Annotated 20-3
“MEN and Elves,” “MEN will always be a majority.” Not “humans,” as I had it at first. My original draft still had the “she’s a woman” closing line, but Phil wisely pushed to conjoin the Heads’ systemic racism/speciesism with more systemic sexism.
“Old bean” makes it clear that that last line is coming from Don Pardo, one of the nicer Heads, so even he is not going to be an automatic ally for Syr’Nj. Thankfully, Syr’Nj is too smart to expect any automatic allies, and she’s finally sufficiently recovered to take on this political challenge.
There’s one factor working in her favor at the moment: the male human Heads of House may love human supremacy and male supremacy, but they love money and power even more. I don’t think any of them except maybe Jarvis and Ardaic truly imagine that Gastonia will fall to an invading army or lose the war, but to resolve it as quickly and cleanly as possible is in their best interest. That’s a wedge issue that Syr’Nj can use to drive them apart.
Well, when their eyes have been poked out, they will have to say Noone did it! Get ’em, Syr’Nj!
“Heads of House may love human supremacy and male supremacy, but they love money and power even more. ”
The more I study of history, the more I am forced to conclude that that’s what it is pretty much everywhere and everywhen. Racism, sexism, etc. are often used as excuses to justify having and exercising power over others, but the instant it becomes clear that the excuse du’jour will no longer keep the “untermenschen” in their place it gets discarded and something else put in its place.
Sure, there are a few morons who really believe the excuses instead of just believing that they believe them. But they’re relatively rare. Just enough to give the jerks a bit of traction to get their ball rolling. The rest are just jumping on the bandwagon and using the stereotypes to justify doing what they wanted to do for other reasons anyway. That’s why the socially-acceptable reasons for being cruel change every generation or two, but who is where in the pecking order stays roughly the same.
Off-topic: Feels a little weird that I made a Monty Python
jokereference just two days ago, and now Terry J is gone. “Two down, four to go” as John Cleese put it.Just imagine if something was able to record and replay conversations… this shit would have gone PUBLIC.