#elves are borzois or greyhounds or some other kind of dog bred for a specific purpose with unnatural and upsetting proportions

[sugarcoatednightshade]

oh i was kind of assuming that elves were the domesticated species in this instance.

since they're "more evolved" or whatever. Also their spindly long limbs reminds me of that one tumblr comic where a wild wolf/coyote meets a borzoi.

Random story thought: What if a fantasy story where there's humans and elves, who are less like different nationalities and/or "human, but in a different font", but more like the difference between dogs and wolves? Like they resemble humans, but are very, very clearly not human. And half-elves, like wolfdogs, are known to be theoretically possible, but so improbable and rare that they might as well be a myth. Like everybody's school had that one kid who loves lying for attention who keeps insisting that they actually know somebody who's a real half-elf for real.

And in the extremely rare case where their friend of a friend who's "totally actually a real half-elf" even exists at all, 99 times out of 100, the aforementioned suspected hybrid is just a 100% full human who's unusually tall, beautiful and autistic. Something that can definitely fool someone who's never seen a real half-elf, and is willing to believe that this friend's mom actually for real fucked an elf (instead of getting hunted for sport, and possibly eaten, which is the more likely outcome of encountering elves in the wild). But it's almost always just a full human with vaguely 'elvish' features.

But once in a blue moon, there actually is a real half-elf, and once you've seen one, you won't mistake a full human for one of them again. They're gangly, not just tall but long-limbed in a way that humans are not, their speech is strangely composed as if they learned their first language as a second language, and their eyes are piercing, wild, inhuman eyes, with a gaze full of strange instinctive wisdom that humans were never meant to know. Secret elvish thoughts that even they, personally, wish they didn't have.

And it sinks in to you that elves, that are so alien to you, would also find this poor creature just as strange and unsettling as you do.