Drowtales
Drowtales: Moonless Age is a fantasy manga-style webcomic that has been running since 2001.
Drowtales has had many iterations, from it's original shitty MSPaint-tier art to dozens of artists collaborating on what is now unarguably one of the best looking webcomics on the internet. Whether the story has likewise improved at all is open to debate. Drowtales is a skub topic on /tg/ that causes massive levels of autism from both it's fans and anti-fans. /tg/ has had several raids of the site's roleplaying forums, with neckbeards attempting to fight the drow Mary Sues with their own dwarf Mary Sues. The only thing most anons agree on is about the art, which, admittedly, is pretty fucking badass.
The simplest way to describe what's wrong with Drowtales is thusly: Take Drizzt Syndrome, infect an entire planet's worth of elves with it and replace any self-awareness moments of characters with cognitive dissonance. Oh, and add in heaps of obnoxious T&A in the middle of all the wangst, and crank up the Grimdark up to eleven.
Story
A long time ago there were two elven nations at war. They used a magic spell to break the fucking moon apart and opened a giant portal to the netherworld so that demons flooded the surface of the planet and ate everyone.
What few elves survived this clusterfuck of a war went underground and turned into the drow. They built a giant city and then started fighting each other, preying on completely underpowered humans and slaughtering entire surface towns to drag women and children to slavery (while philosophizing about how their savior Jesus-archetype sorceress Sharess was a Goddess...)
The empress's daughters betrayed her and locked her in her throne to starve to death while they took over the city, some people began tainting themselves with demons intentionally, the daughter of one of the clan leaders went to a magic school where she pretended to be a boy and then killed a bunch of her friends, a cult tried to summon a demon god into the underworld, and one of the empress's daughters made a magic flower bioweapon and rode around on a magic airship. Blah blah blah. Cue slavery, its awkward confrontation and incredibly edgy Drow butchering each other with swords, crossbows, artillery, particle rifles and mana powered mecha and submarines (I wish I made that shit up) while arguing that slavery is crucial for them to survive for its food and textile yield. (Said houses have armies of submarines and mecha operated by single Drow pilots who would render manual labor obsolete anyway, but then who'd have eye candy of light elves in chains in the marketplace...?)
tl;dr story writer occasionally shocks with completely illogical edgy points just to leave a minty Skub taste in mouth.
Factions
- Sarghress: The clan the main character belongs to and thus the default "heroic" one. They are a clan of mercenary commoners focused on strength, the rights of commoners, and so on. Boring as all fuck. In a last few chapters, they started to liberate (Drow) slaves and acting good...hopefully they'll extend the same courtesy to non-Drow in the future rather than becoming status quo humping, racist and xenophobic angsty elven sluts.
- Sharen: The aristocrats of the city who all wear beautiful outfits and act haughty. Their clan is split into multiple bloodlines who constantly plot against each other. These are the most D&D-like drow in the setting.
- Sullisin'rune: Essentially the Brave New World society in drow form. They wear a lot of blue, use empath abilities and have regular orgies in their glowing dome fortress. One of the more interesting factions in the story.
- Vloz'ress: Anarchist demon worshippers. Generally useless and self-defeating.
- Beldrobbaen: Emo goths who live in an inverted castle built on the cavern ceiling. They dress in all black and mope around. Needless to say, they are by far the most popular clan among the fanbase.
- Nal'sarkoth: Surface merchants who dress in all green. They barely show up in the story and nobody gives a flying fuck about them.
- Illhar'dro: The other merchant clan. Slightly more interesting in that they have a form of magic based on singing. Biggest exporter of drow pop stars in the underworld.
- Kyorl'solenurn: Fanatic crusader assholes, who, aside from torturing tainted Drow to death, are the exact same Mary Sue bastards.
- Jaal'darya: Female-only clan who use biotechnology. They create artificial life forms and transform their bodies into all kinds of weird shit.
So What's Wrong With It?
The main complaint /tg/ has is that the characters are all either Mary Sues, or edgier than Coldsteel the Hedgeheg even at inappropriate moments.
/tg/ doesn't mind grimdark. It doesn't mind slavery, S&M, badass Drow, porn, PROMOTIONS, mutilation and torture and wars, a world after a horrible disaster or hopeless, overwhelming racism and powerful warrior races ruining everyone's day.
/tg/ minds logic and moral dissonance, /tg/ minds weeaboo faggotry trying to show Dark Eldar level slave societies and the plot having more holes than swiss cheese with logic failures and Mary Sue faggotry combined with bishie sparkles that outdo Twilight.
Are They?
Well, kind of. The series start with a illustration of how their poor race suffered a catastrophe and how "their story came to be"...right before we see a Drow war party happily slaughtering a human town and enslaving the women and children as the protagonist cheerfully tells her history of "kicking human asses" that grow like mushrooms around their cities.
The drow are OP compared to every other race and amorally waste lives randomly angsting over leadership crisis. Some have cat ears. All are bisexual. The main character pulls out any imaginary power out of her ass when cornered. There's faggotry like the drow getting high on chocolate (seriously). The drow are shown to be mostly cute, animesque and angsty nerdy teenagers who bitch to each other about their lives, imagining a peaceful future while hordes of slaves are brought to be used in the underworld, completely missing the point of saying "maybe we should not prey on others and be happy and shit" earlier, when they have an orgy on the settlement they just conquered from humans. After a blissful after-sex sleep, the settlement is counterattacked by desperate humans coming to save their kin... which are promptly murdered by the half-light half-dark elf paladin of Sharess (Yes, a Mary Sue worshipping a total Baldur's Gate rip-off) who is all high and righteous when she is burning innocent humans who wanted to save their kin from slave traders who'd buy the survivors. The protagonist's lesbian empath Drow (yes, with a length of purple hair paint, straight out of Deviantart) friend berates the cornered humans with a lame excuse line of "I feel your pain, why don't you take your survivors and run?!" when the said humans scream in desperation to save their families from the town's locked buildings, die horribly and our "I'm glad my clan Sargress prevents slavery, let's shake hands and feast on the food we just plundered!" protagonist shakes hands on it. The moral/logic dissonance of the plot points are enough to make an OCD go into aneurysm.
The drow are so OP in this setting that a couple of children who are competent magic users defeat an entire human settlement with walled fortifications and a brigade of heavily armed adult human guards. At first you think that it is like an examination of the conflicts that arise from putting a bunch of Mary Sues in a cavern that is too small for them, but then you realize that it is about a bunch of Mary Sues who are clearly a projection of the writers' hate of humanity, especially White and Asian (Hermiones- who speak in a runic language and are Nordic-based, Emberi- humans who look Japanese, are ugly and only fit for slavery under beautiful black Drow, nevermind their women and children who are slaughtered, we'll just liberate a desperate female Emberi who is an arena slave for years and lost some of her sanity...to feel morally ok) and imagining themselves as superior snowflakes who can enslave, kill and liberate playing an amoral, gothic God.
Arguments with its fans about the plot dissonance reveal that they simply hand-wave any dissonance with the words that "they are a different species with morals" or "they see humans as bees disturbing them so they are morally justified to do so and if you disagree you aren't hardcore enough with your pink glass morality". So typical "I'm so different than mankind and gothic and purple haired faggot and I reject your morals wankity wank wank" going on there. Apparently in Drowtales, Drow honor is based on the scale of a deed, not the justice of it. However, this is contradicted by all the times where drow have normal morals (that they randomly choose to ignore, taking us back to step one, namely cognitive dissonance since writers without emotional maturity and experience are not the best prospect for authoring an artifical moral code, much less parade it as art).
The faggotry rises to new heights in a "Space Age" story arc about 10000 years later when Drow apparently are the sole rulers of their world and explore the space with mana powered spaceships and Earth of all places. In this arc Drow are somehow good people after 10000 years of slavery and genocide and help Earth humans with some civil war. (Fate of other races in their homeworld are not explained, probably happily genocided by Mary Sue drow because they are too cute to die and all non-Drow are ew ugly).