Dark Elves in Anime are nothing like The Drow

I find it interesting how whenever the Moriquendi come up in something I'm reading or watching about Arda Lore the author needs to stop and explain how “Dark Elves” in Tolkien have nothing to do with the almost Demonic qualities Dark Elves have in modern Fantasy.  Because it’s really mainly DnD Dark Elves they have in mind, perhaps also the second Thor movie.

I watch a lot of Anime, and while on the one hand the influence of Tolkien is way less direct on Fantasy Anime that feature Elves and Dwarves and Goblins then he is in The West, so is DnD, in Japan other Tabletop Role Playing Games were always more popular than DnD.  And I can’t help but wonder if almost by sheer coincidence the Dark Elves you see in Anime are not too dissimilar to the Avari?

These Anime definitely still use the term differently.  Moriquendi in Tolkien’s writings refers neither to a moral assessment or anything about how they looked, it simply meant neither they or their ancestors ever saw the Light of the Trees.  I think most casual film only Tolkien fans would be most shocked to learn that Legolas and the other Mirkwood Elves are Moriquendi not Calaquendi.  So I feel like mentioning here that the standard Elves you see in Anime and JRPGs even if they are called “Light Elves” or their home is called Alfheim are if I compared them to any of Tolkien’s Elves really Wood Elves, perhaps even more specifically the Sylvan Elves before the Sindar royal families took them over.  The thing that might most disappoint a Tolkien fan watching Fantasy is that there are no High Elves, no one who seems at all like the Vanyar, Noldor or even the Teleri of Beleriand.  The Anime or JRPG races that do give off Calaquendi vibes to me are not actually called Elves at all but rather are the Cetra of Final Fantasy VII and the Iorph of Maquia.

Tolkien devotes surprisingly little time to describing what any of his Elves looked like, especially in terms of Skin, Eye or Hair color.  The Sylvan Elves are often assumed to all be Golden haired because only one of them ever had their hair color described at all.  It is possible those Avari tribes who stayed in the East or South even into the Third Age may have developed dark skin tones just like the humans living in those parts of the world, but either way that’s not why they’re called Dark Elves.

There is a lot of talk about how Dragon Quest is the key Ur Text of a lot of aspects of modern “Generic” Fantasy Anime (like how Orcs in Isekai are usually Humanoid Pig creatures rather than another word for Goblin as it is in Tolkien).  However it seems the Anime Dark Elf trend is an exception to this, I have never played any Dragon Quest game but from skimming the Wiki they seem to have no Dark Elves.

So the archetypal basis for the Anime Dark Elves I’m talking about seems to come from Record of Lodoss War, principally the character of Pirotess who’s also important in the spin off Legend of Crystania.  Likewise the Blond Haired Green Clad Archer Elf Maidens of modern Anime largely descend from Deedlit.  Record of Lodoss began literally as a Tabletop Roleplaying Game campaign, but again whenever someone talking about it says it simply was DnD they are assuming, it seems they mostly made up their own rules that drew more on Tunnels & Trolls and RuneQuest.  And I’d say the greatest evidence of that is how Pirotess is nothing like the Drow of DnD.  Modern Anime Dark Elves clearly based on her in part include Aura Shurifon in War On Geminar and Yao Ha Ducy in Gate.

The look of these Dark Elves tends to be Silver Hair and a fairly Dark Skin tone but not like you see in Africa.  The Japanese have a fairly decent variety of Skin Complexions among themselves, there are a number of darker skinned Anime characters in shows set in Japan who the western audience tends to at first assume must be some type of Gaijin but usually no it really just represents coming from certain regions of Japan.  And I think that may be largely what they are going for with these Dark Elves, because they are at the end of the day not all that fundamentally different from the Vanilla Elves.

If you brought back the old Norse terminology you could have both types of Dark Elves in the same story, with Drow style Elves as the Svartalfar and these RoLW style Anime Dark Elves as the Dokkalfar.