Since most fantasy worlds have specific creation origins for humanoid creatures, most fantasy humans aren’t primates

So I saw a post about ElfQuest somewhere forever ago that popped back into my head For Some Reason Thanks Autism and it was someone saying that not only must elves and trolls share a common ancestor, they must be subspecies of the same creature, which... Okay, on one level it makes sense for them to be related species, they're both intelligent immortal humanoids/primates from the same planet. The issue that sticks with me is that the extent of their argument was "Two-Edge exists" - again, makes sense on the surface based on how cross-breeding works in real life, but a quick glance at canon shows that the existence of one "trelf" proves jack shit about Abodean taxonomy.

POINT #1 - WE DON'T KNOW IF TWO-EDGE IS FERTILE

Looking at real-world genetics, while only members of the same/closely related species can produce fertile offspring, there's plenty of real life examples of related species interbreeding to produce infertile hybrids - mules, ligers, etc. With no evidence of Two-Edge having any children, it can't be said conclusively that trolls and elves are closely related.

Well okay, but that still proves they're related species, right?

NOPE, because this is a fantasy world and even if Two-Edge had twenty kids it wouldn't actually prove anything because-

POINT #2 - ELVES CAN MAGICALLY BREED ACROSS THE SPECIES BARRIER

The existence of Timmorn Yellow-Eyes and his descendants the Wolfriders demonstrates that, with a little shapeshifting, elves can produce fertile hybrid offspring with unrelated organisms. Either elves and wolves are the same species when they come from entirely different planets, or genetics is powerless in the face of elven magic.

But there wasn't any shapeshifting involved with Two-Edge's parents!

Are you sure?

POINT #3 - WINNOWILL IS A TRICKY BITCH

Winnowill, Two-Edge's elven mother, is the most powerful flesh-shaper in the entire ElfQuest series, and while the series defines flesh-shaping and shapeshifting separately... are they really? Winnowill herself explains that different disciplines of magic may spring from the same source, that Leetah's healing power may be nurtured into flesh-shaping ability - and shapeshifting may well be the level after that. What are Winnowill's modifications of Tyldak and her own aquatic and human guises if not a shifting of shape? And we know that flesh-shaping can be effective on a genetic level - Winnowill herself is able to edit the infant Windkin's genome to remove his wolf blood and make him pure elf, and the flesh-shaped aquatic features of Wavedancer elves are heritable as proven by baby Korafay. It's not hard to conclude that with practice, flesh-shaping could evolve into shapeshifting, and Winnowill certainly has plenty of practice. The question of why Winnowill would put so much magical effort into a child she fucking hates remains, but knowing her and her pride in her power, she very well might have tried to break the species barrier just to prove she could.

CONCLUSION - Elves and trolls might be related but they certainly aren't conclusively the same species and ElfQuest biology is weird as balls.

Okay 3rd attempt writing this ask, let's get to it lol

So, to keep it simple;

Elves in my world are evolved from humans (or, a common ancestor with humans, undecided) stepping into the Feywild and being affected by wild magic there. What this entails is not fully to my knowledge yet, I'll get to it when I do, but essentially this means that although Elves are magical, they are primates.

Drow and Shadar-kai were deeply affected by, specifically, the Unseelie court/Winter regions of the Feywild (which, includes bits of the Shadow Plane as well). The main distinction between these two in my world is mostly aesthetics;

Shadar-kai were affected more by the Shadow aspects and malevolent spirits of the Unseelie court, leading them to be in a permanent state between life and death, cold and uncaring.

Drow stayed mostly in the Autumn region, closer to Summer than the Shadar-kai were, leading them to be less pessimistic, more emotive, and just slightly warmer in general. And, there they met Lolth. Lolth was heavily changed in my world, but I love the spider aesthetics and certainly wanted to keep them :) As part of this meeting, where the religious devotion began, Lolth promised to make their children in her image as long as they promised to be devoted and hold her close. Her protection, too, was not far behind. Spiders are venerated, and more creepy imagery and strange-looking mutations are just part of this culture, knowing their goddess is looking out for them.

So, to my question; Is there a way you can think to make them more spider-like without sacrificing too much humanoid aesthetics? It's magic after-all, so I'm not concerned that it makes no sense for a primate to have, like, venom or whatever.

I was thinking;

Vestigal limbs

Eye mutations

Limb whiskers (different from primate hair)

Something to do with the teeth?

Idk. Thanks for reading, any consideration you may make, and if you decide, helping me out :)

Hi! here is a more humanoid spider drow design, as opposed to the more spidery ones i posted earlier.

(image description: A simplified sketch of a bipedal drow with spider features. They have stiff body hair, facial whiskers, and claws on all their fingers and toes. From their ribs, they have two pairs of small spider legs. They also have spider fangs and tiny extra eyes. end description)

The extra eyes have been labeled "simple" because there are different categories of eyes. Humans and most other vertebrates have complex eyes. Most insects have compound eyes. And a lot of creatures all over the animal kingdom have simple eyes, sometimes alongside complex eyes. there are some amphibians with extra eyes on their heads, for example. but they're just simple eyes, so they're small and really only function to track changes in light overhead. I think the extra eyes on spider drow would have a similar function, just helping track motion via changes in light and other such simple visual tasks.

Love your world building ideas btw, you've really put a lot of thought into this and I hope my posts are helpful for you!

I’ve been meaning to make this post for a while now just to get some thoughts on the subject organized, but the long story short is that I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that I’m most likely something more like canine-hearted (if that’s actually the right term, or even a helpful term, for describing my experience) rather than being a canine cladotherian.

Maybe I’m just overthinking this all, and I’ll eventually realize that I was wrong... about being wrong(?) But for now, I honestly feel that this needs to be said and that I’m on the right track here and taking steps in the right direction toward understanding more about myself. I’m going to put this under a read more because it’s going to be a lot of me just rambling about my own stuff, but it’s here.

So, I guess the thing that originally made me start really thinking about this was reading a specific personal essay about the author’s experience of animal-heartedness. Of course, I had already been familiar with other-heartedness as a concept long before this, knew the definition, knew what set it apart from therianthropy, knew what made it similar to therianthropy, etc.

But reading the essay made me realize... all of my knowledge on the subject was basically clinical. It was terms, definitions, boundaries. I had no knowledge of the personal, emotional, or intimate. For anyone wondering what it’s like to be a therian, I and many others can immediately link to many personal essays and even collections of essays describing the experiences. How many of us can easily say the same for what it’s like to be animal-hearted?

Sure, there are resources out there for that, too, but not nearly as many, and not nearly as readily-available. So once I read this first essay, I was immediately taken aback by how much it just... really resonated with me, and I had to do a bit of digging to find more accounts of animal-heartedness that went beyond simply defining the phenomenon in an impersonal, textbook manner, but with each new writing that I came across, the more strongly I began to feel that this could apply to me.

Before this, I had pretty much taken for granted that my experience of being (or so I thought) a canine cladotherian was going to be in some ways different from being a monkey therian or elf fictionkind, given the inherent difference of an entire taxonomic family vs. a single specific species of animal or fictional race. While I still do believe that that distinction alone may have very likely accounted for some of the difference, I now think that a big part of what was really going on, and what I couldn’t see before, is that I am actually more accurately canine-hearted, so it’s the difference of identity with canines, and as a monkey and elf.

As for what specifically leads me to this conclusion, the first and probably most obvious thing is that many people who are other-hearted will say that they feel a very strong fondness for, and bond with, their heart-type. I had previously passed it off as mere coincidence that canines have always been some of my favorite animals, and I have always seen myself in them. On the other hand, I would never have thought of primates as animals that I liked all too much, and I’ve always considered elves to be one of the more uninspired fantasy races; I realize that this alone doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but when taken with all of the other evidence I’m discussing here, I think it’s at least worth mentioning. I also was careful to try to separate my liking for canines from my other canine-like experiences when I very first was exploring the idea of being a canine therian, but in the end, I had determined that there was more going on with my identity than just... really liking dogs--and I was right that it was something more, but it turns out, just not exactly right about what that “something more” was.

I knew that, even if my love for canines did not exist, there were still the canine-like mental and phantom shifts that are among some of the first shifts I’ve ever had. They go back for as long as I can remember and have stayed with me throughout my life. Of course, even though shifting is often taken as evidence that someone may be a therian, “shifting does not a therian make.” It’s certainly less common to get shifts of heart-types, which is I think part of what led me to believe that this was a theriotype and not a heart-type, but I now realize that the uniqueness of my canine shifts compared to other shifts may be an example of how therians may experience shifts differently from those who are animal-hearted.

First, the canine-like shifts, although they’ve been with me the longest, were almost always weaker and not as long lasting as other shifts. They were vaguer and less well-defined. I mistakenly thought that this was simply because I was a canine cladotherian, that it might be because I wasn’t just any one specific species of canine, that I couldn’t pinpoint just one specific set of features, and I might at times even be having a kind of mixed shift of many different canine species at once. I now believe that, upon closer reexamination in the context of what I’ve learned about animal-heartedness, this is more likely because of the subtle difference in a shift that comes on as a result of my strong affinity for and identity with canines, vs. my more inherent identity as my other kintypes.

In addition to the differing strengths of my shifts, there is also a disparity in the cause and types of my shifts. I notice that canine shifts, while some are random, are more likely than other shifts to be triggered by external stimuli--being in a certain setting or seeing or thinking about canines, for example. A monkey or elven shift might be triggered by the same things, but they are also more often caused by emotional factors as well, or simply occurring for no reason at all.

While canine shifts were almost always mental or phantom, with the exception of a few lucid dream shifts way back in the day, I still do have dream shifts for my other kintypes. These occur even now that I very rarely, if ever, have lucid dreams anymore, and they’re notably more vivid and seemingly more meaningful or informative as well.

Something else that really resonated with me is that writings on other-heartedness often expressed the frustration of feeling as if you should be, or almost are your heart-type, but you still distinctly are not that thing. Looking back on some of my previous writings and journals on my experience of canine-ness, I now see that this has been a common theme for me as well, in a way; I had thought that I was so frustrated with not being physically a canine, as I am, of course, physically human, but I’m beginning to think that it may be more than that after all, that I am also just not quite a canine in identity, either--that I do undeniably identify with canines, but perhaps not quite to the point of identifying completely as a canine.

This also serves as a testament to my previous arrogance. It was all too easy for me to believe that just because I knew so well the difference in definition between therianthropy and other-heartedness, that surely I would be able to tell the difference in experience. I only now realize that I could not have been more mistaken, that academic knowledge is not always enough and cannot always provide the intimate understanding that more personal knowledge can... That the line between identifying with and identifying as really is so fine, and not always as clear-cut as it looks on paper or may seem to be in abstract thought or theory.

And so, to return to the topic of dream shifting for a moment, I’ve taken this in combination with meditation and soul-searching to supplement my developing spirituality. In the beginning, I considered myself to be a purely psychological therian. With my other awakenings, I’ve become increasingly more and more spiritual in addition to my previous psychological and neurological-based beliefs. I think that, to put it plainly, I just never really personally believed in past lives or souls or similar because, of course I wasn’t really experiencing that when, as I see it, my canine-heartedness as a result of my deep and long-lasting affinity and identity with canines is an (almost...?) purely psychological phenomenon. My other kintypes, in contrast, I believe are instead spiritual in origin with some psychological factors still mixed in, which has allowed me to have this sort of “spiritual awakening” as time went on.

There’s definitely more that I wanted to touch on, but I believe that’s at least the gist of it, so for now, I’ll just wrap this up with this last point as some food for thought: I’ve also been entertaining the idea that my canine-heartedness may actually be a subconscious “side-effect” of sorts of my fictotype. In the Dragon Age series, the Shapeshifter mage specialization is more or less something like the shapeshifting magic that I believe I practiced as an elf, probably the most relevant difference here being that, rather than transforming into a variety of different animal forms in battle, it was more common practice for a mage to work with only one, or a few closely related, animal forms. And you can tell where I’m going with this... As the Dalish have a rich history with wolf companions (and even werewolves), I worked primarily with wolves and eventually adapted to other forms of canines as well with my magic. I feel that I had previously been almost definitely too quick to write it off as a simple coincidence that I was a canine therian who had also taken a canine form in another life as well, and I think now that it might not actually be all too out of line to say that this may have a thing or two to do with why I’m so naturally drawn to canines in this life, and why I see myself so much in them while still being able to fixate on the fact that I am just... not a canine after all, even if the form might feel so comfortable and familiar to me at the same time.