I was going to post this in RP discussion, but I felt like it was too general since it also happens in practically any game with non-human "races" (or rather, races called anything but "human", I guess, more on the air quotes later) and sort of applies to writing fantasy in general
How do people feel about capitalizing the word for a race mid-sentence?Â
For instance, most FFXIV wikis capitalize the names of the races mid-sentence (I don't remember if that's how it's written ingame or not). But my boyfriend sitting behind just pointed out that he doesn't normally see "elves" or "dwarves" capitalized in stories with vanilla elves and dwarves. For another example, the GW2 wiki doesn't capitalize the names of races mid-sentence ("The charr are..."). However, within GW2's community I see lots of people capitalize it all the time, regardless of how it's written ingame.
In fantasy worlds that offer a variety of sentient races to play as (elves, humans, trolls, whatever), they typically seem to be genetically distinct species, as opposed to races as we use the term outside of that context. And we don't capitalize the word "human" even though we are "the human race". As far as I can find (here's an example), you do capitalize the proper names for nationalities, races, tribes, etc. So it would make sense to capitalize "Dunesfolk", "Wildwood", because they're tribes/clans... But we don't say "Hispanic Humans", if we followed up with the word "human" at all (and why would we, when we have no nonhuman contemporaries) I could see maybe in a universe where its different races all diverged from a single ancestor race (the elezen and hyur are like this, right?), then it would be similar to the way we use the word "race" in the real world. One example I can think of where it could work that way is the Elder Scrolls universe. Bretons, Nords, Imperials, etc. are all offshoots of "man", Bosmer, Altmer, Dunmer etc. are all related races of "mer"... Other fantasy universes' races are completely unrelated, though.
There just doesn't seem to be a real convention to it, except maybe what the devs' or writers' preference seems to be. Personally I tend to fall into the lowercase camp since most fantasy races would more accurately be described as species, especially in cases where members of a single species/race are divided into multiple and distinct cultures and tribes. Does it just depend from universe to universe whether or not it's proper to capitalize it?
So what's everyone's thoughts on it? Your preference and why? I feel like there's already some literary resources on this that I just didn't manage to find the google terms for or something or there's a really simple answer. Also I tried to make it not so much a rambling wall of text but I failed sorry
How do people feel about capitalizing the word for a race mid-sentence?Â
For instance, most FFXIV wikis capitalize the names of the races mid-sentence (I don't remember if that's how it's written ingame or not). But my boyfriend sitting behind just pointed out that he doesn't normally see "elves" or "dwarves" capitalized in stories with vanilla elves and dwarves. For another example, the GW2 wiki doesn't capitalize the names of races mid-sentence ("The charr are..."). However, within GW2's community I see lots of people capitalize it all the time, regardless of how it's written ingame.
In fantasy worlds that offer a variety of sentient races to play as (elves, humans, trolls, whatever), they typically seem to be genetically distinct species, as opposed to races as we use the term outside of that context. And we don't capitalize the word "human" even though we are "the human race". As far as I can find (here's an example), you do capitalize the proper names for nationalities, races, tribes, etc. So it would make sense to capitalize "Dunesfolk", "Wildwood", because they're tribes/clans... But we don't say "Hispanic Humans", if we followed up with the word "human" at all (and why would we, when we have no nonhuman contemporaries) I could see maybe in a universe where its different races all diverged from a single ancestor race (the elezen and hyur are like this, right?), then it would be similar to the way we use the word "race" in the real world. One example I can think of where it could work that way is the Elder Scrolls universe. Bretons, Nords, Imperials, etc. are all offshoots of "man", Bosmer, Altmer, Dunmer etc. are all related races of "mer"... Other fantasy universes' races are completely unrelated, though.
There just doesn't seem to be a real convention to it, except maybe what the devs' or writers' preference seems to be. Personally I tend to fall into the lowercase camp since most fantasy races would more accurately be described as species, especially in cases where members of a single species/race are divided into multiple and distinct cultures and tribes. Does it just depend from universe to universe whether or not it's proper to capitalize it?
So what's everyone's thoughts on it? Your preference and why? I feel like there's already some literary resources on this that I just didn't manage to find the google terms for or something or there's a really simple answer. Also I tried to make it not so much a rambling wall of text but I failed sorry
