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landcollector posted:The problem I have with Amaris is that he marks himself as a rear end in a top hat with his speech. Don't get me wrong, the other notable characters are assholes as well, but they either portray affable fronts or are not so overt in their smugness. So there can't possibly be any depth to his character because he's NOT acting like any of the others? I think you're massively underestimating PTN's subtlety in the face of ample evidence for it. He's painted very few characters who are exactly as they appear (or exactly as they were in the canonverse), and he's playing quite adeptly on our preconceptions of Amaris. We'll find out a lot more a lot sooner if we start choosing battles in this storyline. I'm betting when we better understand what's going on, we'll be able to see why Amaris is acting as he does and perceive it as potentally well-intentioned, although I predict most everyone is going to hate him even worse for how he goes about doing things..l
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# ? Apr 14, 2012 16:08 |
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# ? May 10, 2024 00:49 |
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landcollector posted:The problem I have with Amaris is that he marks himself as a rear end in a top hat with his speech. Don't get me wrong, the other notable characters are assholes as well, but they either portray affable fronts or are not so overt in their smugness. 1. Course he's smug. He's a new contender. Anytime anyone comes to something where all the current incumbents have been distinctly unsuccessful at the common goal (for centuries in this example), the new guy is certain to come in with a significant degree of contempt for the incumbents. All the other successor lords are likeable because while they hate each other, they all respect each other to a degree no matter how superior they each believe themselves to be. Amaris doesn't have that because he hasn't been bogged down in a centuries long stalemate. He and the NRWR have bided their time and waited for their moment, and as such he believes his planning is superior and will triumph where no one else has. 2. Part of why you and I think he's smug is because he hasn't actually done anything directly to our notice yet. He's talking the big talk without anything to back it up. Again that's our fault for not putting the camera on him. If we watch him a bit to see if his talk is actually backed up by some skill and competence, I think we'll be changing our tune.
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# ? Apr 14, 2012 16:12 |
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This is actually illustrative of one of my favorite things about Battletech - they're all Bad Guys. Like, all of them. Amaris may be a dick, but five'll get you ten he's no more of a dick than pretty much any other IS leader. We root for some of them because we appreciate their style, but still, they're all dicks.
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# ? Apr 14, 2012 16:17 |
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It's a little reductive to say "They're all dicks", especially considering if anyone ISN'T a dick they're accused (rightly or wrongly) of being a Mary Sue. If all you're left with are dicks (who by virtue of being dicks are all the same with nothing to distinguish them besides style) or Mary Sues, a lot of the interesting drama is sucked right out and the game is reduced to which sports team you like best. People do bad things, people think the ends justify the means, people in power make cold or ruthless decisions to further their ambitions, but in practical terms some of them make better cases or are better options. A cunning, ambitious successor lord who is also fair, sane, and even-handed beats one who's vain, cruel, and incompetent. The Inner Sphere is generally better than the Clans because humanity's crawled out of feudalism before and can do it again but god knows what'll happen in the neo-primitivist eugenic space-future, but on a case-by-case basis you can have better Khans who try to avoid harm and encourage cooperation and worse Sphereoid lords who further petty grudges at the expense of others. All of this isn't even getting into the culture and political situation people are born into severely limiting their options, so that even if you had five benevolent Great House lords it'd be hard for them to decide who puts their gun down first and actually tries to work together. I remember an old saying from... don't remember where, but it goes "At the bottom of the ladder, the rungs are very close together".
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# ? Apr 14, 2012 16:29 |
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Dolash posted:It's a little reductive to say "They're all dicks", especially considering if anyone ISN'T a dick they're accused (rightly or wrongly) of being a Mary Sue. If all you're left with are dicks (who by virtue of being dicks are all the same with nothing to distinguish them besides style) or Mary Sues, a lot of the interesting drama is sucked right out and the game is reduced to which sports team you like best. Ok. So there's three types of people in the battletech universe... Dicks, pussies, and assholes. (Victor Steiner-Davion is the rear end in a top hat.) In all seriousness, Amaris seems to actually be a couple steps above the rest, motivation wise. "Reunite star league. Beat the poo poo out of Kerensky's dogs." Both noble goals. He just seems a bit insufferably smug about it right now for obviously stated reasons. We'll see as things progress how much he actually believes in the star league, and how much he's a power hungry bastard. It's a shame he's being a jerk to the FWL. The Mariks were always big proponents of the star league.
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# ? Apr 14, 2012 16:40 |
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landcollector posted:The problem I have with Amaris is that he marks himself as a rear end in a top hat with his speech. Don't get me wrong, the other notable characters are assholes as well, but they either portray affable fronts or are not so overt in their smugness. I think you're influenced by the Amaris in the original timeline. Now, granted, this Amaris has a Blake and a Cameron and a stockpile of powerful stuff, so it does mean now we've got a periphery redneck who also outclasses the Inner Sphere (to supplement Kerensky's eugenics kids), but he's not really a periphery redneck and, though he's bent on conquest, he's not really a Ming the Merciless. The whole NRWR did not just appear out of nowhere, it's been hinted at by PTN the whole time (and, well, not hinted at, it's been a giant blob on the map during every update) and he's made us aware at first subtly and then deliberately that Things Didn't Go The Way We Remember when it came to the battle for Terra. What I like about this, and I don't know where PTN is going so it might not work like this at all, is the possibility of the NRWR being another Clan Invasion, only with a totally different style to the culture, military organization, and (in my mind, much more clever than the Clans) backstory. I love the Great Unknown of the Periphery and with it the lost warships, the Minnesota Tribes, the battered worlds and ongoing assumption that Periphery equals Hillbilly. It's the reason why the Clans coming out of the Periphery is both shocking and readily accepted, because no one really knows what's out there but no one wants to find out because any time you spend effort looking, all you end up with is a bunch of scrub farmers and water bandits. It kind of annoyed me that the Clans, instead of being some kind of desert people, ended up just being Even More Advanced Civilization in the middle of nowhere. As I said earlier, the Mongols didn't defeat the rest of the world because Ghengis Khan and his sons invented machine guns, they defeated them because of more intangible things. The Bedouins riding out and defeating the Romans and Persians in the 7th century were the same story. That's what the Clans should have been. I think the NRWR, while obviously not being "desert people" have the chance to be something more like this, and therefore rather "evil" to their opponents but more interesting to the readers. TildeATH fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Apr 14, 2012 |
# ? Apr 14, 2012 16:52 |
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TildeATH posted:I think you're influenced by the Amaris in the original timeline. Now, granted, this Amaris has a Blake and a Cameron and a stockpile of powerful stuff, so it does mean now we've got a periphery redneck who also outclasses the Inner Sphere (to supplement Kerensky's eugenics kids), but he's not really a periphery redneck and, though he's bent on conquest, he's not really a Ming the Merciless. The whole NRWR did not just appear out of nowhere, it's been hinted at by PTN the whole time (and, well, not hinted at, it's been a giant blob on the map during every update) and he's made us aware at first subtly and then deliberately that Things Didn't Go The Way We Remember when it came to the battle for Terra. You're likely right that I've been influenced by the original timeline's Amaris. I suppose we'll see what PTN does with Amaris in this timeline.
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# ? Apr 14, 2012 17:09 |
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landcollector posted:You're likely right that I've been influenced by the original timeline's Amaris. I suppose we'll see what PTN does with Amaris in this timeline. I can't blame you for wanting to see less of this guy.
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# ? Apr 14, 2012 17:48 |
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Wait, Battletech has good guys? (that aren't author inserts or mary sues?)
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# ? Apr 14, 2012 23:28 |
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Trast posted:Wait, Battletech has good guys? (that aren't author inserts or mary sues?) It has been my experience that it is less 'good guys' and more 'people who are slightly less assholish then everyone else'. Clans Ghost Bear and Cloud Cobra come to mind. Emphasis must be made on the 'slightly'.
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# ? Apr 14, 2012 23:51 |
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:This is actually illustrative of one of my favorite things about Battletech - they're all Bad Guys. Like, all of them. I'd actually contend that they're not bad guys; they're just more human than a lot of other *serial fiction from the same time period. Even the badly written books touch on the politics of the day and age (only the threat of the Clans could put a sociopath like Jeremiah Rose's in command of a Merc unit and keep him there). The problem is, a lot of the politics gets lost behind the threat-of-the-week syndrome. The Clans were an alien sledgehammer to the Status Quo. It's all they were ever intended to be; but their motives (greed, pride, passing on their genetics) is really little different from anyone else's. The real reason everyone in the Inner Sphere comes across as a bad guy is that they're all motivated by revenge. And not just 'you killed my father' revenge--some of it is incredibly petty, like Romano Liao's hatred of Candice because Candice is better than she is in every way AND a stronger contender for the Capellan throne; or Victor Steiner-Davion assassinating Ryan Steiner with the same assassin who killed his mother (and the same Assassin who later kills Omi Kurita, in that grand 'what goes around comes around' sort of ludicrous garbage (there's seriously only one professional assassin in the Inner Sphere?)). So no, they're not bad people; but I can't argue they're good people either. They're just people, people who happen to have a lot of power and don't always wield it with the most skill. *Other serial fiction from the same time period: The Star Wars Expanded Universe; which is full of some of the most poorly constructed, poorly thought out books. I can comfortably list more than five good BattleTech authors; but poor Star Wars gets stuck with the genuinely good Timothy Zahn, the "people don't talk like that but the action is well written" Michael A. Stackpole, and... Aaron Alliston (who took Stackpole's only decent series of books and made it better by trading a bit of action for believable characters with human motivations). BattleTech comes out on top simply by virtue of not having to try to make Jedi interesting, I suspect. VVVV More likely that Victor Steiner-Davion was never told he had assassins. I can't see Justin Allard actually putting that kind of power at his fingertips. Edit for Analogy: It would be like giving an untrained puppy a dart gun that fired deadly neurotoxins at people whenever it barked. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Apr 15, 2012 |
# ? Apr 15, 2012 00:30 |
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The only reason I could think of that Victor wouldn't just send his best FCIC agents, rather than requiring the services of a hired goon, was that Stackpole thought they wouldn't have assassins because the FC are the good guys. e: Allston is awesome and I really enjoy him. He's a pretty big jump up in quality from Stackpole, partially because he shifts the focus of the novels around a lot (rather than just having every single thing be about his pet character). Also, Matthew Stover is a pretty good author and I feel compelled to mention him. double-edit: Are you implying Justin Allard is like one of those guys the state pays to help people with severe mental handicaps deal with life? Cause I don't disagree. Defiance Industries fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Apr 15, 2012 |
# ? Apr 15, 2012 00:39 |
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Allston really does write great franchise fiction - I kind of hope if Battletech gets a big boost they get him to wrote some books for them. Maybe pick up some of Stackpoles characters again and make them readable. Also gonna throw out Karen Traviss for writer-who-could-write-Battletech. She'd have some amazing infantry specialists working over mech lance after mech lance.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 00:51 |
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DatonKallandor posted:Also gonna throw out Karen Traviss for writer-who-could-write-Battletech. She'd have some amazing infantry specialists working over mech lance after mech lance. I'm a little iffy on Traviss, but I guess Battletech readers have learned to deal with Mary Sue's through constant exposure. And I suppose the political and cultural stuff that seeps into her writing would fit some of the more die hard clanners.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 00:57 |
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Defiance Industries posted:double-edit: Are you implying Justin Allard is like one of those guys the state pays to help people with severe mental handicaps deal with life? Cause I don't disagree. He has to deal with Victor and Kai. Victor is like a cross between Napoleon Bonaparte (in that he's a competant general) and Bella from Twilight: he, (Kai, and Phelan) exist to be replaced by the reader. Victor's only competant / functional when someone's shooting at him. Kai is pretty much the same, except I'd classify him an idiot savant. His only useful skill is Giant Robot-ing at people (and even then, he loses every fight he gets in because he's a suicidal idiot). ... actually, I'm really tempted to analyze Kai's fights now. Kai: Beats an obstacle course Loses a `Mech (Yen lo Wang) to a bureaucratic snafu just in time to... Lose a borrowed Hatchetman on Twycross Loses Yen Lo Wang on Alyina (gets it back) has no on-camera `Mech fights for something like 7+ years becomes Solaris champion off-camera. Loses to Phelan Kell in a simulator (they kill each other). Maybe doesn't lose some fights during Operation Bulldog or Task Force Serpent (it's hard to tell, I don't think he got any face time. If he did, I don't remember it). Surrenders to Sun-Tzu Liao to keep the Capellan Confederation from murdering everyone in St. Ives.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 00:59 |
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PoptartsNinja posted:Maybe doesn't lose some fights during Operation Bulldog or Task Force Serpent (it's hard to tell, I don't think he got any face time. If he did, I don't remember it). I recall his unit pulled out a draw in the Great Refusal, although since the only Spheroid units that actually managed to lose in that shindig were the 1st Free Worlds Guards and
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 01:33 |
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Kai brutalized Vlad in the refusal, using the UAC/20 Stormcrow to murder Vlad's Timber Wolf.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 02:15 |
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Star Wars has also attracted the writing talents of Greg Keyes, Walter Jon Williams, Steven Barnes, and Greg Bear, all of whom are at least middling talented and some of whom are drat good. I'm not sure they were writing in the Star Wars EU during the time Battletech books were coming out, though, granted. I'd call Star Wars EU the most wildly uneven licensed fiction out there. A bunch of talented midlist SF/fantasy authors interspersed (especially in the megaseries like New Jedi Order) with some of the most awful hacks writing genre fiction today, like Kevin J. Anderson.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 02:18 |
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Man the Invader Galaxy.... such a great idea. By which I mean retarded. "Let's train all the time as if we're Clanners, but then when we take the field we'll go back to being Comguard! ".Dolash posted:the game is reduced to which sports team you like best.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 02:20 |
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Arquinsiel posted:That's kind of the point. I would buy the poo poo out of some Ghost Bear sports jerseys.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 02:23 |
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Actually some ridiculously over-sized ones to fit the elementals from Three Points of Pride would be an awesome thing to sell.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 02:26 |
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Malachite_Dragon posted:I would buy the poo poo out of some Ghost Bear sports jerseys. Yeah Team Ghost Bears! My favourite bit of game lore: quote:SHELIAK (DC)
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 02:30 |
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Taerkar posted:Kai brutalized Vlad in the refusal, using the UAC/20 Stormcrow to murder Vlad's Timber Wolf. Oh, huh, I'd never actually heard the specifics, just the outcome. Kinda left off reading the novels before I got to the end of the Refusal War stuff, as I got distracted by a certain series that still hasn't ended yet and fell out of BattleTech's fictional loop for a while. Anyway, I choose to believe that the Stormcrow itself won the fight. I mean, go back and look at Xarbala's picture of that thing, it's totally alive. Probably even sentient.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 02:54 |
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If you have 95 US cents to spare, head over to Battlecorps and buy the story. It's one of the best Battletech reads you will ever find.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 02:56 |
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Arquinsiel posted:If you have 95 US cents to spare, head over to Battlecorps and buy the story. It's one of the best Battletech reads you will ever find. What's the actual title of the story? And does anyone have recommendations for Battlecorp fiction? I've read some of the novels, but I haven't touched the short stories and I'm currently looking at a wall of about 500 titles with almost no idea where to start.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 03:43 |
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cafel posted:What's the actual title of the story? And does anyone have recommendations for Battlecorp fiction? I've read some of the novels, but I haven't touched the short stories and I'm currently looking at a wall of about 500 titles with almost no idea where to start. If you're asking about the Ghost Bear football game, the story is called "Three Points of Pride" by Jason Hansa.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 04:15 |
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Looks like two Draconis Suns `Mechs may win the contest. VVV They're both far more prone to violently oppressing their own populace than any other successor state. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Apr 15, 2012 |
# ? Apr 15, 2012 04:55 |
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Nope nope noap I'm gonna call moral superiority for the Lyran Alliance and Free Worlds League right now. They're the least interesting precisely because they are much less prone to aggression than the other three Successor States. The Steiners barely even bothered to make a claim to the title of First Lord; the head honcho Steiner at the time sponsored like five rounds of peace talks to try to get the matter resolved peacefully. In the end her announcement was really more of a "well gently caress you guys we're all First Lords now, la dee fuckin' da." For the record, I think that was a big mistake on the part of the Steiner woman who was running the LC at the time. If she hadn't done that I think their good-guy-hood would have been pretty obvious. Really what I'm saying goes for the FWL too. Both of those states have been much more "taking our ball and going home" about the whole Star League thing. Now are their villains within the LC and FWL? Absolutely. But their character as states is far more benign than the other 3.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 05:42 |
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SynthOrange posted:Yeah Team Ghost Bears! My favourite bit of game lore: Best part about this was the whole team being taken bondsmen for scoring 3 points.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 06:16 |
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The Lyran Commonwealth did selectively annex the profitable worlds of the Rim Worlds Republic and left the rest to die following the exodus. So not exactly a "white hat" move there. VVV The Democracy Now affair happened several years after Katherine left the LA. Picard Day fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Apr 15, 2012 |
# ? Apr 15, 2012 06:32 |
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PoptartsNinja posted:VVV They're both far more prone to violently oppressing their own populace than any other successor state. I'm not buying that. The CC is a police state; the poo poo Katherine Steiner-Davion did during the FCCW that got people so up in arms is the status quo there. During the reign of Romano Liao, wasn't a Capellan citizen dying at the hands of the Maskirovka ever six minutes or so? Arglebargle III posted:The Steiners barely even bothered to make a claim to the title of First Lord; the head honcho Steiner at the time sponsored like five rounds of peace talks to try to get the matter resolved peacefully. The one after the 2nd Succession War actually made really good headway. Then ComStar got worried they'd actually pull it off and assassinated a bunch of ambassadors and pinned it on everyone else, which caused talks to break down and eventually lead into the 3rd Succession War. Defiance Industries fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Apr 15, 2012 |
# ? Apr 15, 2012 06:35 |
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Defiance Industries posted:I'm not buying that. The CC is a police state; the poo poo Katherine Steiner-Davion did during the FCCW that got people so up in arms is the status quo there. During the reign of Romano Liao, wasn't a Capellan citizen dying at the hands of the Maskirovka ever six minutes or so? The Capellans have a complaint process where citizens can go directly to the Chancellor for arbitration... and Romano was executing everyone who she thought was wasting her time. Which was probably everyone who used it
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 06:46 |
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Arglebargle III posted:Nope nope noap I'm gonna call moral superiority for the Lyran Alliance and Free Worlds League right now. They're the least interesting precisely because they are much less prone to aggression than the other three Successor States. The Steiners barely even bothered to make a claim to the title of First Lord; the head honcho Steiner at the time sponsored like five rounds of peace talks to try to get the matter resolved peacefully. In the end her announcement was really more of a "well gently caress you guys we're all First Lords now, la dee fuckin' da." For the record, I think that was a big mistake on the part of the Steiner woman who was running the LC at the time. If she hadn't done that I think their good-guy-hood would have been pretty obvious. Counterpoint: Loki. There's been some good Archons, but a lot of them were repressive shitheads. They very much are a realm of More Money = Better Than.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 06:56 |
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Defiance Industries posted:I'm not buying that. The CC is a police state Yes, but the average citizen is pretty aware of this. The Capellans are more likely to throw their convicts into a platoon of penal infantry than kill them directly. The Free Worlds League, on the other hand, uses a carrot and stick approach on nearly every planet or group of planets. Stay for the economic benefits, or they'll drop `Mechs on you. It's part of the reason their military's so inflexible--at least half of it has to be pointed inward, most of the time. quote:the poo poo Katherine Steiner-Davion did during the FCCW Heimdall would never have existed if there wasn't a history of that kind of thing. Yes, you can vote an Archon out of office (gee, Victor, why didn't you try doing that?), but that doesn't mean it actually happens very often. quote:During the reign of Romano Liao, wasn't a Capellan citizen dying at the hands of the Maskirovka ever six minutes or so? Her reign was atypical. The Capellan Confederation is the only successor state with free, universal healthcare. Sure, it may not be very good, but they actively try to take care of their non-citizens and encourage everyone to try to become a citizen. The CC is more concerned about oppressing their nobility anyway, the general population already follow orders like champions. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 07:01 on Apr 15, 2012 |
# ? Apr 15, 2012 06:56 |
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PoptartsNinja posted:Yes, but the average citizen is pretty aware of this. The Capellans are more likely to throw their convicts into a platoon of penal infantry than kill them directly. You don't need to do criminal investigations to oppress people. Hell, it works better if you don't. quote:Heimdall would never have existed if there wasn't a history of that kind of thing. Yes, you can vote an Archon out of office (gee, Victor, why didn't you try doing that?), but that doesn't mean it actually happens very often. Heimdall exists in part because the conditions aren't right for it to exist in other states. You need personal liberties like privacy (so the DC and CC are out) prosperity among both nobles and commoners (so the FS is out) and enough cultural unity that a secret organization like that could function state-wide (so no FWL). I'm not so much surprised that it exists as I am that nobody else has ever tried it. When a nutjob takes over the FS, it seems like they collectively bend over and wait for a member of the royal family to save them. quote:Her reign was atypical. The Capellan Confederation is the only successor state with free, universal healthcare. Sure, it may not be very good, but they actively try to take care of their non-citizens and encourage everyone to try to become a citizen. The CC is more concerned about oppressing their nobility anyway, the general population already follow orders like champions. Capellan health care is only universal if you are a Citizen, which does not include everyone. Servitors are excluded, because they have no rights at all in Capellan society. They absolutely do not take care of their non-Citizens in even the most perfunctory ways. It's in their best interests to make being a Servitor as lovely as possible, because it reminds people that if you don't spend your time extolling the Dear Leader, when you turn 20 you have a long, lovely life ahead of you. I think that having a slave class automatically puts you in the basement, myself. It doesn't stop being oppressive just because everyone accepts it as the status quo. Defiance Industries fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Apr 15, 2012 |
# ? Apr 15, 2012 07:07 |
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Defiance Industries posted:I think that having a slave class automatically puts you in the basement, myself. It doesn't stop being oppressive just because everyone accepts it as the status quo. To be fair to the CC, when Sun-Tzu came into power he pretty much emancipated the servitors and set up pretty strict "No Slavery" policies for them. As far as Successor Lords go and all the poo poo Sun-Tzu gets for his Hanse Davion like foreign policies, he was actually one of the only lords to view the citizenry of his state as something more important than tools to build more Battlemechs/plebes to be kept in their place. As far as a free and open society with actual personal and political liberties go, two DO exist in the Inner Sphere - The Magistracy of Canopus and the Outworlds Alliance. The Lyran Commonwealth or any of the successor states really don't even come close to registering on this scale. Between Loki and Heimdall it should be pretty clear that talking the wrong poo poo about the Archon to the wrong person will get you killed in the LC/LA; after all, intelligence agencies have to do something between coups and assassinations and i'm sure Loki isn't going to file off all those serial numbers without getting a little use out of it; and terrorist organizations dedicated to protecting peoples rights don't just come out of vacuum, conditions or no conditions. Lyrans do come off pretty good matched up against other successor states though - but as you pointed out it isn't exactly a competitive field.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 07:41 |
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I think PTN's point wasn't that the CC (or the DC for that matter) isn't a repressive police state, but that it's less prone, over the course of its history, to use lethal force on its own citizens - which, Romano excepted, may actually be true - and it's certainly more or less true of the DC. That doesn't make them not terrible, it just means they're a different sort of terrible. Oppression in both of those states is institutional and effective enough that they don't need to get violent. In the LC/LA and the FWL, they don't have the sort of political structure that allows for the sort of massive and overbearing national security apparatus seen in the DC and CC, so they have to compensate with military-led crackdowns. In the FS they really just don't give enough of a poo poo at the top (takes time away from combating the Capellan and Drac menaces!), so they just sort of go with a "benign neglect" sort of policy and leave poo poo to the local planetary governments for the most part.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 07:44 |
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Picard Day posted:As far as a free and open society with actual personal and political liberties go, two DO exist in the Inner Sphere - The Magistracy of Canopus and the Outworlds Alliance. The Lyran Commonwealth or any of the successor states really don't even come close to registering on this scale. Between Loki and Heimdall it should be pretty clear that talking the wrong poo poo about the Archon to the wrong person will get you killed in the LC/LA; after all, intelligence agencies have to do something between coups and assassinations and i'm sure Loki isn't going to file off all those serial numbers without getting a little use out of it; and terrorist organizations dedicated to protecting peoples rights don't just come out of vacuum, conditions or no conditions. The Taurian Concordat is pretty cool too, until the Star League decides to punch them in the face over and over again.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 08:08 |
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b0lt posted:The Taurian Concordat is pretty cool too, until the Star League decides to punch them in the face over and over again. Generally pretty much everything was better before the Star League. Sure you had the "Age of War" but after the Ares treaty it was pretty much a low burning, low intensity conflict spread across most of the Inner Sphere with fairly low impact on civilian life. It's only after Ian Cameron decides that Earth has got to be in charge of everything do things really get bad. First he demobilizes a shitload of house troops, which creates the huge pirate/bandit problem that hadn't really existed in any major way before. Then he uses the results of his own action to start poo poo with the nations who didn't want to get involved with the League and once the war starts goes "Oh hey, that Ares treaty thing that everyone loves and has stopped us from nuking each other into oblivion? Totes doesn't apply to me." Cue the death of one out of every five Taurian citizens "in the name of progress." The whole Reunification War supplement actually made me a lot warmer towards the FWL. They were pretty much the only faction who responded to the no more Ares treaty thing with "stick it up your rear end Cameron, we are gonna have a clean war."
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 08:40 |
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# ? May 10, 2024 00:49 |
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Political Vote Results 10 - "Clans’ chance in tactics" -> change. I'm a little disappointed the FRR simply never had a chance to exist in the PTN alternate history due to the early/rapid clan invasion.
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# ? Apr 15, 2012 09:15 |