more Rev stuff

[bedlamsbard]

Some Revelations worldbuilding thoughts. (For those wondering: Revelations is either the post-Dust modern!Narnia AU I'm writing or the modern high fantasy novel I'm writing. I haven't decided yet.) In case anyone else is interested!

1. One of the secondary characters, Kesztheley Appleby (see my headcast here), is an apple dryad whose tree is a bonsai that she keeps on her desk at work. (She possibly has more than one tree; I haven't decided yet.) Despite being a bonsai, it does, in fact, bear real apples -- though not necessarily concurrent with the seasons. Kes is a intelligence analyst for the Counter-Terrorist Unit in the Intelligence and Security Service.

2. The longest-running television program in Narnia is called Jubilee Court, which is a Downton Abbey-esque drama about a fictional (human) noble family in Narnia and their (mostly nonhuman) household staff. One of the main "staff" characters is the children's nanny, a male faun, which has led to a stereotype of fauns as being extremely caring and nurturing. This stereotype has continued to recur in various other media, including in the characterization of Tumnus in several dramatizations of the events of LWW.

2a. One of the side effects of this is that it's also fairly consistently applied to real fauns. Khoury St. Tumnus, half-faun and half-Calormene human, has had people come up to him in the street and ask him what his rates are. Nine out of ten times they thought he was a nanny. The tenth time they thought he was a prostitute. (Khoury is neither. Khoury is an IS field officer. The assumption that fauns are all sweetness and light comes in handy sometimes. Other times it's just annoying.)

3. The current monarch of Narnia is Queen Gloriana Telmar II. Headcast) She and Lady Errasti Dashwood-Newisle, the unit chief of Counter-Terrorism, were roommates in university and remain close friends. The heir is Gloriana's nephew Prince Rilian Telmar, more commonly known as Rowan.

4. The last known Talking Beast in Narnia died 120 years previously and was a fox living in a small village in Greatwoodshire. There have since been several reported cases of Talking Beasts in Narnia, but none have ever been verified. There are still extant Talking Beasts in Archenland, Calormen, and some of the eastern islands. (Most Narnians think that this is nonsense.)

5. The slang term for a nonhuman in Narnia is "non", "nonny", or "nonna." The slang for a part-human is "chimera" or "chim." While the chimera population of Narnia is actually a fairly significant minority (or possibly a majority, depending on who you ask; many chimeras are able to pass for either fully human or fully nonhuman, depending on what the nonhuman part is, and while legally you're required to report your status, if you can pass it makes life significantly easier for you), they are looked down on by both humans and nonhumans, some of whom promote species purity more than others.

6. Due to interbreeding with humans, as well as possible environmental causes, nonhuman lifespans are shorter than they were a millennium ago (when Dust takes place). Another side effect is that the average height of a dwarf in Narnia is several inches taller than a millennium previous, which in turn is taller than during the Golden Age or even the Telmarine period.

7. The Northern Marsh, home of the Marsh-wiggles and the Bog People, is a Crown dependency of Narnia. While technically acknowledging the rule of the monarch, they have their own government, laws, courts, currency, and so on. This system goes back to King Rilian I the Disenchanted, who granted it to the Marsh-wiggle Puddleglum.

8. The court case Redwind v. Kingdom of Narnia seventy years previous established the first centaur reserves in Narnia, setting aside tracts of land for the establishment of centaur communities with territorial sovereignty after the centaur Beneke Redwind successfully argued that the species would go extinct in a century given the encroachment on traditional grazing areas. Unlike the Northern Marsh, which only acknowledges the authority of the monarch (the Cortes not yet having been created at the time of its establishment), the centaur reserves are also subject to the Cortes. They do not have the authority to send a representative with the capacity to vote to the Chamber of Commons, but do have a delegate with speaking rights. There is no centaur in the Assembly of Lords. About 85% of the centaur population in Narnia lives on one of the six reserves.

8a. Although there have been a number of court cases since Redwind v. Kingdom of Narnia attempting to establish sovereign territories for other nonhuman species, none have been successful. The reason given in Malar v. Kingdom of Narnia to the Minotaur Territorial Rights Association was that no other species in Narnia was in such a dire need as the centaurs had been at the time, given their endangered status. Most nonhumans are not pleased by these decisions.

8b. One exception are the Protected Forests, which are Crown-owned lands for which the local dryads serve as stewards. The number of dryads living there is currently unknown. Rumors that naiads also live there are unverified. Although otherwise falling under Narnian law, they are exempt from taxes. This is largely because no one can figure out how to collect taxes from a bunch of trees.

9. As of Dust, the percentage of nonhuman peers is less than 10%. As of Revelations, that percentage is .01%, if that. (It is not illegal to be a nonhuman and a peer, but no nonhuman has been granted a peerage in over a century and her descendants married humans.)

10. The only known remaining relic of the Kings and Queens of Summer is Queen Susan's horn, which is currently in storage in the Narnian Museum in Cair Paravel.

Comments

[sporky_rat]

Oooo.

[bedlamsbard]

Modern Narnia has some problems.

[lady_songsmith]

Ooooh!

More coherently, I find the incidence of humans at high levels interesting! And also the discrimination against half-breeds. You'd think after the Telmarine era there'd be more inter-breeding, as a matter of policy as much as anything (make it impossible for the humans to oppress the native Narnians, and vice-versa).

[bedlamsbard]

Well, the human/nonhuman (or Telmarine/Narnian) tension post-Caspian goes all the way back to my Rilian fic, and it's present in most of my post-PC fic. Including in Dust; there's a paragraph from the current WIP chapter that puts it like this:

In this day and age, the distinction between Narnian and Telmarine ought to be ridiculous, except that it isn’t. Most native Narnians use “Telmarine” as shorthand for “human,” even though not all humans in Narnia are of Telmarine descent. ... From the look that Ironstone is giving him, Elizar suspects that he’s the kind of Narnian who sometimes has trouble remembering that Narnia belongs to its more recent human inhabitants as well as to its native population. Well, the Calormenes are human too. Elizar knows for a fact that that doesn’t actually help the already fraught relationship between humans and nonhumans in Narnia.

One of the major problems is that post-Miraz Narnia was, for lack of a better phrase, forcibly integrated -- like, Caspian tried really, really hard to make everyone be equal! But the thing is that there were just more Telmarines than there were Narnians, and not only were the Telmarines organized (the Narnians, not so much -- in general, the Narnians of PC don't seem to have much to do with each other except in the rather dire circumstances of PC), but they literally had a divine right to rule. Like, their god came down from the heavens, looked at the descendant of the guys who had invaded and colonized Narnia and murdered a large portion of the population over the past thousand years or so, and said, "You shall be king over both peoples. HATERS TO THE LEFT." So, okay, you can argue that the Telmarines who remained are the ones open-minded enough to accept nonhumans as part of society, but I don't think that actually lasted that long. And Caspian tried, and Rilian tried -- I mean, Rilian had some major issues, but he did try the best way he knew how -- but when your two peoples have been murdering each other willy-nilly for the better part of a millennium and one group is numerically and militarily superior to the other, it's not going to end up equal. Plus the Telmarines had all the money, had a concept of ownership of land, had a governmental structure in place, etc. So the Telmarines ended up on top.

And the situation just sort of got worse over the years. (I will probably end up dialing back the passage of time between Dust and Rev to less than a millennium, but still.) Narnia has this problem in a way that Archenland, or Calormen, or the eastern islands don't, because those countries were integrated from the very beginning -- well, I'm not sure about the beginning for Calormen, but they're way more calm about that sort of thing than Narnia because they're a large empire with a lot of ethnic, religious, and species diversity. They really don't have a choice. But Narnia wasn't integrated. Narnia was two different peoples who hated each other like burning and had been murdering each other for the past few centuries mashed together, one of which was technologically and culturally superior.

Now, the other thing to remember about the Narnian nonhuman population is that it's not just one species group -- it's a bunch of different species, and sometimes they hate each other too. Like, on occasion, murderous stabbing-and-arson hate. So they don't organize very well as a whole, rather than as isolated groups (which are sometimes, but not always, divided along species lines. Any group of Cair Paravel nonhumans and (depending on class) humans, drawn from random neighborhoods, will happily murder the fuck out of any group of Glasswater nonhumans and humans, also drawn from random neighborhoods. Unless they're dwarves. Then, not so much. Species mostly trumps regions there). And this is sometimes played against them by various politicians.

Not to mention you still have various species that have a stigma because they're kissed by frost -- associated with the Queen of Winter/the White Witch. Minotaurs, wer-wolves, hags, polar bears, hyenas, etc. Albinos. (Sure, it's been a while, but look at the modern world and our history. Events that happened two thousand years ago are still brought up in political and religious contexts!)

As for inter-breeding -- well, the thing is, it's probably more common than anyone will admit, but it's generally discouraged and has, on and off over the years, actually been illegal depending on the current political climate. A lot of nonhumans are pretty vocal about maintaining species purity, though sometimes it's couched in less inflammatory terms. Well, there aren't a lot of any given species; going extinct is a legitimate fear. (I suspect one or two species are actually no longer extant in Narnia -- although they have some imports, too.) And a lot of humans, even in Narnia, sort of sideeye the idea of having sex with anyone who's part-animal, which is why most part-breeds are human-dwarf and occasionally human-faun, rather than human-satyr or human-minotaur or whatever. (There's some inter-breeding between nonhuman species, but not much, comparatively.) So there's a stigma on both sides.

(As an in-story commentary: Idis, one of the main characters, is half-dwarf and half-human. She actually grew up in the equivalent of a hippy commune -- here's a bit I worked up at one point:

Idís grew up in the High Reaches, in a tiny village four hours from the nearest rail station. Her mother was a dwarf and her father was a human, and somewhere else in Narnia that might have been a problem, except Henley-on-the-Heights was the sort of village that people moved to when they wanted to get away from the rest of the world’s prejudices, so until she’d left her village’s primary school and taken the bus two hours every morning to the nearest secondary school in Badger’s Mound she had never thought of herself as particularly odd – no more than Darial Loudtooth, who had a pair of horns that got more and more impressive each year, or Aerita Mauro, who looked human until you got close enough to see that her skin was covered with fine scales that glistened silvery-blue under the right lights. Idís was a teenager before she learned what it meant to be called a ha’penny or a stump and sometimes, even today, the memory of it struck her so hard that she had to stop and sit down, rubbing a hand over her mouth like it could wipe away the remembered bile. Mostly she was over it; she’d been called that and a lot worse over the course of her career, but it was the memory of the first few times that stayed with her – thirteen and crying in the girls’ loos, under the shitty electric lights, clunky black uniform shoes braced on the scuffed linoleum floor, because she’d never realized that words could hurt that much.

Idis's mother, the dwarf parent, was actually disowned by her family for marrying a human. This is not considered unusual in Narnia. The fact that Aerin ran off with her two half-human nieces has occasionally been couched as "horrible nonhuman monster kidnapped two young human girls," despite the fact that Tamsin and Ros are half-dwarves.)

*cough* Apparently I have a lot of thoughts. Well, if the major theme in Dust is clashing religions, the major theme in Rev is clashing species.

[sporky_rat]

I love world building.

[bedlamsbard]

I quite like it too! Possibly a bit too much.

[lady_songsmith]

more world building? Awesome!

[bedlamsbard]

You'll have to be more specific than that! (The most recent major and secondary character headcast is over here, if that helps!)

[lady_songsmith]

Ok, here are some things in no particular order which I'm curious about:

- The Bullroarers (ok, this is mostly 'cuz I love Lindsay Duncan's acting so when you put her in the head-casting her I squealed)

- how much power/authority does the monarchy still have? and the peers? is being a noble in modern Narnia good for more than getting all the VIP passes?

- how is Narnia situated relative to the other countries around? is it a technological or industrial power economically, or is it sort of marginalized? How much of the western countries would we recognize from Warsverse/Dust - was basically down to the two Shoushani offshoots as of Dust, right?

The Bullroarers

[bedlamsbard]

Sarre and Gyda Bullroarer are another pair of dwarf sisters originally from Glasswater. (All of these women basically came out of the same neighborhood.) Sarre is the oldest of the Daughters of Stone by about a decade or so, which gives her about twenty or thirty years on Aerin Ironstone. Like most of the dwarves from that neighborhood, she spent some time on and off banging around with gangs in her youth, but like Pella Farquarry and Morwen Scattergold, she got out the neighborhood and went to the University of Cair Paravel, where she eventually became a trauma surgeon at the Royal Court Hospital in Cair Paravel. For reasons at this point unknown, after a decades-long career, she suddenly and dramatically was stripped of her medical license but was also given a very large settlement by the hospital. She used this to go halves with Thyri Stonehelm on buying an old pub in Rustwater (on the North Bank of the Great River, part of the greater Cair Paravel area), which they renamed the Broken Shield after a dwarf pub in Glasswater that became famous during the Telmarine Occupation. It is at this point unknown when she got mixed up with Aerin Ironstone and the Daughters of Stone, but it could even have been before she lost her medical license.

Gyda Bullroarer is Sarre's sister, younger by about two decades. (Narnian dwarves have very long lifespans -- not as long as Tolkien dwarves, but still pretty long.) As a teenager, Gyda was in the Smoke Lane Slashers -- one of the Glasswater dwarf gangs -- at the same time as Aerin Ironstone and Louca Farquarry, even though she was a few years older at the time. It was probably at that point that she discovered her talent for breaking into cars. She's fairly good at fixing them, breaking them down, and adding "extras", but what she likes best is driving fast and dangerous, and is one of the few dwarves who's capable of operating cars designed for humans without too much difficulty. She spent most of her twenties either going solo or bouncing from gang to gang, but eventually ended up with the Daughters of Stone, maybe because of the old Glasswater connection. She's fairly notorious among law enforcement agencies and has spent some time behind bars, but is fairly good at both not getting caught and plausible deniability on the rare occasion that she is.

The Bullroarers are also first cousins to Idis on her mother's side, though neither Idis nor Gyda is aware of it, and Sarre wouldn't recognize Idis on sight.

the peerage

[bedlamsbard]

(See the LJ post for the monarchy.)

Well, yes and no. There's still an Assembly of Lords in the Cortes (which is divided into the Assembly of Lords and the Chamber of Commons; the Chamber is elected and the Assembly inherits) and they do have some political power when they actually bother to show up, which is not as often as some would like and not as seldom as some others would prefer. On the other hand, Narnia is still very much an old boys club -- er, not so much emphasis on the boys, fortunately -- because there aren't, percentage wise, a whole lot of nobles, but they all know each other: they went to the same public (private, whichever, heh) schools, they went to university together, they socialize with each other from birth to death, they marry each other, and so on. There's a lot of name recognition with the nobles.

Equally importantly, they still own major chunks of Narnia. I need to check the numbers for pre-WWI England on this one, but maybe seventy percent of Narnian land is privately owned, either by the Crown or the nobles. (Maybe more. Maybe less. A quick google isn't giving me the percentage, so I might have to check it in the book I read that in, which I don't have with me.) The Crown owns a lot of land. A LOT. Technically speaking, the Crown owns the Oldghost Isles (the archipelago just off the coast of Cair Paravel, of which the nameless isle is part), the Northern Marsh, the Protected Forests, the centaur reserves, various estates (including the Barrowlands, traditional lands of the Kingbarrow family -- it's complicated legally), and probably other bits (I think they own most of the High Reaches, but I'm not sure). The nobility owns a lot, the universities own a fair amount, I think the temples own some, and there are parts that owned by major industry or whatever, I'm not sure.

Narnia is modern technologically speaking but maybe not as modern as one would hope, socially.

Narnia and the greater world

[bedlamsbard]

I haven't really worked that out? Because politics/technology/economics et al. aren't really my strong suit.

Narnia as of Revelations is larger than the Narnia of Dust, but still smaller than the Narnia of the Golden Age (which was larger than pre-Long Winter Narnia). It basically just consists of the mainland territory -- the Lone Isles haven't been a Narnian possession since before Dust.

It has a reasonable immigrant population, which argues for some kind of economic power.

(Shh, the Shoushani in Dust are being quietly written out because I don't know what to do with them.)

I have no idea what countries are to the west, because Revelations is completely and totally oriented to the east and I still haven't even worked out much about the eastern islands we have not, at one point or another, visited in the Golden Age.