Learning to Love Your Elf

Elvish

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
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Actually I took the quiz 3 times (because I am indecisive about certain things ... where would I rather live? Glorfindel or Faramir? So hard to choose!) and came up Elf once, Hobbit once, and Numenorean once. I am in truth more Hobbit than anything else, and Hobbit-like, I love elves, so I picked that bit of code for the diary.

It is a constant puzzle to some of the people I play World of Warcraft with that I stick with my elf character. There's a lot of elf-hate in the gaming community and the fact that (1) a person might legitimately like elves and (2) I have levelled this character to the current top of the in-game food chain and lack the enthusiasm to drop her and start over simply doesn't seem to register.

There's a lot of hunter hate, too (hunter being the WoW class closest to the D&D ranger class, which has always been my favourite in that game setting). Most of the hunter hate comes from rogues, because hunters have class abilities that slow down or stop rogues in player-versus-player combat. At higher levels, we get better armour than rogues do, and since the hunter's most important base statistic is the same as for rogues (agility), hunters are frequently in competition with rogues for some items (weapons especially). People who play rogues object to that.

If one visits the forums devoted to the game, there is usually someone complaining about how night elf hunters are the most overplayed race/class combination in the game. Usually that person plays a troll shaman. If you play WoW, you know how ironic that is. If you don't play WoW, trust me, troll shamans are a wildly overplayed race/class combination too.

I have other characters. Too many other characters, really, I don't have time to play them all. I love my gnome mage, and my gnome warrior is lots of fun (in part because hearing her squeak 'I need more rage!' is wildly incongruous with her cute little face and voice). I have a troll priestess on a different server from my Alliance characters, and she's fun too. But the elf was my first character and I love her best. I find the elf-hate tiresome, and it's worse when it gets applied to the person playing the character into the bargain. Choosing to play an elf doesn't mean that I'm a snob, or an idiot, or any of a dozen other things in real life, thank you. You don't want to play an elf, you don't have to play an elf. But could you shut up and let me play my elf and enjoy the game?

Maybe they just hate her because she's beautiful. Isn't she pretty?

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