..fragments of a book that would never be written...
* * *
Captain Selena, late of the pirate ship Nemesis, quietly extended the very tip of her blade around the corner, staring at the tiny reflection on the metal. At once, but still silently, she pulled back the sword; and with her other hand made a complex gesture.
The translation spell told Hirou that the handsigns meant: "Orcs. Seven."
Dolf looked at Hirou. "My Prince," the wizard signed, "do not waste yourself against mundane opponents. Do not draw the Sword of Good as yet. Leave these to Selena."
Hirou's mouth was very dry. He didn't know if the translation spell could understand the difference between wanting to talk and wanting to make gestures; and so Hirou simply nodded.
Not for the first time, the thought occurred to Hirou that if he'd actually known he was going to be transported into a magical universe, informed he was the long-lost heir to the Throne of Bronze, handed the legendary Sword of Good, and told to fight evil, he would have spent less time reading fantasy novels. Joined the army, maybe. Taken fencing lessons, at least. If there was one thing that didn't prepare you for fantasy real life, it was sitting at home reading fantasy fiction.
Dolf and Selena were looking at Hirou, as if waiting for something more.
Oh. That's right. I'm the prince.
Hirou raised a finger and pointed it around the corner, trying to indicate that they should go ahead -
With a sudden burst of motion Selena plunged around the corner, Dolf following hard on her heels, and Hirou, startled and hardly thinking, moving after.
(This story ended up too long for a single LW post, so I put it on yudkowsky.net.
Do read the rest of the story there, before continuing to the Acknowledgments below.)
Acknowledgments:
I had the idea for this story during a conversation with Nick Bostrom and Robin Hanson about an awful little facet of human nature I call "suspension of moral disbelief". The archetypal case in my mind will always be the Passover Seder, watching my parents and family and sometimes friends reciting the Ten Plagues that God is supposed to have visited on Egypt. You take drops from the wine glass - or grape juice in my case - and drip them onto the plate, to symbolize your sadness at God slaughtering the first-born male children of the Egyptians. So the Seder actually points out the awfulness, and yet no one says: "This is wrong; God should not have done that to innocent families in retaliation for the actions of an unelected Pharaoh." I forget when I first realized how horrible that was - the real horror being not the Plagues, of course, since they never happened; the real horror is watching your family not notice that they're swearing allegiance to an evil God in a happy wholesome family Cthulhu-worshiping ceremony. Arbitrarily hideous evils can be wholly concealed by a social atmosphere in which no one is expected to point them out and it would seem awkward and out-of-place to do so.
In writing it's even simpler - the author gets to create the whole social universe, and the readers are immersed in the hero's own internal perspective. And so anything the heroes do, which no character notices as wrong, won't be noticed by the readers as unheroic. Genocide, mind-rape, eternal torture, anything.
Explicit inspiration was taken from this XKCD (warning: spoilers for The Princess Bride), this Boat Crime, and this Monty Python, not to mention that essay by David Brin and the entire Goblins webcomic. This Looking For Group helped inspire the story's title, and everything else flowed downhill from there.
So I'm noticing what you say about the Seder and having just celebrated passover myself I'd like to offer some perspective that you seem not to have been exposed to.
The Egyptians we're punished because they were equally complicit in our suffering. There is even a commentary that goes so far as to say that there was something of a revolt and pharaoh was originally opposed to enslaving and breaking us but he was ousted from the palace until he capitulated. Further any officer carrying out his orders was blatantly culpable. They had the option of imitating the Jewish taskmasters and bearing the brunt of the punishment but they either chose to be prison guards from stamford or to simply defect as prisoners. Either way a choice to do the wrong thing. Also while all plagues affected almost (and yes I do mean not all) all the Egyptians to some degree, those who were more culpable for inflicting suffering on the Jews suffered more and the reverse was true as well. In fact, even according to the opinion that Moshe's adoptive mother remained a gentile and thus an Egyptian, she did not suffer from any of the plagues because she went out of her way to save a suffering Jewish child. Meanwhile other Egyptian overseers were forcing parents to cement their children into walls when they fell short of their brick making quota and later on in the enslavement our status was expanded from that of slaves to the palace to slaves of the common citizen and it became somewhat commonplace for a Egyptians to even hook Jews up to plows and other farming equipment when they wished to give their animals a break. In fact they were so entrenched that even when the warning of the last plague was taken seriously enough by many of the firstborn to start a civil war to free us (out of self preservation rather than recognition they were wrong for how they treated us, otherwise your inevitable follow-up question of "why did they get killed then?" would be a great point.) their own fathers fought against them to keep us enslaved.
You might say "but all that didn't happen because the exodus didn't happen?" So I would respond that if you want to dismiss that part of the story as fiction so must you dismiss your classification of God based on that story. If you will judge the God to whom we pledge ourselves based on the exodus story, know that this is also part of that story partially based upon which we pladge him our allegiance.
Edit- I'd really hoped that unlike reddit, people here would explain why they disagree with something rather than just downvote and move on. Whoever already downvoted me, please explain why and for anyone who has just read this for the first time, if you disagree or don't like what I'm saying please explain why. Thank you