Dolls
The Dolls were an amalgamation of conquered tribes under the control of the Matrix slave empire. Dolls were of mixed ancestry, but the most common ancestral tribes were the Swamp Kids and the Players. Other slaves were abducted from the Crystals, the Soap Bubbles, and the Moonshines. Still others were taken from Dreamland.
Language
Most Dolls spoke Play. The Dolls taught their abusers how to write, as the slavemasters were impressed by the ornate scripts the Dolls used to write their language. These scripts were originally devised for Late Andanese, however.
Some were not enslaved long enough to have learned the languages of their masters, or even of the other slaves. When they dispersed, these languages survived and some entered new territory.
Early history
Ancestry and origins
The Dolls were shorter than all of the neighboring tribes, and therefore made easy victims. Yet, as the Matrixes raped them, they gave birth to babies who ever more resembled the Matrixes.
Abduction of the Swamp Kids
The primary ancestral tribe was the Swamp Kids; in the year 4190, the Matrixes invaded a troop of Swamp Kids, abducted hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and brought them back to camp to meet their new Matrix masters. These slaves were primarily males, since the Swamp Kids used an all-male army, and therefore they could not bear children. However, the Matrixes had had a previously existing pool of female Player slaves dating from a prior conquest.
The Swamp Kids had grown from the Paaapa tribe, a group of Pabaps who had unusually dark hair. This was due to a greater proportion of Andanese ancestry than was the case for most Pabaps. This Andanese ancestry made them even shorter than the other Pabaps, and as the last of the pure-blooded Andanese were wiped out in distant battles of the same war, the Swamp Kids found they had become the shortest people in the world.
The Matrixes realized that the Swamp Kids would be ideal slaves, as they were easily intimidated even by unarmed Matrixes and even the best of the Swamp Kids would lose any fight against an adult male Matrix. They married the physically small Swampy men with women of other, taller captured tribes in order to produce children who would be almost as small as the Swamp Kids.
- Differences in appearance
The Swamp Kids had always disliked the tall people of Dreamland, and said that even though the Dreamers were taller and stronger than Swamp Kids, they were clumsy and fragile, and suffered from frostbite whereas the Swamp Kids seemed to be most at home in the coldest habitable climates. Furthermore, the Dreamers were vulnerable to sunburn despite being otherwise well-adapted for their warm climate, and therefore were forced to wear heavier clothes than other people to protect themselves from the sun. The Swamp Kids' original homeland, Paba, was slightly further south than Dreamland but yet also colder than Dreamland, and therefore the Swamp Kids were accustomed both to stronger sunlight and colder winters.
However strong the Swamp Kids were against the forces of nature, they could not compete with the superior strength of individual Matrix people. The Matrix soldiers simply walked right into the column of advancing Swampy soldiers and picked them up, stabbing those who resisted, and suffering very little damage for their efforts. The Swamp Kids could not retaliate against the Matrix kidnappers because their soldiers were camped in the Matrixes' own nation, Tata, in the mistaken belief that the Matrix was their ally.
Abduction of the Bubbles
The Matrixes also abducted slaves from the Soap Bubbles, a tribe of people who were genetically close to the Matrixes themselves but who received little sympathy. They typically had blonde hair and blue eyes.
The Soap Bubbles had branched off from the Thunder party in the year 3844 and fled into the empire of the dark-skinned Crystal people, based in Baeba Swamp. Because of their blonde hair, the people of Baeba came to identify the Bubbles as Nunabetari, another tribe of blonde, blue-eyed people who had come from Dreamland and had decided to live parasitically. The Bubbles, however, insisted that they had no interest in joining the Nunabetari and that they would be willing to fight for Baeba against Dreamland in a war. However, many Soap Bubbles drifted southwards into the desert, far from any possibility of war, and simply considered themselves a minority within Crystal society.
The Matrixes considered the Soap Bubbles to be highly vulnerable people because, as a minority in Baeba, they were distrusted by all other Baebans and would have difficulty convincing the Baeban mainstream to protect them in a war against an invader who sought to hurt only the Soap Bubbles. As they were traditionally nonviolent, they made poor soldiers, and the Matrixes were able to abduct many Soap Bubbles into their pool of slaves in Tata. They abducted both males and females.
Abduction of the Moonshines
The Matrixes also invaded an organization of humanitarian rescue workers calling itself the Točîku, which had originated in the nearby empire of Moonshine. Moonshine's rescue workers were suffering severe casualties in Baeba, as they were unarmed but were frequently attacked by the people they rescued in Baeba. The Matrixes offered to rescue the rescue workers so long as they would all agree to be slaves for the Matrix on encampments in Tata, but the Točĭku refused and therefore the Matrixes were forced to use violence. This brought them into Baeba's civil war, and both sides of the Baeban civil war considered the Matrix their enemy, but neither was prepared at the time for a revenge invasion northward into Tata. Thus, the Matrixes were able to abduct Moonshine people with some difficulty but nevertheless continued success.
Later history
The Dolls' only victory was as part of a coalition force invading the Matrixes who had formerly abused them.
Structure of society
- This content may be moved to Cosmopolitan_Age#Northwest_Coast, though that page is already crowded.
The multiethnic Thunder quarter of the Anchor Empire broke down quickly after the great war in Baeba. At the dawn of the Cosmopolitan Age, this area of the world was in a power vacuum, as it lay between Baeba, the Moonshines, and the Ghosts, but was not an attractive target for invasion by any of them. The Play speakers would likely have migrated down the Plup River, bringing their language with them, but even they may have been disorganized and so their language could have broken up into dialects and then separate languages, increasing the diversity of the area.
Naming
The Play name for the region was Fayuva and for the new country Fayuvas. This could be translated into English with a name like Sharpland or Clawland, but the name was chosen because it rhymed with Mayuvas, one of the names of Dreamland. (Note that, similarly, Žayuvas had been chosen as one of the names of Memnumu.) More specifically, the Play word fayu depicted any sharp body part of an animal, whether a tooth, a claw, or something else; its use by the United Pacifist League underscored their awareness that, as humans, they did not have any sharp body parts with which to shed the blood of their enemies, and that as humans, they were pacifists by nature.
Height gap
It is possible that the multiracial society will segregate itself based on body type. Although the Dreamers, Oyster speakers (who were of diverse political affiliations), and Cupbearers all commonly had blonde hair, and thus were Lenians, they would have nonetheless considered themselves distinct. As elsewhere, the central divide would be not about skin or hair color but about whether it was women or men who were the taller sex.
Historically, the Dreamers had tall men and short women, while the other two tribal confederations were mixed. This means that Dreamer society could maintain itself, despite being cut off from Dreamland by both Baeba and the Players, as an endogamous social group within each nation. Then, the Oyster and Play speakers could marry each other but yet also soon form into two endogamous groups based on their height profiles, with some of the tall-male families blending into Dreamer society while others remained distinct for political reasons.
It is overwhelmingly likely that the Matrixes would have preferentially selected and bred slaves from the lineages with tall women and short men, knowing they would be easier to push around, but because the Matrixes held power for just a single generation, and because they bred with their own slaves, they would not have been able to significantly affect the population structure in this manner, and in fact may have pushed the gene pool back towards a masculist height profile.
Physical appearance
Apart from the height profile, the three tribal groups were of similar appearance. They had weathered several invasions by tribes with dark hair and even dark skin, but because of the high latitude and cold climate, dark skin was maladaptive, and strong pressure existed for the children of mixed marriages to inherit a lighter skin color. Indeed, this may have been an unspoken reason why the dark-skinned Ghosts did not try to conquer nations that would have otherwise been an easy targets for them.
Of the three tribal groups, the Players would have had the darkest hair color overall because they were the only group with Andanese ancestry. The Oyster-derived tribes would likely have had the lightest. But because the Oysters and Players married each other frequently while the Dreamers were mostly endogamous, these differences may have soon become unnoticeable even to the locals.
It is also possible that there will be endogamous groups based on speech patterns, which by definition would have languages of their own. This requires that the Andanese strain of the Player tribes be recoverable, however, rather than blending into the wider society around them, and this is unlikely because they were forced into slavery for a period of time where they did not have the choice of who to marry.
Daily social organization
Thus, the maximum possible diversity within a Cupbearer Coast nation would consist of:
- A Dreamlandic-speaking community where men are taller than women;
- An Oyster-speaking community where men are taller than women;
- A Play-speaking community where men are taller than women;
- An Oyster-speaking community where women are taller than men;
- A Play-speaking community where women are taller than men;
- A second Play-speaking community, but whose language has a distinct sound and shows Andanic influence, where women are taller than men.
Politics
New political parties
Because the tall-male and tall-female societies stood apart by mutual respect, they would not need to form political parties of their own. It is possible that political parties in this region were based primarily on ideology rather than tribal identity, defying the global trend towards identity-based politics.
United Pacifist League
The United Pacifist League must become the dominant party in at least one area very early on, perhaps even from the dawn of the Cosmopolitan Age, and remain so for thousands of years, as it is the dominant political party in the Poswob Empire in 6800 AD (and likely even in 8700 AD). Likewise, it was historically dominant in Lypelpyp, although canonically Lypelpyp later replaced it with a home-grown party. Lypelpyp's language is derived from Play, and it may be that UPL is naturally dominant whenever the Play speakers take root, with other parties existing due to political pressure from Moonshine, other foreign powers, and possibly internal conflicts with the descendants of the Dreamers.
Moonshine-oriented party
Nonetheless, as the nearby Moonshine Empire grows in power over the centuries, they would have increasingly favored the tall-female societies, and encouraged feminist politics even for the Dreamers, so there could be a political alliance called the Feminists or even the Moonshines (though the Moonshines would not accept these people as true Moonshines). In theory, Dreamland could have also applied counter-pressure and funded Masculist organizations, but the shared linguistic connection, as well as Dreamers' different attitudes towards gender issues, may have led them to simply identify their favored political parties as Dreamer parties rather than specifically picking them out as men's parties.
Political representation
The early split between the Cupbearers and the Bottoms was an artificial creation by an outside party, and almost certainly did not persist into the Cosmopolitan Age. Indeed, the Bottoms came to call their party the United Pacifist League shortly after they achieved independence.
The early UPL prohibited its members from carrying or even owning weapons, but did not apply these rules to the rival parties around them. Thus, Pacifists were vulnerable to attack even in their home territory, and to protect themselves they would have needed to defect to a rival party.
Furthermore, the Dreamer minority demanded that the Pacifists amplify the voting power of all of the non-Pacifist groups, claiming that as minorities, they needed extra power to oppose the Pacifists. The Dreamers claimed that Pacifists would make good soldiers because they were much more obedient to authority than other parties, and were willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of their enemies. This was in keeping with the ancient policy of the Gold party, and the Dreamers pointed out that in Dreamland itself, minority parties indeed had extra representation in parliament. It is not clear, however, that even a party so gullible as the United Pacifist League would have submitted to a demand such as this.
Moreover, it is possible that the rival parties eventually disarmed voluntarily, as only the Dreamers had a foreign ally, and Dreamland was becoming weaker every century.
Relations with foreign powers
UPL-Ghost relations
UPL territory bordered the rival Ghost Empire, whose constitution referred to blonde-haired tribes as pissies (patin) and considered them fit for abuse by Ghosts and by other tribes. The Ghosts may have tried to divide the Lenians in UPL on the basis of hair color, agitating for the dark-haired groups to put aside their differences, join the Ghosts, and attack the blondes. Indeed, they tried to arm the Dreamers in this area, even as they opposed the Dreamers in Dreamland and banned the Dreamer party from the Ghost Empire.
The early Ghosts, who formed around 4150 AD (before the Cosmopolitan Age), claimed their racial discrimination program was necessary to undo the Firebreath's policies of discrimination in the opposite direction. (The Firebreaths may even have still been around, though they would have been controlled by Moonshines.) Yet the Ghosts claimed that they opposed racism because the Ghost party was ideological, whereas the Firebreath party had been tribalistic. The Ghosts claimed that their party was open to membership of all tribes except those with blonde hair, and that their exclusion of the blonde Lenian tribes was based on a law of nature, and did not need to change. Thus, they quickly abandoned their early argument that their discrimination laws were simply needed to equalize the standing of the different tribes.
Indeed, it may be that the Ghosts' original capital city lay directly in the Pacifists' line of settlement. In the long term, however, their strategy failed. The Ghosts had similarly attempted to spark a racial war in Baeba Swamp by promoting the interests of the dark-skinned aboriginals while antagonizing the Iron party, whose members mostly had light skin and dark hair. This led the Iron party to defend the interests of the Lenians, though they took very little positive action and began encouraging Lenians in Baeba Swamp to move to Dreamland.
Because the Ghosts were trying to provoke two simultaneous wars using contradictory positions, their own leaders began to question the Ghost ideology, and defections became numerous. In Baeba Swamp, many Ghosts converted to the Iron party, giving the Irons a firm grip on power.
UPL-Baeba relations
The Irons were not pacifists, but by running a world government from Baeba Swamp they kept hostile powers from starting new wars within their territories. They may have won the approval of Moonshine even though Moonshine was not part of their world government.
UPL-Moonshine relations
Moonshines were pacifists and shared interests with UPL, but their main interest in Blossom politics was to promote feminism among the Blossoms. Thus it could be said that the Ghosts tried to divide the Blossoms along racial lines while the Moonshines divided them along gender-power lines.
Geography
The Plup River was called Nimesippensami in proto-Baywatch; the Thunderers could have borrowed the name at this stage. The Wineapple version of the name would have been Nimešipezami.
