Suikoden Elves Question

Ask questions about the personality and backstory of the multitude of characters in the Suikoden series.
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suiko2fan2
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Suikoden Elves Question

Post by suiko2fan2 »

Been thinking about the elves in the suikoden world. Obviously, they live longer than humans. However, I was wondering after playing Suikoden V recently, do you suppose they can have children with humans.

Urda didn't seem to think so, if you read between the lines of what she says:
Two or three of them(men) once approached me with their stinking breath and wicked intentions. What were they thinking? We're incompatible races! Don't they understand that? Or are they truly that foolish?

Yet, Kyril, well not elf, is a hybrid, half-human, and half-otherworld. If walter and Yohn are "compatible" enough to have offspring, why cant an elf and human? Elves seem more similar to humans than Yohn's race does. Just my thoughts..
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Raww Le Klueze
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by Raww Le Klueze »

Urda's comment doesn't imply that the species can't interbreed. For one, Urda is more or less a racist, when she says the races aren't compatible it doesn't neccessarily have anything to do with procreation, no more than it would if someone said that Muslims aren't compatible with Western Society.

Secondly, it's extremely unlikely that the men that approached her were asking for a baby. While she certainly believes their end goal was copulation with the "wicked intentions" not even she would have thought it was for actual breeding purposes. So if you truly wanted to "read between the lines" as it were, you'd have to infer that Elves don't have vaginas. Or you can assume that she's not being literal as much as bigoted.

Though the fact that we have never seen an Elf/Human, much less heard of them, suggests that interbreeding might be impossible it could also be extremely rare due to the elves insular culture and probably considered taboo by both sides. Though we've also not seen any half-Wingers or half-Dwarves and at least Wingers have a much closer relationship to Humans.

At this point we simply don't know, but Urda's comment isn't evidence of it one way or the other.
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sticky-runes
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by sticky-runes »

I don't think human-elf relationships have been explored in Suikoden. Haswar announces she's getting married, possibly to Isato? So we'll have to wait and see if they have any children.
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by suiken »

In some fiction works, it is told that elves have low birthrate percentage. I don't know if it applies on the world of Suikoden.
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suiko2fan2
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by suiko2fan2 »

My main interest in asking is that I am thinking about writing another story, and I wanted one of my characters to have this as their background, and I was wondering how plausible it sounds in the Suikoden world.
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Pyriel
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by Pyriel »

I'm going to wander out on a limb here and say it's probably possible; it just hasn't been presented in any story yet. I'm actually approaching this a bit pedantically, but if a satyr from another dimension is genetically compatible with a human, there's very little reason to assume that any limitations exist until they're stated explicitly. At that point, compatibility is simply the whim of the writers, and the only reason there aren't hybrids of every sort is probably because they wanted to have overcoming racism as a plot in the first game. That message is just better received if the races are different, insular species with their own internal diversity, rather than having Tir discover a deserted Mongolian village at the edge of the forest, followed by a vaguely African tribe living in a tree. And shortly thereafter, he's sent to meet with a cave-dwelling nation of pygmy Scandinavians.
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by Wolkendrache »

We’ve never met half-elves or human-elf couples in Suikoden, so you’d have to make up a theory. If you don’t want to risk scaring away all canon lovers, you could just say that in the Suikoverse, a child of mixed parents would end up being either 100% the one or 100% the other, and you’d just need to refer to Kyril.

The differences between elves and humans are not very big in Suikoden, compared to Tolkien for example, where elves are immortal and thus much wiser and more skillful than humans. In Suikoden, elves get a little older than humans and have bigger ears (Tolkien elves do not have these special ears) and are more peaceful perhaps, but they aren’t any wiser. There are some racists among all races, but most are not, so Suikoden actually owes us an explanation why we’ve not seen elf-human couples or children so far (or other mixes I’m less enthusiastic imagining).
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Pyriel
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by Pyriel »

My first thought was a half-human, half nay-kobold, mingling with a beaver. If the possibilities are that open, there's nothing stopping human-cut rabbit hybrids from existing, and Karl Pilkington's world where we got leaf insects because at some point a beetle had it away with a leaf, becomes real for Suikoden.
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by Wolkendrache »

I thought into the other direction: If bat-eagle-human "hybrids" share a town with human-dog "hybrids", why should I care about a human sharing a night with an elf, resulting in a human with oddish long ears?
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by BrucePrintscreen »

Wingers may look like a mixture of humans, bats, and eagles, but it doesn't mean they are the product of a gang-bang between the three species. I mean, platypuses are not born from a duck and an otter. They just happen to look like them.
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by Wolkendrache »

That's why I used quotation marks. Sure, Suikoden deliberately avoided implying how the different races evolved, that's why these races aren't called half-dog or half-anything. Anyway, back to the OP's concern: if you create a character with an elven mother and a human father, it would be fine to me, because these two races are very similar. You wouldn't even need to tell me that this is extremely rare, because I can tell by having played the games. It would be more difficult if the two races were more different, but then you can still avoid telling anything about this like in Kyril's case, and you can actually rely on that.

Or, if your readers are children, you could tell them the babies are brought by a flying squirrel, the Suikoden equivalent to the stork. :wink:
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sticky-runes
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by sticky-runes »

In Elder Scrolls, humans and elves can have babies, but the child will be of the mother's race, so we don't see any characters with traits of both races. And the beast-like races are not able to reproduce with people besides their own kind. But Skyrim allows the player to have a marriage between just about any two races, and childbirth is simply not a game play feature, but you can adopt child NPCs.

The Greek myths, on the other hand, were not shy about how certain human-animal hybrids came into being.
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by BrucePrintscreen »

as a rule of thumb, you should not create a concept that does not already exist in the universe you are using. Creating a half elf half human character in suikoden sounds terribly marysueish to me, no offense, I'm not targeting you necessarily, I just give you this advice: it sounds suspiciously contrived. Just ask yourself the question: do your character really needs to be half-bred? Is it really fundamental to its identity? Couldn't it be played in a more simple and natural way instead? Deep inside, aren't you really just the only one to enjoy that concept. You ask yourself these kind of things constantly when you write a story. And I think the answers in this case will tell you it's not a good idea.

edit: to be more precise, by definition, any character you create that can be questionable should not be created. Characters cannot afford to be questioned. They may not be universally liked, but if it is debatable whether they are plausible or not in their universe, then they should be discarded or redesigned.
Look, I hate Pesmerga, but I don't think he is out of place in the Suikoden universe. The idea of a black night that's some sort of mysterious being chasing another similar character is not something out of place in Suikoden. You will notice that his true nature is blurred, which makes it more acceptable in the framework of the suspension of belief that applies to anyone accepting to follow the storyline of a fantasy universe like Suikoden. In a way, I don't mind Pesmerga as a secondary or third-class character, a blank filler of sorts. What I don't like is how people overreact to such a footnote in the game. But as a footnote, he's acceptable, there is no matter of debating whether he could exist or not in Suikoden. I have less of a problem with the Suikoden team creating him than I have with his fanboys.
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Pyriel
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by Pyriel »

Yes, let's do all art by committee, and empanel focus groups to decide if certain types of characters can plausibly exist on a planet with no less than 7 sentient species inhabiting it. Don't do something outlandish and meaningless just because it sounds cool in your head, is a good rule of thumb, but if it falls in line with some theme you want to include, and you're truly enthusiastic about the idea, go for it.

And personally, when I'm attempting comedy, I find that some of the ideas I consider my worst are actually the best received. It all depends on the audience in the end.

I don't mean to imply that if you follow your heart you'll create Shakespeare, or some damn thing. If I'd been Ayn Rand's writing partner, Atlas Shrugged would be very different and much more readable, in my opinion. But she wrote something that was 100% a product of her rather twisted outlook, and holy shoot is it ever popular in its niche. People love it so much they made three movies out of it, even though all of them lost money at the box office, and at least one of them didn't break even after VOD and DVD sales. Aside from naked conceit, how do you explain an author having one of their wooden characters pontificate in the general direction of the entire American populace for 60 pages. And while we're at it, Victor Hugo. He masturbated over the corpse of Napoleon's military accomplishments for about a hundred pages to explain why Marius felt he owed a debt to Thernardier, and it could be explained in the sentence, "Marius's grandfather believed Thernardier had been searching for wounded on the field after Waterloo, and had saved his life, when in fact he was looting the dead." I've seen papers and master's theses analyzing that section of the book and defending its inclusion, when it's very clearly self-indulgent wank.

Edit: I didn't write "holy shoot". Evidently there's a filter getting uppity 'round here.
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Re: Suikoden Elves Question

Post by sticky-runes »

Pyriel wrote:
Edit: I didn't write "holy shoot". Evidently there's a filter getting uppity 'round here.
You're an admin now, aren't you? Unfilter it.
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