Annotated 44-10
Flo’s notes on winter elves:
“The winter elves are anachronism personified. They see all of the past and future, collectively, all the time. Not everyone sees everything, but as a whole, they do. Therefore their individuality is expressed based on which timelines, possibly even UNIVERSES they are privy to as individuals making clothes and houses and art and whatnot.
Some of it may even resemble Sepia world. None of it would REALLY resemble Cyberia because they lack the technology, though they might have made a noble attempt. Other homages to different periods of history within Arkerra and ‘The Real World,’ but still made with the natural materials one could be expected to find in a mountainous region.
Evocative of other timelines and universes, rather than any direct copies.
The wood elves themselves are equally anachronistic in fashion choices, but again limited to materials on hand and again, MOST of them just kind of look like they walked out of a fantasy version of an LL Bean catalog (http://guildedage.net/comic/chapter-1-page-13/).
As far as what RACE they are based on, they would most strongly resemble Native Americans in skin tone and hair color.”
FB: “Being part of the fog that’s everywhere all at once means that every vacation can be a staycation! But it does make it kind of challenging to order a pizza.”
Huh, I never noticed in the background that all the dwellings have massively different structures. I know most of the elves are dressed for winter, so I never picked up on the clothing differences, ‘big fuzzy concealing coat made of natural materials’ didn’t really jump out at me.
Does this mean the winter elves aren’t in snow areas all the time, so the houses that aren’t built for massive snow do a lot better, while only a few currently are good snow homes? With future vision it’s probably absurdly easy to get around any problems by knowing so I guess it’s moot really.
Auraugu always struck me as furious at Best in the final panel, glaring down at him menacingly. Not sure if that was the intent (it’s hard to tell with his mask) but I still see it…
I mean, I think that’s just his mask.
And if you look at it slightly differently, it just looks like a big ol’ grin.
Yeah, I definitely hear Auraugu sounding greatly amused in his one line here. And in the last panel, while it is true that something in the vicinity of his face is glaring at Best…you can’t actually see his face and his mask doesn’t change with his feelings.
Did you guys ever come to terms with how winter elves can see times with advanced technologies without actually having advanced technology?
This is what yanks me right out of verisimilitude with them–screw worrying about what the other races think, the winter elves should be able to roll over them with lasers, nukes, and automated drones if anybody wanted to mess with them.
There is a vast difference between seeing the future, and being able to do anything about it. I suspect enough Winter Elves would find the long-term concequences of such actions to not be worth the short-term benefits. Plus, who knows what the psychological impact of seeing the future would be? A finite mind is still finite even with precognition. Honestly, I would argue that it is more “unrealistic” (such as realism applies to a speculative fiction work) that Winter Elves wouldn’t have found ways to block or temper their abilities just so they didn’t regularly go insane.
I don’t think seeing the history of the automotive industry would be enough to teach me to build a car out of what I had lying around. Same basic deal: winter elves may know a bit about what’s coming in tech, but they don’t have the patience or dedication to industry to replicate it for themselves.
Well, mankind went from not barely being able to make coal-fired steam engines (which the Gnomes are kind of doing already) to mass-producing cars whose costs are 80-95% comfort function and brand recognition, and just 5-20% for the actual function, in just shy of 100 years, and much of that time was spent figuring out how to do this stuff. Winter elves would still need to build the required infrastructure but they could entirely skip the invention and development.
So I think it makes sense to think that they should be able to build all those things if they wanted to. But then, they also chose to retire from the rest of the world, so they clearly don’t intend to rule it, and might not have the motivation to assemble the infrastructure and materials needed for modern-day “RL” technology. Although I would also imagine that some more modern amenities should still appeal to them. Especially things related to heating and insulating homes, because finding and collecting firewood must be kind of impossible if the place you live in never goes above freezing…
Zak kinda gets at this, but I want to stress it more–by and large, the biggest BIGGEST hurdle to setting up new technology is actually figuring out how to do it, at least once you get advanced enough. Skipping all the failed prototypes and decades of optimization and innovation is basically a cheat code.
Would it take them a while to set up the first automation system for doing mass production? Maybe, though even then if they have 100% clairvoyance even that wouldn’t necessarily be that hard. A decade at the most, ball-parking it. If they aren’t doing that, it should really be because they’ve made some conscious decision not to, not because they can’t.