The Phaedra/os/x route is actually what I was thinking of. You ditch your existing alliances to back the heir, which is supposed to happen before the final book.
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Throwing away all your hard work to back the current system, I don’t see how that will be appealing to very many people, even the non-helots as it relegates you to playing second fiddle forever.
For my mc and any other helot I see it being a complete non-starter as you’d be throwing away everything just to become their personal pet house slave and go back to being just another helot slave animal with zero rights again.
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Well, there is one very attractive upside that has been repeated many times before in this thread and the last.
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No twisting of the nipples is worth it. 
Even a “noble” mc will be just an insignificant country bumpkin within the circles of prince(ss) nippletwister while, again, a helot mc will just become a slave with zero rights again and forget about ever practicing magic again too for an Int focused helot.
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There are a number of people who would react to this with “hot”, presuming the slaver is a hot lady.
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I presume helot MC will be priviliged or socially “promoted” enough to be a part of ruling elite or Phaed inner circle at this point. But yeah not a lot of people gonna be interested in doing that, maybe hard pro-elitists or people who want reform over revolution at all cost.
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You cannot promote or manumit a helot it goes against everything the regime is based on. If they do that they have to recognize that helots are fundamentally people and if they do that they seriously erode their already weakened foundation. After all if one person was “mistakenly” categorized as a helot who is to say there aren’t more? Potentially a lot more. And on the other side of the coin who is to say that some people currently categorized as “noble” were not mistakenly categorized as such either?
Opening that can of worms is not something the regime cannot ultimately survive as it needs a slave caste and needs that slave caste to stay docile and not think about improving their lot.
Remember their slavery system is not a roman-esque system where manumission can sometimes happen and the children of some freed slaves, albeit not the freed slaves themselves, could rise to the highest ranks of the elite, it is instead based on the helotry of ancient Sparta, who were unpersons who could be hunted down without remorse.
If a helot sides with nippletwister they’d just become their favourite sex slave and any role as adviser is very strictly behind the scenes and limited to and wholly dependent on nippletwister. In public they would be helots again and expected to obey and show proper deference to their “betters” always.
Nippletwister heads the most vile and also the most conservative faction, even doing what the Shayardene Laconniers might do and making helots into land-bound serfs with some purely theoretical “rights” would already be too far beyond the pale for most Karagond elites to stomach as it is a direct stab at the heart of their culture(al superiority complex). Stronger regimes have tumbled over less.
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That’s incorrect. Mass is not constant at relativistic speeds. Mass is not constant in QM, nor in GR nor even in classical physics (hot coal has more mass than cold coal, contracted spring has more mass than relaxed spring). But I agree with your counter in general - in purely physical world we’ll always be able to reduce to absolutes even if these absolutes end up mutually exclusive (qm-gr incompatibility).
Wow. I would’ve thought that the main aether cost for hegemony is the border wards and the war effort. Turns out hegemony is in a constant loop of - harvest enough blood to be able to feed enough people to be able to harvest enough blood to be able to feed enough people to be… Damn.
Would stopping the theurgically enhanced agriculture really have famine genocide effects though? If current hegemony can upkeep 270m people and aether spraying is only responsible for 80m of that, then getting rid of theurgriculture would decrease the food output by 30%ish. That’s not widespread famine. That’s skipping one meal a day.
So the real moral conundrum is:
Should we kill 1.3 million people or skip a meal? Tough choice.
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It’s skipping one meal if the loss is spread evenly, which is not at all how famine works. Plus, i’d imagine the helots and poor free labourers are already living on subsistence meals, I don’t think they have the caloric flexibility to cut 30%. doesn’t seem like the slave masters are nearly that generous.
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You certainly can make exceptions. Hitler had a Jewish bodyguard. And if the facts becomes too unplausible then the regime can rectify or hide facts from MC background.
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Don’t forget that a lot of soil is potentially to be exhausted which would additionaly stop harvests in some regions for some time. And transport of said food is reliant on theurgy too, as huge amount of it goes through canals which require theurgic sailing and maintenance.
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helot mc was always noble and if someone disagrees they can find there head on chopping block. even helot mc could change faction it just depends what kind of deal he will be able to get. mc with very strong position can most likely get very good bargain for there new position
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You keep asserting this and it’s simply not true. Historically, even the most rigid caste systems end up flexing at some point, because said caste system exists for the needs of the people on top in the first place and is subordinate to those needs. As Sowe pointed out, even the Nazis made exceptions. One of the Austrian proto-Nazis literally said “I decide who is a Jew!”
As for your argument that a regime couldn’t survive something like that…um…since when has an authoritarian regime ever not been hypocritical? No, go on, I’ll wait. If someone objects, they can flat-out lie, eliminate the objector, or…well, see above. Likewise, expecting rigid logic from authoritarians also ignores reality.
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Hitler himself put the Jewish doctor who’d treated his terminally ill mother under his protection during Anschluss and made sure he could emigrate in addition to the example Sowe gave, so that’s very true.
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There’s also just the fact that communes and communal farming is extremely inefficient and historically does not work. What kept the Soviets fed weren’t the state-owned farms but their own private garden plots.
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I am fairly confident that it won’t be so easy as skipping a meal. After all, if there was no great advantage to harrowing there would be no reason to agonise over whether or not to maintain it. And where would the fun be without that?
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Someone’s always going to Harrow. It’s you or the people who are going to kill you and do it themselves. That’s the problem frankly with Hera discovering the process. Unless you can create incetivization to stop it then you’re just voluntarily agreeing to not use nuclear bombs against nuclear powers who are willing to use it.
To me the message was always this is what happens when you have a bloodright magocracy. All the power in the world and all the human weakness to go with it.
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Halassur and any Ennearch led factions for certain.
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That’s also irrelevant, doesn’t matter if it’s Halassur or the Ennearchs the problem is that it’s there now. The damages caused by Hera’s Wars mean that you need to find a way to protect your lands from the ravages of the Xaos lands.
Religious attributions or not that is a real and present danger. The way to think it over is who do you Harrow and how much of a risk are you willing to take in order to allow for warfare and protective purposes.
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Let the Karagonds eat aether and let Errets be fed by their new Hallasurq masters. The food is staying in Shayard, for Shayardenes…
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