Our Drow Aren't Terrible: Anthropology Discussion

Drow as a concept fascinate me, even though I have zero direct familiarity with D&D¹ and don't really want to; just the archetype of a race of dark-skinned matriarchal elves who are also proudly manipulative backstabbing jerks (to paraphrase the Fantasy Axis of Evil). I am also very aware, however, that this combination typically ends up really sexist, and sometimes racist as well for good measure.

I’m developing an idea that I've been describing as "Shakespunk Drow Ace Attorney". It's very much drow-centric ^note in a similar way to Drowtales² and, in the spirit of SoYouWantTo.Avoid Unfortunate Implications... there are some points on which I could use some suggestions and feedback.

I’ve been assuming that there were reasons for prehistoric human culture to generally give men authority over group decisions, which then stuck because of tradition, and that the drow are much the same. But I'm not going to do a straight patriarchy flip, and similarly I don't want to link it to "the average woman is stronger (physically or magically) than the average man, so obviously women are in charge" (because reasons which I have removed for length). But this is nowhere near my field of study, and "anthropological origins of patriarchy" is a messy topic to try to research. >_<' Is this a reasonable assumption, or are there other factors I should be considering? How would it affect cultural expectations and stereotypes? (Men Act, Women Are would be considered backwards, but Men Use Violence, Women Use Communication is sort of accurate, and More Deadly Than the Male is not only expected but praiseworthy...?)

And what else should I be thinking about concerning drow portrayal?

1. I know they’re AlwaysChaotic, but alignment axes are ridiculous and I refuse to use them so that doesn’t matter.
2. But not nearly as grimdark... Tone-wise, I want to leave the impression that while the drow empire can be a pretty terrible place to live, it isn’t actually ‘‘more’’ terrible than comparable periods in human history.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

I'd consider myself an avid fan of folklore and mythology, but for the life of me can't find Drow outside of Dungeons&Dragons. I'd figured it somehow came out of Snorri Sturluson's eddas where IIRC he made the distinction between alfar (elves, transliterally Whiteys...alf means white apparently) and svartalfar (dark elves, transliterally...darkwhiteys, which is confusing.) I don't recall much being written about either race at all, because the starring roles all went to the Aesir and maybe one or two Vanir. The giants and dwarves got more attention. The elves just seemed to be kind of there.

So...with base material either scant or copyrighted (unless I've made a colossal oversight and Drow actually are a thing in like Russian or Scandinavian folklore or something, in which case ignore me I know not of which I type) then you can make them anything.

My fairyland has vampires considered Unseelie (un-silly) or Swarthy Fellows as opposed to Fair Folk. They're nocturnal, literal-minded, and culturally-conditioned to be humorless, but they're not evil. They drink blood...consumption of meat is something they consider disgusting and evil, and the consumption of vegetables baffles them. They're considered "dark" because they're not diurnal. If you want "dark people" as in complexion, then I'd point out my desert city of anthro phoenixes. Culturally, they're known for being livewires and party animals, but it's not anathema or even difficult in the desert cities to be mellow or studious or otherwise lead with quieter strengths, no matter if they're male or female.

That isn't really what I'm asking about... I don't really care where they came from (as far as I know, they did start with D&D, like you said), I'm developing my own perspective on them anyway. I just want the result to also be coherent and not make stupid mistakes, and regrettably there is no page for Artistic License - Social Sciences.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

How Shakespunk is your setting? Does it have a virgin queen, dodgy property laws, low literacy, A Song Of Ice And Fire levels of sexual violence? My point is you decide which demographics get affected how badly, if at all. If you set real world standards of doing it Right, you never will get it right. From what I've seen, all significant representation of marginalized demographics is appropriative or play to respectability politics which is the only way it becomes significant. Trigger by vacuum is apparently also a thing, but then putting it there like it's normal is a problem and exceptionalizing it to save audiences by recognizing that it's casually perpetrated is a problem...so you will never do it Right if that's what you're going for. I say do it anyway. Or not. It's up to you.

If you want to make a realistic matriarchy, I recommend looking into the ones that occur naturally in our world. And no, I don't mean humans. There are plenty of animals worth studying.

edited 21st Apr '15 9:34:53 PM by AwSamWeston

Award-winning screenwriter. Directed some movies. Trying to earn a Creator page. I do feedback here.

Also, quite a bit of "Real World" patriarchy came from the dominant power at the time - the Church. Additionally, the feudal system in place around baronies and heritage along titular lines was from the grand tradition of clan warfare and conquest, a typically male dominated arena. Of course, go back far enough and you have people like Boadicea who is a good template for how things could have gone differently without that Religion-focused division of "roles" betwixt the sexes.

If your religion in the setting reinforces a certain type of attitude, then the society will adopt it. Of course other non-Abrahamic cultures have an attidue of subservient femininity (Look at Hindhu and Shinto traditions - there is still an attitude of subservience, even with female gods); however, our MODERN attitude to women in power, whilst shifting, is still also ingrained with several generations of ingrained attitude, cultural reinforcement and aggressive marketing.

If you set the culture up so that the religion is not necessarily Patriarchal, or reinforces the value of a certain moral code, that could add weight to the Drow structure; also throw in some "capitalist" style morality where maybe cunning is valued in the early stages beyond brute strength or aggression, with more investment maybe placed on Males as "protectors" rather than rulers?

Something to consider perhaps.

Another thing to consider with patriarchy/matriarchy is that Men Are the Expendable Gender, since women bear children and the evolution of the population is decided by their number alone. I think it's where a lot of double standard tropes come from : women stay (safe) in the kitchen, men are stronger (because they are the one who should get in harm's way), polygamy is polygyny (because men die more).

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

Quite, by my own definition which is the only one I'm concerned about. No (that's the exact sort of thing that makes no sense in this setting), yes, yes, no (when did I ever say I wanted to imitate ASOIAF?).

Danke schön. :) Hyenas use the "women are in charge because they can hit harder" system I don't want to use, though.

...okay, see, this I have read up on a bit and it isn't anywhere close to being that straightforward (among other things, "at the time" is most of the history of the western world, secular societies included). Drow religion is matriarchal because of the same traditions behind the rest of society being matriarchal - whatever those are.

That makes sense, and since drow physiology would retain the tendency for men to be stronger (I've been reasoning that sexual dimorphism allowed for specialisation for the two basic biological drives, survival and reproduction) at least some of those gender roles will still be kept. Some of that can be flipped though... Polygamy is obviously polyandry because odds are at least one of the men is going to perish, for example. So figuring out what other gender dynamics are reversible...

Not sure what to do with the kitchen... a drow kitchen is going to be more like an armoury, what with all the knives and poisons. :P

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

Science is somewhat divided on how patriarchy got its start. One idea is that patriarchy began not only because of the greater average strength of the male but also the differences in hormones, more testosterone means more risk-taking behavior and a greater likelihood of making a grab for power. Another factor to look at is the comparison between women and female hyenas (as mentioned in the linked article) regarding reproduction. Women have no biological way of protecting their sexual reproductive choice (preventing rape) other than physically fighting (an aggressor who may quite possibly be stronger than her), while with female hyenas not only does copulation seem at least improbable without female consent but they have built-in birth control.

Since the matriarchy in question is of a different species than humans, even if the race is humanoid and the males still have the physical strength advantage, you could still give the Drow females some biological advantages of their own.

Come to think of it, how do relationships work in your Drow culture. Monogamy or open relationships?

One tribe of American Aboriginals (I think it was the Soux but I probably remembered wrong) evolved matriarchy because the lads were allways too busy fighting to run things. So perhaps drow men are too busy cracking skulls to do any "desk work" and a Gender Flip of the "too emotional" chestnut.

edited 22nd Apr '15 10:17:07 PM by dvorak

Now everyone pat me on the back and tell me how clever I am!

I did dark elves in my setting.

Now, I didn't feel the need to explain "Why a matriarchy?" because those things happened in real life, they just got phased out a lot by Westernization.

I just started thinking about the Underdark. Just this world that, underneath its surface, has frankly absurd tracks of tunnels and caves and shit. Just so much of it empty and wild. Here, a woman can have no mistress but herself. It'd just be her, her "sisters", their man and their spawn. Her rewards would be won by her own sweat and labor, raising umber hulks in the family ranch.

The Underdark is a harsh and unforgiving, and so is the justice dealt out there. A vigilante hunt down those who did her wrong. A corrupt enforcer is shot down by a lone bowmaid who rode into town. She claims she's just passing through, to ride into the shadows like she was never there, but the town's matron might convince her to take up the enforcer's medallion for herself.

Awww yeah...

Is it even legal to use drow?

Anyways, dwarves in my setting are matriarchal. I used it as the reason you never see female dwarves. They're hardly ever born, and when they are they're far too valuable to be put to work as miners. They stay home and run the dwarven kingdoms. They're frequently fighting over the throne. Women are nobles and scholars. Men are workers.

edited 23rd Apr '15 7:29:28 PM by washington213

Primitive hunter-gatherers were egalitarian societies, patriarchy developed at some point (I've seen theories posit between 3000-6000 BCE) in multiple geographic areas. One theory is that warlike cultures are more likely to be patriarchal, but there are others.

Regardless, there are still cultures described as matriarchies (e.g. the Rade, the Mosou) where women/females have more power than men in areas that men hold power in patriarchal societies like owning crop production or land.

Important points to consider for a matriarchal society are matrilineal inheritance and matrilocality. A matrilineal society passes titles and inheritance to daughters instead of sons, usually through the mother. In matrilocal societies are when the bride-groom moves into the bride's home. For a good example of both of these concepts is the traditional Iroquois culture, where men married into the women's tribe & children were born into the mother's clan.

Just to play devil's advocate, there is evidence to support that the Iroquois were an expansionist, imperial, warlike culture but it developed more of an egalitarian society/matriarchy than a patriarchy.

This drow society should be built aware of these structures. Female drow should be positioned socially as prominent, not physically prominent, though they could be that way too. What if the drow sacrificed or disposed of most male infants/children and kept their population a higher ratio of females (3:1, 5:1, 10:1?). To change the physical advantage, maybe the boys they keep to adulthood are shorter and slighter than their women. Work it into their myth and culture.

There are societies today that prize male babies over female, and reversing the current orphan ratios of certain countries like China where more female than male babies are orphaned for adoption could be interesting.

Take any of the patriarchal structures applied to women in the Jacobian era of Shakespeare and see how it turns out if they applied to men.

However, it should also be noted that matrilineality and matrilocality do not automatically correlate with matriarchy. A culture may be the first two but still be patriarchal. And theoretically the reverse could also be true.

Definitely, since most recorded & contemporary societies are patriarchal.

The Tuareg people of Northern Africa have a matrilineal & matrilocal society while roles of social power are given to men & inherited by men (generally the son of a noble's sister). The Comoros Union practices a form of matrilineal inheritance of property from mothers to their daughters, and again, it is a patriarchy.

It would be interesting to see an imagined matriarchal society that is patrilineal & patrilocal, there would have to be significantly different social & cultural dichotomies than patriarchal norms.

I've noticed that "Drow" in most settings seem to be the Evil Twin to "Elves" in a lot of settings (until players get to be Drow PC's of course).

• Elves in forests or castles, ergo "Drow" underground.

• Elves worship a goddess of the forest = "Drow" worship a god(ess) of the Big Creepy-Crawlies variety.

• Elves are the PC's friends = "Drow" are constantly stabbing the PC's backs when they aren't being The Starscream to each other.

Now inverting this would be a good idea. A matrilineal & matrilocal society that's more Blue-and-Orange Morality than Always Chaotic Evil would be closer to The Fair Folk that the cruft that LOTR Fan Dumb brought in to most settings.

Why are the Drow undergound? Maybe their magics and the source of their power is literally Closer to Earth. Perhaps they just don't care for the affaris of surface dwellers. Or they are like most cave dwelling species, just elves that are adapted to living in caves and underground. They like it there and they've structured their society that way due to some schism with their surface dwelling cousins.

As for being matrilocal, it needs to be more than just "Dude, it's like the chicks are in charge man! Men are now treated like chicks are in real life". That is all too often the horrid cliche in fiction: our society but with the genders reversed. A proper fluff for a race needs to have more than that.

• The chief Goddess needs a bit of a backstory and creation myth that's more than "She demands males to be sacrificed".

• What role do males play? Are the soldiers? Magic users? Magitek users? Adventureres?

edited 25th Apr '15 4:29:28 PM by TairaMai

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48

It can't be something as simple as a queen taking over from the king, and living long enough that the little policies she instituted here and there add up to a role reversal over the years, can it?

And what of the old guard? Those males who would have lost power?

Now if the Queen has a power that's not for males (Things Man Was Not Meant to Know - literally), then there would be a changing of the guard. Men fight and use certain magics, women are the leaders and knights. They use different more powerful magics only they can use. Some males might even get a Gender Bender if they win the Goddess's favor.

So of course a drow army would be a thing to fear. A bunch of fighting men lead by a 90 pound girl who could throw fire with her hands or worse? She's also their priestess, so she's got their loyalty and she might be able to hurl minor curses at the enemy.

edited 25th Apr '15 8:35:00 PM by TairaMai

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48

HUGE WAVE OF REPLIES ACK

I'll definitely reply further when I have more time to think about some of this (thank you!), but some of the shorter things -

I haven't settled on drow sexual mores yet. I think they're formally monogamous (it's what I'm most comfortable writing, and it'd be a valuable point of commonality with humans for a society which is going to be partly familiar but also alien in ways that will likely catch the audience by surprise). But I also expect that marriage will be commonly used as a political tool, especially in the upper classes, so there will probably be room for extramarital dalliance to at least the level of the Courtly Romance.

"Drow" is a real word from Scandinavian folklore (translates as "troll", remembering that in folklore "troll" is basically synonymous with "elf", "goblin", "faery", "spirit", "oni", or "yokai"), and is therefore uncopyrightable. (You can't copyright "scheming society of melanistic matriarchs" any more than you can copyright the idea of a Proud Warrior Race.)

Anything that could be copyrighted I don't intend to use, mostly because I am semi-intentionally ignorant of it. My vocabulary with respect to drow in RPGs consists pretty much exclusively of "Underdark" ^note vast cavern network populated entirely by infighting evil, "Lolth" ^note evil spider-goddess, "drider" ^note spider centaur, "Drizzt" ^note Good Guy Drow, "Valsharess" ^note female leader of some sort, and "rothe" ^note underground yak, and I'm not using any of that, so any further resemblance is coincidental.

As Taira said, it isn't nearly that simple. In Earth history, England has been ruled mainly by queens for centuries, but it has still been in the context of a patriarchal government - hence the importance of the Virgin Queen, for instance, since if the queen were to be sexually involved then clearly she was vulnerable to seduction and the real ruler was her lover.

...though that said, I'm under the additional restriction that I don't use magic nearly so overtly as that. That sounds like it would be a pretty awesome culture in its own setting, though. :D

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

I was thinking like the Episode II Jedi. Field commanders and force multiplers. Having the Church Militant fighting by their sides gives Drow armies a bonus. It doesn't have to be overt magic. Better "enchanted armor", Bullet Timeesque reflexes, flaming swords of fire. The men get other gifts like being the Combat Medic, the potion master etc.

As for "Driders" I'd go with the "Dirdder" which is a copyright-free version. Basically a spider-taur that's either:

• A creature in it's own right.

• A combat monster that's a "gift" from the Goddess.

Either way, it's a huge creature that let loose on the battlefield to scare the crap out of the other army.

I don't get the "turn into a monster" curse. A Goddess could just send those she doesn't like straight to "hell" as it were.

So how about a last chance for those who've let the Goddess down. A form that's The Juggernaut (elf-wise) and is the Drow's last chance for "a death worthy of the Goddess".

-Or-

They are a magical hybrid created by the Goddess as a sign of her power. Again, a gift used to win battles in her name. A priestess has to care for them and teach them language and some fightin' skillz. Their natural spider powers (and some magic?) do the rest. They use these to scare low level troops on the other side and as living siege engines. They can crawl into the enemy's castles killin' their dooz. (Is their a Drow word for "QQ"?)

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48

Weird thing is, as enough time passes, attitudes change. (Or, y'know, there's careful reshufflings of departments that gradually separate positions into "important" and actually important.) Power is relative; always has been. Most of the time, all you need to do to convince someone they have power is to tell them so.

If a Queen has power that's not meant for males, that's taking the really easy way out, and I'd highly advise against it for storytelling purposes. (In the simplest terms, if all that grants you power is a 'thing', you will not have power when that 'thing' is taken away from you. True power is not any one 'thing', but getting someone with a 'thing' to think that you can tell them how to use it and get better results than if they were to act alone.)

No leader should be leading from the front - that's a quick way to get killed, especially if your burning hands make you an easy target in the dark.

No, England has been ruled mainly by human queens in a human patriarchy. If the Drows you've got in mind are still subject to the whole "elves don't age much" rule, the comparison to people who can feasibly hold power for... 50 years and call that a good run, doesn't work too well I think. I am suggesting that an extremely gradual approach to changing who holds which keys is feasible, within the context of a long-lived D&D race that thinks of geological time as waiting for the Sunday funnies.

By the time the other side gets to the Queen, they would have to have fought a LOTR-style battle in the underdark.

Most leaders would be the younger drow (say 70-80 years old) who are Child Soldiers by Drow standards. As they get older they'd move father back and let the new meat do the fighting. Smart ones would sucker the other side into a "contest of champions" and have an archer off the "human hero" dumb enough to fall for that. If the can't use their glowing hands to save themselves from a human with a sword well that's the way the spider hatches, We Have Reserves.

Good point on immortals.

Sf Debris had a good point about a long lived species. An immortal (or close enough) species has a different perspective than those who live your bog standard age.

A queen could come to power, die, and her daughter takes the throne. She could have had several daughters and, given their track record, they ain't lookin for no king. Why the queen ruled for 3,000 years and her daughter "just took the throne" 300 years ago.

A king may require the realm as a dowry, may not be worthy of the MacGuffin that's needed to hold the throne (a la Thor's Hammer, no male Drow is worthy yet) or the ruling family just doesn't see the need to change course. They have enough retainers, princes, princesses, nobles and armies to go out fighting. Baring an Offingthe Offspring or court politics, no one would make a play for the throne.

Since other races had lives that wink in and out (from the Drow's perspective) murder is an "acceptable" way to take the boss's job. If any drow would launch a scheme to sack the boss, it would take decades to pull off. And they know that the ruling family has seen it all. Besides, regicide is for those silly mortals. The Queen sits well on the throne, it's the age of Drow.

The ruling family might instead play the other nobles off each other and against outsiders. And if they have the favor of the God(ess), they might have Divine job protection.

edited 26th Apr '15 10:32:55 PM by TairaMai

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48

Males are seen as physically stronger but physical strength isn't considered all that it's cracked up to be in other cultures. Men are usually put to menial labor while women are entrusted with actually important work.

Using men as shock troopers seems appropriate if they feel men are expendable.

If not, men might be cut from the military all together or used sparingly, perhaps as stone walls plugging up choke points or body guards.

Shiro: Interesting. I don't want to get too wild with biology (my elves won't live to 900), but some changes on those lines isn't too implausible.

dvorak: Hee - I like. XD Actually, I've read that the Spartans are sometimes classed as a quasi-matriarchal society because during wartime basically the entire male population would vacate the government and the women would take over. (This ties in somewhat to what Undocking mentioned about patriarchy, expansionism, and the Iroquois, too.)

I think something like this may have happened in drow prehistory... not warfare exclusively (there has to be more to the male gender role than fightin' good, or the culture will collapse when they run out of enemies), but I think the ecology is a bit more hazardous than Earth's - larger and more vicious prey animals, and toxic plants, so size and strength don't have selection pressure working in their favour as much (in accordance with the tendency of elves to be more lithe and agile in general, and explaining why poisons are so abundant and advanced). Hunting, herding, farming, fighting, and other kinds of resource-gathering took all the drow men, so it fell to the women to establish the basis for social development and this produced the foundational gender roles of drow civilisation.

Undocking:

It sounds like the right to own and acquire property and use it as one wants is pretty crucial to determining a society's power structure (like with the Tuareg, where social position is matrilineal but it's still the men in the family who actually use it, if I understand correctly).

I already decided that drow are matrilocal. :D Useful to know that isn't the sole factor involved though. (Matriarchal but patrilineal/patrilocal would be interesting, but I don't think it fits here...)

Taira: That's a pretty succinct list of stupid things I don't want to do. :D The drow are my setting's dominant civilisation, with an empire ranging from equatorial to subtropical (mostly based on Renaissance Italy and Ming China). Other elven races exist, mostly as vassal states or undeveloped tribes (including the dwarves, who are... Mesoamerican, more or less, and the only foreign nation of consequence that the drow know of); there are no humans.

I haven't fully worked out the religion yet other than it's polytheistic, and the divine genealogy begins with Mother Darkness hatching the cosmic egg. (Darkness and one of her children play out a Tiamat-and-Marduk analogue, but in this case Marduk is betrayed by his sister and Tiamat wins.)

GoA: Something like that... hmm. Could you explain your reasoning about men in the military, though? <_<

---

Side topics not directly relevant to me:

It's the Wild Wild Underwest!

Being valuable, unfortunately, is no guarantee that they would be agents and not commodities. :/ If women are hardly ever born, then it's critical to the longevity of the species that they give birth as often as possible. That would give a significant advantage to cultures that believe women should be baby factories...

Why wouldn't longer lifespans lead to proportionally longer-lasting traditions?

edited 27th Apr '15 4:01:38 PM by Noaqiyeum

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

It would, which is why a sudden paradigm shift of any kind wouldn't work. This is a system that would take centuries to change, starting with pinkies going from not extended to extended while drinking tea.

You are looking for an anthropology solution to a sociology/pol-sci problem, is what I'm saying. I don't know what you intend to do with this idea, if you're looking to write a novel or a tabletop backstory or what, but going into the evolution of a society when the result of it all is social organization (matriarchy, plus avoiding Unfortunate Implications levels of sexism and racism) is taking the needlessly long and ancient route.