Annotated 50-3
I’m not much of a fan of utopian fiction. The books in the genre that I’ve read—mostly Walden Two but also parts of Gulliver’s Travels and Tomorrowland—seem to be simplistic or disingenuous in their solutions to human problems. They also seem to believe, much like Karl Marx did, that once the ideal state has been attained, we’ll all just stay there forever, as if a world without development is desirable or possible. Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good!
So when it came time to wrap up our time in Arkerra, I decided to write an improving society that still had a lot of issues to deal with. Lots of hope (equality between…most races!), lots of new problems (corrupt sky elves falling in with corrupt goblins)…and some old problems we’d neglected (hi, orcs).
You can write your own backstory for Jemmington if you want. Mine is that he was always a little sleazy, but he was also very naive about what leaving his home would mean for him. He expected to have a cushy life as a war hero, and he also expected the war to be a lot easier. Since he’s a morally weak person, he shifted from following Clair and Hollister (as his meal ticket) to blaming them for everything that went wrong for him after he joined their faction.
And yeah, sure, dude, Hollister and Clair were clearly having sex with the Peacemakers, because why else would they be so devoted to helping them—why else does anyone help anyone if not for personal gain? He was viewing them cynically and selectively even before things started going wrong for him. Otherwise, he’d remember that Clair has always had a problem with unethical conjuring.
FB: There’s a big market for House spoils in general, though some connoisseurs who bought an old, half-empty bottle of juice from House Iwatani ended up REALLY regretting it.
My backstory for Jemmington is he’s a sky elf equivalent of Tony Montana. The elders decided to empty their prisons and exiled him with the rest. I agree with your take on utopian fiction and have to wonder about the ramifications of the Savage Rebellion. How many humans decided to seek out other kingdoms in Arkerra since they weren’t keen on the peace settlement? Did it lead to a brain drain as well as an hardline position against the former state of Gastonia? And I can see some friction with the Goblins and other non humans like Jemmington. Perhaps a Goblin like the Kingpin secretly has Iver, Frazington, the other gnome, and others working for him.
I can *absolutely* see some racist groups forming around some very explicitly racist tenets, in response to the previous implicit racism being officially rejected. And I could imagine some well-meaning but incredibly naïve attempts by some people who’ve never been in contact with one particular race or another, to behave towards them in whatever way their internalized clichés lead them to think is appropriate, and causing issues. Some of those people would then make things worse by insisting they meant it well (which is true), and therefore everyone should be fine with them continuing this way (which is false), and ultimately joining the racists when that doesn’t work out.
One also wonders if some regions of the former Gastonian territories became autonomous chauvinist states. Sort of like Judah vs Israel back in Old Testament days (the ethnic chauvinists of Israel being the ones who mostly brought the Old Testament to its current version).