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Tumunzahar makes Menegroth look like a contract project. Which, the Dwarves assure her, it was. The stonework is astonishingly careful and beautiful, silky to the touch up close while from a distance it gives the impression of stretching on forever above, a sky of stone with crystals for stars. Vast natural cave systems are connected by dozens of perfectly smooth, gently sloped broad stone pathways from which the fall, if she fell, would be several miles down. There are handrails. "We use those to move materials carts," someone explains to her, "we're not going to be reckless."
There's an amphitheater, a place where a hundred of the stone walkways twine around to create space for a hundred thousand people to sit in close proximity, and someone is giving a lecture or a demonstration at the base of it, the seats closest to him filled with eager, tiny, bearded Dwarf-children.
And they spiral down, and down, and down, past waterfalls and egg-sized gemstones left half in the rock and halls of crystal. Everything grows gradually more ornate and more perfectly maintained and the clang of hammers fades behind them. "People say," her guide says, "that we only have a council instead of a single King because there were nine winners of the competition to design the throne so we couldn't just select one person to sit it." And they push open the doors to reveal, indeed, nine thrones so elaborate it would be hard to choose between them, and nine squat bearded people sitting them.
Most people don't look out at the world and think about what they could hit with an eight-foot-tall longbow.
purposeful_glory
You might be able to transfer your accuracy to a sniper rifle. Make shots from a few miles off.
Aside from that the King thought it was mostly a precision problem. Perhaps you can discuss it with him.
There's nothing I'd love more than to visit Asgard and try all your weapons and monsters and enemies, except I can't because I'm not a girl. I wonder if this is how Irissë feels all the time.
purposeful_glory
Sigyn gets to fight things. It's not as bad as being a girl who wants to do magic. And I don't think the bilgesnipes will know the difference. I didn't have the impression that the problem was nearly as bad for Quendi, anyway?
No one would exile a child over it. But I had to talk at Oromë for a couple hundred years before he agreed that there wasn't anything objectionable about Irissë riding with us, and he took me when I was only a child and practically useless. And my grandfather also had two daughters, one of them older than Nolofinwë, who didn't feature in the succession dispute because it just didn't occur to anyone.
purposeful_glory
Well, I'm not sure adding more participants to the dispute would have helped anything, but yes, that is a problem.
That's among the reasons I didn't point this out to people. That and that politics is stupid and my aunts had the right idea.
purposeful_glory
Well, Nolofinwë seems to do all right... and I think I am prepared to say of your father that at least on a typical day he probably makes a better king than a subject.
Amusement. He'd have passed it on to Maitimo and managed to mostly be neither, if things hadn't all fallen apart at the worst possible minute.
purposeful_glory
I'm much more prepared to say that he'd be vastly better at 'neither', but that does not seem to be in the cards in the immediate future.
He is a quick learner and will grow into the best King our people have ever known. He's not as quick a learner with this kind of thing and didn't grow into it quite fast enough, but he's not Elf-paced about even his weaknesses.
purposeful_glory
Unfortunately, politics is iterated. The best politician with a damning legacy can and will be outperformed by the mediocre one with no such handicap.
Outperformed at what? Killing the Enemy? If it can be done with conventional means and they go ahead and do it, great, the Enemy being dead is more important than any of our legacies. If it can't, Father's the only one who can do it.
Outperformed at popularity contests? Sure. Sorry if that doesn't move me much. The fate of the world's rather at stake here.
Outperformed at popularity contests? Sure. Sorry if that doesn't move me much. The fate of the world's rather at stake here.
I don't think you can. His style of leadership is entirely about evaluating which projects need to happen and who can make them happen, which he can do very quickly, attracting the most capable people to those projects, and pushing himself on whichever element would otherwise be the one delaying a plan in coming together. It would be a very very unusual political arrangement that gave him the latitude he needs without amounting to 'he's King, someone else does the administrative tasks and the public relations'.
purposeful_glory
He sounds more like a corporate leader than a political one, actually. Of the high-powered interstellar commerce type, not the Asgardian, but I've met the breed.
The interesting kinds of leadership are vision and execution. Everything on top of that is just phrasing things delicately and looking wise.