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In the world I've built, people and mythological creatures (dwarfs, elves, et cetera) once lived side by side. They fought together, they lived together, they could marry each other and loved each other. Some lived in different places, such as underground or in a forest, however everyone could come to each other's place and live like one of them.

They even fought the evil mythological creatures (dragons, orcs) together.

What could divide these two cultures (humans and mythological creatures) and end in deep hate against each other?

(BTW: After humans began to hate mythological creatures they almost made them go extinct. Then the creator of the universe came in and created a separate world for these creatures. The one who made them a world for their own had also created these beings, so they were not products of evolution. They have a big difference: they can't interbreed. They were all created and put in the same world by the creator. The differences are their powers. And they have the ability to control magic.)

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    $\begingroup$ yes, they can't interbreed. They were created and put all in the same world by the creator. The big difference between humans and mythological creature are their powers. $\endgroup$
    – Moonhorse96
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 8:04
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    $\begingroup$ yes, mythological creature know they're different and more "magic" than humans. $\endgroup$
    – Moonhorse96
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 8:10
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    $\begingroup$ @Moonhorse96 Please Edit your question to incorporate answers to questions raised in comments. Comments should be regarded as temporary "post-it notes" which can be deleted at any time for almost any reason. $\endgroup$
    – user
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 8:18
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    $\begingroup$ In the same way humans live next to each other and hate each other if something like the skin color is different or the religion? $\endgroup$
    – Fl.pf.
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 9:53
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    $\begingroup$ I would recommend reading Witcher series of books and playing the games based on them. "non-human" is a common term thrown at those mythological creatures but it's not blatant racism for the sake of racism either. What would you do if elves burned down your village and killed your friends and family? They did it because your kind slaughtered them some 300 years ago and they were there to witness it, but they don't care if you can't even trace back your linage that far! For them you're just a pesky "bloede dh'oine" that needs to be put down. $\endgroup$
    – Nick Dzink
    Commented Apr 14, 2018 at 12:30

15 Answers 15

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Everything. Literary. Different language, different look, different custom, different gods (this would make for some nice, whattayacallit "crusades"), racism,and the need to strengthen the rule of one particular lord over his subjects.

If you look into history of Europe you will see that people lived there side by side. And yet, brother king tried to destroy his brother king's kingdom. One mustache boy had a superiority complex. Some leader thought that they their political system is better than other.

But to make things short and easy "DAMN THOSE ELVES/ORCS/HOBBITS/HUMANS/DRUIDS/WITCHERS COMING HERE AND TAKING OUR JOBS".

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    $\begingroup$ @Moonhorse96 no, it's a tale to depict how emperors where bad. Lot of workers died, buyt hey were buried near the wall, not inside the wall. It would be useless and weaken the wall as hell, you don't want your new great wall to collapse everywhere because there are holes $\endgroup$
    – Kepotx
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 8:24
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    $\begingroup$ For things like dragons and gryphons: those would essentially be forces of nature. And like most destructive natural disasters, we resent them. $\endgroup$
    – Draco18s no longer trusts SE
    Commented Apr 14, 2018 at 21:18
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Scarcity

When they had the same enemy the different creatures could unite to stand against the evil threat. But now that they had been living in peace for some time they realized that some natural resources that they need won't be enough for all of them.

Maybe they still have a couple hundred or thousand years left - but most of them live for a couple hundred years.

They are starting to rally their brethren to stand up against supporting the other races - they are the ones that should survive! There won't be enough for everybody, so why would they want to support others? You have to think about yourself and your family first. Not some strangers! Just look at them! How big/small/wide/hairy/sleek/... they are.

Food, water, oil, land, mythril, adamantine, magical-energy-beans, ...

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    $\begingroup$ Quoting (hopefully right) from Art Spiegelman's Maus: "if you want to see who your friends are, stay one month in a closed room with them and no food" $\endgroup$
    – L.Dutch ♦
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 7:54
  • $\begingroup$ Very realistic points here, almost everything ever fought over boils down to survival of the fittest. $\endgroup$
    – Lara Croft
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 12:36
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You'd only need to look at humans. But you'll want something specific to them.

Different longevity (aggravated by peacetime)

The "mythos" live too f*cking long and the humans die in a flash in comparison. They grow distant of each others since they have different sorts of problems in peacetime.

  • Mythos get tired of making new human friends every generation. Young humans will never be friends with their grandparents friends.

  • While humans die and their children pay taxes or ruin the family businesses, the mythos' enterprises' owners don't, and they keep growing in power.

  • Each new plague that affects only humans raises resent towards the mithos.

  • Mythos feel insulted by human disregard towards "classic" works of art that the mythos consider almost new.

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  • $\begingroup$ that's an awesome new aproach. $\endgroup$
    – Moonhorse96
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 12:37
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    $\begingroup$ Additionally, the humans of each successive generation might forget more and more why they were ever on friendly terms with the “mythos” in the first place. $\endgroup$
    – JustSnilloc
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 16:30
  • $\begingroup$ The second point seems wrong does not it? A shorter life usually always means new ideas and large amounts of ambition. $\endgroup$
    – Kavi Vaidya
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 18:09
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    $\begingroup$ @KaviVaidya For some yes, but just look at our own world for comparison. Lots of ventures are ruined by those that inherit them. You can boil this down to one simple reason. Each generation has to learn everything all over again. Take the kid that inherits his father's shop. Maybe his father was a genius and built a very successful business, but the kid would have to learn what his father already knows. If his father stayed in business, learning and adapting for hundreds of years, he'll get a lot further than his descendants that have to relearn every few decades. $\endgroup$
    – Lord Drake
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 18:37
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This is slightly cynical, but the simplest answer is that that's what mankind does. You might be interested in the Robbers' Cave Experiment or the behaviour at some football grounds - a sufficient condition to inspire humans to violence is that you divide them into two arbitrary groups. If one group is noticeably different (long ears, dark skin, three feet tall, scaly) from the other there's not going to be much more necessary to inspire repeated attempts at genocide. You don't need to explain why humans and sentient mythological creatures would hate each other, you need a damned good explanation why they wouldn't.

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I would go against the grain here and say: exactly the absence of a threat will make them fight each-other.

When there's war and threats, there is a very good reason to work together. When there's not, the ones most alike will see the smallest of differences in each-other and start fighting over it.

Think about it, brothers are the ones fighting the hardest battles....unless someone external touches one of the brothers and then it becomes: you touch my brother, you touch me.

Look also at things like Rwanda where the Hutu's and Tutsi's lived peacefully together and still there was a genocide. Or the civil war.

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    $\begingroup$ this is how Persia tried to take over Greece after their first failed invasion. $\endgroup$
    – Reed
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 13:08
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The're Different From Us

In the world where I live, people of various races have lived side-by-side for a long time. We've lived together for centuries, and it's been 50 or more years since anti-miscegenation laws in the US were overturned. Some people lived in the city, some lived in the suburbs, however everyone could come to each other's place and live like one of them.

We even fought against the Axis Powers together in the late 1940's.

What could divide these cultures and end in deep hate against each other?

I think we're still trying to figure out the why, but it's real. Humans have a strong tribal sense, and it takes work to overcome our instinct to mistreat those who aren't like us. With that in place, all it takes is a real or perceived offense to set people off. If the presence of white supremacist groups in the US isn't enough to prove my point, consider the following small sample of historical genocides:

  • The Trail of Tears [Cherokees and other tribes, 1830-1850]
  • The Sand Creek Massacre [Arapaho and Cheyenne people, 1864]
  • the Holocaust [Jews 1941-1945]
  • ethnic cleansing in Bosnia [Bosniaks and Croats, 1992]
  • the Rwandan Genocide [Tutsis an Batwa, 1994]

In each case, there was a tendency to dehumanize the victims as a justification for the atrocities that followed. For many people, that was enough. How much easier, then, would it be to argue that Dwarves/Elves/Fairies should be eliminated?

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    $\begingroup$ add Sunni v Shia in Syria - they lived alongside each other for ages perfectly peacefully, visiting each other's mosques. And then extremist-Islamic ISIS loons arrived and turned all that on its head.Same applies to the Yazidi and Christian communities in the war-torn middle east. I think the reason is mob rule - once a mob forms, its mindset affects everyone to coalesce into us v them monsters. You even a form of it today with Trump v Hillary, nobody cares about their policies, just the tribe they've formed. $\endgroup$
    – gbjbaanb
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 23:38
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Diseases

A new diseases spread like plague, but oddly, only mythological creatures seem hurt. Several quarantines are made, in parallel with medical studies. It appears that humans are healthy carriers of the new disease, and therefore spread the disease without being ill. As, while you have humans, the diseases will spread silently, the only way for the mythological creatures is to escape and create their own cities and kingdoms.

When recreating society from scratch, each creature did it with his own community, to avoid the same scenario.

The thing is, we have now separate kingdoms, but with the same land. It's hard to avoid war in this case. The spread of different creatures was chaotic at the beginning, but soon, distinct kingdoms come out. Imagine what happen to a human enclave in dwarf territory, and you will understand how condoms were created. After some centuries, culture has changed, dynasties have raised and fallen in different kingdoms. Mankind forgot that they were once united, and after centuries of war between mythological creatures, one word come to mind when speaking of them: hate

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  • $\begingroup$ ...and you will understand how condoms were created that's a story I have never heard of. Until this day, I always thought that they were created to facilitate safe sex and prevent STDs $\endgroup$
    – polfosol
    Commented Apr 15, 2018 at 14:29
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    $\begingroup$ @polfosol "how", not "why". Weren't they originally made of sheep intestines or something like that? The implication is that the dwarves will use human intestines to make dwarf condoms... $\endgroup$
    – Criticizing Israel not allowed
    Commented Apr 16, 2018 at 5:39
  • $\begingroup$ @immibis That's a really nice idea :) $\endgroup$
    – polfosol
    Commented Apr 16, 2018 at 5:41
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As hinted by other's answers, you just need to add a threat to their lives and environment: scarcity of a resource, a new disease, sudden political uncertainty, a new menace coming from outside.

In all this situation competition between groups gets more fierce and humans rely on gut feeling rather than brain to take decisions. So whoever is different starts to be seen as a threat and therefore hated.

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More Human Than Human

Human motivations have been chronicled, studied, categorized and explained for hundreds of years and as a result, there is a wealth of reading material to source possible motivations for hating another culture and wanting it dead.

Our will to survive is legendary, even amongst our own kind. I'm jesting, but a common theme in literature is the indomitable spirit of a Human trying to survive. Whether one's life is in actual or perceived danger doesn't diminish the response. Ultimately, this means that in your world, humans must have believed at one time that the other races/creatures directly, or indirectly, threatened their own race's survival.

Competition for Resources

The scarcity of valuable resources drives competition and this applies to all levels of humanity. If you have your world organized into nations of people who identify with each other geographically, then they may have trade relations, a marketplace for resources, and an economic dependency on each other. Put humans in charge of one or more of the government bodies that have force/violence capabilities. If one of your nations was ruled by monarchy/dictatorship and had sufficient power, you could start a global, genocidal war based on one human ego.

Example:

The Human Queen, Veruca Salt, has always wanted to ride a dragon. Since the Last War of Good V. Evil, dragons have been bred down from intelligent, arcane magic-wielding people-eaters, to cherished, lifelong companions by the Elves. The dragons are paired with Elves during a sacred tradition of linked, simultaneous birth, named The Clarion. The Clarion is eight millenia in practice, which is old even for elves. The ritual synchronizes the hatching of the dragon from its egg and the birth of the elf from its seed pod through the careful application of mystic energy the Elves refer to as Wu Wei. Inexplicably, only elves feel and can manipulate Wu Wei, which is done so almost exclusively by priests of the elves most holy order, The New Dawn. Humans will never train dragons, because the only dragons left are those the elves pair with. Sooner or later, Veruca Salt starts a war to get one. This begins the initial, hateful divide.

I think the 2014 American film Maleficent is an excellent take on this concept.

Truthfully, once the initial spark has set things on fire, humans can be notoriously difficult to talk down from war. Religion can be started by a single, charismatic lunatic, or a narcissist. Cultures change with exposure to meta-stimulus over a few generations. Contagions make entire species a threat to the common health. One race's technology/magic could run awry and cause a catastrophe that kills a disparate amount of another race. Maybe they just don't like each other and that's enough.

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Hate comes from fear.

Remove the fear that caused them to band together (the dark lord is dead, the orcs have vanished, dragons are extinct, etc), then have someone benefit financially and socially from spreading rumors about the thieving elves and the child snatching dwarves, etc.

Possible motivations to spread rumors are:

  • Political gain by rallying people under an artificial threat.
  • Monetary gain by real estate investments.
  • A silly bet between young lords.
  • General unrest (famine, disease) directed at others so it doesn't target the self.

Two prominent examples from the previous century are blaming the Communists or the Jews. But there are countless examples, some even going on right now.

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Humans hate them because they are beautiful

Humans just hate the the longer lived races because they are beautiful.

Well that and the fact that they keep trying to ruin human's fun, by claiming that human's actions will have dire effects. Summoning demons being a bad idea? They give us humans free stuff and then just disappear wherever demons go when they aren't selflessly helping those who have freed them. How dare those elves tell us not to get free gifts from demons? We need to to cheer ourselves up, what with all the grisly unexplained ritualistic murders we have been having.

From the dwarves point of view the humans are basically vermin. I mean you can't trust an elf. Elves arrogance leads them to mess with things that shouldn't be messed with. The elves messed the world up when they, in their hubris, picked a fight with the Gods. Then they withdrew from the world for 10,000 years of uninterrupted pursuit of pleasure and accidentally created a new and rather Evil god. But even Elves don't make the same mistake twice.

Humans on the other hand -- it doesn't matter how much they protest they are a "Good King" and would never mess with forces of pure elemental Evil. You turn your back on them, even just for a few hundred years, and suddenly... demons. Again. And again. And again. Humans are basically just the early stages of yet another daemonic infestation.

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Well, if it were like 90% of the fantasy dealing with elves and fairies, especially of what is called Merry Old England: mythical races lived nearby humans and were somewhat superior, until humans discovered iron. Mythical creatures (especially elves) by and large couldn't bear the touch of iron, and didn't like humans using it. Tried to force humans to abandon it, humans fought back, won. Much atrocities committed on both sides, you get hate for the next millenia sorted out.

It's part of folklore so you got link to real world, however, this has been used so many times you should really be careful if you'd like to tell something new.

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Magical creatures must to follow their nature.

The thing that separates Mankind from from all other creatures magical or not is that we have control over our natures. We have choice. This is our glory and our tragedy. It is glorious because we can be anything we want. It is tragic because we do not have anything we ARE.

A deer cannot be other than a deer. A scorpion cannot be other than a scorpion. It is only mankind that can choose what to be or not to be.

A magical creature could be your friend for decades and then betray you not because they want to, but because circumstances have conspired to turn their nature against you. Contrive to make the circumstances dire enough and the resulting backlash by mankind would so brutal terrible that god himself would weep and have no choice but to intervene and separate the warring creatures before one side exterminated the other.

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Maybe each race blames the other for a past catastrophe. Maybe they disagree over which people owns a rich territory. Maybe one race did a big favor for the other centuries ago, and now there are bitter feelings about ingratitude (from one side's perspective) and laziness (from the other's). Maybe a great enemy they fought together did more harm to one race than to another, and the injured race feels they didn't get enough help. Maybe the prince of one race married the princess of the other race, and because they can't breed, their lineages went extinct. Maybe a cruel god was scared of what they could achieve together, and manipulated them to hate each other so they wouldn't cooperate and build a flourishing world.

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There were traitors

During the war with the hostile species, a minority of each of the allied species turned traitor and worked for the other side. After the war, demagogues from each species blamed the others for the traitors in their ranks, while turning a blind eye to the traitors in their own. Better informed and more reasonable people knew that the ones stirring up the trouble hardly had unblemished war records themselves.

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  • $\begingroup$ This isn't a bad idea, but could you flesh it out a bit more and be specific about what everybody's doing? Consider the premise that the war may have created the hatred long before any betrayals took place. When you have a moment, please review our tour and help center pages. Thanks! $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 23:41

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