A RED-ROSE CHAIN open thread!

I think that, really, too much is being made of what will happen if the antidote falls into the proverbial wrong hands. It's like finding the cure for cancer, and then hiding it away because it might be used on some 'bad people.'

So what? Some people get awakened that we'd really prefer to have out of the way. To me, that's a dodge. If these people are so bad that society would clearly be better off without them, they need to be dealt with, permanently.

Before anyone brings up Oberon's Law, I'll point out that it doesn't prohibit all killing, period. It's a 'prohibition against killing purebloods except in formally declared war." I would extrapolate that it also allows killing in self-defense, or in defense of others, but I can't recall if this was ever said in the books. In Late Eclipses, King Sollys pardoned Toby for killing Blind Michael, and thanked her for acting as his executioner, and, of course, that was necessary because the False Queen was hellbent on executing her, so capital punishment is allowed. If there are elf-shot people out there that have been judged, fairly and legally, to be too dangerous to ever be awakened, they need to just deal with them, and stop dancing around the law to make themselves feel better.

So Eira gets awakened. It's going to happen anyway. They aren't even sure elf-shot will keep her down for a hundred years. Mags said that she can heal from just about anything, as long as she can sleep; well, she's snoozing away right now, so she'll be back, even without the antidote.

Using elf-shot to deal with the bad people is like human society abolishing the death penalty, and instead placing those convicted of capital crimes in a medically induced coma until they just fade away on their own. The end result is the same, their life is over, but hey, we feel better because we didn't kill them.

And war? As said above, the law specifically exempts killing in a declared war, so this practice of using elf-shot in warfare is really a perversion of the law. It's like that Star Trek episode, the one with the two planets that had reduced war to a computer simulation, and then would execute the calculated casualties. War is supposed to be brutal and ugly, people are supposed to die because otherwise, in the words of Robert E. Lee, "we should grow too fond of it."

The fae seem to be there already, so I say rendering elf-shot null is a good thing. You can't hide behind it anymore, people, so it's time to step up, grow up, prove that you're really better than the humans and the changelings, like you think you are, and stop the killing for real.

Okay, this got way too preachy, so I'll stop now.