Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2
Butcher is undercutting his own past work with his latest Faerie stuff, IMHO, making precisely this error. As we get closer looks at the Fae, they start to look and act too human.
[...]
If Winter's orange morality requires that they freeze a major city to death...what differences does it make to the White Council whether they are doing so out of malevolence or alien morality? The Wardens still have a city facing destruction and a major emergency on their hands.
For that matter, from the POV of the Wardens trying to save Chicago's people from being frozen to death, what difference is there between the Winter Court doing this out of alien morality or a nutcase human wizard doing so because he's bat**** insane? Either way, they've got a city to save...somehow.
|
The difference lies in that the Winter Court has rules of conduct, alien and intolerable as humans might find them, and can usefully be negotiated with.
Insane humans who attack others with lethal weapons cannot reasonably be opposed by maneuevering them to agree to a treaty not to do so. The Winter Court, however, will abide by treaties and their motivations, while strange, are internally consistent.
The Wardens cannot realistically kill all faeries that do morally repugnant things by human standards. They can't treat them as wild animals, because the Wardens ultimately do not have the power to destroy Mother Winter or any other similar being. No matter what they might morally believe, their only rational course of action is to learn the rules of the faerie Blue and Orange morality and use those rules to negotiate.
That is what makes Blue and Orange morality on the part of vastly powerful aliens a useful fictional device. It forces the hero(es) to compromise and/or into actions that they regard as evil, if only as lesser evils.