Beka is not sure what she was expecting as a result of walking into a snake monster but an Elf city would have been very low on a list of possibilities if someone had jumbled a lot of random words together into place-phrases and had her rank them. "Elf city" would probably have been under "spider void" and above "grape juice ocean". And yet here she is.
"- I mean, I realize we are currently here, and that when last you were in your world there was a war on, but, like, if you get home and the wizards rip up your Melkor also, is this still a hard problem to solve in any way."
"It's a strange point to want to get across, if I'm understanding it properly, but I assume we're missing some context."
Shrug. "As long as you can fix it I think anyone being shocked that a society that hadn't invented plumbing also hadn't invented modern sexual ethics has, uh, skipped even more history classes for being depressing than I did."
"To some extent it's actually weird Elves get ethics at all, given the degree to which - at least among our people - they're the thing extracted from watching history happen and going 'okay, that thing, it's bad, can we enforce a taboo against it?'"
"But that's what I'm saying, it doesn't actually seem to be something societies get right on the first try. Except bizarre Elf societies, and this Elf society is just - not-bizarre."
Rabka has tuned out to have a side conversation with Rebecca about how Pink II can totally have a lactation potion if the wizards have enough ingredients.
" - I would phrase the problem as 'someone is suffering a lot, and also inconveniently the form this takes is one that modern societies have a very strong taboo on because having a very strong taboo on it dramatically reduces the rate of all kinds of problems, and yet more inconveniently one of the ways strong taboos are enforced is by being really appalled at violations even if they're committed by people who couldn't have been deterred by your taboo because they have been planet-shuffled by mysterious possibly-snakes.
And the solution is just 'find ways of expressing your defiance of the Valar which involve less suffering and which won't run you into this problem'. I actually bet we've invented lots of things they'd disapprove of, going off, uh, descriptions."
"I don't want to stop having sex with people who want to have sex with me just because they're prisoners."