I do need to hear about the original jewish fantasy
Liiiiiiil I'm gonna need more specifics waugh this is my fault
So this is a world that I started brainstorming while talking to @animatedamerican and complaining about what I've been mentally thinking of as The Elf Problem. The Elf Problem is a thing you see in fantasy, mostly medievalesque fantasy, where a fictional group takes the societal position of Jews without actually bearing enough resemblance to Jews to count as representation. This is a problem I have complained about before with the elves in Dragon Age. It's also a rather glaring problem in The Witcher.... also with the elves (and to some extent the Witchers, too). Discworld has elements of it with the dwarves. I have a lot of theories about why this happens, but the summary of it is that it's very frustrating, particularly in fiction that is not shy about its other allegorical cultures - although rarely well done, it's extremely common for fantasy worlds to have an Obviously Fantasy Arab culture or an Obviously Fantasy Chinese culture. But the Jews are layered under enough fantasy that they're much harder to find.
So this is not that. Ilfhan is to ancient Judea as Ankh-Morpork is to London. Ilfhan is a country that was originally filled with immortal elves until a human empire came in, sacked their cities, stole their sacred artefacts, and, for an unknown reason, brought death, disease, and old age. By the time our story actually starts it's been a few hundred years since then. Elves have mostly settled into being mortal, but are currently fighting off another human empire, Civitas.
Making things more complicated is magic. The easiest way to power magic is to draw it from the sacrifice of a living being - Elven law forbids the use of people for magic, but Civitan law doesn't. In fact, many Civitan mages believe that due to their past immortality, elven blood casts more potent spells. Elven life is disposable because it's (seen as) powerful.
At the moment I have three extremely loosely outlined stories I'm planning set in this universe:
The first one is a tragedy set during the Civitan occupation of Ilfhan, following Kalavan, a slave who joins an Ilfhan revolt which eventually fails. This is the least developed of the three.
The second is.... the closest genre descriptor I can come up with is romance, but I'm pretty sure it's a romance that would get me strangled if I were to market it that way. It follows Geulah/Gallus, who is first a gladiator attempting to buy his way to freedom and then a concubine of Kyrillus, the heir to a wealthy Civitan family. It's set a few decades after Kalavan's story, and mainly focuses on the inner workings of Civitas as a city and culture. I mentioned Tryphaena the other day? Yeah, she's Kyrillus's wife. This is the most developed of the three.
The third is a revenge tale set about a thousand years after the other two, set in what used to be the Civitan empire and is now roughly analogous to 11th/12th century Europe. At this point, the former Civitan empire has long since converted to the worship of the Threefold God, but the elven lot hasn't improved all that much. The combination of the politics of a plague outbreak and a Crusade lead to the local king Lysander agreeing to help the main character Nekhama get revenge for the massacre of her family and the local Elven community.
pick a wip for me to talk about!
