| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
On page 5 of The Armageddon Echo, James Jacobs said:
Elf ears are a funny issue. They're one of those things that everyone seems to have strong opinions about, and I'm not really sure why. The exact length and shape of these things sends our readers into shockingly passionate debates. I'm sure we didn't help things by going all over the board in the early days of Pathfinder as we experimented with a look that would be Golarion's. I knew I didn't want Spock-length ears (I wanted to save those for our half-elves), but I also knew that the overly huge "anime-ears" threw a lot of our readers into fits of rage. The direction of those ears caused problems too; do they stick straight up, straight out, or at some angle in-between?
After reading this, I have some questions.
1. My knowledge of Japanese animation is limited, but don't the elves on Golarion have overly huge anime-ears?
2. Can I also assume that the elves on Golarion have ears that stick straight up?
3. Azatas are the most elf-like of the celestial races. Do they also have overly huge anime-ears that stick straight up?
4. Can I assume that Calistria, Desna, Nocticula, and Socothbenoth have overly huge anime-ears that stick straight up?
5. Additionally, can I assume that elves in Dungeons & Dragons have short ears, like Spock-length, that stick straight out? At least, that's how the elves in Baldur's Gate 3 appear to me.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Yeah, I'm not sure why we're trying to relitigate something tongue-in-cheek from 2008 here.
Creative Director
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
This is a discussion that was pretty important back in the early days when we were trying to establish a look for our characters in Pathfinder, and I was (and remain) passionate that our elves in particular (those being my favorite core ancestry) had an appearance that looked different than those in other games and illustrations that were significant at the time.
Here's some answers to the questions:
1) Yes, but the classic anime elf ear look is of ears sticking out horizontally, not up vertically.
2) Yes, as you can see from the vast majority of elf art we've published.
3) Some do, some don't.
4) You don't have to assume because there's plenty of art of those characters to reference. They're pretty different in the ear department.
5) D&D's elf ears have a wide range of looks, but I'm not the expert there. You'd have to talk to D&D folks.
And to double down on the implied answers—you can see plenty of examples of elf ears across all these games. Pathfinder and D&D are no longer in the early days of establishing looks for things as core as elves. That said, sometimes artists don't follow art briefs or direction exactly, especially on licensed products. When that happens, we either correct the errors in house, have the artists correct the errors, kill the art, or end up publishing it, all depending on the timing and situation at the time.
|
Creative Director
|
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Yeah, I'm not sure why we're trying to relitigate something tongue-in-cheek from 2008 here.
That wasn't really tongue in cheek*. It was a post I made in earnest years ago to help explain our direction in how we were trying to establish our own look for Pathifnder, and some of the difficulties in breaking away from long-held traditions of things like "How do elf ears look?"
Wayne Reynolds' look for Merisiel was pretty much what we landed on for our elves—upward ears, tall and thin, and no whites to the eyes. But he didn't finalize her look on day 1, so there were some awkward variants for elves that showed up in the early adventures as we got used to things and worked at guiding and training our artists away from illustrating them D&D style. Remember, for several years, we WERE publishing for Dungeons and Dragons, and when we transitioned from the magazines to Pathfinder, that transition didn't have a break in time. It overlapped and we in large part didn't really change the artists and cartographers and writers we were using, so there was a lot of work in guiding those freelancers into our new vision.
In fact, for the first few years, we REALLY struggled with artists accidentally using D&D's iconic characters instead of ours in Pathfinder illustrations. Like, we'd ask for an illustration of the iconic cleric fighting a dragon or something, and would provide Kyra reference, but the artist ended up using Tyralandi reference (from Dungeon) instead and we'd have to kill the art or have it changed at the last minute. We also had Lidda and Redgar (3rd edition iconics who predated the use of the word in public as "iconics") show up a few times too. It was a really tumultuous and confusing time, for sure.
*EDIT: The bit about "throwing our readers into fits of rage" was a bit hyperbolic... but it was certainly something that drew an unexpected amount of discussion as we started publishing images of elves in the early, pre-Wayne Design for Merisiel days, with folks comparing an early image of Shalelu to looking like a bicycle with her ears sticking straight out and being comically huge, or people getting anxious about how the publishers of their favorite magazines for D&D were going to CHANGE things now that they were publishing for themselves. And that was all in a backdrop of work conditions at Paizo where we weren't sure if we'd even be in business as a company by the time between me writing the elf-ears comment that appeared in the foreword of Pathfinder #15 and it actually being available in stores for folks to buy and read (at that point, we knew we were going to have to abandon 3rd edition D&D rules to build our own rules but the public had no idea of what was coming there, and had only just barely started to settle into a world where Paizo was no longer publishing official D&D content).
|
Creative Director
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I wouldn't take any musings from the days of Second Darkness too seriously. In those days there were people at Paizo who still believed elves didn't sleep.
I stand by those musings, being the one who wrote them, but as I've mentioned in posts above this one... that was a VERY different world. I was a different person, and so was our customer base, who was reeling from a giant shakeup to their favorite game.
As for "elves not sleeping," that's a great specific example of the difficulties we faced in transitioning to our own fantasy setting away from D&D. The D&D inertia, be it "elves not sleeping" or "NPCs above 10th level are rare to the point of nonexistance" or "dragons love spending their time posing as humans and meddling with human politics" or "elves are fey creatures" or "elves are isolationists" or "Tiamat as a five-headed dragon is public domian" were all things we really struggled with for several years... in large part becasue we had to hit the ground running and didn't have the luxury or time of building up a world bible and its rules before publishing content for it.
THAT ALL SAID: It's also important to remember that the world has changed in the many years since we started publishing Pathifnder. Just as we no longer have things called Hit Dice in our game, elements of the lore have changed significantly as well. The fact that rules changes are easier to present and for folks to accept than is lore changes is, I guess, at the heart of the confusion, but... yeah, it's not SUPER helpful to quote musings from the 3.5 era for asking about lore in the same way it's not SUPER helpful to discuss Hit Dice or THACO when it comes to seeking character build advice.
James, thanks for the kind answers.
You mentioned that the elves on Golarion have ears that stick straight up vertically, not horizontally. However, according to various arts in Pathfinder books, elf ears seem to be positioned at some angle in-between, neither entirely horizontal nor entirely vertical.
For example, let's consider the elves depicted on page 46 and 49 of Pathfinder Remaster Player Core. Would you say their ears could be considered as sticking straight up vertically?
Also, I just thought of a weird question: Are goblin ears and hobgoblin ears bigger and longer than elf ears?
|
Creative Director
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
James, thanks for the kind answers.
You mentioned that the elves on Golarion have ears that stick straight up vertically, not horizontally. However, according to various arts in Pathfinder books, elf ears seem to be positioned at some angle in-between, neither entirely horizontal nor entirely vertical.
For example, let's consider the elves depicted on page 46 and 49 of Pathfinder Remaster Player Core. Would you say their ears could be considered as sticking straight up vertically?
Also, I just thought of a weird question: Are goblin ears and hobgoblin ears bigger and longer than elf ears?
There's a degree of latitude for elf ears we prefer to see. They don't always have to be extending from the side of the skull at the same angle, same as for real human ears. The ones you cite from the Player Core are on-model, and to my eye are vertical, not horizontal. If an elf's head were a letter of the alphabet, then "Y" is a fine profile for their ears. "T" is not. For Pathfinder.
As for the question about goblin and hobgoblin ears, I think that the art answers that fine on its own.