All the options for female elf heads have Caucasian features. There are other racial options for other races, but literally all the female elves look Caucasian -- even changing skin tone, it's not really possible to make a female elf have features common to people of African, East/Southeast Asian, Indigenous, or Latinx descent.
Elves arose from the myths and legends of people with caucasian features, so them having caucasian/european features is just natural and normal. Insisting that elves should somehow conform to our modern sensibilities about race and ethnicity is like drawing a fedora and shades on the Mona Lisa and putting a joint in her mouth so that she is more cool.
It's weird not to see yourself reflected anywhere.
You aren't supposed to see yourself reflected in a completely different species tbh. Just imagine how messed up would it be if someone saw themselves reflected in a gnome or a lizardfolk. The only reason you bring up elves because they are the pretty race. and everybody wants to be pretty.
There's this amazing quote by the Dominican-American author, Junot Diaz, about representation:
"You know how vampires have no reflections in the mirror?" the Pulitzer Prize-winning author asked. "If you want to make a human being a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.
"And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, ‘Yo, is something wrong with me?’ That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist? And part of what inspired me was this deep desire, that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors, so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it."
This quote resonated with me so hard; as a weird kid from a messed up home who listened to weird music and was into weird things, it made me even weirder that I was brown. The stories I escaped in were almost always about kids like me -- isolated, broken, difficult homes, different than others, but they ended up being special in some way. They ended up finding magic in some way. They ended up escaping and growing and becoming magic themselves in some way.
That quote is messed up. No-one should seek to judge himself or herself based on external validation of fallible human beings. You are who you are and you should learn to be happy with who you are regardless of what the world thinks. If you seek validation from outside you will never be happy because most people will never care for you, no matter who you are.
But also, when playing a video game in the RPG genre, it's a unique opportunity to live out a certain type of fantasy -- to create and be the hero of your imagination, to inhabit a world made of magic in a body, with a face, that reflects whatever ideal (or anti-ideal!) you want.
Then why do you want to live out your reality in a game? It's like you treat your own life as a fantasy that has no place in reality. If you really believe this, then for your own sake, you must change it. You should be able to be who you are IRL, and if anyone's stopping you it's probably you.
I'm hoping that in the future, more options will be added to the female elven faces available to reflect greater diversity and allow everyone to be able to enjoy the fantasy of being an elven hero.
Elves are already incredibly diverse as it is. If you need a skin color change and a different nose structure to enjoy being an elven hero... well excuse me but that's just very shallow.
You enjoy being an elven hero because of the history behind elven culture, which some games can write pretty well. It's not about looks, never was.
