Naril — Roleplayer Guild

Again, thanks for answering.

But here's the thing: you're saying these characters have gone from a society in which they had a lot (TV, cars, roads, showers whenever they wanted, inalienable rights) to a society in which they have virtually none of those things. They might be "making it for themselves," but now the world is one where they're at the level of feudal, lord-and-nation-state society. 

The concept of fundamental rights almost cannot exist when there are power disparities like the ones here. For example, everyone needs water. There are no (or almost no) clean, naturally-occurring sources of fresh water, because the water table has been flooded with salt water, is inaccessible due collapsed wells, or whatever. Some person has the water, because they can turn sewage into potable water. Everyone needs the water. If the person with the water decides that the price of the water is...something unpleasant and autonomy-abrogating, you have to do that or you die because you don't have water. You can't get water from the outside world, because they'll kill you for asking. Considering that this world already presupposes violent gangs and a psychotically violent (or at least profoundly xenophobic and violent) entire nation, and that clean water is a valuable trade good, this is a recipe for Mad Max more than anything else. Please don't make me extrapolate out exactly how terrible being certain things are going to be here.

The reason I talk about living a modern life is because that's where these people came from, and they are aware, at every second, that they are being kept from it by threat of horrific death. Los Angeles didn't cease to exist, Gothenburg is a few hundred miles away. There's shitty daytime TV and Pepsi and podcasts and they can't have any of it. They aren't an enclave of equivalency being kept from another equivalent nation to keep both sides safe, they are being oppressed and isolated, affected by a treaty that stripped them of their right to travel, their right to communication, and their right to live without the constant threat of destruction from a force so hostile that their default position is state-sponsored murder.

That has to be part of the default narrative understanding. Writing to be content under that weight is fine, but carries the risk of introducing a profound initial narrative place of passivity. This isn't the gentle slide of one societal state to another, from villages to city-states to monarchs to democracies (or whatever), where change happens gradually and people are born into a societal assumption. This is the abrupt and complete alteration of social norms (especially for anyone living in reasonably-modern-Western-cultures). Contentment with that situation, rather than "ground-down resignation" is something that, to me, suggests "widespread mental alteration," possibly by something added to the drinking water. :P

I'm still working on a character, but she's going to be fairly adversarial to the status quo - at least partly because I, personally, would hate this situation with nearly every fiber of my being and would do if not anything, at least quite a lot to tear it down.

Finally, thanks, but I don't...like, I'm reasonably bright, but I just ask questions. :3
Naril Member

Tinker, builder, hacker, thief

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