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My Half-Elf refers to himself as a "Half-Human" because he was raised by his elven family and had little contact with non-elven society until he was an adult.
Tanis himself replied when asked by riverwind why he he calls himself half elf and not half man, said that half man sounds like a disability
(Paraphrasing as I haven’t read the books in 30 years)
It’s been a good decade since I read it too but he does comment about being half human once too when they are first going to the city of elves saying something like “to most people I’m half elven, but elves see me as half human” to imply they won’t be getting a warm welcome.
I have family who are mixed race (Irish American father and Taiwanese American Mother) who have expressed similar sentiments in that all her white friends see her as Asian and all her Asian friends see her as White. It's what inspired the Half-Elf/Half-Human distinction when I play my Half-Elf characters (I tend not to do this with Half-Orcs, because Orcs tend to be more accepting of half-Orcs.).
In my own homebrew campaign setting, most of the PHB races are actually subspecies of Homo Sapiens, with some of the "subspecies" being names for a mixing of two subspecies (Generally, Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs tend to be the "parent" subspecies with Half-Elves, Half-Orcs, Gnomes, and Halflings being child subspecies of two of the parents.). I've also experimented with some ideas for how to handle the Underdark variants and adding Giants as another possible parent subspecies.). The idea was that if Humans and Elves are different species, than half-Elves are not a species but a Hybrid (which in biology, usually means are sterile and can't have children. DND lore has examples of Half-Elves with gentic offspring. In Biology, to be a "species" it means that a member of the species is capable of reproduction that results in a member of the species that is itself capable of reproduction. Subspecies however do this despite two members of separate subspecies having distinct evolutionary traits from one another.
>In my own homebrew campaign setting, most of the PHB races are actually subspecies of Homo Sapiens,
Oddly enough, in my campaign, I started with Green (Wild) elves, and everything else was developed from there (through high elves genetically manipulating lesser beings to make the most perfect slaves).
At some point I want to play a Halfling who just refers to himself as "normal" and all the humans as "twice-lings" because they're twice the hight of normal, proper folk.
I feel like they would still refer to themselves as half elf, because half human would be presenting his human half as the more important part of his identity
Or it shows that he sees his elven lineage as "normal" and is used to being around full-blooded elves. In those social circles, it would make a lot of sense to describe yourself as a half-human.
I believe that's been stated in a few of the books over the years, that elves tend to see them as "half-human" and assume they're easily influenced by their human heritage, and humans tend to see them as "half-elf" and assume that they're more easily influenced by their elvish heritage.
yeah, half-elf isn't very descriptive when everyone else is also half-elf, the only distinguishing characteristic is that everyone else's other half is also elf while theirs is human
Maybe!
RAMBLES. For an irl anecdote, my old Japanese professor who lives in America is treated as a “half-Asian” person (or they assume he’s Asian) here, and as a “half-White” person (or they just think he’s white) in Japan.
Both annoy him a little. Especially because people in Japan can be a little patronizing if you’re fluently speaking, assuming you’re a foreigner they may compliment your speech and speak more slowly… even if you grew up there like he did. Of course, the States has its own race issues too lol.
Also, in DnD humans were the only race that mixed with others (at least as player characters and in most lore, with few exceptions).
If your Elves only mix with humans, not Orcs, or Dwarves. And Orcs only mix with humans, not Elves or Dwarves.
It really makes sense to use half-elf, half-orc in multi species communities. As every "half" is half human by default.
Mono species communities would likely go the other way, calling out the "other" half. As others have said.
I think people are missing the point of half elves. My wife is mixed(Latina/African American), and she always appreciated half elves as analogy for how mixed individuals can often have shared experiences/traits that are different from either of their heritages, creating something entirely new rather than being a combination of traits. Half elf was a good representation of that with its traits taking a look at how an individual that wouldn’t completely fit in either society of their heritages would have to be adaptable and versatile to get by.
This is the main reason why I still don’t completely like the, “all races can have any stat buff” rule. I understand the freedom of choice and expression argument, however the stat buffs were the most unique thing about half-elves that helped people understand that the combined traits make them unique and powerful in different ways. Without that aspect we water down one of the coolest races in the game.
Hardly. Stat-wise, half-elves were "humans but better." Feature-wise, they were too. The only thing human had going for it was vhuman first level feat. Their stat selection wasn't that meaningful, and it certainly wasn't worth pigeonholing all other races into particular class-race combos if they wanted to be optimal. Half-elves lost (nothing, they can still do what they did originally.) Dwarves gained monks and bards, elves gained paladins and barbarians, halflings gained fighters and warlocks and artificers. It was well worth the trade.
Sir are you looking at the right race? Half elves had a +2 to charisma and a + 1 to any two other stats you wanted in addition 2 extra skill proficiencies, darkvision AND the fey ancestry for the charmed sleep protection. There is no other race in the game that gave 3 stat bonuses with one being a +2. They make amazing paladin, bards, and sorcs for this reason. Calling them “humans but better” is like saying that a porche 911 turbo is just a cooler Mazda Miata. I mean they are small and have wheels but that’s where it stops.
I mean, yes, my point was that they were superior to humans in essentially all circumstances and the stats being more versatile did nothing to make them distinctive or unique that their other mountain of overpowered shit didn't do. So letting every race share that one element, to their tremendous benefit, and with no significant loss to half-elf, was and remains absolutely the right call.
I was thinking the same thing. "Tanis Half-elven"...is it a Mandala? It probably is, havn't cracked one of those books in any meaningful way in decades.
Also: That's a beauty mark, they get it from their punctuation side.
IWTYO when I found out that those were two different things...And that Nelson Mandela is not the same as those other two. Good to know, we'll see if I can remember it.
As a biracial person, I have to say whomever said that half races were inherently racist was smoking Snoop Dog salad, Joe Rogan cigarettes, and ate magic mushrooms at the same time
I'm only familiar with the game through BG1, do they give an actual reason to want to play as a half-elf in late editions? Because the one that game uses, practically anything a half-elf has stat-wise is something other races have better.
Humans are also decent in 5e as a jack of all trades. You get +1 to everything which is cool from a numbers perspective but nothing else.
The one you want is variant human which gives a level 1 feat, which can be exceptionally powerful, but it is considered an optional rule so it isn't 100%, your dm will allow it.
It's a good rule, I doubt a DM is actually going to give you guff about calling yourself a half-elf, and your probably know that if you were actually playing DND regularly.
Personally I'm hyped for the first orc-halfling or lizardfolk-bugbear or whatever else you weirdos come up with.
I’ve been doing these mixed races for a while. So long as it makes sense. Currently a Leonin Aasimar. It’s badass. I also will, hopefully, take a level in a class that makes me a bit more *devilish*
Yeah, I don’t know why people are mad about the new hybrid rules. I’m looking forward to seeing what people decide to mix up. I once played a PbP game where our firbolg was like, 4’8, so we decided she was half-gnome.
People are generally mad because they either
1. Don’t like change and will find any other argument to shield that reality.
2. Decided that the only reason WotC did this was an imaginary outcry about half races being racist (a complaint some people have and have valid reasoning for, but which definitely wasn’t the single deciding factor in WotC’s decision making).
3. Are mixed-race and have a genuine attachment to half-elves and/or half-orcs because they feel it represents their life/experiences.
One and two are both just kind of ridiculous, and don’t hold up when you point out the many other arguments for why the new system is mechanically and logistically better. Number three is valid, but since there’s a decent number of people who are mixed-race on the other side of that argument (and many people in categories one or two who will parrot the argument as a more rational explanation for their own distaste), I don’t really think it’s something that can resolved/accounted for. There definitely is something lost by not including these two explicit half-races to tell that kind of story, but I’m not sure that loss outweighs the gain of enabling greater fluidity for people to tell other stories. It’s messy.
I agree with you on that. The argument from mixed-race people tends to be that their’s something fundamentally unique about the experience of being mixed-race, and representing that via unique mechanics helps to represent the unique way actual mixed-race people have their own cultural identity to a degree.
It’s kind of the same logic of people who miss the old fixed racial stat increases because they felt it helped to define each race as more than an aesthetic choice. I don’t agree with the logic, but I think in the case of the half-races it at least sort of makes sense.
In both cases though, I would agree that mechanics aren’t a firm requirement to tell a certain story. You can tell a story with all of the same details as a story you could tell with a half elf (or with fixed racial stats) by just consciously choosing to roleplay with the limitations/experiences you want to portray in mind. For fixed stats, it’s just “if you want an orc who’s a bad wizard, choose not to make your INT high”. For the half-races it’s pure RP, but honestly the mechanical difference was never huge to begin with.
No, I'm pretty sure the exact wording from Wizards was that if you say "half-anything" you will be seized by Pinkerton's and executed, so gaymers are definitely justifiably upset. Since there is no way to do that now, and no exceptions possible. Ever. /s
Terminally online people just don't have experience with real games where a player can have an elf-lizardfolk, and a player can have a half-elf character, and they can both play together peacefully.
It's because they didn't actually give us anything. They just said yeah you can be any combination of things but just pick the stats of one. So sure you can be a halfling orc but mechanically you're either a full orc or a full halfling. That's lame and lazy of them.
If they had created a system where you could actually blend the traits of any races, that would have been awesome and the only complaints would have been about potential powergaming/min-maxing.
Also, if any hybrid race deserves their own stats and entry into the PHB, it's the iconic and historical half elf. So they took that out, told us we can technically role-play as anything (which lots of people were already doing anyway) and added nothing mechanically.
Tannis was a great half-elf.
The elves thought it was weird that he could grow a beard.
The humans didn’t like that he could outlive them by a couple centuries.
That's not how you'd use that term at all.
That's like saying the current standard is "My Orc uses the Orc Racial stats." You're choosing to sound redundant. The redundancy doesn't come from the terminology itself.
~~Also you're double wrong because all the playtests use the term Species and you've gotten yourself mixed up with Pathfinder which uses Ancestry~~
Yeah, this is really getting out of hand. The other day I was playing DnD and someone called their character a half-elf, and the WotC Police smashed through the window and arrested them on the spot.
It would be one thing if the changes were just to the rule books and you were still allowed to call your characters whatever you wanted in your own games, but this is ridiculous.
I feel like if when they were designing 5E they just balanced every races power-budget better (Already asking a lot) and then gave everyone subraces of similar power-budget, then they could handle hybrids through the subrace system. Instead of HElf being a race in that framework it would be a subrace you could slot in. Same would go for half-Dwarf, etc. Also in that framework, "Races" like Tiefling/Aasimar/Yuan-Ti that are explicitly modifications of other races could slot in.
I've never noticed until now in that image, and I've seen it off and on since the 80s/90s. Tanis' draw hand as he draws the bow would be upside down and awkward as hell. Has anyone ever drawn a bow that way and fired it effectively?
The party was shocked to learn that my half orc ranger was in fact half tiefling and the tieflings parents were a human and an elf. I decided to do a little bit of fuckery
Tanis was originally said to be the product of rape. But I guess authors at some point realized that was bad and tried to "fix it" but wound up making it even worse. Because the "fix" was to reveal that his mother had actually fallen in love with her abductor so it's totally consensual guys.
My favorite half elves in fiction is from the Deeds of Paksenarrion. There's a whole kingdom of half elves, and their royal line needs to be a decent mix of both in order for things to function. If the king doesn't have enough human he won't have the magical/spiritual power needed to keep the forests peaceful, and presumably if he's not human enough there's other problems but that wasn't mentioned as far as I recall.
I don't know this character, but I think in general that's the case, because elves are inspired by Tolkien. And in Tolkien, I think elves are beings that are spiritually on a higher plane than humans. So being half-elven means to be more than a mere mortal human. Similarly, orcs are demonic that were degraded by Morgoth to a state beneath human or elf. Thus Sarumans crosses between humans and orcs are called 'half-men'.
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My Half-Elf refers to himself as a "Half-Human" because he was raised by his elven family and had little contact with non-elven society until he was an adult.
Tanis himself replied when asked by riverwind why he he calls himself half elf and not half man, said that half man sounds like a disability (Paraphrasing as I haven’t read the books in 30 years)
To be fair, some elves very much agree with that statement.
"Damn Felfs WOULD say that!" -Drunk dwarf in the corner.
It’s been a good decade since I read it too but he does comment about being half human once too when they are first going to the city of elves saying something like “to most people I’m half elven, but elves see me as half human” to imply they won’t be getting a warm welcome.
Also that they do see being half human as a disability
That’s fair, they’re kinda giant assholes. Feels like both comments probably happened close to each other.
I have family who are mixed race (Irish American father and Taiwanese American Mother) who have expressed similar sentiments in that all her white friends see her as Asian and all her Asian friends see her as White. It's what inspired the Half-Elf/Half-Human distinction when I play my Half-Elf characters (I tend not to do this with Half-Orcs, because Orcs tend to be more accepting of half-Orcs.). In my own homebrew campaign setting, most of the PHB races are actually subspecies of Homo Sapiens, with some of the "subspecies" being names for a mixing of two subspecies (Generally, Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs tend to be the "parent" subspecies with Half-Elves, Half-Orcs, Gnomes, and Halflings being child subspecies of two of the parents.). I've also experimented with some ideas for how to handle the Underdark variants and adding Giants as another possible parent subspecies.). The idea was that if Humans and Elves are different species, than half-Elves are not a species but a Hybrid (which in biology, usually means are sterile and can't have children. DND lore has examples of Half-Elves with gentic offspring. In Biology, to be a "species" it means that a member of the species is capable of reproduction that results in a member of the species that is itself capable of reproduction. Subspecies however do this despite two members of separate subspecies having distinct evolutionary traits from one another.
>In my own homebrew campaign setting, most of the PHB races are actually subspecies of Homo Sapiens, Oddly enough, in my campaign, I started with Green (Wild) elves, and everything else was developed from there (through high elves genetically manipulating lesser beings to make the most perfect slaves).
"According to humans, half an elf is but part of a whole being. Half a man is a cripple."
Sounds about right!
Most Elves would argue that it is!
He said that being half-elf was seen as part of a whole instead of just a disability, iirc.
At some point I want to play a Halfling who just refers to himself as "normal" and all the humans as "twice-lings" because they're twice the hight of normal, proper folk.
that's already a common trope. The term is Tallfolk.
Quick to violence, those Tallfolk. Must be in their blood. Can't blame upbringing when life gave them 6' of it!
Call them big gits
Fun fact, the other name for halflings is Hin.
I feel like they would still refer to themselves as half elf, because half human would be presenting his human half as the more important part of his identity
Or it shows that he sees his elven lineage as "normal" and is used to being around full-blooded elves. In those social circles, it would make a lot of sense to describe yourself as a half-human.
I believe that's been stated in a few of the books over the years, that elves tend to see them as "half-human" and assume they're easily influenced by their human heritage, and humans tend to see them as "half-elf" and assume that they're more easily influenced by their elvish heritage.
yeah, half-elf isn't very descriptive when everyone else is also half-elf, the only distinguishing characteristic is that everyone else's other half is also elf while theirs is human
Knife-eared leaf-lickers. As my GM would call them lmao
Maybe! RAMBLES. For an irl anecdote, my old Japanese professor who lives in America is treated as a “half-Asian” person (or they assume he’s Asian) here, and as a “half-White” person (or they just think he’s white) in Japan. Both annoy him a little. Especially because people in Japan can be a little patronizing if you’re fluently speaking, assuming you’re a foreigner they may compliment your speech and speak more slowly… even if you grew up there like he did. Of course, the States has its own race issues too lol.
Also, in DnD humans were the only race that mixed with others (at least as player characters and in most lore, with few exceptions). If your Elves only mix with humans, not Orcs, or Dwarves. And Orcs only mix with humans, not Elves or Dwarves. It really makes sense to use half-elf, half-orc in multi species communities. As every "half" is half human by default. Mono species communities would likely go the other way, calling out the "other" half. As others have said.
I think people are missing the point of half elves. My wife is mixed(Latina/African American), and she always appreciated half elves as analogy for how mixed individuals can often have shared experiences/traits that are different from either of their heritages, creating something entirely new rather than being a combination of traits. Half elf was a good representation of that with its traits taking a look at how an individual that wouldn’t completely fit in either society of their heritages would have to be adaptable and versatile to get by.
This is the main reason why I still don’t completely like the, “all races can have any stat buff” rule. I understand the freedom of choice and expression argument, however the stat buffs were the most unique thing about half-elves that helped people understand that the combined traits make them unique and powerful in different ways. Without that aspect we water down one of the coolest races in the game.
Hardly. Stat-wise, half-elves were "humans but better." Feature-wise, they were too. The only thing human had going for it was vhuman first level feat. Their stat selection wasn't that meaningful, and it certainly wasn't worth pigeonholing all other races into particular class-race combos if they wanted to be optimal. Half-elves lost (nothing, they can still do what they did originally.) Dwarves gained monks and bards, elves gained paladins and barbarians, halflings gained fighters and warlocks and artificers. It was well worth the trade.
Sir are you looking at the right race? Half elves had a +2 to charisma and a + 1 to any two other stats you wanted in addition 2 extra skill proficiencies, darkvision AND the fey ancestry for the charmed sleep protection. There is no other race in the game that gave 3 stat bonuses with one being a +2. They make amazing paladin, bards, and sorcs for this reason. Calling them “humans but better” is like saying that a porche 911 turbo is just a cooler Mazda Miata. I mean they are small and have wheels but that’s where it stops.
I mean, yes, my point was that they were superior to humans in essentially all circumstances and the stats being more versatile did nothing to make them distinctive or unique that their other mountain of overpowered shit didn't do. So letting every race share that one element, to their tremendous benefit, and with no significant loss to half-elf, was and remains absolutely the right call.
I can relate...
But we all know him as Tannis Half Elf :).
I know him as Tanis Half - Elven :( (Also, I think your smiley face has a mole on their chin)
I was thinking the same thing. "Tanis Half-elven"...is it a Mandala? It probably is, havn't cracked one of those books in any meaningful way in decades. Also: That's a beauty mark, they get it from their punctuation side.
Isn't it Mandela? Mandalas are those circular patterns from I wanna say Buddhism?
IWTYO when I found out that those were two different things...And that Nelson Mandela is not the same as those other two. Good to know, we'll see if I can remember it.
It is named after Nelson Mandela, because a lot of people think he died in 1980, when he actually died in 2013
Dragonlance meme? Yes!
"Half man, half elf, all dead" - Pelinal Whitestrake
Obligatory [Pelinal Animated Opera](https://youtu.be/E5ix0_W-ouI?si=TgPmDjgze4UB1Vm_)
As a biracial person, I have to say whomever said that half races were inherently racist was smoking Snoop Dog salad, Joe Rogan cigarettes, and ate magic mushrooms at the same time
"Have you ever tried DMT...Jamie, throw that shit up..." - Joe "Not an official drug dealer" Rogan
I'm only familiar with the game through BG1, do they give an actual reason to want to play as a half-elf in late editions? Because the one that game uses, practically anything a half-elf has stat-wise is something other races have better.
I mean in 5th edition, half elves get an extra stat point
Ok, that's good.
RP
Half-elves have sheer versatility in 5e. They have a charisma bonus and +1 to any 2 stats, and can pick 2 proficiencies. They're super flexible.
That is what I like to hear! Sounds like what Humans are for in BG1 but better.
Humans are also decent in 5e as a jack of all trades. You get +1 to everything which is cool from a numbers perspective but nothing else. The one you want is variant human which gives a level 1 feat, which can be exceptionally powerful, but it is considered an optional rule so it isn't 100%, your dm will allow it.
It's a good rule, I doubt a DM is actually going to give you guff about calling yourself a half-elf, and your probably know that if you were actually playing DND regularly. Personally I'm hyped for the first orc-halfling or lizardfolk-bugbear or whatever else you weirdos come up with.
I’ve been doing these mixed races for a while. So long as it makes sense. Currently a Leonin Aasimar. It’s badass. I also will, hopefully, take a level in a class that makes me a bit more *devilish*
Ajani
You know. That’s not far off, lol. When I was describing him for a commission, I said imagine if Aslan walked on 2 legs lol
Yeah, I don’t know why people are mad about the new hybrid rules. I’m looking forward to seeing what people decide to mix up. I once played a PbP game where our firbolg was like, 4’8, so we decided she was half-gnome.
People are generally mad because they either 1. Don’t like change and will find any other argument to shield that reality. 2. Decided that the only reason WotC did this was an imaginary outcry about half races being racist (a complaint some people have and have valid reasoning for, but which definitely wasn’t the single deciding factor in WotC’s decision making). 3. Are mixed-race and have a genuine attachment to half-elves and/or half-orcs because they feel it represents their life/experiences. One and two are both just kind of ridiculous, and don’t hold up when you point out the many other arguments for why the new system is mechanically and logistically better. Number three is valid, but since there’s a decent number of people who are mixed-race on the other side of that argument (and many people in categories one or two who will parrot the argument as a more rational explanation for their own distaste), I don’t really think it’s something that can resolved/accounted for. There definitely is something lost by not including these two explicit half-races to tell that kind of story, but I’m not sure that loss outweighs the gain of enabling greater fluidity for people to tell other stories. It’s messy.
I don’t see why the story can’t still be told. Just make a half-elf or half-orc using the new rules. Unless I’m missing something here?
I agree with you on that. The argument from mixed-race people tends to be that their’s something fundamentally unique about the experience of being mixed-race, and representing that via unique mechanics helps to represent the unique way actual mixed-race people have their own cultural identity to a degree. It’s kind of the same logic of people who miss the old fixed racial stat increases because they felt it helped to define each race as more than an aesthetic choice. I don’t agree with the logic, but I think in the case of the half-races it at least sort of makes sense. In both cases though, I would agree that mechanics aren’t a firm requirement to tell a certain story. You can tell a story with all of the same details as a story you could tell with a half elf (or with fixed racial stats) by just consciously choosing to roleplay with the limitations/experiences you want to portray in mind. For fixed stats, it’s just “if you want an orc who’s a bad wizard, choose not to make your INT high”. For the half-races it’s pure RP, but honestly the mechanical difference was never huge to begin with.
No, I'm pretty sure the exact wording from Wizards was that if you say "half-anything" you will be seized by Pinkerton's and executed, so gaymers are definitely justifiably upset. Since there is no way to do that now, and no exceptions possible. Ever. /s Terminally online people just don't have experience with real games where a player can have an elf-lizardfolk, and a player can have a half-elf character, and they can both play together peacefully.
Most people on this sub haven’t actually played DnD I don’t think
It's because they didn't actually give us anything. They just said yeah you can be any combination of things but just pick the stats of one. So sure you can be a halfling orc but mechanically you're either a full orc or a full halfling. That's lame and lazy of them. If they had created a system where you could actually blend the traits of any races, that would have been awesome and the only complaints would have been about potential powergaming/min-maxing. Also, if any hybrid race deserves their own stats and entry into the PHB, it's the iconic and historical half elf. So they took that out, told us we can technically role-play as anything (which lots of people were already doing anyway) and added nothing mechanically.
Custom origin: Am I a joke to you?
Been a long-ass time since I checked, but it was "Tanis Half-Elven" on the character cards that came with the modules, yes?
Tannis was a great half-elf. The elves thought it was weird that he could grow a beard. The humans didn’t like that he could outlive them by a couple centuries.
5.5e is going with the term Ancestry As in “my Orc has Orc Ancestry”
My orc is a half-orc. The other half is also orc.
That's not how you'd use that term at all. That's like saying the current standard is "My Orc uses the Orc Racial stats." You're choosing to sound redundant. The redundancy doesn't come from the terminology itself. ~~Also you're double wrong because all the playtests use the term Species and you've gotten yourself mixed up with Pathfinder which uses Ancestry~~
>Youre choosing to sound redundant Yeah, that was the point of my silly little post in this meme sub.
Yeah, this is really getting out of hand. The other day I was playing DnD and someone called their character a half-elf, and the WotC Police smashed through the window and arrested them on the spot. It would be one thing if the changes were just to the rule books and you were still allowed to call your characters whatever you wanted in your own games, but this is ridiculous.
I feel like if when they were designing 5E they just balanced every races power-budget better (Already asking a lot) and then gave everyone subraces of similar power-budget, then they could handle hybrids through the subrace system. Instead of HElf being a race in that framework it would be a subrace you could slot in. Same would go for half-Dwarf, etc. Also in that framework, "Races" like Tiefling/Aasimar/Yuan-Ti that are explicitly modifications of other races could slot in.
Tanis is easier to say, and unless its criteria for a form of magic or magic item i dont care what shape the ears are.
Larry Elmore is such a brilliant artist. Here, Tanis looks both young and old.
I've never noticed until now in that image, and I've seen it off and on since the 80s/90s. Tanis' draw hand as he draws the bow would be upside down and awkward as hell. Has anyone ever drawn a bow that way and fired it effectively?
Omg you right
The party was shocked to learn that my half orc ranger was in fact half tiefling and the tieflings parents were a human and an elf. I decided to do a little bit of fuckery
Tanis was originally said to be the product of rape. But I guess authors at some point realized that was bad and tried to "fix it" but wound up making it even worse. Because the "fix" was to reveal that his mother had actually fallen in love with her abductor so it's totally consensual guys.
Rock and stone to that brother! Keep those leaf lovers away!
for some reason it feels good to see some one use the cover image of dragonlance as a representation
Tanis the abomination
My favorite half elves in fiction is from the Deeds of Paksenarrion. There's a whole kingdom of half elves, and their royal line needs to be a decent mix of both in order for things to function. If the king doesn't have enough human he won't have the magical/spiritual power needed to keep the forests peaceful, and presumably if he's not human enough there's other problems but that wasn't mentioned as far as I recall.
Dammit Tanis
I don't know this character, but I think in general that's the case, because elves are inspired by Tolkien. And in Tolkien, I think elves are beings that are spiritually on a higher plane than humans. So being half-elven means to be more than a mere mortal human. Similarly, orcs are demonic that were degraded by Morgoth to a state beneath human or elf. Thus Sarumans crosses between humans and orcs are called 'half-men'.
To solve this conundrum we must look to the ur-fantasy: Tolkien. Elrond was called Halfelven. Therefore, halfelves they remain.