Reading through the Elfquest Archives again has brought up an interesting thought train. How do you feel about relationships between immortal and non-immortal characters? (Gods, demigods, angels / demons, elves, aliens, anything with an extremely long or immortal lifespan)

- Is it pedophilia / robbing the cradle / squicky for an immortal well over a human's age to be in a relationship with a regular human of adult age? 18-ish or upwards, I guess.

- Is it possible to have a fulfilling relationship considering both parties? Why would an immortal choose someone whose entire life is the blink of an eye compared to them?

- Which brings us onto, what about when the mortal peron starts to age and eventually dies, but the immortal is young forever?


There's a ton of 10/Rose fanfiction out there, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like a romantic / sexual relationship of equals between them would be impossible or awkward at best. Rose can't comprehend the many, many lifetimes of experience that the Doctor has. She can be awed by them (and never close her mouth, ROSE CLOSE YOUR MOUTH) but never be as experienced or intelligent as 10.

Another interesting relationship of note is that of Cutter and Leetah throughout Elfquest. It's touched on in the story how their lives will eventually play out, but much of it is implied and left up to the reader to figure out.

Essentially,

Spoiler:

Cutter starts out the story around 20-ish. Being a wolfrider, he and his tribe have a small amount of wolf DNA and are mortal. Cutter meets Leetah, who is then 600 years old and immortal. They marry, and have twins. Leetah finds out that Cutter is mortal and that the maximum wolfrider lifespan is about 1500 years, if they don't die of something else before. Seeing as how a few of the elves in the story are already 20,000 years old, this is not very long at all. In a very condensed summary, Leetah is sprung forward in time 10,000 years in an instant to her. Cutter waits for about 500 years, but can't stand aging, and so is magically preserved for the rest of the time, then reawakened when Leetah reappears in time. They are now roughly the same age and experience, however, Leetah will never age and will remain young forever. Cutter will eventually grow old and die.

I'm not really for or against mortal/immortal relationships or sex. (Oh, gosh, Zeus, your sleeping around sure entertained everybody! Except Hera. She hated that shit.) I'm just wondering what others think.

WARNING: Been trying to drink my problems away well before I wrote this post.

I find myself oddly reminded of a Dinosaur Comic that's kinda-sorta related:



Well, if they reach "hittable" adulthood and proceed to age no further, who says they even benefit from experience the same way mortals do? Maybe if you're 30 and you bang a 3,000-year-old immortal, you're the cradle robber simply because they mature at a much slower rate, if at all, so they're mentally roundabout 18.

Especially since the most commonly-represented immortals, gods, represent an aspect of humanity or nature. Well, these things change very, very slowly. And I suppose, this is an odd way of putting it, but it seems to me that humanity is going through a sort of mass adolescence right now. Gods used to represent parental figures warning humanity along certain paths. But in the last two centuries, especially the last two decades, the spread of information has gotten so fast that humanity is no longer like a collection of children learning everything about the world from their frightened, watchful parents. Interacting with other "kids" is commonplace all over the globe. Expanding, exchanging, forming cliques with others we would never have met otherwise. And now you see a sort of humanizing of immortals in fiction. They're more like us: They get bored, lonely, confused and horny.

To the modern immortal, death is an occurrence that will never really happen, or can only happen under extreme circumstances. But the thing is, for most human audiences in first-world countries, well... the same rings true for us.

When was the last time you thought "Oh shit, I'm going to die?" And planned your life around the fact that you're probably not going to live 2-3 more years? Do you assume you're going to die in your 70s at the earliest? Because to die sooner would require something really silly happening, right? A drunk driver, a terrorist attack, sucking down quarter pounder greaseball burgers for the rest of your life, lupus... things that never happen to you or anyone you've known in real life.

Honestly, at this point, I think relationships between mortals and immortals would be more appropriately compared to the rich and the poor. (Yes, I know there was a movie released revolving around this concept recently where mortal time remaining was money. I haven't seen it yet and I don't care.)

Take this song for example:



You'll never live like common people
You'll never do whatever common people do
You'll never fail like common people
You'll never watch your life slide out of you
And dance, and drink, and screw
Because there's nothing else to do

And

You're amazed that they exist
And they burn so bright while you can only wonder why

There's a fundamental disconnect that keeps the immortal from truly understanding where the mortal is coming from.

This is different from the much more easily inferred age difference problem. Gods reach a glass ceiling that keeps pace with humanity. If Mars was out and about now, how do you think he'd act?

Probably more or less the same as he did when the Greeks actually went to war believing in him and Athena. Perhaps more ruthless in some areas, more dignified in others. But the point is, immortals don't wear experience the same way we do. It's more comparable to a commodity that we have a very small amount of, and means nothing to them. I mean, what's the point of learning from your mistakes if there's not chance your mistakes could kill you? Every relationship you get into could be like your first, fully trusting and hopeful and ultimately vulnerable.

That's where the unbalance comes in. Because to a mortal, every bad experience must make us more callous to it happening again or we'll perish and lose everything. Compared to immortals, we can't afford to do anything by halves, because there is never any guarantee it'll ever get done. We can't waste a millennium getting over a breakup, either.

So if your characters are trying to create some sort of meaningful relationship... yeah, then it gets complicated. But then again, what does age mean if you don't age yourself? If you're immortal, you might start having sex with someone when they're, say, 18 and don't stop until they give up the ghost at 86. What difference does it make to you? It's a relationship where age has no meaning to either of you. If it's a fling, that's different.

TL;DR: Whatevs, an adult's an adult.

Obvious difference here: Highlander immortals have no idea they're immortal until they're "killed," and thus have a mortal's expectations right up until the very end.

There's also a difference between "Can't die" immortals (deities) and those who merely live greatly extended life-spans (Heinlein's 'Methusalahs'). The latter must be cautious, even more so than 'normal' humans, because they have so mush 'more' at risk. But since a bullet can kill them just as dead as any 'ephemeral', they also have more in common and thus a relationship between the two, despite the likelihood of it being finite, isn't that huge of a stretch.

Peng: You're right, I should have seperated the kinds of immortality in my original post.

- There are true immortals who can never, ever die no matter what happens to them.
- Those who are technically immortal, but not impenetrable; perhaps somehow stronger than humans, or just regular amount of defenses.
- And those who have extremely extended lifespans, but will eventually die.

.... Not really sure where the Doctor fits in, as he is technically immortal, but reincarnates when he "dies"

Quote:

Honestly, at this point, I think relationships between mortals and immortals would be more appropriately compared to the rich and the poor. (Yes, I know there was a movie released revolving around this concept recently where mortal time remaining was money. I haven't seen it yet and I don't care.)

Interesting way to frame it. I hadn't thought of this way before, though it makes sense in the context of Elfquest's main baddie villain, Winowill. She's another Old as Fuck immortal, around 20,000 years old. At some point during her lifetime she got bored of living a stagnant life in a castle where her healing powers had no use (nobody was ever injured), went insane and became an evil megalomaniac villain bent on destroying all the "impure" (mortal) elves.

She sees humans as playthings and pawns in giant, lifetime spanning games, slowly manipulating the development of humanity from cave-men to the rennaisance just to amuse her. Sometimes she would pit one nation against another in a game lasting 500 years, because she felt like it. Winowill is also technically super-immortal in that she has self-healing powers and can close up most mortal wounds given time and concentration. Wouldn't survive instant death (hit with a meteor) though. Also, when an elf's body dies, the spirit does live on forever, mostly in a semi-lucid state, but someone like winnowill would have full power to go about and keep fucking things up for humans.

She's actually not above seducing them, but she does it as a form of torture rather than relationship. Humans in this world, are somehow confused and injured by elf sex. (It's never explained how or why, just that the two are incompatible) She exploits human emotions and vulnerability and sees that once humans learn from all those mistakes, OH LOOKIE THEY DIE! And the new ones are just as dumb as the last. Time to start exploiting them all over again!

From her perspective, teh fact that they can't get over their mistakes and keep repeating them over, and over and over again is worthy of contempt. Humans are no better than any other animals compared to her. (She has a point, but it's taken to the extreme for her villain character) It's an interesting take on someone who is immortal, but doesn't have a forgiving, compassionate attitude towards human-ness.