Thorns

You can’t put themes of fealty and anti-imperialism in the same narrative box is a really interesting post, discussing the problem in the context of the Vorkosigan saga but generally worth reading.

If you wanted to put them together, and somehow do both of them justice, I think you’d have two choices:

- Positively-presented fealty angle with the Barrayarans (or at least the Vor Barrayarans) but realistically and narratively terrible actions vis-a-vis the Komarrans and the proles. Which is to say, you have created a subset of the Feudal Fantasy register within a larger picture of Realistic Ack. Many, many people will be lovely to those they consider worthy (or Us), and awful to those they consider not (or Them), so this isn’t a stretch at all. You could re-write VS canon into this mold without too much trouble, I think, but you’d need a lot more narrative criticism of the MCs than you get from LMB.

- Fealty angle where the colonized/vassal desperately wants that relationship to actually work as advertised, perhaps to the point of willful blindness, but, of course, it doesn’t. This is Realistic Ack register all the way down, and probably chock full of whump and angst. This is maybe what I was trying to do with Duv, but I’m not sure I can actually manage it.

- I don’t think you can do anti-imperialism in the Feudal Fantasy register at all (since part of the premise is that feudalism, and by extension imperialism, aren’t inherently bad), but I’m open to ideas.

One other approach I’ve enjoyed is Fealty is Fatally Flawed But Tragically Beautiful, set during the inevitable collapse of feudalism, and not saying that collapse shouldn’t happen, but still wallowing in the appeal of what feudalism remains. So vassals still feel that delicious fealty, but the actual power imbalance is in the process of disappearing. You can show how even the Nice Feudal Lords screw up, but since their power is waning it’s easier to forgive them for it, and there’s no way to fall into the Vorkosigan Saga trap of just giving the Nice Feudal Lords all the power and calling that utopia.

EDIT: Ok it has been pointed out to me that this is EXACTLY as romanticising, it's just a SAD romance. FINE.
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So a while go it occurred to me (aka various POC/non-white poeple pointed it out) that while space exploration proponents use the metaphor of Frontier (and the US frontier specifically), the thing about the frontier was that it wasn't actually untouched land that had to be settled from scratch, it was cultivated farmland, complete with local crops, that was stolen from it's original inhabitants. Plus a lot of the really difficult work was done not by wide eyed settlers but by slaves and indentured workers etc.

And in space there are no original inhabitants to prepare the land, no indentured workers to die on the railroads, not unless we build way better robots or find aliens to exploit or something and neither of those look likely.

And it turns out, some of the people who see space as a Frontier we Must Explore have realised this! And have decided that the obvious solution is to send out some brown people to prepare the land and then die.

If science wishes to proceed, it's going to have to start killing some people, deliberately, instead of through malfunctions due to old equipment or overlooked things. As callous as it sounds, those places that are already rife with overcrowding are probably also rife with people who have the necessary brains and disciplines to be able to make a one-way mission successful and transmit their data back so we can build the better mousetrap and send again. If nothing else, we should have enough material sent in intermittent missions for later missions to be able to cannibalize and use to make their work that much better and easier.

(the mod of politics has apologised for letting this through and is going to try and fix things so it doesn't happen again, thankfully it's not representative of the usual type of post, but I guess given the nature of the comm you have to expect some fail from time to time)