aethersea asked: SINCE YOU HAPPENED TO MENTION ALLEIRAT I was wondering what the government system looks like? You've mentioned lords, who seem to have a pretty solid grip on their domains, so I'm guessing something vaguely feudal? Is there a monarchy? A parliament? An oligarchical council of the major nobility? A mix? How does the reigning body feel about Brenneth's return? How do they react to her grabbing Crispin and running for the hills shortly after arriving?
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.
