Demihuman

An elf, a halfling, and a dwarf.

"Then, in the good lands, they came back. Arising from their long sleep: fairies, elves, dwarves... The true ancestors of man."

—Narrator, Wizards

Demihumans are the Fantasy Counterpart to Rubber-Forehead Aliens. Related to Half Human Hybrids, Human Aliens, and Human Subspecies. Mythology and folklore have no shortage of fantastical beings that resemble good old Homo sapiens until you start to notice something off about them. Depending on the story, they've been called elves, dwarves, giants, angels, trolls and many other names. Most of the Standard Fantasy Races are demihumans of some sort.

Typically, creatures that fit this trope have some sort of physical trait that distinguishes them from regular humans. They may have:

• A combination of stature and body shape which is just far enough from human norms that it would be clearly odd or unusual without being obviously nonhuman.
• Some physical feature (or more than one) that is slightly yet obviously outside human norms, such as Unusual Ears or Cute Little Fangs, and instantly identifies them as nonhuman to any racist or savvy human character.
• Some sort of affinity for, or resistance to, Functional Magic.
• A nonstandard lifespan.

They may also:

• Have a combination of skin, hair, and eye color that is outside the range for humans.
• Some different preferred environment to humans (e.g. mountains, caves, tundra, deep forest).
• Some sort of crafting/building ability. Lots of dwarves have this trait.
• Be Always Chaotic Evil, Always Lawful Good, etc.
• Possess abilities/senses well beyond (and/or skills far superior to) the human norm.

This serves as a supertrope to numerous types of demihumans with their own tropes, although all or only some of them may be portrayed as such in any given work:

• All Trolls Are Different
• Angelic Tropes
• Beast Man
  • Little Bit Beastly
• Elf Tropes
• Fairy Tropes
• Hobbits
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same
• Our Elves Are Different
• Our Giants Are Bigger
• Our Gnomes Are Weirder
• Our Humans Are Different
• Our Ogres Are Hungrier
• Our Orcs Are Different
• This Index Has Horns

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The titular characters in Interviews with Monster Girls are referred to as Demi-Humans due to being Cute Monster Girls. In-series, they prefer the term "demi".
• Delicious in Dungeon has elves, halflings, dwarves and gnomes included under the term "human", with the term "demi-human" reserved for monsters with human-like features and intelligence such as orcs and goblins. Laios argues with Chilchuck over whether or not fish-type mermaids are more monster or demi-human. There are also beastmen in the setting, but they are artificially created when a beast soul and human soul are put in the same vessel. The effects of this can vary from relatively minor changes as we see with Itsuzumi who has grown fur all over her body and grown cat ears and a tail, to rather monstrous changes such as with Falin, who has turned into a giant half human half dragon monstrosity after being fused with a dragon soul.

Fan Works

• With Strings Attached: C'hou has elves, but Word of God states that they're just another race of humans with pointy ears and fine features. However, the Hunter's world has goblins and trolls.
• In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, C'hou now has plenty, though not the standard ones (though there are some of those amongst the outworlders). Among many others, C'hou is now home to demihumans such as Brillymen, Gashans, and Svenjaya. Most humans take a dim view of these folks (e.g., the Svenjaya are indentured servants on the Flying Island of Tipaan). Because the four are actually nice to them, interesting things happen.

Literature

• Age of Fire: Humans, elves and dwarves, collectively known as the hominids to other creatures and as the naran, or speaking peoples, to themselves. Dragons believe them to have been created by the spirits of the elements in order to create beings who can kill dragons, while they consider themselves to descend from the blighters, a species of subterranean morlock-like beings that are also considered hominids by other beings.
• Bazil Broketail: The Enemy uses imps, who are somewhat human-like and born from captured women, as their main foot soldiers. Elves appear occasionally as well, along with dwarves, with stereotypical shapes. Trolls and ogres also have the same basic body plan, but are clearly inhuman.
• Codex Alera: The Marat. They look human, but they all have white hair, Bond Creatures, and some other things that set them apart from humans. Justified, as they are implied to be descendants of Neanderthals who were brought to Another Dimension.
• Discworld: Dwarves, gnomes, vampires, werewolves. Trolls are about as normal as people; they're just biologically very distinct — demihuman in treatment, but not in biology. Elves are Always Chaotic Evil. Orcs appear in Unseen Academicals, .
• The Lost Years of Merlin and its Sequel Series have a lot of the standard races, like dwarves and elves, and add a few more, including some werebeasts like deer people and eaglemen. There are also the flameons, who are basically orange-eyed humans who can shoot fire from their hands.
• Record of Lodoss War: Elves, dark elves, dwarves, and grassrunners are treated as this. Goblins, ogres, and kobolds are treated as barely-human monsters.
• The Rising of the Shield Hero: The term "demi-human" (ajin in Japanese) is a broad category of non-human races that have some physical traits distinguishing them from humans. The most common are those with animal ears and tails, such as Raphtalia.
• Rivers of London: The demi-monde are various beings that look human enough that they don't get many strange looks in the pub, but have an innate and often hereditary connection to magic. Words like "elf", "goblin" etc. get thrown around, but there's no consistent definitions for them, except that The High Fae come from Another Dimension.
• Tolkien's Legendarium: Elves, Hobbits, and Dwarves, and maybe orcs/goblins and trolls depending on your interpretation.
  • There's some grounds for supposing that Hobbits are a sort of pygmy human. Tolkien went into some details about the origins of the other humanoid species, but never mentioned anything about the Hobbits.
  • Adaptations of Tolkien's races and their Theme Park Versions appear in many, many, fantasy novels since, sometimes filtered through Dungeons & Dragons.

Live-Action TV

• The Outpost: Blackbloods look visually indistinguishable from humans except for having pointed ears with black tips and, well, black blood. This is because they're all descended from a human woman along with a Master, making them all Half Human Hybrids ultimately.
• Cursed (2020): Sky Folk look visually identical to humans, while Ash Folk are distinguished only by facial markings that look like black tears dripping down their faces.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has Dwarves, Proto-Hobbits, with special mention going to the Elves which are barely different from Men, and the Orcs, who are just corrupted Elves.

Pinball

• Devil's Dare has a gaggle of green-skinned demons with large dragon wings, horns, pointy tails, and three-toed talon feet (on the males, anyway).

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes (in 2e), irda (in Dragonlance) tieflings and eladrin (in 4e), etc.
  • The trope-namer; 1st and second edition D&D used the term "demi-human" to describe the "good" races and "humanoid" to describe the "evil" races of orcs, goblins, bugbears, etc.
    • And Planescape did away with this trope entirely, explaining what the prefix "demi-" actually means. For example, demigod doesn't mean "like a god" it means "half god".
    • Parodied in Toon: in the "ToonQuest" setting the equivalent to humans were Dogs, dwarves became Badgers, elves turned into Squirrels, and halflings became Mice. The capitalization is where the 'demi' part comes in — yes, these races are specifically distinct from regular old Toon dogs, badgers, squirrels, or mice as dictated by the rules of the mighty wizard Teeyessarr.
• In Shadowrun, several 'traditional' demihuman races exist, but count more as Human Subspecies In-Universe. All of them arose from baseline humans when the magic came back and can interbreed with both 'baseline' humans and with each other (their offspring are not hybrids, but belong to one of the parents' subspecies). "Metahumanity" is the term used to cover both humans and demihumans. There are, however, some (much rarer) humanoid species who do not have a human origin: Centaurs, Pixies, Drakes and Shapeshifters (who are intelligent animals able to take human shape) being the most common.
• Marvel Super Heroes uses the term "demihuman", but it refers to Beast Men.
• In New Horizon, not only are there three races of Ridiculously Human Robots, but there's also the group of humans who merge with wild animals called Medeans.
• Warhammer: Humans co-exist with elves, dwarfs, halflings, ogres and (in some editions of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay) gnomes. Most of these races were created by the Old Ones, which may be why they look superficially similar. There's also the beastmen, a corrupted and savage race created when ancient humans were exposed to the mutating effects of Chaos and wild magic.
• Warhammer 40,000 started as a straight analogue of Warhammer IN SPAAAAACE but evolved over time with some additions and some removals. So far there have been Squats (Dwarfs), Eldar (High Elves), Dark Eldar (Dark Elves), Exodites (Wood Elves), Ratlings (Halflings), Ogryn (Ogres), Orks (Orcs) and Space Undead (Undead) (the latter started off literally as skeletons in space but have now become the Necron legions).
• Exalted:
  • The Mountain Folk, also known as Jadeborn, look almost identical to humans (even if the Worker and Warrior Castes look like fairly short ones), except for the stony appearance lent by the fact that they're "born" by being carved out of magical jade, as well as innately having a variety of magical powers and generally greater lifespan. They're actually supposed to be the race that humanity was based off of, and are even capable of interbreeding with them (the only form of sexual reproduction the Jadeborn experience).
  • Some groups, like the Lintha, think of themselves like this, but they're really just another Human Subspecies.
  • There are also some places in the East where local plant life has developed mobility and sapience as well as vaguely human shapes (but still generally having the biological features of plants).

Video Games

• The Elder Scrolls
  • The races of Mer (Elves). While primarily humanoid in size and shape, each race of Mer shares at least a few features outside the range of normal humans including unusual skin tones, classic Pointy Ears, and elongated skulls of varying degrees.
  • There also exist several "Beast Races" (also known as "Betmer") in Tamriel, with the Lizard Folk Argonians and Cat Folk Khajiit being the only ones to make an appearance in the series to date. Both have generally humanoid forms but numerous saurine and feline traits as well, respectively. The Khajiit complicate things in that while usually only one form shows up in each game (Elder Scrolls Online being the exception), they have multiple "furstocks" decided by which phase of the moons they were born under that vary in appearance so strongly that on one end they fall squarely into this trope (the Ohmes, who look like on average slightly shorter wood elves) while on the other they don't even qualify for Beast Man (such as the Alfiq, who look like housecats).
• Chrono Cross uses the term for Funny Animals. The Fair Folk are considered a subspecies.
• Elemental — War of Magic - The only "official" one is the Fallen, a bunch of half-dragon, half-human gents.
• BlazBlue has these in the form of Beastkin, human-animal hybrids manufactured to fight the Black Beast. These hybrids are considered by almost everybody to be second-class citizens.
• Elden Ring: there are several different varieties. The ones literally called "demihumans" are a race of savages that have a cross between ape and dog features, generally becoming more bestial as they increase in strength and status. There's also the Misbegotten, people with animal characteristics such as scales or wings, who are used as slave labor by the humans in the Lands Between. Finally, the "Omens", very large, fat humanoids with twisted horns growing out of their bodies in just about every place you can think of. They're considered cursed and are shunned, though a few Omens can be seen fighting alongside normal humans here and there.

Webcomics

• Twice Blessed: Elves, dwarves, gnomes, goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, ogres, etc. Like OotS below, it's based on Dungeons & Dragons.
• The Order of the Stick: Again, elves, dwarves, halflings, goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, ogres. Fitting, as it's based on Dungeons & Dragons.
• Drowtales: see here.
• Linburger has the Cyll, the Trokks, Firne, and Mirrakae. All of which suffer Fantastic Racism, and most live in poverty in the slums. Though there are a few rich demihumans, such as a pornstar.
• Speak With Monsters mocks the human-centric nature of this trope with a list of alternate names for humans, ranging from "double halflings" to "I can't believe it's not bugbear."
• El Goonish Shive has elves, who are offspring of Immortals and humans, and Greater Chimera, who are offspring of humans and a species of aliens called Uryuoms through the aliens' Bizarre Alien Reproduction. Greater Chimera can have animals among their genetic parents but if they don't they are visually identical to humans except for their very unusual eyes and the fact that they have at least a pair of furry antennae on their heads. ^note though these are similar in appearance to Hair Antennae, they are prehensile and have other functions
• My Impossible Soulmate: Kitsunes, bastet, nereids, skyfolk, drake, lamias are all inhabitants of The Other World.

Web Original

• The art of Fredrik KT Andersson (Not Safe for Work!): elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs (who look like cavemen with tusks), trolls (who look like a human with a lion's tail). Not to mention tons of Half Human Hybrids, many of them the result of a certain bard who gives new meaning to Extreme Omnisexual:
  King: No, no, NO! I said slay the dragon, not lay the dragon!
• In a similar vein to the BlazBlue example above, the Faunus of RWBY are humans with animal traits. And like the aforementioned example, they are also discriminated against. A notable few just decided to take a more... radical approach to their protests.
• There are many different humanoid races present in the setting of There is no GATE; we did not fight there, including standard fantasy races such as elves and dwarves that were already present in Gate, but also races created for the sake of the roleplay. These include Wolfos, Harpies, the Drex, Uruks, and many others.

Western Animation

• The Fairly OddParents! has fairies, genies, pixies, anti-fairies, and lawn gnomes.
  • Fairies have insect wings and are the size of children. Interestingly, their eyes match their hair.
  • Genies are about the size of humans, and have tails of smoke. They fly, despite not having wings.
  • Pixies are like fairies but evil, and all sound like Ben Stein.
• Winx Club has several examples, most of them overlapping with Rubber-Forehead Aliens seeing they are from a magical dimension, yes, but there are plenty of planets in said dimension.
  • Fairies, witches, and magical warriors in general are identical to humans with the only difference being they can use magic and, in the case of fairies and witches, have magical transformations. It's implied at least Earth's fairies can breed with humans without problems, though it's not entirely clear whether the descendants will always get magic (like Roxy).
  • The Ethereal Fairies and the first fairy, Arcadia, are shining, mystical humanoids whose status can only be described as demi goddesses.
  • Andros has an underwater kingdom populated by merfolk. Fairy mermaids seem to have permanent wings attached to their backs, opposed to their terrestrial counterparts who only summon their wings when transformed. Some witch mermaids have tails from different submarine creatures.
  • In Magix there are Pixies which are, essentially, miniature fairies with a more chibi bodybuild and also permanent wings. They can bond with fairies, boosting them both. Protecting the Red Tower (the entrance of another dimension) in Magix's Barrier Mountain, there is a herd of centaurs. The Downland is inhabited by trogs who have beige skin, bulbous eyes, and sometimes more than two arms,
    • Alfea (Magix's the fairy academy) has a rather interesting collection of demihuman professors. Barring other fairies, there's an elf, a leprechaun, and a paladin with angel-like wings made of Hard Light. They are the only known members of their respective species/classes.
  • The oceans of all the planets in the Enchanted Dimension have gates guarded by the selkies — miniature mermaids. They are the demihumans who resemble humans the less — technicolor skin tones and eyes with no sclerae. The selkies are similar in design to that of the Guardian of the Sirenix and the Undines (nymph waters) inhabiting Magix's lakes and the.
  • The comics introduce a whole lot of demihumans such as vampires, werewolves, an elven dimension, the Gingko spirit (kind of a Greek dryad), Lamya (a mummy), Melusina (half-serpent), the Atlanteans (merfolk but with far more fish features), and Princess Astrid (a literal Ice Person, made of ice, powers of ice).

Real Life

• Neanderthals, a physically hardier species of hominid (or possibly sub-species - it seems they weren't as different to us as was thought at first and inter-breeding may have been possible). Anthropologists have even speculated that many modern people of virtually all ancestry but sub-Saharan African may in fact have Neanderthal ancestors. The Cro-Magnon subspecies won out in the end over that durability through a pelvis better shaped for running and a better ability to throw projectiles (like spears).

---