By: cucio

cucio — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 08:47:47 +0000

Alt-text pun has grown on me.

By: Lurklen

Lurklen — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 06:23:48 +0000

Sure, though the idea of all furniture being immovable has always struck me as a big pain in the ass. It’d make mores sense if they had furniture made from things like vines or living vegetation. Shrubs or something. (Actually that reminds me, a book I read as a tiny tot had a settlement of unicorns and other fanciful folk, and they lived in yurt like houses, which were all made of leafy shrubbery that grew up quite quickly and was cultivated into the proper shapes. I don’t remember what they did for furniture, perhaps it was less of a problem as many of them were basically horses/deer/goats. Most interesting was how they would carry the bits of the plant with them when they moved on, as they were nomadic, and plant them elsewhere when they changed settlements based on the season. As an extra benefit, the houses also served as a snack for the unicorns lol.)

But no other creature operates like that, squirrels and the like don’t, if there’s a spot in a tree that works for a den, but could be a little bigger, those suckers get to gnawing. Same thing with Beavers, the beaver isn’t concerned with the effect it has on the landscape. It wants a house, it gets to work, you mess with it you get the teeth. (A beaver killed a man in my city not too long ago, it was terrible. No joke.) The rapacious nature of man does seem to be the bigger bugbear, but it still sounds a little hypocritical, as due to their civilization not seeming all that different from a human one, the Wood Elves must use large amount of wood (you’d need a hell of a lot of dead wood to run a forge for those polearms we saw a couple pages back, and arrowheads, lots of arrowheads, not to mention arrows and bows for that matter) but even if they did have some kind of magical ability to accelerate growth and create the wooden things they need, it’s still a civilization wide use of the living world for the betterment and ease of their people. So it sounds like their use isn’t so different, but their methods are. Of course the humans do have access to those methods.

It’s wrong headed to be so hostile about something you have exclusive access to, like no wonder humans don’t have the same relationship with nature, they don’t have magic nature powers. It’s a hell of a lot easier to live green when you can literally ask the trees to grow you a house! (I suppose all of this is Syr’s point in trying to find a middle ground.)

I wonder how the wood elves feel about Gnomes, those folks must use a crap ton of wood, and also be terribly efficient lumberjacks.

By: Sumgai

Sumgai — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 19:49:49 +0000

I think somewhere in an alt text or something it was mentioned that wood elves fuel fires only with deadwood. So dead wood at least is considered fair game.

By: drs

drs — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 11:56:05 +0000

Maybe take twigs and branches, attending to the wounds, but not felling/killing whole trees.

By: The Gorram Batguy

The Gorram Batguy — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 09:07:34 +0000

In these kinds settings, the wood furniture is often magically-guided plant growth – living extensions of the tree itself. These tables and chairs are literally rooted in place.
But either way, it may be that they indeed use wood – they eat plants and animals both, after all. “when life consumes life in order to live…” But they have some kind of philosophy of taking only what you need for the moment and maintaining sustainable balance. They see humans as insatiable consumers who harvest wantonly. So it may be less the idea that cutting down trees is a crime, and more that they associate lumberjacks with the humanoid equivalent of locusts. It’s not the act – it’s the degree. Perhaps

Comments on: Annotated 17-19

By: cucio

By: Lurklen

By: Sumgai

By: drs

By: The Gorram Batguy