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calebwidogast-localcatdad · 2 years

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ANYWAY you cannot convince me that the air nomads didn’t have any sort of trade good based on the flying bison and aang just didn’t have the time or safety to make and sell any of these while trying to stop ozai. they probably did so much spinning just because drop spindles are super transportable, it’s something to do while flying long distances, there’s always a weaver somewhere willing to buy yarn, and there’s always, always large amounts of shed fur just. around. look at how much came off of appa that one episode. so much fur

so three things happen the summer after ozai is defeated and appa starts shedding in earnest again

aang starts spinning and selling yarn because that’s What You Do and he’s clinging REAL HARD to every possible air nomad tradition because, well, who else will remember these things?

toph hears about this and scruffs him before he can sell too much because she’s a merchants daughter and holy shit aang do you understand what you’re selling?? yarn from the last known sky bison! the avatar’s own spirit guide!! spun by the avatars own hand!!!! what are you doing aang!!!!!! she has to drag katara in at this point because aang is real unhappy with the idea that his normal flying bison yarn of, uh, questionable quality is being sold to exclusive high class weavers so they can make shawls for filthy rich nobles for baaaaaank just on the basis of his name. this isn’t how the monks did it :/ and he doesn’t WANT a lot of money anyway! he’s a monk!! he only asks for what he needs to survive!! anyway katara manages to talk toph around to donating most of the money to reconstruction efforts, charities, and orphanages and convinces aang that having an emergency fund is a good thing and he should keep something. aang accidentally ends up with a reasonably full bank account and is really confused about how that happened, why it’s there, and what he’s supposed to do with it

there is a real weird period of time where it’s In Fashion for high noble ladies to have shawls and scarves dyed the same color as aangs clothes (because that’s how you know it’s made with special avatar yarn!) or have images of appa woven into them (can you imagine a shawl that’s just a full length body shot of appa?? amazing) and all the earth kingdom nobility are just rocking green and orange like nbd. weaving decorative shawls with slubby yarn becomes really in fashion, too, because aang is not great at spinning. he’s 13 and it’s boring, ok?

BONUS sokka is just. so mad. you could have been making bank with appa the whole time we were scrambling around the planet aang? do you realize how much more food we could have had? how many more hot baths?? how could you betray me like this

(probably the air nomads also did a lot of weaving but it was mostly the pregnant nuns and the really old nomads so it’s a little off aangs radar. and does aang eat cheese? it never comes up in series but I would also believe that the nomads made a lot of air bison cheese and bison butter tea)

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calebwidogast-localcatdad · 2 years

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So somebody reblogged the last 'yes I need to talk about Jrusar's Secret Government' post with thoughts/questions about the Tal'dorei council, and it made me want to get in here and actually write the damn holy shit Matthew Mercer your city is run entirely by a SECRET SHADOW GOVERNMENT WHAT THE FUCK post, so here we go.

(I wrote a whole essay, and somehow I didn't even get into the rampant corruption, because there's so much to say even outside of that, but: minor spoilers for general worldbuilding throughout C1, C2, and C3, extremely minor plot spoilers I think for C1 and maybe C3 before episode 3.09? Mostly this is about worldbuilding.)

The thing is that, right, "who's on the Tal'dorei council?" was a long-running joke during Campaign 2, but, aside from some suggestion during EXU that there may be secret council members (and EXU is canon, but that doesn't mean it's explored canon), the Tal'dorei council isn't actually a secret. The Mighty Nein don't know who they are, and have absolutely zero in-universe reason to know who they are, because it's like knowing the entire slate of cabinet members of a foreign country where you've never been and also TV and airplanes don't exist, and like, I don't know about you but I can't even remember the new Chancellor of Germany who literally just got elected a few months ago. This is why Matt keeps giving the players shit for asking. Not because nobody knows.

The Tal'dorei Republic is the sort of confused confederacy you get when you start building a fictional government in bits and pieces without a big overarching plan, because this is a D&D game you play with your friends over brunch. It's also the sort of confused confederacy you get when there was an empire, except its borders had sort of stopped expanding a while back more or less, and then the king stepped down and then five minutes later there were dragons, and everyone's still sort of trying to figure out exactly how politics work again. Politics, on that level, were never really the point of Campaign 1, and they didn't get a ton of focus. There are probably really interesting things to explore there, but thematically, politics really started being a thing in Campaign 2, and oh boy howdy did they.

Campaign 2 is about fascist nationalism. Like, it is! It just is! That's it, that's -- well, not the whole thing, but a pretty central piece of the thing. The Somnovem are the Somnovem (and actually, hmm, I want to think about how Cognouza's backstory relates to C2's political themes), and they were important at the end, but the entire campaign held the running thread of Dwendalian Empire and Cerberus Assembly, and their manufactured war against the Krynn.

And we see a lot of what fascist nationalism looks like, in C2. We see intense propaganda machines full of fear of the Other, particularly aimed at riling people up against this very convenient scary enemy of ~dark elves~ and their ~strange dark magic~ and ~oooh, monsters~. We see tight governmental control over even personal aspects of everyday life. Certain religions are banned. Magic is highly regulated. Government is present everywhere -- even small towns have magistrates and Starostas and Crownsguard, generally according to the same system throughout the empire.

There's a strong central government that's generally not split between factions. No, really! The Cobalt Soul is a respected institution, but they're not so much a faction of government as they are an independent body with a lot of weight and respect. King Dwendal is relatively ineffective, but he's managed by the Cerberus Assembly, not in opposition to them. The Assembly itself is full of politics and backbiting and infighting, but by and large, to the country itself the Assembly presents a united front, and that front is united behind the crown. The horrifying back-alley secret spy work, torture, and assassinations are all run by the same people who run the government at large, who everyone knows run the government at large, in service to furthering the power of the government at large (and therefore their own power, of course, because one thing feeds the other.)

It's a power struggle, but it's not a class struggle, not really. The average citizens of the Dwendalian empire generally do pretty well, when they're not being targeted or scapegoated by some machination of the government itself. It's easy to be middle-class in the Empire, or to convince yourself that you're middle-class, to be a farmer who never has trouble putting food on the table, to be a merchant or a blacksmith or a winemaker or an artisan. It's easy to enjoy a fine standard of living even if you're not one of the people with power. So long as none of the people in power decide you're more useful in misery.

Jrusar is different.

The government of Jrusar is secret. Nobody knows who runs the city. People take it on faith, generally, that somebody runs the city -- infrastructure is maintained, cops get paid, there's no open warfare in the streets most days -- but this city is fucked up in ways that sometimes mirror the Dwendalian Empire, and sometimes are entirely new.

When I call C3 a class warfare campaign, what I mean is that it's been showing us economic stratification everywhere we look since day one. We have seen, thus far, no middle class in this city. We've seen astonishingly rich people, but mostly we've seen working-class people just about scraping by. We see aging artisans, those people who would have been comfortably middle class in Emon or Zadash, trying to make ends meet by letting out their spare room or breaking a werewolf out of jail for a job recommendation. We see bartenders and performers who never appear to be making enough to support a family (unless that family is part of the trade and performing too). We see warehouse and factory workers who go to those bars and performances and bars and bars and bars at the end of their workdays, and drink their dinner and eat their Meals. (People drink a lot, in Jrusar. People drink a lot in CR in general, but then, our parties have always been on the move and staying in inns and taverns to begin with, and when they had a place to sit and settle they'd inevitably find neighbors who did all sorts of things with their evenings that weren't 'go down to the local and get blitzed'.)

Nobody seems to have a spouse, a family, children. There really don't seem to be a lot of children in Jrusar.

Which isn't to say that all of Jrusar is like this! There are several spires we've never even visited, and plenty of places throughout this very big city that could be a world of experience away. There are plenty of places in Tal'dorei and the Empire, likewise, that might function like this. But that's why it's a campaign theme, not just a locational one -- because the places we're looking in C3, the things we've actually seen, all fall into this same pattern. And some of that is absolutely down to the way the government here functions.

The thing we keep hearing, over and over again, from all sorts of different corners in Jrusar, is 'the city's going to shit'. Nobody ever follows it up with a 'since'. It's never 'since that guy took power', or 'since the Natural Disaster', or 'since that new policy went into place' -- it's just going, going, gone towards some unspecified "shit". A gradual worsening of general affairs. A diffused, maybe even imaginary, decline.

This isn't an accident, either on Matt's part or on the part of the people in charge of the city. The interesting thing about 'the city's gone to shit' as a muttered refrain is that nobody necessarily agrees on what that means. (Who here has heard 'this country's gone to hell in a handbasket' before? Which hell? Which handbasket?) What was it like before that was so good, that we've lost now? Do people even know, do they have concrete things to point to, or is it just a sort of pervasive discontentment? Fear and insecurity because of violence, because of poverty, because of working too hard? And the violence has always been there (but maybe not in your neighborhood), and the poverty's always been a problem (but everything just keeps getting more crowded), and work is work (but there are more jobs in mining than in making things, and look I'm not saying Marxist concept of alienation of labor, but I'm also not NOT saying that ok).

People are unhappy, and they don't really have anything concrete they can point to as the source of their unhappiness. Not on any unified, structured basis, not as a movement rather than a couple of dozen people hidden in an attic.

And this? This is great for the people in power in Jrusar. Sure, everybody's unhappy -- what of it? Unhappiness is always rampant. The important thing is that nobody's directly unhappy with them.

Nobody can strike up a petition to demand that Bobby Treshi step down from the Chandai Quorum if nobody knows Bobby Treshi is on the Chandai Quorum. Nobody can show up at Suzie Lumas's office and make her pay attention to anything if she doesn't have an office. Nobody can influence, petition, persuade, bother, or cancel anybody in the Quorum if nobody knows who they even are.

What's more, this seems to be related to a general lack of transparency in governance in Jrusar in general. There's another essay I want to write about Rule of Law in C3 (which I was going to include here but holy shit this post is already REAL LONG), but basically what it sums up to is, I have no idea exactly what's legal or illegal here, and my guess is that much of the people who actually live in this city agree. Is murder legal? Okay, but what if a bounty hunter does it? How do bounty hunters work, exactly? Who pays the cops' salaries?

One important aspect of the Tal'dorei council is the simple fact that, not only are the names of the council public, so are their respective positions. We know that there's a Master of Development whose job is civil infrastructure, and a Master of Commerce whose job is the budget, and a Master of Law who runs the courts. We know what the jobs even are. We know their duties and responsibilities. We know how the republic is run.

We know none of that, here in Jrusar. Not only do we not know who's in charge of civil infrastructure relating to public transit, we don't know if anybody is. Do the sewage maintenance projects just get sort of shoved off onto the desk of whoever in the Secret Cabinet Meetings doesn't nose-goes fast enough? Is there some young mid-level civil servant somewhere who's running the entire cable car system single-handedly because his boss can't get an audience with her boss outside of a thirty-minute appointment slot booked two weeks in advance, and even then she's only talking to the Official Mouthpiece of the Council rather than the councilor themself? How the fuck does anybody get anything done???

And like, many of these are basic logistical questions that can get kind of smoothed over in a fictional universe and a D&D game, because mid-level government bureaucracy isn't nearly as sexy as secret conspiracies and elaborate heists. But we also see the results of these things manifest in the campaign itself. We see the wild, rampant stratification between people who definitely go to dinner parties with whoever's in charge of the government (even if you're not sure who at this dinner party it is), and the people who don't even have a name to call out. We see the no-oversight corruption endemic in the police system, which definitely appears to be the only way most people in the city interface with their government at all. We see citizens who want specific, targeted change trying to do it via flyers and petitions that maybe nobody will even see.

We see the way basic infrastructure amenities like the cable cars could be improved -- and this was sort of a joke, last Thursday, except that it's not. It came up because the players themselves are feeling the nickle-and-dime ding of having to pay the same toll that working-class citizens in Jrusar have to pay every day, unless they can afford to live in the same nice spire where they work, unless they can't afford to move out of the same shitty one. And there's nobody to tell, nobody in charge who would even know it was an issue.

Jrusar is a mess. And it's a mess in the way that a city-state with a government this utterly un-transparent should and would be a mess.

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