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/moral/logical 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.

So how bad is it?

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).

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, but unlike the DnD drow nothing about their society requires it to do any of the shit they do. They don't even have Lolth being Lolth to justify it- in fact, their deity is supposedly their equivalent of the messiah and yet has no problems with the mass enslavement and consumption of other sapient races (technically not cannibalism, but still repulsive). Combine that with blatant Mary Sue bullshit like being able to alter their own DNA with magic and being a futuristic civilization when everyone else is stuck in the middle ages, as well as them being shown to use golems and robots for the same things they supposedly need slaves for, and you have what is effectively a race full of blatantly evil Mary Sues with a hypocritical streak a mile wide. They say that slavery is "necessary" for them, but when you have literal armies of robots and particle beam rifles being considered commonplace, one has to wonder why they even bother.

Other Races

Elves: Basically Drow but not assholes. And without all the futuristic tech.

Dorfs:Archenemies of the Drow, and with good reason: their simple life was ruined by the arrival of hordes of Dark Elves (whose next generation was born as the Drow), who promptly enslaved them because...well...let's just forget we had no arable land and needed food and pretend they did menial slave work. Survivors and freedmen dwarves (Freedwarves?) ran away and now mostly are Taliban of Chel, the Drow underworld, complete with beards and explosives and ambushes, plus the complete justification for their acts. This alone should drive an elegan/tg/entleman insane.

Everyone else: Humans, orcs, and so on. 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. There's two flavors of humans, an Anglo-Saxon stereotype and a Japanese stereotype. The orcs and goblins are simply never discussed in detail due to nobody caring.

Factions

• Sarghress: The one the main characters belong to, therefore the obligatory "heroes". They are a clan of mercenary commoners with a musclegirl matriarch who somehow ride wolves around in the dark underworld. Good only by comparison to the other assholes.

• 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, so apparently being an empath works for once in the series as a not-depressing detail. Since everyone in their clan is always sensing each others emotions, they amount to a kind of quasi-benevolent police state with omniscient surveillance.

• Vloz'ress: Anarchist demon worshipers led by the equivalent of a 4-year old with ADHD.

• 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. Would be decent if anyone cared 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. Oh, the hypocrisy.

• 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, because apparently they don't know how to just clone them.

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.

Some semi-important characters who still do fuck all half of the time:

• 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.
• 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 she fits right in.

Now for the Porn

Amazingly enough somebody thought a "Space Age" story arc/parallel universe 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.

Everyone else is only given the bare minimum of attention due to lack of interest. Instead, they just show bizarrely deviant porn involving nanomachine dildos. There is no real plot, just a mishmash of repetitive lesbian sex scenes.

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.