Elfquest Re-Read, Fire and Flight: Recognition

(This is part of my Elfquest re-read. There will be spoilers.)

I suspect I’ll wind up making several posts about Recognition during the course of this series, because it’s such an interesting and complex topic: a spontaneous soulbond, with bonus reproductive instinct. You can spin a bunch of different stories out of that, and the Pinis hit quite a few of them; in fact, I’m not sure there’s any point in what I consider the main canon (the first eight volumes, up through Kings of the Broken Wheel) where they play it completely straight. Cutter and Leetah come the closest — but before I get to that, let’s talk about Recognition itself.

I mentioned before that the Wolfriders have a serious birthrate problem, and this extends to basically all the elves except the Go-Backs (who have managed to ditch Recognition entirely; I don’t recall if we ever find out how). The instinct that drives Recognition is based on genetic matching; some magical instinct looks at another elf and says “yep, you’d make a good kid with me,” whereupon the two of you bond at a psychic level and feel an urge to get it on. Savah says in Fire and Flight that “Recognition insures that your offspring will number among the strongest and most gifted of our race” — which would run the risk of elitism, the special super-awesome Recognition-born children vs those who happen the normal way, except that apparently Recognition is just about the only way elves can have children. Out of the seventeen Wolfriders in the present day, only one (Pike) was born outside of it, and that’s considered a noteworthy thing. Later on, Nightfall and Redlance will need Leetah’s magical assistance to have a kid. Now, something I read — I don’t remember where this was; probably in an interview or something from the Gatherum or maybe even the RPG — said that the Recognition instinct gets less selective the older an elf grows, which is why an elf can turn around one day and find themselves bonded to a person they’ve known for centuries. But essentially, without Recognition, you’re unlikely to reproduce. And only the Go-Backs, who have ditched the impulse entirely, seem to have more than about two kids max.

When your birthrate is that low, your species is going extinct. I don’t care how long you live: if your replacement rate is that abysmal, then you’ll barely maintain population in good times, and bad incidents will whittle you down one bit at a time. Madcoil took out six elves who had only four children among them. Shale and Eyes High both died after a single kid. Rillfisher left only Dewshine behind, and Treestump hasn’t Recognized anybody else since then. This is especially a problem when your super-picky reproductive instinct may wait for three or five hundred years before deciding, okay, I guess that person will do. That’s three or five hundred years in which you might get killed without having any children at all.

So: Recognition is narratively fascinating, but logically kind of dumb. You’d either need to just run with the elitism, keeping Recognition-born children in the minority and having most being conceived the normal way, or you need Recognition to be way more active in an elf’s early years, so they have a better chance of reproducing before something takes them out. And either way, most of these elves need to be like Woodlock and Rainsong, bringing more than two kids into the world.

Of course, the story is less interested in the pragmatic implications of Recognition than it is in the narrative aspects. Which is fine, because that’s what I’m ultimately interested in, too.