Now imagine all the people who didn't have the talent and ambition to make it. I wonder what the Empire did to them.
Now imagine all the people who didn't have the talent and ambition to make it. I wonder what the Empire did to them.
I know I myself would have probably gotten sold down the river.
The Empire with its hyper darwinistic meritocracy? I wonder when we will get to see the dark side of this moon.
I've been convinced. Let's go talk to the totally-not-a-pet Dragon.
The Empire just doesn't really feel like a thing I could morally support.It's honestly weird to realize how much I rely on people's in-depth commenting and line-quoting to keep me going motivation-wise until people hushed up after this update and I was like "wait did I do something wrong"
But I realize the current situation being intentionally kind of "what" is somewhat harder to comment on.
Yeah as MJ said the hyper-aggressive meritocracy is mostly at the top and influenced by what new Arachne is projecting back. It was a lot more mundane depending on where you were in the middle, then potentially quite awful at the bottom. But basically the necessities of existence are more or less accounted for - you never have to worry about disease, real hunger, sleep, shelter, etc, and even regular citizens are functionally immortal. This doesn't account for those who were not citizens, at which point you're in a different very bad ballgame. That doesn't really have any excuse beyond philosophical differences treating those who don't interact with the tapestry as p-zombies with no free will at worst, and mere fragments of an actual person at best. Even the most well-intentioned basically see the goal to interact with the tapestry as a form of uplift, and it would have been unthinkable then (though perhaps not in the present Fringe sector) to intentionally not uplift people.
It also doesn't account for the top, where assassinations, deaths and turnover is fast. If the old Arachne was a high person in THRONE//NEXUS, the actual governing body of the sector, then she and anyone close to her would never have been secure.
That being said spiritual and digital sicknesses were more common, and the Empire's laissez-faire behavior to the actual person on the ground and the fact it basically just demanded you follow a UN-charter like list of rules meant that for most people the Empire just...didn't really exist. What existed was the local planet or city or system, and then above that whatever actual nation/corporation/gestalt was actually running and defining their local culture, mores, rules and customs.
As you saw from that FORCE//FRINGE dossier, at the margins and boundaries even a lot of FORCE responded to the Emperor's death with 'damn, that's crazy'. The Emperor was so distant and vast, and the Empire itself so huge, that it took a long time for the ramifications to manifest.
I believe the stated goal was to create a state which would endure forever, therefore achieving victory over entropy. The whole hyper-darwinism thing is part of that, as whatever wins is "superior" and better able to survive into the future. However, given it was seemingly set up to collapse if the emperor was ever lost, I have to wonder how much it followed that ideal.
Frankly, if the goal was to defeat entropy hyperdarwinism was exactly the wrong way to go about it.
I mean, yes, but the preservation of everything wasn't the goal, only of the idea of empire. Things may be lost, but the goal was presumably to create something that could adapt to any challenge it faced, and thereby the idea at the center could survive into forever. It was also, as we see, probably not successful.
And what happens when the central idea is itself challenged? When the sharp knifes, seeking yet more advantage, turns inevitably to the one thing that binds them as perhaps easier prey than their neighbors?
Apparently, the collapse. I never said I thought it was a good idea.
Yeah, to add to this, even the best of the successor states are things that trigger a "nah, dog" response in people from the modern-day. Like, I made a faction for the GSRP that's best described as Doctors Without Borders (Armed With Nuclear Weapons) and I give it a fair bit of side-eye whenever I think of what its internal society is like.
Something I think is quite clever about the setting is that The Emperor, someone intrinsically key to understanding The Empire, has been erased. The single most important, most powerful, most influential, most historical, etc. etc. is... gone. There is an "The Emperor" shaped hole in the audience's understanding of The Empire. Did they institute hyper darwinism out of cruel philosophy, or selfish pragmatism? Were they self-aggrandizing, or distantly glorified? Was The Emperor wise, wrathful, petty, greedy, generous, kind, cruel? Were they some created being? Were they given or somehow earned their position through some kind of pre-Empire organization? Or were they just the first lucky SOB to gain prototype Tapestry technology, and (ab-)used that to go a-conquering and never stopped?
Yeah, to add to this, even the best of the successor states are things that trigger a "nah, dog" response in people from the modern-day. Like, I made a faction for the GSRP that's best described as Doctors Without Borders (Armed With Nuclear Weapons) and I give it a fair bit of side-eye whenever I think of what its internal society is like.
