Tau pulled halfway out of the hug, "Ah, this is Eta. An old... Wouldn't call him a friend. A colleague, perhaps. He attempted to kill me, and when I showed him the error of his ways, he created the church. Mostly in an attempt to annoy me into death."Tau, Chapter 2, Adaptation
When it comes to discussing the philosophy of most works based in a fantasy world, certain ideas are going to breakdown and become either muddled or confused. It isn't necessarily a bad thing - exploring another world means that certain things aren't comparable. That's the point of fantasy, to be different.
I have found that the one guaranteed concept to throw a wrench into any thought out system of morality, is immortality.
Tau is an explanation of that concept, and it is a book I don't know if I'll ever be able to finish writing because it took the concept to its inevitable conclusion, crossing so many lines that I was no longer conflicted about the morality of the dragon race, but sickened by them.
There's a small taste of a non-controversial aspect in the quote above. If death is something that simply can't happen, then someone trying to kill you might be annoying, it might be as friendly as two people greeting each other with a punch on the shoulder. It treats something that would rattle any human being and expose them to massive trauma as something flippant.
However, the line that was crossed that really made me halt and stare at the world I created in revulsion, involved both sex, and cannibalism. If you haven't run for the hills yet, it is as bad as it sounds.
Dragons, throughout many cultures, are not just immortal, but consume each other in the pursuit of power. Whilst they are intelligent creatures, they are also bestial in nature. Those two aspects together create something that is horrifying from a purely human perspective.
Many sexual fetishes revolve around placing you at the mercy of the other person. When we expose our vulnerabilities and our partner treats that with due respect, a deeply loving relationship can form.
When you combine those aspects into a creature that lacks the human sense of morality, you become guaranteed to encounter something incompatible with our own sense of right and wrong. When introduced at the right pace, the writer can cause the reader to willingly accept these things.
This kind of disturbing pattern seems inevitable for anything immortal.
If something cannot die, then their perspective becomes greater than our own.
The creature might be long lived enough to see humans repeating horrifying patterns of behaviour. It doesn't take that long for something to even be old enough to remember our non-tool-bearing ancestors, at which point we become little more than murderers and rapists, like our bonobo cousins.
If it is younger, it lacks the influence of right and wrong, because most of human morality has come from religion, but something that cannot die cannot expect an afterlife. Even if they believe in religious values, there is no punishment for breaking with those values.
Without the feedback loop of a community that can understand their own nature, it seems inevitable that an immortal creature would be pushed to become either a nihilist, or a stoic.
Neither is necessarily bad - it's a matter of perspective. And an immortal creature would be entirely justified in whatever perspective they found in life. No human experience is enough when held against something greater than what we are capable of experiencing.
© Copyright 2024, James Milne