My elves are different?

(Note: This post was originally composed in August 2019 and was not posted until February 2021. It may come across as "politically correct." The statements I make here do not necessarily reflect my views as of this writing. I decided to leave it unaltered for archival purposes.)

For the longest time I have struggled with devising a new, creative take on elves. I am bored of lazy Tolkien clones that do not even understand the underpinnings of Tolkien's own creation. Tolkien went to a crazy amount of effort to detail the origins, mythology, culture, psychology and physiology of his elves. Fantasy gaming mindlessly copied surface-level details while ignoring the complicated explanations of why the elves were like that.

Indeed, one of the most important and basic aspects of Tolkien's cosmology that is forgotten in fantasy gaming is the concept of fëa and hröa (soul and body). Tolkien's elves may reincarnate after death, because their souls are bound the world. However, time in Middle Earth operates on the logic of ages, with each successive age being progressively boring and bland. Since the elves are bound to Middle Earth, they are subject to this deterioration as well. The elves grew resentful of their inevitable fate. Sauron played upon this resentment to convince their master smiths to forge the rings of power specifically to arrest this cycle. Obviously, that didn't work and Middle Earth ultimately deteriorated into the horrible modern Earth.

Earlier editions of D&D payed lip service to the concept of different souls by specifically that elves are not subject to raise dead and resurrection spells but must instead be revived through reincarnation spells. This was discarded around third edition in A.D. 2000 and elves became subject to standard revival effects, presumably because it was really inconvenient for players.

Anyway, my efforts seem fruitless since many other authors already devised creative takes on elves over the last several decades since D&D popularized the surface-level Tolkien clones.

• RuneQuest depicts elves as plant people, not unlike some folkloric imaginings of wood nymphs. 
• Warhammer depicts elves as prone to inhumanly excessive emotions. 
• Magic: The Gathering depicts extremely vicious wood elves in its Lorwyn setting, nothing like the popular hippie stereotype. 
• The Dragon Prince depicts elves with horns and ethnic groups based on their elemental magic affinity, such as "moon", "sky" and "stars." (D&D does this too, but here the magic system gives it weight)
• Warcraft depicts various elf ethnic groups created by magical mutations. (These are far more extreme than the largely cosmetic D&D ethnicity.) There are night elves, high elves, blood elves, void elves, fel-corrupted elves, and more.
• The miniatures company Raging Heroes wrote a backstory for elves in which they were depicted as one soul sharing two bodies, one a tree and the other an animal; dark elves were created during a war that burned their groves, leaving their surviving animal halves horribly burned and their souls permanently shredded.

At this point, probably the best I can do is just mix-and-match elements based on the work of other authors. Pick what bits that I like and stick them together, while making sure the result looks holistic and not lazy patchwork.

There are basically only three flavors of elves: high elves, wood elves, and dark elves. Virtually every depiction in the fantasy genre is a variation on one or more of those three. By keeping myself restricted to detailing those three for the most part, I can save myself a lot of work that would otherwise be wasted on convoluted backstories for the bazillion different elfish ethnic groups. Three ethnic groups are much easier to write as distinct than a bazillion.