I really like fantasy stories with elves, dwarves, and orcs.

We could add a few more items to this list of common fantasy species (often called “races”), like halflings or gnomes, but the point is that they live alongside humans and are mostly-humanlike, but with a few defining (and usually superhuman) characteristics. Elves often live forever or have extremely long lifespans, keen eyesight, and/or high magical aptitude; dwarves are tough and resistant to magic and exceptionally good builders/craftsmen; orcs are big and strong.

But fundamentally they’re not that different than humans. They organize themselves into societies with recognizable social structures; they need to eat and drink and sleep (or meditate); they have families and loved ones. We can relate to them, for the most part, as characters in whatever world the story takes place in. They’re not treated as alien, and while they may be othered within the story or in-universe, to the reader they’re not usually radically different from humans.

Role-playing games have a big influence here. The ampersand game has codified a lot of the ways we think about elves, dwarves, and orcs (including many of the examples I listed above) and when we choose to play these characters in our games, in general we don’t play them as fundamentally different from humans. They’re still people, and that characteristic is key to the rest of what I’m going to say in this post.

I really like these fantasy races and I like when stories include them.

Now I’m not saying this is a “hot take,” or anything; these types of characters are popular for a reason after all. But I do see a subset of fantasy fans complain regularly about how “cliche” “tired” or “overdone” they are. I want to push back a little, and examine this line of thinking.

Now, fantasy fiction at its most abstracted is fiction that takes place in impossible worlds and has impossible characters. And if you don’t dig down any deeper than that, then it seems strange that the specificity of elves, dwarves, and orks should be so integral to the “feel” of fantasy fiction for a lot of people. If fantasy is limited only by the author’s imagination, then why not create completely new fantasy species? Doing so has the advantages of flexibility and novelty; it ensures that your fantasy world is immediately recognizable as your own.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with coming up with your own fantastical peoples and species and races, but in practice, I almost always find efforts to do so less satisfying than trusty old elves, dwarves, and orcs. I think part of the reason comes down to the author’s reasoning for creating them.

(First of several caveats: this doesn’t apply to authors who have what I’d like to call Elves By Any Other Name in their stories. This is where there’s a race of people who are clearly just Tolkien elves, but they’re called like Qoars or something like that for novelty. That can be annoying in its own way, but isn’t what we’re talking about here.)

If you set out to “subvert fantasy expectations” by eschewing elves or dwarves in favor of three-horned Snurls or eleven-foot-tall Haggychiks or scaly Ontils or some other combination of fantasy races of your own creation, you should first ask yourself why you’re doing it. There are certainly valid reasons for doing so–maybe you want your world to have a certain aesthetic, and pointy-eared humans and green orcs don’t fit, but one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people-eaters do, then go for it. If you want to explore how a species of sentient people made of magical glass would live among more familiar humans and organize their own society, that sounds fascinating. And if you are going for a gonzo tone full of people of all different sizes and shapes and colors and numbers-of-appendages just to see what happens, then by all means, swing for the fences.

But when you act like your story is superior or more creative because your story has green-winged Halgroses with gems for eyes and mine has “boring” old mountain dwarves, it starts to be a problem.

See, at the basest level you might be correct that your totally unique fantasy creatures are “more creative” than my good old-fashioned bearded dwarves. But, so what? Does that mean that their society is more fully-realized and integrated into a more interesting story than my dwarves? Not at all. Especially not if you’re using that sort of simple measure of “creativity” as a measuring stick for the overall creativity of the world or story.

This attitude reeks of the kind of “worldbuilding-first” tendency that is rampant among wannabe fantasy authors. Worldbuilding can be fun and satisfying in its own right, but when talking about fiction, writing the damn story is far more important. Give me a well-written, engaging, and immersive story about a farmboy going on a quest to kill a dark lord with an elf, a dwarf, and an orc over a completely “unique” world full of gonzo fantasy creatures that I can’t orient myself into any day of the week.

And if you are truly interested in breaking away from fantasy cliches, why are you starting with the fantasy races? Why not make it a farmgirl? Or a farm-middle-aged-woman? Or telling a slice-of-life story, or an adult drama, or hardboiled mystery?

To state clearly, my point is that having unique fantasy races does not, by itself, make your story better or more creative. I do think the majority of people will agree with me there, so I won’t harp on it.

On the other hand, there are bad reasons to include elves, dwarves, and orcs. If you’re doing it just because you think that’s what a fantasy story is supposed to have, then stop right there and go read some Robert E. Howard. Tolkien did not invent the fantasy genre, and while he codified these fantasy races and their general role in high fantasy (although Margaret Weis probably deserves as much credit on the literary side), it’s not the only way of doing things.

This usually manifests itself more subtly (I’d even wager unconsciously). Most authors aren’t consciously starting stories going “Well, I’ve got this great story idea, but I need to shoehorn some orcs in or else it’s not fantasy.” What happens instead is that they see fantasy stories they like that include these elements, and then they set out to write their own without critically analyzing why they were in the story that inspired them.

Often there really isn’t much of a good reason, because this tendency has been a factor in fantasy since Tolkien and this problem has become self-perpetuating. Tolkien’s elves, dwarves, and orcs serve his themes (not always pefectly) of greed, life and death, political unity, and the passing of ages, and they also fit within (better: emerge out of) his folklore-immersed setting.

Why do they fit into the Forgotten Realms? Well…because people like them, that’s why. (Or maybe because Ed Greenwood liked them; he created the Realms before D&D existed and I couldn’t find any info on if they included these fantasy races in their earliest incarnations.)

Why do they fit into the world of Krynn? Because they were in D&D, that’s why.

Authors working in both of those worlds have told meaningful and fun stories using these races, but in a strictly literary sense, most of the stories told in those worlds could still work without them.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it’s worth thinking about, right? When people find elves, dwarves, and orcs annoying or tired, it’s not because there’s anything wrong with elves, dwarves, and orcs; it’s because there’s something wrong with including story elements that don’t fit, or don’t have a reason for being there. It might work in an RPG setting where player freedom is paramount, but a story is different.

So let’s think about why we might include elves, dwarves, and orcs in a fantasy story. What benefit do we get from including them that we wouldn’t get from just making up our own completely-unique fantasy races? That’s really the point of this article–not to definitively say that all fantasy stories should have them, but to illustrate why criticizing fantasy stories that do include them is misguided at best.

And, since this is the internet, I’ll organize my reasons into a nice web-friendly numbered list! Here are 5 Reasons to use Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs in your Fantasy Stories.

Reason #1: It allows you to focus more on character.

I’m going to make a claim that I’ll probably have to defend in more detail in a future article: the more character-driven a story is (as opposed to plot-driven), the better.

Corollary: character development and conflict are inherent goods in a story.

Yes, there are good stories without these things–but those stories could have been even better if they’d included them.

(If you disagree with that I’m not really sure what to tell you other than we have such different conceptions of what makes fiction worthwhile that we may as well be speaking different languages.)

Storytelling is inherently limited in what it’s able to depict and portray. Every writer, but especially spec-fic writers, needs to carefully balance plot, character development, and worldbuilding. This balance isn’t exactly zero-sum, but there’s always going to be a limit, which means that too much focus on worldbuilding will detract to one degree or another from plot and character (and this goes every which way).

If you want to introduce a race of fantasy creatures completely unique to your story, then you’ll have to do that much more worldbuilding to make the story work. We’ll need to know what makes them different from humans; what kind of relationship they have with whatever other fantasy races exist in your world; and we have to get to know all of the ones that are important characters in your world.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with all of that–as long as you understand the tradeoffs you’re making.

On the other hand: elves, dwarves, orcs, fairies, gnomes, goblins, halflings, these are all recognizable archetypes that most fantasy readers will be immediately familiar with. You’ll still need to worldbuild a bit to explain how they work in your world (and the more you subvert the common tropes, the more you’ll need to do this), but in general, you drop a dwarf into your story and most fantasy readers will use their prior knowledge of fantasy tropes to quickly relate to that character so you can put more focus on the character. You don’t need to spend as much time showing us the dwarven mines, their penchant for craftsmanship, or their rocky relationship with the elves; you can reassure your reader that your dwarves are like most of the other dwarves they’ve met before and then focus on making them fall in love with your dwarf characters.

Note that this only works if you’re planning on actually developing your elf/dward/orc/whatever characters. You know, with arcs and stuff. If they’re just set dressing then you’re not really getting much benefit here.

Reason #2: It allows the reader to become invested in your world more quickly.

This follows from the first reason. Every new fantasy book a reader picks up requires a mental and emotional investment in a brand-new fictional universe with its own geography, physics, magic system, politics, history, etc. Sometimes it’s cool to be brought to a brand-new world full of people unlike any we’ve ever seen before, but other times you’re better off spending that precious word count (or screentime) on other things.

If I’m picking up a story because of an intriguing love story, or political plot, or high-concept premise, then usually I prefer not to have to also spend my limited brainpower on understanding the culture of a race of beings made out of pure energy, or whatever. Give me a tribe of orcs, though, and bam, I’m into the story.

Reason #3: It gives you a starting point to subvert expectations.

We all love subverted expectations, right? After all, that’s why The Last Jedi is the most popular of the modern Star Wars movies.

Joking aside, like everything else, subverting expectations is good when it’s done well, and bad when it isn’t. (The Last Jedi did it very well, by the by.)

But you can’t subvert expectations without first, y’know, putting those expectations into your reader’s minds.

If you’re the type of writer who likes to deconstruct tropes, to pick apart genres to see what makes them tick, or to parody common conventions, you need to first set up those tropes, genres, and conventions.

Maybe you want to tell a postmodern or metatextual story that really explores the fantasy genre from within, whether parodic or serious. In that case, you probably want to use the most common tropes.

Even if you’re not writing a full deconstruction, maybe you just want to subvert a single aspect of fantasy that’s always rubbed you the wrong way, like orcs being barbaric and evil or elves being basically humans, but better in every single way. Use these racial archetypes to explore that.

Just be careful not to deviate too much right off the bat, or you’re not really subverting expectations anymore, just falling victim to the Elves in Name Only trap.

Reason #4: You can explore what it actually means to be human, or what it means to be a “person.”

Elves, dwarves, and orcs are basically humans but with a couple of very noticeable differences. Elves live a long time/forever, dwarves resist magic, orcs are green, etc. We covered this.

But if your story is written properly, almost nobody would argue that they aren’t people.

This raises a lot of interesting questions that comparatively few fantasy stories really grapple with–what does being a person actually mean?

There are a lot of potentially interesting downstream questions, too–how would ethnic, cultural, or linguistic differences among humans manifest if there were also pointy-eared elves that lived for centuries in the next kingdom over? What forms of prejudice would exist between different kinds of elves, orcs, and dwarves? How would people go about resolving these differences (or would they)? How would we conceive of identity, of indigeneity, of “human rights”? Would it affect peoples’ willingness to eat animals, since they know that their species isn’t the only sentient or sapient one?

(It’s all the more disappointing since this was a significant theme even in LotR. Most fantasy stories don’t ignore it, necessarily, but few really dive into all thse implications.)

These sound like fascinating themes to explore, and they’re the kinds of themes that fantasy and sci-fi are better-suited for than any other genre. You can still explore these themes with your Haggychiks, I guess, but wouldn’t that be a little…distracting? It can work in sci-fi where aliens are an expectation, but in fantasy it’s just more work for the writer and the reader. We know elves, dwarves, and orcs, and we know what makes them similar to and different from humans. That’s exactly the kind of starting point you’d need to explore these themes.

I think all four of the above reasons are pretty good. They’re not prescriptive rules–you don’t have to include elves, dwarves, or orcs for any of these reasons, and there are many reasons not to. But if you’re looking for a reason to do so, or if you want to do so but aren’t sure how or why, I think they’re all good.

But there’s one final reason I just wanna throw out there:

Reason #5. Because they’re cool!

Look. I know this whole thing has been about why you should have actual reasons for the things you put in your stories. And generally, yeah, you should.

But I’m not going to sit here and pretend that fantasy (and any genre of fiction) can’t just be escapism sometimes. And you can have escapist elements without the story being “just” escapism.

Every kid in my generation came out of the Lord of the Rings movies thinking Legolas was awesome, hot, or both. I devoured stories about elves after seeing him grind that Uruk-hai shield down those stairs at Helm’s Deep, which included actually reading the LotR books.

Themes and character arcs are great. They’re what make stories worth sharing and revisiting and being inspired by. But they’re second-draft concerns (for the most part). Most “writers” never even get to the second draft. If focusing on the shit you find cool is what you need to get to that point, then do that.

I have mixed feelings about the “Story Workshop” method of writing that I studied at Columbia College in Chicago. One aspect that I don’t have mixed feelings about, however, is the practice of writing whatever is taking your attention. Every writer should do this, and often this means writing something you think is awesome, or comforting, or fun.

You’d be surprised how much this can help with writer’s block. Do you find yourself daydreaming about a scene you want to write, but you can’t get to it because you need to cover the exposition, inciting event, and rising action first? Fuck it. Write the scene. You might just find that it’ll get those floodgates open, and if you need to change something later to fit with an earlier scene, you can always do that.

To expand this point, if you have a story idea that you’ve been wanting to write, but you’re hung up because “Who needs another fantasy story with a bunch of haughty elves and reclusive dwarves,” guess what? I do!

There’s this quote that I once heard attributed to Beethoven (I am sure he did not actually say this) that goes something like, “There are so many songs in 4/4 time in the key of C Major that we will never be able to explore them all.” Whoever first said that, they were right about music and it applies just as much to fiction.

Stories can be derivative and unimaginative, sure. But there are worse things for a story to be–cynical, insincere, mean-spirited, reactionary. Boring.

And, perhaps worst of all, unwritten.