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:

1. A Dreamlandic-speaking community where men are taller than women;
2. An Oyster-speaking community where men are taller than women;
3. A Play-speaking community where men are taller than women;
4. An Oyster-speaking community where women are taller than men;
5. A Play-speaking community where women are taller than men;
6. A second Play-speaking community, but whose language has a distinct sound and shows Andanic influence, where women are taller than men.

Politics

Political representation

Appointment of leaders

Remember to use the EC system (not electoral college!).

Rather than assigning extra voting power to members of closed-entry privileged parties, as in Memnumu, or treating tiny tribes as equivalent in power to whole nations, as did the Gold party, the EC system established the Phoenixes (EGW) as an absolute ruling class, whose members continually voted each other out of the party, replacing them with new members from the underclass parties.

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.

Phoenix party

The Phoenix party was the party that evolved from the Phoenix party of the tropics, whose people invaded Fayuvas sometime before 4220, meaning that they were involved in the war and did not merely arrive after the other armies had worn each other out. They supported Moonshine in global politics but Moonshine had already been driven out of the region by this time, and they did not expect help from Moonshine. They may have renamed, but strictly speaking, their name was never surrendered to Baeba's Leaper party, nor to the Gold party that later enveloped the Crystals. (The Phoenixes had surrendered their name to the Crystals, but not all Phoenixes signed the agreement; by the time the Crystals surrendered their own party to the Goldies, most Phoenixes were living in the tropics and had no knowledge of what had happened.)

Ghosts

The Ghosts of Comfort tried to establish a foothold in Fayuvas, but had so few supporters among the natives that they became an army and only ruled what areas they could hold by force. They preferred to move into territory where pacifist politics prevailed so that they could bully the locals without fear of counterattacks. This likely put them at odds with the Phoenixes.

Wami

A breakaway party from the Phoenixes formed early on. One name for this new party was Wami or Wamu, but this was not their true name as it was from a different language.

Ghost-Phoenix relations

Both the Ghosts and the Phoenixes appealed to the indigenous Dreamer minority in Fayuva, for different reasons. In nearly every way, the Phoenixes held the stronger pull on potential converts, but nonetheless, the Phoenixes had many weaknesses which prevented them from completely routing the Ghosts.

Feminism

The Phoenixes explicitly endorsed Moonshine-style feminism, and considered applying to join the Feminist Compact, an alliance of nations who supported Moonshine even though they were not allowed to join the core Moonshine Empire. (To formally join Moonshine, they would have needed to either forcibly remove the entire non-Phoenix population of their empire or define themselves as a landless party; moreover, they would have needed to give up all of their slaves.) Feminism was popular even among men, as the long period of war had led men to believe that a society in which men submitted to their wives would be the only type of society safe from war, and thus it was no shame for a man to submit to a female power structure. The Phoenixes nonetheless focused their outreach efforts on women, hoping that they could deprive the Ghosts and other parties of the female base that those parties would need in order to experience natural population growth. The Ghosts were unable to fight back with a masculist platform because a large part of the Ghost power base was feministic as well, and the Ghost leaders knew that to explicity endorse men's rights would cost them most of their women, and most of their married men, and therefore doom their party. Nonetheless, the Phoenixes lost ground here because they had such strict admission criteria that many potential male converts were ruled out of the party from birth and the Phoenixes stated that they did not need an adult male power base to rule their empire, as their police force would be primarily female and they would have no army.

Most importantly, the Phoenix feminist platform demanded immediate implementation of a society in which women were taller than men, as in Moonshine, and because this was known to be an inherited trait, conversion was impossible, and the Phoenixes ruled out any married couple in which the husband was taller than his wife, along with the children of such couples. It so happened that the Dreamer minority in Fayuva tended to have tall men and short women, whereas in the Empire as a whole, the height of men and women were about equal.

Pacifism

The Ghosts planned to declare war against Baeba Swamp as soon as they believed their army would be strong enough to win, and if necessary, stated that they would also declare war against the pacifist empire of Moonshine. The Phoenixes believed the coming centuries would be an era of peace, even if also one of poverty, and stated that the Phoenix military would only be a police force, obligated to keep the Empire whole, but not to engage in wars abroad or even to defend the Empire from invasions (since the Moonshines were openly pacifistic and Baeba Swamp claimed to have no interest in an invasion, even far in the future). The Phoenixes thus had greater appeal; nonetheless, some potential members questioned the ability of the Phoenixes to hold their empire with only a police force, leaving the borders open to invasion; even Moonshine refused to abolish their army.

Yet, both the Phoenixes and the Ghosts alienated pacifists in Fayuva, for different reasons. The Ghosts declared that pacifism was a mental sickness, stating that it was human nature to fight, and moreover that they considered pacifists fair targets in war. While the Phoenixes opposed war, they were the only party in the Empire that practiced slavery, and their slaves were taken almost entirely from pacifist groups who had been unable to fight back. Thus Phoenix "pacifism" was a sham in the eyes of opponent parties, and the Phoenixes held back from explicitly declaring themselves a pacifist political party.

Physical appearance

Both the Ghosts and the Phoenixes were dark-haired tribes, often with dark skin, living in an empire whose population was light-skinned and often showing blonde hair. The Dreamer minority, however, had darker coloration than the people around them as well, and both the Ghosts and the Phoenixes hoped they could appeal to the Dreamers in this manner.

The Ghosts declared that blonde hair was a sign of cowardice and that in their militaristic society, people with blonde hair were unwelcome except as slaves, and would be given the worst treatment even among slaves. The Phoenixes avoided categorizing people based on physical appearance, knowing that mixed marriages would help grow the Phoenix population, and stated that while the Phoenixes would never give up their blonde Lenian slaves, they defined their tribe by heredity, and that a member would never be thrown out of the Phoenix party for having been born with blonde hair. For this reason, the Phoenixes had greater appeal. However, the Phoenixes admitted that most of their slaves had partial Crystal ancestry, meaning that they were enslaving their own relatives, whereas the Ghosts promised that they would never enslave their own kind, and that because they defined their tribe by physical appearance, the question of whether a slave did or did not have Ghost ancestry could never come up.

Ideological ancestry

The Ghosts and the Phoenixes both claimed to be the true ideological successor of both the Raspara and Crystal parties, which had been strongly hostile to each other before the war but had forged ties at the very last stage of the war when both were overcome by their enemies. Scholars nonetheless associated the Ghosts with Raspara and the Phoenixes with Crystals, and nearly all people considered the Crystals to be more trustworthy than the Raspara. Yet the Ghosts claimed to have revised their constitution, whereas the Phoenixes identified themselves as conservatives, saying that their ideology had not changed in more than two hundred years, even though they had formed their party in the tropics where the world around them was very different.

Summary

The Phoenixes alienated the Dreamers by demanding that women be taller than men, while the Ghosts alienated the Phoenixes by demanding the Phoenixes (both male and female) enlist in the military and prepare for war.

Some Dreamers did join the Ghosts in order to gain political power, figuring they would switch sides at the last moment if war were to break out against their true ally, Dreamland, or if a situation erupted in which the ex-Dreamer Ghosts were put on the front lines to defend the original Ghosts. Very few Dreamers joined the Phoenixes, but at the same time, the Dreamers considered the Phoenixes to be no threat, as they had no army and put women in charge of all affairs both foreign and domestic. Thus, although resistant at first, the Dreamer minority eventually decided to allow the Phoenixes to settle in Dreamer territory and coexist as a minority in the wider Fayuvas government, banding together against the Ghosts while also both plotting to sap power from the pacifistic Dolls concentrated in the northern coastal region.

Phoenixes move north

When the Phoenixes realized that they were welcome in Dreamer territory, but yet locked out of power there, they decided to send people into the pacifist states of the north, knowing that people there would be easy to prey on, even for a party such as the Phoenixes that had no army of its own. The Phoenixes said that they would protect the pacifists from all outside parties, but in return, the pacifists needed to cede all political power to the Phoenixes. The Phoenixes thus restored the Leaper's name for these pacifists: the Dolls.

NOTE: Canonically, the Phoenixes were already in UPL territory by 4220 at the latest, and thus played a role in the final stages of the war, rather than merely showing up after the other armies had worn each other down.

Gold-like voting legacy

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.

Gikani Era (4767 — 5547 AD)

NOTE: This section is likely misplaced, as it can only have taken place on the Cupbearer Coast, thousands of miles from Memnumu. However, the end date of 5547 still belongs to Memnumu.

In 4767, the para-Crystal overseers announced a new era of increased pain for their Player slaves. Thus began the Ŋikani era.

It is possible that, as had happened in the past, when an antislavery movement arose during the Gikani era, the antislavery advocates planned to kill all of the slaves, as they saw the slaves as irreparably broken by their abuse and incapable of functioning within wider human society. Thus the slaves would have sided with their masters, and strengthened the masters' grip on power.

This era may have featured a refined version of the above parliamentary system, in which the ruling party (likely no longer the Police) has even greater power, and can overrule all other parties regardless of their population share, except when the opposition to the ruling party's vote is entirely unanimous and the ruling party's vote is not. The effect of this is that all power in fact rests with the ruling party, but that when the ruling party is divided, a minority within it can sometimes win the vote by demonstrating that the common people are on their side.