Forrest wrote:
A bit of a tangent, but it just clicked with me that Poe said somewhere recently (in the thread about Elf aging IIRC) that it's a minor faux pas in Elven culture to refer to your parents, siblings, etc as such after a few hundred years or so - I imagine it's something like a 40 year old referring to his mother as "mommy" instead of "my mother", except taken even further where even "my mother" sounds immature coming from someone thousands of years old. I've always wondered why Sarine would hesitate to reference her mother in particular; but this could just be a subtle instance of that "don't call your parents mommy and daddy once you're a grown-up" custom.
The Poe statement is
here. (Again, no reference to Sarine's mother being on the Council, etc.)
Incidentally, this bears on the parallel sub-thread about the persistence of racial/ethnic animosities. In certain regards, it doesn't matter how many years have passed since the event that caused the animosity, as much as the number of
generations matters. We don't know for sure how long a "generation" in Tsuiraku lasts, but it's probably more than the 25-30 years that has been characteristic of humans in real life, for several reasons. One, they have reliable contraception (as long as the user isn't too drunk to cast it...), and real-world experience shows that that tends to cause childbearing to occur at a later age. Two, they're fairly prosperous, with the same effect. Three, having discovered magical rejuvenation, they probably remain fertile later in life, same effect. Finally, at least at their founding, they probably had a small leavening of half elves (and it's an interesting question where they all went), whose generation time is much longer, to the extent that the concept exists at all -- there's not much doubt that FAR too few generations have passed in Santuariel, for example, for racial hatred to have subsided.
There is also the point that even if lots of generations in Tsuiraku have passed since the problem with the elves, not even one elven generation has passed (and now we tie back in to the elven-generation thread), and the Tsuirakuans know it. One elven ambassador every 20 years is enough to keep the agelessness of the elves in front of the Tsuirakuans, when you consider that that ambassador is going to be the same one that your father, grandfather, etc., dealt with, with zero signs of aging as the human generations pass.
All told, for Tsuirakuans to have a long-standing bias in their dealings with elves doesn't seem odd at all to me.