In reply to Van's comment on "Lar becomes the nameless thing":

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from my borderline-obsessive re-reading of Lar chapters, I have to disagree with Imin whenever he says that Lar thinks his blood is too good to pollute with that of a kisor girl. Consider this bit from the Dre Days:

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“You shall not pollute my race merely for your—your amusement, or your experiments, or whatever you have in mind! No! My first responsibility is to my people, and I will not allow you to make monsters out of them.”

Dre did not react at first, so Lar spun on his heel and started to walk away. At once he heard the dark elf rise.

“Lar.”

He stopped.

“He is not one of your people,” Dre said.

"He is an elf.”

Lar heard the slow tapping of boots across the floor as Dre advanced behind him. “He thinks you and your people are monsters already.”

“We are all elves. I shall not make the same mistake they do and believe myself above them.”
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I think if anything, Lar's afraid of polluting the kisor blood with his own, because essentially, that's just what the khirron males do by raping the kisor females, and like he says, he will not make the same mistake they do. What he says to Dre about making monsters of them rings kind of personally for Lar, I think. He doesn't want anyone to make monsters of the elves, and because of that, he will not make monsters of the kisor.

(Quote from "Lar gets a bothersome task", circa November 1084.)

Good detective work.

Imin can certainly be wrong on occasion, and it is true that he is wrong about this.

As is often the case, Imin's explanations of Lar's behavior may be based more on his own fears and fantasies and preoccupations. Imin and his wife are both pure-blooded kisór so he may be just as guilty of wanting to avoid mixing races as he claims Lar to be. Though it is worth noting that both of his so-far married children have married gentlemen with khírrón fathers. They have magic so there may be some accumulation of power going on there. Imin can be a hypocrite when it serves his own ends. Of course they are daughters, so it will be interesting to see whom he choses for his eldest son next spring.

Imin may also have a sore spot about Sela running off with Egelric, so that not only adds more fuel for the anti-miscegenation fire, it also may really infuriate him that Lar's only child so far is half-human. As if he (Imin) wasn't good enough for Sela, and they (the kisór -- including Imin's own daughters) aren't good enough for Lar. So Imin probably takes it more personally than he ought.

And even then, Imin may have his own hidden reason for hammering Lar with this "our blood isn't good enough for you" refrain. Stay tuned.

Still, I think I've held back on the real reason Lar won't have any children for far too long. It is hard to address because Lar's ability to avoid thinking about it is almost pathological. If he isn't forced to think about it, he himself actually manages to believe the fake reasons he gives.

(His ability to firmly believe things he knows untrue is what gives him that air of falseness and hypocrisy that so infuriate Imin, who knows him well enough to see his contradictions -- and they're also one of the reasons why Dre/Dantalion has not been able to control him better, since whatever small sense of Lar's thoughts that Dante may grasp is tainted by these lies he tells himself.)

However, as I said, this question has been festering too long so I think I'm going to provide the answer later this month. Maybe Lar will tell it, or at least we'll get a chapter from his POV and be able to see what he thinks. But it will be good to know finally. Still, it may prove to be that his reason is wearing thin, but he's beginning to cling to it for other still more complex reasons. Oh, Lar, you complicated elf you.

His thoughts about the mixing of the races are interesting in their own right though. His true father is unknown to all but Imin and Llen these days, but he can't hide the fact that he is tall and magnificent and has more magic than any elf that has ever lived among the kisór. Growing up was hard -- the kisór boys taunted him for not being one of them, and while we don't know what happened when Lar met his father, the khírrón obviously didn't welcome him back with open arms either. He is truly an outsider, and he is in no position to believe that one race is superior to the other since he can't really say to which one he even belongs -- culturally, the kisór, genetically the khírrón. The only thing that could redeem him is if everyone realized that hey we're all just elves, and the difference disappeared.

That makes him sound utterly self-centered, which is not the case, however. He is a born leader, and not just because he's the only elf of the "superior" race among his adopted people. He has great ambitions, which are not all personal, and he has the ability to dream big and take charge and make sacrifices, unlike some elves who just want to hole up and say "You know what? I'm just going to take care of my family and myself, and let someone else worry about the rest of the world." In fact that selfish individualism was probably what put the kisór in this position in the first place -- Dasi once said that they had no leader before Lar and they would have none after. It seems to be a cultural thing. Lar is Great Man enough to step out of it.

But Imin is right, too, about Lar's "love" for "his people". That is, Imin was wrong about Lar's perception of "his people", but right about the "love" bit -- Lar's loves have always come second to his plans and not-necessarily-personal ambitions. He doesn't have kids and he was not married long. He does not remember how it feels to have "real" parents, so foster parents are in no way inferior in his mind. In short, he doesn't truly understand what it means to a father to send his sons out to perhaps die, or what it means to send some lumbering adult male off to impregnate (by force if necessary) a young girl who has perhaps never seen a male before except once or twice in her life through a peephole, or to order a girl like Imin's daughter Sisi to have another baby right away just months after her husband died. He doesn't truly understand why it's so unnatural to take babies away from their mothers and raise them underground. He doesn't truly understand why he can't just outlaw marriage and expect everyone to live happily in some weird commune where the men make the rounds of the ladies' beds.

I mean, he understands that all that really sucks and wishes it didn't have to be that way, but he doesn't understand it viscerally. And Imin, in particular, is really understanding it "viscerally" lately like kicks to the stomach. We saw his reaction when his boy came home and told him Mash and Surr had been killed -- and he realizes his eldest boys are just about men now, and will be fighters, and the day will soon come when they won't come home at all. And we saw in this most recent chapter how unbearable he's finding the situation with the girls, now that Sisi is a widow and eligible for "the rounds". He's been the one on top for so long, but now he's forced to imagine what it's like for the girl on the bottom, and he is about to crack. And he even knows how it feels to love a girl and be compelled to go visit her in spite of the danger, like Ilal and Pima.

So despite being all creepy and troll-like (and to some sensibilities eerily sexy), Imin is like the heart Lar lacks. It may be a necessary condition in a great leader, I don't know... I've read some things about Ghandi for instance that made me glad I wasn't his wife or daughter. Lar may have a point when he says that he can't think about the good of all if he's too busy worrying about one or two elves in particular, just because they're "his". But if he doesn't play things right, it could be a tragic flaw. He may manage to save the bodies of his people, but destroy everything that made their lives and culture beautiful, and truly turn them into a herd of cattle as Imin fears.