Or: ruining fanboy’s hopes and dreams one murder elf at a time.
In writing my On making the drow less problematic post — some three years ago now! — I realized that a lot of why I see the drow as so interesting? Comes from my own head.
Yes, I do see the organic flaws of the rules-as-written drow… but then I just substitute my own reality. This informs how I write the drow characters in my fanfic, as well as how I play drow in my various murder elf-fancying games.
But maybe, yanno. This isn’t super transparent to my friends who are asking me “what do you find so interesting about them?”
So, here, at long last, is a series of drow headcanon posts. I’ve written the whole thing already; it should work out to 12 posts. I’ll post links here as I publish the remaining 11.
- Introduction + the banality of evil and social Darwinism (this post)
- The law of “don’t get caught”
- The ultimate in “guess” culture
- Chosen ones
- Connoisseurs of sensual pleasures
- Sexual orientation
- Gender identity and trans-ness
- Yes, heat vision
- Drow language
- Consent in the matriarchy
- No one is born knowing their society is fucked
- Etc etc
Introduction
I feel like I need to start by establishing my credentials — or maybe my lack thereof. As I alluded to in the previous post, I have been a drow fancier since 2e, and I was reading the Legend of Drizzt novels before they were even called that. But I lost interest over the years; after all, the Dunmer of TES are pretty awesome and much less problematic.
Only when I was playing Out of the Abyss in 2020-2021 did I decide to dive back into the world of my second favorite murder elves.
Then, writing Bright Future, I went deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.
And then I started playing my drow intrigue game.
And then I played a drow in a short-lived Waterdeep: Dragon Heist game.
And then I started writing about a minor character in WDDH and holy shit now I have an entire headcanon.
And I’ve been back on my drow bullshit ever since.
So, I guess my expertise comes from:
- Reading numerous D&D sourcebooks featuring the drow, including Drow of the Underdark for 2e, Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue from 4e, and Volo’s Guide to Monsters from 5e.
- What Drizzt novels I have actually read and remember. I have not read all of the 34?35? of the damn books; please forgive me. I actually don’t enjoy Salvatore’s writing much at all, and I often have to force myself to read it.
- Lots of time on the Forgotten Realms wiki.
- Playing a lot of drow characters.
- Reading lots of fanfic about drow.
- Writing my own fanfic about drow.
If that doesn’t qualify me to write this post… well, too bad, I’m still gonna write it.
Also, whenever I write “drow” in this post, I mean “Lolthite drow,” because they’re the most interesting to me personally. But as I said in the original post, #notalldrow.
And a big ol’ “drow being awful” content warning for this entire series — but I’ll be more specific in individual posts.
So how do the drow do, according to Lise? Let’s find out.
The banality of evil and social Darwinism
The phrase “the banality of evil” comes to us from Hannah Arendt, taking cues from Kant, and refers to the belief that evil is commonplace and petty, and arises out of treating people as means to an end. I talked about this in the original post — about how I have major problems with the extravagant, Snidely Whiplash levels of evil we see on display so often in the books, where drow arrange elaborate tortures for other drow, or are cruel just for the sake of being cruel.
As I said over there, this gets glossed over as “well, chaotic evil, lol,” but that explanation doesn’t do it for me. A culture based on nothing but chaos wouldn’t stay together as long as this one has — tens of thousands of years, we’re told. It could hardly be said to be a culture at all.
Canonically, the drow are taught that Lolth’s chaos is what makes the society strong; that they are tempered by internecine strife and wars with other races. But I’d argue that’s less “chaotic evil yay!” and more “social Darwinism, yay!”
In fact, we’re also told that the drow engage in an extreme form of social Darwinism, which includes such charming practices as selective breeding, eugenics, and murdering infants with disabilities. (Not to mention the traditional sacrifice of the third son to Lolth). Any life this ends tends to be brushed off as “eh, they were too weak to have survived in drow society anyway.”
Given this, I believe that drow culture is deeply selfish — and selfishness is what I took evil to be when I first learned about D&D’s alignment system. Most individual drow see no harm in shoving another one in front of the metaphorical bus. (Purple worm? Demon prince?) This leads naturally to the belief that anyone you screw over probably brought it on themselves.
That is evil. But it’s not mustache-twirling, “let’s arrange overly complex tortures for our enemies” evil. As I said at one point re: my boy Jorlan: while he’s definitely suffered in drow society, it’s mostly through neglect. Few people have been cacklingly evil to him, because that is simply more fucks than most people have given for him.
And, honestly? I find that utter disregard more evil, more terrifying, than any overly creative torture some teenaged fanboy — or Salvatore himself –would come up with.
(I will admit to sometimes having some extravagant evil in my fanfiction, though — the chapter “Orb’illythiiri” of Bright Future is a good example — if only because I love making my boy suffer! But it’s important to have a light hand with it, and stay true to the characters involved).
More… tomorrow? When we discuss the only law that matters in Menzoberranzan: “don’t get caught.”
