Modern fantasy setting extrapolations...(Yeah, yeah, I haven't been on this site for like a year and a half, shut up.)
I've been playing ridiculous amounts of Tales of Symphonia over the break with my little brother, and despite his claims that it's "boring" because of all the "cutscenes" and "character development," he's always begging to play because Wind Waker finally got boring after the fourth successful playthrough (in three days!).
But it's been giving me weird dreams, and they're giving me ideas for a story I'm probably never actually going to write because it's not a plot so much as a setting.
But it came about like this.
See, in Tales of Symphonia, there are these "half-elves" that are discriminated against shamelessly--they're at the bottom of the caste system and in some places they're executed for crimes without a trial or consideration for gravity of offense. I put "half-elves" in quotes because they're basically just humans with weird ears who live longer and sometimes have oddly-colored hair.
Naturally, the PROTAGONISTS are totally non-discriminatory, but everyone else is like "zOMG half-elves" and when the party is arrested for trying to undermine the almighty Church ("Damn the pope!"), the party's half-elves are separated for execution while the rest just get jail time. Srsly.
The weird thing is that no reason is given for the discrimination, like, none at all. Full elves are totally chill. The two main characters who are half-elves don't take any crap for the first third of the game because they're just pretending to be elves. And, like I said, they're basically just long-lived humans that can do magic and live longer. If they were in our world I bet everyone would be obsessed with them. (And it's really weird, once you realize that there are way more half-elves in the game than normal elves. Then again, I guess elves live long enough to have a bajillion kids, but since elves mostly stay secluded I don't know when this would happen. You NEVER find any just roaming around in the overworld.)
The in-game explanation for the discrimination (yeah, yeah, I sort of lied, there is one, but it's pretty weak, and just warning: spoilers ahoy) is that the bad guys who run the "human slave ranches" are all half-elves, and they all hate humans. Yeah, I can see where that might upset people, but it does fall apart at a certain level. There are (SPOILERS) two worlds in the game, Sylvarant and Tethe'alla, and the basic system is that one is flourishing while the other wanes, and there's this whole gigantic process that takes place every few hundred years or so to reverse the status quo. In the world that's crapping out at the start of the game, Sylvarant, the half-elf bad guys, called "Desians," are supposedly unleashed as evil spreads and can be sealed away as soon as the world-flourishing process occurs. The thing is that in Tethe'alla, the nicer world, half-elves are actually treated worse. No Desians needed.
And then you find out later that this whole 'half-elf discrimination' thing was going on for thousands of years before Desians even existed. I just don't understand why. And it's been bugging me for days, because now that I've played the game through a couple of times the logic errors are less excusable.
And then I had weird dreams about Lloyd teleporting through random dungeons, and that's when I got the idea for a different story.
(The only reason I'm posting this here is that I get the feeling I've seen the same idea somewhere before and I want you guys to tell me if I'm just ripping anyone off with this thought process.)
tl;dr -
Okay, I've got an idea for this fantasy race. They're humanoid, but not human, and I want the fact that they AREN'T humans to be a little more significant than just aesthetics. Yeah, they have weird hair colors, but they also have differently shaped eyes (like, rounder and a little bigger) and their skin tones are largely different. I don't think I want to set them up as aliens or anything, but maybe they used to be mostly native to this one part of the planet where a shit-ton of colorful plants and animals live and that's why they sort of turned out more brightly, and green is the most common hair/skin combination.
They technically have a longer lifespan than humans and develop more slowly, but since they get fragile as they grow older it basically evened out until fairly recently in world history. Then, when the older ones started staying alive longer due to lifespans in general increasing with more food, etc., their population skyrocketed because the birth rate stayed the same.
I don't really know the specifics. It's fantasy and I don't have to explain myself like I would science fiction, and I want them to have the different hair and skin and ears and stuff because it's important to the plot, but I don't want it to sound contrived and stupid. Especially since I want the setting to be pretty modern, with cars and grocery stores and stuff.
But they are a completely different species from human, although a few bajillion years back maybe they had a common ancestor. But they eat different food from humans, they have slightly different environmental needs than humans, and, by and large, they're emotionally different from humans, though I haven't decided if I want that to be a learned behavior or an inherent trait.
Another thing that's sort of important is that they're not elf-based, they're fairy-based. But no wings. They do have magic talents--they can all teleport, and the other stuff includes telekinesis, water manipulation, and some healing (but not combustion; more on that later). The most common is the ability to help plants grow. All of these can be honed and refined, but it's sort of like muscle building: unusual to find developed in younger kids, takes off at puberty, great potential from youth to middle age, and then tapers off. This is important because the fairykin or whatever basically have no physical strength. In hand-to-hand combat a human could basically snap one in half, so the teleporting thing is pretty important from a survival standpoint.
Except that since they're as intelligent, or maybe a little less, than humans on the whole, they've basically joined society and of course they aren't living like animals. But they're discriminated against.
This is basically working from a religious standpoint within the story, since all the sects basically preach that only human beings can have souls and go to heaven. Most of them still tell the congregations that being cruel to the fairykin is wrong for the same reason you shouldn't kick puppies, but a few fundamentalists believe that the fairykin are devils incarnated, since their power clearly does not originate from a divine source. It's sort of hinted that people used to believe that the fairykin were angels, but no one says that anymore and the idea is laughed upon.
In practical application the discrimination is just bad enough to be tolerable--no more, no less. I guess the closest I could compare it to is being a non-English speaker in America. A lot of the humans resent them and make jokes or derogatory remarks, but if they met one in passing they wouldn't say anything, and would probably be fairly nice. After all, it's harder to be an asshole in person, although of course there are exceptions.
Except the resentment is really widespread. The fairykin are considered sort of creepy, and their weird emotional responses are the reason people are content to accept the explanation that they don't have souls and don't really count as "people".
Relationships between a human and a fairykin are really, really looked down upon, however. There's a couple of reasons. For example, even though the fairykin, generally, are sort of pretty in their own weird way (since the odd pigmentations are actually natural and look more tasteful than a human with dye in their hair), it's usually not in a way that a human would find sexually attractive. The difference is a lot bigger, than say, an Asian person and a Caucasian person. As I mentioned, the species has different eyes and ears, and possibly hands, although the body build is pretty much identical, with the fairykin being much slimmer in general due to having basically no muscles, although they can be overweight just from fat. (However, since a handful of hair and skin pigmentations are shared or have a close resemblance between the two species, it is THEORETICALLY possible for a fairykin to look human, but only from a distance.) The other reason relationships are met with pretty much universal disapproval is because EITHER any children produced by such a union would be sort of horrible failures with unworkable disabilities, OR it just flat-out wouldn't work. I haven't decided which of the two options to settle on.
So with all this discrimination going on and gradually getting worse instead of better, the fairykin are little by little disappearing from society. Rumor has it that a bunch of fairykin-only communities are springing up, but no one knows where they are.
One last important thing about the fairykin is that they can't deal with fire. When they see fire they've got this ingrained response to go ballistic and try to get away as fast as they can, which usually means teleporting. This is because they're pretty fragile, and serious burns would be pretty much fatal, as there's no treatment and the skin won't recover, ever.
That's the setting. Here's the plot, or what little I have of it. It's basically a deconstruction of the whole 'fantastic racism' thing, since I sort of think if these kinds of creatures existed in real life people would be absolutely obsessed with them.
So basically, the story opens with a fairykin, a kid. He (I sort of wanted it to be a girl, but magical girl stories are just too overdone) seriously lucked out in the gene pool, since his hair is a shade of maroon that looks brown except in extremely bright lighting and his skin is the sort of orange that people could passably see as a result of bad tanning. His parents are humans, or rather, the two people who raised him are humans, but they never lied to him about the fairykin thing. They're rich, and since one parent is actually a cosmetic surgeon the kid had work done on his ears to make them sort of human-ish, which is further helped by the fact that he has long enough hair to hide them 90% of the time. He also has bangs to hide his eyes, although they're just, barely, passable as human eyes. The kid also wears colored contacts to disguise the fact that they're red. He always wears gloves to hide his hands. The parents tell their friends that he's just adopted, and he goes to a small school, has friends, and basically lives a normal human life. He knows he's a fairykin but doesn't really identify with them, and for all intents and purposes considers himself as human as his friends and family.
Like I said, his parents are rich, and they live in a rich neighborhood and have a really nice house. So they're throwing a party one night, and it's all fine and dandy. The kid usually just stays in his room for those sorts of things but it's not that unusual for him to walk around and exchange hellos with the guests, who, again, are rich upper-class people and think he's just the sweetest kid. (The copious alcohol helps.)
So he's doing this one night, just saying hi to everyone and looking for his parents among the guests, when someone lights a match for a smoke. This happens despite the hosts stressing a billion and one times that NO ONE IS TO LIGHT ANY SORT OF FIRE IN THEIR HOUSE.
In true fairykin fashion, the kid freaks, since the match is lit about a foot away from him, and makes a scene. The parents arrive and try to calm everyone down and make up some excuse. The only reason he doesn't teleport is because he's simply ignored his magic for years and sort of forgotten it as a first response, which is the only thing that saves his cover from being blown in front of everyone. The guests seem to buy whatever excuse is given and nothing comes of it.
Except then the kid gets kidnapped by one of the party guests.
S/he's completely obsessed with the idea of fairykin "passing" for human, but had never seen it done successfully before. S/he wants to study the cosmetic surgery done on the kid and grill him about his birth parents to figure out the combinations that worked to make him look human enough for any of this to be possible. Of course he doesn't know anything about his fairykin birth parents, but, unable to accept that this really important link in the mystery might actually be worthless, s/he just keeps getting more desperate for answers. When s/he starts to get literally hysterical and abusive, the kid, afraid for his life, works out an escape plan and manages to get back to his parents. His cover is blown, though, since the guest stole his contacts and gloves, and a media shitstorm/controversy ensues.
This increases tenfold when everyone finds out the kidnapper was working on orders from his/her religious leaders, because everyone's convinced that they were trying to figure out ways to weed out other "passing" fairykin. Some people are okay with this, since if they're looking and acting like humans, what's to stop them from marrying humans and trying to have kids? But other people are saying it's an abuse of civil liberties, and then more people bring up whether or not civil liberties should even apply to 'non-humans' and it's all just going to hell.
...Have you ever read anything sort of like that before?
Seasonal
Lonely
Affection
Optimism
