From Edition One, Shadowrun fucked up with the elven nations. The authors wanted to make a plot point out of immortal elves bringing back a several millenia-old culture to establish a fantasy dictatorship. They had no idea about how it could be done, and it shows. No one seemingly ever noticed the oldest regular elves would have been 20 at the time the drive to Oregon cities started and 24 went they pushed for independence (
Tir Tairngire SB actually reads that 16 was "a few years younger than the average of most elves at the time" which is not something one with vague clues about demography would have written).
There could have been a story on how immortal elves led tens of thousands of elven teenagers and post-teenagers who left their home and family to engage into a magical meritocracy with medieval references and start using lingasoft to speak Sperethiel. But that story was actually never told.
Then Tir na nOg gave a similar treatment to Ireland, with even less background because people were supposed to wholly embrace the change on the basis of ancient history. It doesn't seem like someone with a clue about how culture and religion develop ever wrote for Shadowrun on those topics.
However,
Run Faster may take things to a whole new level. I'm just not sure if it is stating metatypes have distinct personality and culture traits that spread worldwide, or if the authors are just so self-centered they would never consider there is a world outside of North America they could write about. Either way it is racism-that-is-okay-because-you-see-those-are-actual-races. Because indeed all dwarves ought to have the networking gene...
My jury still's out to decide if that's more or less racist than
Dirty Tricks was with its ork population figure that almost systemically echoed current african-american population ("just over fifty percent orks in New Orleans, "two-third tusker" in Mississipi, and so on...).
RelentlessImp wrote:Elves are just 'special' because the current writers are fucking terrible - but they're really only following suit from previous editions, if you consider this in the context of the old Tir books.
Tolkien-elves are special, and so are Shadowrun elves. Conceptually, there was no reason to allow "non-exceptional" elves to get Body and Strength 6 like humans, except that elves weren't supposed to have any drawback. Even if that should mean that, for all the fluff about thin, gracious elves, there are in fact just the same amount of regular and exceptional humans or elves able to play as defensive tackle (US football) or forward (rugby).