This wasn’t technically a question but I saw the conversation in the comments and thought it’d make a fun little exchange.
Anthrocon is today!! The theme is CRYPTIDS so you know I’m all about that. Come see me and Moth Monarch at tables K01 and K02!
This wasn’t technically a question but I saw the conversation in the comments and thought it’d make a fun little exchange.
Anthrocon is today!! The theme is CRYPTIDS so you know I’m all about that. Come see me and Moth Monarch at tables K01 and K02!
20 Comments
Okay but now I’m curious about why harpies, at least, didn’t get medallions, they don’t seem dangerous as a whole besides the single sub-species. In fact they seem to be about as dangerous as the average gryphon or satyr.
My guess would be that the harpies were, and are, extremely isolationist. So they had little access to any that would want them.
As an aside, I love the idea that Bugbears are in the same category as the Black Dogs, dangerous omens, but not malevolent.
Fantasy racism is probably involved. However, I have a somewhat benevolent reason.
Logistics and tyranny of the urgent.
The purpose of medallions is to let you hide among humans. At the time of the last medallion forging, there weren’t as many humans. Technology development, infrastructure, and urban expansion hadn’t reached the point where everyone has to flee to an Avalon. Harpies and dragons are winged creatures, flying a way to a new territory is possible. It sucks because you are abandoning your ancestral lands and uploading your own societies infrastructure. However, it is more survival than a monster hunt..
Monster hunts would be another issue also. Even if you want to give everyone a medallion, you have to triage who gets served first. On one hand, you have a given species risk of extinction on the other hand, you have whether or not they can adapt to hiding.
However, during an emergency rationing system, people tend to fall back on their unconscious biases. There is a reason EMTs, social workers, and even the military are supposed to get a butt load of training. “Gut instinct” “that’s how we’ve always done it” is poor defense in the court of public opinion.
tldr
The sphinxes were flying by the seat of their pants. We don’t know how transparent their selection criteria was to the general public. Having the monopoly on medallions insulated them from peer review and ethical oversight committees.
Opps that’s a lot of typos. Time to go punch the voice-to-text dictionary back into shape.
And she knows this……how?
I think it’s a little bit funny how her answer isn’t even “they aren’t inherently evil, of course” but ” it’s okay they’re inherently good”. Oh, okay! If you say so, ma’am!
A death omen creature doesn’t necessarily cause the death, they just predict it. Blaming a death omen for a death feels like blaming a storm siren for the tornado.
Church grims are primarily guardian spirits, is the thing. Medieval people believed that the first one buried in a new graveyard would be bound to protect it forever, so to spare a person from this fate whenever a new graveyard was opened a dog would be interred first, to act as the guardian. Seeing the spirit was an omen of death because if you can see the church grim it means you’re close enough to death that the guardian of the dead thinks you’re one of the things it needs to be guarding.
I’m sure that there were a lot of supply and demand issues as well. I would suspect that the reason bandersnatches didn’t get medalions was that Jocasta and Worset never heard of them.
In Obverse and Reverse it gets stated, in chapter 2 page 6, that Wonderland is an artificial creation made as an Avalon and a couple pages later that most of the species in Wonderland were created by all the ambient magic. So it’s likely that bandersnatches just straight up didn’t exist at the time, and whatever they evolved from didn’t need medallions for one reason or another.
Doodle request: forcing wosret to play Tales of Symphonia, a game that is at its core about racism, and how it only creates an unending cycle of hatred.
Yay, sphinxes ^_^
My guess is that Harpies were Something Of A Problem at the time, and would have been a big problem to deal with if be-medallioned. Might have even refused help, given how onery they can be. It’s probable that they only ‘simmered down’ once it was the only way to survive.
There actually exists a word for racism agains specific or different species.
Speciesism.
That gets pretty deep into the weeds. If you look at nature, every species in existence is “speciesist” in favor of their own species. I suspect this is an evolutionary survival trait. There are some symbiotic relationships that rise above this, but pretty rare.
Racism, in the context of humanity, generally involves prejudice based on irrelevant external characteristics of the human species.
Wosret? And at least a certain new Sphinx can rectify that! Like giving Eleanor a medallion, for instance.
I mean if anyone wants to see otherism, jist drive from one town to the next.
“Those folk over there are the issue.”
I think the general term for people not liking something for “reasons” is tribalism. So basically otherism. They aint us so that be bad, that’s the root of all the ‘isms.
I actually can not wait to see who Michelle made the medallion for.
It’s still racism, but racism doesn’t necessarily make or break a story… Depending on how it’s handled. I’ve been reading Skin Deep for many years, so I tend to trust Kory on this stuff. :3
I’ve been thinking about writing a story that deals with species as “othering” and having that be the main issue in the story. Orson scott card dealt with this in the sequels to ender’s game and also with the buggers in the first book. OSP pointed to this as a way to code for racial issues, but I think that does a disservice to humanity’s potential relations with species that are not our own.
So like rakshasa are literally immortal, Nemean lions are functionally invincible, bugbears are able to know intuitively where everyone is, and they live next to some bloke who’s just an aquatic horse. besides the fact that bugbears are universally regarded as right pains in the tuckus, It wouldn’t be hyperbolic nor factually wrong to say that they exist on a different level than regular humans or even less fantastic mythics/cryptos/others. Also while dragons are capable of remorse, humility, and moral action, the fact that every dragon shown thus far has been predisposed to not do that tells me that not giving them medallions was probably a good choice, albeit one with consequences.
we’ve already seen diagetically how being unable to shapeshift and also having a body that is casually deadly comes with baggage attached: that manticore literally had to get body mod surgery: 1 so that he could live in polite society, and 2 so he didn’t accidentally murk someone while passing them in the street.
It’s one thing when the “other” is functionally the same as you and you’re just trying to justify grandad’s trophy wall, it’s another thing entirely when you’re just a neapolitan dude and the “other” is as big as a city bus, flies, swims, and literally willingly works with the forces of hell. Is segregation okay when the only way for two species to literally coexist in the same area requires one or the other to wear an HEV suit? if an entire species requires unsavory acts in order to procreate is it even still right to look at that from our known perspective of right or wrong? how is that addressed when Heaven and Hell are both literally expressly stated to exist in universe?