system
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human
[General Fantasy] If elves are so overpowered why are they basically an endangered species in almost every setting?

In Black Clover elves possess near godlike strength but are almost completely wiped out. In Eragon two cornered elves are a match for dozens of human soldiers but their numbers are low and are kept to pretty much to one exclusive forest. The elves in Warhammer FB can cut through steel armor like warm butter but constantly seem to be losing ground.

What gives? It's like this race is generally given every advantage you could ask for but can never seem to hold onto their position in the world. Don't tell me they can't breed. They have genitals and presumably know how to use them. Surely they can get over "ew sex" when there's only like a couple hundred of them left.
gpt
In some circumstances, they're on the tail end of their time of prominence, and have been fading away for a long time. On Middle-Earth, for instance, the days of whole empires populated with Elves are thousands of years in the past, and the remaining ones are the ones who haven't *quite* gotten sick of the world and struggle and so on and so forth, *yet*. They're all just a few more headaches away from getting on a ship and going to literal Heaven, which is a thing they get to do. Heck, a bunch of them have been there already, came back, and know precisely how nice it is.

Similarly, in the WH40k universe, they spent so much time being the absolute king-shits of the galaxy that they got tired of being diligent, got very, very, very, very, very decadent, and essentially partied themselves to destruction.

In others, in many many others, it's not that they *don't* breed, it's that they breed *slowly*, compared to everything else. It doesn't matter how desperate a human might be to increase numbers, you're still not going to get more than a kid or two out every few years. For elves, in most cases, no matter how desperate the situation, it's still going to take years to produce each kid, and even then, you still might not get families much larger than a comparable human family. Depending on the setting, the fertile time for elves might also be limited. Consider that Elrond was around for at least 6.000 years, and only had, what, 3 kids?

Similarly, their wacky relationship with age can cause issues. An individual adult elf is powerful and skilled and can overcome great odds, and might be at the top of his game for centuries, or even millennia, but it takes that elf a couple of hundred years to get to that point. It takes humans, in comparison, a couple of decades to reach full strength, and there are always more of the sweaty monkeys coming up right behind them.

Elves represent quality, sure, but without *quantity*. Humans (or whatever) will out-breed them most of them time.

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(that being said, there are places where Elves are dominant, even over the long term. Both Arianus and Pryan in *The Death Gate Cycle* have elves being powerful nations that completely dominate their human neighbors.)