Drowtales

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In the skin darkness of the future, there is only Mary Sues.

Drowtales: Moonless Age is a fantasy manga-style webcomic that has been running since 2001, starting out as shitty MSPaint-tier art and growing to dozens of artists collaborating on what is now unarguably one of the best looking webcomics on the internet, although whether the story has likewise improved at all is open to debate.

The simplest way to describe what's wrong with Drowtales can be summarized as: Take Drizzt Syndrome, infect an entire planet's worth of elves with it and replace any self-awareness moments of characters with ethical dissonance and pump up the Mary Sue. When you've done that, add in heaps of obnoxious T&A in the middle of all the wangst, and crank up the Grimderp to eleven.

On /tg/ Drowtales is a skub topic, sometimes resulting in lulz, like when /tg/ had several raids of the site's roleplaying forums with neckbeards attempting to fight the drow Mary Sues with their own dwarf Mary Sues.

Setting

It's standard fantasy fare with a few changes, mostly with the elves and Drow in particular (go figure) who are shown to be mostly cute, animesque and angsty nerdy teenagers who bitch to each other about their lives before having an orgy on the settlement they just conquered from humans (more on that later). Some other characters have cat ears, all are bisexual. The main character pulls out any imaginable power out of her ass when cornered and there's faggotry like the drow getting high on chocolate (seriously).

So about those Drow...

Drow politics

The Drow are the villains of the setting. Full stop. The series tries to say that it has no real villains, but that's only really because the Drow are the creator's pets and are evil for the sake of being evil, with the flimsiest of justifications to try and explain away their actions.

First of all, the Drow are elves and the elves are the only ones capable of using magic, which on its own sets them head and shoulders above everyone else in the setting since this allows them amazing technologies like power armor and antigravity ships while everyone else is still stuck in the medieval era. it also allows a couple of children who are competent magic users to break through and rout an entire human city with walled fortifications and a brigade of heavily armed adult human guards, before killing the king and his entire court with little issue. On top of this they are twice the height of a human, do not menstruate, can regrow limbs and alter genetics with mana-magic, and are immortal while they are close to a mana source. Many have empathic abilities which feel every emotion (which should make it hard to do the things they do) and the sentient beings enslaved by them immediately become docile and obedient to the point that they can openly gloat about eating their own kind to thier face without as much as a spot of anger on the victim.

So about that eating people comment, the reason the story is so Grimderp is because they go well out of their way to try and build up a setting with limited resources that would require the Drow to raid the surface on a consistent basis, and ignore any sort of common sense that would prevent this from happening. Basically a long time ago there were two elven nations at war, until 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, building a giant city and then fighting each other while preying on humans and slaughtering entire surface towns to drag the women and children to slavery. Normally this would make them the villains of the setting, but we'll get to that.

The reason the Drow want slaves is twofold: The first is for labour, the second is for food and neither make much sense. The reason they're wanted as food is apparently because meat is a delicacy down there and in famines slaves (especially humans) are regularly slaughtered for food because apparently food is expensive, and slaves are cheap. This doesn't work thanks to the fact that the slaves also need to eat and their basic upkeep should've kept the Drow fed and happy on its own. If they really wanted to the Drow could even have slaves watch over herds of cattle on the surface while occasionally taking a few for whenever they want to eat meat (because heaven forbid they just trade with the surface for the easily accessible meat) and why they can't raise their own herds of cattle or why the Drow can't just go cattle rustle isn't ever really explained. As far as their labour goes though, they still aren't needed as the Drow have golems and mecha that would render the slave labour obsolete.

The webcomic tries to hammer home the point that slavery is 100% necessary for their society to survive, but even if you lack the common sense to find the easy solution, there's not much reason for the Drow to want surface slaves in the first place as apparently their cities are full of urban Drow in slums that would happily work for anything (also happy enough to sell their children for morally bankrupt experiments), and it's not like the main factions are left wanting in terms of resources. This would also prevent any slave revolts from happening, if the slaves weren't perfectly content with being slaves since there hasn't been a single slave revolt at all for some reason. In fact, most slaves don't even resist when they're going to be killed, simply going along with their Drow masters. Getting regular Drow to grow crops and raise cattle however would mean that they'd have to become a perfectly functional and relatively normal society however, so of course we can't have that.

You might assume then that the only reason the drow are this evil is because they intentionally choose to be evil, and this is where the ethical dissonance comes in full force. The short (and obvious) answer is yes, they are evil because they love being evil, however because they keep up the facade that slavery is necessary, and especially from surface races, we're treated to Drow happily slaughtering towns and enslaving the survivors while saying that they're only doing it to survive. Because of this shitty justification to their own survival, the Drow are supposed to be immune to all conventional criticism as far as their ethics go, which allow them to do things like freeing light elf slaves and returning them to their village since they'll just be enslaved underground, before they go back home and buy a different light elf slave, their previous morals all but forgotten. They are also explained away as having an entirely different moral/honour code.

Apparently it's honourable to do something, with the greater honour the harder it is to do whatever it is, but it's dishonourable to fail. If you succeed then your act is worthy of respect and awe, no matter how evil, while if you fail you're looked upon with derision. This applies no matter what, so killing all life on the surface would be worth great respect and awe (even though it would totally fuck over their whole society, allegedly) while failing to blow up the moon is worth scorn purely because you failed. This is also a frequently forgotten point considering how often somebody fails to do something without many reprecussions and by contrast, this allows the characters to get away with anything and still claim to be in the right so long as they win, and thanks to the Mary Sue complex and fandoms behind the characters it also allows the fans to look past anything evil the characters do, regardless of how evil the act is.

Speaking of that... at a point the characters visit a surface colony (i.e a human village massacred and taken over) and typical of Drow, an orgy ensues. During the blissful after-sex sleep they are woken up to a counterattack by desperate humans coming to save their kin... which are promptly defeated by the half-light half-dark elf paladin of Sharess (Yes, a typical mixed-blood Mary Sue worshiping a Goddess who is a total Baldur's Gate rip-off). It doesn't help that she's trying to be all high and righteous when she is burning to death a bunch of humans whose only crime is trying to save other humans from a lifetime of slavery and inevitable death because somebody was feeling a little hungry one day.

The protagonist's lesbian empath Drow (yes, with a length of purple hair paint, straight out of Deviantart) berates the cornered humans with a lame excuse line of "I feel your pain, why don't you take your survivors and run?!" Apparently feeling their pain isn't enough to make her want to do anything about it because when the humans scream in desperation to save their families from the locked buildings, they all die horribly.

And so we have our heroes going "I'm glad my clan Sarghress prevents slavery, let's shake hands and feast on the food we just plundered from humans whom we will sell later!" Mind you, they had talked about doing great things and ensuring peace in the world a couple of issues before.

TL;DR: All that needs to be done to remove the majority of the grimderp is for the Drow to use their golems/mana tech in place of the slaves to get the exact same results. If that happened though then they wouldn't have NSFW scenes with slaves in bondage, which is quite possibly the reason the comic got so well funded in the first place.

Other Races

The Drow's cousins, the surface elves are socially functioning normal people, having a prudish, pacifist and non-slaving sex-segregated caste system. They are the boring to the Drow's exciting, because while the Elves are summed up by 'normal people' the Drow on the other hand are a bisexual, sex-rich, matriarchal BDSM empire which has slaves by the ton to eat/rape/kill with no moral compunctions (odd considering that the Drow are supposed to be the ones to sympathize with).

The humans, orcs and other "goblins"? Their failure to manipulate mana makes them soulless and on par with animals in Drow eyes, and as such you're not supposed to feel pity for any of them either. Regularly enslaved (not that they don't enslave regular elves anyway), massacred and eaten even by the "good" characters. Humans in the setting are also composed of two sub-species, Hermione and Emberi. Hermiones are hairy, white people with a distinct Nordic/Saxon culture, whereas Emberi are Japanese. Hermiones are pictured as coming beyond the seas, threatening our little innocent Drow colonies with a series of Holy Wars and calling them black devils, and the fact that this is exactly what the Drow are/deserve is lost on the creators, since this is one of the few fantasy settings that expect you to side with the murderous, cannibalistic empire instead of the good guys coming to destroy it. Emberi on the other hand are naturally subservient, sexist towards their women, worshipful of Drow and beastly docile to the point of doglike obedience, gladly enduring any abuse, suggesting our "artists" took a nice gander at FATAL and regurgitated it.

Factions

• Sarghress: The clan the main character belongs to and thus the default "heroic" or "reasonable" one. They are a clan of mercenary commoners with a musclegirl matriarch who somehow ride wolves around in the dark underworld. Yeah... In the last few chapters, they started to liberate (Drow) slaves (honestly for pragmatic purposes to stop the Sharen from using a slave army) 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. So far we make do with them accepting any runaway non-Drow slave under a mercenary brigade called War Meat to fight demons, since non-mana bearing races seem to be immune to demons.

• 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. Also they ride dragons around and their males are mostly nether tainted automatons who wear special armor to keep them from being transformed into demonic horrors.

• 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 (it's implied to be for intelligence gathering reasons). The main character's lover is from there and quips about that they treat their slaves well (Maya, the light elf slave had a real nice outfit), so apparently being an empath works for once. Since everyone in their clan is always sensing each others emotions, they amount to a kind of quasi-benevolent police state with omniscient surveillance. One of the more interesting factions in the story.

• Vloz'ress: Anarchist demon worshipers. Like anarchists IRL, they are generally useless and self-defeating. Their leader is a figurehead woman with hair like Washu and brain damage making her equal to a 4 year-old child who turns the clan's slaves and captives into eternally tortured dolls, accompanied by a reality busting, 4th wall leaning LOLRANDOM orange haired kid, because self inserts with modern 1337-5P33K adds class to a story... Right?

• 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. Their clan is dying out because they lost a whole generation of their girls during a summoning accident, which one would think wouldn't be too bad for a race of immortal beings who can apparently reproduce for their whole lives, except that they refuse to mate with commoners and traditionally turn any male that impregnates a Beldrobbaen woman into a drider knight, so they're basically drow panda...mantis...things..

• Nal'sarkoth: Surface merchants who dress in all green. They are seen running a surface trading post and treating their human workers as equals as they actively recruit non-drow races to build up their numbers. They might have even been one of the good/more interesting factions (also being good people in general) but 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 (and mana powered concerts). 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, with a twist: most are descendants of former light elf slaves, so their hatred of tainted Drow might be an outlet for their passive-aggressive grudge... Kinda like an entire society of half-black KKK in New York trying to hunt down Ashkenazim...

• Jaal'darya: Female-only clan who use biotechnology. They create artificial life forms and transform their bodies into all kinds of weird shit. Regularly seen snatching babies to make bio-golems, as if the setting wasn't any more edgy.

Characters

Way too many to list. There are dozens of them. The comic just rains characters, most of which are unimportant or are only there for background. The reason is that the characters are commissioned by donators who want to show off their horribly designed alter egos.

Basically:

• The clan matriarchs are all expert mages who would kick your shit in if you fought them, yet can't even run their houses without fucking up half of the city in an enormous conflagration by magic and demons.
• One of them is a empath who can kill opponents with a glance. One of them uses shadow tentacles to rip opponents apart. One of them is a 9 foot tall warrior woman. One of them is straight out of Dragonball Z.
• Ariel is supposedly the main character but in the end amounts to fuck all. She goes to a magic school and then dicks around on the surface for a while, occasionally wrecking human towns and generally being a Mary Sue with a moral myopia. Before she was retconned, it was even worse: letting her light elf slave Maya be a sacrifice to Sharess for visions (a goddess who wasn't even supposed to be a Lolth expy but a sorcerer/turned savior goddess of her people and the world since she stopped demons from emerging). After the retcon she is still a fucking idiot with a case of Grimderp-lesbian-mana-operated mecha pilot (which is one of her hundreds of different, omnipotent skills) who accidentally killed Maya in a fit of rage when the light elf tried to maternally protect her young master, and started to feel bad about it... For a few days.
• Liriel, her perky loli slave who is retardedly optimistic of her fate and cheered as Maya's guts were blasted by a magic missile by accident, is actually the Empress whose soul fled into her personal slave to escape death... yeah, some chuunibyou-grade cliche shit there (I was the Empress in my former life!).
• Vaelia, Ariel's human gladiator bodyguard, and a character who is so fucked beyond all saving that she needs to be explained in detail below.
• The actual main characters are supposed to be Chrys'tel and Kiel'ndia. Both of them take initiative in fighting their own evil clans and trying to save the city.
• Chrys'tel is a Sharen petulant loli drow noble who investigates her traitorous family.
• Kiel'ndia is a Vloz'ress tomboy punk demon summoner girl who breaks the 4th wall and speaks in modern English vernacular.
• Naal'suul is the best character in Drowtales. She is a totally adorable Beldrobbaen emo goth drow girl who has a giant spider that she wears as a backpack. She manages to defeat Ariel fairly easily during their fight by magically encasing her in tangible darkness, but lets her live so that she can save Ariel's mercenary slave from bleeding out on the ground. She even has a pretty noble death in the end, sacrificing herself against Snadhya'rune's agents so that her friends can escape. She has the most emo appearance, powers and backstory anyone could ask for but is one of the few characters who could be considered to be purely heroic.
• There's 4-5 other characters from various clans that travel with Ariel, but they do nothing of any importance.
• The main villain of the story is Snadhya'rune. She is a purple haired Sharen summoner who wears fabulous fur coats and has smug levels that go into orbit. Though evil and cruel, at least she doesn't dick around or claim goodness or innocence. Perfect sociopath.

So what about Vaelia?

Vaelia is one of the greatest missed opportunities of the series, and shows how Drowtales never fails to miss the mark of making its story interesting. She's a human gladiator slave woman whose village was destroyed when she told the Drow where it was in a fit of anger. The survivors were put to chains and sold to Drow cities, while she was put to an arena to fight to death because nothing says that slavery is 100% vital to keeping their society working like arena bloodsports(on a brighter note, a lot of Drow, especially Kyorl were disgusted by it).

Eventually Ariel wanted a bodyguard and bought her to take home. On the road, Ariel was being strangled by some asshole Drow, upon which Vaelia kickboxed the Drow to a stalemate until she was stabbed. Ariel has her healed and sets her free which amounts to fuck-all since Vaelia is now homeless and alone below miles of rock, so she stays with our Skub loli Drow for some time. On a brighter note, the Black Dragon Inn, the home of this atrocity is brutally destroyed by Ariel's clan, and the slaver woman tossed in front of a dragon, which did show there are some folks with working neurons and a shred of decency down there(honestly there are far more than D&D Drow but, the transition is so incomplete, Skub is still inevitable). Vaelia's loyalty, time she spent with the Drow behavior makes Ariel wonder if humans have feelings and stories worth preserving; so just when we see the trigger of a change in the Drow society, she suddenly goes to the surface and leaves her circle of friends... to work with Drow raiders who hunt for artifacts because she somehow wants to see the sun and didn't feel like asking enough to get anyone else to take her up there. There's no good explanation for why she decided to stick with the raiders either, as she's treated like a dog, beaten and left to starve in a locked magic hut because she prevented Drow from crushing fairies to death for fun (remember, the Drow are supposed to be sympathetic!). Despite this our masochistic moron keeps following her new "mercenary" company and even begs them to spare a human village, persuading the humans to give away their wealth. Her "captain" even remarks how races could get along with a little effort with a happy drawing (by robbing the villagers and sparing their lives), inadvertendly poking holes in the whole setting before forgetting this point entirely. One needs real brain damage to even appreciate the broken Aesop.

15 years later she is seen, having fucked like rabbits and having three human children and helping the more peaceful, less racist Drow overthrow Sharen slavers, STILL treated worse than a dog by her captain, only mildly appreciated by a Drow whom she saved later. Of course, in typical Drowtales fashion, the kids' fathers are irrelevant and unknown because father figures are anathema to the comic.

She could have been an amazing catalyst for a cross-racial epic motive change like Thrall from World of Warcraft, only to be used as a MILF musclegirl punching bag, mentally subjugated put on a bus and fuck off to nowhere because donators want MORE DROW AND ONLY DROW.

In Summary

At first you think that Drowtales 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 with a developer possessing a plot memory and integrity of a goldfish.

Arguments with its fans about the ethical dissonance reveal that they simply hand-wave any dissonance with the words that "they are a species with different morals" or "they are morally justified to do so based on their own morals". So typical, Nietzsche-on-crack ,"I'm so different than mankind that I reject your HUUMAN morals of good and evil" going on there.

Drowtales 10k?

Amazingly enough somebody thought a "Space Age" story arc about 10000 years later would be a good idea. In this timeline the 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 millenia of slavery and genocide and help Earth humans with some civil war; only after they beat the crap out of them when they mistake a powered-down human spacecraft for a derelict.

But what about the humans on the Drow planet?

Left alone in hut reservations next to high tech Mary Sue cities. The exact reason for this is because apparently the humans haven't developed far enough to be on the same technological level as Drow, despite stating to have developed faster than regular human civilization yet they somehow haven't moved past the medieval age in 10000 years. Funnily enough too they mention that humans used to be classed as beasts and hadn't developed nearly as far, when both of those were caused by Drow raids and those 'modern day' Drow take no accountability in those actions and like to pretend they never happened.

Dorfs? Very likely extinct, along with orcs, because it feels good to waste an amazing opportunity where humans and other non-Mana using races could be integrated as subjects amongst the Drow empire in modern times and could have their little stories of culture shock.

Naturally in that setting on board the magitek make-believe spaceships are god-tier AI's and sexy pink-purple realities for Drow to constantly fuck during spaceflights rather than training or even reading something which is needed for any decent modern vocation, because you need to keep the donations coming in for more. It's a cruel cosmic joke here when a webcomic with one of the worst plots in existence gets the best update rate and artists.

Are there saving graces?

Now to render unto Caesar...

As stated, the art is outrageously above and beyond the usual webcomic fare. It really can't be stressed enough how beautiful some of the pages can get, though when other webcomics are mostly teenagers on DeviantART and you employ the best artists with porn sponsor money, that's to be expected.

The artist also deserves some praise for actually keeping this thing going since 2001. With 50 chapters and over 2500 pages not including the spin-offs, it is one of the longest webcomics ever and runs at an insane daily update rate. The man works at a pace that makes Servitors look lazy. If only we could give some of his energy to GRRM... But then, they have a certain motivation called money and actually employ lots of artists by the fuckton and are financed by fan donations. Donate enough and they can have self-inserts (when humans try to liberate their imprisoned kin, an out-of-place drow character uses a female high heel shoe to kill the desperate (and justified) attackers while shouting a stupid line) as well as their own plot lines, so the sheer commercial motivation will allow this series to carry on for a long time yet, which is a good thing if you enjoy it.

See Also

• Goblins: A sort of inversion on Drowtales where instead of the main race being blatantly OP, the main race is constantly bullied by everyone else to show how sad they are.