Post by ckret2 on Jun 29, 2008 16:27:07 GMT -5
I was gonna put this in the Mira's Wedding thread, because that's the episode that made me think of all this, but I realized it would probably go better here.
First, a random and mostly rhetorical question: do ALL of the non-Grounders live in that one little building? (And are the blue-skinned non-Grounders all called Royals, or is that just something my brain concocted?) If not, where are their other dwellings? Just from the looks of things, the Royals (for now I'm just calling them that) seem to be fairly isolated from their own planet. What's their culture like, outside of the fancy royalty and weddings? Or is that really all there is to the Tangean Royals, a bunch of hoity-toity nobles who play at Byzantine games of intrigue and don't actually have lives outside that? Can a culture like that really exist, where every level of class is upper class?
If not, where are the others, and where do they live? Are there blue-skinned Tangean "commoners" who live on the surface with the Grounders, somewhere we can't see them, for whom bartering for food will have far more "boom-boom" and "meebo-greebo" than it will have any of the King's Tangean? There's so far no canon evidence of this, but somehow I think it's likely.
Just looking at human history, back when Europeans were doing their nasty conquer-and-colonize thing and subjugating various and assorted local populations, I don't think there was ever an example of a colony where the conquerers were 100% in charge and the conquerees were 100% oppressed. (And I now present my Big Disclaimer that basically states that I don't consider myself a historian, almost everything I know I learned in one year of World History and a smattering of US History classes, I intend no offense towards anyone, and conquering/subjugating other people is a Very Bad Thing and the people who were subjugated often had unjustly crappy lives.)
In our own conquering cultures, there were always people with mixed parentage who filled the gap between Those In Charge and Those Being Oppressed--and even if Royals and Grounders are physically incapable of producing offspring, there could still be cases of people from the "superior" race losing their money, being shamed, not being able to find a job, etc. and ending up having to live among the "inferior" race, and then there are people from the "inferior" race who could convince their "superiors" that they're somehow Better Than Their Peers, who could then gain a small, small amount of class and respectability, if not any REAL power or authority. Kissing up to The Man and perhaps even turning traitor to their own people. It's happened in human cultures time and again, why not in Tangean cultures?
I find it difficult to imagine that their world and its people could be so uniformly polarized. There's gotta be some gray shades between the Royals and the Grounders; Mira and Romac can't possibly be the first to have cross-cultural romantic relations. Unless, of course, the entirety of the Royal population really DOES live in that one single Palace In The Sky, in which case their supposed authority over Tangea is a heckuva lot more fragile than we're led to believe. (And if their gene pool is really that small, that would also raise all sorts of nasty questions about who's probably got a higher percentage of redneck-style family relations, the Grounders or the Royals, but let's not get into that.)
Plus, there's the question about how they would sustain themselves, under circumstances like that; did they, the fancy group that they are, build their own palace? Where do they get their food from? Perhaps before joining the Galactic Alliance and opening up the option of imports, they were hiring services and purchasing goods from the very Grounders they so despise? And if they DO rely on imports now--heck, how does a culture like that sustain itself economically, if they don't have any exports other than their pretty Royal faces? What's their exchange rate like, a million Tangean coins for a Unibuck?!
And then there's the question of why the heck the Grounders are still listening to them. Sure, they seem pretty dumb, but might be language barriers; imagine if Romac spoke with a Grounder accent, wouldn't he sound like a moron, too? Besides, they're smart enough to understand the finer points of sarcasm. (Mocking LordScar Angstrom: "'Pleeease, in the King's Tangean'!") The Royals don't seem to have much defense against them except a couple of guards with poofy balls, and their respective power-cancellation abilities. What would happen if the Grounders got their hands on some guns?
Oh, wait. We saw what would happen. They would win unless there were some Rangers around to save the day. So why did it take the Grounders until a Royal came to them with a plan for them to even think of killingMufasa King Nova? We know they CAN get access to nice weapons and such: Romac did.
So, there's a couple of theories on how Tangean culture works. The sorta-blended-social-structure one, and the completely-separate-and-really-precarious one. Anyone else have any thoughts on how they might work?
First, a random and mostly rhetorical question: do ALL of the non-Grounders live in that one little building? (And are the blue-skinned non-Grounders all called Royals, or is that just something my brain concocted?) If not, where are their other dwellings? Just from the looks of things, the Royals (for now I'm just calling them that) seem to be fairly isolated from their own planet. What's their culture like, outside of the fancy royalty and weddings? Or is that really all there is to the Tangean Royals, a bunch of hoity-toity nobles who play at Byzantine games of intrigue and don't actually have lives outside that? Can a culture like that really exist, where every level of class is upper class?
If not, where are the others, and where do they live? Are there blue-skinned Tangean "commoners" who live on the surface with the Grounders, somewhere we can't see them, for whom bartering for food will have far more "boom-boom" and "meebo-greebo" than it will have any of the King's Tangean? There's so far no canon evidence of this, but somehow I think it's likely.
Just looking at human history, back when Europeans were doing their nasty conquer-and-colonize thing and subjugating various and assorted local populations, I don't think there was ever an example of a colony where the conquerers were 100% in charge and the conquerees were 100% oppressed. (And I now present my Big Disclaimer that basically states that I don't consider myself a historian, almost everything I know I learned in one year of World History and a smattering of US History classes, I intend no offense towards anyone, and conquering/subjugating other people is a Very Bad Thing and the people who were subjugated often had unjustly crappy lives.)
In our own conquering cultures, there were always people with mixed parentage who filled the gap between Those In Charge and Those Being Oppressed--and even if Royals and Grounders are physically incapable of producing offspring, there could still be cases of people from the "superior" race losing their money, being shamed, not being able to find a job, etc. and ending up having to live among the "inferior" race, and then there are people from the "inferior" race who could convince their "superiors" that they're somehow Better Than Their Peers, who could then gain a small, small amount of class and respectability, if not any REAL power or authority. Kissing up to The Man and perhaps even turning traitor to their own people. It's happened in human cultures time and again, why not in Tangean cultures?
I find it difficult to imagine that their world and its people could be so uniformly polarized. There's gotta be some gray shades between the Royals and the Grounders; Mira and Romac can't possibly be the first to have cross-cultural romantic relations. Unless, of course, the entirety of the Royal population really DOES live in that one single Palace In The Sky, in which case their supposed authority over Tangea is a heckuva lot more fragile than we're led to believe. (And if their gene pool is really that small, that would also raise all sorts of nasty questions about who's probably got a higher percentage of redneck-style family relations, the Grounders or the Royals, but let's not get into that.)
Plus, there's the question about how they would sustain themselves, under circumstances like that; did they, the fancy group that they are, build their own palace? Where do they get their food from? Perhaps before joining the Galactic Alliance and opening up the option of imports, they were hiring services and purchasing goods from the very Grounders they so despise? And if they DO rely on imports now--heck, how does a culture like that sustain itself economically, if they don't have any exports other than their pretty Royal faces? What's their exchange rate like, a million Tangean coins for a Unibuck?!
And then there's the question of why the heck the Grounders are still listening to them. Sure, they seem pretty dumb, but might be language barriers; imagine if Romac spoke with a Grounder accent, wouldn't he sound like a moron, too? Besides, they're smart enough to understand the finer points of sarcasm. (Mocking Lord
Oh, wait. We saw what would happen. They would win unless there were some Rangers around to save the day. So why did it take the Grounders until a Royal came to them with a plan for them to even think of killing
So, there's a couple of theories on how Tangean culture works. The sorta-blended-social-structure one, and the completely-separate-and-really-precarious one. Anyone else have any thoughts on how they might work?
BG FTW!!
XDDDDDD No comment, folks
