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Old 02-25-2016, 08:51 AM   #8
jason taylor
 
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Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
Default Re: [Spoilers?] Blue and Orange Morality: Adapting the Faerie Courts

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Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 View Post
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.

The problem is that blue/orange morality is almost impossible to interact with for humans without serious conflict, precisely because it is alien, and often leads to the entity following it doing things that the human's morality forces him to see as 'dark/evil' or at least 'intolerable' rather than 'orange/other'.

For ex, from a human POV, using the Dresden Fae, does it matter that Mother Winter likes the taste of the meat from human infants not because she's evil but because she's 'orange/other'? You might say that she's no more evil for doing it than a bear is for eating a baby...but you shoot a bear that does that, too, and a human who failed to shoot a bear to keep it from eating a human baby would be reviled as an evil monster by most, even by those who agreed that the bear was not evil.

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.



But note that the Vulcans don't follow blue/grey morality, but rather a very austere and ascetic version of traditional black/white morals recognizable to humans. That's a critical difference.

This was sort of how Butcher tended to portray Winter in the earlier novels, for that matter. When Harry had to interact with the Fae, he often ended up doing best dealing with Mab precisely because it's possible to do rational business with her. If Maeve was Winter as cold caprice, and Mab's monsters are Winter as Appetite, Mab is Winter as Necessary Season and part of the natural cycle.

But up close and personal, that's hard to portray because of the conflict I mentioned above. For the protagonist to interact with the Fae much, the author has to humanize them. Otherwise, it's hard to even have coherent communications with them.



But again, to interact with them very much in any readable or gameable way, it's hard to avoid having to humanize them. Otherwise, from a human POV, it's not a lot different than interacting with a bat**** crazy human, only with superpowers.
Some of the things that fay do sound not much different from what humans do for that matter. Putting curses on people for going in their forests? Well people go a long way to keep enemies out of their patrimony, including mass slaughter. Kidnapping babies to increase their population-the Iroquois did exactly that. For the matter the excuse for baby-napping the fairies give in Stolen Child sounds suspiciously like the one always given by slavers(for the world's more full of weeping then you can understand). When fae take a human lover they are torn between their new family and their own, just like humans.
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