Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Listen, I know they’re making a third one to close the trilogy and I’m pumped as fuck for it but that being said I’m going to be spectacularly disappointed if it doesn’t end with John as the manager of the Continental.

I have a lot of disjointed half-thoughts about this, but it basically sums up as: BUT THAT’S HOW STORIES WORK.  John breaks the ONLY LAW in the underworld when he kills someone on Continental ground, he renders himself an outlaw among this community of outlaws, and like.  Outlaws and kings are members of the same category, those who are not bound by the rules, IDK man I didn’t take a class about homo sacer but my roommate did and I absorbed a lot of it by exposure?  @lathori be proud of me.  Basically what I’m saying here is please make it a thing that, in the process of being a badass and saving his own life, John reveals that Manager Wednesday (I think his name is actually Winston but my feelings about American Gods have intersected with my feelings about John Wick and therefore he is Manager Wednesday, an inveterate con artist and liar who low-key has supernatural abilities and enjoys the Absolute Belief that his people have in his authority and power) is forging Krugerrands or whatever and takes over.  OR, arguably even better, Manager Wednesday either dies (good! kill everyone John cares about, I want to see him suffer, Keanu Reeves does a good Suffer) or just…retires.  Like, the only way to retire is if you just disappear and the only way to just disappear is if you have the power to make it happen.  

Or, arguably THE BEST, Manager Wednesday owes John an old favor for saving his life and just kind of promotes him.  I am JUST SAYING that it would be a really quality twist to have the end of the movie be a brief conversation between John and Manager Wednesday about how much John sacrificed to Get Out and how much he’s right back where he started, and then Manager Wednesday leaves and John watches him go and sighs and starts to stand…and stops.  There’s a Continental key card left on the table, with a single gold Krugerrand on top of it.  John takes it to the front desk and asks which room it gets him into, and he’s simply told “top floor”, and he takes the elevator up, battered and exhausted but alive and he’s going to find one more answer before he sleeps for a million years.  The elevator doors open and John (plus his dog, kept safe by friends who Did This For John when he asked) walks to the only door in the antechamber, and opens it with the key card.  It’s Manager Wednesday’s penthouse suite, impeccably made up and cleared out of all personal possessions, and there’s a piece of stationary laid on the pillow under another Krugerrand.

John, the note says, no one ever really talks about what makes a manager, so I’ll tell you.  We’re the ones who can manage, no matter what goes wrong.  

I’ve cleared it with the others.  Welcome to your new life.

Um…you’re correct, that is a loaded question, and ultimately my answer boils down to ‘because I’m confident in my own ability to tell right from wrong in the real world’ but sure, we can do this.

First of all, I don’t have any personal issues centered around incest, which, like, I tend to think is the important part of this?  Obviously, if you’re uncomfortable with a relationship in a piece of media, please choose to take care of yourself and not engage with it.  Ex: I have the show Rick & Morty comprehensively blacklisted because I can’t deal with it.  I don’t have any of those issues with the Borgias so…thus, I watch it.

Second of all, it’s history.  Like, okay, I know this is a pretty fragile argument, but it’s pretty much accepted historical fact that there were some…interesting familial dynamics happening with the Borgia family, as with many of the powerful families in Italy at the time.  And I generally believe that if you’re doing a messy part of history, you need to deal with the fact that it was messy.  

Third of all, I just care a lot more about whether a fictional relationship is interesting than whether it’s the picture of mental health and moral purity.  Like, I’m sorry, I just do.  The Purity Olympics that this blue hellsite likes to get into exhaust me, I have unfollowed people for it when I got too tired of watching the discourse scroll down my dash.  I care infinitely more about how interesting and complicated the relationship and the emotions are.  Even the ships that are genuinely pretty good and harmless, I generally care about them in terms of complications.  Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley is my jam, but I would be WAY less interested if they weren’t both child generals in a war they were born into and victims of possession and traumatized and scared and courageous and forced to fight separately in order to win.  The very first thing I said about Diana/Steve Trevor was “why are we even here if he’s not torturing himself with guilt for staining the purest soul he’s ever known with war”.  I’ve always been someone who loves stories for their messiness, because it makes the characters and their relationships more interesting.  And by far the most interesting available permutation of Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia’s relationship is the one in the show, where they’re so bent and misshapen by the pressures and demands of their father’s nation-spanning chess game that the only way they really know how to love is with each other.

Fourth and finally, this is the kind of complicated morally graphite stuff I grew up on.  The five other people on the internet who’ve read the Kencyrath know what I’m talking about, but more than that, this is always the kind of story I’ve loved.  For all else that it is, Harry Potter is a story about a profoundly traumatized kid and the grim reality that sometimes there is no one else to fight except for you.  The Hero and the Crown is a story about how sometimes being good at something won’t change the fact that you’re not good at the right thing and you might have to beat that into people.  Jesus Christ, Animorphs brings up the question of whether or not it’s morally okay to commit a war crime.  A lot.  The characters commit war crimes.  A LOT.

Basically, I’m an adult with the ability to make my own decisions about right and wrong who enjoys grim and messy relationships because honestly life is grim and messy.  If you yourself, anon, are not comfortable with the incest in the Borgias, then you are more than welcome to not engage with it.

Oh my god, let me talk to you about my very favorite Alleirat city: Dase, the city of stone, called by her own people and all those with sense the jewel of the east.

Perched on the easternmost coast of the Alleirai continent, Dase (pronounced dah-SEH) is the biggest city in terms of population if not physical size, and presides over the finest harbor in the world (the southern coast, with their sprawling river delta, politely begs to differ, but look, they’re wrong, okay, good talk).  Beyond her size, Dase’s claim to fame is her towering four-hundred-foot coastal cliffs, and the semispherical harbor the ancient citizenry excavated straight into the stone wall with a combination of magic, explosives, and sheer determination.  The harbor is massive, able to comfortably house even the tallest ship without scraping the mast along the ceiling and protect quite a number of vessels in the event of a storm.  The city itself was originally built almost entirely out of the excess stone removed from the harbor, and as further expansions have been executed under the eye of the city stone workers, the buildings have been expanded since then with the same material, either taken from expansions to the harbor or knocked off another part of the cliff.  Dase mostly gets expanded up rather than out, since it’s approximately a half-circle facing against the cliffs on one side and there’s a city wall hemming it in along the curve, but it’s still sizable, about three miles in radius.  It’s also the place where Crispin and Brenneth grew up and lived until things went badly–Brenneth used to own a smithy on the blacksmith’s row that’s still standing, and her old sword is mounted in the audience chamber of the gothkenla (like a city hall crossed with a citadel, literally ‘city center’).

Because I have no impulse control, here’s a brief excerpt of Brenneth and Crispin returning: 

“Welcome back to Dase, the jewel of the East,” Crispin said, switching fluidly back to Alleirai and raising his bound hands as if presenting me a gift.  I turned, and looked, and all my exasperation with Crispin drained away to be replaced by the sun-warm, dizzy ecstasy of being back.

Dase was less beautiful and more striking—all its beauty was in strong lines and hard angles, like the cliffs it commanded. It was tall, about three or four stories on average, and built almost entirely out of the hard silver-grey stone of the cliffs, with wide windows cut into the walls and the sun turning it into a labyrinth of brilliant light and impenetrably dark shadows.  The air smelled of salt at the cliff face, but the city wind itself could change on a dime, bringing the scent of the farmlands from the inland fields.   From our angle were the places where Kal Dase—Dase Below, the subcity of tunnels—could be accessed were invisible, but we could see where the stone was ragged enough to be scaled to the eaves of the roof level. Shadows moved, quick as starlings, overhead, thieves about their business in Lai Dase, Dase Above.  

…From above, the city would look like a ragged half-circle, butting right up against the edge of the cliffs with an absolute disregard for the potential drop on the other side.  At what would be the center of the circle, if it were complete, was the gothkenla, the city center—the citadel building where the gothed lived, received audiences, passed judgement, and completed all their other duties.  City-side of the kenla was a sprawl of empty space that spread all the way to the cliff, serving as the central marketplace and, occasionally, execution grounds.  The ten major streets radiated out from the city square, a nest of alleyways interconnecting them, and led all the way to the city limits. Every sector had its own markets, its own hierarchies and systems—the city in miniature, divided up by class.  The path to the cage, sardonically marked Drop Alley with a wooden sign, butted up against one of the major throughways, the one that ran immediately cliff-side. Unless they had moved everything around rather a lot, which I imagined would be a challenge, the kenla was about an hour walk from where we stood, depending on foot traffic.  

But so, as you might imagine, food in Dase tends toward fish for meat and depends on her protectorate lands for kestho (the main grain grown in Alleirat, a very hardy, adaptable plant that produces dense breads that taste sort of like…rye?) and other farm products.  The ten city sectors often have smaller markets to service day-to-day needs, with the large market outside the gothkenla being a once-or-twice-a-week thing for more variety, but that’s, like, raw cooking material.  

Since street food is generally stuff that can be acquired and cooked with a minimum of effort and expense on the vendor’s part, I’m guessing that smoked meats (maybe venison/other wild-hunted meats in seasons where they’re plentiful and therefore cheaper, chicken/beef if a vendor could get a good deal, most commonly fish) play a big part.  I’m kind of thinking of a kabob-like situation, with chunks of smoked meat served on a skewer with whatever suitable vegetables are in season.  Spices and seasoning would be easy, it’s a trade city and you can make spices last a long time if you know what you’re doing, so please assume that all of these are very flavorful.  

Straight-up fruit vendors are also a pretty common thing, especially in the richer parts of the city where the fruit is nicer and possibly imported (maybe from the west where apples do better, or the south where everything does great, or even the Outrigger Islands where more tropical stuff can be found).  Fruit vendors also do phenomenally well in the hostel district where there are always sailors who miss real fresh stuff and are willing to shell out of their wages accordingly.  Like, the fruit vendors in the hostel district charge more than they maybe ethically should but the sailors don’t care enough to try to change it.  

Oh, and bread stuff, that should fill out the basics.  Since kestho grain doesn’t easily grind down into really fine flour and tends to be very dense, fluffy pastries aren’t really a thing like they are here, but miniature loaves of bread (like, the size of two fists) with various things baked into them are a hit.  You can go with meat/veggies for savory or (often dried) fruits for sweet–they’re often baked as an easily transported ration, too, although not so elaborately.  Kestho loaves with meat and hot Island spices do a booming business on the training grounds and as a traveling ration for the city guard, because they’re quick and easy to eat with protein and carbs for energy and a good kick.  That specific combination is actually called a soldier’s meal, because they were the original kestho loaf cooked by soldiers during the ancient pre-unification wars.

I wrote this on a bus with no dinner in sight and now I’m ravenous and I could murder a soldier’s meal with like some strawberries after, Jesus this was a bad idea.

AHHHH ALL VERY GOOD AND HELPFUL QUESTIONS TBH.

Me, upon receiving this ask: Wait Jesus Christ did I ever figure out how power is passed on.

Turns out the answer was “I half-assed the fuck out of it” so anyway now I have a real answer.

Right, so, it’s important to know why Alleirat politics works the way it does, so buckle up for a real fast history lesson.  Alleirat, way back in their ancient history, operated as a bunch of city-states run by variably decent lordlings who were perpetually at war with each other–think of Germany during the waning Holy Roman Empire (circa ~1630), not Renaissance Italy.  Each city state was centered around the largest local city, and the immediate countryside was allied closely with the city in question.  So, once Alleirat exhausted their armies (literally, like, okay, when you’re throwing armies of magic users around like snowballs there’s a huge death toll, they literally started to run out of armies), they drew up unification treaties as a way to solve the Gordian knot of blood feuds and bitterness they’d landed themselves in.  This is their version of BC/AD, by the way, things are measured before/after unification, which was some four thousand years before Brenneth and Crispin came for the first time (this number may be subject to change later if I feel like it).  In order to protect the newly unified country (named after the continent so as not to give preference), they mostly did away with the hereditary title thing, but they ran into an issue: smaller villages and farms had depended on the protection and help of the bigger cities, which relied on the villages and farms for food and raw materials.  Not to mention that the old alliances between city and country ran bone-deep–colorism had a pretty short life in Alleirat, but they’re still working on the very real prejudices against people from other cities–so they couldn’t be gotten rid of entirely.

The balance they struck was the protectorate system, which largely preserved the pre-unification lines of alliance by formally denoting protectorate lands of each sizable city, but also protected the citizenry by laying down clear responsibilities that each has to the other.  For example, the great eastern city Dase has a sizable protectorate that pays taxes to the Dase coffers and generates a majority of the farmed food (Dase being…like 90% rock), while Dase provides the farms with protection from both natural and human threats with her city guards as well as manufacturing that the smaller villages wouldn’t be able to do.  Dase, like all other cities holding their own protectorates, is run by a gothed, which literally means ‘city servant’, an office subject to reelection by popular vote every eight years and falling somewhere between a prince and a governor as far as power goes.  The gothed appoints a given number of advisors (there are ten in Dase, five from the city and five from the protectorate) who represent the interests of their district–if the district feels ill-represented, they can petition the gothed to remove the advisor in question from office and appoint a new one.  The gothed is also responsible for selecting a representative to the Unified Council, which is sort of like a senate and which makes the small handful of decisions pertinent to the country at large.  The list of things the Unified Council is responsible for is significantly shorter than, say, our Congress because the protectorates have much more hands-on management from their gothedan.

Incidentally, if the gothed dies while in office things can get real interesting.  In theory, a new gothed can be promoted out of the ranks of the advisors, but if proof of corruption is revealed in the chaos, all of the advisors are required to be removed from office.  The guards in each city (more like a small occupying army, called the lathan) take loyalty oaths to the city and citizens, not to the political figures of power, which means that technically they have the power to arrest any sitting politician as long as they have evidence.  Furthermore, there are several functioning criminal bodies in any given Alleirai city, most pertinently the White Touch, a dubiously legal organization of flesh workers whose work covers everything from facial reconstruction (illegal) to assassination for hire (SUPER illegal).  The Touch has been known to work in tandem with lathan before, in order to take down politicians.  It’s a risky business, being a corrupt politician in Alleirat, far more so than on Earth.

There are some capital P Problems with this system, among them that it takes approximately forever to get things done and also it’s not very adaptable to a crisis–the logical issues you run into when a goodly percentage of your population might be looking at a several century lifespan.  Also, money talks, as in our world, also a problem.  That being said, the only real requirement to be gothed or to be appointed as such is literacy, and Alleirat has decent literacy rates, so there are and have been plenty of gothedan who were craftspeople, soldiers, farmers, or even minor criminals (the definition of ‘criminal’ is flexible and also Alleirat doesn’t believe in incarceration pretty much at all) before their election to office.

And as for the response to Brenneth ‘Worst Plan Ever’ Fireheart and her highly terrible plan, well.

Originally posted by teel-me-that-you-need-me

THESE ARE ALL MY FEELINGS IN A NUTSHELL.