As for elves… they just annoy me because, often-enough, they’re Tolkienien carbon-copies used by lazy authors to add an element of ramanticism to their writing. If they have a purpose, then have at it. I’m REALLY tired of authors doing things just “because Tolkien did it”. Write your own story, not his. If yours happens to have elves, then fine.

But tea and coffee are other matters. If you want to have them, or their equivalents, fine, but recognise that you will have to have a world in which it’s plausible that they are prevalent. In a mock-Celtic mock-medieval milieu, where is the tea being grown? Establish trade, and in quantity, and you can get away with it. Otherwise… drop it. Accept that people in medieval times didn’t have coffee for breakfast.

Some exceptions work though. Alien foods deserve alien names - if you’re talking about something which is rare and you want to evoke the mystery of a flavor the characters have never tried before, or something that has no current real-world equivalent, a weird name works. Then you need to use the propper descriptors then - sweet, salty, sour, bitter, rich. (I use “rich” in place of the propper Japanese term, “Umumi”, because not many people know that one…)

I guess it’s situational then.

jay, hot is as hot does. Some people have a narrow range of what they consider attractive and others a much wider range. I fall into the latter category, in that I tend to write characters who are in some manner - Hollywood-style looks least among them - attractive.

Mark - I object to feudalism, too, although that hasn’t stopped me from writing books set in a time frame where some manner of feudalism holds sway. Since I write both sf and f, I find it interesting that certain readers have clear preferences between the two sub-genres, or approaches, or what have you.

All these years, I thought it was the feudalism I objected to.