Then I have some news for your helot mc, you’ll never be one, not truly. I mean you can certainly rule through fear and call yourself “emperor” or thaumatarch, or whatever other titles you fancy, none of the other aristo’s is going to truly buy into it.
This is a caste system worse than ancient India’s there is no true social mobility and no provision for it. It’ll take utterly demolishing the caste system to even begin to do that. And even then it’ll be a long road. Take poorly executed half-measures (like modern India) and you’ll never get there and even start to see reversals.
I seem to distinctly recall us having this particular discussion before. We’ll wait for Book 5 to see how it plays out, but Havenstone has mentioned that it’ll be possible for a helot MC to get aristocratic support.
True, I still think that “support” means either you’ll become a puppet for (some of) the slavocrats to put a different face on their new regime or you need to rule through naked fear and might. Either way I think that support will be more along the lines of opportunistic “allies” then truly genuine.
Most allies you make in these causes aren’t open ended full supporters. They have their own terms and conditional support. Assembling a coalition of supporters means that you will always need to be doing a balancing act in which you will need to prioritise needs at a near daily basis.
For your MC, he’ll find it especially hard to govern because your solution is basically. Harrow all the people who can help them govern and shatter the fabric of society.
Your MC is the dangerous leftist that creates the Republican Party and Donald Trump.
True, that doesn’t mean there aren’t better and worse allies and for a helot considered sub-human the current nobles with their inbred superiority complex are the worst, they’ll backstab a helot mc the second they get the chance and will literally lead us straight to the Harrower.
How is the current Republican Party the fault of the left, the Soviet Union was more than 20 years ago and internally the US hasn’t had a politically significant left-wing well before that. You can try to blame Debs and Thomas and Browder for the current Republican Party all you want but that just makes you sound like one of the more deranged alt-right podcasts with a persecution bias.
Believe me if I were behind a vast world-dominating left-wing conspiracy I’d certainly like the credit and you’d have basic income and single-payer healthcare by now and Apple, Disney, Amazon and Facebook would have been broken up into smaller entities with a new round of anti-trust a long time ago.
Anyone born a helot in the Hegemony would. Hard doesn’t quite mean impossible.
If by that you mean most of the current “nobility” then, yes, though he’ll try to avoid Harrowing. But let’s be realistic the current nobility will never truly help a helot do anything at all, except menial labour.
We also don’t need them or the priests. What we do need is some of the merchants and lots of the people like Bleys. Oh and some of the mages, but I already said that ideally my mc would be looking for the family men and women among them and make their families “valued guests of the state” as he know they won’t help him out of the kindness of their hearts.
The crux of building a stable society is rooted in these concepts.
Social stability, people like routine, they prefer to know that they can get up, go to work, and come home. Your MC’s plan uproots this and replaces this with uncertainty.
Food, people need to eat and their needs to be a place where you can get that food. I am detecting a massive famine problem.
Economic stability, people want to be able to walk into a place and know that the 1 gold coin they have can buy them the grain they need to live.
These are what people need to live, everything else is a nice to have. That is why most successful revolutions maintain elements of the status quo and the bureaucratic structure of their predecessors. Also your opinion is based on the foundation that people actually spend more than five seconds thinking about others.
As I stated in the politics thread, most people will always choose their own personal welfare over that of others. Most people are not interested in learning about how other cultures and people live. When I go and volunteer at a soup kitchen and clothing distribution center you learn certain things. Namely how important socks are for the homeless. A pair or woollen socks can save their lives if they can’t get to a shelter.
The differences between helots and nobles are simply that the helots for the nobles must be treated dispassionately. Joanna Orchard most likely raised us since we were little, if our nobles mother did not have a kind, caring, and conscientious personality that was imprinted on us we would be more likely to not understand their plight. Nor would we have the desire to learn.
Differences are always born of ignorance, willful or unintentional. You don’t need to line up people against a wall and shoot them, what you need to do is empathise the helots humanity. You need them to interact with each other, break bread together, and bond.
Luckily there is no greater bonding force then shared interests and experiences. While before the revolution my noble never understood true hunger and suffering, she does now. She has listened to the plight of the Helot and while she has never experienced the sexual exploitation and other darker aspects. She understands that Helots are humans and it is wrong.
Bridging the gap between people requires both sides to earnestly speak to one another and for you to make an honest commitment to learning and respecting their story.
Nope, my noble has been keeping mum on their actual thoughts in order to maintain flexibility. The ideal society they want to build is one of a meritocratic bend, public schooling, cosmopolitan bend, and a thriving market based economy where one can get goods from all over the former Hegemony in their local backyard.
As a named female Helot, without the means to pay for staff, and a confidant of your mother. She most certainly would step in and help if her duties permit.
Has been the death knell for feudal nobility historically, as well as the type of chattel slavery your American South practiced.
Problem is the Hegemony economy runs more on blood then it does on money at present, which is probably a big part of why the landed nobility is still richer and more powerful and influential than the city merchants.
Money (whether it is gold or paper) won’t help buy food that simply isn’t there and the current crop of guild merchants are not used to functioning in a (mostly) “open” economy with free competition from their fellows in Halassur or even the next city over. Except for a trickle of luxury goods internal trade seems to be more of a centrally run command economy and external trade, except for an even tinier trickle of luxury goods, supplied mostly by foreign merchants at that seems to be next to nonexistent.
Transitioning to the type of economy you want seems to at the very least combine all the problems of the disintegration of Austria-Hungary with all the problems of the disintegration of the Soviet-Union.
Well, he didn’t have the money for anything better, plus he doesn’t seem to care all that much about his kid either way.
Yep, that’s the caste system and that needs to be broken.
And this would be the problem of the vast majority of current “nobles”. They, or at least the vast majority of them, sincerely believe helots are sub-human and overcoming that, if it is possible at all would require both breaking the caste system and be a generational effort. Even the tiny minority still believe a smart helot is at most only a bit smarter than a dumb noble. The pink unicorns like Simon can on the other hand probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. Which means it is not of that much use to my mc to put undue effort into “allying” with the nobility, especially since it costs him helot, yeoman, poor urban dweller and likely even some potential merchant support.
Respecting their angels-given “freedom” to rape and torture helots for whatever silly thing they want, whenever they feel like it, because they’re not human? Yeah, that one is not going to happen.
From the actual game
Horion hesitates for a long moment, then ventures, “How much do you think you’ll get for ${zhim}, ${kuria}? Is it worth souring the sympathies of every noble who hears the tale?”
*choice
#“All five who weren’t already soured? Perhaps six?”
“Ah, ${kuria}, ${kuria}. Do you truly think no
*if aristo
other noble could travel a road like yours?”
*if helot
noble could see a helot rising as the hope of Shayard?"
And
#“Oh, come. Every noble knows that ransom is part of war.”
Horion shakes his head. "But this isn’t war. Not to them.
*if helot
Not—if you’ll hear it from me, Captain—from a helot.
In any case the nobles won’t take any helot rebellion seriously and by the time they do the Hegemony will be weak enough that they would opt to start their own rebellions over joining one started by a helot. Either way they are the enemy or at the absolute best a very temporary ally that we’d better stab in the back before they get the chance to do the reverse.
You missed my point completely. Which is part of my point in a nutshell. People are wrapped up in their values to the point that they refuse to question them or understand the other side. Breaking decades of indoctrination and antipathy is difficult. But it is better than committing genocide because you can’t be arsed to try.
Note: I don’t want things to remain the same and she would want to break the power of the nobility and shift it to a class of meritocratic bureaucrats. She distrusts the nobility as an institution of power because they will place their self interest first.
Pretty much. My Alya is pro-aristocracy but she’ll still end up bettering the helots’ lives, if only by cracking down on the Alastors and switching to a Halassurq blood economy.
Bold of you to assume that institution as a whole is even salvageable. You might be better off replacing it with a new law enforcement agency or multiple agencies, who can also check each other somewhat. You’d also need to replace most/all of the Alastors as most of them are criminals, thieves and rapists themselves.
For exactly this reason I’m inclined to replace the Alastors entirely with a police force composed of mostly former helots officered by literate yeomen and maybe merchant’s sons. I want to entrench the ex-helotry in the power structure so the rights the revolution gains them aren’t lost over time, but lack of education makes it unwise to give them the highest level police jobs unless like Elery they’re willing and able to pick up the needed education on the job.
That’s still keeping the caste system intact , Though my mc might end up doing something not too dissimilar, in practice that is as everybody ought to be promoted on merit. Though there are exceptions to this in practice of course, in my mc’s case former priests and nobles are too dangerous and subversive to entrust with the job of actually enforcing the new laws. I think my mc will also have gotten enough helots up to the job to stock the higher ranks with them too, though the middle ones might indeed be filled with former yeoman, those free urbanites and the occasional merchant’s kid who has more of a head for investigation than business.
The crucial difference with your plan seems to be that my mc also wants to stock the upper ranks with his own former helot veterans. Will it be possible to get enough former helots educated well enough to fill the vast middle layers, likely not. But to get some educated enough to fill the key positions at the top, I do think that might just be manageable, seeing how far some of his fellow helots have already come in less than a single year.
It is the former priests and nobles my mc is most afraid, less so the other castes. Thus far he seems to be working well-enough with the yeoman and merchants.
Eventually we’ll probably need to set up police academies as part of the education system anyway, so by then former caste should not matter all that much anymore.
Now since you mentioning it… i think Choice of Rebel initial background setting from Book 1 lack a “respectable” or “Anti-Villain” type of Aristocrat non-player character who gave a more “Neutral” perception towards the Aristocrat as a whole… In general , i could see that the back story was concentrated on the cruelty of the Aristocrat which didn’t let the readers perceive there “might” be a “good” Noble society among them, when MC play as a “good” Aristocrat … he/she might be the Only Aristocrat who uphold the Noble standard of a nobility , the other character who share the same sentiment was Suzanne/Simon who we may not met in the story… hence in general the tone was set that “all Aristocrat” are Evil in this world, which is why when player play as a helot … it might feel “weird” for a helpt MC to pro-Aristocrat
If there was a certain "well known " Aristocrat character in the back story, who even though we may not met… but set the tone that not all aristocrats are Evil, it will be more believable for a Helot MC to be pro-Aristocrat …
I think towards the end, there was mentioning of other noble character who was oppose to the cruelty … hopefully in the next book there might be more alternate perspective towards the Aristocrat Society … and there is still the prince right ? we will have to see how is the personality of this prince/princess who will perhaps alter the perspective of a Helot MC…
In the story of Robin Hood Universe, there was backstory of King Richard the LionHeart and Ivanhoe who serve as a standard bearer for the Aristocrat society … which at least some commoners will still referring to such figures that they were willing to stay loyal to the Aristocrat Society due to their respect to those figures
, Though my mc might end up doing something not too dissimilar, in practice that is as everybody ought to be promoted on merit. Though there are exceptions to this in practice of course, in my mc’s case former priests and nobles are too dangerous and subversive to entrust with the job of actually enforcing the new laws. I think my mc will also have gotten enough helots up to the job to stock the higher ranks with them too, though the middle ones might indeed be filled with former yeoman, those free urbanites and the occasional merchant’s kid who has more of a head for investigation than business.
