Trope-a-Day: Can't Argue With Elves
Can’t Argue With Elves: The eldrae, and indeed the Imperials in general, so not just the Space Elves, live this trope, being profoundly elitist and unashamedly, even if they bothered to notice, arrogant about their superiority in almost every way to anyone else and generalized personal awesomeness. That literally thousands of years of bio-, nano-, and sopho- technology actively directed at (and succeeding in) creating an entire society of impossibly beautiful sexy immortal billionaire genius demigods – coupled with a pressure-cooker of a culture that demands personal striving for perfection and considers pride in the result a virtue – actually lets them back this attitude up most of the time is just icing on the hubris cake, so far as everyone else is concerned.
Really, the only things that make them tolerable at all is (a) their complete and utter refusal to demand any special privileges or position because of their utter awesomeness, even if that’s just because they can’t tolerate the thought of only being comparatively awesome rather than absolutely awesome (a.k.a., “What sort of pathetic excuse for a Superior Race has to actually keep the Inferior Races down? Newsflash, morons, that means you weren’t qualified for the position in the first place.”), and (b) the way in which they’re willing to, and even insistent sometimes on, selling beauty, genius and immortality to the rest of the galaxy so that they can stop having to put up with all these ugly, ephemeral morons.
Actually, that doesn’t make it any better.
(All of this may not be strictly true as written, of course: it was written, as it were, from the point of view of the people who find themselves on the wrong end of it.)
(Also, it occurs to me, somewhat subverted by the fact that they greatly prefer it when people Argue With Elves. I mean, they still believe that they’re right about everything, and probably aren’t going to agree with you unless you have a really good argument, but they will respect you more for trying.)