Screw You Elves / Literature

Screw You, Elves! moments in Literature.

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• Animorphs:
  • The Andalites get quite a bit of this after it turns out they're not quite the benevolent saviors they first appeared to be, especially after it turns out their big plan regarding the Yeerk invasion of Earth is to let as many Yeerks as possible crowd onto the planet before frying the whole thing. And every time the kids came into contact with the Andalites, they would beg for help. The whole time, the Andalites believed that the Animorphs were lying, in order to get special treatment. Naturally, Jake tells the Andalite generals to go stick it up their asses in the most polite way possible.
  • From #38:
    Jake: Andalites are very fast, those snakes are faster. One move from your boys and they will die... Now we stop playing games, you're not the Andalite fleet, and I'm not going to snap a salute and say 'Yes Sir!' We deal as equals. Which, to be honest, is generous of us under the circumstances.
    Gonrod: I command here. Am I clear on that?
    Jake: No, sir. This is Earth. This is a human planet. We are not the Hork-Bajir, we know how you 'rescued' them. As long as you're on Earth, you'll get along with us. Am I clear on that?
  • In #40, Ax shows his species' ugly ableism when they meet disabled Andalites. The human Animorphs call him out on it, though he points out that humans are no better most of the time.
• In the fairy tale "Childe Rowland", the King of Elfland kidnaps Burd Ellen and puts two of her brothers who come to her rescue into a magic coma. But after Merlin has advised the youngest brother Rowland how to evade the elves' baleful magic, the youngster can single-handedly make his way to the Tower of Elfland and defeat the Elf King, using nothing more than brute force with a sword.
• Peter F. Hamilton's Silfen from the Commonwealth Saga are basically alien Elves with sandworm maws for mouths. They go the whole hog, magic-style tech, capricious personalities, unintelligible riddles, the lot. Ozzie Fernandez Isaacs has many encounters with the Silfen, and always gets at the very least annoyed with them for being so bloody obtuse.
• R.A. Salvatore's Demon Wars Saga novels: While rangers Elbrayn, Brynn Dharielle, and Ancanadavar (all elven-trained) paint a much more gushing view of the elves in this world, it becomes increasingly apparent to less-indoctrinated individuals, the reader, and even the main elven character that his people's worldview, while not evil, is still at times excessively callous, self-serving, and racist. Hints of the past showed that they used to be far more open and friendly, but when a war wiped most of them out, they became more closed off and self-serving as they are trying to avoid completely dying out. As such, with a few exceptions, they typically don't help humans unless they have something to gain from it.
• Both Silvanesti and Qualinesti elves are called out on their bad things in the Dragonlance novel Dragons of the Winter Night. Too bad they refuse to accept that.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Harry Dresden tends to be fairly direct in telling arrogant fae (and anyone else) what he thinks of them. Then he blows something up or sets something on fire, generally. This is probably done just to throw them off guard (and take his mind off of the fact that he generally knows exactly how horrible they could make his life, or the end of same) as much as anything else, though he just can't seem to help himself sometimes (there are only so many times you can hear the 'what you don't know' speech before you snap).
  "I DON'T BELIEVE IN FAIRIES!"
  • Part of the reason why Harry's bluntness hasn't gotten him killed yet is something known as a Death Curse. If a wizard has the presence of mind to concentrate for a few seconds before he dies, he can pack together all of his magic, including his life force (because why not, he's going to die anyway), and drop a big ol' "See You in Hell"-style megaspell on his murderer's head. It's incredibly powerful and almost unstoppable, able to at the very least permanently cripple even a Humanoid Abomination.
  • In Skin Game, Harry flippantly points out to yet another supernatural psychopath that claims to not be afraid of Chicago PD's 13,000 manpower, the hypocrisy of that statement when he admitted to hiding under a veil while going around the city. Really, Mr Butcher's whole series can be seen as this to the supernatural world in general, whenever he points out the pains they go through to hide from humanity as a whole since we've come a long way from having crossbows and longswords—which is proven conclusively in an Offscreen Moment of Awesome in Battle Ground (2020): Southside Chicagoans crush an entire wing of the Fomorian army by themselves and Army National Guard helicopters massacre the surviving Fomorians at daybreak.
• Dune:
  • At the final confrontation against the Bene Gesserit, a centuries old order claiming to have the moral high ground even as they ruthlessly manipulate people through multiple generations of eugenics, when The Chosen One they've been trying to create actually arrives they're caught quite off guard when he's disgusted by them and refuses to follow their script.
  • The Bene Gesserit consider anyone who cannot pass their test of humanness to be an animal. As this test is "the death-alternative test of human awareness" anyone who takes it and fails is a DEAD animal. They don't use it to decide who's suitable breeding stock (Feyd-Rautha was intended to be the mate of the girl who was supposed to be born in Paul's place, and he's no human by their standards), they use it to decide who's suitable to teach any of their skills to. (Since the test is administered only by Reverend Mothers, who have the whole range of skills, that means that anyone giving the test knows precisely what they're putting the subject through and does it anyway. This is only the beginning of what they have done in their quest to produce The Chosen One.)
  • Since the Gesserit were blindsided mostly because they actually screwed up the eugenics program (the savior arrived a generation earlier and one branch over from where it was predicted) the backlash is close to universal, since the savior is living proof of their fallibility in addition to some of his superiority resulting from partially rejecting the Bene Gesserit skills and training, and training as a Mentat instead.
• Glen Cook's Garrett of his Garrett, P.I. series snarks right back when snarked at by anyone, including his best friend Morley Dotes (who is actually a half-elf, but let's not get technical...) and his regular adviser the Dead Man (who isn't an elf at all, but is a member of long-lived (sort of) race with a superiority complex definitely fits the bill).
• The Orc Marines of Mary Gentle's Grunts! do so literally; "Pass me another elf Sergeant, this one's split!'.
  • During the later stages of the book, when the Elf King has decided that buying orc guns is a good idea, the training the new Elf Marines receive gives the Orc cadre marines plenty of chances for this.
    Lt. Gilmuriel: You don't like elves, do you, orc - I mean, Gunnery Sergeant?
    Gunnery Sergeant Dakashnit: Me? Man, I love elf. Nothing beats roast and basted elf haunch. Unless it's breast of elf with chile peppers.
• If one considers the Caamasi to be subject to Can't Argue With Elves, then the Caamas document crisis, a major plot in Timothy Zahn's Hand of Thrawn duology, was this trope taken to the extreme. The entire New Republic somehow managed to divide itself into two factions over whether to defend the Bothans or to make them pay reparations (with the Empire ready to capitalize on the inevitable civil war). Meanwhile, the few Caamasi left have their voices drowned out when they try to say, "Stop the fighting." Of course, most of the galaxy WAS using this as an excuse to pursue their own feuds, but still.
• Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton approach this trope in The Halfblood Chronicles.
• In M.C.A. Hogarth's An Heir to Thorns and Steel the human kingdoms banished the elves to a remote island centuries ago because, with few exceptions, elves are complete and utter bastards. They treat their human slaves and magically engineered Servant Races as livestock, draining magic from them when their immortality which the humans inflicted on them to limit their powers saps almost all of their own power. They constantly quarrel with one another and think nothing of killing their own family members. The few elves who are not assholes include the King, whose powers require pacifism and tends to be treated as a plaything and resource by the nobles, and the protagonist, who was raised by humans.
• John Grammaticus to Slau Dha in the Horus Heresy novel "Legion":
  "Fug you, you uptight Eldar bastard. Piss off and hide in whatever corner of the cosmos you deem safe."
  • The sentiment is subverted about 10 seconds later when John realizes that his boss isn't a psychic projection. He's actually standing right in front of him.
• In the Company of Ogres, by A. Lee Martinez has an elf side character who's attractive, adept with conjuring magic—and very overweight, though this doesn't stop her from getting men. The real "screw you" comes with the rank-and-file elves among the platoon, who are basically hothouse flowers who can't remotely compare to other races in matters of physical effort. Their greatest contribution to the final fight comes from the fact that demons love tasty, tasty elf meat and many get killed when they break off fighting and start eating elf corpses.
• In the Inheritance Cycle, Murtagh, who does not agree with the elf worship prevalent in the rest of the series.
  • The third book has a number of non confrontational Screw You, Elves! Where the main character comes to disagree with certain things he learned form the elves in the previous book (vegetarianism and atheism, respectively).
  • Then comes the fourth book, where we find out that for the most part, humans are disturbed by the elves. Viewing them similarly to the Fae... The creepy Grimm Fae, not the happy Disney Fae. At least one human character mentions that he'd rather fight with Urgals than Elves. And humans generally hate Urgals.
  • There's also Rhunön, an elf introduced in the second book who hates her own race. Or at least what it has become. A big chunk of her introduction scene is her complaining about elves.
    • Since she's the oldest elf in the series^note She was old before the Dragon Riders existed, so at least 2500 years old, this is partially a case of When I Was Your Age....
  • Galbatorix justifies his tyranny by claiming that he is protecting humanity from the elves' influence and is the only person strong enough to do so. Considering that elvish Riders ruled Alagaësia before Galbatorix took power, he has a point.
• During Journey to Chaos, the response of all orcs and many humans to elfish posturing is basically to pull on their pointy ears and then kick them in the nuts. Emily, in particular, has many choice words about elves and their culture: "They can’t understand a human’s need for food because starvation can’t kill them. They think we’re stupid barbarians because we can’t spend our lives doing mad science for shits and giggles". She follows up by forcing one such elf into a one-sided bargain.
• The Darhel in John Ringo's Legacy of the Aldenata initially fall into Can't Argue with Elves, being Corrupt Corporate Executives, however they are later argued with in an exceedingly violent manner.
• Justified and averted in Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies. The elves cast a glamour to make people think they're wonderful, but if someone breaks through that then they're usually downright pissed off. Granny Weatherwax at one point tells the Queen of the Elves what she can do with with herself:
  "Go back. You call yourself some kind of goddess, and you know nothing, madam, nothing. What don't die can't live. What don't live can't change. What don't change can't learn. The smallest creature that dies in the grass knows more than you. You're right. I'm older. You've lived longer than me, but I'm older than you. And better 'n' you. And madam, that ain't hard."
• Mercedes Lackey's Obsidian Mountain Trilogy: The elves think they know everything about fighting the endarkened, having done it before. It takes The Chosen One Kellan to realize that this is all wrong because the endarkened have learned since then. He has to challenge their general to a duel to the death before they listen. But they do. And a thousand years later, they remember the lesson, and refuse to give the next Chosen One any advice to avoid repeating the mistake.
• Zig-Zagged in Reign of the Seven Spellblades volume 8. Elves as a people are on the receiving end of this in absentia... by Khiirgi Albschuch, an elf who was kicked out of elven society for her disrespect for propriety, such as conjuring undead plants. For her part, she thinks her birth people are stuck in a rut and refuse to innovate or break the rules of the world's long-dead god (who favored them over the other races), which allowed more iconoclastic humans to long ago pass them by. Her Motive Rant to this effect is largely blown off by her rival Lesedi Ingwe, who says that Khiirgi may be more innovative than other elves and an objectively stronger mage than Lesedi herself, but her aforementioned disrespect for propriety is a Fatal Flaw in one very important way: "Nobody fucking likes you."
• In The Sleeping Dragon by Johnny Nexus, humans view elves (not without justification) as "smug, superior, speciesist bastards" and their fading into the West was just an epic sulk that humans didn't appreciate how wonderful they are. Presto the wizard in particular looks forward to getting in a Wizard Duel with an elf and proving that just because they literally invented magic, that doesn't mean nobody else can be as skilled as them.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Karen Traviss' Jedi are supremely overconfident, incompetent, and get killed really, really easily and without a qualm, mostly by Mandalorians, who are superior in every way imaginable. Most of the Jedi who appear in the Republic Commando series are pointed out as extremely capable, if overreliant upon their powers and bound up by their philosophy. Those Jedi who ARE killed are either 1. betrayed, 2. unarmed and otherwise trapped, or 3. if fought head-on, put up a huge fight and are only taken down with difficulty.
    • Hilarious in Hindsight as Traviss' portrayal of the Mandalorians quickly began to resemble 'elves' even more so than the Jedi as the series progressed, namely through the use of Can't Argue with Elves. Then it becomes even more confusing when Maze, one of the less psychotic characters, calls out the Mandalorians for being a bunch of brainwashed psychopaths. Amusingly, in a bit of Take That!, Troy Denning has Darth Caedus kick their ass easily.
  • Now the Mandalorians are subject to this in Fate of the Jedi. The Jedi easily curbstomp Mandalorian efforts to break into the Temple, and events in the series have essentially shown the galaxy that Mandalorians are evil.
  • There is a lot of anti-Jedi sentiment. Even when Luke is popular, the Jedi are seen as a Corrupt Church and he's seen as unable to keep the Jedi under his control. Given that this is likely the result of Palpatine's smear campaign, this also counts as Hero with Bad Publicity. It's also likely because the Jedi tend to be a lot more forgiving of war crimes when they're perpetrated by other Force Users. Luke gives "Darth Vader was a nice guy at heart" lectures to his students, and later offers similar defenses on behalf of a student who also destroys an entire inhabited planet. Even some of his other students disagree, leading to some impressive examples of an Elf calling out the chief Elf.
• Robert A. Heinlein does this IN SPACE in Starman Jones, with centaurs standing in for elves. The entire second half of the novel is a massive Take That! to the "horse people" part of Gulliver's Travels: the characters encounter a horse-man tribe while lost on a distant planet, and it turns out the horse-people see themselves as much more technologically and morally advanced than the humans. They're in tune with the land, they have a complicated hierarchical court system, and they won't have the filthy humans settle on their paradise planet. In true Heinlein fashion, the main characters slaughter them and somehow come out as moral victors.
  • The centaurs enslave the first humans they meet and beat an old member of the herd to death. The conflict quickly turns violent, though off camera, as the centaurs (it's implied) attempted to enslave the whole shipload of humans. Heinlein usually has his planets inhabited, often by intelligent life. And the odds are good that they'll be smarter than humans.
  • It could be argued that seeing the horse people as a "take that" of the Houyhnhnms is a bit off the mark, as they were themselves a satire of the stereotypically "perfect" culture.
  • By the time Heinlein wrote his stories, a lot of readers and literary critics often missed the satire part which was the point of Gulliver's Travels. Many still do, since most do not understand the 18th century cultural context it was painted in.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Lord of the Rings: Shortly after meeting elves for the first time, Frodo Baggins gets exasperated at Gildor's Cryptically Unhelpful Answer. Frodo: "And it is also said, 'Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.'" Actually an inversion of the trope in the work largely responsible for codifying the Standard Fantasy Races: Gildor was not offended and found Frodo's response truly funny, and clarified saying he was still making a decision and didn't want to say anything concrete yet.
  • The Silmarillion: This is effectively the attitude of the last Númenórean kings, especially Ar-Pharazôn the Golden. This is coupled with Rage Against the Heavens, since his plan for getting what the Elves have, namely immortality, involves invading the home of the Valar, who are effectively the gods of the fantasy world.^note Eru, the supreme god, does not interfere with his creation, and generally lets the Valar do their thing. The war situation developed not quite to his advantage, and the plan wouldn't have worked anyway even if they somehow had succeeded in their conquest, but that's what you get when you take advice from Sauron.
• Barryarans in Vorkosigan Saga have this attitude toward Cetaganda and in some cases most galactics. But especially Cetaganda which once invaded them.
• In Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher stories, Geralt mocks the leader of a band of elves that have tied him up and are about to execute him to keep him from talking. Eventually the elf sets him free and concedes that he is right, after the local goddess condemns him. This is shortly after he breaks the nose of a particularly belligerent elf woman by headbutting her. In fact, all human-elf relations are built on this trope. No one gives a damn how elves were bright, educated, sophisticated and great, because, well, they were and now they are almost extinct. The Aen Seidhe elves themselves came into conflict with human settlers, but gave ground to the humans, thinking that they would just be content with some territory. Instead, the humans became stronger and kept expanding, and when the elves finally went to full-scale war with the humans, the humans crushed them and sent them fleeing. By the time of the main storyline in the books, the elves have been reduced to hiding in barren mountains with little food, or became brutal guerrilla fighters known as "Scoai'tael" who are little better than bandits. They do manage to carve out their own kingdom of Dol'Blathanna... but only by allying with the human Empire of Nilfgaard, who conquered and granted them the land, and to whom they are now vassals.
  • Most humans tend to be bastards, but there is still a fair amount of neutral and even decent ones. There are few elves in the shorts stories and five books long saga that aren't decadent jerks or just plain monsters.
  • Cue the parallel world, ruled over by the Aen Elle elves who form The Wild Hunt, where they rule and treat humans as their disposable slaves, along with exploring and conquering other worlds around the multiverse with a superior military, magic and technology. Unlike the humans they didn't outbreed the local population for dominance, they likely simply killed off all of it, before kidnapping humans from the world of the Aen Seidhe to be their slaves. Whereas the Aen Seidhe who interbred with the humans and lost their lands in the process in conflicts, taught the humans magic and gave ground, the Aen Elle simply slaughtered all of their enemies on sight and remained powerful, the dominant force of their world and thriving for doing so.
• In Lisa Papademetriou's The Wizard, The Witch, and Two Girls from Jersey, the main characters are annoyed by the snooty Sylvan elves and their ridiculously long-winded poetry. By contrast, the Kiblar elves (basically Hobbits who are the Sylvan elves' servants) are humble and down-to-earth. The protagonists shame the Sylvan elves into helping them by asking if they're not as brave as the Kiblar elf who is on their quest.

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