Elfthreads!

[MaggieoftheOwls]

I am in intense distress that I cannot try the sauce fish thing.

[DanielH]

So Limbo was implemented at the end of the Second Age, beginning of the Third?

And I think I remember the word “crushed” in glowfic related to the invaders of Aman immortal under the mountains. Other sources say “Caves of the Forgotten”, which to me implies room to manuever; any particular reason for this difference? Either way it seems more evil than any act of Sauron or Melkor.

[MaggieoftheOwls]

Which would mean that Arwen was there.

[jalapeno_dude]

I think creating orcs is pretty straightforwardly more evil than the imprisonment, especially in glowfic canon where they're constantly suffering.

[DanielH]

Orcs don’t suffer that pain in Mandos, and the glowfic interpretation of the invasion seems to forgo caves in favor of crushing, which is also painful. Keeping people under a mountain with no outside stimulus, for thirty thousand years, with or without caves, is worse torture than Melkor could manage even with time dilation.

Unrelated, there are two separate magic systems I would have expected the historical Jesus to tie into. Since God exists with strong similarities to Catholicism, I would have expected some relation; since beings exist who could accomplish the majority of miracles attributed to him I would have expected them to interact. Thus it is doubly odd to find Jesus in Limbo instead of Heaven, Valinor, or somewhere beyond Eä.

[jalapeno_dude]

Orcs don’t suffer that pain in Mandos, and the glowfic interpretation of the invasion seems to forgo caves in favor of crushing, which is also painful. Keeping people under a mountain with no outside stimulus, for thirty thousand years, with or without caves, is worse torture than Melkor could manage even with time dilation.

Even if your first assertion is true (and remember that many orcs don't go to Mandos when they die), and if we're just adding up total suffering and not assigning Melkor any evil points beyond that for creating the race in the first place, I find it highly unlikely that (# of people under the mountain * 30 thousand years per person) is larger than (# of orcs who have ever lived * average orc lifespan). I'd guess 10 thousand people in the army, 100 thousand at most. Then you only need 100 million orcs living for three years each to equal that, and both of those numbers seem low to me even if I ignore time dilation.

EDIT: Another way to think about it: there were ~10 thousand years between the creation of the orcs (which happened before the elves went to Valinor) and the end of the Third Age. So to equal the suffering of the Numenorean army, the average number of orcs alive at any point during that time only needs to be three times the size of the army, which seems like a ridiculously small estimate to me.

[DanielH]

True. When I said it I mostly thought of the prisoners, and I think what happened to the army is even worse than what happened to most of the prisoners. I expect most could eventually be convinced, by a combination of time in Valinor and memory manipulation, that they were out; even if not, they can interact with people. The army would, despite the prophesies, not be in any condition to <verb>.

I don’t think your math is quite valid; torture has nonlinear behavior of harm with respect to time, and the isolation would be much worse than the pain after at most few weeks. It’s probably the right order of magnitude, though, and that’s more than enough.

[AndaisQ]

I've always been slightly confused at the Total Orc Suffering metric, probably because I am Insufficiently Rationalist, but also because I tend to measure the negative utility of pain in, like, distress? Which the orcs don't have regarding their pain, because it's inborn. It's just, like, How Shit Is for them*. The Numenorians on the other hand are very, very aware of their own suffering, and as DanielH said, the isolation is a form of psychological torture as well.

*Notably, this means that Loki's hard-won temporary relief of the orcs would qualify as a much greater evil under my intuitive metric, because when the anaesthesia wore off they'd know to actually suffer from it.

(Sorry if this is, like, decades-old Discourse for the Real Rationalists. I know not what I do.)

[DanielH]

That’s part of why I said it was nonlinear. And this specifically seems like a question for psychology, where habituation and the hedonic treadmill indicate that you are likely correct, at least about thw general case of orc pain not being as bad (although they might have been designed so the pain bypasses those). I don’t think the temporary relief would actually be a net negative, though I could easily be wrong about that.

It is, in principal, an empirical question. If you find an IRB to approve the necessary experiments, let me know so that I can have them fired.

[MaggieoftheOwls]

I agree that a given year in the life of a Numenorean-under-the-mountains is significantly worse than a given year in the life of an orc, on average.