[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Icelander

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.

Agreed. It works quite well from the POV of a story about the Wardens trying to save Kansas City (or wherever) from whatever nastiness Winter or Summer has in store. It works fine with the Fae as aliens, sapient natural forces, like living storms or the like. I could easily imagine a good story set in Butcher's universe (to continue using it as an example) about a Warden striving desperately to figure out some angle that would let him turn the Fae Law to his advantage to save the city.

It works when the human POV character is 'outside' the Fae, or the Fae are outside his reference frame, more or less.

Where is breaks down is when the story is 'up close and personal', when Fae and human characters are closely interacting as people over the course of a game or a story. Then it starts to break down in the way we've seen in Butcher's latest works. Here is where the inherent moral conflicts become unworkable and either have to be dodged or somehow evaded.

For ex, since we're using the Dresden Files as our example text, Harry is now the Winter Knight. He has a variety of duties, which he's still learning, but one of them is that he's Mab's hatchet man. Harry did extract a promise from her that she would never command him to slay a loved one. That's worth something. Further, as she herself says, she doesn't kill indiscriminately.

(Titania might actually be more likely to order her Knight to kill someone because she didn't like the color of her pantyhose, moreso than Mab. Caprice vs. rationality.)

But at the same time, it would be totally in-character for Mab to order Harry to kill someone because that someone was inconvenient, knew too much, whatever. As long as it was a stranger, Mab's promise doesn't kick in.

That someone might be a woman or a small child, or group of such, it wouldn't faze Mab (or at least it wouldn't as she's been written up until lately).

But Harry? That's another matter. So far, Butcher has avoided the issue by not having it come up. He had to kill the former Winter Knight, yes...but that was not an innocent and further could arguably be called a mercy.

I'm sure Butcher probably has some plan for just such a moment, but it's still an example of the issue. When a human is among the Fae, when he's on their team, so to speak...the blue/orange/black/white dichotomy suddenly has to be addressed, and it has no good solution that I've seen.

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Summer is irrational - recall when Harry requests Titania's help against Nemesis and, despite it being the right thing to do by every measure she refuses because Harry killed her daughter and she hates him.
Winter is cruel but rational - not for nothing was it Mab who was called upon to write the unseelie accords - Summer's appetites are unconstrained and that is why it is dangerous.

Yes. Bob even mentions that point in the early Fae story, Summer Knight, trying to get Harry to grasp that what serves the interests of humans is that the Courts stay in balance. He notes that Summer would encourage the growth of ebola as readily as kittens and daisies. Winter can restrain disease, conversely. Human interests are harmed if either Court gets the upper hand.

It's equally plausible that Rumpelstiltskin was Winter or Summer. He could have fit into either Court.

In the same story where he meets Titania, Harry dares to summon Mother Winter (and that's a pretty daring thing for a mortal to do in that world), and the subsequent encounter is a wonderful bit of Fae-human interaction. It could be right out of Medieval legend, from Mother Winter nearly killing him with a thrown cleaver to the reference to the taste of baby's marrow and the threat to make a meal of Harry.

But then...Mother Summer shows up, and the subsequent sequence is weak. She acts too human. She reveals that Mother Winter talks a good game, but cares underneath. Etc. The alien coldness of Mother Winter and the wild caprice of Titania are undercut by this sequence. The Mother Winter of the encounter in the cottage is Winter Fae. The Mother Winter described by Mother Summer is more like a human in a costume, or so ISTM.

The queens of the courts seem to be unusual amongst the fae in having once been human - and that leftover humanity would appear to be a handicap to them.

But there shouldn't be any leftover humanity in them, not after the passage of thousands of years as Faerie Queens. The magic should have devoured that long since. (We don't know just how old Mab and Titania are, but IIRC Titania mentioned that they were alive in 1066.)