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Some recent conversation with Bright (who's got a substantial world-building project going on in a forum thread), RP, and several recent stories (plus a couple that are brewing) have turned over my love of world building like a plow cutting through dry soil to find the dark loam beneath.
I figure I may as well take some notes on my default furry (and/or quasi-furry) setting. What you see in the picture is our Earth (recognize it? ) overlaid with the only real major "countries" or states. The rest of the map isn't unpopulated - quite the contrary - but species tend to form enclaves of just their own kind or a few cooperative species. So Africa may be loaded with creatures (if strictly furry) / people (if quasi-furry), but you'd see a tribe of zebra in a village not far from scattered impala ranches bordering the giraffe's town. Bigger cities tend to accumulate from collections of these enclaves accreting together as suburbs do around our cites. Common ground and fresh water sources can be shared peacefully or squabbled over endlessly.
Of course this is a vorish environment, and it's important to know how predators and prey interact. Of course, many, many creatures are omnivorous, and for the most part I give them a pass when it comes to eating insects or fish, which generally aren't considered intelligent enough to matter (even if they are a bit anthropomorphized). But there are larger species that still prefer big, intelligent herbivores as a primary food source, and that's a source of conflict. In some parts of the world, predators lord over the prey as tyrants, in others as conscientious landlords. In other places, predators are outcasts who raid protected villages. Somewhat less frequently, predators live in villages or city enclaves that war with their prey, but are generally equal (like the Spartans and the Athenians, rather than the Spartans and the helots).
It's exceedingly uncommon for these groups to organize into a larger governmental body - even in the face of a conquesting opponent. (You can see, for example, just how successful both the Khanate and Grassland were in their territory grabs.) Large cities are far less common than they are in our world because creatures just have so much trouble working together across species lines, and getting two successful cities to ally is like herding catgirls into a room full of vacuum cleaners. Language is also isolating - many species have their own dialect, and nearly everyone considers regional trade languages to be an unsophisticated gutter tongue (even if everyone speaks one or two).
Individuals of different species get along splendidly, and it's very common for any creature to have friends from outside their enclave; even friends with romantic attachments. But attempting to actually interbreed is, in most cases, more taboo than incest, so no-one takes these relationships seriously.
To get to the map:
The four areas marked are, from East to West (and oldest to newest), The Khanate, Free Albion/Rodentia, The Capital Cities, and Grassland. (These names are extremely subject to change.) Note that borders are generally fuzzy because there aren't a lot of boundary disputes that arise between anything larger than two towns, even if one of those towns nominally belongs to a nation.
The Khanate is the only historical example of a single-species conquest that remained successful beyond a single generation, and thus it's also the most successful in terms of of total landmass swallowed. The Khans came from a tribe of highland yak, originally, but for the aggressive lot of spearmen that they were, they were remarkably enlightened in their peaceful moments. They didn't really care what species someone was, as long as they followed the rules and paid their taxes, and so their empire didn't collapse like so many others when there were more vacant spots in the administration than willing bureaucrats. The Khans weren't trying to be inclusive; they just happened to be accidentally successful. Since that massive sweep across Asia and most of Europe, the empire has crystallized, and is now sustained through an exceptionally elaborate web of interdependencies, trade routes, and mutual treaties. A creature in the Khanate could go 360 days a year without remembering they were part of the empire (tax day and several holidays being the obvious exceptions), but those outside the empire feel the lack in their smaller trade networks and less stable relationship with their neighbors. The Khanate continues to grow, albeit slowly, and as an accidental pyramid scheme. Towns petition to join the empire, but the "bride price" to do so has grown to an exorbitant sum.
Free Albion isn't any older than any of the individual capital cities, but it's older than the Capital Cities as a unified entity. Europe was a very unstable place (as if the stability of the Khanate required a balance), and when the better creatures set sail for the new world to found the capital cities, who remained in Europe were among (or living next to) the worst of the lot. Free Albion was the idea of a British dormouse who envisioned a land free of predators, and somehow managed to achieve it. Rodents, Lepids, ungulates, and "other creatures of a cooperative and communal nature" were invited en masse to the islands, much to the amusement of the wolves and cats and badgers and weasels and owls and hawks, etc... until they found themselves on the business end of a hundred fire-hardened spears and were greeted with a demand to flee the land or be ventilated. The continent was not particularly pleased to find themselves overrun with predators, but no one could get the outcasts to cooperated long enough to arrange a substantial counterattack. Free Albion is closed to non-residents, aside from the pearl necklace of trading ports around both islands, but there are rumors that the land is crumbling from within. Corruption is suspect.
The Capital Cities were the biggest cities to spring out of the hundreds of colonies founded by those leaving Europe to start anew. Largely founded by carnivorous creatures who were guided by an attempt to recreate and improve upon the harmony of the Khanate through intent. The Capital Cities allow creatures (or their parents) to buy citizenship when they reach age three (creatures who don't live that long need not apply). There is no limit to the number of citizens, and few restrictions on who can apply as long as they can pay the fee; there is also no guarantee of citizenship to those who are born in the Cities and their territories; all must pay. Citizens are exempt from predation; if they are killed for any reason, it is considered murder, and all murder is punishable by execution. Non-citizen residents may by temporary exemption visas. Everyone else is nominally available for licensed predators to hunt - so long as the hunts do not cause property damage or other loss. An employer could reasonably sue even a licensed predator for killing a non-citizen employee that they deemed necessary. Natural predation does occur within the Cities, but it's generally considered unwise and uncivilized and not flaunted. A strong citizen initiative has pushed for decades now to outlaw predation in the territories altogether, especially as there is such an ample source of processed meat available. The Capital Cities are the pinnacle of technology and education; they have uplifted much of the rest of the world to near-modern levels. Religion is typically a hobby at most, and breeding relationships are more often contractual and business-oriented than not; living partners are frequently of different species.
The Grassland Collective sprung up in the shadow of the Capital Cities; its conquest was financial rather than military. Comprised largely of herd animals (with cattle as a heavy majority in the leadership positions, fowl, other ungulates, and even some sea creatures have been allowed in as provisional clades) the collective aims to be the primary protein provider to the Capital Cities - and the world, eventually. They self-farm, producing dairy and dairy products... and meat. The Lottery is a monthly national holiday in the Grasslands, and every adult citizen (reached after four viable birthing periods) has to enter; winners have two more months of life to wrap things up before they have to submit for rendering. The tradeoff is wealth and an easy, comfortable life for all, and -if a citizen's number is called - two final months of pampering. The Grasslands are unusual in that their gender ratio is heavily skewed; species that are allowed into the collective must agree to limit their males to breeding stock (they essentially become the property of the state), and though their lives are generally even more ease-filled and decadent than their female counterparts, they are also short without exception. Every male must submit for rendering when he has passed maximum viability. The females of the Grassland collective make up for the lack of available sexual partners with a thriving slave trade. The Capital Cities officially denounce the slave trade, but since males and females both of every imaginable species flock to the Grasslands to voluntarily trade their freedom and dignity for what is advertised as the easy, voluptuous life of a Grasslands slave, they have little ground to complain.
I'm sure there will be more - in fact there already is much more, especially about the Capital Cities, but this is a good chunk for the first WIP.
I figure I may as well take some notes on my default furry (and/or quasi-furry) setting. What you see in the picture is our Earth (recognize it? ) overlaid with the only real major "countries" or states. The rest of the map isn't unpopulated - quite the contrary - but species tend to form enclaves of just their own kind or a few cooperative species. So Africa may be loaded with creatures (if strictly furry) / people (if quasi-furry), but you'd see a tribe of zebra in a village not far from scattered impala ranches bordering the giraffe's town. Bigger cities tend to accumulate from collections of these enclaves accreting together as suburbs do around our cites. Common ground and fresh water sources can be shared peacefully or squabbled over endlessly.
Of course this is a vorish environment, and it's important to know how predators and prey interact. Of course, many, many creatures are omnivorous, and for the most part I give them a pass when it comes to eating insects or fish, which generally aren't considered intelligent enough to matter (even if they are a bit anthropomorphized). But there are larger species that still prefer big, intelligent herbivores as a primary food source, and that's a source of conflict. In some parts of the world, predators lord over the prey as tyrants, in others as conscientious landlords. In other places, predators are outcasts who raid protected villages. Somewhat less frequently, predators live in villages or city enclaves that war with their prey, but are generally equal (like the Spartans and the Athenians, rather than the Spartans and the helots).
It's exceedingly uncommon for these groups to organize into a larger governmental body - even in the face of a conquesting opponent. (You can see, for example, just how successful both the Khanate and Grassland were in their territory grabs.) Large cities are far less common than they are in our world because creatures just have so much trouble working together across species lines, and getting two successful cities to ally is like herding catgirls into a room full of vacuum cleaners. Language is also isolating - many species have their own dialect, and nearly everyone considers regional trade languages to be an unsophisticated gutter tongue (even if everyone speaks one or two).
Individuals of different species get along splendidly, and it's very common for any creature to have friends from outside their enclave; even friends with romantic attachments. But attempting to actually interbreed is, in most cases, more taboo than incest, so no-one takes these relationships seriously.
To get to the map:
The four areas marked are, from East to West (and oldest to newest), The Khanate, Free Albion/Rodentia, The Capital Cities, and Grassland. (These names are extremely subject to change.) Note that borders are generally fuzzy because there aren't a lot of boundary disputes that arise between anything larger than two towns, even if one of those towns nominally belongs to a nation.
The Khanate is the only historical example of a single-species conquest that remained successful beyond a single generation, and thus it's also the most successful in terms of of total landmass swallowed. The Khans came from a tribe of highland yak, originally, but for the aggressive lot of spearmen that they were, they were remarkably enlightened in their peaceful moments. They didn't really care what species someone was, as long as they followed the rules and paid their taxes, and so their empire didn't collapse like so many others when there were more vacant spots in the administration than willing bureaucrats. The Khans weren't trying to be inclusive; they just happened to be accidentally successful. Since that massive sweep across Asia and most of Europe, the empire has crystallized, and is now sustained through an exceptionally elaborate web of interdependencies, trade routes, and mutual treaties. A creature in the Khanate could go 360 days a year without remembering they were part of the empire (tax day and several holidays being the obvious exceptions), but those outside the empire feel the lack in their smaller trade networks and less stable relationship with their neighbors. The Khanate continues to grow, albeit slowly, and as an accidental pyramid scheme. Towns petition to join the empire, but the "bride price" to do so has grown to an exorbitant sum.
Free Albion isn't any older than any of the individual capital cities, but it's older than the Capital Cities as a unified entity. Europe was a very unstable place (as if the stability of the Khanate required a balance), and when the better creatures set sail for the new world to found the capital cities, who remained in Europe were among (or living next to) the worst of the lot. Free Albion was the idea of a British dormouse who envisioned a land free of predators, and somehow managed to achieve it. Rodents, Lepids, ungulates, and "other creatures of a cooperative and communal nature" were invited en masse to the islands, much to the amusement of the wolves and cats and badgers and weasels and owls and hawks, etc... until they found themselves on the business end of a hundred fire-hardened spears and were greeted with a demand to flee the land or be ventilated. The continent was not particularly pleased to find themselves overrun with predators, but no one could get the outcasts to cooperated long enough to arrange a substantial counterattack. Free Albion is closed to non-residents, aside from the pearl necklace of trading ports around both islands, but there are rumors that the land is crumbling from within. Corruption is suspect.
The Capital Cities were the biggest cities to spring out of the hundreds of colonies founded by those leaving Europe to start anew. Largely founded by carnivorous creatures who were guided by an attempt to recreate and improve upon the harmony of the Khanate through intent. The Capital Cities allow creatures (or their parents) to buy citizenship when they reach age three (creatures who don't live that long need not apply). There is no limit to the number of citizens, and few restrictions on who can apply as long as they can pay the fee; there is also no guarantee of citizenship to those who are born in the Cities and their territories; all must pay. Citizens are exempt from predation; if they are killed for any reason, it is considered murder, and all murder is punishable by execution. Non-citizen residents may by temporary exemption visas. Everyone else is nominally available for licensed predators to hunt - so long as the hunts do not cause property damage or other loss. An employer could reasonably sue even a licensed predator for killing a non-citizen employee that they deemed necessary. Natural predation does occur within the Cities, but it's generally considered unwise and uncivilized and not flaunted. A strong citizen initiative has pushed for decades now to outlaw predation in the territories altogether, especially as there is such an ample source of processed meat available. The Capital Cities are the pinnacle of technology and education; they have uplifted much of the rest of the world to near-modern levels. Religion is typically a hobby at most, and breeding relationships are more often contractual and business-oriented than not; living partners are frequently of different species.
The Grassland Collective sprung up in the shadow of the Capital Cities; its conquest was financial rather than military. Comprised largely of herd animals (with cattle as a heavy majority in the leadership positions, fowl, other ungulates, and even some sea creatures have been allowed in as provisional clades) the collective aims to be the primary protein provider to the Capital Cities - and the world, eventually. They self-farm, producing dairy and dairy products... and meat. The Lottery is a monthly national holiday in the Grasslands, and every adult citizen (reached after four viable birthing periods) has to enter; winners have two more months of life to wrap things up before they have to submit for rendering. The tradeoff is wealth and an easy, comfortable life for all, and -if a citizen's number is called - two final months of pampering. The Grasslands are unusual in that their gender ratio is heavily skewed; species that are allowed into the collective must agree to limit their males to breeding stock (they essentially become the property of the state), and though their lives are generally even more ease-filled and decadent than their female counterparts, they are also short without exception. Every male must submit for rendering when he has passed maximum viability. The females of the Grassland collective make up for the lack of available sexual partners with a thriving slave trade. The Capital Cities officially denounce the slave trade, but since males and females both of every imaginable species flock to the Grasslands to voluntarily trade their freedom and dignity for what is advertised as the easy, voluptuous life of a Grasslands slave, they have little ground to complain.
I'm sure there will be more - in fact there already is much more, especially about the Capital Cities, but this is a good chunk for the first WIP.
Category All / Miscellaneous
Species Unspecified / Any
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File Size 827.1 kB
It very well may be that your current vision of this setting had advanced vastly since you last visited this pleasantly-coloured map's feedback page, but I was still excited enough about reading all this to start an account on the Eka's site in order to leave a comment, before realizing that you probably had a mirror submission in the Scraps directory. Of note is the fact that the Eka's Portal version apparently can only be accessed through a search engine, unless some finer trick to the local browsing mechanics over there eluded me.
I intend to tackle my impressions of this insight into your constructed world on a quote-by-quote basis, but in the opening I'd like to applaud the scale of your work, and considering how scrupulously this WIP-version was described, it makes for a very diverse range of sub-settings and environments. The attention you've paid to the social uniqueness of each large geopolitical player suggests a panoply of scenarios and conflicts, like a good setting ought to. The historical era is also notable for bringing hard fantasy into the near-modern period that is so often left out in favour of the more romanticized temporal landmarks of civilization. One thing I've been noticing recently is that the medieval fantasy writers have it easier than their sci-fi-oriented counterparts, since the former aren't expected to come up with original government types that the post-Renaissance civilization tends to sprout by the dozens, and just stick with the default feudal warlordism or imperialism instead.
A few questions before I proceed. Firstly, during an exchange with a commenting party, you admitted to placing the Miranda's characters into that setting, or its close approximation - specifically, the Capital Cities for the urban iteration of Eleanor; would that suggest that all the rural version of that splendid character could hail from the neighbouring Grassland collective, possibly even being the same lady portrayed at different points of her biography ?
Additionally, did the ubiquitous sentience of your world's populace develop naturally, or through a potent outside influence of some sort ? That is to say, was there ever a time drastically different from the current cannibalistic state of affairs ? It is an acceptable starting point, but a more geek-friendly way of laying it all down would be to present some elaboration to the eager audiences - unless the axiomatic nature of the world's founding principles is what the setting is meant to be relying on.
But there are larger species that still prefer big, intelligent herbivores as a primary food source, and that's a source of conflict.
The way you described your world, the gastronomical needs of the carnivore peoples can only be sufficiently satisfied by the very efforts of a governmental entity taking up half a continent, and only at the cost of a being draconianly utilitarian. Would that imply an utter exclusion of the non-sentient animals of agriculturally significant body mass from the setting ? Obviously, this concept is blazingly conductive of the carnal elements inherent to this world's intelligent design, and the declared abundance of illegal and conquest-enabled type of predation is accepted, but can there be any Soylent Green substitutes made from actual soy at the current stage of the world's industrial development(Grasslanders' economic interests notwithstanding) ?
Large cities are far less common than they are in our world because creatures just have so much trouble working together across species lines
It's a nice Zeitgeist-establishing basis, and the way your denizens have been gathering into species-specific communities is fully plausible, as well as the profound success of the first large society to base itself around egalitarianism.
But attempting to actually interbreed is, in most cases, more taboo than incest, so no-one takes these relationships seriously.
Brushing aside the personal preferences of the taboo violators, are such alliances physically capable of bearing mongrel fruit ? And if so, does the stigma of being a live reminder of one's parents' transgressions hit the hybrids hard ? Or perhaps a couple with a species X and a species Y partner could only result in and X or Y offspring ?
They didn't really care what species someone was, as long as they followed the rules and paid their taxes, and so their empire didn't collapse like so many others when there were more vacant spots in the administration than willing bureaucrats.
Even with the as of yet low number of political players announced so far, you've already introduced a great deal of variety of approaches: you have the far left (both socioeconomically and territorially, if this map's alignment is used) Grasslands; the borderline libertarian, cosmopolitan Capital Cities with the institution of citizenship being more of a protection service than a real social security package; an insular island nation with strict chauvinist principles that developed from honest ideals and cooperation of the oppressed, The Free Albion; and lastly, the Khanate.
It is an interesting concept - to create the sort of Lax Imperia country that outreaches so far as to barely keep in touch with its extremities, but is paradoxically held together by this same superficiality of supervision. If the provinces prove culturally resilient enough to assimilate their immediate Khan overlords before the latter swap their tribal roots for the grandeur of centralized power, the Empire may be well on its way to becoming a full confederacy. It is also highly pleasing to see the process of this multinational menagerie's development being described as a result of a fortunate coincidence of beneficial factors rather than a realization of a single leader's will or the like.
and when the better creatures set sail for the new world to found the capital cities, who remained in Europe were among (or living next to) the worst of the lot.
The alternative history type of fiction has a notable trait of featuring the real events painted in accordance to the author's political inclinations; it's gotten me to wonder if your interpretation of the seventeenth' century European exodus matches the description of the future founders of the Capital Cities migrating to build their better world. I realize that there is very little neutrality about the ceaseless popular debate on whether the colonists responsible for the eventual founding of the US were heroic luminaries, paragons of human diligence and ingenuity, as well as the last shred of decency splintered from the dying cradle of civilization, or an assortment of opportunistic riffraff and the newly made financial barons who have grown reluctant to keep sending the spoils of strip mining and conquest back home. Even if the historical parallels are completely incidental and negligible, I would like to learn your criteria for "better creatures" - does it mean more enterprising, more active, passionate and dedicated ? More educated and technically-minded ? More prosperous or boasting nobler bloodlines ? Better at chess ?
Free Albion was the idea of a British dormouse who envisioned a land free of predators
Uninterestingly enough, a constructed setting of my own also included a UK spiritual clone that had murine connotations by the merit of being inhabited mainly by the mouse-folk(the setting itself was designed to include as many of the staple species as individual nations).
There is no limit to the number of citizens, and few restrictions on who can apply as long as they can pay the fee; there is also no guarantee of citizenship to those who are born in the Cities and their territories; all must pay.
That is also a refreshingly realistic system of an ostensibly voluntary system that implies a good deal of dependency, if only by the expedient of family ties and other forms of association, providing the state with a steady influx of wealth and citizenry, as well as engendering a degree of loyalty in their people.
It also reminded me of the Old Testament's rather shady assortment of paragraphs implying that YHWH demanded all firstborns, men and cattle alike, to be his to receive as sacrifices, with an option of bailing out the children with a special offering.
Everyone else is nominally available for licensed predators to hunt - so long as the hunts do not cause property damage or other loss.
Again, a nice example of deviously clever planning on the parts of Capital Cities legislature and the setting's creator: a self-incentivized militia movement policing and culling the illegal immigrant demographic, as well as maintaining the prestige of the paid citizen status. One wonders how the distinction between licenses and unlicensed predators is made clear, though - is it simply a deciding matter in court if a predator is prosecuted by the prey party's associates, or are there some other enforcement methods in place ?
Natural predation does occur within the Cities, but it's generally considered unwise and uncivilized and not flaunted.
What does constitute natural predation ? An act committed by an unlicensed predator against a likewise unregistered person ? Hunting citizens is equivalent to murder, the way I understand it, so the repercussions would be more severe than being called unwise.
The Capital Cities are the pinnacle of technology and education; they have uplifted much of the rest of the world to near-modern levels.
This brings up the question of relative political influence of the denoted great (or at least significant) powers: is there a linear hierarchy, or are different states roughly on equal footing with each other in net power, but excel in certain areas while lacking in others ?
The Lottery is a monthly national holiday in the Grasslands, and every adult citizen (reached after four viable birthing periods) has to enter; winners have two more months of life to wrap things up before they have to submit for rendering
Those last two months must have been an enormous impact on the culture of the Grasslanders, and the periods of citizens' lives both before and after the lottery make up an inexhaustible pool of dramatic possibilities. The monthly uncertainty would mean that all business contracts would either be short-term, or dependent on group productivity rather than that of individual workers, which in turn would lead to the prevalence for employees with a jack-of-all-trades education(unless prized specialist are exempt from lottery). With the state power being so firmly dominant, the Grasslands would probably have pretty high personal hygiene, medical and fitness standards enforced either through company and state agency mandatory tests and performance improvement courses, or limited to the education system PE classes. I also imagine that predation is largely outlawed within the collective(with the possible exception of slaves).
All that rests on the premise of the self-farming laws being effectively enforced throughout the Grasslands, rather than circumvented at any opportunity, or being targeted at certain demographics with some of the others being given a pass. With laws this severe and at odds with the survival instinct, there would have to be a number of ways out of it in order of the collective conscious to be able to accept it. One way around it would be for the state to sell personalized policies that would give a protection from the lottery for a few years in exchange for voluntary submission to the rendering process at the end, or a high risk underpaid job in return for a full immunity.
The Grassland policies take me back to an idea I had about a dragon banking service in a civilized anthropomorphic animal-peopled setting. That establishment used the dragon family hoards as a safety capital that allowed offering better deals than any competition with greater security guarantees, but randomly scheduled the folks with bad credit for a very special appointment with a collector agent.
The Grasslands are unusual in that their gender ratio is heavily skewed; species that are allowed into the collective must agree to limit their males to breeding stock
"Species that are allowed into the collective" meaning those single species enclaves that the rest of the world is covered in, presumably, and the agreement in question is made between the Grassland officials and the enclave's own ? Later in your description, it is mentioned that many join the collective as voluntary slaves, but is it possible for individuals to be accepted as citizens(and becoming subject to the same laws) ?
he Capital Cities officially denounce the slave trade, but since males and females both of every imaginable species flock to the Grasslands to voluntarily trade their freedom and dignity for what is advertised as the easy, voluptuous life of a Grasslands slave, they have little ground to complain.
What is the primary function of the slaves in a society that has its own citizens farmed and slaughtered(in a duly civilized manner, of course) ? It can be inferred from your description that the males especially prop up the disparity in gender demographics either by performing the services usually expected of males in a society or by supporting the females as concubines. But what of their own role in relation to the meat industry ? And wouldn't it make more sense for Grasslanders to process slaves rather than citizens ? Granted, it would work wonders for the morale of the utterly subservient classes to have as huge an advantage over their masters as being off the hook where the Lottery is concerned.
I intend to tackle my impressions of this insight into your constructed world on a quote-by-quote basis, but in the opening I'd like to applaud the scale of your work, and considering how scrupulously this WIP-version was described, it makes for a very diverse range of sub-settings and environments. The attention you've paid to the social uniqueness of each large geopolitical player suggests a panoply of scenarios and conflicts, like a good setting ought to. The historical era is also notable for bringing hard fantasy into the near-modern period that is so often left out in favour of the more romanticized temporal landmarks of civilization. One thing I've been noticing recently is that the medieval fantasy writers have it easier than their sci-fi-oriented counterparts, since the former aren't expected to come up with original government types that the post-Renaissance civilization tends to sprout by the dozens, and just stick with the default feudal warlordism or imperialism instead.
A few questions before I proceed. Firstly, during an exchange with a commenting party, you admitted to placing the Miranda's characters into that setting, or its close approximation - specifically, the Capital Cities for the urban iteration of Eleanor; would that suggest that all the rural version of that splendid character could hail from the neighbouring Grassland collective, possibly even being the same lady portrayed at different points of her biography ?
Additionally, did the ubiquitous sentience of your world's populace develop naturally, or through a potent outside influence of some sort ? That is to say, was there ever a time drastically different from the current cannibalistic state of affairs ? It is an acceptable starting point, but a more geek-friendly way of laying it all down would be to present some elaboration to the eager audiences - unless the axiomatic nature of the world's founding principles is what the setting is meant to be relying on.
But there are larger species that still prefer big, intelligent herbivores as a primary food source, and that's a source of conflict.
The way you described your world, the gastronomical needs of the carnivore peoples can only be sufficiently satisfied by the very efforts of a governmental entity taking up half a continent, and only at the cost of a being draconianly utilitarian. Would that imply an utter exclusion of the non-sentient animals of agriculturally significant body mass from the setting ? Obviously, this concept is blazingly conductive of the carnal elements inherent to this world's intelligent design, and the declared abundance of illegal and conquest-enabled type of predation is accepted, but can there be any Soylent Green substitutes made from actual soy at the current stage of the world's industrial development(Grasslanders' economic interests notwithstanding) ?
Large cities are far less common than they are in our world because creatures just have so much trouble working together across species lines
It's a nice Zeitgeist-establishing basis, and the way your denizens have been gathering into species-specific communities is fully plausible, as well as the profound success of the first large society to base itself around egalitarianism.
But attempting to actually interbreed is, in most cases, more taboo than incest, so no-one takes these relationships seriously.
Brushing aside the personal preferences of the taboo violators, are such alliances physically capable of bearing mongrel fruit ? And if so, does the stigma of being a live reminder of one's parents' transgressions hit the hybrids hard ? Or perhaps a couple with a species X and a species Y partner could only result in and X or Y offspring ?
They didn't really care what species someone was, as long as they followed the rules and paid their taxes, and so their empire didn't collapse like so many others when there were more vacant spots in the administration than willing bureaucrats.
Even with the as of yet low number of political players announced so far, you've already introduced a great deal of variety of approaches: you have the far left (both socioeconomically and territorially, if this map's alignment is used) Grasslands; the borderline libertarian, cosmopolitan Capital Cities with the institution of citizenship being more of a protection service than a real social security package; an insular island nation with strict chauvinist principles that developed from honest ideals and cooperation of the oppressed, The Free Albion; and lastly, the Khanate.
It is an interesting concept - to create the sort of Lax Imperia country that outreaches so far as to barely keep in touch with its extremities, but is paradoxically held together by this same superficiality of supervision. If the provinces prove culturally resilient enough to assimilate their immediate Khan overlords before the latter swap their tribal roots for the grandeur of centralized power, the Empire may be well on its way to becoming a full confederacy. It is also highly pleasing to see the process of this multinational menagerie's development being described as a result of a fortunate coincidence of beneficial factors rather than a realization of a single leader's will or the like.
and when the better creatures set sail for the new world to found the capital cities, who remained in Europe were among (or living next to) the worst of the lot.
The alternative history type of fiction has a notable trait of featuring the real events painted in accordance to the author's political inclinations; it's gotten me to wonder if your interpretation of the seventeenth' century European exodus matches the description of the future founders of the Capital Cities migrating to build their better world. I realize that there is very little neutrality about the ceaseless popular debate on whether the colonists responsible for the eventual founding of the US were heroic luminaries, paragons of human diligence and ingenuity, as well as the last shred of decency splintered from the dying cradle of civilization, or an assortment of opportunistic riffraff and the newly made financial barons who have grown reluctant to keep sending the spoils of strip mining and conquest back home. Even if the historical parallels are completely incidental and negligible, I would like to learn your criteria for "better creatures" - does it mean more enterprising, more active, passionate and dedicated ? More educated and technically-minded ? More prosperous or boasting nobler bloodlines ? Better at chess ?
Free Albion was the idea of a British dormouse who envisioned a land free of predators
Uninterestingly enough, a constructed setting of my own also included a UK spiritual clone that had murine connotations by the merit of being inhabited mainly by the mouse-folk(the setting itself was designed to include as many of the staple species as individual nations).
There is no limit to the number of citizens, and few restrictions on who can apply as long as they can pay the fee; there is also no guarantee of citizenship to those who are born in the Cities and their territories; all must pay.
That is also a refreshingly realistic system of an ostensibly voluntary system that implies a good deal of dependency, if only by the expedient of family ties and other forms of association, providing the state with a steady influx of wealth and citizenry, as well as engendering a degree of loyalty in their people.
It also reminded me of the Old Testament's rather shady assortment of paragraphs implying that YHWH demanded all firstborns, men and cattle alike, to be his to receive as sacrifices, with an option of bailing out the children with a special offering.
Everyone else is nominally available for licensed predators to hunt - so long as the hunts do not cause property damage or other loss.
Again, a nice example of deviously clever planning on the parts of Capital Cities legislature and the setting's creator: a self-incentivized militia movement policing and culling the illegal immigrant demographic, as well as maintaining the prestige of the paid citizen status. One wonders how the distinction between licenses and unlicensed predators is made clear, though - is it simply a deciding matter in court if a predator is prosecuted by the prey party's associates, or are there some other enforcement methods in place ?
Natural predation does occur within the Cities, but it's generally considered unwise and uncivilized and not flaunted.
What does constitute natural predation ? An act committed by an unlicensed predator against a likewise unregistered person ? Hunting citizens is equivalent to murder, the way I understand it, so the repercussions would be more severe than being called unwise.
The Capital Cities are the pinnacle of technology and education; they have uplifted much of the rest of the world to near-modern levels.
This brings up the question of relative political influence of the denoted great (or at least significant) powers: is there a linear hierarchy, or are different states roughly on equal footing with each other in net power, but excel in certain areas while lacking in others ?
The Lottery is a monthly national holiday in the Grasslands, and every adult citizen (reached after four viable birthing periods) has to enter; winners have two more months of life to wrap things up before they have to submit for rendering
Those last two months must have been an enormous impact on the culture of the Grasslanders, and the periods of citizens' lives both before and after the lottery make up an inexhaustible pool of dramatic possibilities. The monthly uncertainty would mean that all business contracts would either be short-term, or dependent on group productivity rather than that of individual workers, which in turn would lead to the prevalence for employees with a jack-of-all-trades education(unless prized specialist are exempt from lottery). With the state power being so firmly dominant, the Grasslands would probably have pretty high personal hygiene, medical and fitness standards enforced either through company and state agency mandatory tests and performance improvement courses, or limited to the education system PE classes. I also imagine that predation is largely outlawed within the collective(with the possible exception of slaves).
All that rests on the premise of the self-farming laws being effectively enforced throughout the Grasslands, rather than circumvented at any opportunity, or being targeted at certain demographics with some of the others being given a pass. With laws this severe and at odds with the survival instinct, there would have to be a number of ways out of it in order of the collective conscious to be able to accept it. One way around it would be for the state to sell personalized policies that would give a protection from the lottery for a few years in exchange for voluntary submission to the rendering process at the end, or a high risk underpaid job in return for a full immunity.
The Grassland policies take me back to an idea I had about a dragon banking service in a civilized anthropomorphic animal-peopled setting. That establishment used the dragon family hoards as a safety capital that allowed offering better deals than any competition with greater security guarantees, but randomly scheduled the folks with bad credit for a very special appointment with a collector agent.
The Grasslands are unusual in that their gender ratio is heavily skewed; species that are allowed into the collective must agree to limit their males to breeding stock
"Species that are allowed into the collective" meaning those single species enclaves that the rest of the world is covered in, presumably, and the agreement in question is made between the Grassland officials and the enclave's own ? Later in your description, it is mentioned that many join the collective as voluntary slaves, but is it possible for individuals to be accepted as citizens(and becoming subject to the same laws) ?
he Capital Cities officially denounce the slave trade, but since males and females both of every imaginable species flock to the Grasslands to voluntarily trade their freedom and dignity for what is advertised as the easy, voluptuous life of a Grasslands slave, they have little ground to complain.
What is the primary function of the slaves in a society that has its own citizens farmed and slaughtered(in a duly civilized manner, of course) ? It can be inferred from your description that the males especially prop up the disparity in gender demographics either by performing the services usually expected of males in a society or by supporting the females as concubines. But what of their own role in relation to the meat industry ? And wouldn't it make more sense for Grasslanders to process slaves rather than citizens ? Granted, it would work wonders for the morale of the utterly subservient classes to have as huge an advantage over their masters as being off the hook where the Lottery is concerned.
Goodness! I always love to receive a comment of yours, no matter how long ago something was posted. I have no idea of this site has maximum comment lengths - I suppose we'll find out!
It very well may be that your current vision of this setting had advanced vastly since you last visited this pleasantly-coloured map's feedback page
Not by that much. For the most part this level of development has suited my needs well enough that further exploration hasn't been much necessary. There have been occasional forays into individual cities and regions and wrinkles on the world (including one that accommodates the idea of the citizenry as kemonomimi - where the creatures wear "city faces" so we could thrust a particular cat-girl and squirrel-boy (and later still a bird-boy) into the setting and still make it crunchy enough to be satisfying, but it the ideas presented above are still more or less 'canon'.
I was still excited enough about reading all this to start an account on the Eka's site in order to leave a comment, before realizing that you probably had a mirror submission in the Scraps directory. Of note is the fact that the Eka's Portal version apparently can only be accessed through a search engine, unless some finer trick to the local browsing mechanics over there eluded me.
High flattery there! Yes, it's still marked hidden there, as not really representative of "art" (though of course, now that I say that, the world-builder in me screams in fury). It's an artifact of my last "let's just give up on all this and go do something else" phase.
I'd like to applaud the scale of your work, and considering how scrupulously this WIP-version was described
Thank you!
One thing I've been noticing recently is that the medieval fantasy writers have it easier than their sci-fi-oriented counterparts, since the former aren't expected to come up with original government types that the post-Renaissance civilization tends to sprout by the dozens
My feeling is that they're like some hollywoodized race where each competitor continues to pull into a higher gear or step heavier on the petal, alternating in the lead toward some finish line 20 yards away that takes 10 minutes of movie-time to reach. At casual dabbling, fantasy allow a writer to exploit a common understanding (however accurate) of past societies, so they can shorthand the development of their society with homages to Rome or China or Tudor England, etc. (as I've very clearly done in this setting). When you wade a bit deeper, though, the fantasy nerd-dom can become oppressive, and accept no excuses for eschewing George R. R. Martin-esque forays into quasi-realism, as there is so much source material and documentation to draw upon. In short, at a certain level you have to become a PhD candidate in some social science or another in order to write "good" fantasy. Of course, then you can delve into the dark, utilitarian corridors of extreme sci-fi, where no excuse is accepted either, because even if there isn't source material, if you're not clever enough to figure it out to the 11th iteration of logic, you're not clever enough to be writing 'real' sci-fi anyway. There - that is a paragraph long on snark and short on substance. :)
during an exchange with a commenting party, you admitted to placing the Miranda's characters into that setting, or its close approximation - specifically, the Capital Cities for the urban iteration of Eleanor; would that suggest that all the rural version of that splendid character could hail from the neighbouring Grassland collective, possibly even being the same lady portrayed at different points of her biography?
There was certainly an initial attempt to shoe-horn that in, but... no. My early stories putting Eleanor in a farm setting was really still figuring out her personality and character, and happened previous to developing this setting. "Better off Dead" is perhaps the last story I wrote with a furry society before I sat down and though I needed to think up something I can reuse and put characters into, and it has hints and previews at this setting. In the farm setting Eleanor, she's someone else's cow, and I can't really imagine that fitting modern, canon Eleanor at all. Miranda's person and I have discussed this, and I think we both ended up liking the idea that "farm Eleanor" is a fantasy of Eleanor's - her own little alternate reality that she finds amusing, so long as she still ends up eating someone in the end. ;)
did the ubiquitous sentience of your world's populace develop naturally, or through a potent outside influence of some sort?
Good question! When I write in this setting, I intentionally use the term 'creatures' to refer to people. I can't really conceive of a plausible way that intelligence could have developed across so many species, or so far back in a common ancestor that it would relatively equal across lizards and mammals alike, so I nod to the necessity of some kind of intervening influence. In the aforementioned 'city-faces' wrinkle to the setting, there is a canonical uplift event in the distant past that coincides with the demise of a sapient dinosaur population. I imagine the same could be adapted to this anthro version (the primary version), but I haven't thought it through with much care.
Would that imply an utter exclusion of the non-sentient animals of agriculturally significant body mass from the setting?
Not exactly. Insects (known euphemistically as "ground-meat" in this setting, and usually sold minced) and fish are both of dubious sapience. Insects are often kept as pets, and depending on species are of comparable intelligence to hamsters up to well-trained dogs. Fish are of similar to higher intelligence, with some species approaching the point where they can communicate intelligibly. One of the best arguments employed against -not- ending predation is that it is a slippery slope that ends where? Before or after ending fishing? Before or after ground-meat is removed from store shelves?
But there are no non-sapient mammals, reptiles, amphibians, or birds - at least not on a species-wide level. Individual cases are arguable. ;)
can there be any Soylent Green substitutes made from actual soy at the current stage of the world's industrial development(Grasslanders' economic interests notwithstanding)?
Ground-meat is definitely the Soylent of the Capital Cities. It's ubiquitious, plentiful, inexpensive, and generally derided as tasteless (or, contradictorily, disgusting) and lower-class. Hamburgers made of ground-meat would be readily available at a number of fast-food joints. Hamburgers made of Grasslands beef are an expensive luxury.
Brushing aside the personal preferences of the taboo violators, are such alliances physically capable of bearing mongrel fruit?
Rarely, but yes. It's not possible in the case of, say, an alligator and a raccoon, but within this setting a cat-dog might be feasible, even though biologically they are not (different numbers of chromosomes, etc.) However, for every fantastic liger such interbreeding produces, there are a hundred monstrosities that didn't survive their first year, if they even survived their birth. Taboos tend to appear where particular activities occasionally produce undesired results (like incest exposes recessive traits and cannibalism can produce madness), but in this case the result is -much- more likely to be undesirable than desirable, if there is any result at all.
It is an interesting concept - to create the sort of Lax Imperia country
If you made this up, contgratulations on producing one of my favorite turns of phrases ever! If you didn't make it up, what an ideal application!
If the provinces prove culturally resilient enough to assimilate their immediate Khan overlords before the latter swap their tribal roots for the grandeur of centralized power, the Empire may be well on its way to becoming a full confederacy.
Honestly, I think the Khanate could potentially be my favorite setting in this world. Unfortunately, I just haven't been struck with any ideas for stories that belong here. Going forward 150 years, though, I expect trade relations with the Capital Cities and the resulting influx of technology to either balkanize the Khanate or uplift it to global dominance. Or both in one order or another.
it's gotten me to wonder if your interpretation of the seventeenth' century European exodus matches the description of the future founders of the Capital Cities migrating to build their better world.
No. And yes!
That line is half-hearted sarcasm. I'm an American with mixed feelings about my country (truly mixed). I'm a "nice guy" who believes you shouldn't expect anyone else to be, and that's okay, not bitterness. I'm a great believer in modernism and manifest destiny insofar as it has no inherent moral worth and is merely a microscosm of evolutionary tendencies. It's easy to distance one's self from Rome and gladiatorial games or the Middle Ages' cat-burning festivals or trench warfare and say, "Yes, this is how people are and have been!" whilst simultaneously attempting to remove pain and danger and even slightly miffed feelings from the daily experience of my immediate family as not what people should have to deal with. There is a semi-robust philsophical underpinning there, but in terms of this question, perhaps it suffices to say that the descriptor "better" should be read as tongue-in-cheek, where the resultant effects on Albion should be read as practical consequences as imaged through the lenses of a Capital Cities Citizen?
Uninterestingly enough, a constructed setting of my own also included a UK spiritual clone that had murine connotations
Britain and mice go together like France and wine. There's just too much in the way of fictional-setting-accumulation to ignore the connection, methinks.
One wonders how the distinction between licenses and unlicensed predators is made clear, though - is it simply a deciding matter in court if a predator is prosecuted by the prey party's associates, or are there some other enforcement methods in place?
Licensed hunters are required to register their kills, though is exceedingly common for this step to be rubberstamped. To some degree, one could say that the matter of licensing comes into play only if the predator is challenged during or after their hunt by someone with authority to do so. Unlicensed predation is not particularly uncommon - any more uncommon, say, than carjacking. Depending on to whom it happens, the matter of a license may never come up. The police have better things to focus on than the 4,562nd person to go missing from the cheapside slums this year.
What does constitute natural predation?
One creature hunting and killing another for food (i.e. a licensed creature doing what they paid their license fee for). The key here is that it's socially frowned upon. There are anti-predation ads on television. People who hunt non-citizens are wouln't want to mention it in polite company, or they'd likely be ostracized, no matter how legal it is. It's seen (when done legally) as being an ugly habit of old, out-of-touch aristocracy. It has all the social grace of smoking over your new baby's crib.
This brings up the question of relative political influence of the denoted great (or at least significant) powers: is there a linear hierarchy, or are different states roughly on equal footing with each other in net power, but excel in certain areas while lacking in others?
I wouldn't say there is a linear hierarchy, but that could be only because I haven't thought about it long enough.
The Capital Cities are definitely the dynamo of the modern world - they are the primary source of technology, the source of "forward-thinking" (sarcasm warning; they have already been one-upped by the Grasslands) socio-economics; they are the primary body effecting modernistic change in the world.
The Khanate is a pre-Boxer Rebellion China slowly waking up from a long slumber to Capitalism <snark> without the intervening communism . They are an eager consumer of all things Capitaline -except- the liberalism, but they are a vast frozen network thawing along the interconnections of smaller communities. There are very liberal Hong Kongs around the periphery with towns built of mud bricks in the interior who can recite their lineage back to the creation of the world, though none of them agree on when that is and very few know about the dinosaurs.
I honestly haven't thought too much about Free Albion in the last 50 years; I think it's adopting technology and modernizing very slowly, through a semi-centralized government filter, and the hunger of the population for the new and exciting they see in their ports is likely fueling the impending revolution.
But the Grasslands - I have a long story plotted out that takes place here which I may someday write. I really like this locatoin. They exist solely as a functional siphon of the wealth of the Capital Cities - they are a welcomed parasite, and quite successfully so. They have hacked the needs of the Capital Cities and provided them an alternative to NIMBY. Technically speaking, they could be considered a "client-state" of the Capital Cities, who provide some protection for them in exchange for favorable trade agreements. However, an argument could be made that they are the tail wagging the dog. If there is any lobby in the Capital Cities keeping predation legal, it is them. They keep the idea of meat fresh on the public's collective mind, where it can be burned in effigy and make everyone's mouth water for the taste of barbecue.
Those last two months must have been an enormous impact on the culture of the Grasslanders, and the periods of citizens' lives both before and after the lottery make up an inexhaustible pool of dramatic possibilities.
Indeed! There's so much to do here. I hope some day I get around to writing that story!
The monthly uncertainty would mean that all business contracts would either be short-term, or dependent on group productivity rather than that of individual workers, which in turn would lead to the prevalence for employees with a jack-of-all-trades education(unless prized specialist are exempt from lottery)
The percent of the population affected on a monthly basis is fairly miniscule - you'd see a more pronounced effect by comparing to a world pre-antibiotics. There is a -lot- of meat coming out of the Grasslands, but nowhere near the amount of meat consumed by our America, for example. It's the largest export primarily because of the price of the meat, and the willingness of the Capital Cities to pay for it so they can wash their hands of the social consequences.
With the state power being so firmly dominant, the Grasslands would probably have pretty high personal hygiene, medical and fitness standards enforced either through company and state agency mandatory tests and performance improvement courses, or limited to the education system PE classes.
Yes and no. I envision the society as a hybrid of Brave New World and modern Japan. Social mores are different there than we'd expect if the Capital Cities were shifted into the same kind of a society. Death does not have the same connotatoins there as it does for us. There are certainly those who bitterly oppose going to theirs, but the society promotes celebrating it as 'going out with a bang' instead, and people buy into that. Being selected in the lottery is, as in the 'Hunger Games' almost certain death (or definitely certain death) but with otherwise generally unobtainable (even by Grasslands standards) luxury and opulence for the final two months - including full access to males. Creatures of the grasslands who are part of the dairy collective (rabbits, fowl, sheep, cows, goats, primarily) incorporate health and hygiene and uber-fitness (not to be confused with lean-ness) into their concept of social arete. You are a responsible, productive, excellent member of society if you'd give good meat when your number is called. It wouldn't be entirely unheard of for creatures to -volunteer- for the lottery as they reach the end of their viable years to show off. It's an equivalent concept to bankrupting yourself to pay a hundred thousand dollars for your daughter's wedding.
I also imagine that predation is largely outlawed within the collective(with the possible exception of slaves).
Yes. Only those entered into the lottery are true citizens, and they are sancrosanct. Their lives are the public's property - kill one of them for any reason, and you have wounded the collective as a whole.
All that rests on the premise of the self-farming laws being effectively enforced throughout the Grasslands, rather than circumvented at any opportunity, or being targeted at certain demographics with some of the others being given a pass
I actually envisioned it as being opt-in, like citizenship in the Capital Cities (and modeled on them, in a way). The government, though, is -very- wealthy; while individual communities in the grasslands are not required to participate in the larger governmental meatmongering program, it's like union labor - where the goverment body gets its foot in, they will make sure those who don't play ball their way don't play at all. It's economic enforcment rather than legislative enforcement, though the government butchery has the law on their side as well. Only citizens see the direct benefit of government wealth - everything else trickles down to the non-citizens and slaves (though in this case there is a fair amount of trickling - enough to draw immigrants). [Lord, I'm realizing how much I really do sound like I'm espousing conservative economics here. In real life, this is not the case. I assume I know absolutely nothing about money and try to make no suggestions regarding how it should work, so this is not indicative of my largely misinformed anarcho-communistic tendencies.]
One way around it would be for the state to sell personalized policies that would give a protection from the lottery for a few years in exchange for voluntary submission to the rendering process at the end, or a high risk underpaid job in return for a full immunity.
Yes - it works both ways. You can increase and decrease your stakes in the lottery depending on your role in society, and what benefits you draw from the government. But citizenship - with very few exceptions - means you -are- in the lottery. Famously even government leaders are, and very occasionally they do get called, much to the delight of the tabloids. Again, while there are some people who are very possessive of their life, the idea of a candle that burns brightly burning more quickly as well is built into the social mores. Winners of the lottery are congratulated and idolized. For the majority of the population, this works well.
The Grassland policies take me back to an idea I had about a dragon banking service in a civilized anthropomorphic animal-peopled setting. That establishment used the dragon family hoards as a safety capital that allowed offering better deals than any competition with greater security guarantees, but randomly scheduled the folks with bad credit for a very special appointment with a collector agent.
<grin> I like the concept! I'm particularly partial to the idea of predation on the 'undeserving' though; I'd love it if a story like that involved a case of bad paperwork, and the person visited actually had an account in good status.
"Species that are allowed into the collective" meaning those single species enclaves that the rest of the world is covered in, presumably, and the agreement in question is made between the Grassland officials and the enclave's own?
Sort of. The Grasslands were a bovine initiative. Other dairy animals lobbied for for access, and were accepted at a species level with particular standards for what would be acceptable. Now the Grasslands are a collection of City-states not unlike the Capital Cities in general organizations, but with client enclaves who use their collective bargaining to sell other goods through them. In the story I keep mentioning, an enclave of sheep in the West beyond the reaches of the Collective sell wool through the Grasslands.
is it possible for individuals to be accepted as citizens(and becoming subject to the same laws)?
I suppose it's very unlikely but possible. If someone was eligible for citizenship, there would be no need for them to be a slave first - the cost of Citizenship is inherent in the lottery.
What is the primary function of the slaves in a society that has its own citizens farmed and slaughtered(in a duly civilized manner, of course)?
Manual labor. Adminstrative duties. Household help. Preserving the opulence of citizens. Fuck toys. :)
It can be inferred from your description that the males especially prop up the disparity in gender demographics either by performing the services usually expected of males in a society or by supporting the females as concubines.
Males who would be eligible for citizenship (and are in fact citizens of a kind) are kept in an inner city enclave and studded out to those who participate in the lottery. They essentially live in a monastary, and rather than have a ticket entered in the lottery, they are assigned a fate of the expected number of viable years, which is probationary. If they live out their fate or for one reason or another are no longer viable, with some exceptoins they are rendered. There are both opt-in males and 'born-in' males given to the state by citizen mothers (in exchange for some relief from their lottery chances).
And wouldn't it make more sense for Grasslanders to process slaves rather than citizens?
The Grasslands takes great pride in the quality of the meat they sell. It is offered in stark constrast to ground-meat. Additionally, the voluntary nature of the meat is what makes it so palatable to the people of the Capital Cities.
Thanks again for the great comment, as always! I know I still owe you a reply to the other. I've had it bookmarked since I first read it, and I think I'll get to it tonight!
It very well may be that your current vision of this setting had advanced vastly since you last visited this pleasantly-coloured map's feedback page
Not by that much. For the most part this level of development has suited my needs well enough that further exploration hasn't been much necessary. There have been occasional forays into individual cities and regions and wrinkles on the world (including one that accommodates the idea of the citizenry as kemonomimi - where the creatures wear "city faces" so we could thrust a particular cat-girl and squirrel-boy (and later still a bird-boy) into the setting and still make it crunchy enough to be satisfying, but it the ideas presented above are still more or less 'canon'.
I was still excited enough about reading all this to start an account on the Eka's site in order to leave a comment, before realizing that you probably had a mirror submission in the Scraps directory. Of note is the fact that the Eka's Portal version apparently can only be accessed through a search engine, unless some finer trick to the local browsing mechanics over there eluded me.
High flattery there! Yes, it's still marked hidden there, as not really representative of "art" (though of course, now that I say that, the world-builder in me screams in fury). It's an artifact of my last "let's just give up on all this and go do something else" phase.
I'd like to applaud the scale of your work, and considering how scrupulously this WIP-version was described
Thank you!
One thing I've been noticing recently is that the medieval fantasy writers have it easier than their sci-fi-oriented counterparts, since the former aren't expected to come up with original government types that the post-Renaissance civilization tends to sprout by the dozens
My feeling is that they're like some hollywoodized race where each competitor continues to pull into a higher gear or step heavier on the petal, alternating in the lead toward some finish line 20 yards away that takes 10 minutes of movie-time to reach. At casual dabbling, fantasy allow a writer to exploit a common understanding (however accurate) of past societies, so they can shorthand the development of their society with homages to Rome or China or Tudor England, etc. (as I've very clearly done in this setting). When you wade a bit deeper, though, the fantasy nerd-dom can become oppressive, and accept no excuses for eschewing George R. R. Martin-esque forays into quasi-realism, as there is so much source material and documentation to draw upon. In short, at a certain level you have to become a PhD candidate in some social science or another in order to write "good" fantasy. Of course, then you can delve into the dark, utilitarian corridors of extreme sci-fi, where no excuse is accepted either, because even if there isn't source material, if you're not clever enough to figure it out to the 11th iteration of logic, you're not clever enough to be writing 'real' sci-fi anyway. There - that is a paragraph long on snark and short on substance. :)
during an exchange with a commenting party, you admitted to placing the Miranda's characters into that setting, or its close approximation - specifically, the Capital Cities for the urban iteration of Eleanor; would that suggest that all the rural version of that splendid character could hail from the neighbouring Grassland collective, possibly even being the same lady portrayed at different points of her biography?
There was certainly an initial attempt to shoe-horn that in, but... no. My early stories putting Eleanor in a farm setting was really still figuring out her personality and character, and happened previous to developing this setting. "Better off Dead" is perhaps the last story I wrote with a furry society before I sat down and though I needed to think up something I can reuse and put characters into, and it has hints and previews at this setting. In the farm setting Eleanor, she's someone else's cow, and I can't really imagine that fitting modern, canon Eleanor at all. Miranda's person and I have discussed this, and I think we both ended up liking the idea that "farm Eleanor" is a fantasy of Eleanor's - her own little alternate reality that she finds amusing, so long as she still ends up eating someone in the end. ;)
did the ubiquitous sentience of your world's populace develop naturally, or through a potent outside influence of some sort?
Good question! When I write in this setting, I intentionally use the term 'creatures' to refer to people. I can't really conceive of a plausible way that intelligence could have developed across so many species, or so far back in a common ancestor that it would relatively equal across lizards and mammals alike, so I nod to the necessity of some kind of intervening influence. In the aforementioned 'city-faces' wrinkle to the setting, there is a canonical uplift event in the distant past that coincides with the demise of a sapient dinosaur population. I imagine the same could be adapted to this anthro version (the primary version), but I haven't thought it through with much care.
Would that imply an utter exclusion of the non-sentient animals of agriculturally significant body mass from the setting?
Not exactly. Insects (known euphemistically as "ground-meat" in this setting, and usually sold minced) and fish are both of dubious sapience. Insects are often kept as pets, and depending on species are of comparable intelligence to hamsters up to well-trained dogs. Fish are of similar to higher intelligence, with some species approaching the point where they can communicate intelligibly. One of the best arguments employed against -not- ending predation is that it is a slippery slope that ends where? Before or after ending fishing? Before or after ground-meat is removed from store shelves?
But there are no non-sapient mammals, reptiles, amphibians, or birds - at least not on a species-wide level. Individual cases are arguable. ;)
can there be any Soylent Green substitutes made from actual soy at the current stage of the world's industrial development(Grasslanders' economic interests notwithstanding)?
Ground-meat is definitely the Soylent of the Capital Cities. It's ubiquitious, plentiful, inexpensive, and generally derided as tasteless (or, contradictorily, disgusting) and lower-class. Hamburgers made of ground-meat would be readily available at a number of fast-food joints. Hamburgers made of Grasslands beef are an expensive luxury.
Brushing aside the personal preferences of the taboo violators, are such alliances physically capable of bearing mongrel fruit?
Rarely, but yes. It's not possible in the case of, say, an alligator and a raccoon, but within this setting a cat-dog might be feasible, even though biologically they are not (different numbers of chromosomes, etc.) However, for every fantastic liger such interbreeding produces, there are a hundred monstrosities that didn't survive their first year, if they even survived their birth. Taboos tend to appear where particular activities occasionally produce undesired results (like incest exposes recessive traits and cannibalism can produce madness), but in this case the result is -much- more likely to be undesirable than desirable, if there is any result at all.
It is an interesting concept - to create the sort of Lax Imperia country
If you made this up, contgratulations on producing one of my favorite turns of phrases ever! If you didn't make it up, what an ideal application!
If the provinces prove culturally resilient enough to assimilate their immediate Khan overlords before the latter swap their tribal roots for the grandeur of centralized power, the Empire may be well on its way to becoming a full confederacy.
Honestly, I think the Khanate could potentially be my favorite setting in this world. Unfortunately, I just haven't been struck with any ideas for stories that belong here. Going forward 150 years, though, I expect trade relations with the Capital Cities and the resulting influx of technology to either balkanize the Khanate or uplift it to global dominance. Or both in one order or another.
it's gotten me to wonder if your interpretation of the seventeenth' century European exodus matches the description of the future founders of the Capital Cities migrating to build their better world.
No. And yes!
That line is half-hearted sarcasm. I'm an American with mixed feelings about my country (truly mixed). I'm a "nice guy" who believes you shouldn't expect anyone else to be, and that's okay, not bitterness. I'm a great believer in modernism and manifest destiny insofar as it has no inherent moral worth and is merely a microscosm of evolutionary tendencies. It's easy to distance one's self from Rome and gladiatorial games or the Middle Ages' cat-burning festivals or trench warfare and say, "Yes, this is how people are and have been!" whilst simultaneously attempting to remove pain and danger and even slightly miffed feelings from the daily experience of my immediate family as not what people should have to deal with. There is a semi-robust philsophical underpinning there, but in terms of this question, perhaps it suffices to say that the descriptor "better" should be read as tongue-in-cheek, where the resultant effects on Albion should be read as practical consequences as imaged through the lenses of a Capital Cities Citizen?
Uninterestingly enough, a constructed setting of my own also included a UK spiritual clone that had murine connotations
Britain and mice go together like France and wine. There's just too much in the way of fictional-setting-accumulation to ignore the connection, methinks.
One wonders how the distinction between licenses and unlicensed predators is made clear, though - is it simply a deciding matter in court if a predator is prosecuted by the prey party's associates, or are there some other enforcement methods in place?
Licensed hunters are required to register their kills, though is exceedingly common for this step to be rubberstamped. To some degree, one could say that the matter of licensing comes into play only if the predator is challenged during or after their hunt by someone with authority to do so. Unlicensed predation is not particularly uncommon - any more uncommon, say, than carjacking. Depending on to whom it happens, the matter of a license may never come up. The police have better things to focus on than the 4,562nd person to go missing from the cheapside slums this year.
What does constitute natural predation?
One creature hunting and killing another for food (i.e. a licensed creature doing what they paid their license fee for). The key here is that it's socially frowned upon. There are anti-predation ads on television. People who hunt non-citizens are wouln't want to mention it in polite company, or they'd likely be ostracized, no matter how legal it is. It's seen (when done legally) as being an ugly habit of old, out-of-touch aristocracy. It has all the social grace of smoking over your new baby's crib.
This brings up the question of relative political influence of the denoted great (or at least significant) powers: is there a linear hierarchy, or are different states roughly on equal footing with each other in net power, but excel in certain areas while lacking in others?
I wouldn't say there is a linear hierarchy, but that could be only because I haven't thought about it long enough.
The Capital Cities are definitely the dynamo of the modern world - they are the primary source of technology, the source of "forward-thinking" (sarcasm warning; they have already been one-upped by the Grasslands) socio-economics; they are the primary body effecting modernistic change in the world.
The Khanate is a pre-Boxer Rebellion China slowly waking up from a long slumber to Capitalism <snark> without the intervening communism . They are an eager consumer of all things Capitaline -except- the liberalism, but they are a vast frozen network thawing along the interconnections of smaller communities. There are very liberal Hong Kongs around the periphery with towns built of mud bricks in the interior who can recite their lineage back to the creation of the world, though none of them agree on when that is and very few know about the dinosaurs.
I honestly haven't thought too much about Free Albion in the last 50 years; I think it's adopting technology and modernizing very slowly, through a semi-centralized government filter, and the hunger of the population for the new and exciting they see in their ports is likely fueling the impending revolution.
But the Grasslands - I have a long story plotted out that takes place here which I may someday write. I really like this locatoin. They exist solely as a functional siphon of the wealth of the Capital Cities - they are a welcomed parasite, and quite successfully so. They have hacked the needs of the Capital Cities and provided them an alternative to NIMBY. Technically speaking, they could be considered a "client-state" of the Capital Cities, who provide some protection for them in exchange for favorable trade agreements. However, an argument could be made that they are the tail wagging the dog. If there is any lobby in the Capital Cities keeping predation legal, it is them. They keep the idea of meat fresh on the public's collective mind, where it can be burned in effigy and make everyone's mouth water for the taste of barbecue.
Those last two months must have been an enormous impact on the culture of the Grasslanders, and the periods of citizens' lives both before and after the lottery make up an inexhaustible pool of dramatic possibilities.
Indeed! There's so much to do here. I hope some day I get around to writing that story!
The monthly uncertainty would mean that all business contracts would either be short-term, or dependent on group productivity rather than that of individual workers, which in turn would lead to the prevalence for employees with a jack-of-all-trades education(unless prized specialist are exempt from lottery)
The percent of the population affected on a monthly basis is fairly miniscule - you'd see a more pronounced effect by comparing to a world pre-antibiotics. There is a -lot- of meat coming out of the Grasslands, but nowhere near the amount of meat consumed by our America, for example. It's the largest export primarily because of the price of the meat, and the willingness of the Capital Cities to pay for it so they can wash their hands of the social consequences.
With the state power being so firmly dominant, the Grasslands would probably have pretty high personal hygiene, medical and fitness standards enforced either through company and state agency mandatory tests and performance improvement courses, or limited to the education system PE classes.
Yes and no. I envision the society as a hybrid of Brave New World and modern Japan. Social mores are different there than we'd expect if the Capital Cities were shifted into the same kind of a society. Death does not have the same connotatoins there as it does for us. There are certainly those who bitterly oppose going to theirs, but the society promotes celebrating it as 'going out with a bang' instead, and people buy into that. Being selected in the lottery is, as in the 'Hunger Games' almost certain death (or definitely certain death) but with otherwise generally unobtainable (even by Grasslands standards) luxury and opulence for the final two months - including full access to males. Creatures of the grasslands who are part of the dairy collective (rabbits, fowl, sheep, cows, goats, primarily) incorporate health and hygiene and uber-fitness (not to be confused with lean-ness) into their concept of social arete. You are a responsible, productive, excellent member of society if you'd give good meat when your number is called. It wouldn't be entirely unheard of for creatures to -volunteer- for the lottery as they reach the end of their viable years to show off. It's an equivalent concept to bankrupting yourself to pay a hundred thousand dollars for your daughter's wedding.
I also imagine that predation is largely outlawed within the collective(with the possible exception of slaves).
Yes. Only those entered into the lottery are true citizens, and they are sancrosanct. Their lives are the public's property - kill one of them for any reason, and you have wounded the collective as a whole.
All that rests on the premise of the self-farming laws being effectively enforced throughout the Grasslands, rather than circumvented at any opportunity, or being targeted at certain demographics with some of the others being given a pass
I actually envisioned it as being opt-in, like citizenship in the Capital Cities (and modeled on them, in a way). The government, though, is -very- wealthy; while individual communities in the grasslands are not required to participate in the larger governmental meatmongering program, it's like union labor - where the goverment body gets its foot in, they will make sure those who don't play ball their way don't play at all. It's economic enforcment rather than legislative enforcement, though the government butchery has the law on their side as well. Only citizens see the direct benefit of government wealth - everything else trickles down to the non-citizens and slaves (though in this case there is a fair amount of trickling - enough to draw immigrants). [Lord, I'm realizing how much I really do sound like I'm espousing conservative economics here. In real life, this is not the case. I assume I know absolutely nothing about money and try to make no suggestions regarding how it should work, so this is not indicative of my largely misinformed anarcho-communistic tendencies.]
One way around it would be for the state to sell personalized policies that would give a protection from the lottery for a few years in exchange for voluntary submission to the rendering process at the end, or a high risk underpaid job in return for a full immunity.
Yes - it works both ways. You can increase and decrease your stakes in the lottery depending on your role in society, and what benefits you draw from the government. But citizenship - with very few exceptions - means you -are- in the lottery. Famously even government leaders are, and very occasionally they do get called, much to the delight of the tabloids. Again, while there are some people who are very possessive of their life, the idea of a candle that burns brightly burning more quickly as well is built into the social mores. Winners of the lottery are congratulated and idolized. For the majority of the population, this works well.
The Grassland policies take me back to an idea I had about a dragon banking service in a civilized anthropomorphic animal-peopled setting. That establishment used the dragon family hoards as a safety capital that allowed offering better deals than any competition with greater security guarantees, but randomly scheduled the folks with bad credit for a very special appointment with a collector agent.
<grin> I like the concept! I'm particularly partial to the idea of predation on the 'undeserving' though; I'd love it if a story like that involved a case of bad paperwork, and the person visited actually had an account in good status.
"Species that are allowed into the collective" meaning those single species enclaves that the rest of the world is covered in, presumably, and the agreement in question is made between the Grassland officials and the enclave's own?
Sort of. The Grasslands were a bovine initiative. Other dairy animals lobbied for for access, and were accepted at a species level with particular standards for what would be acceptable. Now the Grasslands are a collection of City-states not unlike the Capital Cities in general organizations, but with client enclaves who use their collective bargaining to sell other goods through them. In the story I keep mentioning, an enclave of sheep in the West beyond the reaches of the Collective sell wool through the Grasslands.
is it possible for individuals to be accepted as citizens(and becoming subject to the same laws)?
I suppose it's very unlikely but possible. If someone was eligible for citizenship, there would be no need for them to be a slave first - the cost of Citizenship is inherent in the lottery.
What is the primary function of the slaves in a society that has its own citizens farmed and slaughtered(in a duly civilized manner, of course)?
Manual labor. Adminstrative duties. Household help. Preserving the opulence of citizens. Fuck toys. :)
It can be inferred from your description that the males especially prop up the disparity in gender demographics either by performing the services usually expected of males in a society or by supporting the females as concubines.
Males who would be eligible for citizenship (and are in fact citizens of a kind) are kept in an inner city enclave and studded out to those who participate in the lottery. They essentially live in a monastary, and rather than have a ticket entered in the lottery, they are assigned a fate of the expected number of viable years, which is probationary. If they live out their fate or for one reason or another are no longer viable, with some exceptoins they are rendered. There are both opt-in males and 'born-in' males given to the state by citizen mothers (in exchange for some relief from their lottery chances).
And wouldn't it make more sense for Grasslanders to process slaves rather than citizens?
The Grasslands takes great pride in the quality of the meat they sell. It is offered in stark constrast to ground-meat. Additionally, the voluntary nature of the meat is what makes it so palatable to the people of the Capital Cities.
Thanks again for the great comment, as always! I know I still owe you a reply to the other. I've had it bookmarked since I first read it, and I think I'll get to it tonight!
My concentrated, yet still somehow intangible gratitude for being willing to allot enough to time to clear out the various points of interest for me ! Your answers rendered this constructed world much easier to grasp on the surface, and increased the magnitude of potential depth to its finer points by an order or two.
including one that accommodates the idea of the citizenry as kemonomimi - where the creatures wear "city faces"
If it's not asking too much, could you expound on that idea a little more ? With the species-people connections as strong as they apparently are in your setting, it would be highly interesting to learn what sort of technology would something like what you mentioned require, and how much cultural impact would it make.
At casual dabbling, fantasy allow a writer to exploit a common understanding (however accurate) of past societies, so they can shorthand the development of their society with homages to Rome or China or Tudor England, etc.
Shorthanding can be accidental or deliberate: a fantasy writer desiring certain traits and flavour from the fictional race being created would be wasting time not to bite into the rich and colourful template of real life cultures sharing these traits; a business-minded author would likewise be remiss not to tap into the recognition factor of exploiting the venerated aspects of foreign and archeological mystique. I used to fear borrowing from the popular national trope-clusters, but time has proven it to be the optimal way for casual games of creation.
When you wade a bit deeper, though, the fantasy nerd-dom can become oppressive
The standards are quite high in that regard, since a number of professional historians and scientists have at some point in their lives given in to the appeal of literary fame, producing some classic pieces in the process and forever shaming the amateur aspirants in the field. Works belonging to all levels of scientific hardness and historical accuracy have their audiences, so it's all a part of natural saturation of the bibliosphere. I guess.
the last story I wrote with a furry society before I sat down and though I needed to think up something I can reuse and put characters into
It is an inspiring thing to learn that a pragmatic bid for organizing the creative toolbox could lead to a large and elaborate independent project coming into existence. 'Independent' in the sense of its self-contained worth, not its lack of applicability.
In the farm setting Eleanor, she's someone else's cow, and I can't really imagine that fitting modern, canon Eleanor at all.
If it's been negotiated with the character's owner, then I will have to defer to the consensus. The barn version of the notorious bovine does indeed feel like a stand-alone interpretation with less depth and opportunities than her corporate self, and it was her throwaway confession to lacking a citizenship license in "A Rainy Day" that greenlighted the train of thought heading for the "Self-made success story with a past so humble no one would believe it if they were told" station. If that out of scope owner of Eleanor's farm version was willing to cut her so much slack as to allow a chance disappearance of favourite unit of livestock in return for her productivity, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine her moving on to bigger, greater things after an episode of wanderlust - a safety measure sufficient to restrain her would be difficult to conceive, after all. But even if that connection is lost, the Grassland setting would likely be capable of sustaining a similar scenario with a different character.
wrinkle to the setting
A nice descriptor, that.
When I write in this setting, I intentionally use the term 'creatures' to refer to people.
The hints you've dropped are enough to generate the fog of mystique composing the past wall of the setting's parallelepiped box. In an another limited world of mine, a society of anthropomorphic animals a couple million strong were placed on a offworld terraforming colony, with implanted memories of belonging to genuine, honestly-evolved furry cultures separated from their motherfleet after a jump drive malfunction. But really, the entire settlement was a biological refinery, covertly supervised and harvested.
It is an idea that I cherish in relation to justifying how animal people could come to be: a loophole exploited by the pharmaceutists and biochemists of the future where they get the opportunity for legal human experimentation provided they'd spliced the grown organism with enough alien traits to disqualify them as humans; after that, it's the usual cycle of accumulation of sub-citizens that either rise up in rebellion or assimilate peacefully.
Insects are often kept as pets
Should your collages of people-like invertebrates be used as reference when trying to picture these insects ? Are fish creatures of your setting equally blessed with erect posture, binocular vision and opposing thumbs ? And what of their average sizes compared to the mammalian norms ?
It is a chilling thought that a highly humanized creature could be non-sentient and relegated to the role of pets and cattle, but it is also a helpful one in that it gives more depth to the predation controversy, providing some important arguments in its favour. It also strengthens the consistency of this world, for it is more believable to accept cannibalism as a shade of natural dietary forays if the only thing that separates conventional food from fellow citizens is a couple feet in height and a different external texture, the latter being that much less of a factor in this world of tremendous phenotypical variety among the sapients.
Hamburgers made of Grasslands beef are an expensive luxury.
This touch of elitist connotations surrounding the real, premium, first grade, top notch, unsullied Ambrosia-can-go-rot-in-the-darkest-corner-of-the-fridge type of meat injects some welcome decadence into the underworkings of your setting, since in addition to finding it more palatable than the alternatives, the masses - even those staunchly opposed to predation and butchery on a moral level - also view those practices as something inherently top echelon, and as such - a coveted thing for any person of ambition. That way an average citizen with less chances of winding up on somebody else's menu would be perpetually oscillating between contempt and envy for the meat-eaters.
It's not possible in the case of, say, an alligator and a raccoon...
If certain species combinations were known to be sterile in this world, I suppose it would lead to the increase of such unions' popularity among the more open-minded people of the Capital Cities, even though the interbreeding in general is looked down on.
The reason you gave for the popular disdain towards mixed families is great in that it leave the door open, but hangs a notice that it's been tried before, and it isn't pretty. In addition to explaining the taboo, it also makes the world's general racism-speciism more understandable and sensible.
If you made this up, congratulations...
Can't really tell if I did(the memory is a very cluttered open-air attic downstairs), but it was based on the name of an old game(which I didn't get to play back in its time, but which apparently is most worthy), not the general concept/expression. But I'll accept your compliment either way.
Khanate could potentially be my favorite setting in this world
I am glad that you didn't relegate that state to the role of an amorphous hive of hostility against which the rest of the significant world-shapers play. The Khanate also stands out from its peers in that the way it has been described so far, it has less obvious real world cultural influences than the rest, unless the yak tribesmen are supposed to eponymously be Mongol stand-ins. In any case, the territories they'd overwhelmed present an bountiful smorgasbord of flavors to draw from, including the Ancient China's red dragons and isolated, yet advanced culture, India's affluent kingdoms swimming in lush wildlife, Russia's rugged ethos suspended between vastly different peoples on either border, or Arabic heights of ancient science, sociology and arts.
There is a semi-robust philosophical underpinning there, but in terms of this question, perhaps it suffices to say that the descriptor "better" should be read as tongue-in-cheek, where the resultant effects on Albion should be read as practical consequences as imaged through the lenses of a Capital Cities Citizen?
Thank you separately for the paragraph containing the above quoted segment, since even though it was too deep for me to fully comprehend, it was none the less beautifully worded. My reaction wasn't precisely that of justice-seeking scorn, but more of a data-mining drive picking up a peculiar judgmental phrasing that might lead to something interesting if the author would oblige with a response. I could have just as well picked the Albion's act of driving the predators out, inquiring if the consequent rumors of the closed island community's decay were an indication of mixed predator and prey collectives being more viable than any attempts at total segregation along those lines.
It has all the social grace of smoking over your new baby's crib.
The legal vagueness and uncertainty surrounding the issue were all explained in a firmly convincing way with, relatable for anyone socially aware enough to pick up the analogies in the waking world. The fact that what amounts to murdering other individuals is treated as a massive faux pas in this world also spoke volumes of how adept have the settings' denizens become at compartmentalizing; if the act of predation is perpetrated legally, the immediate reaction of the ones playing audience to the predator's confession isn't that of projection of the possible repeat offenses against themselves, but just a disgust at the confessing party's cleanliness being compromised - especially if the discussion group in question is composed of citizens. If you play by the book and pay your taxes, predation is something that happens to other people, with the transgressors being no more worthy of a place in a polite conversation than a drunk driver - it is a very fortunate integration of common everyday civil apathy(or rather, highly selective involvement) into the fictional sanctioned slaughter machine.
I honestly haven't thought too much about Free Albion in the last 50 years
This line had made me go It's-full-of-stars! in regards to the question of your age, but then the confusion was cleared out.
vvv continued below vvv
including one that accommodates the idea of the citizenry as kemonomimi - where the creatures wear "city faces"
If it's not asking too much, could you expound on that idea a little more ? With the species-people connections as strong as they apparently are in your setting, it would be highly interesting to learn what sort of technology would something like what you mentioned require, and how much cultural impact would it make.
At casual dabbling, fantasy allow a writer to exploit a common understanding (however accurate) of past societies, so they can shorthand the development of their society with homages to Rome or China or Tudor England, etc.
Shorthanding can be accidental or deliberate: a fantasy writer desiring certain traits and flavour from the fictional race being created would be wasting time not to bite into the rich and colourful template of real life cultures sharing these traits; a business-minded author would likewise be remiss not to tap into the recognition factor of exploiting the venerated aspects of foreign and archeological mystique. I used to fear borrowing from the popular national trope-clusters, but time has proven it to be the optimal way for casual games of creation.
When you wade a bit deeper, though, the fantasy nerd-dom can become oppressive
The standards are quite high in that regard, since a number of professional historians and scientists have at some point in their lives given in to the appeal of literary fame, producing some classic pieces in the process and forever shaming the amateur aspirants in the field. Works belonging to all levels of scientific hardness and historical accuracy have their audiences, so it's all a part of natural saturation of the bibliosphere. I guess.
the last story I wrote with a furry society before I sat down and though I needed to think up something I can reuse and put characters into
It is an inspiring thing to learn that a pragmatic bid for organizing the creative toolbox could lead to a large and elaborate independent project coming into existence. 'Independent' in the sense of its self-contained worth, not its lack of applicability.
In the farm setting Eleanor, she's someone else's cow, and I can't really imagine that fitting modern, canon Eleanor at all.
If it's been negotiated with the character's owner, then I will have to defer to the consensus. The barn version of the notorious bovine does indeed feel like a stand-alone interpretation with less depth and opportunities than her corporate self, and it was her throwaway confession to lacking a citizenship license in "A Rainy Day" that greenlighted the train of thought heading for the "Self-made success story with a past so humble no one would believe it if they were told" station. If that out of scope owner of Eleanor's farm version was willing to cut her so much slack as to allow a chance disappearance of favourite unit of livestock in return for her productivity, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine her moving on to bigger, greater things after an episode of wanderlust - a safety measure sufficient to restrain her would be difficult to conceive, after all. But even if that connection is lost, the Grassland setting would likely be capable of sustaining a similar scenario with a different character.
wrinkle to the setting
A nice descriptor, that.
When I write in this setting, I intentionally use the term 'creatures' to refer to people.
The hints you've dropped are enough to generate the fog of mystique composing the past wall of the setting's parallelepiped box. In an another limited world of mine, a society of anthropomorphic animals a couple million strong were placed on a offworld terraforming colony, with implanted memories of belonging to genuine, honestly-evolved furry cultures separated from their motherfleet after a jump drive malfunction. But really, the entire settlement was a biological refinery, covertly supervised and harvested.
It is an idea that I cherish in relation to justifying how animal people could come to be: a loophole exploited by the pharmaceutists and biochemists of the future where they get the opportunity for legal human experimentation provided they'd spliced the grown organism with enough alien traits to disqualify them as humans; after that, it's the usual cycle of accumulation of sub-citizens that either rise up in rebellion or assimilate peacefully.
Insects are often kept as pets
Should your collages of people-like invertebrates be used as reference when trying to picture these insects ? Are fish creatures of your setting equally blessed with erect posture, binocular vision and opposing thumbs ? And what of their average sizes compared to the mammalian norms ?
It is a chilling thought that a highly humanized creature could be non-sentient and relegated to the role of pets and cattle, but it is also a helpful one in that it gives more depth to the predation controversy, providing some important arguments in its favour. It also strengthens the consistency of this world, for it is more believable to accept cannibalism as a shade of natural dietary forays if the only thing that separates conventional food from fellow citizens is a couple feet in height and a different external texture, the latter being that much less of a factor in this world of tremendous phenotypical variety among the sapients.
Hamburgers made of Grasslands beef are an expensive luxury.
This touch of elitist connotations surrounding the real, premium, first grade, top notch, unsullied Ambrosia-can-go-rot-in-the-darkest-corner-of-the-fridge type of meat injects some welcome decadence into the underworkings of your setting, since in addition to finding it more palatable than the alternatives, the masses - even those staunchly opposed to predation and butchery on a moral level - also view those practices as something inherently top echelon, and as such - a coveted thing for any person of ambition. That way an average citizen with less chances of winding up on somebody else's menu would be perpetually oscillating between contempt and envy for the meat-eaters.
It's not possible in the case of, say, an alligator and a raccoon...
If certain species combinations were known to be sterile in this world, I suppose it would lead to the increase of such unions' popularity among the more open-minded people of the Capital Cities, even though the interbreeding in general is looked down on.
The reason you gave for the popular disdain towards mixed families is great in that it leave the door open, but hangs a notice that it's been tried before, and it isn't pretty. In addition to explaining the taboo, it also makes the world's general racism-speciism more understandable and sensible.
If you made this up, congratulations...
Can't really tell if I did(the memory is a very cluttered open-air attic downstairs), but it was based on the name of an old game(which I didn't get to play back in its time, but which apparently is most worthy), not the general concept/expression. But I'll accept your compliment either way.
Khanate could potentially be my favorite setting in this world
I am glad that you didn't relegate that state to the role of an amorphous hive of hostility against which the rest of the significant world-shapers play. The Khanate also stands out from its peers in that the way it has been described so far, it has less obvious real world cultural influences than the rest, unless the yak tribesmen are supposed to eponymously be Mongol stand-ins. In any case, the territories they'd overwhelmed present an bountiful smorgasbord of flavors to draw from, including the Ancient China's red dragons and isolated, yet advanced culture, India's affluent kingdoms swimming in lush wildlife, Russia's rugged ethos suspended between vastly different peoples on either border, or Arabic heights of ancient science, sociology and arts.
There is a semi-robust philosophical underpinning there, but in terms of this question, perhaps it suffices to say that the descriptor "better" should be read as tongue-in-cheek, where the resultant effects on Albion should be read as practical consequences as imaged through the lenses of a Capital Cities Citizen?
Thank you separately for the paragraph containing the above quoted segment, since even though it was too deep for me to fully comprehend, it was none the less beautifully worded. My reaction wasn't precisely that of justice-seeking scorn, but more of a data-mining drive picking up a peculiar judgmental phrasing that might lead to something interesting if the author would oblige with a response. I could have just as well picked the Albion's act of driving the predators out, inquiring if the consequent rumors of the closed island community's decay were an indication of mixed predator and prey collectives being more viable than any attempts at total segregation along those lines.
It has all the social grace of smoking over your new baby's crib.
The legal vagueness and uncertainty surrounding the issue were all explained in a firmly convincing way with, relatable for anyone socially aware enough to pick up the analogies in the waking world. The fact that what amounts to murdering other individuals is treated as a massive faux pas in this world also spoke volumes of how adept have the settings' denizens become at compartmentalizing; if the act of predation is perpetrated legally, the immediate reaction of the ones playing audience to the predator's confession isn't that of projection of the possible repeat offenses against themselves, but just a disgust at the confessing party's cleanliness being compromised - especially if the discussion group in question is composed of citizens. If you play by the book and pay your taxes, predation is something that happens to other people, with the transgressors being no more worthy of a place in a polite conversation than a drunk driver - it is a very fortunate integration of common everyday civil apathy(or rather, highly selective involvement) into the fictional sanctioned slaughter machine.
I honestly haven't thought too much about Free Albion in the last 50 years
This line had made me go It's-full-of-stars! in regards to the question of your age, but then the confusion was cleared out.
vvv continued below vvv
They have hacked the needs of the Capital Cities and provided them an alternative to NIMBY.
First, my gratitude for working that last acronym into my wax political vocabulary.
It is all highly believable, too, for a state with a pointedly liberal and, well, benign public rhetoric to outsource the darker mechanics of its social framework elsewhere - it's been done all around the globe, after all. The dog-wagging argument is also worth considering, since for all their other failings, strong planned economy dictatorships don't lack in focus and efficiency of execution *pause for audience laughter*, whereas democracies thrive when grouped with like-minded regimes that don't breech diplomatic tact, and take a lot of time to implement any meaningful change or drastic policy. And all the worse for the Capital Cities, the encroaching collective is more than rampantly socialist - it is also frighteningly business-savvy. Still, I suppose the current beacon of civilization in your worlds would have time to draw the line before it is co-opted utterly.
They keep the idea of meat fresh on the public's collective mind, where it can be burned in effigy and make everyone's mouth water for the taste of barbecue.
Immaculately put !
The percent of the population affected on a monthly basis is fairly miniscule
I hadn't thought of that one obvious thing - that in order for the collective to self-propagate, the lottery couldn't be allowed to prune more than a certain rather low number of individuals. However, the half of the population natural decline numbers must be contributing to the meat industry, unless my understanding of how gender policies work for Grasslanders is severely imperfect. In that case, it would amount to quite a bulk of butchered biomass - much more than the lottery would be netting, I imagine. It appears that I would benefit greatly from a bit of clarification about whether the Grasslands collective has any males that escape the usual breeding stock monastic conscription funnel; the way it stands, it would seem that the state lottery is only a gamble for females, with the males' chances being a nadir constant. My doubts essentially coalesce into wondering whether Grasslands males can be full citizens at all ?
There are certainly those who bitterly oppose going to theirs, but the society promotes celebrating it as 'going out with a bang' instead, and people buy into that (...) I actually envisioned it as being opt-in, like citizenship in the Capital Cities (and modeled on them, in a way).
Thanks to your explanation, I've finally stopped trying to squeeze the hexagonal peg of the Grasslands' entrenched ideology into the triangular hole of generic Westernese mindset. Since instead of dreading the steep price of their lives' stellar quality, the collective embrace and prize it, the Capital Cities' neighbour really starts appearing as more of a triumphant conceptually-constructed society that boasts healthier chemistry of its citizenry(national solidarity and all that jazz) than its counterparts despite the ominous unorthodoxy in their approaches.
espousing conservative economics here
The last year's Republican caucus-conservative, or the British Golden Standard-conservative ? The trickle-down notion can be more commonly seen voiced by the rightists, as far as I'm aware, with the trickling party being the self-made Scrooge McDucks; the government's amassing and distributing of wealth is something more befitting the monarchies of old and the Eurasian socialistic ventures of not so old.
Famously even government leaders are
Famously
I applaud your audacity in assigning the notability values to a project that in many ways still remains obscured to the world; there's really no greater testament to the constructed setting's self-reliance than having every momentous phenomenon meet with an appropriate reaction from the world's simulated denizens.
<grin> I like the concept! I'm particularly partial to the idea of predation on the 'undeserving' though; I'd love it if a story like that involved a case of bad paperwork, and the person visited actually had an account in good status.
Well, no one said anything about that banking system being completely fair or ulteriorly unambitious. A covert subsidiary of the bank could keep itself busy running a catering service for the discerning diners, with the ledger of all of the bank's clients repurposed as a dish menu, complete with each account owner's detailed personal information; after a selection is made, a group of employees of that catering business would make necessary arrangements with the bank proper, and set out to influence the unaware person's life in the subtlest of ways. After less than a week's worth of unfortunate accidents, the selected individual would all of a sudden wind up with a long list of expenses, and a grinning clerk waiting at the bank advisory desk, more than eager to extend the payment threshold almost indefinitely, with just a few amendments to the initial accounting contract. Amendments in question would include a timidly worded clause suggesting that as a redundancy preparation measure for the most unlikely event of the the punitive collection policies being put in action, the account owner should take certain steps to facilitate and enhance the collecting agent's job performance - steps like putting on a few pounds of taking up yoga, all the while using a certain set of skin and hair treatment products.
And after a week more, the unfortunate is desperately buying one more day after another by agreeing to the increasingly candid requests of from the bank, bringing the meal-to-be ever closer to the diner's specified preferences, until the day that the grinning clerk would shrug his shoulders, saying that there's simply nothing he could do to move the collection date past tomorrow.
That is not to say that I consider a person saddled with a bad credit a 'deserving' victim, especially given the widespread less than ethical banking policies that exploit the clientele obviously unable to earn their way out of the debt pit. But yes, the bad paper work and the fine print are both good friends to any writer digging into the deal with the devil scenario.
It can be inferred from your description that the *males* especially prop up the disparity in gender demographics...
(an auto-quotation)
The asterisked word should have been 'slaves', of course - my bad.
the voluntary nature of the meat is what makes it so palatable to the people of the Capital Cities.
A certain scene from "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" comes to mind.
Two more quick questions, even though I've already stretched all limits of correspondental hospitality beyond anything imaginable.
Do the basic mechanics of predation in your setting incline towards the soft of the hard side of the spectrum ? Is the degree of devouring act's hardness situational between hunts, or is either form overwhelmingly more common than the other ?
Next up, while your elaborations on the four states were wonderfully exhaustive, they only dealt with culture, general advancement and trade, and the brutish specter of industrial warfare demands to know of such aspects as relative mineral abundance and military capabilities of each of the major players in your world. For instance, while the today's USA is both a military superpower and a major cultural influence on the rest of the world, many smaller states had enjoyed the status of a scientific or artistic fountainhead without a vast army to support it. But since you mentioned The Grasslands relying on The Capital Cities for protection, it would seem that the East Coast of your setting has both the know-how and the muscle to milk it. The Albion is being all mysterious, and the Khanate apparently prevails by grit and numbers, with some fortunate management policies to duct tape it all together.
That is all for now. Thank you for reading and responding ! You world is a delight to ponder about.
First, my gratitude for working that last acronym into my wax political vocabulary.
It is all highly believable, too, for a state with a pointedly liberal and, well, benign public rhetoric to outsource the darker mechanics of its social framework elsewhere - it's been done all around the globe, after all. The dog-wagging argument is also worth considering, since for all their other failings, strong planned economy dictatorships don't lack in focus and efficiency of execution *pause for audience laughter*, whereas democracies thrive when grouped with like-minded regimes that don't breech diplomatic tact, and take a lot of time to implement any meaningful change or drastic policy. And all the worse for the Capital Cities, the encroaching collective is more than rampantly socialist - it is also frighteningly business-savvy. Still, I suppose the current beacon of civilization in your worlds would have time to draw the line before it is co-opted utterly.
They keep the idea of meat fresh on the public's collective mind, where it can be burned in effigy and make everyone's mouth water for the taste of barbecue.
Immaculately put !
The percent of the population affected on a monthly basis is fairly miniscule
I hadn't thought of that one obvious thing - that in order for the collective to self-propagate, the lottery couldn't be allowed to prune more than a certain rather low number of individuals. However, the half of the population natural decline numbers must be contributing to the meat industry, unless my understanding of how gender policies work for Grasslanders is severely imperfect. In that case, it would amount to quite a bulk of butchered biomass - much more than the lottery would be netting, I imagine. It appears that I would benefit greatly from a bit of clarification about whether the Grasslands collective has any males that escape the usual breeding stock monastic conscription funnel; the way it stands, it would seem that the state lottery is only a gamble for females, with the males' chances being a nadir constant. My doubts essentially coalesce into wondering whether Grasslands males can be full citizens at all ?
There are certainly those who bitterly oppose going to theirs, but the society promotes celebrating it as 'going out with a bang' instead, and people buy into that (...) I actually envisioned it as being opt-in, like citizenship in the Capital Cities (and modeled on them, in a way).
Thanks to your explanation, I've finally stopped trying to squeeze the hexagonal peg of the Grasslands' entrenched ideology into the triangular hole of generic Westernese mindset. Since instead of dreading the steep price of their lives' stellar quality, the collective embrace and prize it, the Capital Cities' neighbour really starts appearing as more of a triumphant conceptually-constructed society that boasts healthier chemistry of its citizenry(national solidarity and all that jazz) than its counterparts despite the ominous unorthodoxy in their approaches.
espousing conservative economics here
The last year's Republican caucus-conservative, or the British Golden Standard-conservative ? The trickle-down notion can be more commonly seen voiced by the rightists, as far as I'm aware, with the trickling party being the self-made Scrooge McDucks; the government's amassing and distributing of wealth is something more befitting the monarchies of old and the Eurasian socialistic ventures of not so old.
Famously even government leaders are
Famously
I applaud your audacity in assigning the notability values to a project that in many ways still remains obscured to the world; there's really no greater testament to the constructed setting's self-reliance than having every momentous phenomenon meet with an appropriate reaction from the world's simulated denizens.
<grin> I like the concept! I'm particularly partial to the idea of predation on the 'undeserving' though; I'd love it if a story like that involved a case of bad paperwork, and the person visited actually had an account in good status.
Well, no one said anything about that banking system being completely fair or ulteriorly unambitious. A covert subsidiary of the bank could keep itself busy running a catering service for the discerning diners, with the ledger of all of the bank's clients repurposed as a dish menu, complete with each account owner's detailed personal information; after a selection is made, a group of employees of that catering business would make necessary arrangements with the bank proper, and set out to influence the unaware person's life in the subtlest of ways. After less than a week's worth of unfortunate accidents, the selected individual would all of a sudden wind up with a long list of expenses, and a grinning clerk waiting at the bank advisory desk, more than eager to extend the payment threshold almost indefinitely, with just a few amendments to the initial accounting contract. Amendments in question would include a timidly worded clause suggesting that as a redundancy preparation measure for the most unlikely event of the the punitive collection policies being put in action, the account owner should take certain steps to facilitate and enhance the collecting agent's job performance - steps like putting on a few pounds of taking up yoga, all the while using a certain set of skin and hair treatment products.
And after a week more, the unfortunate is desperately buying one more day after another by agreeing to the increasingly candid requests of from the bank, bringing the meal-to-be ever closer to the diner's specified preferences, until the day that the grinning clerk would shrug his shoulders, saying that there's simply nothing he could do to move the collection date past tomorrow.
That is not to say that I consider a person saddled with a bad credit a 'deserving' victim, especially given the widespread less than ethical banking policies that exploit the clientele obviously unable to earn their way out of the debt pit. But yes, the bad paper work and the fine print are both good friends to any writer digging into the deal with the devil scenario.
It can be inferred from your description that the *males* especially prop up the disparity in gender demographics...
(an auto-quotation)
The asterisked word should have been 'slaves', of course - my bad.
the voluntary nature of the meat is what makes it so palatable to the people of the Capital Cities.
A certain scene from "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" comes to mind.
Two more quick questions, even though I've already stretched all limits of correspondental hospitality beyond anything imaginable.
Do the basic mechanics of predation in your setting incline towards the soft of the hard side of the spectrum ? Is the degree of devouring act's hardness situational between hunts, or is either form overwhelmingly more common than the other ?
Next up, while your elaborations on the four states were wonderfully exhaustive, they only dealt with culture, general advancement and trade, and the brutish specter of industrial warfare demands to know of such aspects as relative mineral abundance and military capabilities of each of the major players in your world. For instance, while the today's USA is both a military superpower and a major cultural influence on the rest of the world, many smaller states had enjoyed the status of a scientific or artistic fountainhead without a vast army to support it. But since you mentioned The Grasslands relying on The Capital Cities for protection, it would seem that the East Coast of your setting has both the know-how and the muscle to milk it. The Albion is being all mysterious, and the Khanate apparently prevails by grit and numbers, with some fortunate management policies to duct tape it all together.
That is all for now. Thank you for reading and responding ! You world is a delight to ponder about.
Hello again! Thanks for your continued comments - I love them! I'm going to forego replying to everything, though. I really appreciated all the comments, but mostly I'm just going to answer the questions (not because I don't want to encourage ongoing conversation - I'm just short on time and energy and looking to be moreso soon - but please feel free to continue replying if you have further questions or comments!)
>>including one that accommodates the idea of the citizenry as kemonomimi - where the creatures wear "city faces"
If it's not asking too much, could you expound on that idea a little more ? With the species-people connections as strong as they apparently are in your setting, it would be highly interesting to learn what sort of technology would something like what you mentioned require, and how much cultural impact would it make.
Oh, I really haven't thought this through all the carefully. Historically, there was a sapient society of dinosaurs - a single species that rose to prominance - probably raptors - of which there are no remaining traces, but who became somewhat humanoid. They were visited by an alien civilization, who found them to be generally unpleasant and unfit for galactic society, and wiped them out to the last one rather than let them develop into a space-faring society (they'd already gotten about as far into space as we have).
But rather than leave the planet to have to restart sapience from the ground up, they fiddled around with virus that would capture some of the homonidity of this sapient race and re-insert it into anything with DNA. It didn't take with a lot of species (and completely failed outside of anamalia), but they were generally out-competed and overwhelmed by the species it -did- take in.
Overall, the traits those genes expressed became sexually selected for in general, as intelligence, bipedalism, and hand dexterity went along with them, and so we see a significant overlap between homonidity and cultures where lack of aggression and intelligence have been promoted - i.e. especially in the Capital Cities (but also the Khanate, and more recently, the Grasslands. This has given rise to the term "City faces", and it's also a way to discriminate against non-city- folk, who tend to look more like generic anthros.
Should your collages of people-like invertebrates be used as reference when trying to picture these insects ? Are fish creatures of your setting equally blessed with erect posture, binocular vision and opposing thumbs ? And what of their average sizes compared to the mammalian norms ?
I hadn't thought too much about it, but overall my imagination leaned more toward the insects being still very insectoid, with only a little bit of anthropomorphization, so probably not as far as those drawings I posted more recently. They belong to an entirely different setting. :)
With the fish-people, yes - they tend to be more anthropomorphized. In the Kemonomimi setting, it was normal to fish-for and eat mermaids. :D
Sizes, though, are relative to original species size. It's not perfect - there's some normalization toward human sized, but a mouse character might stand a foot tall, and an elephant 12 feet. There's references to "Classes" through the setting - Class A being about house-cat and down, Class B being about large dog and down, and Class C being deer, bovines, etc. (with rarely used Class D's for the elephant type. Housing, public transportation, work accommodations, vehicles, etc, all operate in terms of these classes, so you don't generally have a class A sized competing in traffic with the big Class C refrigerated trucks coming out of the Grasslands.
I am glad that you didn't relegate that state to the role of an amorphous hive of hostility against which the rest of the significant world-shapers play. The Khanate also stands out from its peers in that the way it has been described so far, it has less obvious real world cultural influences than the rest, unless the yak tribesmen are supposed to eponymously be Mongol stand-ins.
It is actually fairly heavily based on the Golden Horde - or at least HG Wells interpretation of them. He wrote an excellent history of the world which I enjoyed immensely, but I'm not sure how accurate it's considered now.
Thank you separately for the paragraph containing the above quoted segment, since even though it was too deep for me to fully comprehend, it was none the less beautifully worded.
I'm sure that has much more to do with my unintentional obfuscation than any deep thought on my part!
And all the worse for the Capital Cities, the encroaching collective is more than rampantly socialist - it is also frighteningly business-savvy. Still, I suppose the current beacon of civilization in your worlds would have time to draw the line before it is co-opted utterly.
Yes! I wonder what's going to happen here. Long-term, I suspect dissolution of the cities in separate polities, and potentially some civil war. The grasslands, at that point, may be powerful enough to step in and extend their influence to reverse the patron-client relationship, but their current model doesn't allow for them to be the patron - they need a wealthy client. Perhaps they'll develop a relationship with the more stable Khanate. Perhaps some new player modeling on the Capital Cities will have arisen by then. The African "gold coast", the South American East Coast, and the Pacific Northwest are all sufficiently rife with resources that predation may not be overwhelming and more complex states could arise.
I hadn't thought of that one obvious thing - that in order for the collective to self-propagate, the lottery couldn't be allowed to prune more than a certain rather low number of individuals. However, the half of the population natural decline numbers must be contributing to the meat industry, unless my understanding of how gender policies work for Grasslanders is severely imperfect. In that case, it would amount to quite a bulk of butchered biomass - much more than the lottery would be netting, I imagine. It appears that I would benefit greatly from a bit of clarification about whether the Grasslands collective has any males that escape the usual breeding stock monastic conscription funnel; the way it stands, it would seem that the state lottery is only a gamble for females, with the males' chances being a nadir constant. My doubts essentially coalesce into wondering whether Grasslands males can be full citizens at all ?
In 1950, the US had an overall mortality rate of ~9.6% (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art.....00184-0087.pdf) In the grasslands, the birth rate, infant survival rate and the overall health are higher than 1950's US. I'd suggest the overall death rate due butchering is ~5% among citizens, with a high peak right around middle age when they are at the end of their viable meat period, and then a fairly lenghthy tail for survivors. I haven't done the math, but I think that's a pretty large quantity of meat, and a fairly sustainable rate.
Males born to female citizens are automatically full citizens, and automatically entered into the conscription funnel and sanctioned away with the other males. Citizenship does -not- confer voting rights necessarily - it confers participation in the benefits and protections offered by society. Government is not exactly representational - it's sort of a modified clan/republican system.
Males of acceptable species born non-citizens occasionally join up - the life of a male citizen is mythologized, after all - but generally speaking, joiners are "young, dumb, and full of cum".
The last year's Republican caucus-conservative, or the British Golden Standard-conservative ?
Good question! Politics and I have had a nasty divorce. Probabaly post-Reaganism conservatism (where Reagan is treated like Jesus - it's more important what we -think- he said and did, rather than what really said and did). Either way, I'd reckon conservative economics and I don't see eye-to-eye, though I'm not confident that speaks well of me. I'm a bit flippant where economics is concerned.
... That is not to say that I consider a person saddled with a bad credit a 'deserving' victim, especially given the widespread less than ethical banking policies that exploit the clientele obviously unable to earn their way out of the debt pit.
Ah, yes! I do like that scenario. And yes, I agree with you. I suppose what I should say is that I most enjoy vore when the victim is chosen because of predatory activity rather than accidentally volunteering in one way or another.
It can be inferred from your description that the *males* especially prop up the disparity in gender demographics...
The asterisked word should have been 'slaves', of course - my bad.
Oh! In that case, to some degree, yes. But not as much as you might think. There's a bit of a built-in public approval for female homosexuality, as we see with male homosexuality among many of the ancient Greeks.
Two more quick questions, even though I've already stretched all limits of correspondental hospitality beyond anything imaginable.
Not at all! I love questions!
Do the basic mechanics of predation in your setting incline towards the soft of the hard side of the spectrum ? Is the degree of devouring act's hardness situational between hunts, or is either form overwhelmingly more common than the other ?
I'll give you a different answer now than I would have when I was building this setting. When I was building this setting, soft vore -was- vore. Hard vore was a edge case. I didn't have any real justification for it; it was just an expectation of the setting. In the last 8 months or so I've had something of a sea change in this regard. Part of that is due to shifting tastes, and part of that is just releasing a sacred cow to go frolic in other people's fields. I wouldn't push hard vore on other people, and so won't likely heavily advertise it, but in my mind it's the default method of eating for most creatures, and there's no reason, including because of the fetish, to assume otherwise.
Next up, while your elaborations on the four states were wonderfully exhaustive, they only dealt with culture, general advancement and trade, and the brutish specter of industrial warfare demands to know of such aspects as relative mineral abundance and military capabilities of each of the major players in your world... But since you mentioned The Grasslands relying on The Capital Cities for protection, it would seem that the East Coast of your setting has both the know-how and the muscle to milk it. The Albion is being all mysterious, and the Khanate apparently prevails by grit and numbers, with some fortunate management policies to duct tape it all together.
Generally speaking, the Khanate and Albion should be consdered to be at between late renaissance to early Industrial levels of technology, suddenly receiving cast-off automatic weapons in fire sales. It's not a stable situation, and I reckon it is part of what will undermine Free Albion sooner rather than later. Mineral availability should match what we find in our version of the world, except that mining practices are behind the curve except in a few of the Capital Cities. This technology is rapidly trying to catch up around the world, and the trade network to keep up with that. Imagine the rest of the world like China trying to keep up with the West, and then multiply that by about five, as the trade network (while always existing to some degree) is coming -after- the technological expansion instead of before it. There was no British Empire to preceed the technological explosion in the Capital Cities.
>>including one that accommodates the idea of the citizenry as kemonomimi - where the creatures wear "city faces"
If it's not asking too much, could you expound on that idea a little more ? With the species-people connections as strong as they apparently are in your setting, it would be highly interesting to learn what sort of technology would something like what you mentioned require, and how much cultural impact would it make.
Oh, I really haven't thought this through all the carefully. Historically, there was a sapient society of dinosaurs - a single species that rose to prominance - probably raptors - of which there are no remaining traces, but who became somewhat humanoid. They were visited by an alien civilization, who found them to be generally unpleasant and unfit for galactic society, and wiped them out to the last one rather than let them develop into a space-faring society (they'd already gotten about as far into space as we have).
But rather than leave the planet to have to restart sapience from the ground up, they fiddled around with virus that would capture some of the homonidity of this sapient race and re-insert it into anything with DNA. It didn't take with a lot of species (and completely failed outside of anamalia), but they were generally out-competed and overwhelmed by the species it -did- take in.
Overall, the traits those genes expressed became sexually selected for in general, as intelligence, bipedalism, and hand dexterity went along with them, and so we see a significant overlap between homonidity and cultures where lack of aggression and intelligence have been promoted - i.e. especially in the Capital Cities (but also the Khanate, and more recently, the Grasslands. This has given rise to the term "City faces", and it's also a way to discriminate against non-city- folk, who tend to look more like generic anthros.
Should your collages of people-like invertebrates be used as reference when trying to picture these insects ? Are fish creatures of your setting equally blessed with erect posture, binocular vision and opposing thumbs ? And what of their average sizes compared to the mammalian norms ?
I hadn't thought too much about it, but overall my imagination leaned more toward the insects being still very insectoid, with only a little bit of anthropomorphization, so probably not as far as those drawings I posted more recently. They belong to an entirely different setting. :)
With the fish-people, yes - they tend to be more anthropomorphized. In the Kemonomimi setting, it was normal to fish-for and eat mermaids. :D
Sizes, though, are relative to original species size. It's not perfect - there's some normalization toward human sized, but a mouse character might stand a foot tall, and an elephant 12 feet. There's references to "Classes" through the setting - Class A being about house-cat and down, Class B being about large dog and down, and Class C being deer, bovines, etc. (with rarely used Class D's for the elephant type. Housing, public transportation, work accommodations, vehicles, etc, all operate in terms of these classes, so you don't generally have a class A sized competing in traffic with the big Class C refrigerated trucks coming out of the Grasslands.
I am glad that you didn't relegate that state to the role of an amorphous hive of hostility against which the rest of the significant world-shapers play. The Khanate also stands out from its peers in that the way it has been described so far, it has less obvious real world cultural influences than the rest, unless the yak tribesmen are supposed to eponymously be Mongol stand-ins.
It is actually fairly heavily based on the Golden Horde - or at least HG Wells interpretation of them. He wrote an excellent history of the world which I enjoyed immensely, but I'm not sure how accurate it's considered now.
Thank you separately for the paragraph containing the above quoted segment, since even though it was too deep for me to fully comprehend, it was none the less beautifully worded.
I'm sure that has much more to do with my unintentional obfuscation than any deep thought on my part!
And all the worse for the Capital Cities, the encroaching collective is more than rampantly socialist - it is also frighteningly business-savvy. Still, I suppose the current beacon of civilization in your worlds would have time to draw the line before it is co-opted utterly.
Yes! I wonder what's going to happen here. Long-term, I suspect dissolution of the cities in separate polities, and potentially some civil war. The grasslands, at that point, may be powerful enough to step in and extend their influence to reverse the patron-client relationship, but their current model doesn't allow for them to be the patron - they need a wealthy client. Perhaps they'll develop a relationship with the more stable Khanate. Perhaps some new player modeling on the Capital Cities will have arisen by then. The African "gold coast", the South American East Coast, and the Pacific Northwest are all sufficiently rife with resources that predation may not be overwhelming and more complex states could arise.
I hadn't thought of that one obvious thing - that in order for the collective to self-propagate, the lottery couldn't be allowed to prune more than a certain rather low number of individuals. However, the half of the population natural decline numbers must be contributing to the meat industry, unless my understanding of how gender policies work for Grasslanders is severely imperfect. In that case, it would amount to quite a bulk of butchered biomass - much more than the lottery would be netting, I imagine. It appears that I would benefit greatly from a bit of clarification about whether the Grasslands collective has any males that escape the usual breeding stock monastic conscription funnel; the way it stands, it would seem that the state lottery is only a gamble for females, with the males' chances being a nadir constant. My doubts essentially coalesce into wondering whether Grasslands males can be full citizens at all ?
In 1950, the US had an overall mortality rate of ~9.6% (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art.....00184-0087.pdf) In the grasslands, the birth rate, infant survival rate and the overall health are higher than 1950's US. I'd suggest the overall death rate due butchering is ~5% among citizens, with a high peak right around middle age when they are at the end of their viable meat period, and then a fairly lenghthy tail for survivors. I haven't done the math, but I think that's a pretty large quantity of meat, and a fairly sustainable rate.
Males born to female citizens are automatically full citizens, and automatically entered into the conscription funnel and sanctioned away with the other males. Citizenship does -not- confer voting rights necessarily - it confers participation in the benefits and protections offered by society. Government is not exactly representational - it's sort of a modified clan/republican system.
Males of acceptable species born non-citizens occasionally join up - the life of a male citizen is mythologized, after all - but generally speaking, joiners are "young, dumb, and full of cum".
The last year's Republican caucus-conservative, or the British Golden Standard-conservative ?
Good question! Politics and I have had a nasty divorce. Probabaly post-Reaganism conservatism (where Reagan is treated like Jesus - it's more important what we -think- he said and did, rather than what really said and did). Either way, I'd reckon conservative economics and I don't see eye-to-eye, though I'm not confident that speaks well of me. I'm a bit flippant where economics is concerned.
... That is not to say that I consider a person saddled with a bad credit a 'deserving' victim, especially given the widespread less than ethical banking policies that exploit the clientele obviously unable to earn their way out of the debt pit.
Ah, yes! I do like that scenario. And yes, I agree with you. I suppose what I should say is that I most enjoy vore when the victim is chosen because of predatory activity rather than accidentally volunteering in one way or another.
It can be inferred from your description that the *males* especially prop up the disparity in gender demographics...
The asterisked word should have been 'slaves', of course - my bad.
Oh! In that case, to some degree, yes. But not as much as you might think. There's a bit of a built-in public approval for female homosexuality, as we see with male homosexuality among many of the ancient Greeks.
Two more quick questions, even though I've already stretched all limits of correspondental hospitality beyond anything imaginable.
Not at all! I love questions!
Do the basic mechanics of predation in your setting incline towards the soft of the hard side of the spectrum ? Is the degree of devouring act's hardness situational between hunts, or is either form overwhelmingly more common than the other ?
I'll give you a different answer now than I would have when I was building this setting. When I was building this setting, soft vore -was- vore. Hard vore was a edge case. I didn't have any real justification for it; it was just an expectation of the setting. In the last 8 months or so I've had something of a sea change in this regard. Part of that is due to shifting tastes, and part of that is just releasing a sacred cow to go frolic in other people's fields. I wouldn't push hard vore on other people, and so won't likely heavily advertise it, but in my mind it's the default method of eating for most creatures, and there's no reason, including because of the fetish, to assume otherwise.
Next up, while your elaborations on the four states were wonderfully exhaustive, they only dealt with culture, general advancement and trade, and the brutish specter of industrial warfare demands to know of such aspects as relative mineral abundance and military capabilities of each of the major players in your world... But since you mentioned The Grasslands relying on The Capital Cities for protection, it would seem that the East Coast of your setting has both the know-how and the muscle to milk it. The Albion is being all mysterious, and the Khanate apparently prevails by grit and numbers, with some fortunate management policies to duct tape it all together.
Generally speaking, the Khanate and Albion should be consdered to be at between late renaissance to early Industrial levels of technology, suddenly receiving cast-off automatic weapons in fire sales. It's not a stable situation, and I reckon it is part of what will undermine Free Albion sooner rather than later. Mineral availability should match what we find in our version of the world, except that mining practices are behind the curve except in a few of the Capital Cities. This technology is rapidly trying to catch up around the world, and the trade network to keep up with that. Imagine the rest of the world like China trying to keep up with the West, and then multiply that by about five, as the trade network (while always existing to some degree) is coming -after- the technological expansion instead of before it. There was no British Empire to preceed the technological explosion in the Capital Cities.
Rest assured that no time-conserving measure of your could be met with anything less than total understanding. It is your prerogative as a productive creator to decree any policies pertaining to your working schedule with tyrannical finality, although your courtesy is still very much appreciated. The time you've already spent on humouring my curiosity has a significant monetary equivalent.
And anyway, your reply was extensive enough to cover all of my points of interest. Cleverly put as per usual, but never ceasing to take by surprise in places, your latest elaboration has been the veritable sixth day of genesis in relation to establishing the setting in my mind. It was even supported with actual statistics. Tremendous !
But rather than leave the planet to have to restart sapience from the ground up, they fiddled around with virus that would capture some of the homonidity of this sapient race and re-insert it into anything with DNA.
The most gruesome instance of planetary uplifting overkill ever.
This has given rise to the term "City faces", and it's also a way to discriminate against non-city- folk, who tend to look more like generic anthros.
Meaning the positive correlation between realizing the genetically-prescribed destiny on species level and the degree of how human-like the creatures appear ? With the kemonomimi being sort of the more refined stage of the hosts affected by the virus ? Or would that stylistic wrinkle be better off in a subsetting of its own ?
There's references to "Classes" through the setting...
A reasonable move; I applied it in my medieval one as well, with the The Little, The Middle and the The Tall Peoples self-categorizing themselves thusly. It's always tempting to violate common sense and saddle lemmings with a proud warrior culture, or make a nation of tiger farmers and philosophers.
Citizenship does -not- confer voting rights necessarily...
Who needs those, anyway?
I didn't have any real justification for it; it was just an expectation of the setting.
It nebulously relates to our style and substance debates, although personal preferences play as big a role here as realistic sensibilities.
This drift of taste from soft to hard could be a tendency yet unaccounted for, since I could attest to following in the same direction. Perhaps it's the unavoidable descriptive haze that surrounds trying to picture the unimaginable, and which becomes a liability as soon as one develops a more precise and anatomically-sensitive mind's eye.
And anyway, your reply was extensive enough to cover all of my points of interest. Cleverly put as per usual, but never ceasing to take by surprise in places, your latest elaboration has been the veritable sixth day of genesis in relation to establishing the setting in my mind. It was even supported with actual statistics. Tremendous !
But rather than leave the planet to have to restart sapience from the ground up, they fiddled around with virus that would capture some of the homonidity of this sapient race and re-insert it into anything with DNA.
The most gruesome instance of planetary uplifting overkill ever.
This has given rise to the term "City faces", and it's also a way to discriminate against non-city- folk, who tend to look more like generic anthros.
Meaning the positive correlation between realizing the genetically-prescribed destiny on species level and the degree of how human-like the creatures appear ? With the kemonomimi being sort of the more refined stage of the hosts affected by the virus ? Or would that stylistic wrinkle be better off in a subsetting of its own ?
There's references to "Classes" through the setting...
A reasonable move; I applied it in my medieval one as well, with the The Little, The Middle and the The Tall Peoples self-categorizing themselves thusly. It's always tempting to violate common sense and saddle lemmings with a proud warrior culture, or make a nation of tiger farmers and philosophers.
Citizenship does -not- confer voting rights necessarily...
Who needs those, anyway?
I didn't have any real justification for it; it was just an expectation of the setting.
It nebulously relates to our style and substance debates, although personal preferences play as big a role here as realistic sensibilities.
This drift of taste from soft to hard could be a tendency yet unaccounted for, since I could attest to following in the same direction. Perhaps it's the unavoidable descriptive haze that surrounds trying to picture the unimaginable, and which becomes a liability as soon as one develops a more precise and anatomically-sensitive mind's eye.
Rest assured that no time-conserving measure of your could be met with anything less than total understanding. It is your prerogative as a productive creator to decree any policies pertaining to your working schedule with tyrannical finality, although your courtesy is still very much appreciated.
Well, I do very much enjoy conversing with you! It really just a matter of busy time of year at the moment rather than apportioning out my time like the dole (a concept which, when applied to myself, seems impossibly arrogant).
The most gruesome instance of planetary uplifting overkill ever.
<grin> And here the aliens thought they were being generous!
Meaning the positive correlation between realizing the genetically-prescribed destiny on species level and the degree of how human-like the creatures appear ? With the kemonomimi being sort of the more refined stage of the hosts affected by the virus ? Or would that stylistic wrinkle be better off in a subsetting of its own ?
Yes! The virus does not still exist as such, really. It was only there millions of years ago to insert strands of code into the DNA of DNA-bearing creatures so they would have the enhanced possibility of redeveloping bipedalism, dexterous hands, intelligence, etc. As it stands, the "human-like" face, within that setting, should actually be referred to as 'raptor-like'. ;) Humans are merely the city-faces of apes. <grin>
But yes, that's the idea behind 'city-faces'.
>>Citizenship does -not- confer voting rights necessarily...
Who needs those, anyway?
Certainly not the males - they are the apotheosis of societal standards! Idolized, pampered, and service society from sexual maturity to slaughter. How wonderful their life is? What could they possibly want to change? ;)
Perhaps it's the unavoidable descriptive haze that surrounds trying to picture the unimaginable, and which becomes a liability as soon as one develops a more precise and anatomically-sensitive mind's eye.
That's certainly part of it. I have an attraction to fangs and claws, though, and to vampirism and blood-drinking, and those kinds of things just naturally tend to drift in a messier direction. But one -does- start to wonder how to make sense of a wolf swallowing a deer whole. Why? How does it benefit them? The justifications begin to wear thin after awhile.
Well, I do very much enjoy conversing with you! It really just a matter of busy time of year at the moment rather than apportioning out my time like the dole (a concept which, when applied to myself, seems impossibly arrogant).
The most gruesome instance of planetary uplifting overkill ever.
<grin> And here the aliens thought they were being generous!
Meaning the positive correlation between realizing the genetically-prescribed destiny on species level and the degree of how human-like the creatures appear ? With the kemonomimi being sort of the more refined stage of the hosts affected by the virus ? Or would that stylistic wrinkle be better off in a subsetting of its own ?
Yes! The virus does not still exist as such, really. It was only there millions of years ago to insert strands of code into the DNA of DNA-bearing creatures so they would have the enhanced possibility of redeveloping bipedalism, dexterous hands, intelligence, etc. As it stands, the "human-like" face, within that setting, should actually be referred to as 'raptor-like'. ;) Humans are merely the city-faces of apes. <grin>
But yes, that's the idea behind 'city-faces'.
>>Citizenship does -not- confer voting rights necessarily...
Who needs those, anyway?
Certainly not the males - they are the apotheosis of societal standards! Idolized, pampered, and service society from sexual maturity to slaughter. How wonderful their life is? What could they possibly want to change? ;)
Perhaps it's the unavoidable descriptive haze that surrounds trying to picture the unimaginable, and which becomes a liability as soon as one develops a more precise and anatomically-sensitive mind's eye.
That's certainly part of it. I have an attraction to fangs and claws, though, and to vampirism and blood-drinking, and those kinds of things just naturally tend to drift in a messier direction. But one -does- start to wonder how to make sense of a wolf swallowing a deer whole. Why? How does it benefit them? The justifications begin to wear thin after awhile.
Well, I do very much enjoy conversing with you! It really just a matter of busy time of year at the moment rather than apportioning out my time like the dole (a concept which, when applied to myself, seems impossibly arrogant).
I must apologize for yielding to my unconscious tendency of wording any concession in a way that surreptitiously plants guilt on the party in whose favour the concession is being made.
What I'd meant deliberately and in full control of my faculties, though, was that the time deficit-related problems are nothing to be ashamed of, objectively undeniable as they are - triply so in case of those people who continuously present evidence of that thinly stretched time being put to very good and noble use. I am very enthused and honoured about conversing with you also, but only as long as it isn't to the detriment of your overall peace of mind, or the cadence of your work. As far as I'm concerned, the golden rule of thumb regarding any delays, deficiencies or absence of response in artist-audience feedback is this: They Have Their Reasons.
But one -does- start to wonder how to make sense of a wolf swallowing a deer whole. Why? How does it benefit them? The justifications begin to wear thin after awhile.
One man's shrug of dejection is another's handsrub of a accepted challenge. The principal reason is, of course, that for some the alternatives to swallowing whole are less arousing. But the basic idea of soft vore is nothing new, it's just that it's applied to unlikely carriers. Any animal that preys exclusively on relatively small and defenseless creatures doesn't really need to spill any nutritious blood at mealtimes, and it it can afford to lounge around for days at a time, then the bigger the serving, the better. But yes, the evolutionary successful semi-migratory medium-sized predators with high metabolism that routinely pick on someone more than twice their size would need both the mobility of a modest maximum stomach capacity and the introduction of fragmentary decimals into the 0/1 prey consumption logic of snakes and frogs.
With the right motivation, it really isn't too much of a bother to come up with a workable justification for the bloodless carnage. Some size difference between sentient beings would play into easing the suspension of disbelief(e.g. Eleanor), as you illustrated in several works. Otherwise, the "designed to do it" premise is the next best thing, even if it is bare-facedly meta.
I must apologize for yielding to my unconscious tendency of wording any concession in a way that surreptitiously plants guilt on the party in whose favour the concession is being made.
What I'd meant deliberately and in full control of my faculties, though, was that the time deficit-related problems are nothing to be ashamed of, objectively undeniable as they are - triply so in case of those people who continuously present evidence of that thinly stretched time being put to very good and noble use. I am very enthused and honoured about conversing with you also, but only as long as it isn't to the detriment of your overall peace of mind, or the cadence of your work. As far as I'm concerned, the golden rule of thumb regarding any delays, deficiencies or absence of response in artist-audience feedback is this: They Have Their Reasons.
But one -does- start to wonder how to make sense of a wolf swallowing a deer whole. Why? How does it benefit them? The justifications begin to wear thin after awhile.
One man's shrug of dejection is another's handsrub of a accepted challenge. The principal reason is, of course, that for some the alternatives to swallowing whole are less arousing. But the basic idea of soft vore is nothing new, it's just that it's applied to unlikely carriers. Any animal that preys exclusively on relatively small and defenseless creatures doesn't really need to spill any nutritious blood at mealtimes, and it it can afford to lounge around for days at a time, then the bigger the serving, the better. But yes, the evolutionary successful semi-migratory medium-sized predators with high metabolism that routinely pick on someone more than twice their size would need both the mobility of a modest maximum stomach capacity and the introduction of fragmentary decimals into the 0/1 prey consumption logic of snakes and frogs.
With the right motivation, it really isn't too much of a bother to come up with a workable justification for the bloodless carnage. Some size difference between sentient beings would play into easing the suspension of disbelief(e.g. Eleanor), as you illustrated in several works. Otherwise, the "designed to do it" premise is the next best thing, even if it is bare-facedly meta.
What I'd meant deliberately and in full control of my faculties, though, was that the time deficit-related problems are nothing to be ashamed of, objectively undeniable as they are
<grin> Very well! What I'd originally meant to imply, though, is that I very much welcome further conversation on this and other topics, and wanted to make clear that my shorter reply should not imply otherwise. :D
One man's shrug of dejection is another's handsrub of a accepted challenge... With the right motivation, it really isn't too much of a bother to come up with a workable justification for the bloodless carnage.
Oh, certainly! I've spent plenty of time rationalizing, and will continue to do so - I don't foresee abandoning soft vore. But one does get to a point, at times, where they ask - why am I bothering to rationalize?
<grin> Very well! What I'd originally meant to imply, though, is that I very much welcome further conversation on this and other topics, and wanted to make clear that my shorter reply should not imply otherwise. :D
One man's shrug of dejection is another's handsrub of a accepted challenge... With the right motivation, it really isn't too much of a bother to come up with a workable justification for the bloodless carnage.
Oh, certainly! I've spent plenty of time rationalizing, and will continue to do so - I don't foresee abandoning soft vore. But one does get to a point, at times, where they ask - why am I bothering to rationalize?
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