Posted by Mourtzouphlos 2 months ago Report

Alright, we’ve finally got back to civilization! Time for us to get to talk with someone who actually knows what’s going and get some answers and he doesn’t bother explaining anything and just sends them all off to perform various tasks. Well, it is an authoritarian dictatorship that has clearly cocked up the situation worse than Luigi Cadorna, so it makes sense that no one would want to talk about what went wrong when it was obviously their fault, and the story is a character drama so it’s not like there’s a compelling out-of-universe reason for them to find out anyway. That’s fine. It’s not like I was hoping for him to drop everything and spend half the story going on an exposition dump covering a detailed history of the Eanlian’s plan to infiltrate and subvert the US government and an analysis of how they’d successfully engineered a global takeover. That would be unreasonable.

Anyway, Leon Price as a person. We see a lot of that here, and I’m pretty sure it’s enough to get a good view of what makes him tick, but I can’t figure it out (I’m pretty sure it’s a me problem. It feels like I’m taking a test I didn’t study for at all, not like the answers aren’t actually there). Top line though: he’s a follower, not a leader. A really reliable hatchet man. The sort of person who honestly regards “I was just following orders” as completely sufficient justification and absolution for anything. Whenever he’s on his own, he goes to the big guy in the room, vows loyalty, and means it, because he does not want to be the one making decisions, he wants to be told what to do. The extremely rare sort who can be trusted with significant power in a dictatorship without any sort of risk that he’ll back a challenger or become one (no wonder he rules a quarter of the population), because his only goal is obedience and loyalty, even if he knows it’s a bad idea (his drunk speech is basically ‘we did everything wrong and everything’s fucked now, but the same people will fix it. Somehow. Unless you hold our past actions against us’). I suspect his repeated (and apparently failed) relationships tie back into this by way of him being unwilling to sever (platonic) relationships no matter the cost (which in turn help explain his popularity with those who actually meet him in person) as well as his hypertrophy (also, holy shit how does he not have medical problems from that thing? The blood supply alone...). I’m rather reminded of the emperor Tiberius, in that they were both loyal subordinates who, due to their loyalty and competency, were entrusted with increasing responsibilities but never sought to be at the top because they didn’t want to be, except that Tiberius was eventually ordered to take the top job due to lack of alternative candidates (and still skived off to Capri), while Leon wasn’t supposed to be in charge, he just sort of ended up here and look, here’s someone who wants to be in charge and oh how his knees just feel so much more comfortable bent before someone…

That bit with Venus is actually very revealing about the social structure of post-coup America. The things she talks about are things that actually happened in the past (good job looking all that up), but only in highly stratified societies with basically no social mobility. Regarding social class altering physical boundaries: in Victorian Britain, it was relatively common for the highest aristocrats, despite the otherwise strict social mores, to have absolutely no compunction about being naked in front of servants, since they were viewed as being more like furniture, while regarding the ‘anatomical reification of class divide’: medieval archaeologists can tell whether any skeleton they unearth is an aristocrat or peasant because the aristocrats are all much taller and larger because they always got enough to eat, while the peasants are all malnourished, and they can be dated to pre or post Renaissance/Enlightenment improvements in medicine by whether or not the nobles are in much better health than the commoners. (Although I do wonder: she says she’s really interested in Eanlian music, but the Eanlians have been restricting human access to information on Eanli. Something cultural like that would probably have a lot of avenues to convey some things they probably don’t want humans to know, while also being famously hard to fully censor)

The little stuff: You did the introduction again! Is it in the last part too? I’ll find out later.

So ‘state capital’ and ‘federal regional capital’ are apparently different things, and counties are meaningful internal units (since one being dissolved is not solely a matter of administrative convenience). I think that’s another point in the ‘neo-feudalism’ column.

So (if I’m reading this right) Johnston gets into power, then pulls a Bismarck with Indonesia to cement his popularity. Alternatively, one of hypothetical John Birch guy’s successors pulls a Napoleon III, Johnston begins forming the political groundwork for a coup, then launches it when the old government got voted out.

How does Leon Price know who Pat is already? Is ‘The Last American Communist’ actually famous?

I have exactly one source for evangelical theology, but, yeah, that accords with what it says. Whatever the right wing already wants but say it’s for Jesus.

Apparently fifteen thousand people is a significant amount for Leon Price right now. California has a population of forty million. America has a population of three hundred million. Yeah, I don’t think you’re doing too well.

We actually finally get a rational debate over whether eating people is acceptable! That then immediately fizzles out and goes nowhere because one side is in an extremely poor position for it, but I think it’s still enlightening. Notably, Lord Rhes does not actually affirmatively argue that it’s good, he merely implies that it’s natural and inevitable (via unfounded assertion) then skips straight to criticizing the humans instead. This is classic what-aboutism, and it’s used not to establish superiority but to delegitimize the idea of it being possible for anyone to be better because everyone is horrible, and I think it’s an admission that there is no rational argument for why Earth should be annexed by Eanli, which is why the Eanlians aren’t going to give the humans a meaning ful choice.

How do the Eanlians even taste anything from their prey, anyway? All they get is the outside, not any of the actual nutritious bits.

I actually agree that the habitats, as presented, are indeed better than the current government. It’s the bits they aren’t telling them about that tips it over into being worse.

The mother of Paxhe – is that Lau from Kiyi and the Pale One, and they’re just wrong about her species? I’m pretty sure that’s the right part of the world.

When I was reading this Lord Rhes sounded like Mel Brooks in my head. When I did it again, so did Leon Price. I have no idea why.

Some typos: His desk was grand, fourteen feed wide

It was a regional conflict, centered around a small sore the State department nursed into a full gushing wound.

These men would fair worse, probably

Posted by ObsidianSnake 2 months ago Report

Okay there's some things that are a bit easier for me to respond to without spoiling upcoming sections or stories, or about matters I don't have interesting commentary about. Hey, I write the stories, I'm not telling people what to think of feel here.

Regarding Leon - he's a people pleaser. Deep down, he likes to make others happy. I would argue that, ultimately, that's a neutral personality trait, with potential to be both bad and good. Also, he totally has some minor problems due to that thang, but good diet and exercise does a lot.

State / Regional Block structure - Yes, the regional blocks are administrative entities comprised of continuous multi-state regions and territorial holdings. The regime wanted to run things that way.

Regarding Eanlian predators' sense of taste - they have them, and it's more than just simple taste buds. They've evolved to eat like this, and waves of chemical information pour into their nervous system as they consume their prey.

The historical legend of the matriarch of Paxhe and the myth of the origins of the Lau are two entirely different stories. At the time of writing this comment, you can currently read the truth behind the second one. :)

Posted by Mourtzouphlos 2 months ago Report

An extra layer of bureaucracy to handle things that duplicates efforts on the state and national levels - did the regime want to run things that way because they wanted to send in more loyalists with an excuse to be officious, or were they responding to a breakdown in communications or something (just like feudalism)?

What sort of information can they glean? If it's chemical, it's based on chemical reactions with the inside, and the whole point of having an epidermis is that the inside and outside don't react with each other except through highly controlled conditions.