anything less than meeting everyone of their very high standards makes you an infidel.  Even dark elves are the same way.  The are evil elitists, very racist and superior.  In my opinion you have a very good grasp of things.

I like the idea of elves thinking they're superior to the other races, but depending on the extent i can't see it fitting that a race that embraces all of nature would look down on the other sentient.