Really it's no wonder that the Hearthguards have become less culturally relevant over the centuries. The way that Kicha and the rest have interpreted their oaths of service have ensured that they remain locked in isolated ivory towers, forever cloistered away from, and unable to influence, the bulk of Shiplord society.
This. They're basically walking talking memorial plaques at this point, and the trouble with being a memorial plaque is that you're not flexible and other people may or may not even care enough to read what you say.
I know it's been a long story spread over a long time, but it does seem like you've forgotten a lot of what happened over the course of the quest. There are, in fact, answers to most of your questions, and you've acknowledged them yourself in previous messages, so the problem here is more that you're rejecting the answers rather than them not having been provided both in and out of story. There comes a time when you have to choose to suspend your disbelief; not every work of fiction is going to jive with the way you reason about the world.
Remember what I said about the creaking bridge?
This is the sound of that bridge, "the audience's suspension of disbelief," creaking
really, really loudly.
It is probably not a great time to jump up and down on the bridge and demand that the bridge is sacred and must not be changed.
It is probably a good time to acknowledge that the bridge is in danger of collapsing.
For instance, we need to be honest with ourselves. The Shiplord worldview and self-justifications do indeed contain ridiculously thick layers of self-absorbed and often self-contradictory bullshit, that the Shiplords (and here I am including the Hearthguard) have been so fucking neurotic about answering not just sensitive questions about the Secrets (which would be understandable) but
basic normal questions like "how do your own politics work and is there any real hope of bringing about change" and "how did this historical event you just told me about shape the Tribute system?"
And it is also noteworthy that the Shiplords are so self-absorbed that their idea of "self-sacrifice" and "martyring their emotions" is to inflict galactic agonizing mega-torture that every single member of every race apart from themselves screams inside about on some level. And that this
very material suffering, by the way, makes the angst they feel about the Consolat dying to rewrite physics seem
pathetic in comparison. Because
oh, it is so sad that the Shiplords lost their friends and in the process gained the ability to do amazing things and to control the galaxy for five million years or however long it's been.
So tragic that they live in the most powerful civilization that has ever existed and can do more or less anything it wants. Such a burden to have all the best stuff and just murder anyone who looks like they might get better stuff.
Meanwhile, in the other pan of the balance, there are trillions if not quadrillions of alien children sobbing themselves to sleep throughout the last five million years or whatever of galactic history, all wondering why Mommy and Daddy had to die and be rendered down into bio-goop.
Fuck this shit.
I think we need to be honest enough with ourselves to start from that place, rather than acting like saying the Shiplords' self-righteous and self-justifying and self-absorbed nonsense is something we need to treat like a precious sacred mystery. It's something that we have a practical need to figure out because preventing a giant galactic mega-war is important, but it's not precious and it's not sacred and the Shiplords long since gave up their right to be considered as a morally worthy culture even if they have specific individuals who are personally innocent.
There is a limit to how many times you can play the "grief and trauma" card, especially if you're doing your damnedest to inflict equal or greater trauma on literally everyone forever.
We haven't finished visiting the Sorrows yet, so to claim that they haven't answered our questions is premature.
And at some level you need to read between the lines to figure out the path they took rather than having it spoonfed to you.
Well yes. But at this point it is
fairly important that we recognize that we are 90% of the way through the Sorrows, roughly speaking, half way through the last one we're checking out.
There is not a lot of time left on the clock here for remaining revelations. There are a lot of facts that are very well established at this point and that paint a picture that is very damning regarding Shiplord society. A picture along the lines of "the people running this show must be very evil, very crazy, or some combination of the above, and even the dissenters from that social order are so self-absorbed that they're quite capable of fatally botching their one chance to fix all this in the past several million years because they're so damn ossified."
You say that as if organizations don't frequently take actions that are counterproductive to their professed goals. Especially whole nations, which often have multiple different groups, with different goals, shaping policy.
So they aren't Spacebattles Competent Optimizers. This makes them more believable, to me.
This is beyond that.
This is a very basic foundational policy (mega-extermination of every species that isn't tooled up to blow up a Tribute Fleet battleship at the moment of First Contact). And they've been pursuing it consistently for millions of years. That isn't the kind of thing you get when there are multiple groups with different goals shaping policy. It's what you get when
ONE group's hands are firmly Superglued to the wheel and is fucking up the nominal objective of the entire system, and no one else actually cares enough to do what it would take to change that.
See, if this were something the Shiplords
debated, if there were different factions within their system that argued about this, I'd see matters quite differently. If there had been periods when the Shiplords actually encouraged the development of pacifist species, and others in which the cult of ritually committing genocide as a sacrifice to the memory of the Consolat took full control and killed pacifist species, then taht would convince me that the system is, well,
sane-ish.
Instead, power has been in the hands of the people who choose the crazy course of action
all the time, for millions of years. And the rest of the Shiplords just... go along with that. They don't even seem to suggest firing that particular guy who sets that policy, or whatever. They just roll with it.
Find out the shape of their irrationality. We know that they're driven by grief.
Find a lever to manipulate their irrationality. That's Origin.
Once that's done, puppet the (metaphorical) corpses of the people they're grieving to get them to stand down. There's a sliding scale of expected outcomes from White Diamond to Scion. Aim for wherever looks most likely to work.
I don't think Amanda would be psychologically capable of literally puppeting the literal corpses of literal Consolat to tell the Shiplords that everyone even slightly complicit in the Tribute system and who has not actively tried to make it stop is terrible and should just go kill themselves.
But if she
did it, I'm not sure I'd be able to say with a straight face that she'd be wrong to do so.
I absolutely love this Quest and can't wait for the next post.