>>106452914I find it annoying that people ignore everything in the show to push this silly culture wars agenda.
Let's examine dark magic. Firstly, as of second season, we know that elves have a history with dark magic. We don't know what that is but we do know than they are aware of where it leads, and it was apparently so bad that not!Sauron was shoved into the Phantom Zone for it. We'll bet back to this.
1. Dark magic is useful, but not necessary. We know now that humans actually can learn to channel primal magic, they just have to come at it from a different angle. Dark magic is then essentially a shortcut that gets the raw power of primal magic without the dedication and practice, at the cost of destroying reagents and possible long-term consequences.
2. Dark magic has lead to extreme environmental decay. The half of the continent that humans live on has been almost completely stripped of magic. As such, we know that to use dark magic on a societal scale requires massive overconsumption. This has several problems. The first is that you're driving species to extinction - you might not care about this if you only give a shit about human convenience, but most people do, and the elves clearly do. The second is that dark magic doesn't seem to be renewable on a large scale and if you build your magical traditions on it, and your society on it, you're in for a huge fall when there's just not enough magic left to go around. This also has sinister implications, because if you run out of 'animals' to harvest and you want to continue your dark magic supported status quo, you're going to have to start harvesting intelligent beings. The third issue is speculation but it bears considering: massive changes to the environment can cause big problems in other areas. We already know that a terrible famine swept through western Xadia relatively recently. Who's to say that burning away magic doesn't have dire consequences to the land itself?
