Just because it's not the root of the problem doesn't mean it would hurt to do it. Olaf needs political victories in order to keep his position - getting a big chunk of the debt to Avernus forgiven as reparations would be such a victory.
It's part of the solution, not the whole of it.
It's a stopgap measure at best. His approval ratings will only drop when it once again becomes apparent that he has failed to stop us from messing with Vanaheim sovereignty. Going down this path will only galvanize the conservatives to greater levels of resistance.
This is kinda true, we really don't care for they're beliefs.
And you don't realize why this has diplomatically kicked our ass over and over?
Well of course we are not listening. They are wrong. Us getting caught does not make their position any less stupid.
What's stupid is not knowing when to back down even when one is in the right. Namely us, example we have done more to harm the position of the Quartoks than the conservatives ever could.
Heck this is only really bad cause the people who caught us were Olaf's enemies not Olaf's people.
I assure you, whatever his enemies believe will also be what the majority of the Vanaheim populace believes. Olaf is not popular thanks to his ties to us and our actions against the sovereignty of the Vanaheim state. If we continue the way we are we'll only cause the conservatives to consolidate against us.
Hmm.... What are Vanaheims main problems right now, anyway?
Durin said:
Avernus cares nothing for the rest of the Imperial Trust's beliefs and is trying to highhandedly force the rest of the Trust into following their own beliefs and that Governor Olaf is too connected to Avernus to deal with the problem.
It's hilarious that Durin can all but say what we have to do and we'll pointedly ignore it just because it is inconvenient for us.
Which is exactly what we've been trying to do, repeatedly, to our own detriment. We're not the ruler of the trust, we're simply a member. No nation likes their sovereignty being threatened by an outside force. Giving them money and forgiving debt will quiet some complaints for a time but it doesn't address the issue which only makes things worse for us when we continue to confirm their fears with our actions.
No one likes the Xenos, Avernites were optimistic but after the scandal their approval dropped. The Xenos went from disliking to hating us, next is Vanaheim level loathing. Despite this, no one else in the trust is going to to take a fleet and bombard the Xenos cities. I seriously don't know why we're focusing on trying to change the trust's view of Xenos when we have done almost nothing diplomatically with the Xenos since they've arrived. Again, the Xenos hate us, we haven't proved to the trust at all that we can work with Xenos, quite the opposite in fact. Once the Xenos actually like us,
then we can focus on changing the trust's view of them. Maybe once we've made some progress there we can bring it up in the next trust meeting. Until then, stop bringing up the quartok with the rest of the trust.
In fact, here's an idea. These next few years we work on building relations with the Quartok, as well as other members of the trust who are ambivalent towards us or further strengthen the bonds of the people who we're still in the good graces of.
Then after sufficient time has passed we can revisit the issue with the Quartok in the trust. Why is this a better idea?
*We'll have backed off trying to change the Trust views for several generations mollifying Vanaheim.
*We'll actually be on decent terms with the Xenos we want everyone to accept
*We can call on favors in votes to get changes in trust structure that we want without risking getting our allies approval too low.
*The resources we save not spending time desperately trying to save opinion with other governments.
*We can stop reading about the parabolic curve of Vanaheim approval.
*We can go back to being memetic space Australians instead of a caricature of imperialist America.
*We can stop tempting a trust wide civil war with a misplaced crit fail,
*We can stop tempting the Vanaheim nobility to burn down our embassy.
