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Clearly Eldar do change, it's just much slower than humans. It took 15 years for them to evolve their miniatures

In all seriousness, I'd argue against dismissing how the Eldar view their own history.

From our own past, there's good evidence that some of our older folklore (fairy tales) dates back to the Bronze Age and was talked about by our proto Indo-European cultures. Since most were only "officially" written down in the 17th - 18th century, the strength of the oral tradition has survived for much longer.

Now that is a comparatively paltry timespan of around 9000 +- 7000 years or so, around the time we little humans first started messing around with metallurgy.

But if you are considering an alien race that could at one point reincarnate, farseers that can manipulate time and are generally long lived anyway, that's not a crazy thing. If the history says Necron = bad, it'll stick around.

Togusa wrote:
Isn't it also that the Eldar were much more benevolent in those years as well? I've heard lore discussions before were folks were saying they usually ignored other races in the galaxy, and did barter or trade, especially for new knowledge when it suited them.

Well, "more benevolent," in the sense that they were less outright evil/antagonistic than they are now, at least. It's noted that part of the Fall was their society becoming markedly more full of overt sadism and such, so they used to be less cruel and actively malicious than modern drukhari. And craftworlders have spent about 10,000 years enduring the xenophobia and genocides of the imperium, so modern craftworlders have a lot more reason to murder the heck out of humans even if they're not doing so out of vengeance.

But I'm not sure we can say they were "benevolent" towards anyone. It could be that humanity was just too small and non-threatening to warrant any particular attention from the aeldari.

Niiai wrote:
God remaining is yneed, harlequeen God, the one nurgle hash stashed away and the avatars. And I suppose Slanesh, but they do not really count.

There are some very thin hints that Asuryan and the Morai-Heg might still be influencing things even if they're not strictly alive at the moment. Asurmen seems to think that Asuryan is somehow guiding the phoenix lords, and there's a measurable (by seers) effect that phoenix lords have on the skein that seems to suggest there is something actually going on there. And Yvraine becoming the herald of Ynnead happened when a priestess of the Morai-Heg killed her in the arena. Now, being a "priestess" doesn't necessarily mean the god you're worshipping is alive, but it would be quite a coincidence if the only crone priestess we've ever seen just so happened to be in the same arena as Yvraine and just so happened to kill her at just the right time for her to bond with Ynnead and meet up with her old pal the visarch just a few minutes later.

As an aside, before the ynnari were released, there was a bunch of speculation that they were going to write out or modify Slaanesh. So when the Ynnead prophecy teasers started being released, I really liked the idea of Ynnead acting as the Woodsman to Slaanesh's Big Bad Wolf and returning at least some of the old pantheon to the setting; a possibility that the Wind Rider novel seemed to be teasing at. Personally, I think it would be really interesting to see what a version of Slaanesh that got reabsorbed into the pantheon might look like. Basically Slaanesh on a diet. Still embodying concepts of sensation, etc., but not glutted on enough power to be the Slaanesh we currently know.

You could do something neat with Slaaneshi devotees trying to repair their wounded god by reclaiming the shard that joined the eldar pantheon. Have other followers of Slaanesh glob onto the most powerful remaining daemons of Slaanesh as they start pursuing their own goals and desires without the overarching influence of Slaanesh to maintain some shred of order. Let each "successor" embody a different excess like greed or sensation or gluttony, and use those as the Slaanshi equivalents of Thousand Sons cults in the Slaaneshi codex. It would make Slaanesh as a faction feel a bit more unique from the other chaos gods, and it would give you an excuse to flesh out the ynnari by making them servants of the reborn pantheon instead of just a different chapter tactic for craftworlds.
[/ ramble]

GW just needed to push back against the whole "Slaanesh = *wink wink nudge nudge* time" stuff the internet latched onto but instead we got stuff that strayed too close and didn't show any other aspect of Slaanesh. At best we had Fulgrim going insane from an inability to create perfect art and to a degree the fall of Serena De'Angelus but so much other stuff was just based around physical pleasure and kinks that anything else was lost. The updated Hedonites line for AoS did exceptionally well showing that Slaaneshi devotees focused not just on physical pleasure derived from excess, but on other aspects such as gluttony or warrior perfection. I think its just sad that because writers use the physical pleasure stuff as such a shock factor to hook people in, we lose out on the more varied aspects in stories.

That's sort of what happened in AoS. Slaanesh is captured and bound, and the souls of some devoured Elves (ahem, I mean Aelves) were drawn out. Some of these souls were traumatized and damaged by their ordeal within Slaanesh and basically they have to act like Dark Eldar, raiding others, to replenish their souls. Of course, Slaanesh isn't dead and seems on the verge of escaping.

If I were writing this, I would say something similar may be Cegorach's plan. The Codex Harlequins said his plan is to somehow trick Slaanesh into expending power saving the Eldar. As shown in Valedor, at least one Troupe has made a variation to the performance Dance Without End, and ends on a hopeful note. Specifically the Laughing God deliberately makes a misstep and Slaanesh trips them up and seems about to get him, not noticing that Ynnead is rising behind Slaanesh. Slaanesh turns around at the last moment and there is an expression of fear and then the performance ended. My head fanfiction would be that while Ynnead and Slaanesh fight, Cegorach does like the Woodsman and slits Slaanesh open. When Slaanesh exerts himself/herself in the ongoing fight, out spill Eldar souls and maybe even a few gods, but they are damaged and traumatized from their time so they are not the same as they were previously. Of course, gods being gods, being disembowelled is not fatal for Slaanesh.

 Olthannon wrote:
In all seriousness, I'd argue against dismissing how the Eldar view their own history.

I'm certainly not saying we should dismiss it. Just that it should be viewed as stories the Eldar tell themselves, not as any sort of objective 'facts' about the history of the setting.

For example, the Blackstone Fortresses might be called Talismans of Vaul because an Old One the Eldar worshipped as the god Vaul created them during the War in Heaven to fight the C'tan. Or it might be because an Eldar clan devoted to the concepts Vaul represents (i.e. a bunch of engineers) built them. Or maybe they were built by the Necrons to shatter the C'tan into shards and the whole concept of the crippled smith-god Vaul is actually an allegorical representation of the Necrons (technologically brilliant and immortal, but crippled by being soulless). Or maybe they were created under the auspices of the Void Dragon to use against the Old Ones and the Eldar slaves who built them rebelled and used them to shatter the Void Dragon instead, and Vaul is a composite memory of the Void Dragon and the leader of the Eldar slaves, the god's lame leg representing him being 'betrayed by his own limb', and being chained to his anvil representing the Void Dragon's shards being imprisoned or the state the slaves were in before their rebellion.

I think any claim that 'the Eldar gods are definitively XYZ' is missing the point of how Eldar 'history' works. They probably aren't any one specific thing. Even an individual god might represent different things in different stories. The Vaul that created the Blackstone Fortresses is not necessarily the same Vaul that forged Khaine a bunch of swords and then duelled him with the last one.

It's like King Arthur. It is certainly possible that some of the stories about King Arthur are loosely based on real events that happened during the Dark Ages in Britain, but that doesn't mean there was a historical king called Arthur, or even a single real person that all such stories can be linked to. Heck, archaeologists aren't even sure the whole Anglo-Saxon 'invasion' was a real thing. It might have been a relatively small influx of migrants accompanied by a largely peaceful adoption of new culture and language now that Germanic rather than Latin peoples were the rising power in Europe. Maybe the 'real' Arthur was just some xenophobic donkey-cave lionised by centuries of Welsh nationalism?

This thread was a great read.
Some very interesting thoughts.

I always find it annoying how certain writings for certain factions shoe horn in other faction from their point of view.

For example, the way Necron lore speaks about Eldar or Orks will be different to how Ork and Eldar speak about their own lore.

I think the Eldar Gods are a lot like the Greek gods and how they are portrayed in modern movies. They exist both in an ethereal relm and, when they want to, our reality.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there a bit of fluff about Khaine narrowly defeating the Nightbringer (not shard, whole being) at some point, but that it took A LOT out of him?

 Argive wrote:
This thread was a great read.
Some very interesting thoughts.

I always find it annoying how certain writings for certain factions shoe horn in other faction from their point of view.

For example, the way Necron lore speaks about Eldar or Orks will be different to how Ork and Eldar speak about their own lore.

A very deliberate choice in how 40k is written, that. Every codex, every novel, every piece of fluff in White Dwarf and so on is always written from a diegetic position within the world itself, coloured by the narrator's lived experience. Everything is true, but all you're being told is a lie. Ambiguity on who's the reliable source makes it all work.

Part of the charm, though the point is often missed by online fanwikis and such collections.

I think 'mostly dead' fits as well

 Crimson wrote:

 Gert wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
I still hate this. Even in the silliness of 40K the timescale is beyond laughable. It is totally inconceivable that there would be any cultural continuity for that long, and even the whole eldar species would have evolved into completely different forms.

The culture did change and so did the species. They slowly became more hedonistic in their lifestyles, looking for pleasure and excess over all else. This led to the first Exodites who left the Empire for frontier worlds where they would have to once again learn to work the land and do manual labour, living lives of hardship compared to that of those they left behind. As the cults grew in prominence, yet more would leave to become Exodites and we see the first of those who would become the Asuryani, the Craftworlders, start to emerge as well. When you live for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years, cultural change isn't going to be rapid, nor will it necessarily be needed in what could easily be described as a paradise.

That's not the scale of changes that happen in 60 million years. Whales evolved into their current from from land dwelling animals in 8 million years. It is just utterly bonkers timescale by several orders of magnitude.

The actual morphology of whales changed little over that period beyond some strains developing a sort of gigantism.

They went from being a large wetland inhabiting mammal to a water based mammal, with the most obvious shifts being increased body fat, lense dense skeletons and widened limbs better suited to aquatic propulsion than locomotion.

Take a whale from 8 million years ago and most people would still recognise it as being a close relative of the species we know today.

They still breath air, they look similar, they're just much better at swimming.

Likewise in the same time frame sapiens have developed by degree. 8 million years ago our ancestors were still recognisably humanoid albeit with different proportions and posture.