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Halkegenia Online Thread 6 - //"Pixies!"\\

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kojiro kakita said:
Unlike our society, Halk has a magic noble class, which clearly differentiates them from the lower classes. After all its a bit difficult to revolt successful when one mage can completely dominate a peasant unit.
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Yeah, while future Japanese society is probobly still somewhat stratified, if perhaps less so then today, that's going to be a change that will have a lot of interesting, in the negative sense of the word, conflicts with the fae. They are in a weird place, actually. They're all petty nobles, theoretically a society of equals (if untrue in practice), but they're also 'better' then all the mundanes.

So how is employment going to develop? Right now the Fae Cities are fae only, but those cities are mostly empty. Commoners will start to move in, taking over jobs 'below' the fae. Nobles that have lots of dealings with the fae might want homes there as well, and will eventually receive them, and they'll bring their retainers. There are certain jobs that are simply 'below' the dignity of even the petty nobility, and first world middle class people aren't going to fight for the opportunity to be the inn scullion.

Event if the don't want to, they're going to eventually start internalizing the noble mindset; most of them are going to be young enough that their worldview is still forming, in fact. Late teens and early twenties, still young enough to really change in big ways, expectantly under stress.

It won't help that the average commoner is going to be, well, stupid. Not because of inherent stupidity, of course, but because reasoning is a skill, reading is a skill, math is a skill, learning is a skill, and all of these skills will forever be a third language to someone who didn't learn them as a child. Some people rise above that, but many don't.

The average commoner is going to be noticeably... less. Those who aren't, the successful merchants, musketeers, and other elites, they'll just play into the idea that merit can allow the worth to rise above that. That that's bullshit, that it's luck more then anything that creates the opportunities people gain to escape such bad circumstances, is something people have a hard to internalize in our nice cosy first world homes.

The whole world is against you in a place like Halk.
 
Last One you are giving me a sad. I want to believe that there are enough fae that they won't internalize the noble mindset to a large degree.
 
On the other hand, they are young and idealistic, they are the type of people aim higher and further, they're the dreamers.
And they'll stay young for a long time, time to see their some of their long term enterprises bear fruit.
 
TheLastOne said:
So how is employment going to develop? Right now the Fae Cities are fae only, but those cities are mostly empty.
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You're overstating the size of the cities by a large amount. Given what we have seen of them from the anime and the little bit from the manga they will be about 70-80% full at this point given that they lost all the surrounding neutral cities and towns.
Commoners will start to move in, taking over jobs 'below' the fae. Nobles that have lots of dealings with the fae might want homes there as well, and will eventually receive them, and they'll bring their retainers. There are certain jobs that are simply 'below' the dignity of even the petty nobility, and first world middle class people aren't going to fight for the opportunity to be the inn scullion.

Event if the don't want to, they're going to eventually start internalizing the noble mindset; most of them are going to be young enough that their worldview is still forming, in fact. Late teens and early twenties, still young enough to really change in big ways, expectantly under stress.

It won't help that the average commoner is going to be, well, stupid. Not because of inherent stupidity, of course, but because reasoning is a skill, reading is a skill, math is a skill, learning is a skill, and all of these skills will forever be a third language to someone who didn't learn them as a child. Some people rise above that, but many don't.

The average commoner is going to be noticeably... less. Those who aren't, the successful merchants, musketeers, and other elites, they'll just play into the idea that merit can allow the worth to rise above that. That that's bullshit, that it's luck more then anything that creates the opportunities people gain to escape such bad circumstances, is something people have a hard to internalize in our nice cosy first world homes.

The whole world is against you in a place like Halk.
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It's even worse then that, remember some Fae buildings can only be entered if you can fly. Which means unless they rework the architecture to accommodate those people which they likely won't there will be a literal gulf between any newly arrived commoners and the Fae.
 
Aranfan said:
This will do less than nothing. Engels knew the importance, and he wasn't that much better than other factory owners/managers of the time. By our standards he was horrifically exploitative of his workers.
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But there should be sime pictures to show why it is bad right? Afterall people respond better to visual imput than to verbal or written ingormation. I not do optimistic or nieve to belive this will trully impact everybody but some horror storys and persistance will go along way to convince some people.
Slso as a psychology student i can tell yo that the most important thing for the fey as a minority faction is consistency this eill wventually change more minds plus the fey are the ones introducing these ideas so can pull the experience card and say how over a hundred years of development got them to a cirtain point and they are just trying to cut out the midfle man. And dont fofget princess henrietta is in your corner she is very into better human rights and nobles not abusing thrir power and with femilies like the valliar alwas in her corner and positive connections with the prince and garmont i think the libary has a fair shot in the long term if not the dhort term.
 
Aranfan said:
Last One you are giving me a sad. I want to believe that there are enough fae that they won't internalize the noble mindset to a large degree.
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The ones who are going to be most resistant to internalizing it are going to be the ones who have the least interaction with the outside world. People who never leave the fae cities because it's a scary world out there. Of course, you're already selecting for the xenophobic in that group, people who will think all of Halk is 'less' then them.

Let me give you a real life example. My mom comes from Texas, and got out of there as soon as she was old enough to. She always made fun of how people down there are scared of Mexican immigrants coming to steal our jobs.

My aunt is married to a Mexican immigrant, one who has poor English to be honest, and she worries about 'wetbacks' coming to steal our jobs in classic redneck Texan hypocrisy. Yes, it's that stupid and hypocritical.

It's the kind of thing that makes you laugh so that you don't cry.

When I went off to collage, my mom moved in with her sister, wanting to get reconnected with her family after all these years. Then the economy took a beating and she found herself without a job, in racists Texas, surrounded by her racist family.

When we got together again two years later, she was worried about Illegal Mexican Immigrants. This basically lasted until she found a job, then her normal liberal tendency reasserted themselves. This isn't my mom being wishy-washy, this is humans doing the normal human thing of conforming with their social group. My mom didn't suddenly turn into a racists fuckhead, but she was worried about her job, everyone around her told her she needed to worry about it because of Mexicans, and if she wanted to make an issue of it should would have to pick a fight with everyone around her. So she bit her tongue, shut-up about it...

An unintentionally started to conform.


She was in a better position then most of the Fae are to not conform: she had left those social circles when she was younger because she hated that mindset, there was no kind of reward (subtle or otherwise) for conforming, and not conforming carried no penalty larger then getting into fights with her family.

Not only are all of those things not true for the Fae, but the peasantry largely buys into the feudal mindset themselves.
 
TheLastOne said:
Not only are all of those things not true for the Fae, but the peasantry largely buys into the feudal mindset themselves.
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Still, one of the things that helps break the fuedal mindset is the social chaos of the industrial revolution, which they are definitely going to cause. So there's that, at least. Hopefully that will help.
 
Aranfan said:
Still, one of the things that helps break the fuedal mindset is the social chaos of the industrial revolution, which they are definitely going to cause. So there's that, at least. Hopefully that will help.
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Eventually, sure, but Halk is uniquely placed for feudalism to survive the industrial revolution in a way it didn't on earth, and the fae make that worse, not better.

Mages are BETTER then other people, not in some abstract my blood is better way, but in a big bad wolf blow your house down way. No matter how nice or polite they are about it, it's a gulf that can't be crossed. It's like a special overcaste who gets to walk around with invisible machine guns and bazookas all the time. Colbert might not want to be a scary monster to the average peasant, a figure of flame and death, he might want to give them steam engines and raise their standard of living. And they'll like him for it. But they'll always know that underneath that, if they push to far...

The flames will come. The disempowerment of the nobility to the new merchant class will be suppressed, because you won't be able to cross the gulf between 'Noble' and 'Commoner' with just lots of money, unless it's truly an obscene amount of it, and then you buy a title in Germania and marry a mage so your children are magic. You need that middle class, between 'real noble' and 'peasant' to destroy the noble overclass.

And here comes the fae, bringing new technologies. You work in their factories, you live in their tenements. THEY live for centuries, you live forty years if you're lucky. They can rip you limb from limb with their bare hands without trying, they don't tire. They have magic like the nobles, slower but stranger, and all of them are powerful in it.

Sir Guillotine is not going to visit their door any time soon. Hell, they're an added appearance barrier that make the difference even more dramatic.
 
What the hell are you guys talking about now and what the hell does it have to do with mitigating the negative effects of an industrial revolution?
 
deadheadzed said:
What the hell are you guys talking about now and what the hell does it have to do with mitigating the negative effects of an industrial revolution?
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One of the major +'s of the Industrial Revolution was the breaking of the power of the nobility over the peasantry. It is unlikely for that to happen in Halkegenia for similar reasons why democracy is a non-starter when you have immortal god-kings.
 
Vaermina said:
The Fae as a collective is all the Fae, which means they all own the land. The only thing that is going to matter at this point is going to be the Fae laws regarding land ownership.
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That's not actually what that says. What it's referring to is an actual thing that existed in medieval, early modern and modern Europe called 'holding a title in commission'. In fact, that's how a chunk of the British government works today (the senior members of the Government hold the title of Lord High Treasurer in commission, which is why the Prime Minister is First Lord of the Treasury, the Chancellor is the Second Lord and so on). The relationship between the title holder and the subjects is the same, legally speaking, it's just that the 'title holder' is a group of people, not a single person. It's not 'all the Fae hold the title collectively', it's 'the people the Fae elect as their government hold the title collectively. When they get formal elections up and running, it's probably going to come with the same legal fiction as Parliament in Britain; the people who win the election are 'appointed' to the various offices of Government by the monarch. It has to work that way, because under the Tristanian legal system (which, remember, this is all working inside), there's probably no provision for subjects to appoint their lord, and commissioners IRL were usually appointed by the Crown.
 
We still have nobles and commoners in this day and age. We just call it a different thing. Remember the occupy wallstreet thing. You know the 99% thing. Yeah that.
 
Aranfan said:
No one was proposing a cure-all.
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There is no cure all. Every possible solution (aside from sparking ideological debate/schism) has extremes that should be avoided, and the trouble is that changing paths before you veer into an extreme is very hard.

Awareness of the potential issues, care to look for signs of developing issues and willingness to undergo fairly radical shifts to steer off problems as they begin to pop up will have to do.
 
The solution is simple, turn all the non-mages into chimera's. That way they will also have magic and greater strength.
 
You have to remember, not all mages are nobles. There are commoners who are descended from nobles who lost their titles or the illegitimate children of nobles. Given time, they could become a significant minority of the commoner population.
 
Jimmy C said:
You have to remember, not all mages are nobles. There are commoners who are descended from nobles who lost their titles or the illegitimate children of nobles. Given time, they could become a significant minority of the commoner population.
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Vis a vis commoners and nobles, theres a bit of a question how it works with magical strength and bloodlines.
How dominant or recessive is magic? Is it simply on/off with talent or is there more to how powerfull mages are?

Commoner-born mages are often thought to be weaker, but how much of that is just not being able to afford training etc.?
 
Xexilf said:
Vis a vis commoners and nobles, theres a bit of a question how it works with magical strength and bloodlines.
How dominant or recessive is magic? Is it simply on/off with talent or is there more to how powerfull mages are?

Commoner-born mages are often thought to be weaker, but how much of that is just not being able to afford training etc.?
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iirc training plays a large role. In brimir's time a lot more mages were triangle and square, or at least line. Because they were fighting for their existance or something.
 
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