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The Mrrshan High Queendom doesn't seem all that stable to me. The current High Queen is popular, but with the high level of autonomy of the vassals, and the lack of what seems to be a centralized authority, I could see Mrrshan society under a weak or unpopular High Queen splitting pretty easily into regional strife and factionalism.
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Jul 4, 2017 19:16
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nweismuller posted:This is, to the Mrrshan mindset, a feature. Who would want an unworthy queen to rule easily? On balance, they would rather endure war than dishonor. <Crosses off Mrrshan from my list of vacation destinations>
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Jul 6, 2017 02:17
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nweismuller posted:I cordially remind people that our Future People are not going to be nearly as obsessed with the 20th and 21st centuries as those of us living in them, so many of our modern cultural products are not necessarily relevant any longer. If reading and watching science fiction has taught me anything, it's that people in, say, the late 23rd century, are obsessed with culture and art from the late 20th and early 21st century, and any art or culture produced between now and then are forgotten. That being said, I have no doubt that mysteries and thrillers are pretty common in Darlok culture. You have heroes like Agent Marfal, Defender of the Darloks, who's the main character of a popular Darlok Holovid show. He's an Nazpam agent (Darlok foreign intelligence), who, every episode, has to uncover and stop plots from violent Mrrshan, brutal Bulrathi, greedy Humans, amoral Psilons, soulless Meklars, and the terrifying Klakon, whose queen wants to strip all life in the galaxy of its free will and make them her mind controlled slave. Every episode, he's got to hunt these alien agents down before they can destroy Darlok society. Sometimes, though, he needs help, because these foreign spies recruit Darlok dupes and traitors to help them. When he discovers they have, he calls on his friend, Inspector Niklar of the Nazlek (Domestic intelligence....the Darlok secret police), who helps round up the spies' Darlok dupes. Marfal and Niklar are friends, but they tease each other a lot and don't always see eye to eye. Part of it is because their personalities are so different. Marfal has to be hard and unsentimental. He's constantly facing evil aliens, and can't show any sympathy at all to them, because sympathy would mean his death and the death of his society, and he knows that enemy aliens have to be destroyed without mercy. Inspector Niklar, on the other hand, is for lack of a better word, a softer touch. Oh, that doesn't mean that he's merciful to the enemies of the Darlok. Definitely not. But as a member of the Nazlek, he doesn't want to give up on his fellow Darlok, and while he realizes that death might be necessary for some of the hard cases, he still believes that most of the Darlok traitors they run into still can be redeemed and saved and turned into productive members of society. Given the choice, he'd rather reeducate than kill.
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Jul 8, 2017 14:39
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nweismuller posted:Indeed, that's popular entertainment. Worth noting that Human and Meklar villains dominate, with a lesser role for Bulrathi villains. Fanatical Alkari also show up, but Psilon, Mrrshan, Klackon, and Alkari portrayals are all somewhat fanciful, as the Darloks lack any real direct experience with those species, only really knowing of them second-hand. As is typical for Darlok entertainment, they rely entirely on practical effects and their actors' own abilities of mimicry to portray aliens- which does mean that Meklars are unusually uniformly bipedal in form in the show, relative to their actual variance in forms. Talent competitions are also big, interestingly enough. So anyway, that's Darlok popular culture. What about Darlok high culture? First of all, representational art is not particularly popular, and generally hasn't been. That's not to say that it doesn't exist, or that there haven't been representational schools, but Darlok art tends towards the abstract. A fairly famous art critic at one point said that "representationalism is alien to the Darlok psyche". While that's almost certainly overstated, still, how can a still portrait truly represent someone who's form, coloration, and structure is always malleable. So, a lot of Darlok art focuses on trying to capture transitive experiences and emotions. There was at one point a school of sculpture called the "mutalist" school. The sculptors would carve in ice, and then display it, not doing anything to preserve it. The ice sculpture would melt in front of the crowd, changing shape as it melted. Skilled Darlok sculptors would actually carve the ice and set up display lights to control the speed of the melting on various parts of the sculpture, so as it melted, new, deliberate forms would be revealed, only to themselves disappear. A later movement developing out of this called itself the living installation. Sculptors would sculpt in unbaked clay, and as the piece was displayed, the audience was encouraged to touch and shape the sculpture themselves, so that, by the end of the day, everyone who saw the piece contributed to its form, and its final form often had nothing to do with the artist's planned conception. In terms of literature, mysteries are, as I said, common. So are works that play with the structure and conventions of the genre. Lipogrammatic novels (novels deliberately written without a specific letter) are a lot more common than in human literature, as are acrostic novels and poems, along with heavy use of anagrams. There's one historical novel, called, in strict translation, "The Fall of the City of Night", set pre-unification, that focuses on the siege and ultimate fall of a Darlok city to a rival army, and the effect that it had on five families in the city. The author, though, made some letters slightly darker than the others, and if you read only the darker letters, you get a sixth perspective, that one from the general commanding the besieging army. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Jul 9, 2017 |
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Jul 9, 2017 01:10
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nweismuller posted:I would be interested to hear more about the Fall of the City of Night- its events and the viewpoints therein- at least, if Epicurius is up to telling us more about it. Their reports of Darlok culture so far do seem to be accurate to me. I certainly can't do the book justice. It's a classic of Darlok literature for a reason, both in its use of language, it's shifting viewpoints, its use of irony and the way it interweaves lighter scenes with tragedy, but here's a brief summary. It's based on a historical event that happened long before unification. There was a city named Rakjul that got rich off the production and trade of a material called nightsilk. I don't know if you've ever seen it...it's expensive, and, ever since the war with the Darloks started, it's hard to find in the Republic. It's a fabric that's greenish grey in its natural color, very light and very tough and durable, and one of the better fabrics that the Darloks had at the time....this obviously was before synthetics. Anyway, Rakjul had a regional monopoly on the manufacture of nightsilk, and that had made it both rich and powerful. It was a republic, but not a very liberal one. In practice, it was a plutocratic oligarchy, where almost all the power was held by these rich merchant families who elected one of their own as Consul. Think Renaissance Venice and you're probably not too far off the mark. The problem started when merchants from a nearby principality were harassed and beaten in the city. Why it happened isn't entirely clear, but the upshot of the whole thing is that the neighboring prince sent his son as part of a delegation to demand apologies and reparations. Unfortunately, neither the Prince's son nor the Consul were particularly patient or wise. The Consul summarily denied the demand, insults were exchanged, and the prince's son was killed. Angered and seeking vengeance, the Prince ordered his brother to lead an army against Rakjul and burn it down. The city held out for quite a long time, but it was taken by treachery, the city burnt down, and a lot of innocent Darloks killed. So that's the story the book tells. It shifts perspective between six main characters. The first is the Consul, who, as the siege goes on, comes to realize that his impulsiveness has doomed his city. The second is a rich merchant who hopes to rely on his wealth to keep his family safe. The third is a common laborer, who is trying to survive amidst the siege and the growing unrest and food shortages. The fourth is a common soldier, who has to deal with both the boredom of the siege and his own fear that he'll be killed in the fighting. The fifth is the slave who is ultimately responsible for opening the gates and dooming the city. (Some Darlok societies had slaves at the time the book was set. Obviously, none do now.) And the sixth is the Prince's brother, the general leading the siege, who's dealing with his grief over the death of his nephew, but at the same time, also realizing that with his nephew dead, he's his brother's heir. The stories are all interesting, but in my mind, the most interesting is the slave's story. I still like the justification he gives for betraying the city. Here it is, in part (and my apologies, this is a really rough translation) The Slave posted:All men owe loyalty to their land and their ruler. How can it be otherwise, for their land gave them birth; it is their mother. And their ruler protects them; he is their father. But I am no true son, but made a bastard. If all men owe loyalty, then what do I owe? For I am no man. The very law that should protect me proclaims it; it calls me 'slave', not 'man', not 'citizen'. But what loyalty does a beast have for his master, and what duties does a master have to his beasts? The beast lives and dies at his master's will. It toils for him. And the law says that, if a beast causes an injury, it is the master to blame, not the beast. How else could it be? The beast has no will; the law has said so. If the law calls me a beast, then let me be one. Besides being an attack on slavery (which was almost entirely abolished by the time the book was written, and the book helped contribute to its abolition in those few areas where it still existed), it also touches on (as does the entire book), a political philosophy, which I think is fundamental to understanding modern Darlok culture. One of the fundamental principles of human society is the principle of liberty. It hasn't always been that way, as studying history will show you, but now there's a general consensus that the individual should have the right to do what he or she wants, to say what he or she wants, and to think what he or she wants, and that it's mostly the job of the state to stay out of the way of that; to serve as a neutral arbiter and to protect people's rights, but, in general, to let people do what they want so long as it doesn't hurt others. The fundamental principal that Darlok political philosophy is based on is that of security. We see antecedents to this in human culture too, of course. A Darlok political philosopher would understand and agree with a lot of Hobbes' Leviathan, for instance. But generally, Darloks are willing to put up with a lot of restrictions on their civil rights that would cause rioting on Earth, in exchange for the promise that the government will keep them safe and fed. The arguments used to advocate the abolition of slavery serve as an example of this. Both humanity and the Darloks have abolished slavery, fortunately. For all of the sins we can rightly lay on the head of the Darloks, slavery isn't one of them. In spite of the same result, the arguments that led to the abolition of slavery were different in the two societies. The most successful human abolitionist argument was, basically, "Slaves are people, just like you and me, and all people have the natural right to be free. So by holding somebody in slavery, you're violating their natural rights." It was because of this moral imperative, backed up by force, in some cases, that slavery was ultimately abolished on Earth. Among the Darloks, the most successful abolitionist argument went something like, "The state has the responsibility to protect all Darloks, and all Darloks have the duty to serve and be loyal the state. Slaves, though, are outside of this understood agreement, and that's dangerous, because slaves have no moral obligation to be loyal to the state. We must abolish slavery, therefore, and make the slave part of the community, so that he is bound by the same standards as the rest of the community and is entitled to the same protection from the community."
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Jul 9, 2017 06:51
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