How Elf Girls Took Over Anime

A slippery slope to more monster-girl main characters? Please?

And the fact that they emote with them.

Elves have been my favorite long before Frieren ever existed. Its crazy to think that elves weren't prominent before Frieren came along, and honestly makes me think this person maybe hasn't seen a lot of older anime or only watches more recent stuff. Even in old Japanese adventure games elves were a pretty common sight.

A Girl Who Chants Love At the Bound of This World: YU-NO, Record of Lodoss War, Those Who Hunt Elves, etc. I mean heck, there was even a Japanese game studio that called themselves "elf." (Great games BTW, some tasteless content not withstanding).

As I am sure you guessed, their origin, much like nearly everything relating to RPGs and fantasy settings in Japanese media, cones from Wizardry. It always comes back to Wizardry.

Actually he does mention Deedlit (Record of Lodoss War) a lot throughout the video. He mentions Wizardy in the beginning too.
- Yeah, it was nice to see him mention it, but to say that elves "took over" isn't exactly true. It has always been like this. The amount of popular elf characters in anime now is not really much different than it was 30-40 years ago.
  A bit of clickbait in the title, IMO.
Record of the Lodoss War mentioned 🙌
Did you not watch the video? He pretty much covered all of this in-depth. Frieren is only in the thumbnail because it's attention grabbing.

where's the invidious or piped video link?

You can use LibRedirect to redirect to invidious or piped
- it sucks, a lot of things need to be fixed
Everyone can set up a redirector to open YouTube links in their favourite instance. NewPipe and Grayjay open YouTube links automatically. It is way more difficult to do vice-versa because you'd need a list of instances or more detailed link/content analysis.
- many instances of piped and invidious won't accept your connection if you're not logged in with an account there. and now a lot of age-restricted videos on youtube won't play through an alternative front end at all.
  I have ways of virtuallizing multiple instances of the same stuff, I can just copypaste a youtube link into another instance of my browser full of userscripts for bypassing all of google's garbage.