Dolphin Riders

The MFZ Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the Cosmopolitan Age. The original Empire, Mayuvas, was Dreamland, which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the Gold party, as the word for gold in Play was mayu. The other two empires, Fayuvas and Žayuvas, were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, Baeba Swamp, which at the time was run primarily by the Iron party, an offshoot of the much older Zenith party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel ū, giving Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas, but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like uv (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

Mayuvas (Dreamland)

In 4011, Dreamland's navy sealed off its southern coast and prohibited travel in both directions. They also fortified their land border with Baeba Swamp to the east. The Dreamers explained that the blockade was necessary because Dreamland's multiparty democratic government had allowed the growth of dissent movements within its territory, and that to allow Dreamers free travel to foreign nations would mean allowing defectors to assist Dreamland's enemies in war.

Free exit was nonetheless maintained along Dreamland's north coast, which faced the pacifist empire of Moonshine and a few small nations with weak militaries. The northernmost land border, with Tata, also remained open, because even though Tata's peasant class had traditionally been hostile to Dreamland, they had never acted alone, but only through their nation, which as a whole had been friendly to Dreamland.

Structure of Parliament

Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the Dolphin Riders, who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient Gold party. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

Recognition of new tribes

Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Because the Dolphin Riders were creating a new Gold government in a fresh territory, they drew all of the tribal boundaries themselves, and chose boundaries that they felt would help ensure a strong pro-Gold majority well into the future. This meant recognizing many different tribes among peoples who they believed would support the Gold agenda, while lumping historic enemies into the same tribe whenever possible. The Riders recognized that any group of people with its own language was an independent tribe, as previous Gold governments had done, and therefore had to concede the existence of hostile tribes such as the Tippers who had arrived from overseas, but areas of traditionally anti-Gold politics among the native Dreamer population were lumped into the Gold tribe, defying the traditional Gold practice of treating political parties with hereditary membership as equivalent to tribes. Therefore, the only way for any anti-Gold citizens of Dreamer descent to have a voice in the new Gold government was to learn a new language and attempt to join the tribe that spoke that language.

Yet, even as they denied the creation of tribes along political lines, they created dozens of new Dreamer tribes defined by geographical boundaries, claiming the minor dialectal differences between adjacent Dreamer territories represented separate languages, and that these were therefore separate tribes entitled to equal representation in Parliament. The Gold party realized that they could not count on these discrete geographical regions to all support pro-Gold policies indefinitely, but hoped that they could always maintain a pro-Gold parliament by rewarding pro-Gold tribes with extra representation as they created further divisions within those tribes while refusing to recognize any divisions within hostile tribes.

Many purist Dreamers opposed this procedure, saying that the Gold party's long history of stability derived from its practice of respecting the rights of minority tribes and parties.

Language

The Dreamers continued to speak their inherited Dolphin Rider language in daily life, but unlike Dreamers of the past, they promoted bilingualism for common people and scholars alike, and those near Baeba Swamp came to speak Ogili, the descendant of the Leaper language that had taken root there.

Hipsoft War

Despite their stated opposition to immigration, in 4150 the Dolphin Riders voted to resettle thousands of hostile pro-Moonshine immigrants in Dreamer territory. Despite Moonshine's firm commitment to pacifism, these immigrants, calling themselves Tippers, disobeyed their claimed ally and soon slaughtered more than 6,000 Dreamers while themselves losing only a tiny fraction of that number. Most of the Dreamer casualties belonged to the militant Hipsoft party, and had not been allowed to purchase weapons or armor to protect themselves, whereas the Tippers had had access to proper military equipment and even piloted ships in the Dreamer navy.

Dreamland's ruling Dolphin Rider party had excused their nonparticipation by saying that the Hipsofts had started the war, and that the Tippers were merely acting in self-defense. Yet, once the Hipsofts had been destroyed, the Tippers dispersed into the countryside and began attacking Dreamers indiscriminately, even those who were known to be sympathetic to the Tippers. The Tippers now stated that Moonshine was an enemy of Dreamland, and that they were fighting the battles that the Moonshines were too pacifistic to carry out on their own.

The Dreamer military strategists realized that they had lost 6,000 soldiers to the Tippers, and that the Tippers had not even invaded Dreamland, but rather had been invited. They realized that in the event of a traditional invasion, their military prospects would likely be even worse. Dreamland had prided itself on its strong navy, preventing invasion by sea for nearly two hundred years, but by 4183 the Dreamer navy had become so weak that they had been unable to stop the Tippers from boarding their own ships, sailing through the Dreamer naval blockade, and breaking through the naval blockade again as they moved their ships to nearby Dreamer ports.

Meanwhile, Dreamland's military performance on land had also been embarrassing. They had lost a war against the Play party in 4138, and then suffered tens of thousands more deaths from a plague that the Play army had spread to them.

Contact with the Matrix

In 4188, Dreamland's leading Dolphin Rider party surrendered control of their entire empire to the tiny but powerful Matrix army based in the nearby nation of Tata. The Matrix army consisted of only about 3,000 soldiers, but now had formal control of more than 500,000 Dreamer civilians. The Dreamers had surrendered in the hopes that the Matrixes would help revive Dreamland's historically impressive military performance. The Matrixes opposed Moonshine, and therefore opposed the Tippers, but refused to commit a battalion to the unrelated western conflict. Thus, Dreamland had been defeated by their much smaller eastern neighbor, whose border they had earlier consciously left open in the belief that an invasion from Tata was unrealistic.

Nonetheless, within a decade, the Matrixes were distracted by internal affairs and pulled out of Dreamland. The Dreamers may have redrawn their borders to have only one state bordering all of the foreign nations.

Growth of the Kapa corporation

An umbrella corporation called Kapa (in full, Nobolē Kapa) arose and soon controlled much of Dreamland's economy. The kapa part of the name literally meant "teen bone", with the understanding that teenagers were the backbone of its social network. In English this could be represented with a name like Teenprop. The name of the party that represented the corporation could therefore be represented in English with a name like Teens for Tomorrow, though this is not a literal or even metaphorical translation of the native name.

Kapa's founders had consciously modeled their new corporation after STW; although Dreamland did not have a large population of orphans or children seeking to run away from home, Kapa's membership was youth-oriented and soon enrolled much of Dreamland's teen population. Kapa was "cephalist", and thus anti-"sarabist". In the long term, these things also characterized the growing Bottom party (UPL) to the east.

The Teenprop corporation was a top-down enterprise owned and controlled by the Yukiese family, who did business only with customers who did not own weapons. Slowly over time, political parties declined in importance as they all came to either strongly oppose or strongly support the Kapa corporation.

Because Teenprop relied on an unarmed population to maintain their control, they demanded that Dreamland's armies destroy their weapons and relegate themselves to environmental cleanup duties. Because Teenprop knew that this would make Dreamland vulnerable to invasion, they allowed the navy to remain, a strategy that had been used long ago by the pacifist empire of Paba. This navy was also involved in trade, and therefore served the interests of Teenprop , as they relied on trade with foreign nations to bring in consistent profits. As a formality, Teenprop purchased the ships of the Dreamer navy, saying that this legitimized their control over Dreamland's trade and naval affairs. They also formally registered the Teenprop political party, forcing the Dolphin Riders to reorganize the government to give the Teenprops formal control.

Development of new political parties

Two-party stage

The Teenprop party supported policies that strengthened their corporation. They thus supported unregulated capitalism, and the ability of corporations to draw funding from the government. They opposed representative democracy, knowing that in a truly democratic Dreamland, the common people could vote the Teenprops out of power. They opposed the right of the common people to own weapons, or to have a standing army. They also came to support feminism, believing a society led by women would be more peaceful and easier to control than a society led by men. This put them squarely at odds with Dreamlandic tradition, as they had been a masculine holdout in an increasingly feminist world.

In reaction, the Dolphin Riders came to support any position that weakened the Teenprops. Though the Riders had initially supported capitalism as well, they backed down and came to support sarabism, the practice of distributing weapons to the common population to protect them from harm.

The Teenprop leaders realized that, in empires to the east, a radical party had come to be seen as a moderate party by fostering the growth of an even more radical party to serve as a counterweight. They thus sought to create a third party in Dreamland favoring an even more extreme interpretation of traditional Teenprop policies such as feminism, pacifism, and capitalism.

Creation of new parties

Gatotōl had been founded in 4084. It was a non-ideological alliance that peaked at around 30% of power early in this era.

The Teenprops realized a potential benefit of the original Gold system: by creating more than one pro-Teenprop party, they could create the illusion of choice for the public, while herding opposition voters into a small number of parties, whose platforms would also contain a variety of pro-Teenprop policies, with no party permitted that opposed the entire Teenprop platform.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the Teenprops began promoting and indirectly funding the Comb party (Pōrupu Resini) which had opposed immigration in 4150. At the time, the Teenprop corporation had been unimportant, and the Combs had been at odds with the Dolphin Riders, but by the early 4200's the Riders and Combs had mended their ties, readmitted Susileme into Dreamland, and come to agree on important issues. (The Dolphin Riders had founded the empire with a contradictory platform that simultaneously encouraged and opposed immigration, without restrictions.) Thus the anti-immigrant Comb party returned to power even though few people were interested in migrating to Dreamland any longer.

The Teenprops also restored the Hipsoft party to legal status, knowing that they were no danger to either the immigrants or to the Teenprops. They hoped Hipsoft would serve a role similar to Fayuvas' Seashell party, drawing in militants without any feasible means to carry out any threats. Although the descendants of the Tippers remained alive in Dreamland, the Teenprops hoped to push the Hipsofts into opposing other groups of people, in order to turn the militants against Dreamer society in general rather than just focusing on the immigrants.

The new Carriage party (āliki) was created to draw in loyal pacifists who supported an unarmed population but also opposed the Teenprop corporation's unrestricted growth. Thus, the Carriages supported wealth redistribution but not weapons redistribution, and would not arm their own members.

The new Pointer party (Pēbobi Lisuelesi) was created to control Dreamers who supported both unrestricted capitalism and an unarmed populace, but believed in a traditional male-led society. The Teenprops hoped that this party could serve a purpose similar to Fayuvas' Tadpole party, in that it could adopt positions which were even more extreme than Teenprops', except on the issue of feminism. It was the only party identifying itself as a pēbobi.

The Permission party (Lepusepu Lesinepu) was similar to the Pointers in that they also supported a male-led society and an unarmed populace, but also supported wealth redistribution like The Carriages.

For reasons of symmetry, the Teenprops also created the Butterfly party, which stood as a third feminist party supporting extremist positions like the Pointers. Thus both the Butterflies and the Pointers would make the Teenprop party seem moderate by comparison.

Minor parties

The Frame party (Pōrupu Uimeka) also appeared. The /ui/ part of the name may change to a synonym.

NOTE: It is possible that the term sepu (or whatever elaborations replace it) specifically refers to a sarabist party, and that this is considered an atomic concept, much as the word "front" is in English. If this is the case, then it must be either that Lepusepu was deceptively named on purpose or that that name is incorrect. Note that despite its wealth and monopoly on all dangerous weapons, the Teenprop corporation was never able to censor mass communications, and so people continued to spread dissenting views even as they were oppressed.

Note that the rhyming triplet lepu ~ sepu ~ (lesi)nepu is the only reason that this term is native rather than being borrowed from a previously dominant Dreamlandic language such as Wildfire (not drawn up yet) or Baywatch.

Culturebound issues

The Gold party did not allow factions to claim exclusive rule over territories, nor to stand for elections as a bloc, and the Dolphin Riders continued these policies. This led to the breakaway of factions into separate parties very early on. The Dolphin Riders were more tolerant of this than previous iterations of the Gold party had been, as they had themselves arisen as rebels from the Wildfire party. The early Dolphin Riders even allowed treasonous movements who openly promoted war against the Dreamers.

For example, the Treehouse army, though mostly reduced to a waste by this time, was invited to move to Dreamland, even though they considered themselves to be at war with Dreamland. Likewise, the Tippers came from Moonshine and soon killed 6,000 Dreamers, to which the Dreamer army had no reaction.

Hupodas

There was a Hupodas ("filth") movement in Dreamland that was popular in the mid-4100s (during the contact with the Players) and again in the mid-4300s, but otherwise attracting little support. The essence of Hupodas was that dirt was a natural part of human life, and that dirty people would be more healthy than clean people, since even a very thin, nearly invisible layer of dirt could still act as a shield. It was much milder than the Players' Hupodas movement, however, because even Hupodas supporters were afraid to get too dirty.

While supporters of Hupodas claimed that the Players were healthy because they were dirty, opponents of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland explained the Players' resilience by saying that the Players were dirty because they were healthy; that is, the Players were so strong that they did not need to bathe in order to protect themselves from diseases that would be dangerous for Dreamers. The growth of the Hupodas movement in Dreamland was fueled largely by the realization that opposing it would mean acknowledging that the Dreamers had an unknown but fundamental bodily weakness that required them to constantly bathe themselves and carefully avoid sources of disease that seemed not to harm their enemies.

Even fervent Hupodas supporters considered it a side issue and did not seek to make a cross-national alliance with the Players based on this lifestyle.

A native Dolphin Rider name for this movement could be lepisese "trap of filth", but note that there was no party with this name; it was a belief system.

Family issues

Early years

The founding Dolphin Riders planned to lower the global birthrate across their empire, saying that they had already achieved the ideal population for their territory, and that continued growth would be detrimental in a peaceful world. They also shut off immigration, even though they knew that immigrants had been strong supporters of Gold politics in the past.

To encourage lower birth rates, the Dreamers championed homosexuality for both men and women, and disincentivized large families, doing precisely the opposite of what the Players were doing in Žayūas. The Dreamers also promoted a traditional male-led society, in contrast to the feminist societies to their east. They believed that this would lead to fewer babies born because the husband was typically the largest, and often only, wage earner in the family, and thus would spend the most on each new child.

Due to a longstanding custom involving property inheritance, there was no homosexual marriage, nor was there any way to work it into the legal system, but benefits were paid to gay couples and they could raise children.

In stark contrast to the Players, the Dreamers typically kept family issues out of politics, and there were no conflicts about education, child care, or other children's issues. Some issues that the Players considered to be related to childcare nonetheless made occasional appearances in Dreamer politics as issues about adults.

Thus, although the early Dreamers had succeeded in lowering the empire's birthrate early on, they had no legal means of increasing it when they realized later on that they were becoming outnumbered.

Later years

A mild anti-homosexuality movement swept Dreamland in 4327, with views on the issue reverting to their original level by the 4380s. Homosexuality was never banned, but rather laws were passed denying welfare payments to childless homosexual couples. This was an attempt to increase the birthrate, but it was not constitutionally possible to extend the law to childless married couples, nor to redefine marriage in such a way that it would exclude heterosexual couples without children. This was Dreamland's only means of legislating on children's issues.

Ilhina

This is a movement difficult to describe, but which required placing humans lower on the hierarchy of nature than some animals, and therefore was not an animal rights issue, since these animals were assumed to have more agency than the humans who admired them. It sometimes cooperated with traditional animal rights and sometimes opposed it.

Since the original Ilhina party's name simply meant "habitat", it is possible that this movement also will, though perhaps the Dreamers would be more specific since it was not meant to be a party's name.

Sarabism

Related to the carrying of weapons.

Capitalism and communism

These are defined similarly to Earth, but note that the structure of corporations was very different and that Dreamland in time came to be dominated by just one single corporation.

Censorship and propaganda

These issues were seen as only partly related, since the propaganda was being produced by those with the means to distribute it, but censorship took action against the speech of common people which did not easily spread.

Feminism

Support for Moonshine-style feminism increased linearly as this era went on, but it did not motivate electors in Parliament and was sometimes seen as not being part of politics at all.

Pimuo bopi

A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can be translated as pacifism but relates to interpersonal conduct and not preparation for war. Neither does it relate to the question of whether humans should be able to access weapons. Not a major motivator in elections; support hit an all-time high just as Dreamland was being taken over by the aggressive Matrix army.

This name will need to be changed as the speakers would not have chosen a name that uses the same morphemes as bopo below.

Pasio

A culturebound issue difficult to define relating to intertribal relations. Support began very high in 4108 and fell continuously before rising again by the 4500s to as high as it has been before. Not a major motivator in elections.

Bepolere

Refers to regulations on hand-to-hand combat. Not a strong motivator in elections; support decreased linearly throughout time, as if in parallel with feminism's increase, but the two movements were not related.

Bopo

A culturebound issue difficult to define. Can also be translated as pacifism; but nonetheless relates to humans' place on the hierarchy of nature. Bopo was supported by people who relied on trained animals for protection, but bopo was not simply about training wild animals. Its literal meaning is to wipe, as with soap, the implication being that wiping someone (in particular, bathing an animal) is an act of love, and because carrying soap and a towel requires the use of both hands, a wiper is vulnerable and cannot harm the animal.

Early general elections

Proclamation of Empire in 4108

In 4108, the Dolphin Riders declared victory and created their new empire. Initially, the Parliament was much smaller than similar legislatures in other empires, at only 114 members, representing nearly 500,000 Dreamers in eighteen states (sometimes referred to as nations). By comparison, the Moonshine Parliament enrolled nearly a third of its adult female population, and the Play parliament (created in 4127) enrolled its entire adult female population. The easternmost state of Popa was soon lost to the Play army and never recovered.

Yet, 1,300 Dreamers had jobs in the imperial Parliament. Either the Parliament devolved local issues to the states, which would be unusual in their world (though the Crystals did this), or the Parliament of 1,414 members met as a single body, but had a small house governing the entire empire and a larger house (which may have been split) governing local affairs or departments.

Note that this was all separate from the Dolphin Riders' Gold-style parliament, which was in theory open to voting from the entire world. In practice, though, Baeba Swamp had become the center of world diplomacy.

General election of 4111

The first elections after the declaration of empire called for the Dolphin Riders to welcome their enemies, such as the Treehouse party, into Dreamland even if they came heavily armed and ready to kill. They also welcomed the Wildfire party, whom they had fought more than a century and only just recently beaten back.

The Dolphin Riders also voted for a strong pro-hygiene platform, including the use of soap and water for bathing, and that the government, despite being libertarian overall, would closely watch Dreamers to make sure they were keeping themselves clean. (Note that this is separate from the Hupodas issue.)

General election of 4140

As the soldiers of the Play army massacred Dreamers and spread plagues, the Dreamers voted to disarm their population in the hopes that the Players would also disarm and call an end to the war.

NOTE: This was most likely a decision to turn over civilian-owned weapons to the Dreamer army to fortify the border, rather than a perverse invitation for the Players to move further west to slaughter more Dreamers.

General election of 4142

As the Play party occupied eastern Dreamland, having annexed it to the state of Mipatatatatai, the free Dreamer population voted to restore the manufacture of weapons, and to distribute these weapons to civilians for protection. They also increasingly came to favor looser hygiene standards, as they saw the Players spreading plagues through Dreamland that the Dreamers' careful attention to personal hygiene seemingly did nothing to stop; they further pointed out that the Players seemed not to suffer much from these plagues even though the Players had notoriously dirty habits. Thus some Dreamers came to believe that dirt was superior to soap and proposed that Dreamers should keep themselves dirty on purpose. Even these extremists never went so far as to resemble the Players, however.

Immigration

The elections of 4142 also marked a low point in support for immigration, as the tribes who had immigrated to Dreamland during the previous thirty years had not helped the Dreamers in the war against the Players. They were pleased to realize, nonetheless, that their former enemies had not gone so far as to join the Players' side in the war. (There were still potential immigrants from the islands of Hipatal.)

NOTE: As above, the sudden reversal of attitudes on civilian weapon ownership in just two years is likely due to the perception that the Players were content holding the conquered Baywatch territory and would not launch a renewed push towards the Dolphin Riders.

Rise of pessimism

Though Dreamland was still the second wealthiest political entity on the planet, trailing only Baeba Swamp, pessimism began to rise among the best-educated Dreamers, who believed that their nation was headed for certain ruin. Many of these people wished to defect to foreign powers, particularly the Players, but realized that few foreign powers would be interested in adopting immigrants from Dreamland.

Note, this section is very poorly written due to a rush and will be reordered soon.

Dreamland held no general elections for more than sixty years; representatives were allowed to appoint their replacements at any time, whether or not they had become too frail to serve in Parliament.

Dreamland was still considering itself to be a democracy at this time, but the common people did not complain about the lack of new elections and therefore the common situation remained them same for more than sixty years. The common people had the right to demand that Parliament hold new elections, but due to the Play occupation of eastern Dreamland, the common people were united and did not demand new elections.

Dreamers envy Players

The Dreamers were amazed when they learned that the Play census of 4140 had recorded more than one million enrolled Players, more than double Dreamland's entire population, and yet packed into a much smaller land area. They realized furthermore that most of this million-plus population consisted of young children, and that because the Players were by far the youngest nation in the world, their population was sure to rise much higher within a single generation, perhaps to two million.

The Dreamers realized that their own population was unlikely to grow much beyond its current level, and that they would be easy targets in a hypothetical all-out war between the Dreamers and the various nations of Players. Since there was little difference in ideology between the Dreamer party and the Play party, some Dreamers believed that the solution to this problem was to become Players themselves. However, they suspected few Players would be interested in them.

An anti-immigrant movement calling itself Hipsoft emerged here; its name was a reference to Tata's ruling Hip party, but the Hips were tied down by internal conflicts and soon lost power altogether.

Worries about defeat

Though the Dreamers referred to their territory as an empire, it was a confederation with no capital and no common military. The Dreamers understood that while their people would typically join together in defense of an invasion, they were unable to competently project their force outside Dreamer territory because most Dreamer states had little to gain from such endeavours. Though the Dreamers had tried diplomacy, they realized that most examples of political parties establishing areas of support outside their home territory had resulted from military conquests, such as the Players' recent conquest of northeastern Dreamland and Tata.

Throughout the world, the Players were known for their extremely high fertility rate, the highest in the world of any nation or empire. (The Crystal nation calling itself the Heap had achieved a younger population profile but did not have a higher fertility rate.) Most Play women had a wide-hipped body shape that allowed them to have a relatively painless childbirth, whereas Dreamer women had narrow waists and suffered intense pain during childbirth.

The Dreamers' ruling Dolphin Rider party had come to power as a youth-based movement with a high fertility rate as well, but this had quickly collapsed and the Dreamer constitution provided the government no means by which to incentivize parents to have large families, even within the constituent states of the empire. This was because the Dolphin Riders had purposefully made their central government extremely weak. By contrast, the Play Empire was a unitary state in which the government tied food distribution to family size.

Dissolutionism

Some Dreamers wanted to abolish Dreamland as a political entity, and potentially even abolish the states within it, saying that Dreamers would become an economic power and would trade with all of the outside world, even states that were hostile, and that Dreamland could potentially make peace between those nations.

Defeatist art and propaganda

The Dreamers around this time began to compare themselves to outside powers, most commonly the Players, as they began to feel their fall from power was inevitable.

Depictions of the sun

Planet Teppala's highly eccentric orbit meant that the sun was visibly larger and brighter in the sky during the hot season, which passed quickly but was much more intense than the longer cool season.

The Players had taken away Dreamland's northernmost area as well as their sea access to places still further north, turning Dreamland, against their wishes, into a tropical empire. The Dreamers had lost more than 1,000 miles of seacoast in this war; most of it had never been Dreamer territory to begin with, but the local population had been strongly pro-Dreamland because they had been trading with Dreamland more than with the inland populations of their own nations.

The Sun is Too Big

Dreamers' art began to depict the Dreamers as cowering and hiding from the sun, saying that the sun was too big for them and would defeat them. Though the Dreamers were among the world's tallest people, they began producing art showing the Dreamers as unnaturally small and thin compared to their surroundings, such that they could be easily crushed against a rock.

Because Dreamland's sandy soils encouraged the growth of thorny plants, the Dreamers also drew plants with unnaturally sharp and large thorns, even where they did not belong, saying that the Dreamers were so delicate and out of place in their habitat that even the flowers could hurt them.

In this art style, the Players were drawn smaller still, but always riding animals or attached to a larger object; the Dreamers said that the Players had tamed nature whereas the Dreamers had tried and failed to fight nature. Though the Players and Dreamers had similar skin colors, the Players considered themselves immune to sunburn, and the Dreamers, believing this, stated that the Players had tamed the sun as well. Thus every victory for nature was a defeat for Dreamland, and the return of the big sun every year reminded the Dreamers of their coming doom.

Suntan vs sunburn

Although some Players shared the Dreamers' light skin tone, the Players rarely suffered from sunburn whereas the Dreamers often did. This was despite the fact that the Players had settled tropical climates as well and that their home city, Pūpepas, was further south than the largest Dreamer cities.

The Players spent much of their time outdoors, soaking up the sunlight, and the Play occupiers in Tata enjoyed their time outside whereas the Dreamers were eager to get back indoors to safety after a long hot day in the summer sun. The Play occupiers did not know why the Dreamers' skin kept peeling when exposed to strong summer sunshine, and simply blamed the Dreamer slaves for their own bodily disgrace.

The Dreamer military planners began to take seriously a rumor that the Play navy was planning to launch an all-out attack at the height of summer, and would draw energy from the sun whereas the Dreamers would be weakened and pressed down by the sun.

Linguistic issues

The Dreamer and Play languages had similar sounds. Other nations considered the Dreamer and Play languages to sound infantile and be unimpressive in sound. This trait was due to their vocal anatomy, and was biologically bound, meaning that neither the Dreamers nor the Players could evolve towards a language acoustically similar to those of the remainder of the world. The Dreamers had had mixed emotions about this situation, but even those who found their language embarrassing had taken comfort in the knowledge that the Play language had a similar sound.

Script

Yet, the Play language was written with a complex angular syllabary requiring strong hand muscles, as it was typically carved rather than inked, whereas the Dreamer script was much simpler in design, and yet consisted of pictograms with many curved edges such that no human could expect to carve them into wood or metal. Therefore the Dreamers could only write on paper, and could not modify natural surfaces such as wood, rocks, or metals.

The two languages had once had the same script; Play had preserved this original script almost unchanged, whereas the Dreamers had lost it and then created a new script with a softer, smoother look. This, too, made the Dreamers feel inadequate by comparison to the Players.

Depiction of sharp objects

The Dreamers paid careful attention in daily life to preventing injury by sharp objects, as the Dreamers typically wore little clothing in their hot climate, and the frequent sunburn weakened their skin's defenses. The Dreamers reshaped their surroundings to eliminate, as best they could, the growth of plants with sharp thorns, which were common in their area because of the sandy soil. But they also limited people's access to sharp knives and other tools, in order that fights would be less dangerous and because people could injure themselves accidentally while cutting food. The Crystals had also done this in some situations, and it was a common practice among other peoples when caring for small children.

But the Dreamers again contrasted themselves here with the Players and with the Soap Bubbles living in the desert to the southeast of Dreamland, where thorn plants also grew. Neither the Players nor the Bubbles seemed to have any need to protect themselves from sharp objects, either natural or manmade, and the Soap Bubbles ensured this by scraping the skin of potential Soap Bubble converts with wood, and rejecting anyone whose skin showed signs of injury. The Play slavemasters typically blamed Dreamers who were injured during work, saying that they were no more exposed to environmental danger than were the Players. The Dreamers further complained that, even when Players and Soap Bubbles did bleed, they healed very quickly, whereas the Dreamers would continue to bleed, often for hours, from a single small injury.

Debates over economics

The primary economic divide in this world was not between capitalism and communism but between capitalism and piracy, or, it could be argued, a manifold split between capitalism, slavery, piracy, and the state of having no economy at all. Wealth distribution was only an issue when an economy existed with noticeably richer and poorer classes, so nations such as the Players and Crystals had nothing to fight over in this regard. STW mixed elements of capitalism, slavery, and piracy.

Traditionally the world's richest nations had been Baeba and areas around it, including Dreamland, as well as the isolated desert nation of AlphaLeap in the tropics, which had benefited from its geographic position and thus control of the sea trade. But AlphaLeap's economic system was piracy, not capitalism, and their economy had collapsed when they lost their naval superiority. Nonetheless, the Leapers had migrated to Baeba Swamp by this time.

Issues involving trade

Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power.

this section is also poorly written due to hurry and will be reworded later.

Because the Dreamers could not station their soldiers in foreign nations, and had little domestic support in foreign nations, when they engaged in trade, their own people were charged higher prices than they were paid for equivalent items, and rival trading corporations, chiefly STW, openly bragged about their ability to rob Dreamer traders and then resell the stolen goods as legal merchandise in their nation. STW had its own army, and this army was even capable of raiding Dreamland, though this was not their primary means of robbing Dreamers; mostly they robbed Dreamers who were attempting to trade their own goods in STW's home nation.

Put another way, Dreamer's traders were unarmed while STW's were armed, and thus STW always had the advantage, and could take things from Dreamland that Dreamland could not take back. Meanwhile, Dreamers also traded voluntarily with other nations, such as Kxesh, which did not have such a military advantage; but Kxesh knew that Dreamland had a very limited choice of trading partners because of the military problem, whereas Kxesh was much better connected through its allies to the rest of the world.

Arguments for capitalism

The Dreamers' situation in many ways resembled that of the Crystals, but the Dreamers and the Crystals considered themselves irreconcilable because the Crystals demanded a feminist lifestyle whereas the Dreamers knew that surrendering to feminism, while not necessarily bad for the people as a whole, would destroy the concept of Dreamland and the Dreamer parties' grasp on power.

Dreamland became a self-focused economy, with the rising Teenprop corporation extracting profits from the Dreamers rather than from the enemies of the Dreamers. This was unlike STW and other corporations which made money by raiding foreign nations and charging high prices to people in foreign nations, rather than extracting profits from the people in their own nations.

Like the Players, the Dreamers became a self-focused economy. The Players did not see their situation as a problem, however, because they did not allow private corporations because the constitution put the government in control of food distribution and banned all other commerce. The only private enterprise allowed was bartering, but this was not a corporation and there was no way to form a corporation from it because there was no money supply in Play territory except for the coins that could only buy fish.

Figuring they could not win a war, many Dreamers wanted to make Dreamland an economic power instead, so they promoted the Teenprop corporation, with the intent that the Teenprop corporation would improve the economy by organizing the economy along capitalist lines, much like STW had done, even though they knew that Teenprop would be unable to project its influence outside Dreamland because Dreamland did not have the means to station their soldiers in foreign nations or protect their traders from raids. Thus Dreamland was unable to trade with foreign nations such as STW's nation, and therefore they became a self-focused economy with all economic profits being derived from the people in Dreamland instead of foreigners.

The supporters of Teenprop argued that a corporation could make money from within its own nation because capitalistic economics was based on a cash economy, and was more efficient than the "distribution" economy of the Play Empire or of some other nations in which the people were expected to create wealth rather than having a corporation organize people into different careers such that they could create wealth more efficiently. The main weakness of this argument was that Teenprop had no means of stationing soldiers in foreign nations to protect its people, and therefore they were only able to make profits from their own people, and could not acquire goods from foreign nations as STW had. Thus they were not really able to participate in trade at all except with certain foreign nations such as Kxesh that had weaker militaries and could not threaten Dreamland. Yet even here, Kxesh had the advantage, because they knew that Dreamland was more dependent on Kxesh for foreign trade than Kxesh was on Dreamland. Kxesh charged the Dreamers much more for goods than they received back for equivalent goods.

Capitalism thus became a partisan political issue. At this time, there was no capitalist party, because the supporters of capitalism figured that democracy was useless and that they could best promote their interests by joining the Teenprop corporation and accumulating wealth instead of accumulating political power.

Rise of pacifism

Some Dreamers came to believe the best course of action was to weaken their nation's military, figuring that they could become an economic power if not a military power. They did not explicitly consider themselves pacifists, but their philosophy was similar to the pacifist nation of Paba, which had tolerated not merely occupation, but outright invasions of its territory in the past in the belief that by submitting to a stronger power, even an abusive one, their existence would be preserved because the abusers would not want to lose their victims to a third party or even to their own misleadership.

Secret diplomacy

As the Dreamers' representatives occupied the same seats in their Parliament for decades, many came to know each other by name and began to speak privately about the issues affecting Dreamland. Within the Parliament, there arose a group who had come to believe that the defeat of Dreamland was inevitable, as Dreamland could never win an offensive war, even against a tiny enemy, and would in due time lose its ability to win a defensive war as its population relative to the Play Empire and other potential enemies was shrinking at an alarming and irreversible rate.

Some Dreamers in this group now believed that Dreamland could neither be a military nor an economic superpower, because their only profits were taken from their own nation, and therefore they relied on the theory of capitalism, the idea that a corporation could make a profit from within its economy and distribute the money to the people, instead of relying on taking profits from outside nations. Not even all Dreamers believed this theory. They pointed out, for example, that the rival STW corporation in "Anzan" (different names through out time) had relied on slavery and raids against foreign nations in order to make profits.

Some people in Dreamland now worried that their nation would neither be a strong military power nor a strong economy, and figured that their only chance to preserve their culture would be to apply for diplomatic relations with foreign powers, essentially absinthe Dreamland as an empire, saying that different Dreamers would have diplomatically relations with different foreign powers, even if those powers would be mutually hostile, and the Dreamers would stick together because they demented on the each hotter even if their alliances were mutually hostile.

Many people in Dreamland came to believe that they would need to form alliances with foreign nations. They sai that Dreamers were different from Players and could not become Players because the Players, Crystals, etc demanded a feminist society and would always shun the Dreamers. But the Dreamers could become allies of these nations withouit h joining the nations, they said, and thus could become allies. But these Dreamers knew that they would be arguing from a low status with the foreign diplomats since foreign nations like the Play Empire had nothing to gain from making peace with such a weak power as Dreamland.

These conflicts only weakened Dreamland further, since many Dreamers believed the best course of action was to weaken Dreamland, and therefore they wanted to make their military smaller, even though they knew that this would weaken Dreamland even further, and make them vulnerable to invasion instead of just vulnerable t o losing wars.

Since some Dreamers were now effectively anti-Dreamland, their presence made Dreamland even weaker, although these people did not have an army of their own and were not planning to create one because they knew that they would not get the support of outside powers. Still, there came to be factions of "pro-Play Dreamers", "pro-Crystal Dreamers", etc, which planned to save Dreamland by essentially destroying Dreamland. They had no army of their own, however, and therefore the Dreamer army would still be able to beat them in a war, if not for the fact that some of the people supporting abolishing Dreamland were in the Dreamer army themselves.

Diplomatic outreach to Players

In the mid-4160s (possibly 4164), Dreamland sent a team of four diplomats into Memnumu to establish diplomatic relations with the Players. The Players at this time were divided among four major parties and several minor ones, all of which were bound by the Play constitution and therefore shared similar beliefs; they nonetheless disagreed on many important issues. The Dreamers figured outreach to the minor parties was futile, and therefore targeted the four big Play parties: the Eggs, the Milk Bottles, the Pillows, and the Purse.

Hipsoft war of 4183

The immigrant Tipper party, claiming alliance with Moonshine, slaughtered 6,000 Dreamers in the year 4183 and the Dreamers never reacted as they were tied down with other conflicts, because the victims had been unarmed and thus nearly defenseless, and because the Dreamers decided to blame the victims for starting the war. At first, most victims were of the insurgent Hipsoft party, and therefore locked out of the military, but the Tippers went on to kill Dreamers indiscriminately, claiming that Dreamland had started a war against Moonshine and thus deserved a war on its home soil.

Matrix treaty of 4190

By this time, the Dreamers had learned of the Play party's Reconciliation Treaty of 4186, forgiving all intra-Play debts between the various tribes and states, and consolidating the Play nation of Memnumu once again into a single-party state with a unitary army. The Dreamers estimated the size of the new Play army at about 500,000 soldiers, roughly ten times the size of Dreamland's, and though the Dreamers knew that the Play army surely consisted primarily of children and teenagers, both the younger and the older soldiers would be able to work in harmony to invade and settle all of Dreamland if they ever secured a safe access route.

Dreamland surrendered its entire territory to the tiny Matrix army, less than one hundredth the size of Dreamland's population. (But note that the Matrix census only included adult males.)

Slope treaty

General election of 4205

The Dreamers voted to once again restore strict hygiene standards, including mandatory use of soap and water in the bathroom and opposition to the Hupodas lifestyle of the Players in Creamland.

The Dreamers also voted to rapidly increase immigration, and as before, extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, most of the remaining non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing out of Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants. Thus Dreamland's population was in decline.

Arrival of the Cupbearers

Shortly after the new immigration law, the Dreamers resettled tens of thousands of Cupbearer refugees from Baeba Swamp in an area near Dreamland's border with Baeba.

Since some Cupbearers had Dreamer ancestry, the Dreamers stated that they were getting their own people back. Nonetheless, the Cupbearers overall resembled the Players in physical appearance, meaning that their women were taller than their men, but that the people were otherwise of variable appearance, typically tending towards a short stature, light skin color, but darker hair than the Dreamers. Individual Cupbearers could sometimes look like Dreamers, but in groups they were always distinct because of their taller female stature. For this reason, although the Cupbearers were happy to move to Dreamland, they did not expect to marry the Dreamers or learn their language.

Though just twenty years earlier, the Dreamers had been attacked by refugees that they had warmly welcomed in, the Dreamer leaders figured the Cupbearers posed no such threat, for several reasons:

1. The Cupbearers were true pacifists, and not merely allies of pacifists, and because they preferred to live among their own kind, the Dreamers figured they would be unlikely to lose their dedication to pacifism over time.
2. Even if the Cupbearers were to lose their pacifism, they would be ruled out of the Dreamer military because, unlike the Tippers, they were living autonomously and therefore the only military they could ever create would be an independent one (and they would need to acquire their own weapons and ships).
3. The Cupbearers were, as yet, an incomplete refugee transfer, meaning that many Cupbearers remained in Baeba Swamp as slaves or as an underclass. So long as Baeba continued to oppress the Cupbearers, the Cupbearers had an incentive to remain pro-Dreamland and anti-Baeba.
4. The Cupbearers were physically small, with their women in control, and therefore without weapons would pose little threat to Dreamer settlements, even if the Dreamers were also unarmed.

Cupbearers of both sexes continued to wear their hair plain and long, as they had in Baeba Swamp, whereas in other tribes, only women grew long hair. They thus called themselves pavača, just as the early Players had sometimes called themselves the Paaapa. Cupbearer men admitted that their appearance was feminine, even compared to men in other feminist tribes such as the Moonshines, and took pride in this, saying that beauty was feminine, and therefore that Cupbearer men were the world's most beautiful.

Capture of Crystal slaves

A group of Dolphin Riders signed a treaty with the Crystals in which the Crystals would be slaves for the Riders, but in exchange the Riders would protect them from the rising Slope party in the east. Once the treaty was signed, the Dolphin Riders occupied a large area of Crystal territory and stationed themselves as guards to keep the Crystals from running away. Then, the Dolphin Riders defected to the Slopes themselves and made the treaty's protection clause moot.

These people may have grown from the "pro-_____ Dreamers" of a few decades before, and come to realize that their only true path to power was to align with a party seen by outsiders as immoral, such as the Slopes, Zeniths, etc, if only because such parties did not look down on new recruits the way the more admired parties did. The Slope converts did not pass their slaves along to the unaffiliated Dreamers, and because they had moved into Crystal territory, they no longer lived in Dreamland and did not worry about an attack from Dreamland. Meanwhile, other armies were pushing into Dreamer territory and Dreamland was unable to fight back.

Postwar period

After 4221, the last war involving Dreamland came to an end. The Dreamers remained alert for the possibility of future conflicts, but the only known war at the time was thousands of miles away.

General election of 4227

Animals were given reign over areas of land considered to be their traditional habitats, meaning that they had legal rights that humans did not while in those areas. The bopo philosophy, that humans should rely on trained animals for protection instead of carrying weapons, began to gain ground even as Dreamers remained armed. This is because the division between the bopo supporters (the "wipers") and the rest was a two-party conflict rather than a unified movement towards bopo. The Cupbearers may have been the source of the bopo movement, as some of them entered Dreamland early on.

Support for immigration was very low in this election; note that although a sizable immigrant population had arrived since the last election, these people's representatives were given "tribal" seats, meaning that they were isolated from votes regarding immigration even if their constituents included people who had lived in Dreamland for hundreds of years. The Cupbearers were also considered a minority because they had come from Baeba Swamp.

General election of 4238

Support for government censorship of dissenting ideas reached an all-time high in this election, as humans voted to return more Dreamer land to animal holdings and to further reduce humans' use of soap in bodily hygiene. Yet support for the Hupodas movement continued to decline.

General election of 4254

After a series of animal attacks, support for the "ilhina" habitat system declined. Support for strict hygiene standards continued its decline, even as support for Hupodas reached an all-time low. The population remained fairly well-armed, even though the world's only war at this time was a small one between the Play army and the rump state of Nama.

It is possible that by this time, animals were already spilling over from Fayuvas and other places, where humans had either submitted to nature or simply dwindled in population. This would explain why the animal attacks appeared gradually and increased steadily even as the human population remained armed.

Naval war

In 4286, Dreamland declared war on the Players, which they described as a relic of a bygone era. The Players were nationalists, while the other large nations of the world were ruled by parties that transcended national boundaries, such as the Dolphin Riders, the Ghosts, and the Crystals. The shared motivation for the new war was to defeat nationalism, and thus, in this war, the Dreamers had the support of parties such as the Ghosts, who were historically their enemies.

The Dreamers planned to invade the Players from the south, using their navy, which was a politically independent entity called Laba. Laba had not always cooperated with the Dreamers in past wars, but in this case, their interests coincided, and Dreamland forced their men to join the navy to help Laba. Meanwhile, Dreamland also declared war against the feminist empire of Moonshine, but stated the war against the Players took priority, because Dreamland did not have the support of their partners in this war. Moonshine was a pacifist empire, so the Dreamers figured they could fight the war at their leisure, even postponing combat for decades, and still win because Moonshine would not use the delay to prepare their troops for an invasion.

The Ghosts and the Dreamers both agreed that the Play ideology, being nationalistic, had no place in a cosmopolitan world. But while the Ghost side of the coalition claimed that they were fighting a humanitarian war, the Dreamers made no such claims. The Dreamers even admitted to their allies that they were planning to commit mass rape of the Play population as they invaded from the south, and that the other partners in the alliance would have no means to stop this because they would be invading from the north.

Inversion of propaganda

Around this time (leading up to 4286), the Dreamers began to publish pro-war propaganda that in many ways was precisely the opposite of the pessimistic propaganda they had been writing a hundred years earlier. As before, they mostly contrasted themselves with the Players, but this time, they turned their old weaknesses into strengths.

Much of Dreamland's new propaganda had been derived from the Matrix propaganda of a hundred years prior.

General election of 4287

As the Dreamer navy,, Laba, invaded the Play homeland, the Dreamers voted to disarm their civilian population. By this time, the Teenprop corporation had grown large enough to have its own implicit army, which the Dreamer government considered to be just a group of Teenprop employees, as they were neither a police force nor a legally recognized army.

Meanwhile, support for the Ilhina habitat system reached a new high, and humans collected into compact habitats of their own since they could no longer reliably fend off their predators. Hupodas gradually gained support, even as hygiene also gained. All media was censored, and support for propaganda was slowly gaining ground.

Immigrants had arrived from the islands of Laba in the year 4285. These were considered to be of the same tribe as the Dreamers and thus were neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in Dreamer politics. Nonetheless, due to the many centuries of separation, these people had both a very different language and a different physical appearance, and so did not blend in to mainstream society as quickly as the Dreamers had hoped.

NOTE, this is the very time in which Dreamland launches its new war against the Players. The disarmament may have been because they expected to win, meaning that the Players would never get into Dreamland, and because it was a naval war.

General election of 4295

The entire Dreamer Parliament now supported Ilhina, but support for re-arming human civilians also gained traction, because at this point humans had become defenseless against their predators. Teenprop-style capitalism, with clothes and other luxury items selling for high prices, became propular.

General election of 4316

After another rash of animal attacks, support for Ilhina and animal rights in general declined. Support for media censorship declined slightly, in that it was no longer unanimous, but this was not nearly enough to overturn the censorship laws.

General election of 4321

Support for the use of soap and luxury goods declined as support for the Hupodas movement increased.

Nudism gained ground. Nudists were traditionally considered to be both unsanitary and vulnerable to attack by predators and by armed humans, but it was a historically pro-Dreamer cultural value, so whenever arguments against sanitary lifestyles broke down, nudism increased, and in this case increased even as animal attacks were on the rise. Support for nudism had been high (around 50%) in 4108 when the Dolphin Riders had just finished unifying Dreamland, but dropped off sharply as the Dreamers were invaded by outside powers. It only recovered slowly after the final peace treaty in 4221, for various reasons: first, the perception of the possible threat of war stayed in people's minds; meanwhile, animal attacks were increasing; lastly, the army's soldiers were never naked because they needed to carry weapons, whereas nude people in public were more vulnerable that way both because they could not carry weapons and because they had no clothes to protect them from sharp objects.

General election of 4343

Sarabist parties gained ground here, as predatory animals were now regularly hunting humans, and these predators were intelligent enough to understand that humans carrying weapons would fight back more effectively than humans without weapons and especially more than humans without clothes. However by this time Teenprop controlled the weapons supply and these people were forced to make weapons out of stones to protect themselves.

The Parliament declared this legal, but Teenprop began publishing propaganda to convince Dreamers to return to nature and drop their weapons. The common people did not see the connection, and voted to increase both government censorship and the production of propaganda, mostly written by Teenprop.

Teenprop consolidates control (4351 — 4544)

Political stagnation took place in this era, as the Parliament continued to vote, but increasingly their votes were confined to issues of little importance to the common people, such as whether soap and luxury goods should be priced high or low, and where the profits that Teenprop did not need should be directed to. (Even now, Teenprop still ran charity operations.)

Note that the elections below described as changing little did sometimes carry massive changes in party representation. It is merely that the parties being swept in and out of power differed little on important issues, and fought over petty distractions such as the color of painted furniture or over nothing at all.

It is likely that the Teenprop corporation did their best to tie as many unrelated movements as possible into support of capitalism, so long as those movements were gradually increasing in support with time. For example, they could produce propaganda defining Teenprop as a feminist organization (which in fact was true) and as opposing bepolere, which was on a long-term decline. But this would only work once popular sentiment was with Teenprop to begin with.

The Pōbipōpu and Pōronopa distribution networks appeared in this era; they did the same thing as Teenprop, but were illegal, so Teenprop could harass and disrupt them at any time. The names of the guilds respectively resembled the DPR words for dolphins and crabs, but were chosen as puns, not actually containing these words.

Contacts with Moonshine

The Habit party took control of much of eastern Dreamland, claiming all land eastwards from the Hipsoft settlements to and including the Womb Justice settlements.

Tribal identity

The Habits considered themselves Moonshines, even though Moonshine would not let them in. They abolished all internal tribal boundaries and declared that the Cupbearers were also Moonshines, apart from those who rejected the identity. Thus there was no common physical appearance among the Habit tribe; nevertheless, those in charge tended to be recent immigrants from the tropics and thus had darker skin than the Cupbearers or the Moonshines, while the Cupbearers were at the bottom of society.

Partition

By the close of this era, Dreamland had been partitioned into male and female sections, with the Cupbearers and Habits on the feminine side and the Hipatal and Dolphin Riders on the masculine side. Habits here refers to a Moonshine-aligned group whose party is descended from the small Hipsoft migration but which grew much larger over time, presumably with additional immigration and conversion.

The partition may have happened in steps, and may have been hundreds of years earlier, when the Dolphin Riders were still clearly in control. If the Womb Justice party survives, it would likely be the same as the Habits. It is likely that the name Dreamland was retained for the male section only, but there is no convenient term to refer to the whole peninsula.

Because Teenprop needed to maintain control over both the male and female sections of Dreamland, they could not have described themselves as feminists everywhere; indeed, it would not serve their interests to identify as feminists in the female sector either, as the common population would recognize propaganda identifying with an already-won battle as being meaningless.

The partition gave almost all of Dreamland's best land to the feminists. For example, they had all of the territory that bordered foreign nations such as Baeba and Fayuvas. Nonetheless, men retained control of the western tip, the most convenient landing place for immigrants, and therefore they pledged to grow because of immigration, and the immigrants' own homelands opened their shores to boats from the men in Dreamland.

Moonshine-Habit relations

The Moonshine Empire reacted to the partition by annexing the feminine states of the former Dreamland as colonies of the Moonshine Empire. They awarded Moonshine citizenship and membership in Moonshine's Habit party (Tăta) to the residents, and allowed them to move to Moonshine, but only to the least desirable land. Those who chose to move were required to stay there; their children, however, could change from the Habits to a different party and then move elsewhere. (Moonshine assigned parties to different areas of land, so each had a local monopoly on power.)

Moonshine's navy did not have control of any land connecting their own territory to that of the Habits, and although they could travel to Moonshine by sea, the areas of Moonshine accessible by this sea route were those specifically denied to the Habits, and therefore any Habits wishing to leave the ex-Dreamland area had to make the journey on their own.

The Moonshines refused to allow the Habits to move to the core of Moonshine territory, citing their use of Cupbearer slaves and other tenets which were outside the allowed range of Moonshine ideological beliefs. They were allowed to move to a resource-poor area of Moonshine territory called Wagillàra, the understanding being that few would be willing, but those who came would be strong and would help maintain Moonshine control over that region. The rest were expected to remain in eastern Dreamland, preventing the western Dreamers from ever coming close to the core of Moonshine territory.

The Habit leaders explained their difficult situation to their supporters by saying that although they were doing the right thing by supporting Moonshine, anyone seeking to migrate to the safest and richest areas of Moonshine would be a coward, since Moonshine needed people to defend their civilization in difficult, volatile areas such as the ex-Dreamland area and the area afforded to Habits in Moonshine's home territory.

THESE AREAS WILL HAVE BETTER NAMES SOON. Note that the Habits spoke Leaper/Moonshine, which was at the time a single language, and never used Dreamer names.

NEED TO FIND the location of the Moonshine Habit party. Note that it is not one of the five traditiona lfactions, bur tather one of the sevenmodern ones, even though it was old. Therefore its location cannot be simply matched with one of the origina five states of Moonshine.

Because the proper name of the Habit party was "Breast", the Habits may have been attempting to also link up with the Players in Creamland, provided that the Players still existed. (These events may have begun much earlier then they are placed here.)

Demographic shifts

After the partition, the Dolphin Riders maintained the exclusive right to approve or deny immigration to their territory, since according to their constitution, the founding party would retain special privileges even if they became a minority, and their new partition had designated their territory as the successor state of Dreamland. (This is the same reason why the Leapers had been able to eject the Matrixes from Baeba's parliament in the early 4200s despite the Matrixes being a clear majority.)

Nonetheless, the Dolphin Riders believed they were ultimately doomed to minority status, even in their own territory, because of their low birthrate. Their constitution defined their empire as a confederation, making the central government very weak, such that they could not tie food rations to family size as the Players had done, or for that matter, set up a food ration system at all. Likewise, the Riders realized that their strong economy might actually be holding them down, as married couples did not need large numbers of children to care for their needs, and child labor was not in great demand.

Because of the sound of their language, which was biologically bound, they attracted few converts from the Hipatal tribes who were their only remaining allies; though the Riders were clearly the majority at the time of the partition, they were encircled by tribes who readily married among each other and adopted each other's tribal identities but had little interest in joining the Dolphin Riders.

The Dolphin Riders realized that they could maintain their majority indefinitely if they were able to raise their birthrate, but they worried their only legal paths to a higher birthrate would lead in the end to a victory for feminism and the transformation of the Dolphin Riders into a mere subject party of the Moonshines, similar to the contemporary Habits. Some Dolphin Riders wanted to instead pass laws that would make life more difficult for their new allies in the Hipatal party, hoping that the Hipatal birthrate would decline; they argued that since Moonshine was strongly discriminating against their own allies, the Dolphin Riders could pass anti-Hipatal laws and still claim to be morally superior. But they could not find enough support among the Dolphin Rider population for this idea to pass the Parliament.

The Riders thus turned sharply against immigration, hoping to hold off the Hipatal migrations as long as possible even as they believed they needed the Hipatal tribes for defense against the Moonshines.

Remember that the partition was not a single event in 4351 but a gradual process spanning much of the Teenprop era.

General election of 4351

Little changed in this election, the last for nearly forty years. Traditional animal rights activism was now seen as negative, as humans who were being preyed on by strong animals lost their sympathy for weak animals even as those animals were also prey. Yet the Ilhina habitat system was strongly supported and this even increased over the previous election.

As before, representatives were allowed to choose their replacements at any time, even if they were not too old to serve.

General election of 4390

Little changed in this election. Some people began to see censorship as a bad thing, but were unable to overturn the now long-established censorship laws. Capitalism gained ground even as the people knew that only one company would benefit.

General election of 4402

Very little changed in this election. The Parliament now simultaneously supported traditional animal rights and Ilhina, hoping that their predators would be happy enough with both solutions to slow their attacks on unarmed humans.

General election of 4412

The Parliament turned against the advertisement of luxury goods, but retained support for propaganda in general.

General election of 4419

Wealth redistribution regained ground. Teenprop agreed to large payments of charity towards the common people, knowing that nearly all of the money would flow back to Teenprop.

General election of 4438

Luxury goods came back into fashion.

Tribal reform

Around 4432, the Dreamers came to be a minority in their own territory, as the Cupbearer population had grown, and many immigrants had moved in, primarily from the islands, even as descendants of immigrants moved out. The Tipper population was surprisingly resilient as well. Thus, the Dolphin Riders were no longer in power even nominally, and they decided to merge their tribe with those of the Hipatal immigrants, as they were the only other group whose society was still led by men. At this time, the Dolphin Riders still outnumbered the Hipatal immigrants by about 5 to 1 within Dreamland, and therefore they remained mostly in charge, but both sides expected the new mixed tribe would be real and that they would be diverse in appearance for a few generations before blending together as did the Moonshines.

General election of 4440

Luxury goods fell out of fashion.

General election of 4445

Luxury goods came back into fashion. Ilhina support reached 100%.

General election of 4462

Support for government censorship fell once again, but still did not overturn the laws. Support for luxury goods reached an all-time high even as the now mostly nudist population had no convenient means of using them.

General election of 4468

Nudism reached an all-time high as support for censorship resurged.

General election of 4485

Demand for soap became very popular as bathroom police increased their control.

General election of 4492

The Parliament voted to disarm their population. By now, even humans who relied on trained animals for protection were considered to be armed, and therefore illegal.

General election of 4500

Demand for soap and luxury goods once again increased even as support for nudism reached another high point.

General election of 4511

Little changed in this election.

General election of 4529

Propaganda urging humans to throw out their remaining weapons and buy luxury goods and soap was effective, but little changed in this election.

General election of 4531

Support for re-arming the population in defense against animals gained ground, but not enough to overturn the laws against weapons.

General election of 4538

Luxury goods became popular.

General election of 4540

Luxury goods became unpopular, but the election was delayed and by the time it took place the Parliament voted to increase distribution and advertisement of luxury goods even more.

Humanitarian attempts at intervention

The population of Dreamland in the 4540's was roughly the same as it had been four hundred years earlier. Their empire's share of the world population thus had fallen, and humanitarians from both Baeba Swamp and its enemies put aside their differences to plan a war against Dreamland, though they knew that they would first need to convince the peasants to support their war, and knowledge of the Dolphin Rider language had disappeared from the outside world as immigration in both directions had nearly stopped. Proof of the plausibility of the mission arrived when a spy (probably from Baeba) broke through the Teenprop navy, and then sailed back safely to report that they had succeeded.

However, the planned humanitarian war never happened, because the enemies of the countries who had planned to invade realized that it would create a prime opportunity for invasion of those countries, which had become more pacifistic in recent centuries. This led to a rapid re-armament of all countries except Dreamland, which made Dreamland even weaker by comparison, but because these other countries had no common interest, the humanitarian mission still did not happen.

Remember that Baeba Swamp was still going strong. It is likely that at least SOME people would still be able to learn a language intelligible with Dolphin Rider, since even Teenprop would not have been so powerful as to replace the peasants' language with a different language.

Other developments

• 56 (4150)
• 52 (4202)
• 13 (4215)
• 24 (4239)
• 79 (4318)
• 80 (4408)

The DPR (male-led) side of Dreamland signs a pact with the Hipatal people dissolving Dreamland as a political entity and creating a new empire with the Dolphin Riders in control of the Hipatal people. Yet the Dolphin Riders knew they were on a steep decline, trapped on the mainland while the Hipatal people roamed freely around their islands.

Fayuvas

See Dolls.

Note that there is no convenient way to represent the Play-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with dream and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland". The founders were pacifists, originally from the Bottom party, who denied their members the ability to own weapons or armor, making them "soft" (nuufa), even as the rival parties around them remained heavily armed, and thus "sharp". The Play language distinguished between two words for softness: fubap describing something soft and thus flexible, and nuufa describing something easily cut or torn apart. As humans, the Bottoms realized that they were well described by both terms, but that the latter term was more relevant.

Scope

It is likely that this era ends abruptly in 4767 as the Phoenixes switch from political to military domination. They are soon overthrown, and the government becomes milder, but the Phoenixes continue to exist as a people. This may be the Hiboh Era, meaning that Hiboh and Gikani would just be synonyms, or the Hiboh Era may be farther in the future.

Dedication to pacifism

The founding Bottoms declared that pacifism could stand alone, and that they would win over the rival parties without violence; they promised even if they were slaughtered in their own homes by their enemies, the Bottoms would never carry weapons to defend themselves. They soon drafted a party platform denying their members the right to hunt animals or even uproot plants, saying that as humans they were meant to submit to nature rather than seeing themselves as part of nature.

Indeed, many Bottoms and other defenseless pacifists were abused and killed during the early decades of Fayuvas, though the violence was mostly disorganized, because the ruling Hailstorm army policed both their own members and those of any other groups that retained the right to carry weapons. The Bottoms had tried to survive without police, but on their own they had been unable to push out the other groups within their territories, and were forced to admit that their ideal of pacifism had a dangerous flaw.

Nonetheless, as the Bottoms ceded more and more control of their nations to the Hailstorm police force, the incidence of violent crime declined; the police ordered all citizens, not just the Dolls, to disarm and live in submission to nature; the police were exempt because they were not citizens of the Doll nations.

Žayuvas (Creamland)

Žayuvas got its name when the rebel Tink army invaded their ally, the Play party, and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, Dreamland, than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory Memnumu.

Like the Dreamers in Mayūas and the Hailstorms in Fayūas, the ruling Police faction took control of Žayūas and laid out long-term plans for their empire's stability. The Police were the ruling class of the Play party. Their empire's longstanding problems with poverty and education turned into an advantage: their people spoke many languages rather than one, and thus had access to much local knowledge, handed down for many generations, that was out of reach of all foreign empires. Although the Leapers had burned many books, others had survived. Furthermore, the Players had spread their own language far beyond their borders, and thus had access to knowledge of the happenings of the foreign empires as well.

The Player peasantry surrendered physical control of their empire to the Police, and like the Bottoms in Fayūas, disarmed their entire population. Unlike the Bottoms, however, the Players (dominated by a group calling themselves the Magic Combs) never wrote pacifism into their constitution, and still had the power to overrule the Police on some political issues provided that the Police respected their democratic process instead of ruling by brute force. The Magic Combs' native name was unrelated to that of Dreamland's contemporary Comb party.

Scope of Žayuvas

It is likely that Play control of their territory lasted less than 600 years, assuming the unattached "Max" timeline's years are read as one-to-one. This would mean that a further 600 years (and most likely more) are needed to connect the end of the Play era with the split between the Pabaps and the Poswobs around 5547 AD.

It may be that the high fertility rate of the Play culture led to a food crisis, but that they nonetheless could not escape their territory until around 5500.

The red notebook timeline corresponds only irregularly to the current writeup and cannot be used but to point out that a given event existed; it says nothing useful about timing. Thus, it is certain that the Play state of Šasa Kaina, located near and traditionally friendly towards Thaoa, at some point seceded from the Play Empire and came to be surrounded by friendly nations, suggesting these had also seceded. But this could have happened at any point after 4268, be it a few decades later or several thousand years.

One king of a village in northern Nama ("Torushi") has the same name as a city in Šaša Kaina, suggesting that they may have been in continuous contact, or even in the same place.

Fertility calculations

On an older formula, even assuming a fertility rate of only 3.2, the Play population rises out of control and the median age is only about 12, so there may be an error in the calculations. It is possible that the spreadsheet was not counting deaths in childhood until the person would have reached adulthood, making all calculations go wrong.

New numbers, even ignoring all adults over age 35, still show the Play population rising, in fact perhaps faster than before, but now with adults slightly outnumbering children suggesting a median age in the mid-teens. Replacement fertility would be only around 2.47, which might be too low for such a primitive society. It is possible that childhood deaths are still not being accounted for properly.

Oct 10 2021

There is almost certainly still an error in the calculations, as even moving the fertility rate wildly up and down does not seem to affect the proportion of children in the population, which sticks very close to 45%, even with a very low fertility rate where the Players die out. Note that with a fertility rate of 9.0, the Play population increases thirty-fold in just fifty years, suggesting children should be something like 90% of the population, but the ratio stays put. Furthermore, with a fertility rate of 2.44, the population reaches a stable level of only 6,034 people and then all numbers stay the same forever.

Note that the fertility rate in the spreadsheet is run on the adult population only, and does not account for deaths in adulthood, so that during times of famine, war, and disease, a high fertility rate will behave as a lower one. For example, if half of all women do not live to reproduce, a TFR of 8.0 will behave as if it were 4.0. This is a limitation of the formulas.

The Players' TFR during their early wars could be around 8.5 if it is assumed that the adult female population was essentially spared of all war-related deaths, dying only due to disease and crime. If they were killed in significant numbers as war casualties, the TFR would need to be even higher.

The remarkable population ratio, with 75% of the population under the age of thirteen, held steadily from about 4127 to the 4150s, essentially the Players' period of conquests. However, this figure includes all of the orphans and all of the runaways, including those who no longer considered themselves Players, while excluding Tata, where the birthrate was lower and where many adult soldiers had moved.

Remember that as of Oct 10, 2021 the census still does not list any adults over age 35, so it is possible that the TFR must indeed be raised even higher than 8.5. On the other hand, only about 3% of men would have reached this age.

Apportionment of representatives

Rather than relying on preexisting legal loopholes to overrule the majority as in Mayūas and Fayūas, the Police drafted a new constitution stating that while their empire would remain a democracy, the Police were entitled to five times as many representatives in Parliament, per capita, as the Magic Combs, and that therefore the Police would be stronger than the Combs for the foreseeable future. Legally, the apportionment was done on the basis of the voter's occupation, with the police carrying five times the weight of the many occupations grouped together as what the Police described as their empire's middle class. Since police work was a hereditary occupation, Combs and other peasants could not expand their voting power by seeking jobs with the police force; even Players who worked directly with the police were still not considered Police.

The new constitution elaborated on an early Play tradition: the founding Players had denied men the right to vote, explaining that people surrendered their right to vote by joining the military, and since all men were required to serve in the military, no men were allowed to vote. The Police continued to deny men the right to vote, but stated that it was because male-led occupations carried a voting multiplier of zero. Some men hoped that this meant that in the future, men would be allowed to vote, even if they carried a lower weight than women, but they did not realize that the constitution itself barred men from voting, and this could not be changed.

Evolution from factions to parties

The Play charter underlined the need for the Players to rule a one-party state; outside parties bring conflicting interests, they said, and therefore must be banned. The Players allowed an unlimited number of factions in their party, so long as these factions adhered to the beliefs laid out in the Play party's charter.

Over time, Play diplomats conceded that their party's factions were similar in many ways to the independent legal political parties of foreign nations, and that non-Play parties in Play territory were similar to what other nations referred to as illegal parties.

Party membership

The Police party restricted membership to adult females, and therefore maintained their membership only by relying on mixed marriages. This served as a check on their power, but also helped them keep control of other parties, since there would always be Police in the homes of the men of other parties such as the Combs. Because the first generations of Police were typically much taller than the people they ruled over, they preferred husbands who were taller than average for their tribe, and the resulting marriages led to the Combs becoming even shorter than they had been before; however, since only women could be police, the male children of these mixed marriages remained in the Comb party and therefore the height gap between the Police and their subjects gradually decreased.

Culturebound issues of the Play Empire

See also Memnumu#Culturebound_political_issues.

True to its name, the Play party dedicated itself to children's rights and empowered its all-female police and government to overrule parents on many issues that other empires considered out of reach of the government's agencies.

Children's issues

The Players entered the Cosmopolitan Age with the world's highest fertility rate, and maintained it by collectivizing agriculture (including fishing) and tying food distribution to family size. Thus Players married young and had large families. The rapidly expanding population kept the Play army at war until 4268, long after their enemies had conceded defeat and fled into the wilderness; thus the Play soldiers were by this time fighting more animals than people.

The Play parliament's typecast inertia, coupled with the belief that their nation's high fertility rate had spared them the fate of the ruined nations around them, kept the fertility rate high even as population pressure increased. Furthermore, it was illegal to publicly criticize the food distribution system, as it was to criticize any other law that had been written into the original Play party constitution of 4151. These laws applied even to the ruling classes; Police would be fired immediately for so much as dissenting from the party's opinions, and likewise the Police tended to have large families because they, too, were prohibited from maintaining a private food supply.

Cities, especially the capital, Tatūm, had been built with large families in mind: in eastern Tatūm stood a school built for a student population in the tens of thousands, larger than most cities by itself, and smaller neighborhoods within Tatūm were built with playgrounds in the center. The capital city was so known for its families' high fertility rate, above even the Play party's average, that they referred to it as Bābā, "nursery ward", and this became the common word for a capital city. Even as the fertility rate declined, the child population in absolute numbers continued to increase, so the Players were well able to maintain and make use of these structures made for children.

Child discipline and corporal punishment

The founding Players dedicated themselves to opposing corporal punishment inside the home, promising that their police would risk their lives to rescue children from abusive homes. Yet, since the government afforded the Player police force the right to overrule parents in their own homes, the Police were the only political party with the power to inflict corporal punishment on children.

In increasing order of severity, the Police practiced corporal punishment on women, children, and men. Men were typically shorter than women but were expected to be physically hardy.

Like the Moonshines they admired, the Play police officers spent much of their time supervising children, both indoors and outdoors, to protect them from each other and from adults. Adult male Players were confined to certain areas of Play settlements, and young Play children often spent more time with police than with their own fathers.

Child labor

Likewise, the founding Players abolished child labor immediately upon taking power, but by allowing the legislature to define child labor, they found ever more ways to keep new generations of young children bound to their work.

Education

The founding Players described the need for their large child population to attend school, with teaching duties assigned to women in government jobs. But their population did not have a chance to complete any schools for several generations because of ongoing wars.

The Players blamed their failure to build schools for the bloody rebellions led by teenage runaways, unique to the Play Empire, which had occurred many times early on as the overburdened Play parents lost control of their child population. Furthermore, as their adult population at the time was also mostly uneducated, they had swooned into the arms of the predatory Raspara army, whose propaganda had allowed them to control a nation ten times their size.

Voting rights

The Play party's constitution restricted voting rights to adult women only; not only could men not vote, they could be imprisoned if they complained about their disenfranchisement within earshot of any female Police. Indeed, women could not complain about this situation either, as anyone criticizing the constitution in any way immediately lost their citizenship.

Throughout time, many democracies had granted small children the right to vote, sometimes even from birth. Block voting was common in most such societies, and each election was little more than a census of the population of each neighborhood in each town. Citizens took it for granted that their children could vote because the children were citizens just like their parents and deserved representation in their parliament.

However, the Play party restricted the vote to adult women, saying that children of both sexes, along with men, had other duties to take care of, and since they could not serve in government, they would not be able to cast an intelligent vote. Therefore, even though the Players cast themselves as a children's rights party, the decisions affecting children's lives were made entirely by adults.

Furthermore, since childless women had the same voting rights as women with large families, they helped limit the Play party's devotion to children's issues. Childless women often felt that they related better to young children than those children's own parents, as they were more able to see a given situation from the other side. Nonetheless, because it was in the constitution, childless Play women could not vote to overturn the food distribution system that locked them out of the supply chain, and therefore Play women married young and childless women were few.

Parenting and adolescence

This section may be copied to Memnumu so it can be expanded and outdented.

While much of the world saw childbirth as a burden, women in the Play Empire relied on their large families to access food supplies, and came to believe that having many children was a virtue in itself. The fertility rate remained high for hundreds of years after the Players ran out of living space, leading to famines and disease on a scale they had never experienced even during the early wars.

Even as the so-called Empty Womb Era began, the Players' birthrate remained among the highest in the world. Nevertheless, Play family planners knew the difference, proposing to address the declining birthrate by changing their nation's cultural attitudes towards childhood.

The Thumbs (tanisīmū) wanted to promote childlike behavior in adolescence and even adulthood, delaying marriage so that when people did marry they would not feel like they needed to delay childbirth any longer. By prolonging the period of life in which childlike behavior was acceptable, meanwhile, they would replace the missing children with adolescents and make it seem as though nothing had changed. The Thumbs stated that this new era would be even more playful than before since children would have more years of childhood to enjoy.

The Nipples (Natua Mem), on the other hand, wanted to accelerate childhood by introducing young children to adultlike concepts in order to eliminate, as much as possible, the entire concept of childhood in Play society, stating that the Players' strong society had not depended on the sheer number of children per adult in each family but on Play families' careful attention to the needs of children and their being at the center of every political issue. The Nipples stated that it would no longer be appropriate to have long parliamentary debates about the appropriate bedtimes of toddlers and schoolchildren, when the nation's population no longer consisted primarily of children under age 13.

Both parties' names were transparent references to the founding Player faction, which at one point called itself the Milk Bottles. Just as a baby goes from a nipple to a bottle, and from a bottle to their thumb, so too the Nipples and Thumbs positioned themselves on opposite sides of the longstanding Bottle party line on this particular issue. The Nipple party's name can also be represented in English as Milk, but they refused to use such a euphemism in their political campaigns because they were firmly to one side of the early Milk Bottle position. Nevertheless, this same mem was in both the name of the country (Memnumu) and the name of the original Milk Bottle party.

Feminism in the Play Empire

Absolute obedience

The Play party constitution stated that all men must immediately obey any command given to them by a woman, even a stranger. The government, including the police force, was made up entirely of women.

To prevent situations such as a lone woman ordering the entire male population to commit suicide immediately, all men were required to obey more than one woman, and such situations did not occur. Rather, the chain of power proceeded upward from a happenstance encounter with a woman on the street, to a man's wife, to a police officer, to the chief of police (who herself was supervised by non-Police women but not controlled by them).

Nevertheless, it remained that any woman could order the police to arrest any given man simply for refusing to obey her, and the man would be detained until his wife declared him innocent. Furthermore, the police could arrest any man at any time without giving a reason. During the first centuries of the Play Empire, the male population was heavily armed, and these laws had little meaning; when the Police ordered the army to disarm itself, the Police took full control of the nation and men became very weak in society.

Language in the Play Empire

The Play Empire was a unitary parliamentary government superimposed on an array of small independent tribal nations, and as such, the Players spoke many languages. Their common unifying language, spoken in the capital city, came to be simply called Play per a longstanding tradition associating languages with political parties on a one-to-one basis. Most Players were bilingual, as Players with a different ancestral language learned to speak Play, while those who spoke Play learned other languages as well, most commonly Late Andanese. Bilingualism held strong even when war held Players back from attending school, as they tended to learn these languages through passive exposure.

Traditionally seen as a handicap, the Players came to see their empire's language problem as a strength when they built their long-awaited school system and realized that their teachers had access to knowledge written in languages nobody outside the Play Empire would ever be able to read.

Tribal conflicts

Social stratification based on height

The very tall Repilian people, who had recently joined the Moonshines, settled in Play territory just as the last survivors of the very short Andanese people were fleeing to Xema. The Repilian women renamed themselves the Police, establishing a hereditary but all-female police force, and reassigned their men to other tribes. Because the Police by definition could only marry non-Police, they assumed that their nation's height profile would eventually become more homogeneous. In earlier periods, some Repilian women working along the seacoast had found themselves surrounded by full-grown men no taller than their hips; now, the shortest adult Play men were typically between belly and breast-high against the women of the new Police force.

Tribal conflicts (general)

This section will probably need to be moved and trimmed.

Height and hair color

The Players had grown from blonde, short-statured Pabap tribes who had pushed the even shorter dark-haired Andanese tribes into the worst possible land, typically having little sympathy because the Andanese had survived by adopting a parasitic lifestyle. Nonetheless, intermarriage occurred, and began to accelerate as the population of their shared territory increased due to the high birthrates of both peoples. By 4175, the Pabaps and the Andanese had become indistinguishable from each other, having learned each other's languages and intermarried many times. (This is one reason, though not the only reason, why Players as a whole typically had darker hair than the Palli speakers whom they later absorbed.) Because Andanese women were taller than their men, this trait soon appeared in the Play population as well. Nonetheless, Players had not been a tribe in the traditional sense at the time of their party's founding, being very diverse in physical appearance and other hereditary traits.

Background

Tribal conflicts returned suddenly to the Play nation around the year 4144. Though Memnumu had long been home to a diverse population, the strongly unitary Play ideology had taught the nation's young population to identify with their nation and not with their ancestry. Thus, the internal conflicts of the early Play party were about hygiene, food distribution, and issues that affected the nation as a whole.

However, the violently abusive Raspara party had always opposed tribalism, and had used this to explain their forced marriages to Play women during an invasion. Furthermore, a second invasion from the rebellious Tink army, who opposed tribalism as well, underscored the Players' negative feelings towards the concept of tribal harmony.

The new Play tribalists strongly opposed the Raspara, and stated that it was unnatural for a tribe like the Raspara, with such a strong and muscular body type, to live among the small, slender Players. Likewise, they also opposed the Tinks, even though the Tinks were closely related to the dominant tribes among the Players.

The tribalists also united in opposing the very tall Repilian tribes, even though Repilians had never been known for invading or abusing the ancestors of the Players. At this time, Repilians lived mostly in the far north but also had some territory in the mountains along the northern fringe of the Play-controlled territory, which obstructed the Players' paths to the northern reaches of the Anchor Empire.

Furthermore, the tribalists all agreed that they were part of the Play party, and therefore agreed to all of the core tenets of the Play party philosophy. Thus, even as the tribal divisions within the Players opposed each other, they remained more closely bound than breakaway factions led by teenage runaways such as the Flower Bees and the Rusted Pearls. They also served alongside each other in the Play army and navy, whose centralized structure prevented the consolidation of battalions along tribal lines. Because the military enrolled the entire adult male population, there was no feasible way for a tribe to raise an independent military of its own,

Nonetheless, scattered violent conflicts broke out between the Play tribes, mostly between groups of men, though women, in their duty as the nation's police, also committed acts of scattered violence.

Conflicting tribal definitions

Different tribalists disagreed on the boundaries of each tribe, and therefore had difficulty recruiting members. Most groups agreed that the majority of their nation's population was of Lenian ancestry, and that the Lenians had been traditionally defined by their trait of light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; but the Players were darker than most Lenians on average, as well as more internally diverse in appearance.

Many Play tribalists wanted to exclude the Palli-speaking tribes of the east on linguistic grounds, even though the Palli speakers had an even lighter skin and hair color than most Play and Andanese speakers. They produced racist propaganda describing Thaoa's Palli speakers as barely human, but did not mention their physical appearance, which they typically admired. Meanwhile, other Players considered the Palli speakers to be part of their own tribe after all, and said that it was the dark-haired Players near the capital whose membership was suspect.

Thus these new tribalists were fighting not only other tribes, but members of their own tribe who refused to organize along tribal lines.

Formation of unions

This may be as early as the 4180's, and as such could simply be moved to the Players article. However, it is likely that it postdates the many-sided wars, and possibly also the war against Nama.

Attempted breakup of Police

The Police had restricted themselves to a single faction so that they could not oppose each other's interests. Their votes were not required to be unanimous, but because the women at the top of the command chain could revoke party membership at any time merely for disobedience, the Police did not in fact have a free vote in Parliament, and when the party officials required it, they were required to vote unanimously or surrender their membership.

Some Police wanted to further increase the state's control on issues inside the home, saying for example that women with too many children would need to surrender the youngest to families seeking adoption. Since the Police were not allowed to split into factions, these women could not win their vote, and so attempted to enroll Players from the peasant class as Police, even knowing that their street occupations would not change.

Teenage adoption loophole

Police party membership was hereditary, but new members could be brought into the party through adoption. Adoptive families preferred to adopt teenagers so that they would not need to spend thirteen years raising a child just to gain their faction one more vote. By adopting large numbers of young peasant girls into their families, both Police factions attempted to achieve a solid majority, even as they realized they were creating a shortage of women in the peasant parties. The authors of the constitution had not foreseen this development, because they had assumed Player politics would be stable enough that no one would adopt a child just to increase their vote share in Parliament.

Contemplation of partial dictatorship

The Police leaders realized that they would need to take a stand on this new development: they could either force the newcomers to vote with the leaders, effectively abolishing democracy, or they could allow the Police to break into factions while retaining their right to an amplified vote, even if it meant that the nation would have two independent police forces, neither responsible to the other.

The Police were not threatening to create a dictatorship because their commands would only apply to their own members, and therefore, while there would always be a bloc vote of Police in Parliament, non-Police Players could outvote it at least some of the time.

Later periods

These periods overlap and may not even be in their proper order.

Hiboh

The Hiboh era followed, likely at some distance, the close of the MFZ era in Fayuvas. Moonshine had by this time become a strongly centralized feministic empire that still espoused pacifism but was no longer prone to invasion from outside powers.

Thaoa in some sense persisted into the Hiboh era, a strongly feministic society that opposed Moonshine. It may have been significantly displaced from its original location by this time, however, and it would be the "Thaoa" in a political sense rather than a direct continuation of the original state. This may be the only true Sleeperism.

It is likely that Play birthrates do not significantly decline until the early decades of the 4300's, as they continued fighting a war against their twin, the Cold Men, until 4268. Whether this stage belongs to the Hiboh era or some other era unique to Play country is a matter of definition, but note that the Hiboh Era likely did not begin until AT LEAST the 4500s anywhere else.

RKE Wars

The RKE movement was an alliance of male-led societies who spoke of the need to preserve their way of life against the rising feminist societies around them. They openly promoted violence against women and frequently used vulgar metaphors; their acronym here represents a common slogan used by the men: "Rape, Kill, Eat". However, they were a traditional army, attacking women only of enemy tribes, and they carefully protected their own women from harm.

RKE focused its attacks on Moonshine, seeing it as the source of feminism, but to reach Moonshine they had to invade Fayuvas, and by invading Fayuvas they angered not only the natives but also tribes located much further south, such as the Ghosts and perhaps even the aboriginals far to the south in Kxesh (if by this time they had become friendly to the Ghosts). Here again, they used Matrix-like analogies, saying that they would deliberately allow the feminist armies to surround them on all sides and then punch through the feminists in a straight line, splitting them in half.

Nevertheless, the RKE movement was not a single war, but a series of intermittent conflicts that spanned perhaps more than 2,000 years. RKE never had a nation of its own nor a capital city; it was an alliance open to all male-led tribes. Many of these tribes had unsettled conflicts with each other, but to join RKE they had to put aside their differences and their soldiers were made to serve alongside each other so that they could not break apart into a civil war.

RKE scored victories against Moonshine as planned. Indeed, they pushed the Moonshines all the way to the far north, in Todrom, and took control of the valuable coastline of Fayuvas and much of Moonshine. Nevertheless, they never pushed into the eastern areas of Moonshine, and they eventually lost all of their gains in the west as well.