"Oh, it's just preindustrial with humans - preindustrial with Elves is less bad, they don't need to work nearly all the time to produce enough to live and they don't have child mortality really and even when fucked-up they're not actually that bad. Preindustrial worlds with humans or Amentans suck and will be good first priorities if we can ever travel."

"Is her hair magical or...?"

"Yeah, she wandered into a patch of magic - space that causes random unpredictable effects - in the hopes that her owner wouldn't have a way to get her out, because he was trying to sell her newborn."

"...uh-huh."

"...so what exactly is the matter with New Elf Timothy or don't you know?"

"We know... ingredients? He's good at justifying what he wants to do to himself and everybody else and what he wanted to do was 'not let his boyfriend leave' and because they are Elves with some sort of national trauma around holding themselves to standards of conduct of any kind none of the natural checks on that were present."

"Almost no one I know would care if I abused Muggles - and the ones who would I could just have avoided getting to know - but it's not tempting."

"And my life would have been dramatically easier in almost every respect if I'd been willing to let people far away who I didn't like and who didn't like me get killed. I don't really understand, not fully, what the difference is. But he is not actually very unusual for his cultural milieu. 'Preindustrial absolute monarch has a fucked-up personal life' would require absolutely no explanation at all if he weren't otherwise like us."

"Except mostly you turn out better than the societies that produce you. Is he just - spending all his 'better than the society that produced him' somewhere else or - didn't get any -?"

"I don't know. We really didn't ask."

"...why not?"

" - it's not really very important? He could probably lie about it. Lots of people are only decent because they're well-incentivized."

"But we usually aren't."

"What things would it change if it turns out that the answer is that he's wildly ahead of his time about criminal procedures?"

"I mean, it's the difference between 'he's just, like, not really us' and 'he's us but has a really awful blindspot around why you don't abuse your partner because of the upbringing among mind-twisting gods'."

" - I'm not thinking of him as 'me, but' anything, I'm just thinking of him as the King of this Elf planet who has these strengths and weaknesses about which I know more than I could have inferred just from meeting him."

"Usually you can get a lot more than that from the alts thing."

"Here I do not think the alts thing helps. Maybe when he is better-incentivized and not in a war with an evil god it will be clearer what makes him weird and then the alts thing will be more helpful than just - sizing him up straight. But right now I think you'll do better without it."

"So we just pretend he's some unrelated morally myopic monarch."

"And unless you go around turning all the rulers on your own planet into frogs, or have been planning to as soon as you get the Statute lifted, I don't think you should do that here."

"I have occasionally considered turning some of them into squirrels but was never going to actually do it."

"Who would you turn into a squirrel?"

"Do you really want me to list irritating Lords Spiritual and Temporal at you?"

"I guess I'm mostly curious what's irritating enough to make the cut."

"I'd have to go get my notes on Muggle politics. Anyway. I was not going to really squirrel anyone."