...um.

Not on my orders, or on anyone's orders.

Still sounds like a bad habit. Doesn't anyone ever misspeak or anything?

As long as the first thing you say is 'for the next shift' the magnitude of your errors is rather sharply limited. If anyone's misspoken it hasn't been in the scary direction.

Still worth cutting down, I think. How do mind-control oaths even work?

You can't swear to do anything that'd be impossible for you but you can swear to do things you'd otherwise be very disinclined to do, or averse to doing....'for my next shift I swear not to let my attention wander from my assignment' will, in fact, keep your attention as totally on your assignment as an Elven mind can be. Swearing to care about something more than you ordinarily would, or to find something more interesting, works similarly.

On the extreme end, if you swear to desire whatever Melkor desires then as much as that's actually psychologically possible, you will. 

And here I am accustomed to thinking myself as being unusually psychologically self-malleable.

There is a very strong taboo on pulling stunts like that with oaths, even voluntarily, and people who'd otherwise follow me to their deaths who'd kill me if it were ever ordered. But yes, it can be done.

And it's not strong enough that people aren't using them like coffee.

Under very extreme circumstances after having watched a lot of their loved ones die because we were not prepared enough, yes.

Yeah.

Think I should have ordered them not to?

Not quite the level on which I'm inclined to consider the problem. More - what else could they be doing and why aren't they doing that. And maybe the answer is nothing, nothing else would work - but if they could be getting by better with some kind of additional-beyond-singing outlet for the grief or something like that -

We are probably deficient in tragedy-related coping skills, having grown up in Valinor, and perhaps no one's served by the taboo on romance during wartime, but I don't think they need more recreation, exactly. Feeling useful, feeling needed, being surrounded by beautiful things...

There's a taboo on romance in wartime?

Well, among straight people sex is marriage and marriage is metaphysically binding for the lifetime of the universe and marrying someone who might die soon in the fighting is considered deeply unwise. Also, joys are for peacetime, if you only get them once it shouldn't be in desperate times - at least that's the mindset.

Keep in mind that everyone trying to evaluate the tradeoff has never had sex.

So they don't know how useful it is for stress relief, I suppose.

It's crossed my mind.

Humans actually get married younger and more hastily at war. But they can remarry if their spouse dies.

It is not unprecedented for Elves to fall in love more than once but it actually is unprecedented for us to get over someone.

Really?

Yeah. Separate, sure, but - the explanation I always got was that love never fades in our memories.

Well, I can't claim to regret it but I would have thought harder about it before smoldering at you if I had known that.

I definitely could have avoided falling in love with you. Probably only by moving out of the country, but still.

I wouldn't have wanted to drive you out of the country!