Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

[dragoongfa]

I guess it depends on your definition. I think that in the religious sense, lust is the pursuit of sexual pleasure for its own sake without regard to procreation, and gluttony is the pursuit of eating for the pleasure of it without regard to nutrition (or the plight of the hungry). You can understand why a religion would want to discourage such excesses, but that doesn't quite justify the extremes to which medieval Christianity gloried suffering as holy and vilified pleasure as sinful.

It was a form of societal control during trying and turbulent times that followed the violent collapse of the 'golden age' of peace and prosperity that was the Pax Romana of the Roman empire.

Painting certain carnal excesses of the late Roman period as sinful while also preaching about extreme austerity, obedience and martyrdom/unity against an invading foreign religion is par of the course for the calamity that was the collapse of the western Roman empire. All of the above amidst a brutal feudal system where the vast majority of the populace were serfs.

It was centuries of near constant warfare, filled with famines, rampaging pandemics and loss of technological understanding. The Eastern Roman Empire fared better but it still homogenized itself through Christianity whose Orthodox dogma saw its own extremes with the Iconomachy period due to the importation of anti icon practices from Islam mandated by the Imperial family in order to ease up relations with the bordering Caliphate after the Islamic conquest of Egypt and the Middle East.

[Arioch]

It was a form of societal control during trying and turbulent times that followed the violent collapse of the 'golden age' of peace and prosperity that was the Pax Romana of the Roman empire.

Painting certain carnal excesses of the late Roman period as sinful while also preaching about extreme austerity, obedience and martyrdom/unity against an invading foreign religion is par of the course for the calamity that was the collapse of the western Roman empire. All of the above amidst a brutal feudal system where the vast majority of the populace were serfs.

It was centuries of near constant warfare, filled with famines, rampaging pandemics and loss of technological understanding. The Eastern Roman Empire fared better but it still homogenized itself through Christianity whose Orthodox dogma saw its own extremes with the Iconomachy period due to the importation of anti icon practices from Islam mandated by the Imperial family in order to ease up relations with the bordering Caliphate after the Islamic conquest of Egypt and the Middle East.

Yes, I agree... and I think severe hardship breeds radicalism, both from the top down and from the bottom up.

[TerrifyingKitten]

Oh, oh, I know this. Pick me!

The modern view on it is largely covered by Cartesian Dualism but in those days the church was highly infected with several Gnostic heresies that though the Spirit was the only thing holy and the body, as all worldly things, was evil. That spin on interpretation made all things like

"Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wants to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and be following Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for My sake will find it"

and

"But I keep control of my body, and bring it into subjection, lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway."

get interpreted in all sorts of twisted ways.

You're supposed to interpret intent from Scripture, not bring intent to it - otherwise you'll always find justification for what you already believe. And the giant monolithic power structure the Roman Catholics created after the schism with the Orthodox Catholics (1054AD) only went further away until 1517AD Martin Luthor tried to pull it back in line and only ended up fracturing the church more (all these non Catholic churches you see on ever street corner)

The Gnostic movement starts even before 200BC and the upstart Christians were just rolled up into their crazy philosophies and "secret learnings" - being generous, they were the original tinfoil hat people. A less gentle interpretation is they came up with a scam they thought they could get the masses to fall for. The Greeks already had mechanized statues that could perform "miracles" as long as the right mushrooms had been added to the wine. (I think church was a LOT more entertaining in those days)

Celibacy was only a Roman Catholic thing and was not even introduced by them until the 11th century, before that priests could be married.

Aside from being the most popular book in history the Bible is probably also the most abused. Jesus first recorded miracle is making wine for a wedding party back in the time when a wedding party was a 3 day long feast and drinking binge. Dude knew how to partay! And anyone that tells you "new wine" means "grape juice" doesn't know history or how much people like to drink. People haven't really changed in 4,000 years; some of the earliest cuneiform tablets are instructions on how to make beer.

Sorry, I really just came here to peer into the work in progress thread but saw something that I knew the answer to in here....

[Mk_C]

I don't think that anything Talon or Spiral said indicates that they are looking forward to their deaths, or that they find the prospect agreeable (on the contrary, Spiral concurs with Alex that "it is the most messed up!").

Eh, might be just my flawed reading. It sorta seems that they are amused and somewhat proud with the mess they are in, in that teenager "It's cool the way it sucks" kind of way.

Personal deprivation is a necessary reality of military life and a matter of ordinary military discipline; I don't see any need to make dogma out of it. You don't have to preach celibacy when sex partners simply aren't available, and you don't have to rail against the sin of gluttony when food is rationed. You don't want your soldiers to be fasting like ascetic monks.

You also don't want them throwing away their lives needlessly. I think that obsession with either martyrdom or personal glory or honor is a fatal flaw in a military culture.

Well, such cultural beliefs and dogmas are not built on directed railings from above - those merely use the foundation that already exists. That foundation being the way conditions, contexts and purposes that individuals are subjected to - the needs and requirements of control, direction, victory and survival - are processed by individuals themselves. The way they make decisions about how it is proper and right to act in such situations, who they become by acting in such a way, and why. A life of military discipline, struggle and sacrifice is caused by the grater need for Duty, Unity and Victory - and the beliefs of deprivation, honor, submission and martyrdom are how an individual's reflection on his own role in it arrives towards accepting those hardships. If one's actions and decisions in this vein are important, they demand a resolution over what makes those particular actions and decisions right and proper. A logical, ethical and emotional connection between the call and one's answer to it. The objective fact of struggle and sacrifice being necessary for the greater good presents itself before an individual, demanding that they position themselves in the face of it, and with some help from the self or the society - be it parental expectations, peer pressure, political or religious propaganda, the desire for self-actualization or the experience of a diral - the individual comes to believe that overall "it is sweet and fitting to die for the homeland", should that be necessary - otherwise why should they accept this lot? That by itself is a conviction of honor and martyrdom, a celebration of sacrifice and acceptance of duty. To believe otherwise while the necessity is still there would be, indeed, painful and harrowing if the need is still faced - or treacherous and cowardly if it is avoided. And as the individual concludes his reflection on the subject, such a belief is not formed as a flaw - it's merely the sane way one can position self in that hardship which breeds radicalism, accepting that death may be likely or even inevitable in certain circumstances. How does one accept it otherwise without utter self-deception or self-depreciation?

The access to blue bois must be regulated for the stability of society - and respecting that access is just and proper, and doing so makes one a proper Loroi. The commodities must be rationed to maintain the economy of the Union - and following the rationing regiment makes one a proper Loroi. The Diadem must be obeyed to prevent emerging conflicts and prevail in those that happen, and obeying the Diadem makes one a proper Loroi. Such decisions are easy to see as the common sensibility of the general interests in abstraction, but what does the one who gets to live them make of it, and of herself? Such practices are what makes the entirety of a Loroi warrior's life, and what defines them. So - how wouldn't they be defined by those things which make up their lives, which would make them spartan, authoritarian, honourable, dutiful and self-sacrificial, sometimes to scary degrees to a human eye?

Unless, of course, the common sensibility of the abstraction is realized fully in practice - and the hardship is faced with acceptance and conviction not because doing so is the right thing to do according to this or that belief, but because doing so is seen as the only thing there is, the absolutely simplest and most obvious matter. The reflection process doesn't happen, the individual never questions the hows and whys of the whole thing, and their own place in relation to it - "с врагом необходимо воевать, врага необходимо убивать", and that's certainly enough, and Talon and Spiral can indeed just shrug the whole thing away as "that's how it is, we must fight and die, that's all there is to it, duh". But that is not an absence of dogma and belief - it is the absolute apogee of the same dogma and belief. The individual is made into an unquestioning machine that accepts the suffering for granted, or doesn't even recognize it as such, and subsequently seeks no redemption for it. For every tokubetsu kogekitai, SS division staff, politruk, or zealous imam or bishop, producing such individuals was the end goal - they just frequently stopped short of it because appealing to a person's pride and dignity is generally easier than completely unmaking them to the point that a life of hardship ending in a likely violent death is accepted as naturally as sun rising in the morning.

Which being the case would be actually hella cool for the exploration of the condition, but it would make Jardin's task appear that much harder - because such a form of conviction is extremely inhuman, due to the depersonalization inherent in the process, and it cannot be believably reasoned with.

[Arioch]

Death is inevitable for all of us. I think most of us just ignore this fundamental truth and go about our daily business, but for people in hazardous occupations, it's something they can't ignore. In my reading and viewing and personal experience, I think that this is something that most people can come to terms with, and maybe even resigned to, without becoming suicidal. I think that military death cults are mostly a product of peacetime boredom rather than wartime stress. Fanatical death squads may win battles but they tend to lose wars, as no army can win every battle. A successful fighting force must have some kind of instinct for self-preservation.

The Loroi have been in the current state of total war for 25 years. This may seem like a long time to Talon and Spiral, but it's not the usual state of affairs for the thousands of years of the history of the Loroi modern military culture. If there had been extremist Loroi with an inflexible bushido-like code, they would most likely have died in the first few years of the war. If the entire Loroi system had been so inflexible, I think the Umiak would have won the war a long time ago. Such a long war is surely stressing even a militarist society, but I think those who responded by giving up or by seeking death are long since dead.

Paraphrasing a line from Lt. Speirs in Band of Brothers: The only hope you have to survive is to accept that you're already dead. Only then can you act as a soldier needs to. All warfare depends on it.

[Mk_C]

Fair enough. Thank you for answering!

[Jagged]

The extreme rejection of masturbation is more of a remnant of the Victorian era. Victorians were so zealous about sexual purity because venereal diseases like syhphilis had become endemic in the Elizabethan era. That and the tightly packed urbanized human masses of those times likely put quite the selective pressure on Europeans to weed out the sexually promiscuous.

I don't think they were. We are talking about an era where doctors proscribed/administered vibrators for depressed ladies, wealthy men typically had mistresses or attended brothels.
No I put the anti-masterbation thing firmly in the hands (*snigger*) of the church (various).

[Werra]

I don't think they were. We are talking about an era where doctors proscribed/administered vibrators for depressed ladies, wealthy men typically had mistresses or attended brothels.
No I put the anti-masterbation thing firmly in the hands (*snigger*) of the church (various).

Maybe the advance of natural sciences dispelling a lot of the religious illusions made the people defensively extreme in their adherance to religious norms. But people from earlier times were also religious. So that can't be all of it.
Valuing purity is however linked to the cluster of conservative personality traits. A disease that mostly affects promiscuous people can exert a strong pressure to select for those personality traits, which would drive society towards the more strict interpretation of social and religious norms. If that's what happened, the religiosity of the time wouldn't be the root cause, but rather the vehicle by which this then numerically larger personality trait expresses itself within the population.

tl;dr: The type of person that is likely to be religious will also value purity more.

Just read the "tips" taken from a book from the late 19th century here. https://historyofsexuality.umwblogs.org ... ian-era-2/

[Mk_C]

I don't think they were. We are talking about an era where doctors proscribed/administered vibrators for depressed ladies, wealthy men typically had mistresses or attended brothels.

During the same era, a very significant share of those aristocrats were extremely, mindbogglingly illiterate on the issues of sexuality. We know for a fact that a non-significant share of Victorian-era married couples had to be explained by their doctor or their priest, for the purpose of consummation of marriage and production of an heir, what a sexual act even is. Those who were sheltered enough did believe that "laying with your wife" literally does mean "laying in one bed with her". Nobody ever explained the birds and the bees to them, as that was improper talk, and many lacked the personal experience of turbulent hormone-driven youth to figure it out themselves.

Which is why I consider the possibility of, say, some Loroi males not being aware of the concept of masturbation (due to sex being permanently and constantly available to them from the moment of puberty, and their caretakers being directly interested in them not having ways of sublimating their sexual drive other than mating) a gloriously hilarious, but not completely impossible prospect.

[organicmcgee]

Long time (ten years plus? Yeesh) lurker first time poster. I'm a Victorian-era historian, so you know the recent discussion is right up my alley.

I'm afraid that the Victorian reputation for prudishness has been rather exaggerated over the years. A lot of the myths people repeat about Victorians were cooked up in the Twentieth Century (like that old chestnut about Victorians being so body-shy that they covered the legs of pianos) for the same reason that Protestant scholars cooked up many of the myths still circulating about the Catholic Middle Ages. It's easy to make the present look modern and sophisticated by misrepresenting the past. That book that Werra links to is a famously debunked hoax, and is not a good example of Victorian sex education (also, the Victorian Period spanned the better part of a century- if I tried to tell you there was no social change between 1950 and 2021, you'd rightfully run me out of here. Likewise, the period between 1837 and 1901 was not homogeneous).

Interestingly, many of the anti-masturbatory books are increasingly viewed by historians of the Victorian era as rather fringe publications. More extensive studies of surviving letters and diaries- especially those written by women- paint a very different picture. Notably, letters between husbands and wives show loving, active sex lives. As for the sheltered newlyweds, the aristocracy made up such a small portion of the population so as to be statistically insignificant, and I've heard plenty of purportedly true stories about sexually clueless modern people, be they sheltered Mormons/ children of Fundamentalists/from Alabama/what have you.

This is not to say that Victorians shared our social mores. Just that most of them knew what sex was, and probably laughed just as hard at those ridiculous sex tips as we do now.

As for whether the blue boys ever need to use the old stickshift, I imagine those caretakers have to sleep sometime. Any word on whether Loroi wear socks or not?

[Mk_C]

I'm a Victorian-era historian

That's... kinda awesome.

the aristocracy made up such a small portion of the population so as to be statistically insignificant,

But the cultured strata are always the ones who get all the memes and fame. And like I said - such cases would seem to be still quite below statistical significance. Difference lies in how cultural practice at least among the minor - but noteworthy - part of the society could support the emergence of such cases.

and I've heard plenty of purportedly true stories about sexually clueless modern people, be they sheltered Mormons/ children of Fundamentalists/from Alabama/what have you.

Naturally. And that's in a society that actively saturates it's populace with relevant information - and frequently does so with a clear goal. The idea is not the entirety of a historic society being mentally challenged, but rather how variation in social foundations, divisions, practices and sentiments can, and historically certainly did occasionally produce significantly different approaches to even the more common things, in ways that can be both entirely sensible and amusing to us. And nearly every thing that makes different social groups of Loroi approach any given subject in a way different from what can be considered entirely human-intuitive to our contemporary eye, while still being sensible and believable, is something that makes them more interesting and entertaining.

As for whether the blue boys ever need to use the old stickshift, I imagine those caretakers have to sleep sometime.

Buzzkill. And besides, along with caretakers they have a literal waiting list to get through over the month.

[kfcroc18]

I think this has already been asked but, do the Loroi believe in an afterlife?

[Arioch]

I think this has already been asked but, do the Loroi believe in an afterlife?

No and yes. The mainstream Loroi culture is atheistic, but they practice a form of ancestor worship; they believe that the dead live on in the memories of the living, so they spend a lot of effort sharing the memories of the deceased and relating tales of their deeds. This is the responsibility of all Loroi who knew the deceased, but the Ninzadi (and to a lesser extent Listel) with their capacity for memory bear a particular social burden in this practice. In their job of retelling the heroic tales, the Ninzadi to a certain degree embody the memories of the deceased, and sometimes "speak" in a simulacrum of the telepathic "voice" of the dead.

However, the Loroi are not a monoculture, and regional subcultures have their own practices, and individuals differ in their beliefs. There are some Loroi followers of alien religions, including the Barsam church, which is probably the most popular. That does preach the existence of an afterlife, but the various sects disagree on whether the souls of the dead can transit to heaven through the closed gate at the Well of Souls, or whether they must wait, trapped in this plane, to wander aimlessly until the living are finally united in righteousness and brotherhood, at which point the gate will open. (All the Barsam sects agree that, as the Red Woman would say, "there is only one hell, the one we live in now."

[kfcroc18]

What does a Loroi funeral look like both a military funeral and civilian funeral.

[Arioch]

What does a Loroi funeral look like both a military funeral and civilian funeral.

Specific practices vary, but the funeral itself is usually very simple, with a cremation or burial at sea. There is also a telepathic wake, traditionally held before the funeral in the presence of the body, but often especially in the military it is held after the body has been disposed of (or if there is no body at all). Friends and family of the deceased form a telepathic link to share memories of the deceased, and if available a Ninzadi or Listel is included so that the memories can be better preserved. After the funeral, the remains (if any) are anonymously disposed of. While most Loroi don't believe in an afterlife, they still don't like the idea of having an enemy desecrate their remains, and so they are rarely left in marked locations.

Civilian funerals follow the model of the military version (most civilians were born into military families, and share most of the same cultural practices), except where the individual had some special preference. Loroi followers of foreign religions may observe the appropriate funerary practices; in the case of the Barsam church, this usually means some form of preservation and burial of the remains.

[kfcroc18]

Thank you for answering all of my questions.

[Werra]

Have the Loroi tried democracy in the past?

[Arioch]

Have the Loroi tried democracy in the past?

With so many local entities on so many worlds over such a long span of time, I expect that some local Loroi polity somewhere at some point in time has tried out nearly every form of government imaginable.

Also, it depends on what you mean by "democracy." Even a military oligarchy has democratic elements, with various councils and assemblies electing leaders and enacting laws, the difference being that only elders of the warrior class get to vote, and there are lot of rules and vetoes to get around to pass legislation. Some local governments have a position similar to the Roman "Tribune of the Plebs" who is supposed to represent the interests of the civilian class and, has some administrative and veto powers, but while she is usually elected by a council of civilian elders, she is usually not herself a civilian. Civilians participate in local government in an unofficial capacity, forming the likes of a chamber of commerce or homeowners' association.

The Loroi Empire was itself a republic before the Splinter Wars, with an interplanetary Axis Assembly and twin elected consuls. Loremark replaced the Axis Assembly with a centralized military government, but the local planetary governments are unchanged, expect that one the two consuls in each local government is an Imperial appointment rather than elected locally.

In our own history, the early Athenian-style direct democracies were usually more belligerent and less stable than the more conservative oligarchies or monarchies. Athens was infamous for going to war at the drop of a hat, and then executing its own leaders when the mood of the mob changed. I would expect that early Loroi democracies encountered similar challenges.

[kfcroc18]

We've seen the Loroi, the Barsam, and the Neridi. All of which are Soin-Liron organisms. So, the question is are all said organisms blue?

[GeoModder]

We've seen the Loroi, the Barsam, and the Neridi. All of which are Soin-Liron organisms. So, the question is are all said organisms blue?

Mmm... I remember reading the trees of which the Barsam feeded from on Justa were called 'evergreens'. And if the scene picture of Maia is anything to go by, misesa seemss to have the same color of terrestrial grain.