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Elfquest population dynamics
Major warning sign that one's inner anthropology geek is getting out of control: I found myself wondering today, at work, how the population of the Wolfriders in Elfquest manages to stay in balance. They simply don't have enough children, do they?
After coming home I did some figuring, and even allowing for Recognition (which would enable a much smaller gene pool to breed successfully) there *still* aren't enough of them. It isn't even so much a function of population, as it is small family size. They're just not having enough children to keep their population stable, and by a very large margin. Basically, if what we currently see is typical of the species, then they should be decreasing at a nearly exponential rate.
It's never really been explicitly stated in the comic itself, but the creators have said in interviews that Woodlock and Rainsong's 3-child family is very unusual (I believe they called it "a one-woman baby boom"), and that only children are the elvish norm. This appears to be borne out by what we see in the series. However, it should be self-evident that this simply wouldn't work to support a species. Two children is the absolute minimum for population replacement -- that is, if every couple has two children and no one dies without reproducing, the population will stay the same. Clearly this is not happening among the Wolfriders, at least in the last couple of generations. The only siblings that we know of, in the previous generation, are Treestump and Joyleaf, one of whom is now dead. In the current crop of children, Woodlock and Rainsong's three children are considered unusual, as are Cutter and Leetah's twins. Many of the characters have no children at all, either because they don't have a partner (e.g. Pike) or they're not Recognized to the one they do have.
And in KotBW, when we saw the tribe advanced several centuries into the future, the situation looked even more dire: there were NO new children born in all that time, except for Tyleet (who was technically already born, and also required a healer's intervention in order to be conceived) and the unnamed baby who died in infancy. There were also no new Recognitions or pairings -- everybody was already paired off, and no one died to free up a partner. In short, the tribe was almost entirely static. Luckily for them, they were living in a safe area -- the death rate in the original Holt was apparently quite a bit higher, and in the original tribe at the start of original EQ#1, there was only individual who was old enough to have started growing a beard, indicating that the mortality rate over the centuries of a Wolfrider lifespan was very high: old age would be rare. But even if mortality through accident or injury is less likely in the new Holt, it is stated that Wolfriders do have a limited lifespan, so eventually, even in the safer Holt, they would have all died of old age, with no young people to replace them.
Out of curiosity, I decided to figure out how many people the tribe would have had to contain one or two generations ago in order to produce the current crop of characters. This is obviously affected by how closely the current characters are related. There's no way to be sure how many generations back the elves calculate kinship, or how strongly kinship figures in their sexual taboos -- in other words whether close relatives are likely to have children together. We do know that they pay attention to sibling relationships and first cousins; Cutter and Dewshine's relationship (first cousins) is mentioned more than once. Treestump appears to view Cutter (his nephew) as family. It's therefore unlikely that any of the other characters are related that closely if it isn't ever mentioned in the series; also, the quality and detail of the art is high enough that relatives actually resemble one another (both Scouter and Dart being good cases in point; they resemble their fathers very strongly) and none of the surviving elves look enough like one another to make it likely that they are either siblings, parents/children, or first cousins.
Therefore, at the very least, the size of the tribe in the previous generation would have had to have been nearly twice as large as it currently is. Since we can assume that none of the current Wolfriders are siblings or half-siblings unless it's explicitly stated, every one of them would have had to have two distinct parents. The tribe at the start of EQ #1 contained 17 individuals. (Yes, I counted.) Of these, five have at least one parent currently living -- Woodlock & Rainsong's two (later 3) children, Scouter, Dart and Dewshine. This means the 12 remaining elves would have had to have 24 parents ... add Dewshine's mother and that makes 25. The handful of elves killed by Madcoil add to the total of unknown, unrelated progenitors, because aside from (obviously) Bearclaw and Joyleaf, they don't appear to be parents of any of the existing characters. So we need about 30 elves, or so, to produce the ones we now see. And we know that their lifespans would have overlapped considerably with the older of the currently existing Wolfriders, thus at any given time there would probably have been more than 30 Wolfriders. Quite a LOT more if we circle back around to the sibling problem ... namely that there seem to be very few. Either the elves don't pay much attention to kinship and there are actually more siblings, half-siblings and first cousins than we know about, or there were a hell of a lot of them at one point, and the tribe is presently dying out.
... I cannot believe I've spent so much time speculating on this.
After coming home I did some figuring, and even allowing for Recognition (which would enable a much smaller gene pool to breed successfully) there *still* aren't enough of them. It isn't even so much a function of population, as it is small family size. They're just not having enough children to keep their population stable, and by a very large margin. Basically, if what we currently see is typical of the species, then they should be decreasing at a nearly exponential rate.
It's never really been explicitly stated in the comic itself, but the creators have said in interviews that Woodlock and Rainsong's 3-child family is very unusual (I believe they called it "a one-woman baby boom"), and that only children are the elvish norm. This appears to be borne out by what we see in the series. However, it should be self-evident that this simply wouldn't work to support a species. Two children is the absolute minimum for population replacement -- that is, if every couple has two children and no one dies without reproducing, the population will stay the same. Clearly this is not happening among the Wolfriders, at least in the last couple of generations. The only siblings that we know of, in the previous generation, are Treestump and Joyleaf, one of whom is now dead. In the current crop of children, Woodlock and Rainsong's three children are considered unusual, as are Cutter and Leetah's twins. Many of the characters have no children at all, either because they don't have a partner (e.g. Pike) or they're not Recognized to the one they do have.
And in KotBW, when we saw the tribe advanced several centuries into the future, the situation looked even more dire: there were NO new children born in all that time, except for Tyleet (who was technically already born, and also required a healer's intervention in order to be conceived) and the unnamed baby who died in infancy. There were also no new Recognitions or pairings -- everybody was already paired off, and no one died to free up a partner. In short, the tribe was almost entirely static. Luckily for them, they were living in a safe area -- the death rate in the original Holt was apparently quite a bit higher, and in the original tribe at the start of original EQ#1, there was only individual who was old enough to have started growing a beard, indicating that the mortality rate over the centuries of a Wolfrider lifespan was very high: old age would be rare. But even if mortality through accident or injury is less likely in the new Holt, it is stated that Wolfriders do have a limited lifespan, so eventually, even in the safer Holt, they would have all died of old age, with no young people to replace them.
Out of curiosity, I decided to figure out how many people the tribe would have had to contain one or two generations ago in order to produce the current crop of characters. This is obviously affected by how closely the current characters are related. There's no way to be sure how many generations back the elves calculate kinship, or how strongly kinship figures in their sexual taboos -- in other words whether close relatives are likely to have children together. We do know that they pay attention to sibling relationships and first cousins; Cutter and Dewshine's relationship (first cousins) is mentioned more than once. Treestump appears to view Cutter (his nephew) as family. It's therefore unlikely that any of the other characters are related that closely if it isn't ever mentioned in the series; also, the quality and detail of the art is high enough that relatives actually resemble one another (both Scouter and Dart being good cases in point; they resemble their fathers very strongly) and none of the surviving elves look enough like one another to make it likely that they are either siblings, parents/children, or first cousins.
Therefore, at the very least, the size of the tribe in the previous generation would have had to have been nearly twice as large as it currently is. Since we can assume that none of the current Wolfriders are siblings or half-siblings unless it's explicitly stated, every one of them would have had to have two distinct parents. The tribe at the start of EQ #1 contained 17 individuals. (Yes, I counted.) Of these, five have at least one parent currently living -- Woodlock & Rainsong's two (later 3) children, Scouter, Dart and Dewshine. This means the 12 remaining elves would have had to have 24 parents ... add Dewshine's mother and that makes 25. The handful of elves killed by Madcoil add to the total of unknown, unrelated progenitors, because aside from (obviously) Bearclaw and Joyleaf, they don't appear to be parents of any of the existing characters. So we need about 30 elves, or so, to produce the ones we now see. And we know that their lifespans would have overlapped considerably with the older of the currently existing Wolfriders, thus at any given time there would probably have been more than 30 Wolfriders. Quite a LOT more if we circle back around to the sibling problem ... namely that there seem to be very few. Either the elves don't pay much attention to kinship and there are actually more siblings, half-siblings and first cousins than we know about, or there were a hell of a lot of them at one point, and the tribe is presently dying out.
... I cannot believe I've spent so much time speculating on this.
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Totally! Goes in with my redemptionistra and h/c fetishes, I guess. And to think I'd hated him right up until that big brawl between him and Cutter -- the one where the intent was secretly really for Cutter to get his agression/grief out of his system, not to prove who was the "better elf"? That Rayek would do that for him and suffer that pounding was beautiful -- and yet still in character! It made sense for him to reach that maturity, finally, after all hed been through. (And yet he still continued to make prideful mistakes!) Ahhh, complexity in character development! :D
I hate it when a fandom won't let a character change or grow ... I say if they like Jackass!Rayek so much, they can go back and re-read Journey to Sorrow's End again and again! Like with Spike -- if people only like him as a bad guy, they can just watch the DVD of Buffy season 2 ad naseum. ;)
I found the Wendy-painted story in Rogue's Curse in the Frazetta magazine, back when it was first published -- in coulor. Oh, is it gorgeous like that -- the black & white just doesn't do it justice. You can tell she was flashbacking to her Law & Chaos/Elric days with it. :D
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