“I should probably ask Lastwall how they see this, at some point, but - it’ll be politically awkward to do so at any point in the next while. I think the thing I would say if I hadn’t been made aware that the current consensus of the kind of Lawful Good I am is different - and I do, in fact, take seriously what the current consensus of the kind of Lawful Good I am is, for my own conduct - 

I think the thing I would say is that friendships can compromise judgment, and drink can compromise judgment, and having a family can compromise judgment, and being a human being with unmet emotional needs can compromise judgment, and one’s judgment is in fact one’s single most valuable asset, in most contexts, and one should care very deeply about it, but - most people can’t become a functional and healthy person without some things in their life that are good and whole and theirs, and should make life plans compatible with having those. But falling in love is specifically known to be a common extremely distortionary extremely intense kind of judgment-compromise, and it makes sense to have extra guardrails around it. Not bans, necessarily - we don’t ban it, outside a command relationship, but - more opportunities to notice if you’re being an idiot. 

I think that not being allowed to order it is not actually sufficient in a command relationship. I think there is a - thing in human nature, inherent to an oath of service to another, which is about - a kind of power that it is very dangerous to mix with personal power. I can’t think of a form of it I would be comfortable with except one where the command relationship isn’t taken very seriously and I don’t think that’s healthy for other reasons."

“I guess I can make some attempt to determine how common this scenario is and how many current situations we would actually be disrupting if we made a rule. Maybe. I’m sure someone has any idea.” Lann might take it personally but that’s not really - she is not going to decide on a policy either way because of Lann, okay, that is in some sense the entire point of the ‘it compromises judgment’ argument, even if the problem in question is sort of the opposite of the envisioned problem. “I’ll probably want to talk it through with some people who are actually from Mendev and know how people from Mendev tend to see this situation, though, I don’t want to - make rules that people mostly find confusing.”

“I - don’t think that banning having sex with people is particularly close to an effective ban on falling in love with them, though, if that’s the thing you’re aiming at.”

“Well, it’s much harder to make a ban on falling in love with people, what with how it’s half involuntary. I do think our rules encompass most voluntary falling-in-love related actions, like confessing your love, or getting secretly married, or trying a bizarre ritual you heard of that bonds people as lovers forever - yes, someone tried that. Yes, of course the ritual was an evil necromantic ritual. 

I would certainly personally actively avoid falling in love with a person in my power, if this required active effort. It's harder to make rules about but it does seem like an important thing to do, if you're going to have power over people."

She’s pretty sure that almost all of the thoughts she’s having in response to this are just her being mean. It would, she is pretty sure, be kind of mean to inform Lann that she’s decided that maximally lawful and disciplined armies ban confessing your love to your commanding officer, who gave you magic powers and personally helped you deliver your entire people out of the caves where they’ve been starving for generations and who doesn’t really see why it's such a big deal that you’re half lizard person.

“....I am tempted to say that I see the logic in that set of rules, but I think that actually it might be less that I’m seeing the logic and more that I’m tempted to use other people’s rules as an excuse to be a jerk to people who really don’t deserve for anyone else to be a jerk to them. Which is, in any case, a terrible basis for a general rule. …maybe I should actually ask Sosiel, I guess as a military cleric of Shelyn he probably ought to have some kind of opinion on this. Which may or may not mean that he has anything useful to say about it.”

“I do also think that - most of the responsibility, here, falls on the person in power. Half of Iomedae’s paladins are in some sense in love with her, and this is not a significant problem. If she were to respond to it, that would be deeply inappropriate.”

“Sure. I guess."

- although actually she’s not at all sure that the equivalent situation here is not a significant problem, or that the power dynamic between her and Lann or her and Daeran or her and anyone else she met before taking command is anything at all like the power dynamic between Iomedae and any of her paladins, but - you can see how it would be unfair to Woljif, right, if Woljif were still here and thinking he was half a slave.

But none of that is super relevant, right, because the actual problem that she's been experiencing here is that Lann is probably in love with her, and - she likes Lann fine, right, but he's in love with her, or might be, and she is flatly incapable of experiencing any kind of normal human connection with anyone. She's worried about handling that badly and hurting him, or losing him for the crusade, when actually she does kind of need him. But it's not like the thing she wants to about any of this is have sex with Lann, what with how this would obviously be a horrible call and end up hurting both of them for reasons that are totally orthogonal to anything to do with any command structure they may or may not have.

“ - sorry, this is not really the conversation that I said I was going to have, is it.”

“I expect there are lots of conversations it’ll be important for us to have, and the order probably doesn’t matter all that much, except insofar as it’s important that you feel like you’re making progress instead of like you’re - polishing wagon wheels.”

"I agree that it would be kind of contemptible for Iomedae to respond to people hero worshipping her by encouraging them or being willing to sleep with them. I am actually not at all sure that there are any situations around here that are particularly similar to that one. But I'm not - I'm kind worried that arguing the point implies a completely different set of problems and priorities than the ones that I actually have."

"I agree with you that the situations around here aren't very analogous to that, though - there are probably people who think of you in similarly extraordinary nigh-magical terms, and there definitely will be as the war goes on."

"Sure! And I'm probably going to ignore that, and that mostly won't be a problem, because those situations will in fact be different in ways that make that a more reasonable response."

"But that rule doesn't feel to you like it captures what matters in some other cases?"

"I think it's - okay, fine, we can talk about my problems, but for the record I still think that making general rules in an attempt to dodge situations that are personally awkward for me would be irresponsible and unfair to everyone around here who isn't me, and maybe also unfair to the people who I am in mildly awkward social situations with."

"Suppose that some of the people who follow me around were in love with me. Or, you know, liked me, not necessarily as intensely as all that. The instances where this matters at all are ones where the people in question are people who I trust and rely on, and who wouldn't have met me as a magical hero, or as the Knight Commander of the Fifth Crusade. They'd have met me as, you know - a person who convinced them to run around Kenabres trying to save people in an emergency situation, or as some person who fell through a hole in the earth during the attack, and was trying to get back to the surface with some injured people, and who, you know, may have done some light heroism in the course of doing that, I guess. And now they're working with the crusade, and I am in charge of the crusade, but the relationship we have otherwise is not, really, I think, all that similar to a normal military command structure. And it seems - disrespectful of them, I think, to act like people who met me under those conditions are so incapable of knowing what's good for them that I should think of them the same way as whatever I am imagining it was like to be a lovestruck junior paladin working under Iomedae."

" - I mean, okay, actually I guess I don't think that they know what's good for them, and that if I were to try to start anything with them this would go horribly for everyone involved, but not particularly because of the hero out of legend thing, or because of the Knight Commander thing. I just think that everyone involved would end up hurt and disappointed. But I don't see that that particularly makes it fair to them to make up excuses to avoid talking about that. It may, separate from that, be a reasonable rule, if not one that I've ever specifically considered before. But it doesn't seem fair to impose it on everyone just because I don't want to have awkward conversations with my friends."

"I do think that separate from right rules there are right reasons, and 'it'd be awkward' isn't generally a right reason. I don't think I'd argue that they don't know what's good for them. ...this is perhaps unrelated, but thinking aloud of examples in case they shine more light on intuitions, consider a case where a commander is sleeping with a subordinate, and the subordinate thereby getting better treatment, respect, better rations, exemptions from punishment. I wouldn't say ' this is bad for the subordinate and they're too foolish to realize it', I could believe it was genuinely working out well for them. I would say it is immoral because it is a betrayal of the army's mission and a wrong to the other soldiers."

"Sure. ...but if we're going to argue that everyone should be treated the same, to avoid that, we get into situations like Nenio. Situations under which it genuinely makes sense to hold different people to different standards, and to give them different things. And you can say, sure, but sleeping with people is something that specifically clouds people's judgment and makes you more likely to make decisions like that in error, but I'm still not actually sure that it's uniquely bad for that and as opposed to just the easiest thing in that class to make a rule about."

"Fraternization rules are generally construed somewhat more broadly than sleeping with people, though sleeping with people is a very clear cut case where no one can reasonably claim they didn't know it was against the rule. I would generally train junior officers to also be careful not to show favoritism to one subordinate even if there's nothing sexual to do with it, and not to ask anyone under their command for personal favors even wholly nonsexual ones, and you wouldn't want, say, someone and their sibling or child in the same unit, because it'd be understood that those strong bonds would get in the way of good judgment in some cases. 

I think you are entirely right that sex is - a bright line, because it's easy to enforce and it comes up all the time, but hardly the only example of the thing, or necessarily the most important example."

"Making a rule that nobody is allowed to ask anyone under their command for anything as a personal favor sounds - uh, hard. That sounds hard. I am not sure how much of that reaction is just that a lot of our current command structures are unacceptably fuzzy, but."

"I think that the way you establish norms like that over time is by example. It's not at all a thing it's reasonable to expect everybody to pick up out of nowhere, and a lot of people if they're trying to follow a rule about it will end up making themselves less effective. But - a lot of how armies function is by having enough functional people around, who set an example for others, and then over time it's not following some complicated rule, it's just behaving the way your own officer always behaved."

"It - sounds like it would be hard under these circumstances even if I understood the rule? I mean, maybe the problem is in fact that I'm misunderstanding the rule, but that's - everyone, right? That would be a rule that, applied fairly, whoever is ultimately in charge can't ask anyone in Drezen for anything, unless it pertains to the crusade and is being asked for in that capacity?"

" - well, in this ideal well-run Crusade they'd have a household staff that was paid out of their paycheck and which would do things like 'I want to read some romance novels' or 'I want some new outfits in the latest Oppara fashions', and so in this ideal well-run Crusade you'd never be saying that to, say, a Teleporter making a supply run."

"Oh.

"I mean, I guess I could have that, although I might want to figure out having a house before I think about having any household staff to put in it, but I was thinking more about favors in the genre of - I mean, I guess I don't really know what specific examples I was thinking of, but the sort of thing you might ask a... friend... for. All of the people who were previously the closest things I had to friends have inconveniently either had their arms twisted into serving or have willingly pledged themselves to my cause. Which is not to say that we're very good friends, but it seems like it might be - I mean - "

Possibly people who are in charge of operations this big and this demanding actually cannot have friends, if all of their previous sort-of-friends have been subsumed into the cause. She's - kind of going to have to process a new wave of simmering anger at Galfrey, maybe, if that's so.

"I do not want to make the claim that commanders shouldn't have friends on their Crusade. That sounds - like it would involve ripping out a lot of peoples' strengths. I do think it is a kind of friendship that may - require extra skill to navigate."

"Well, that much I've noticed. - actually I haven't, I don't think I knew how to have normal friends either. But it certainly doesn't seem like the most straightforward possible version of the problem."

"I consider many of the men and women I've fought alongside friends.

...I do think all of this is not at all something you need or want in your legal code for your Crusade, this is cultural things that will develop gradually, somewhat but only somewhat according to your direction, over the course of years. You cannot put a whole culture into rules, because rules need to be possible to enforce uniformly and have no one confused."

" - right. Okay. None of this is what I intended to ask about."

"What had you wanted to ask about?"