At the End of All Things Elves in Revelation
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" - are they magically tempting to steal or something, because I really cannot imagine doing that."

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"Maybe to Elves. I didn't find them that interesting. They're really shiny but that's all."

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They're also very powerfully magic, or are we not mentioning that? he offers from his study on a different floor.

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I don't remember that ever featuring as anybody's motive to steal them.

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Most people are blindingly stupid. I do think that was Melkor's motive, though.

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"They're also magic but not in a way random people can use efficiently for anything but lighting."

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"I promise not to touch the Silmarils."

       "Oh, you can touch them, just not - unexpectedly?"

"This seems like a thing to play very safe, honestly. I guess if there's a really good reason I can revisit the question."

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"There's probably not going to be a really good reason."

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"It's a little hard to think of one. Anyway," she says to Caranthir, "I suppose if you'd have been good at taking over the world I wish you had but I think it's usually harder than people expect."

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"Oh, much so, but 'better than 1700s governments' is a fairly low bar."

        "Sure, but the 1700s governments gave way to steadily more modern ones, if we'd have otherwise been stuck -"

"You might have otherwise been stuck. Elves aren't very progress-minded."

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"Although if you'd have figured out 'legalize sex work' despite the untenability of the industry among Elves maybe it would have been better than that makes it sound."

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"I tend to strongly assume that banning voluntary transactions doesn't solve problems. I could see us setting the age of consent at forty or something, though."

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"How long would it take you to notice that was stupid?"

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"An Elf-sized short time?"

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"Fast enough to avoid entire generations in which all the law-abiding citizens have kids with parental age related birth defects, or not that fast?"

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" - possibly not that fast."

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"Yeah this would have been a problem if you had functional enforcement."

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"When we were actually presented with humans to govern we just gave them a lot of land and periodic supply shipments and told them to govern themselves. It - sort of worked."

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"Sort of?"

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"It avoided the failure modes associated with imposing Elf values on human populations. Their lives were not very good but in some ways that would have been hard to improve on - we didn't know anything about human disease - and the humans who accepted the more direct rule of my cousins had mixed feelings about that, later."

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"Oh?"

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"There's a famous text you should read, actually, now that it's been un-lost to history, it's called the Athrabeth - it's a sort of Socratic dialogue between my cousin Finrod and one of his human vassals. They debate whether humans are really meant to die, whether Elf hypermonogamy is stupid, whether there's a human afterlife, that kind of thing."

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"Oh, that sounds fun."

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"You'd have liked Andreth. Relentlessly sarcastic and very opinionated about death. It's really too bad Limbo didn't catch her."

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"Yeah, I was considerably more delighted about Limbo when I thought it had caught, like, everybody with a civilization."

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