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Old 03-03-2016, 10:30 PM   #18
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: [Spoilers?] Blue and Orange Morality: Adapting the Faerie Courts

To amplify on the point about emotional themes: it's interesting that both the Summer and Winter Courts can embody both love and hate as themes. Summer is about passionate love and passionate hate. It's not a coincidence that we use heat and fire as a metaphor for both love and hate in their passionate forms, in part because either one can burn you.

We're mostly familiar with the idea of 'cold hate', the Winter mode of hate. But we tend to overlook (in part because it doesn't lend itself to romantic fiction) that there is a Winter mode of love, too.

The cold form of love, Winter's love, is the love of a parent who refuses to bail out a child, or give them money, because they know they're financing an addiction or the kid will leave the cell to get into worse trouble immediately.

Cold love is the husband or wife who refuses to help their spouse do something stupidly self-destructive, even at the cost of that spouse's anger or the risk of losing them. Note that Winter love might be most necessary when the spouse in the grip of Summer's passion for something.

Or, Winter's love might lead someone to leave the loved one, for his or her own good, in defiance of the Summer love that insists that reality doesn't matter. To use a (rare) romantic-fictional example: in Casablanca, Elsa loves Rick with Summer's love at the end of the movie. Rick is displaying Winter's love for Elsa when he ends their relationship, because he knows that down that road lies only pain for her, and others as well.

Cold love is the friend who must, in Tolkien's phrase, 'rebuke a friend's folly'. Again, this might well take the form of Winter love against Summer passion.

"I love Diana, Mike! Nothing's going to keep us apart, it's destiny!"
"She's married, Joe. And her husband is fifty pounds heavier than you, it's all muscle, and he's already spend ten years in Joliet for assault and battery. Put the guy in a wheelchair. Think Diana would stick with you if you in a wheelchair, Joe? Really?"


Those various forms of love aren't usually passionate, though they may be deep. Winter's love is usually more painful than joyful, but no less love for that. Winter's love may be less passionate, but it's very often more clear-eyed.

As someone noted above, we have a natural perceptual bias in favor of Summer. But Summer and Winter are not good and evil, they are Summer an Winter. Their respective Sidhe should reflect those themes.

Mortals mix the themes of Summer and Winter. That might make us as confusing to them as they are to us, for that matter. How can the same being be passionate and cold, rational and capricious? They are opposites, yet almost every human is both.

Our civilization reflects our mixed nature, from their POV. For ex, we build fires to warm ourselves in winter, a group of humans sitting around a fire in the middle of a snow-covered landscape is bringing little Summer into Winter. Summer, on its own, might produce weed-tangles, mortals apply a little Winter rationallty and order to convert such into orderly but still living, thriving gardens. We might be very, very confusing to the Sidhe because of that mixed nature.

There probably aren't very many if any Sidhe artists in either Court. Why do I say that? Well, Summer has the creative spark, no doubt. But on their own, Summer caprice would tend to produce...well, chaos. Pure Summer music would be discordant, probably loud, but with no order, just pure self-expression. A Summer Sidhe singer might simply break into primal screams in the middle of the song just because he felt like it. Pure Summer painting would probably bear a notable resemblance to a toddler's crayon marks all over the wall...and it might be hard to keep a Summer Sidhe focused on a project for long.

(Or a Summer Sidhe might fixate on something in defiance of all rational motivation, immune to logical entreaties, too. "I am TOO going to paint the entire State of Colorado orange with this tiny paintbrush!")

A Winter Sidhe could stay focused, and probably draw and play music well...but it might well look or sound a lot like a computer-rendered reproduction. Technically perfect...but no more. Perfectly orderly, perfectly logical...and lifeless. A Winter Sidhe orchestra could probably play Beethoven's Fifth with a perfection possibly beyond human ability...but likely couldn't adapt a ditty to save their lives.

But human artists and musicians combine Summer spontaneity and Winter discipline to create art and music. Which might well fascinate Sidhe of either Court! A common theme of legends about the Sidhe is that they are uncreative. That Summer/Winter divide, their inability to be both spontaneous and disciplined at the same time, might account for that.

Both spontaneity and discipline are utterly indispensable to art. Without Summer spontaneity nothing can be created. But without Winter discipline the creation is literally meaningless.

A painter who suddenly thinks, "I'll just throw in some random purple and green splotches here just because I like purple and green right now!" is likely to produce a very odd painting, especially if this happens when he's 95% finished with the picture. The musician who refuses to consider constraining things like meter, chords, coordinating notes and lyrics, etc., will produce not music but meaningless noise.

Last edited by Johnny1A.2; 03-03-2016 at 11:14 PM.
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