#4444

"Don't expect him or any one of us to not make mistakes. Don't expect us to be in your category of things that are right because we are not, we are our own human beings, I have categories that I think is right and you have your category, I don't pressure you to think my way, you don't need to pressure me to think your way and that's that"

TwiX

Celebrity is an unfortunate byproduct of an individual's or group's desire to make music and communicate their truth. In these toxic times with SK artists falling like flies to unrealistic expectations and horrendous double standards it is refreshing to hear someone speak about it. 100% agree Woosung, people either need to accept their artist for the unique, fragile and fallible human beings that they are, with their own opinions and ways of living, or find another hobby. If you are looking for perfection you won't find it here on earth.

So Fae follow rules, very rigidly. They can't lie directly, thanking them incurs actual debt, and names have real physical power. They're very powerful, but they're also subject to massive limitations humans aren't.

I was thinking about why this would be from an evolutionary standpoint. (Even in a high magic world, natural selection is still going to be a thing as long as magic can't entirely negate the laws of thermodynamics.) And my mind was struck by lightning.

What if it's a survival strategy. Humans' big life-defining superpower (besides tool use) is our group cohesion. I think we are a fundamentally cooperative species (exceptions all over the place and are disproportionately represented in current elites/leaders, but in a diverse species of billions those are bound to pop up), and exceptionally good at it. Being cells of a superorganism defines a massive part of our evolutionary niche, and it might be the kind of niche only one species can do well at this scale.

So what if fae aren't? They're clearly social to some degree, but it might be in the zebra or hermit crab way -- out of mutual convenience. They're incentivized to cooperate only when it directly and immediately benefits both parties. Many even reproduce in a radically different way from humans, so they might not even benefit from family units. It makes all kinds of sense, then, for faeries to be a more competitive species (genus?) and behave collectively less like a body and more like an ecosystem.

Still, it's beneficial to be able to team up sometimes, and you need a mechanism to ensure you can trust each other with at least some things. Being magi-physiologically unable to lie will do nicely! I could see some ancestors of present-day faeries developing magic-mediated adaptations that make it painful for words to conflict with reality, developing good-enough prosocial instincts, and gradually outcompeting the proto-fae that don't have those same cooperative adaptations. Boom! A mechanism for fae to treat words as if they're physical laws.