So I had this all done and then looked away and SV ate my entire post. So please excuse this for being a shitty replacement for what I was actually happy with.
Looking at everything seen so far, I honestly can't see how in the world the Shiplords can both have religious remembrance and pilgrimage to the Sorrows and yet perpetuate all of the horrific atrocities they do as standard procedure even without any provocation or cause. Especially since the Hearthguard exist and have a significant voice (both politically and culturally) in the Shiplords' government and collective conversations, so it's not like no one has been able to point out "hey guys we're kind of doing almost all of the things we sacrificed so much for to stop others from doing, and we're doing it as a first resort rather than as a last resort, and the Sorrows literally spell this out explicitly--FFS, us deciding not to fully genocide the Gysians is literally the point of one of the Sorrows and the basis for the Hearthguard, but now we regularly genocide races for far lesser offenses and don't even try stopping short."
I get it, they are a race of alien-type sociopaths that somehow lack empathy. But they are obviously intellectually and logically capable of recognizing that they are blatantly doing the exact thing they put an eternal memorial of religious importance in place for because they rejected doing it. That alone should be enough to get them to reconsider if they have seriously lost the plot and question their procedures/outlook.
At this point, humanity could point out to the Shiplords that they're only a little better than the Hjivn Sphere, but they're also worse because the Hjivn Sphere never pretended to or deluded itself into believing it was righteous.
Humanity has been just as hypocritical and self-justifying countless times in our history.
But to be more than just pithy: the Hearthguard absolutely have political power but it's the type that they've had to carefully stockpile over more years than humanity can remember existing and never been able to use because they don't have an answer that will actually satisfy the majority of the Shiplord population. They're fully aware of how broken the system they've created is, but most people are terrified of actually facing that because of what it would mean to do so.
And even if they did manage to do that, to face that they've become worse in many ways than any single enemy they've fought in their long history, they'd still have to find an
answer to the underlying problem. A case in point on this: the Shiplord Regulars commander at the 3BOS asked you try and find another way, and warned you that you wouldn't have long.
Now to be fair to them, they fully expected you to have basically no time at all before a War Fleet blew Sol into stardust. The reality of humanity surviving a War Fleet attack is still shaking out at the moment, and it's running into problems due to how the entire rest of the galaxy appears to be coming apart at the seams at the same time. There's a lot the Shiplords can do to handle this, and none of the current actions are really hurting them at home. But G6 actions taken since they got Orrery plans and crash-built them in capital/core systems have torn the galactic relay net the Shiplords rely on so much apart. The Nileans took out most of a spiral arm's worth of the damn things as an opener.
To loop back a little though: the Secrets provide the capacity to end reality. Not end a planet, or a star system, or a galaxy - reality. All of it. And those Secrets are the product of death of the only real friends the Shiplords had, and friend isn't enough to describe how close the Consolat and Shiplord species truly were. A lot of them realise at some level that they should stop, and would sign up in a heartbeat if someone could offer them a real solution - this is why Kicha latched on to what you gave her so fiercely.
But at present? They're so weighed down by cultural inertia and the weight of their own failures that the majority can't see any other way but to keep on going forward. The Hearthguard hate this, but breaking the broken system they're in further isn't certain to make anything better at all. Not where it matters, long term, for all reality.
I'm also a bit confused as to why the Uninvolved haven't curbstomped the Shiplords into submission by now. Yes, the Shiplords have weapons capable of fighting back. But it's clear that the Uninvolved absolutely outclass the Shiplords when it comes to power and capability, and while the Uninvolved would definitely take losses, I can't see how an alpha strike by the Uninvolved wouldn't utterly devastate the Shiplords in a way that they would be totally unable to handle, with them capitulating in short order. Sure, hoping for things to change and a solution to be found might make sense for a while, but after a few million years of regular genocide, atrocities, and creating a vicious cycle that ensures they will never learn, the Shiplords have clearly reached the point of no return. Humanity getting a Consulat-like gift was something they couldn't have seen coming, and waiting as long as they did for even the smallest chance to come about strikes me as the Uninvolved evading responsibility for their own failures.
So first off, what I said in the post just above this one holds. To expand on that some: the Uninvolved aren't a unified group, and they're very much capable of cancelling out each other's actions. I'll get back to them in a sec, though, because there's something much more important going on.
The Uninvolved lifecycle has an endpoint of some sort, a place where they go dormant, fade out of existence, or something else in that ballpark. No one is really sure how this works, all the Uninvolved know is that at some point they stop responding to outside input, and then stop being detectable in local soulspace.
This is important because it means that none of the Uninvolved today have known anything but the Shiplord Tribute system. These are races who have spent their entire life within a reality that never gives them freedom, and whose cultures have been deliberately shaped to make them unable to conceptualise the idea of truly challenging the Shiplords.
They can think about the possibility of trying it, consider how they might do so, but there's always the question of are we getting manipulated by the Shiplords to do this. Is there an infiltrator pushing at us to make us make a lethal mistake? The Shiplords don't actually try to make races go extinct with covert action, they use those agents to make sure races can't do much without it being detected. So the question then becomes this:
The Uninvolved know that the Shiplords have anti-Uninvolved weapons. They have no idea if they have anything more than the Soultear weapons that got used during the Third Battle of Sol. And they have been primed to expect the Shiplords to always have just one more layer of power hiding behind the facade. So what if - and let me be clear, humanity doesn't know if what I'm about to say isn't the case - the Shiplords have a galaxy-scale anti-Uninvolved weapon hidden somewhere. Something that they could use to wipe them out in a single sweep?
It's too big a risk for most of the Uninvolved. The core group of this opinion were called Forgetfuls by Tahkel, and basically are of the opinion that living for as long as possible is worth anything. Is this cowardly? Yeah, probably. But it fits, and it's not really their fault, either.
I'm also thoroughly disappointed by how few answers we've actually gotten here. The Lament should have given us the ultimate answer about the great secret that the Lament were told by the Shiplords that they were not only unable to solve in 100 years, but that they outright gave up entirely after only a hundred years and decided to go Uninvolved rather than remain as a counterbalance to the Shiplords to help speak reason to them if/when someone else came about that had a chance at solving the problem themselves. You'd think that the Lament would tell us at least this much, this absolutely critical thing that we need to at least show believable hope of solving to the Shiplords to achieve peace, instead of just another big question mark. Like, seriously, the Lament built their own Sorrow--they had one job, and they just decided not to do it?
So I wanted to wait until the Remember post for this, but what the hell. In simple terms.
The Shiplords told the Teel'sanha about the Consolat. They showed them their home system, let them access the Archive there, and basically begged them to find a solution other than the flawed path the Teel could see them starting down. The problem? They were essentially asking the Peoples to become the Consolat. And they couldn't do that. Not would not, not didn't want to: couldn't.
That's why they stopped after a century. Because they could recognise futility when they saw it, and knew that unless they could solve that the Shiplords would never listen to them. And to be very clear, in a full on war the Teel'sanha would have been crushed by the Shiplords. They'd have hurt them, but they were only a mature galactic civilisation. The Shiplords were and remain a fully developed elder civilisation.
What the Lament left you was the coordinates to the Archives, in the hope that you'd be able to understand what they couldn't. And this wasn't an answer they could really write down, because they didn't know how to become the answer the Shiplords needed.
By the by, wasn't there one race among the Second Contacts who strongly suspected that the Shiplords were using their implants to make that race go Uninvolved via turning people into finger puppets for them. Would that not screw up the resulting Uninvolved? It's supposed to be a choice taken up by enough of that race, but if a big chunk can't make a choice...
It also reeks of Hvjin crap.
There are many more ways to influence a species than by mass brain hack. The Nileans suspect that the Sarthee Uninvolved movement has been supported by the Shiplords, yes. That doesn't mean that the Shiplords are mind-hacking en masse, assuming they
are doing what the Nilean's suspect.
