About

Lelf, a portmanteau of the words "Lel" and "Elf," is the nickname given to a laughing elf character featured in a manual book for the tabletop role-plying game Pathfinder. On image board sites, the original illustration of the elf and its photoshopped variations have been employed as reaction images.

Origin

The original illustration (shown below) can be found in a supplementary manual book for Pathfinder, a top-selling tabletop role-playing game released by the Paizo Publishing, titled "Ultimate Campaign" and published as hardcover in May 2013. The illustration shows a tall male elf laughing hysterically at a halfling attempting to charm his companion with a flower.

On February 25th, 2014, the earliest known thread featuring a cropped version of the laughing elf surfaced on 4chan's /tg/ (tabletop games) board^[2], where it generated more than 300 responses and several dozens of photoshopped iterations based on the exploitable image.

Spread

Throughout 2014, the laughing elf continued to gain traction as a popular choice of reaction image on 4chan, though it wasn't given the nickname "Lelf" until another /tg/ thread^[3] emerged on September 29th, 2014. Meanwhile, additional photoshopped variations featuring a cutout of Lelf's face were produced in the process.

Notable Examples

External References