Subverting expectations, particularly when it comes to elves, seem to be a recurring trend from Dragon Age, to Divinity Original Sin, to Baldur's Gate. I posit elven stereotypes wouldn't only be appropriate and wanted by the community, but actually somewhat of a breath of fresh air considering.
Kind of like how the "everyone is morally grey/secretly reprehensible" subversion in the heroic fantasy genre has been slowly losing ground to classic "good versus evil". It turns out that simple escapism isn't so terrible after all. Crazy, huh?
But, uh...that aside, there has to be a starting point/common ground in order to define what makes an elf an elf (physically, in this case). You can't really subvert something unless you can define the basics.
