Editing Eldar (section)

==Lameness, Courtesy of Games Workshop==
[[Image:End of the line.jpg|400px|right|thumb|Hm, a dead Eldar. I wonder what GW is peddling in this picture? The Space Marines, the creek, the forest perhaps...? Gotta be something.]]
Eldar recently were dethroned as the punching bag of Games Workshop. Until the most recent codex (Newcrons), the Eldar suffered repeated and humiliating defeats. Every single defeat involved overwhelming odds in favor of the Eldar, with gigantic [[wraithbone]] constructs and [[Khaine|burning shards of war gods]] being overwhelmed by [insert faction GeeDubs is trying to sell this time]'s broken pinky finger.

Let's make a list here:
*''Fulgrim'' - Big Eldar force including a fucking Avatar and Wraithlords is killed by a small detachment of the Emperor's Children (the Avatar is strangled to death by Fulgrim because he's distracted by his glowy Laer blade. I'm not making this shit up.)
*''Codex: Chaos Daemons'' - Aside from being a nifty reference to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ys Ker-Ys/Ker-Is], an Avatar is possessed by a Keeper of Secrets and helps wipe out a Craftworld.
*Codex: [[Tyranids]] - Avatar issues a challenge to the Hive Tyrant leading the assault on Iyanden. Apparently it doesn't work and it literally gets stampeded to death by 12 Carnifexes. What the fuck. (To be fair, it is 12 [[Carnifex]]es and the Avatar took four down with it.) Oh, and Farseer Kelmon dies, despite neither the Avatar nor Kelmon dying in older iterations of Iyanden's invasion. Oh, and the Doom of Malan'Tai [[Fail|singlehandedly eats an ENTIRE CRAFTWORLD]].
*''[[Matt Ward]]'s Cornucopia of Wank'' - From the Avatar getting his chest punched in by Papa Smurf, other hilarious things like Wraithlords being killed by Sergeants and god knows what, Matt Ward's Necron Codex featuring a [[Eldorath Starbane|fucking retarded Alaitoc Farseer]] who fucks over every engagement he commands and gets 'captured' in the White Dwarf issue, I don't even know where to start.
** Ironically, Ward is also the only one who writes the Eldar being badass, including a bit about Biel-tan beating two whole Imperial sector fleets and ten Space Marines chapters. It seems that only his love for his Ultrasmurfs can surpass his compulsion to make the Eldar actually, y'know, even remotely competent.
* [[Dawn of War: Dark Crusade]] has the Blood Ravens wipe out all of Taldeer's distractions and then kill her, with [[Azariah Kyras|their heretical Chapter Master]] gaining a fancy new piece of bling by taking her spirit stone ([[LCB|or perhaps she escaped and Kyras only managed to kill a body double, depending on who you listen to]]).
* In [[Dawn of War: Soulstorm]], [[Vance Motherfucking Stubbs]] wipes the Ulthwe forces on Kaurava III out wholesale and used his sheer manliness to make Caerys join his harem.
* [[Dawn of War II]] has the Eldar farseer acting like a complete and total ''DUMBASS'' from the moment you take control of Force Commander Hairgel/Aramus. While things started off good with the Eldar making the Orks and Space Marines do the work for them, Farseer [[Idranel|Ree-t'ard]] then decides to antagonize the Blud Rehvens for literally no reason, resulting in a total of 11 marines, 3 scouts, and a dreadnought killing somewhere in the ballpark of <s>hundreds</s> thousands of Eldar and a fucking avatar.
* ''Imperial Armour 11: Doom of Mymeara'' (which sounds like a Playschool TV show puppet - way to go on the Craftworld name GW) - Again, droves of Eldar in the midst of snotting Imperial Guard and Space Wolves from here to Jupiter, somehow get their collective arses handed to them. This is achieved by some fresh out of training/wet nosed/"tea bagging my comrades for the Emperor is my past time" IG commander, pulling a victory out of his chocolate starfish - with collective precision that makes the Dome of Seers predictive foresight look like your average crystal ball psychic con artist.
* The Battle of Orar's Sepulchre: Seeing yet another Avatar of Khaine die and the combined might of both the [[Alaitoc]] and [[Iyanden]] Craftworlds defeated, with death tolls so high that the Space Marines create barriers out of the enormous mounds of Eldar dead
* Yme-Loc raided: The Craftworld with the explicitly most powerful vehicle force of all Craftworlds getting bitchslapped by the Mechanicum who land on it, beat it up and raid it at their leisure. Although considering the AdMech tends to whip out whatever supertech they need when they need it, this might be forgivable as it was a smash-and-grab.
* Alaitoc's near death: Despite being one of the five most powerful Craftworlds, Alaitoc is almost completely outclassed by a small Imperial Crusade including only one Chapter of Space Marines in support.

(And let's not forget that all of these instances are pretty recent fluff, from 4th-5th edition.)
Case in point, when [[GeeDubs]] needs to give some character or unit or faction some street cred, they just go "he killed an Avatar, so that's good enough." As if the prevailing logic wouldn't be; "gee, if so many things can kill the Avatar, isn't it kind of a lame thing to kill anymore?" Regardless, GW sucks at writing decent fluff (with [[Phil Kelly|a]] [[Dan Abnett|few]] exceptions).

Fortunately, the new punching bag has been changed to the [[Tau]], who for reasons uncertain, don't seem to mind the change of pace- ''Uh, don't you mean Sisters of Battle? The ones who, you know, not only die in droves, but usually at the hands of their own alleged allies?'' No, we mean the Tau. The ones with two traitor legions gunning for a portal into the heart of their territory and the species that retardedly infected one of their worlds with Gene-Stealers to see what would happen. Eldar still lost most times they were mentioned in the codex, though.

This also had the effect of making many people turn away from them. If nearly every story about Eldar is "they tragically die in drove in a heartwrenching defeat/Phyrric victory" , it tends to be too bleak for anyone to keep caring after a while, not to mention boring. Plus no one wants to keep reading about how their favourite faction are constant losers.

From a lore prospective GW seems to not realise that the Eldar are, truly, horribly, and totally outnumbered by every other faction (yes, that includes the [[Tau]]) in the setting- by truly insane numbers. Each Eldar alive would have to kill tens of thousands for every Eldar life lost, to even come close to reaching anything that could be considered an equivalent level of loss; the Imperium alone outnumbers each Eldar alive by something like ten's of millions to one. Which is why depicting the Whole "Dying race" trope, by showing them getting mowed down in their thousands, really doesn't work, and only goes to show how pathetically weak the Eldar are as a named faction; they literally can't even be called a minor irritation by any of the other factions.

The loss of a Craftworld is something momentous, there are probably less then 500-800 Craftworlds out there, so the loss of one is vastly more impactful on the Eldar then it is for the Imperium to loss a world or system. A single Imperial world potentially holds more lives on it then multiple Craftworlds combined (there Is probable more Marines then there are Aspect Warriors in the galaxy, as Gav had the Aspect Warriors in the Path series, outnumbered by the forces of a single chapter; apparently one of the big named Craftworlds can only field around a thousand warriors in its defence)- so although the number of lives lost to the imperium is greater in number, the effect on the Eldar population is catastrophically greater in impact; having Craftworlds getting wiped out left and right, which is the new trendy thing to do apparently, really does not take into consideration the true ramifications of doing so; the Imperium always has more worlds, the Eldar do not have that luxury. Not saying that they shouldn't get destroyed or invaded, but it needs to be a much bigger deal then it is currently, and the cost of doing so should be suitable very high.
If in a single conflict the Imperium lost one million lives, and then a single baby is born on each Imperial world, they will have replaced those numbers within the first 10 seconds of the conflict. Those babies will be able to fight for the imperium in just over ten or so years, compared to the Eldar, were it takes over a year to even create a new Eldar life within the womb, and then the century or so that it takes for the child to eventual reach maturity, it doesn't matter how much more powerful or advanced they are compared to humans, unless they can kill tens of millions for every Eldar life lost, its an impossible task for the Eldar to ever enter into a conflict and actually claim they have won; they may achieve their objectives, but they still lose.

It used to be that the Eldar would be able to, through the use of seers and carful planning, achieve victory with, ideally, not a single loss of life- this of course was thrown out the window as GW has a growing fetish for killing as many Eldar as they can; did you know that during the 'Gathering Storm', they had thousands of Eldar get killed by a single slash from a Keeper of Secrets tongue, not joking, they really got licked to death.