Like a good Neighbor

David Stockhoff · 20 Nov 2011, 23:32 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:32:48 -0500
Subject: (urth) Like a good Neighbor
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On 11/20/2011 12:23 PM, James Wynn wrote:
>> I agree. You're missing your own point. Fairies are notoriously amoral and, as you say, limited in their powers. Why expect the Neighbors to be perfectly moral and powerful? When are fairies ever that?
>
> Well, they aren't amoral. An seemingly unending list of strange rules govern their behavior. Rather, their morality is alien to ours.

THANK you. Their amorality is "apparent" to humans because it's not 
human morality and certainly not Christian.
> So one ought expect that a human who consults with Faeries is going to behave immorally by human standards. Think of the sorceress Medea who burned her own children. From her perspective she was making them immortal, purging them of their mortal parts. (To go to Faerie is also to go to the Underworld, the Land of the Dead.)
>
> Gerry's mistake (one of them) is thinking that all the Neighbors must be acting in concert, always with larger ultimate plan in mind. If we were talking about a human character, he wouldn't make that mistake.

See below. I do think that Neighbors are culturally less divided than we 
humans are, but this doesn't mean they all work in the same Office of 
Intervention in Human Affairs.
>
> Just because a young faerie has acted to resurrect Horn out of personal guilt does not mean he stopped to plan beyond that decision.

In fact, fairies are always doing things "apparently" on a whim---they 
often go against their own code (the "seemingly unending list of strange 
rules [that] govern their behavior"). Usually this is in what you might 
call "literary" fairy stories rather than the traditional ones, but the 
precedent exists.
>
> Incidentally, I consider Horn's replacement here to be instructed by the story from the Mabinogion of Pwyll who chased a white stag into Faerie (Annwvyn) and ended up having to swap identities with a faerie.

Yep. Although the exact deployment of "swap" is left pretty open.

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