Then you have a limited imagination, or else it's another species difference. I would find politics very boring if everyone just communicated directly their current opinion of everyone else and then picked their shared goals and negotiated on the other ones. I'd change to a world where that happened, of course, because the point of politics is not my entertainment, but I would lose my principle source of something that I very much enjoy. And sex, unlike politics, only affects the involved parties, making it much more ethical to make it an elaborate power game! Or at least so I naively thought back before the war started.

Oh dear. On multiple counts.

Have I run afoul of galactic sexual ethics again?

Little bit, maybe, although I can't guess exactly how unless for some reason you want to go into elaborate detail that isn't my business.

Or mine to share, presumably. You could print me some books that touch on the topic, it's how I've learned lots of other cultural norms.

My eidetic memory's not quite that good for anything that's not about physics - it's all right for books I remembered reasonably clearly or read more than once to start, although I'm sure there are discrepancies, but I didn't read anything called The Nice Sexually Liberal Galactic's Guide To Sexual Ethics, it's dribs and drabs from stuff I skimmed.

And we're not going to adopt nice sexually liberal galactic ethics just because I find them soothing and they seem in many respects better than ours, we'll think for ourselves. I will be more careful of putting you in positions of having to publicly disapprove of things.

Thanks.

Lúthien's coming along nicely.

Do tell.

She has decent political instincts and I think at least half of her father's advisors are tractable in terms of getting them to take her seriously in less than five centuries.

Less than five centuries, gosh.

I'm not going to be able to bring about 'convincing them to let us off with a slap on the wrist' through 'make Lúthien the power behind the throne, convince her to do that', don't have enough time, but I can run both projects in parallel and at least feel like I'm doing right by her.

Nod.

I assume her complicated fate is not such that it's a mistake to make her more capable and powerful?

Not as far as I know, just a mistake to set her up with guys her father disapproves of.

There are so many ways she is not my type that it hadn't even occurred to me, except as an appearance worth avoiding, until Galadriel brought it up.

It's probably not supposed to be you.

Who else am I supposed to be introducing her to, exactly? She's met all of them a couple thousand times before.

I don't know! It's hundreds of years off in the fated trajectory! I don't even know if anybody introduces her to whoever, and it's not specific on the whoever!

Making Thingol less likely to overreact if or when she does get involved with someone seems like a more promising avenue, except it's not one of the first ten things I'm trying to accomplish with him.

My plan is still the free will thing.

I'm not even sure what it'd mean to give us free will, beyond oaths not working.

I'm not entirely sure either but it would make it a lot less ominous to hear that somebody's fated to something. 'Oh, is she, I'll just go suggest that she not do that then. That might actually work, whereas in the absence of free will somehow it just wouldn't quite.'

Well. Good luck. I wonder if people will miss it.