Posted by Mourtzouphlos 2 months ago Report

In my defense, like I said earlier, I've been thinking about this a LOT, which means I have a lot of thoughts and they all wanted to take the opportunity to come out ... so I just wrote them all and didn't stop until there weren't any more wanting out. And, here it is.

Posted by Mourtzouphlos 2 months ago Report

So I’ll start with the most important thing I noticed, which is that I FUCKING CALLED IT! PROBABLY! ASSUMING THAT WHAT HAPPENS LATER STILL MATCHES AS IT’S RATHER EARLY ON AND THAT WHAT’S HAPPENING OFFSCREEN AND ISN’T GONE INTO IN DETAIL ALSO DOESN’T CONTRADICT IT SO THIS IS ACTUALLY QUITE PREMATURE BUT I’M CELEBRATING ANYWAY!

Anyway, the first thing I noticed when I was thinking through this is that Patrick’s commune’s situation is pretty similar to Clearhaven: they both were founded to provide an isolated, safe haven from societies they didn’t want to be a part of, they didn’t try and threaten those societies directly in any way, they just sought to be left alone to live their lives in peace – but that in and of itself, the prospect of an exit, the idea that the main society is not the inevitable, eternal, be-all and end-all, the realization that something different is possible, was enough of a threat just by existing that the powers that be had to shut it down hard. The Eanlians were just smarter in the way they went about it.

Which brings me to my second point, which is that Patrick is pretty much the ideal person to lead an anti-Eanlian resistance. The American dictatorship (or however you want to call it) in my opinion, narrowly beats out Eanli as a place to live based on potential. The Confederate wanna-be’s are worse (they remove that potential and make everything else worse), while Patrick represents someone in the camp of inalienable human rights, popular sovereignty, and rule of law – AKA liberal democracy, one of the most attractive and successful ideologies in history. He also has experience running a grassroots movement and hiding from authorities (in a way the government should really fucking know from overseas work – is one of your themes here that fascists are stupid? Because they are, these people are fascists, and they’re stupid), which means that he can counter them militarily (popular support and evasiveness – which he’s good at – are the keys to a successful insurgency) and ideologically (he offers a superior alternative to Eanli, so people won’t join Eanli willingly, and unwillingly brings us back to insurgency). Which gives new meaning to the way Patrick could so easily contact the Eanlians (“We were hoping to hear from you” – so they knew that he, specifically, was in the area) and the Dixie cosplayers ability to fly under the radar – they’re not (the security team pretty clearly knows they’re there), but from the point of view of extending Eanlian control, they are a positive (they drive people to join Eanli and nobody will complain when they’re conquered), so dealing with them is pretty far down the priority list, while he is a threat, one which they appear to be actively monitoring for an opportunity to neutralize in some manner.

Also regarding the fascists are stupid angle – one of the things I’ve noticed is that the methods the Eanlians are using to exert control would not work if the world had been managed remotely competently. With the partial exception of the environmental issues, everything they’re doing is something that governments, historically, and for very good reason, do not outsource if avoidable. They just don’t. They only let someone else do it if they can’t do it themselves, and even then that requires balancing ‘how much I like/trust them’ against ‘how bad would it be if no action is taken’. Starting with the environmental issues, while there are a plethora of examples of governments ignoring environmental problems, those almost all involve either short-sighted selfishness (i.e. it’s not affecting me, personally, right now, so it’s safe to ignore) or lack of ability to address the problem. Once they start affecting the people in charge, they usually get addressed at least somewhat (Parliament concluded that large scale sewer works in London were too expensive until the Great Stink of 1858 forced it to adjourn due to the smell, at which point they were approved), and when they don’t, it’s usually due to other deep flaws (the Soviets for example, hated and distrusted scientists for their attachment to objective reality over Marxist theories, leading them to institute rigid control over acceptable thinking and accepting ideologically flattering nonsense like Lysenkoism and pouring resources into fundamentally impossible projects), which are also extremely not good. Here, it seems like there is enough environmental damage that it would start having effects, but it seems to be largely the Eanlians cleaning it up, meaning that either the government lacks the ability to do so (which is bad, they absolutely should), or (as military governments are almost invariably right wing) they are too ideologically opposed to environmental regulations to acknowledge reality (which is worse).

Then there’s communication. The internet is massively decentralized by design. Radio is geographically limited by the laws of physics. The telephone, and its predecessor the telegraph, can be used to create massive networks under the control of a single entity, and we can see that they do indeed – unless it involves crossing national borders. When the telegraph (and later telephone) are invented, we see very quickly national networks being created by private companies, and while countries were perfectly happy to let these new companies largely sort each other out as long as service kept improving, they did not let other country’s companies into their territory (save for those that were effectively vassal states who let their overlord in). The only time they allowed the networks they used to be under foreign control was for international connections (where it was unavoidable); even then, they tried to maximize their own leverage; there were multiple connections under the Atlantic between America and major European countries because each wanted a direct bilateral link controlled by them. They all knew that secure, fast, long-distance communication was incredibly useful, and that being able to read someone else’s messages gave an enormous advantage over them (and they were right: the British cutting of the German trans-Atlantic cables at the start of WWI meant that the Zimmerman telegram trying to convince Mexico to declare war on America had to travel through both British and American cables, allowing the British to decode the message and give the decryption code to the Americans to check against their own copy and prove it was genuine). AT&T’s headquarters in New Jersey (as close to New York as possible without being inside nuclear blast radius) was built under the assumption that it might have to take control of the entire US network in the case of nuclear war – in which scenario it alone would represent, essentially, the US’s entire communication abilities. This is a vital capability, yet the Eanlians are able to take it over with what appears to be little pushback. This can only represent lacking the ability to say no.

And now we come to the big one: the military. This is a big fucking deal, the sine qua non of a state – the very definition of a state is an entity that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given area. Letting a foreign entity operate militarily on your soil is one of the highest gestures of trust a country can give, because of just how badly it can go for you if they turn hostile. Even a purely domestic force can be dangerous and destabilizing – the Carthaginians had to fight another war immediately after the First Punic War when the mercenaries they’d hired to fight that war showed up back home and asked for their back pay (which the Carthaginians had expected to take from Rome in the peace settlement – oopsie). And this has been known for a while! It’s not a complicated concept: if I have a gun to your head, and you don’t have a gun to mine, I can hard override your decisions whenever I want, and you can’t stop me. Which is why governments do not let anyone else operate armed forces, not unless they have no other choice – medieval feudalism came about because the central government lacked the resources to control and administrate large areas and was thus forced to devolve in exchange for (tenuous) loyalty. And we can already see that they’re failing at this before the Eanlians come in and start buying out military contracts (holy shit they bought military supremacy how the fuck are you this incompetent even for fascists). Mercenaries only exist when the benefits to the government of having relatively small (since they can’t rely on government support for their logistical needs, they have to be small) armed groups around for hire outweigh the risks of them doing some banditry on the side (the traditional fallback for unemployed men of violence). This is why we see mercenary groups in Classical Greece (with all those small city-states for whom a mercenary group could be quite a helpful boost to their war effort in a pinch), but they immediately disappear into either regular armies or piracy in the post Alexander era, when the big Hellenistic powers (and later the Romans) take over, who find mercenaries to small to be useful. Likewise, they reappear in the Medieval Era, when all those low level lords are constantly conducting small-scale wars over whatever petty squabbles they have with their neighbors, then disappear again when the Early Modern Era comes in and warfare shifts to the resource-heavy gunpowder based armies. A modern army should not be using mercenaries; a modern army should not even be in a position where using mercenaries is even feasible, because creating state-relevant armed forces requires the resources of a state (the Hessians from the American Revolution were the actual army of Hesse fighting with the British in exchange for payment from the government of Britain to the government of Hesse; the infamous Wagner Group is essentially an arm of the Russian military that they pretend is independent to increase legal flexibility). If a modern state has had its capacity degraded to the point where it’s seriously considering using regular (i.e. non-state-backed) mercenary companies, it is a failed state (especially since the only things a modern state could use it for – those involving civilians and no serious armed forces – are the sort of things mercenaries are really bad at – during the Thirty Year’s War (the last time mercenaries were used in significant numbers) large swathes of Germany were rendered essentially depopulated and burned to the ground by looting mercenaries, since they didn’t care about collateral or long-term damage – AKA the main concerns when operating in civilian areas).

All of which could be avoided, and relatively easily too. Starting with the environmental damage: in real life this is the best example of allowing in foreign powers, as, for historical relative power reasons, there’s a lot of rich people in America and Europe who care about the environment and a lot of environmental damage in poor areas outside of that, and it’s the hardest to use against you, since all it requires is bringing in large numbers of civilians to civilian areas, which is rather hard to weaponize – they can’t do much directly and most of what they’d observe would be public knowledge already. Allowing them to bring in their own security forces is right out – this isn’t done in real life precisely because unless there’s an active war in the area (and sometimes even then) it would lead immediately to accusations of using it as cover for a hostile takeover of the area and straight up refusal: it’s all under the aegis of the local officials. And this is all assuming they don’t have the situation under control already, like they should at least be trying to. Then there’s communications and the military situations, for which the answer is the same (and also the easiest): just do what we’re doing right now. You said the divergence point was in the 80s, and back then, we already had a reliable communications network. We already had a way to reliably exert military control over our own borders. Screw the improvements made over the past few decades (which, again, we know are possible because we did them), all they had to do was not fuck up what they already had, then they could just refuse the Eanlian’s offers and keep on doing what they were already doing.

Which brings me to some rather interwoven threads: I suspect the Eanlians are not so much conquering as taking over a collapsing state (one which they may have had a hand in pushing over the edge), the preceding government definitely laid the groundwork for this collapse (even if the Eanlians brought it down by exploiting it’s weaknesses they didn’t put those weaknesses there), and how I suspect the timeline went (which I would really appreciate some clarity on, since there’s very few references anywhere). The initiating thought: they didn’t restrict Eanlian smartphone equivalents. Why not? That should be a very simple task, just saying no. The Eanlians could have leaned on them, but in the beginning they lack leverage apart from military force, which even using as a threat would make friendly relations impossible. More likely, they were afraid of the domestic pushback from forbidding their population from upgrading their flip phones to smartphones, and this, I suspect, was because of the nature of 21st century authoritarianism. Over the past several decades, the ability of information to flow has become vastly easier. As a result, the ability to keep your populace from seeing information that contradicts the official narrative has become much harder to achieve. As such, modern authoritarians do not try and control their populations by getting them to believe an official narrative as truth. Instead, they try to control them by overloading them with mutually contradictory information until they give up on the idea of anyone telling the truth at all, and thus having no reason to side with a dissident over the regime – the infamous ‘flood the zone with shit’ strategy. This has advantages in that it meshes well with the current media environment and takes a lot of concentrated effort to dispel, but it also leaves the population with no real attachment to the regime – they may not care enough to topple it, but they also don’t care enough to save it. Instead, they form an implicit bargain – the regime gets to stay in power as long as the main bulk of the population isn’t targeted by the regime directly. This is mostly reliable, insofar as it goes, but also extremely shallow, since the state now can’t rely on the citizenry to make sacrifices. Contrast America in WWII, where the populace volunteered for the armed forces in high levels, didn’t complain about the existence of the draft, and willingly accepted rationing, with Putin’s current war against Ukraine, where he’s having trouble getting enough men and materiel but is unwilling to resort to the draft and to even ask the populace to contribute more, because that would break the bargain, and he just got a new houseguest who can tell him how quickly it can go bad when apathy kicks in against you. Thus the populace is accustomed to consumer goods flowing freely, and they will not accept the state telling them not to buy certain ones for the greater good, because that is not a legitimate claim the state has on them, and they will not obey it. They can be made to obey it, possibly, at great effort and risk, by turning the army on them, but that requires maintaining and supplying a large and loyal enough army to directly compel the entire population, as well as opening up a vulnerability to another flaw of this approach, which is that it has an obvious centrifugal effect, in that if another government marches in and declares themselves in charge, the populace – if they offer the same bargain – still doesn’t care (indeed, this basically what happens with the Eanlians – who cares if your unaccountable master changes from a human to a space furry? That’s the Eanlian’s biggest advantage right there, and they weren’t the ones responsible for it). If the army is busy compelling the obedience of the population when they do this…? As a result, this sort of regime is extremely brittle – once they lose local military superiority, they’re gone, and they’re significantly constrained in their domestic policy choices, especially once you throw in the need to maintain army loyalty, which is, after all, composed of citizens.

That explains how the Eanlians were able to just sort of show up and move in and be accepted, while the governments weren’t able to stop them, so here’s what I think the timeline was. (Also, I think the timeline is really important because an age cohort’s life experiences do shape their behavior to a significant degree: the social movements of the 60’s occurred worldwide when the post-war generation became old enough to be politically active, Russia targets those who grew up under the Soviet Union when recruiting agents in Eastern Europe and those who grew up after its fall in Western Europe and America, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re seeing a rise in the far-right now that WWII is passing out of living memory). You’ve said the timeline diverged in the 80s, so: The 80s were a time of conservative backlash to the social advances of the civil rights movement, feminist movement, gay rights movement, etc. Instead of Reagan and his sunny, Morning Again In America, no need to worry, everything is currently fine approach, the avatar of the decade is one of the John Birch Society types, the kind that spent the 50s shrieking that the civil rights movement was godless communism that needed to be purged from America with extreme prejudice before we’re all taken over by mixed-race Satan worshipers, and then kept on doing that until the late 70s (when someone finally managed to bludgeon him over the head with the concept of a euphemism). Once elected, he also does a military buildup, same as Reagan, the Soviets match him, same as Reagan, unlike Reagan he doesn’t work on arms control, viewing it as an anti-American plot (since any relative or absolute reduction in American military might is ipso facto bad) and abolishes all environmental regulation (a communist plot to harm the economy). The Soviet’s internal politics happen the same, Mikhail Gorbachev (not-at-all coincidentally, the first Soviet leader not born under the Tsars) is once again installed, withdraws the military from the Warsaw Pact, and precipitates the Soviet Union’s collapse, and here’s where things really begin to change. America in its superpower era has a tendency to view geopolitical success as 100% validating everything about America. In the post-war era, Americans saw their society as basically perfect with nothing for anyone to seriously complain about, and then the civil rights movement came knocking, because no, you’ve got some pretty big flaws that You. Need. To. Address. Right. Now. Likewise, when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was seen as proving that not just liberal democracy but Reaganomics was the ideal system of governance, and that nobody could ever doubt that ever again (Francis Fukuyama famously wrote ‘The End of History’, arguing that we’d solved everything and nothing important would happen anymore). As a result, the US then proceeded to spread the gospel of capitalism and democracy far and wide, and were met with general reception (after all, the main competitor had just collapsed ignominiously while the US was still going strong). Then, of course, the 2000s came, and all the geopolitical and social problems that were going to be solved so easily turned out to be quite a lot thornier than they looked (or as I like to put it, the 90s were a mindless party, and the 2000s were the 90s hangover) and the 90s came to be seen as an era of astonishing hubris (which, frankly, should have been obvious at the time – the breakup of the Soviet Union was handled abysmally: instead of engaging in any serious economic planning for the restructuring of the entire Soviet economy and formation of new countries they just sold everything as-is, piecemeal, to the highest bidder (who were usually midlevel KGB people – which didn’t help), resulting in a decade of shortages at best, complete collapse at worst, and overall chaos and a much worse experience than they’d had under the Soviet Union – Putin’s initial popularity was based on ‘I brought us out of the 90s’). Something similar happens here, but instead of validating liberal democracy and laissez faire economics, it validates far right conspiracy theories and thinly veiled racism – which America then does it’s best to export. The Operation Condor crowd and their ilk seize on the excuse to persecute democratic movements as ‘communist’, while the ethnic conflicts of the late 90s are turbocharged by the conspiracies and excuses for racism that work just as well outside America, and through it all America’s official stance is that it doesn’t count if they’re commies. Inside America, the degradation of the civil service due to loyalty purges, increasing corruption, and an inability to address actual problems instead of crackpot conspiracy theories, environmental disasters that are obviously tied back to the rejection of environmental science as a communist plot, an economy that’s only regulated for the benefit of rent-seekers, and an increasingly heavy police crackdown on ‘domestic terrorists who are definitely not peaceful protesters’ lead to a shock loss for the regime (my guess is 2008, as Patrick’s group had access to end to end encryption when they were operating shortly after Johnston came to power, and that started being available sometime around 2010). The then-president steps down peacefully, but the army, which has been deliberately filled with the sort of people who think the Geneva Convention is a communist plot to hamstring American military might, is extremely unhappy at the prospect of accountability, so all those people who have been happily murdering democratic activists to prop up a brutal right-wing military dictatorship overseas come home to do the same thing there. Johnston emerges as the leader and marches on Washington; the remnants of the old regime aren’t willing to fight and the incoming administration isn’t organized enough to put up any serious resistance. He announces that the civilian leadership has failed to stop the communists from rigging the election and taking over, so henceforth it is clear that the military, in the person of him, must lead the country as the only people capable of safeguarding it. This is not popular, and in the ensuing fighting, America withdraws its forces back home and concentrates its resources on rebuilding (which it can’t do properly, having gone full on authoritarian) and leaving the dictatorships it’d been propping up vulnerable, leading to a series of revolutions and wars as various groups take advantage of each other’s weakness, none of them having been able to fully consolidate, while the various WMDs America has been handing out to its clients/allies like candy start being used in earnest, which just makes the whole thing worse. Europe has been able to keep itself stable through all this, but is too busy defending its own borders from incursions and dealing with the flow of refugees to offer the rest of the world any help. The fighting is just beginning to die down a little when Eanli shows up in the mid 2020s (a couple years before Patrick comes out of hiding for twenty years, which he started circa 2010), bringing us to this story circa 2030.

Now, regarding the annexation: there are two major points where the Eanlians will have the most difficult job and resistance will be maximized (and are therefore of the greatest interest as to just how they pulled that off). The second (chronologically) will be after they’ve finished taken over and are ready to allow free travel between Earth and Eanli, when they finally break it to the humans that hunting hours are a thing. In other words, it’s a ‘To Serve Man’ situation, AKA the classic low-inventiveness way to show that your aliens are evil (apart from having them be slavers, of course – which the Eanlians are as well!). This is, to humans, evil. It is unquestionably evil. It is the kind of evil that the first contact era governments of Earth would not dare countenance, not just because there are some things that even they consider beyond the pale, but because the public would not stand for it – even for fascists there are some crimes they can’t spin away, some taboos that hold even in the darkest depths. And when the humans find out what they’ve unwillingly signed up for, that they’ve been sold a bill of goods? The natural result is massive resistance from all corners, resistance that might very well spread back to Eanli proper or attract prey to Earth to help out – after all, even after millennia of social conditioning that predation is going to happen somewhere, prey still desperately want it to not happen to them. The prospect of abolishing it entirely? Tempting. Since they aren’t going with the ‘take all their children and inculturate them directly with our beliefs’ plan, they must have some way to convince the populace at large that this is a normal, natural, and above all legitimate way of doing things. A tall order, but one they apparently have a plan for.

The first one (chronologically) is the one that is apparently just finishing up: the transfer of governmental authority from the human’s governments to the Eanlian governments. This is much simpler to find parallels for, since it doesn’t involve anything fantastical, and what we find is that (if we ignore territorial swaps as distinct from one way transfers) governments really, really, hate doing this. It goes against their entire raison d’etre, and there are basically no examples where governments do this if they have any other choice (e.g. Basil the Bulgar-slayer had the Venetians take over the administration of Dalmatia under Byzantine suzerainty after Tsar Samuel of Bulgaria’s westward expansion cut the overland route, meaning the Venetians with their navy were the only ones who could exercise control there – while as expected the Ventians fairly quickly started viewing themselves as the actual owners of Dalmatia and ceased forwarding taxes, the alternative was losing control of Dalmatia anyway and getting nothing in return). As a result, most examples fall into one of two categories: the benefiting state has superior military capabilities (demonstrated via winning a war or gunboat diplomacy) or (as per the example above) the state losing its capability to retain its authority and trying to minimize the loss. Based on the willing population transfer (people don’t like being conquered, and usually try and flee conquerors, not flock to their strongholds), Pontius’s statement that national borders don’t really exist anymore, and the general decrepit vibe, it looks to be the latter. However, we haven’t really seen enough to be sure of what exactly is happening; the previous story was still in the stage where the Eanlians held no more formal powers than any other citizen; all they were doing was selling cheap advanced technology and paying generous salaries. The time skip covers the start of the territorial acquisitions (which, to be perfectly honest, I would rather like to have explored the politics of in detail, but then it would have been a political story, and while I quite like political stories like that – this is a vore site), so we haven’t seen how that’s going, other than that it apparently is (although I expect (and hope) that we’ll be getting a good after-the-fact analysis once they make it to civilization; how to replace one government with another is something that a communist would naturally have spent a lot of time thinking about and take a great deal of interest in). My theory (going in, which hasn’t been disproved yet) was that the Eanlians would manipulate the humans and play them off against each other, making agreements with some to take care of their enemies for them, which of course would require boots on the ground. Then behind the scenes they would arrange for some of the other enemy groups to become more of a danger (probably by covert sabotage of their allies), or for their human partners to have a schism, and suddenly Eanlian support is worth a great deal more and the Eanlians demand a commensurate amount in return, which the humans are unable to refuse. Rince and repeat until eventually their partners are completely assimilated, polities which refused to compromise their independence have been overrun by armed groups herded towards them by the Eanlians, and the only other people left are Neo-Nazis and the like, at which point they crush the remaining opposition to widespread approval. This would also help introduce the idea of them eating people in an acceptable manner (who cares if they’re eaten? They’re Nazis). This does seem to fit at least so far, but there are other considerations – while the general milieu here seems worse than in the previous story, that could be because that was in the capital and this is in the sticks. In addition, the habitats the Eanlians are building seem to be concentrated in the large population centers, which yes would be some of the best locations to build in – but that’s also why the local government wouldn’t want to give them up, and they appear too intact for the Eanlians to have that much leverage over them. It’s most likely some form of economic coercion, as military threats are likely to backfire (dictators are notoriously egotistical and thin-skinned) and military dictatorships tend to have economic problems. However, the endgoal is to completely annex the territory, which economic coercion cannot accomplish – a bankrupt dictator is still a dictator – unless they precipitate a collapse so bad as to completely eliminate their logistics capacity. That being said, that’s much easier said then done, and even if they do manage it that still leaves quite a lot of heavily armed people (based on the relative sizes, far more than they can control) just wandering about the countryside, AKA an instant bandit crisis (and because of the self-sorting effect, they will be the most anti-Eanlian members of society). Obviously, this is far from ideal, meaning they must have some sort of plan to usurp the authority of the remaining government and then have the remaining population accept them. Which, I suspect, is what this story will be about.

Various small things: How does Eanli compare to Earth, technology-wise? I’d been assuming that the portcullis was in the same time period as reformation, but apparently not. What’s the progression there?

What’s the legal status of the habitats? They can’t be fully Eanli, as hunting hours aren’t implemented yet, and formal legal takeover would come near the end of an indigenous collapse and foreign annexation (which, while it appears to be rapidly approaching, isn’t there yet)

On the Eanlians having, apparently, really big testicles: is that new? I don’t remember that being mentioned before. Or is it just that Patrick is the first person so far to be in a position to both observe that and find it noteworthy.

Apparently anyone can just walk onto a military base in this timeline. They must be very confident in their spy network catching people before they can do anything. Or incompetent.

‘Subprofessionals’ – Ah, the old ‘define something out of existence to avoid having to deal with it’ strategy. I was immediately reminded of modern Republicans and trans people – was that intentional?

America’s refeudalized, hasn’t it? We’ve seen they’re desperately lacking in military strength (see above) and have political actors with major independent support bases and significant autonomy from the central government. Feudalism was the former leading to the latter.

The federal government here really doesn’t get how people work, do they? Pontius insisting that he can be trained out of sleep deprivation, Spartan’s matter-of-fact statements that humans are evolving out of empathy – really? The key ingredient in social cooperation, AKA the sole reason a solidly second tier, physically unimpressive ape rose to unquestioned dominance of the planet being gotten rid of is a good thing? These people are really drinking the cult of machismo’s kool-aid.

“Maybe rewarding the elimination of internal enemies inevitably leads to aimless violence.” Gee, you think? Liberal democracy was invented precisely because that sort of thing elevates otherwise petty issues that you can absolutely ignore into life-or-death issues worth plunging the country into civil war over. Civil wars are bad. If an ideology leads to a lot of civil wars, it is a bad ideology.

Can I just say: the Foundationists. You really nailed that sort right-wing fever swamp movement: the way they interact with others, their internal politics, the highly specific ways they’ve lost touch with reality.

Is Patrick, like, famous? The Last American Communist – that seems like they’ve heard of him before, like he’s notable.

Patrick knows a lot more about history than anyone else, and he hasn’t brought up anything really complicated yet. I’m guessing it’s because he’s the only one who grew up before Johnston started ideologically purging the education system.

I’m pretty sure that if you ignore trivial statements (This is New Sumnerton), literally every statement Albus makes is either stupid or wrong or both. No wonder even this government didn’t want him. (Or possibly the better analyst than spy thing was an insult. That’s also possible.)

Spartan being officially part of the Union Enforcement Agency: is that union as in Untied States, or union as in strike busters, because that would be a hell of a lot of irony for the latter.

That bit where the security otter talks about Patrick being brave for him? He totally wants to take him as prey, doesn’t he? That’s how Eanlians act when they meet prey they’d like.

‘Pontius looked at the phone in Pat’s hand. “That thing is a class one risk, Pat.”’ He’s learning! There might still be hope after all. For it not to be a foregone conclusion, I mean.

Some typos: in the diner, Pontius says he’s unable to contact his handler “though any means.”

When they’re talking about secure in-person communications, Pontius says “Field word, is of vital importance”

And finally something technical: I noticed that when I saw it in the ‘Latest Writing’ list it had a comment, but when I went directly to the story it didn’t, and when I checked the author’s latest comment list it wasn’t there either. Is that a visibility thing? Do you know how that works?

Posted by ObsidianSnake 2 months ago Report

Thanks for the comment! :) I wish I could respond at length to this but alas I don't have the time, and also many of the things that you're interested in will continue to develop in future parts. However! There's something extremely salient that you mention that I think needs to be highlighted immediately due to its thematic and factual importance:
Yes, Eanlians have always had very large genitalia compared to Earth life. Other characters have remarked or observed it in stories prior to this one but, yes, Pat is unique in that he's the first protagonist that highlights and raises it as a topic.

Also regarding the comment thing -- Eka's Portal is a bit buggy when it comes to moderation actions. In the spirit of forgiveness and encouraging a positive environment, let's not dwell on it.

Posted by Mourtzouphlos 2 months ago Report

I started to suspect that might be the case once the document I wrote it in breached five pages (at least you read the whole thing; I was a bit worried I was being presumptuous). I'll be reading the next part shortly; hopefully it won't take as long to write up the analysis this time.