Times where you Can't Argue with Elves in Literature.
- The People in Artemis Fowl call humans "Mud Men", and the few human characters they interact with never really call them out on it. This is somewhat justified as fairies, as a species, are more environmentally minded and peaceful than humans are and Artemis gives them credit for that. Individually however, there are plenty of shady and some downright evil fairies, and for all their advanced technology, Mud Boy Artemis can rival the best fairy scientists.
- Kitai of the Marat in Codex Alera often talks about the shortcomings of the human Alerans, but she avoids the usual problems of this trope because: she herself is a likeable and sympathetic character, her exclamations of "_____ is/are insane!" are usually a Running Gag played for comic effect, her observations take the form of "your people are crazy" rather than "my people are awesome" and her criticisms are of social institutions that are either harmlessly ridiculous (the prudishness about nudity and sex) or clearly immoral (slavery), so she has a point. Any annoyance is also reduced by the fact that her people are clearly not intended by the author to be a perfect Superior Species; in the first book they are The Horde of savage cannibals whom the Big Bad easily manipulates into doing his dirty work with the intention of crushing them afterwards, and though they quickly show themselves to be a complex people their society clearly has a host of its own problems, even if they're different problems from the "civilised" Alerans.
- The Abh in Crest of the Stars and its sequels, being essentially Space Elves, fits this trope perfectly, to the point that the Abh Empress can arrogantly proclaim to a group of human ambassadors that if they win the interstellar war that is brewing behind the scenes, there will be permanent peace within the galaxy because there will no longer be any more petty disputes amongst humans that can escalate into all-out war. And then the trope is subverted by the other half of the humanity (notoriously, Abh do not consider themselves a different race) basically saying "Screw You, Elves!", and going to war. Both societies are shown as seriously flawed, though Abh still come out as less of the hypocrites somehow.
- In The Death Mage Who Doesn't Want a Fourth Time, it's mentioned that a lot of people hate elves because they often go for high-ranking positions and then never leave, spending thousands of years as dukes and viscounts while humans only get a few decades if any. Imagine applying for a job with two years' experience, only to get screwed over by a guy with two hundred.
- Discworld uses this with The Fair Folk, whose glamour produces a crushing inferiority complex in others. Readily averted by cats, bees, and any character that thinks like a witch (that is: very, very hard). Also by dwarves and trolls, whose instinctive reaction on meeting an elf is to bash it with something hard, heavy and/or sharp.
- Steven Brust's Dragaera novels are built on the question of "if elves are so amazing and perfect, how come they aren't dominating the world?" In Dragaera, they are. However, this comes not from any moral superiority: just the advantages of a greater size, a much longer lifespan and a culture that integrates 100,000 years of study in magic and strategy. It's even suggested they were made so by their Abusive Precursors. As a result, they're often outrageous bastards who consider everything they do to be in the right. Humans residing in the elven lands suffer a stigma like that of immigrants, restricted to lower-class jobs and expected to stay out of the way.
- In Dragonlance the Qualinesti elves and especially the Silvanesti elves. Their common belief is that they are the chosen race of the god of good, Paladine (despite failing in actually doing something good to the world), they're the best in everything, and they blame humans for every single bad thing happened to Krynn, especially the Cataclysm and the return of the chromatic dragons. Oh, they're also so arrogant that they'll enslave their less advanced cousins, the Kagonesti. They eventually pay for their hubris by losing their homelands (Silvanost's taken by minotaurs, while Qualinost is destroyed by a giant dragon).
- What makes things worse is that, according to all lore on the setting, elves genuinely were created by the Gods of Good, led by Paladine. Then again, as has been noted, The Gods of Good really aren't that convincing at being forces of good...
- Let's really be clear here: the awfulness of the elves can be summarized quite simply in the fact that they caused the Cataclysm. Elven bigots who served as councilors to the King-Priest were secretly goading him along the whole time, planning on basically using humans united by the King-Priest to exterminate first the creatures of Evil (goblinoids, ogres, etc)... and then to wipe out fellow creatures of Good and Neutral who they found unpleasant, such as dwarves, gnomes and Kender. As we all know, this led to the destruction of the Old World. In fact, making things worse, the story of Lord Soth the Death Knight explicitly calls out that he was manipulated into abandoning his quest to stop the Cataclysm by three elven priestesses who were in on the conspiracy and, with typical elven arrogance, didn't believe the Gods of Good would actually agree to destroy the world to preserve the Balance Between Good and Evil. About the only silver lining is that at least those three priestesses found themselves damned to an eternity of torment as banshees for their sins.
- Various magical species (including the Sidhe) in The Dresden Files have this attitude towards themselves, but it's an unusual example of this trope because the various species are not seen as such by humans; Harry defies the hell out of the "don't mock them back" aspect of this trope (and says Screw You, Elves! at every available opportunity) and the fact that no other humans do it is more because the elves are incredibly dangerous rather than because the humans agree with their declarations of superiority. Clearly an example where the author fully intended them to be annoying even when they aren't being openly antagonistic.
- A mild example, but in Elminster: The Making of a Mage, Braer gently lectures Elminster (when he's become a female version of himself named Elmara) on how elves live in tune with nature, while humans destroy everything which they can't control.
- The gnomes of the Gnomes faux field guide are quietly disapproving of humanity for the way we despoil nature, in comparison to their own ways. When the authors try to defend the human race, they are quickly embarrassed into stopping. This irritates many readers in regards to what is otherwise a very fine book, because the fact that the gnomes have one-thousandth our mass (and therefore require one-thousandth the resources to feed), can perfectly control their (already low) fertility, live for hundreds of years, can understand animal speech, and have access to magic probably makes it a little easier for them to live in harmony with Mother Earth, y'know? But they're never called out on this.
- The antihero of Jack Vance's Green Magic
is a master of the Black and White Arts who discovers the existence of an even more powerful form of magic. He actually does argue with elves, or rather the sprites of the Green Plane, and makes himself such a nuisance to them that they eventually give up and teach him Green magic, although they repeatedly warn him it's a terrible idea. They were right: it turns out that human beings are just too primitive to ever become competent in Green magic... oh, and once exposed to the indescribable beauty of the Green plane, no human will ever again be content with anything on Earth. - There's a rather interesting twist on this trope in Kathryn Lasky's Guardians of Ga'Hoole books, in which all the main characters are owls. The owls consider themselves superior to other birds because most other birds don't regurgitate pellets. The other birds never take offense.
- Neither do the nest-maid snakes, who are defined entirely as servants to owl families.
- The Houyhnhnms of Swift's Gulliver's Travels are about as bad as it gets. They aren't a magical race, but they fill this trope quite well. Then again, considering that Gulliver is an Unreliable Narrator who worships any backward race he encounters, there's much literary debate over whether the reader is actually expected to have such an adverse reaction to the Houyhnhnms and their hypocrisy.
- Harry Potter:
- Wizards themselves: they restrict contact with normal people, and consider the problems of the country they live in to be nothing to do with them. They are shown as superior (and arrogant because of it) all the time. However, this is ultimately averted. A recurring theme of the series is that wizard culture is heavily flawed, featuring casual Fantastic Racism and a comically incompetent government. The one time a character does get to argue with wizards, it's the Prime Minister of the UK, who is bewildered at how badly they've been managing the war with Voldemort, and it's pretty clear that he's got a point.
- The centaurs refuse to accept any sort of human dominion over themselves, and indeed even contact with humans is seen as a crime. Though it ends up being averted, as Hagrid, arguably the character who has the most contact with centaurs, regularly gets frustrated with them and considers them to have their heads in the clouds. Neither the narration nor other characters consider him wrong. In fact, Firenze, a centaur who is eventually banished for continued contact with humans, is treated as the most heroic and open-minded of his kind. Ironically, the only elves we do see in the series avert the trope entirely, as they have a psychological compulsion to serve their master's wishes.
- The House of Night provides us with a serious in-universe example. Vampyre society is considered- both in-universe and by the authors- to be completely perfect. The narrative explicitly states that vampyres are smarter, hotter, stronger, and more creative than humanity. The only good humans in the story all assist vampyres in some way. Any humans who don't like vampyres are invariably hateful, murderous people who are hopelessly envious of the vampyres' perfection and probably serving evil.
- The Elves of Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle. The protagonist Eragon, who lives with them for quite a while, doesn't seem to notice (and also becomes elven later on). The text makes it apparent that the elves are more in tune with nature, more logical, more attractive, more graceful, more physically capable, more intelligent, more magical, and even more sexually liberated than humans are. It runs so deep in this series that non-Elves will regularly point out their own inferiority to Elves (usually along the lines of "We're not as good as you elves at this, but we manage"). The Elf being spoken to always accepts this as indisputable fact, and never disagrees.
- In Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, the gentleman with the thistle-down hair is absolutely convinced that his beloved humans enjoy his games as much as he does. The idea that they are consistently horrified by their slavery on his account is so far removed from his own frame of reference that they just can't convey the notion to him.
- Averted in Shannon Messenger's Keeper of the Lost Cities where Elvin society ends up not being as perfect as it seemed at first glance, with elves practicing a form of eugenism called Matchmaking and any elf that does not fit their ideal is shunned and condemned to live their whole life as a second-class citizen. Still, they are eternally young, beautiful, have no concept of racism by Wordof God and are seemingly unable of violence, to the point where they keep looking down on humans who are constantly at war with each other — though the Big Bad admires humans for this feature, as elves literally die from hurting others because their minds are too fragile to handle culpability. They all possess superhuman abilities beyond human grasp such as telekinesis, thermal regulation, super strength and most of them possess an extra Superpower (called a Talent), such as Invisibility, Technopathy, or Telepathy, that they unlock in their teenage years. They are also heavily implied to be much smarter than humans, as one of the main characters openly mocks Einstein saying he's "not very smart" and tells the main character, who is in 12th grade at 12, she's average by Elvin standards as the dumbest elf ever would outmatch the smartest human with little to no effort. They are also much more advanced technologically than humans, as they have achieved teleportation and claim they could expand human lifetimes, treat cancer and infertility, but choose not to because they believe humans would abuse their technology or find a way to make it harmful. Thus, nuclear bombs were derived from humans corrupting Elvin technology - at a time elves decided to "monitor" humans and help them from the shadows - and things as mundane as chocolate cake and electricity were gifted by the elves. Plus, it doesn't help that every human that encounters them is in awe of their beauty and perfection and does not call them out for being condescending toward humans and being arrogant in general. They literally had a giant statue of a human with "rough features" kneeling in front of a perfectly beautiful elf built in a city they intended to be primarily inhabited by humans. And once it was discovered that the reason why humans tried to overthrow them millennia ago — which is also the reason why elves choose to abandon them and hide themselves in their sheltered world — was because a group of elves were kidnapping them and conducting experiments on them while the Elvin Council refused to address the problem, Elvin authorities and the main character, even though she was raised by humans, decide not to reveal the information in fear of causing a riot.
- The Adem from The Kingkiller Chronicle are this, effortlessly better than every other society martially, socially, musically, morally, and able to refute any objection the protagonist has to them.
- The Next in Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's The Long Earth series come across as this. Aside from the usual traits associated with this trope (sexual liberation, preposterously advanced intelligence, perfectly logical, almost perfectly utopian society, outward condescension to regular humans), regular humans routinely talk up their superiority and are even implied to be on the path to completely replace humanity in the future.
- J. R. R. Tolkien's Elves (of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion) aren't really like this, but some of the second-hand false impressions of them by people like Boromir and dwarves (as well as false portrayal in adaptations) fit the trope. It very much depends on the Elf. Thingol starts out as a straight example, but the trope is totally averted with Finrod Felagund, who's prepared to risk his life to help out the son of his human friend/fellow warrior.
- This is something of a Justified Trope (to the extent that it even applies) once you read the backstory - the living Elves remaining in Middle-Earth by the time of The War of the Ring are the last survivors of a once-great race who have endured a series of rather catastrophic wars which basically ended their control of the land. As a result, the remainder are a) atypically intelligent, kind, and badass, and b) very much aware of their people's past failings. Basically, all the Elves you Could Argue With were killed or left Middle-Earth for good centuries ago.
- Averted in The Hobbit, in which the Elves of Mirkwood (and King Thranduil in particular) act more like paranoid rednecks than untouchable paragons of greatness. They live in a dank forest overrun by giant evil spiders, kidnap and imprison the Dwarves for no good reason, and then throw a huge party and get so blackout drunk that the Main Characters are able to escape. In contrast, the Noldor of Rivendell are portrayed as wise and noble, but they also avert the trope by being friendly and gracious hosts.
- Frodo himself in The Fellowship Of The Ring gently mocks Gildor for answering a question with a vague proverb by coming up with another proverb that one should not ask elves because they will they say yes and no at the same timenote . Averted because Gildor himself thought it was Actually Pretty Funny.
- Subverted in Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard. The elves of Alfheim think this is the case. Most of them have a very high opinion of themselves and believe that they're naturally superior to the other races of the nine worlds. The reality is that they aren't impressive at all. They're mortal, aren't graceful or in tune with nature, and they haven't been able to use magic for centuries. They aren't even attractive, as they're described as being weirdly thin with unsettlingly large eyes. Needless to say, nobody agrees with their perception of themselves nor do they make any effort to hide it.
- The Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn books by Tad Williams. The Sithi can't help coming up with subtle put-downs, condescending behavior, and reproaches about old injustices done to them by ancestors who have been dead for centuries. Their high-bred human allies mostly ignore them.
- The Aurënfaie in Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner novels have this going on in spades. Longer lifespans (and thus perceived greater experience and wisdom) than humans. Innate magical potential (all the more so because human magical potential originates from cross-breeding with them). A language that is difficult for most humans to pronounce properly. Plus, a Monotheistic religion while the humans are following their own gaggle of silly gods. All of this leads to a tendency to drag out any kind of decision making for a length of time that makes most humans want to give up and leave.
- Lampshaded in The Obsidian Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory. The first human protagonist, Kellen, does quickly come to admire elves and elven culture, and these elves are fairly varied and polite and, well, human, as elves go. He does take minor offense when an older elf telling him some ancient history implies that humans did something or other because it's a natural human failing. A later human protagonist on the same side flatly dislikes elves for their formality and their absolute perfectionist attitude, though since they're all fighting a war he tries to keep it under wraps. It's actually a saying in that 'verse that you can't win an argument with elves since they'll just change the subject.
- It is literally impossible to win an argument with the Lambertians of Permutation City. Their method of communication is structured in such a way that any logical error is necessarily a syntactical error as well, meaning that if a group of Lambertians is told a fallacious argument, they will notice the error within a matter of minutes and then tell you what's really true. This backfires on the outsiders who seek their help to save their own universe, because the Lambertians live Inside a Computer System, but are not advanced enough to know that computers can exist. Therefore, they find the claim that they were created to be absurd because they have worked out a theory that explains how their universe could have come into existence naturally. Not only do they try to "correct" their creators and do nothing to help, but since their creators are also living in a simulation (it's complicated) this somehow makes the first simulation irrelevant, and the other universe collapses.
- Weirdly subverted in The Riyria Revelations. The elves are better than humans in every way (stronger, faster, tougher, more technologically advanced, and better at magic), but they have a single crippling weakness: their incredibly low birthrate. This allowed the humans to beat the elves in an ancient war by simply Zerg Rushing them until the elves arranged a peace treaty to end the (to them) unbearable losses. As one of the main characters put it, "the elves were drowning in a floodtide of humanity."
- An interesting aversion occurs in Terry Brooks' Shannara series. The elves there are the only sapient race not descended from humanity, and really are older and more naturally magical than humanity or the other races. Interestingly, though, they had, well before the beginning of the first series, forgotten their heritage and the vast bulk of their magical abilities. That is not to say that there were no arrogant elves, but the primary victims of their arrogance were other elves. The elves as a people had no particular sense of superiority, even during periods when they were among the best organized and most powerful factions.
- The Star Trek: Destiny series features the Caeliar, a race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who have evolved almost completely beyond the need for physical bodies, have no crime, poverty, or want, and are devoted completely to artistic and scientific pursuits. They have just enough respect for others' beliefs to not try to convince other races that the Caeliar's way is correct, but no amount of cajoling will convince them that the Caeliar's way is wrong. They are severely isolationist but are Actual Pacifists, which leads various characters who stumble upon their home planet to become permanent "guests". Not a bad place to be, all things considered, but don't argue too much. Make too much noise or disrupt their work and the Caeliar will teleport you to a nice uninhabited planet a few billion light-years away, just to make sure you never get home with information about them.
- Star Wars Legends rarely relies on this trope, but the Caamasi might count. They're basically a martyred race of pacifists who will fight if they must and are tirelessly moral. Still, they don't feature all that heavily, and most of them don't spend their page time lording it over other cultures. When other races try to hold them up as this for political reasons in The Hand of Thrawn the Caamasi get shouted down for disagreeing.
- In the books by Karen Traviss, the Mandalorians. To most others, they're at best Proud Warrior Race Guys, at worst Proud Sociopathic Soldier Race Guys.
- In C.L. Wilson's Tairen Soul books, the Fey are so self-righteous and brash that the "evil/stupid" humans are on the verge of cancelling their alliance. The strange thing is that the author is completely with the Fey on that. The author seems to think it is their natural right to be arrogant. The "good" humans are the ones who don't take offense at being treated with condescension.
- A self-righteous example would be the Hero Antagonist Mizzamir in the book Villains by Necessity. The other elves have all left for a distant world, but he remained behind to guide mankind to a glorious future. No one dares argue with him, even as he brainwashes dissident citizens into loyal ones.
- The Cetagandians in the Vorkosigan Saga are a human variety of this, being obsessed with aesthetic accomplishments and possessing an extreme superiority complex. Naturally Barrayarans have other ideas.
- Betans can be kind of like this, everyone making a fuss about how morally superior they are. Mind you this is a planet whose GNP is based on weapons development and sex tourism.
- The Barrayarans themselves are this in matters of war, frequently dismissing other militaries for their supposed lack of discipline (and recruitment of women).
- Timothy Zahn's Warhorse has the Tampies, who live in complete harmony with all living things and have no trouble being snooty about it.
- Lampshaded in The Waste Lands when Eddie sees the city of Lud in the distance and muses about finding some "wise fuckin' elves!" who would give the ka-tet some food and supplies and maybe tell them the best route to the Dark Tower. He's in an After the End Crapsack World, so he's not surprised when this doesn't happen.
