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 wpuld 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

But 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 (Pērupu 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.

Timeline of 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 4188

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.)

General election of 4205

Dreamers voted to rapidly increase immigration, and always extended their welcome even to openly hostile tribes. At the time, non-Dreamer tribes were fleeing Dreamland, either for their ancestral homelands, or for new areas that were also attracting immigrants.

The Dreamers also 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.

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.

General election of 4287

As word spread that the world no longer had any active wars, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Fayuvas

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Unlike some contemporary societies such as the Thunder Empire, the Play party restricted voting rights to adult women only; children could not vote, neither directly nor using their mother as a proxy. This meant that the few childless women in Play society had equal voting power to those with many children, which was seen by many Players as a looming problem.

Nonetheless, tying food distribution to family size forced young childless women to adopt orphans simply to be allowed to eat, meaning that very few women (only the extremely rich) could afford to remain childless; therefore this demographic never truly materialized.

Other information

The Players had grown from the pacifist nation of Paba, whose high fertility was kept in check by a high infant mortality rate and the perils of being an unarmed society in a war-happy world. As time went on, however, Paba survived, hygiene improved, and the wars around them quieted down. Yet Paba's society was built on farm labor, and every family had a strong incentive to have many children. Furthermore, people married young.

The founding Players had the world's highest fertility rate and maintained it for more than a hundred years as their people spread across the planet. Indeed, their fertility rate had been high for more than a thousand years prior, and remained so for more than a thousand years hence. Their party name attested to the central position of the lives of young children in their party's philosophy.

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.

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.