Yeah, way before. My feelings for drow are super complicated because they've never been anything other than lame to me-- like, my earliest exposure to them was Driz'zt, & Driz'zt is lame. Lolth on the other hand has always been cool-- basically the thing that redeemed drow for me was deciding to look at them anthropologically-- like, when I got enough distance from canon to think of them as spider elves & not "drow."

I like wemics for being lion-elves. Like centaurs are horse-men. I want dwarves to be either badger-dwarves or boar-dwarves? & then what? Orcs -> ? Halflings -> ? Halfling-eagles, yeah, that is the ticket.