Mmh. I’m not convinced, though in the case of Karagond it’s practically moot. Zebed is only able to get away with his preaching because nobody cares about him screwing over the helots, but even under Olynna, what helots would get is the official right to a same-sex marriage with the underlying threat of being first into the Harrower.
In the case of the PRC, as I understand it, it’s more a case of the Xi administration not caring about LGBT rights one way or another, but very much caring about social activism.
Amazing post! Elery is definitely one of the most interesting characters because she doesn’t have a set-in-stone stance on things; in contrast to Radmar who is out for noble blood, and de Firiac who wants everybody to stop fighting each other.
Honestly looking forward to her in book 2 the most of any character.
I was thinking more about the early republic period of my own country, the “nightwatchman” state will stand aside while the churches police “morality” with a heavy hand and their ecclesiastical courts among the lower and sometimes middle classes including their own inquisitions. Not as numerous and well organised as their Spanish counterparts but they were there. The state only got involved if the church got overzealous persecuting rich folk, including rich jews and generally rich people of other religions.
And, of course, once we got colonies the state did start meddling in the enforcement of morality, if only so they could deport the “malcontents” to the new colonies.
I rather thought it was viewed as a useful tool by those on the top. The “liberal” , or more accurately, “animal welfare” portions of the priesthood, where Olynna is from, may object and say that there are gay sheep. But since those in power have increasingly less use for gay sheep Zebed’s position is at least tacitly supported and without our rebellion and the other rebellions messing things up would likely have become the new canon in one or two generations.
It’s also a natural outgrowth of the caste system with a different morality for the casteless and dovetails perfectly with the pro-natalist policy goals of the Hegemony, which is a theocracy.
Do we know that? I think at best it was silent about it. But then again in our mc’s days the “original” Shayardene codex is what you make of it, assuming you can ram that view down the throat of enough people.
It’s no more of a theocracy than the various editions of the Roman Empire. Religion is an arm of the state apparatus and a source of legitimacy for the Hegemony, and the Ecclesiarchy claims that the Hegemony is divinely ordained, sure. But the primary source of the Hegemony’s authority is Theurgy, and even Radmar can make the distinction - as he points out, it’s Theurges who are Harrowing the gay sheep, not Ecclesiasts.
EDIT: To add to this, one thing I can say with confidence is that the priesthood as a group is not any more supportive of the Hegemony than any other order of society. You already know that the Diakons have a significant number who think that the Hegemony is corrupting the Codex to its own ends, but even multiple Ecclesiasts are having doubts. You may doubt that Olynna cares about helots as more than an animal welfare issue, fine, but the Ecclesiast at the Tithe Barn can risk her life to step back and let your band of outlaws take her tithe grain, and Linos is an outright rebel in his own right - he’ll anoint a helot Eclect, so there’s no way to characterize his beneficience as mere concern for the sheep!
Yes. This is an aristo scene, so you might not have seen it.
Radmar’s lips curve. “Our Diakon came close to calling it a load of dung. Said the one thing she clearly saw in the Codex was that everyone’s got their missing half, and that it’s your nature to be drawn to someone like that—whether or not you could breed with them. Nothing about mullow, nothing about having as many children as possible.”
He glances sharply back at you. “But here’s the thing, ${kuria}. Whatever a swiving priest says, it’s the Theurges that Harrow us. And however they pick victims, whether by Angels or some little spy from our camp…they’ll pick you a whole lot quicker if you’re not childbearing. If Poric and I had been promised to anyone, it would have been a safe-mate who could make lots more helot babies with us. Marrying each other would have been suicide.”
The Codex does include some same-sex couples as heroes, so the statement that people should pursue their other halves is clearly intended to include same-sex couples – as the Diakon said in @Ramidel’s quote.
No, that is more bargaining for the life of his lover, as my mc sees it. We quite literally have him hostage at that point and hold his life and that of his lover in our hands.
Put me in that kind of duress and I’ll give you any meaningless title you might want. It would still be of little value though.
It’s a bargaining chip, something that might bolster the credibility of the mc to the faithful in our little band (but not anywhere else really) in exchange for the lives of him and his lover.
If it works that still amounts to a pretty sweet deal for dear old Linos, imho of course as he gives something of little value in return for something of presumably great value to him.
I’ve always wondered this but what do ethnicity are native shayardenes? From what I can see from some of the art there appear to be multiple races present but they could’ve come from anywhere
Catching up on a few comments that I overlooked before:
No – my “Old Earnn” comment above was a joking reference to someone else’s speculation. I’ll give plenty of evidence in future games but don’t plan to give hard confirmation one way or another.
Less than fifty meters. Really quickly.
No, just the tantalizing first mention. I think the most I’ve shared about him since is behind spoiler-blurs here.
I don’t think I’ve ever said the second Thaumatarch was male – for years I didn’t have a clear image of them, and just referred to them as Hera’s “successor.” Let me know if I’ve called them a son anywhere and need to fix it. I’ve since decided that the second Thaumatarch was actually Hera’s daughter Eosphora, and the third and current one is Eosphora’s son Kleitos.
First: there’s no canon art (not even the “book jacket,” really) so take anything you’ve seen with a big grain of salt. Ethnicity in Shayard is mainly linguistic – the names of the Rim and Westriding are different from those in the Coast and Southriding, and the names from the Reach sound weird to all of them. They’ve all got their own accents and dialects.
But assuming you’re asking about skin color, Shayardenes are some shade of brown-to-black. Readers might have assumed that the Anglo-French cultural signifiers of Shayard go with pink skin, but there’s really no reason to expect that, especially considering:
The people whose skin color is noteworthy to the MC (because out of place) are the “pallid” Neres and the olive skinned Karagond Theurge. The reader is I suppose free so far to imagine the Nyr as a race of albinos.
Nobody from Shayard gets their hair color or eye color described, which is consistent with a context where all “normal” people are black-haired and brown-eyed.
Nobody from Shayard “turns red” when they get embarrassed or other pale-skinned signifiers (unless I’ve messed up and included some such signifier by mistake – which readers are warmly encouraged to point out)
For those who’ve got their head around the world map, Shayard is a lot closer to its world’s equator than France or England are in ours.
So while I’m certainly not going to nitpick lovely art like this, it’s not the author’s own vision for what the characters look like.
Did Hera’s daughter abdicate? Or was she also killed, I don’t recall if you ever brought it up. But, I do imagine she probably did a purge of her mother’s generals and companions in order to solidify her hold on the Hegemony.
So this probably wouldn’t work else someone would’ve done it, but … could the storm be contained with a 50 meter-wide canal?
Unlike the Wards, this could - at some point in the future - be solved with heavy machinery and automation. So I’d definitely go for the canal, given the option.
Ah thanks for informing me. I just assumed that they Shayardanes were white considering the naming conventions and the like. I guess I have to reimagine what the characters look like now lol
Well, you don’t have to. I’m not really inclined to tell anyone they’re imagining my characters wrong; death of the author and all. But there will probably be a growing dissonance in future games as I keep writing the world consistent with how I’m visualizing the characters (where only the Nyr and northern Halassurqs are pink, with lighter shades of brown and some hair/eye color variety for Erezziano and Karagonds). A reader who’s been imagining themselves as white might find it odd when the story tells you you’re seeing blue eyes for the first time.
It’s not a bad idea – well done for asking it. Gonna be totally honest with you all: I’d not thought out the implications on this one, so when I read your comment I had that familiar sinking feeling of the fantasy author – have they thought of something that breaks my world?
I don’t think it does, though, and here’s why: when a Storm hits the water, it dumps everything it’s been making – whether that’s lava or acid or a mountain of glass. So the coastline of Xaos is always shifting, but the ocean can swallow a lot without becoming a less effective barrier. One rock-Storm hitting your canal or a river, on the other hand, could dump the equivalent of a sizeable hill into it along a five-mile storm front. That Storm would dissipate without ravaging your crops and villages, but the one that rolled in two days later wouldn’t find water deep enough to dissolve it.
With that as the picture: yes, you could try to make and maintain a grand canal across the RIm as an alternative to the Ward. It would still take quite a bit of Theurgy to maintain it effectively, I reckon – clearing breaches by hand would often be impossible before the next Storm arrived (not to say terrifying and possibly lethal, depending on what the Storm actually dropped), so you’d need to have Theurges on hand to cut through or clear away or exterminate the blockage.
That canal system might well still require less continuing blood investment than a Ward, and would be less effective but perhaps acceptably so (0% chance of a breach in a Ward, maybe a 5-10% chance in any given year of a catastrophic breach in your canal guarded by Theurges). So if Storms were the only, or even the primary, threat the Wards were designed to keep at bay, you might well be happy to fall back on the canal plan. That certainly wasn’t the case for Eosphora or Kleitos, but might be the case for you.
I for one was always imagining the mc as Latino (and my very first impression of the scenery was actually Brazil gone really, really wrong), fortunately there are enough of those with brown eyes and black or dark brown hair.
Ah, my mc is already planning a canal, though that one is more intended for economic purposes. Still he’d gain a lot of experience building canals, so a border “moat system” could certainly be a possibility, that is if dropping the wards and doing nothing isn’t satisfactory enough.
Of course on the border it doesn’t exactly have to be canals, as they do not need to be navigable by commercial shipping. An artificial lake system would suffice and a pond, lake or marsh is a bit easier to create than a proper, navigable canal.
There is also the possibility of the Storms themselves gradually abating once the wards are dropped if @P_Tigras feedback loop theory turns out to be correct of course.
Could be something with the salinity and the depth? Perhaps there are trace amounts of meteoric aether dissolved in the oceans as well? Of course with the tech/science available the causes for why and ocean is effective and not a canal might not be entirely understood.
I thought the comparisons people made to 40K are interesting. The setting has sort of a similar theme of science (in particular certain miraculous discoveries) exploited to their logical conclusions being pretty terrifying. In 40k’s case its psykers in this setting it’s is therugy. Both civilizations require that the vast mass of society be ignorant of the true nature of the technology that is foundational to the civilization’s existence, and have selected to maintain that ignorance through a state-sponsored religion. The elite of both settings would also attest to the falsity of their respective religions as well.
It was also caused by a serious reversal in the Founding Figure’s plans that were caused due to some form of internal dissonance that led to, in this case, the death of Hera the Immortal before she could see her plan through.
I suppose one difference might be that the Hegemony (or Hera at least) is actually worse. She had already made the devils bargain before she died. In 40k at least the Emperor can say that if he hadn’t been incapacitated most the the Imperium’s worst abuses would not be necessary. The source of Hera’s power was the discovery of harrowing.
How would I go about successfully getting Bley’s wife to heal the food poisoning? Would like to know so I don’t have to restart multiple times just to get one result lol
So I know that Karagond is Greece, Nyr is either Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or Iceland, Erezziano is Italy, Shayard is England and Wiendrj (how do I say that?) are either Welsh or maybe Scottish. I THINK the abhumans are Native American (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). What culture are the Halassurqs and Unquiet Dead based off of?
