The Insult

[sythyry]

Mirrored from Sythyry.

Inconnu flounced into my parlor with Arfaen in his wake, and waved the note to me. “Furious! Incensed! Tricked!”

I slithered out of the fireplace, where I had been taking a nap. “Perplexed. Confused. Awake.”

“Someone played a rather mean trick on Inconnu. Or maybe a nice trick, depending on how you count such things,” said Arfaen. “Show Sythyry the note, would you?”

Dear Inconnu my lover,
This may come as a shock, but you and I made love. My friend and I were disguised as Rassimel sluts. I’m really an Orren in real life though. Welcome to the wonderful world of cisaffection!
Here’s hoping to do it again — without a disguise this time!
— Y^r Secret Orren Admirer “Plisciné”

I thought a moment. “So, the Rassimel prostitutes you were so proud of getting a free night from were actually Orren Strayway passengers, magically transformed into Rassimel girls, purely for the purpose of seducing you?”

“Not just seducing me! Of breaking my life-long record of pure transaffection! Up until Confisse I had never so much as kissed another Orren! Now — now I have slept with one! With two!” wailed Inconnu. “I have degenerated into the realm of the merely indiscriminate! I am destroyed!”

“You are not, Inconnu. Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped. I had been traff for far longer than Inconnu had, or even than he had been alive, until a worriesomely-pleasant night with my distant cousin Saza. I am still mostly traff — I am Arfaen’s tofyof, her legally-registered concubine in the laws of the city-state of Hanija — but I am forced to take a broader view of such matters. Well, a more standard view, saying little more than the truism that “people sometimes fornicate with — or love — each other, in a variety of combinations, some of which are socially acceptable and some are not.” Inconnu is one of the few holdouts on my prior and more radical philosophy.

“I am ruined!” wailed Inconnu. “The essence of my character has been shattered!”

“Only if the essence of your character is being the stereotypical traff brought to life,” I said. “And I know you enjoy playing that role, but there’s more to you than that.”

Inconnu threw his head back. “You are ignoring me, Sythyry! You cannot see the depths of my despair, my degradation, my doom!”

“Lots of us have slept with socially-appropriate people,” said Arfaen quietly. “I certainly did. Where do you think my son Quendry came from?” I’m pretty sure she was loyally defending me; Cani are like that.

Inconnu stamped a web-toed foot. “You do not understand! You were not tricked!”

“I was shoved into an arranged marriage over my objections, if that counts,” said Arfaen.

“It was years ago — you have forgotten! You are so used to your impurity and degradation that you cannot remember!” howled Inconnu.

“It was only a few years ago, and I remember perfectly well, and I am less degraded now that I am with my own kind than I ever was when I was married,” snapped Arfaen. She bared her teeth and growled warningly.

Inconnu growled back at her. “Well! If you care nothing for what has become of me — you who are both my lovers! — I shall seek someone aboard who cares to render assistance to a fellow traff in need!” He turned and stomped out of the parlor, his tail lashing back and forth, and knocking a hat-stand over.

Arfaen shrugged to me. “I was going to ask you to use some sort of magic to see who wrote the letter. Or maybe even see if you can figure out if someone borrowed your body-changing devices to switch from Orren to Rassimel.”

“Actually, I’d been leaving the transforming cloak in a parlor for anyone to use,” I said. “I got tired of people asking to borrow it. The students have been wanting to do all sorts of experiments — one married trio of Orren wanted to try their lovemaking as all seven other prime species. Anyways, I left it over there, where … it … is now. Maybe you could sniff it and see who has been using it?”

Arfaen smelled the cloak up and she smelled it down, she smelled it forwards and she smelled it backwards. “Lots of people have been using it, many of them Orren, like you said. I can’t pick out any one of them in particular, not this far after the fact. Not that I really want to do sleuthing on Inconnu’s behalf, not after he insulted both of us like that.”

“Well, as your loyal and obedient concubine, I will forbear from helping him either,” I said. I was a bit annoyed at him as well.

Comments

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

[I don't know what the law is like in World Tree, but in many parts of the US, the use of deception to trick someone into sex they would not have otherwise agreed to is still legally considered rape]

Thenel is an important distinction--he never presented himself as single, especially not after being told you have an aversion to engaging with the act with married primes. This letter seems to suggest the writer knew Inconnu did not want to sleep with Orren, deliberately acted to fool him, and now is deriving perverse pleasure revealing to him that he has been tricked. There is a difference between being wrong about someone and them deliberately attempting to deceive you.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

[I don't know the general World Tree law either, but it seems to place more responsibility on the individual. Or perhaps it doesn't consider sex as big a sin as US law might. But ... really? If I take off my wedding ring and pick up someone who ordinarily doesn't do married men, that's rape? And I could even be committing that act without knowing it, since it depends on the someone's opinion on a topic I didn't know?]

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

Well, no, you can't do it without knowing it. Deception is an intentional act.

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

[I don't think it's a 'sex is bad' thing. The World Tree in general seems far more tolerant of various forms of fraud than the US]

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

[That's quite true about fraud as well. Fraud against foreigners is generally acceptable.]

[rowyn]

I think Stormydragon is correct in at least some cases. There's at least one case on a woman whose husband's identical twin pretended to be him in order to have sex with her, and I'd unequivocally say 'that is rape'.

This is, I dunno. Certainly wrong of the perpetrator, but it's not really on the same scale, perhaps because the perpetrators (a) never actually said they were *not* Orren and (b) were not pretending to be a specific person they weren't. Impersonating Arfaen in order to sleep with Inconnu would've been worse. One might even argue that they expected Inconnu to have noticed the spells with magic sense (although the note suggests they did not).

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I really, really, really, really, really hate the ludicrous expansion of 'this is rape' that people have been doing lately. It's sickening and insulting.

[rowyn]

Why does it bother you?

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Why doesn't it bother you?

It's not the only emotionally charged crime that people abuse this way -- EVERY time a crime gets noticed this happens so that people have an excuse to excessively punish their enemies or otherwise profit from the situation. And they all make me angry. It makes me wonder if the rule of law is even a good thing, when the only reason society even functions is that most crimes go unpunished.

In this case, you've got rape. Which has horrible mental effects on the victims. That's why it's a special crime with severe punishment beyond what you'd give for assault or false imprisonment, or whatever else would otherwise cover it.

But now you've got all these people desperate to get a piece of that and screw over someone they're mad at in the process, even though they weren't actually raped.

And instead of laughing at them or at least talking them down (since some of them actually have an excuse; they were treasted badly and they're angry) everyone jumps on the bandwagon to make things worse. Because they hear about it and think 'that's kind of icky'.

'That's kind of icky' is not an acceptable reason to put someone in prison.

[rowyn]

DMaybe you see different sources than me? I haven't seen any cases where someone was jailed for something that didn't sound like a crime.

Lots of reports are so wildly across the map as to what the person is even being accused of (in the pre-trial stage) that I've got no way of telling with them, though. :/

I'm not sure how I feel about Inconnu's position, although so far the situation sounds icky and not criminal. There certainly doesn't seem any danger of criminal prosecution.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine what legal system would consider that a crime -- or even what jurisdiction it falls under. I could, I suppose, toss someone off the boat and make them walk home. At times I wanted to toss everyone involved off the boat.

[kris-schnee.livejournal.com]

It's a sort of Godwin's Law for crimes. I'm annoyed by the similar term "wage slavery", unless it's like one of those places in India where being stuck with a crummy job means "if you walk off the property they'll shoot you".

Rule of law only really works if you try to limit what you punish people for, so that you don't then have to create Morality Police or know that everybody's guilty of some crime. And if being accused of certain things doesn't automatically make you considered guilty. I know somebody who's in jail right now for the crime of, as far as I can tell, being accused of something terrible and getting a free lawyer who assumed he's not worth helping.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I accept the important distinction. The two cases are far from identical, though I still consider that they share important similarities.

And if Inconnu were saying, "This is an insult! Someone set this situation up purely to make me look foolish!" I would probably have reacted quite differently.

[brynndragon.livejournal.com]

It might be more important to note that *Inoonnu* might consider it as rape, and thus act accordingly. What do you think he's liable to do to someone who raped him? Particularly if he recruited, say, Yerenthax and Jyondre to help him out?

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

We will see shortly!