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Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Labster - 06-21-2023
In this fic, we're looking towards establishing a proper "Neo" Moon Kingdom on the actual Moon, because, let's face it, realpolitik means she is not going to suddenly become Queen of Earth even if she is Sailor Moon. It's going to grow out of just two tiny settlements: Moonbase Alpha in Plato Crater, and atop the ruins of Serenity's Castle along the edge of the Mare Serenitatis.
I'm curious as to what this government, and the society it builds, would actually look like. Rob's done a bit of work on the key players, identifying people who would count as some level of nobility. But this is only a small part of what a society looks like.
The first thing to look at is canon: what did the government of Crystal Tokyo look like? We know very little. First off, in the manga, Usagi travels to Sag A*, and pretty much every protagonist in the series gets killed off, and finally they all jump in the Galaxy Cauldron to be reborn. And at some point in the distant future, they are reborn together thanks to Ginzuisho magick and um uh, Usagi says "I'm the queen of the world!" (On a boat like a proper sailor.)
Second, Chibiusa is the heir apparent. The manga says she has been for 900 years, despite looking and acting like an 8 year old, so in this reality Tuxboy and Bunny are too dumb to get the "an heir and a spare" thing in nearly a millennium. The anime just makes Chibiusa her own age, which makes 900 times more sense. The manga does give her her own Sailor Team of the Asteroid Senshi, which is pretty cool. We're using that in this project.
Third, we know that at least some people rejected future!Usagi's purification, and were exiled to Nemesis, and became the Black Moon clan. The manga suggests that they rejected the long life as "unnatural" (read: religious reasons), or perhaps it was the happiness that came from being "refreshed". And, gosh, is there a lot of fan wank about this point. I found a thread about it in /r/sailormoon, and they basically concluded that Crystal Tokyo is an authoritarian dystopia, exactly like the United States is now, and I just closed the tab. (I mean seriously, why not compare Singapore if you're going there?)
The problem is that the Black Moon Clan is all very unreliable narrators, all living under the influence of Wiseman. Compare Númenor when Sauron gained favor; nothing good followed. In any case, it would be worse that being stuck in Philadelphia with a bunch of Death Eaters. Oh right, the original point: all of this exposition was either from their perspective, or trying to explain the perspective of the Black Moon Clan.
You know what we call people like the Black Mooninites in our world? Terrorists. And Demande's thing about rejecting Serenity II's rule while simultaneously desiring her so much as to subdue her romantically is class S incel material. I don't trust anything from their perspective, other than the fact that they were exiled to a distant planetoid. So what else can explain the exile?
Crime and Oshioki yo!
Government is, at its heart, about legitimate power. The phrase "the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence" comes up a lot. There are two core ways that power is used: in warfare, and in resolving disputes. In a sense, that's only one way, as war is just an external dispute and courts are for disputes internal to the society, but you get the idea. I'll get around to war a bit later, since we want to deal with the Black Moon Clan first.
A primary role of the king, noble, or even tribal chieftain is to resolve disputes among members of the group. The most basic of these is not criminal law, but civil law: a family wants restitution for a murder, so the murderer must pay.
In Classical Athens, where we have lots of records, the murderer would most often have to pay money, unless they killed a citizen. Athens could afford a jail to hold people for a speedy trial, but not a prison. So really, there were only three punishments available: money/property restitution, exile, or death. (Literally anything could be proposed in the sentencing phase, but these are the only workable things.) And remember, Athens is considered to be the most progressive society for centuries!
If the Black Moon Clan came about in the early phase of Crystal Tokyo, as a something of a frontier society, they pretty much have these choices as well. The great fanfic Dance of Shiva proposes that Crystal Tokyo emerges after a long ice age on Earth, where a new generation of survivors building a kingdom like this makes sense.
Either way, we are building something from scratch, and one of the sad truths preventing utopia is that some folks are going to be criminals. Some people make a simple wrong decision, some people fall into the wrong crowd, and all of these people can be forgiven. And then there are the sociopaths, for whom there's really no saving them. Unless maybe you have a magic gem that does moon healing purification?
But I'm getting ahead of myself. One thing we know about Usagi, very very well, is that she believes in punishment in the name of the Moon. She uses the word "unforgivable" nearly as often, but always makes it clear that the action is unforgivable, not the person. So the core concept behind criminal justice in our fic Moon Kingdom (slash canon Crystal Tokyo) is forgiveness. A person is either in a state of grace, or is not and in need of punishment.
This is radically different than most systems of justice. The aim of some systems, like, let's say the Scandinavian countries, is to reform the offender. In places like the US, it's to extract vengeance and provide punishment. But if the Moon Kingdom mirrors its founder, the purpose of justice for her is to forgive. The court system is a process to create forgiveness. Love and justice, after all.
How this works out as a real system, I really have no idea. There have been a lot of different systems of justice in history that operate similarly but have radically different goals. Even today, it ranges from "protect the regime" to "rehabilitate" to "carry out the divine law". It might work, if enough people are willing to follow. Which is something I can say about all governments, because as I said before it's really about legitimacy.
This kind of system determines the kind of punishments. Assuming you're not personally having your butt on the receiving end of a Sailor Kick, there needs to be some standard ways to be forgiven. The death penalty is not an option, since it precludes the repentance that leads to forgiveness. People who truly repent, or were manipulated by others, may get off very lightly.
People who only appear to truly repent might go on to commit more crimes. Recidivism might be a big problem in small crimes. Things may go badly for people who do not confess, including the truly innocent. I'd imagine this part of the Japanese court system would be replicated pretty well in Crystal Tokyo (but without the beatings).
Yep, that's right, even in perfect Sailor Moon Land the government will do the wrong thing, or have imperfect solutions.
For the most part, punishments will fall along familiar lines as in liberal democracies near you. Imprisonment, monetary fines, and especially community service. Occasionally service to the wronged party; a shoplifter may be asked to make amends and be forgiven by the person they wronged. Pink Sugar Hearts aside, I don't think physical punishment is part of the courtroom punishments, but it might be part of policing.
And then there's the weirder stuff. First: exile. If it's clear a person will never join a community, they will probably be asked to leave the Moon entirely. In our setting, this is easier, as there are plenty of countries on Earth that may take an exile. Or a person may end up stateless, which is effectively what happened to those banished to Nemesis in canon (but not necessarily to those who followed them there). Most likely, they will just fly exiles to California because thats where unwanted people are sent these days.
And then we finally have to deal with the question: what does Moon Healing magic actually do? In canon, it cures people who have been possessed by an evil spirit, as well as heal some physical wounds. In fanon, it brainwashes people to be happy and never rebel against their God-Empress Usagi. And ultimately I'm wondering why on earth the fans drank the Black Moon Kool-Aid (which dyes your tongue stygian purple with its grape flavor!)
I know there is so very little information about Crystal Tokyo that people latch on to whatever they're given. But does Usagi even want worshipers or adoring brainwashed hordes? The manga goes into detail about how Usagi's purification offers long lifespans, in the range of ~1000 years. Book of Genesis style lives. And that a minority rejects this purification. Wiseman rejects it because he's a fricking eldritch horror masquerading as a human. But the other people who follow?
I'm just going to point out that worship of death is a fairly common tenet of Ur-Fascism, perhaps the most common one. It's point #11 in Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism. Honestly a few of the other points in that essay apply the the Black Moon, which is kind of amazing with how little backstory we get. In any case, I'm pretty sure we can discount everything they say about the politics of the future as extremely biased and probably just delusionally wrong.
But what if the magic really does work on brains? Recall the sociopaths I mentioned earlier, which are a somewhat intractable problem for most countries (and in most countries they provide a significant portion of leadership). Is healing a broken brain, one that doesn't include a conscience, unconscionable? Wouldn't feeling guilt lead to forgiveness? I get the feeling that all of the sailor senshi would come down on the side of using magic to fix people's minds and souls. If you believe so strongly in morality, not ever caring for others is, well, unforgivable. The other starting population from Moonbase Alpha is going to be more mixed about such a thing, but most will actually believe that psychiatric diseases should be cured.
Right now, I'm partial to the idea of this as an analogue to capital punishment: A crime so severe that it must be forgiven only by the Neo Queen herself. And they face a final choice, to be healed and be made whole — and I do mean healed in a clinical sense, at least from Ami's understanding — or to choose a life in exile. The monarch's role as ultimate judge is a long one in history, and still exists in republics with the rights to pardon crimes (i.e. forgive) given to the executive heads.
As for the other people serving as judges, I'm not sure yet. But I will say that I have been looking at the Islamic Republic of Iran as a potential model, along with Commonwealth countries.
I'll be following up on more topics later. Feel free to post your own ideas, I'm curious to hear them. Unless they are ideas about how the Moon Kingdom is an Orwellian nightmare (you didn't watch the the same show, apparently).
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Labster - 09-10-2023
Government Structure
The Moon Kingdom is obviously a kingdom, right? But there are many ways to be a monarchy, and in some respects, the state led by Neo-Queen Serenity will resemble other kinds of governments a lot more.
Fundamentally, the types of governments have not changed since the ancient Greeks first defined them: monarchy, rule by a legitimate king; democracy, rule by (then a male subset of) the people; oligarchy, rule by a small group of families; and tyranny, a dictatorship run by an illegitimate king or a small group of oligarchs pretending to be a democracy. Added to this list are republic, the abstracted version of democracy, and theocracy. Those basic forms keep recurring over and over again, because they say something fundamental about the human condition.
All of the Sailor Senshi came from some sort of monarchy, but were reborn into a place where people vote for their representatives. And obviously, growing up in Japan, they will have picked up some republican values. In our version, they additionally lived in Canada, so have become accustomed to living in another country governed like a republic. But both of these "republics" are actually monarchies! The government may afford extra privileges to the monarch, but effectively functions without them entirely.
This might seem like an invention of the modern era, but the Roman Republic had a Rex for the entire run. After all, if your rituals for Jupiter need a king, then you better darn well have a King of Rome, even if it's just a ritual office. Why would you piss off the gods just to make a point about democracy? -- that's just stupid.
On the topic of gods, though, we do have to deal with the question: is Usagi a goddess? OG Queen Serenity is supposedly the incarnation of the Moon itself, Selene I suppose. And Usagi by becoming Neo-Queen also becomes Serenity, which certainly rings a bell of apotheosis. And if a goddess is the center of a state, doesn't that by definition make it a theocracy?
But if we take the title Queen literally, Neo or not, it implies a monarchy. We have lots of evidence for this too in canon.
Charlemagne, King of the Franks, conquered a lot of land. In fact, he conquered too much land -- so much land that he could never hope to manage it by himself. The Romans before had relied on a vast sea network to maintain their large empire, augmented by roads, which mostly relied on trade across the Mediterranean to keep it well supplied. Charlemagne's German possessions never had good roads, and the trade network had long since become saturated with pirates. So he turned to his friends to help manage different parts of the land, his companions, which is comes in Latin. These comes became the first counts, managing the empire in a newly developing feudal system (specifically the vassalage part of feudalism).
And in Sailor Moon, we see evidence of the same thing happening again, with the warrior companions becoming princesses of a new realm, with dominions far from Earth. It's implied in the anime, but with the orbital castles in the manga, it's reasonable that those are actual holdings of each princess. But more on this later.
Charlemagne had three sons, and by the custom of the time (partible inheritance), gave each son an inheritance. The western third became France and after a long period dealing with the vassal appanages and the English became highly centralized, the middle kingdom got eaten by its neighbors, and the eastern third became the Holy Roman Empire - a decentralized blob of vassal states that Voltaire once quipped was "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."
The HRE is, however, the best model of what kind of monarchy the Moon Kingdom could be: a reasonably decentralized one, where leadership is decided by the elector princesses. The very last episode of the Sailor Moon S season might have seemed fairly weird, because immediately after defeating Pharaoh 90, Sailor Moon has a duel with Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune. For anyone aware of medieval politics, this no denouement but is in fact the real climax of the season.
This is going to go pretty deep into aside territory, but the whole season hinges on a moral question: is it okay to sacrifice a very few people in order to save the entire planet? Usagi's stance is clear: she will not back down on love. Haruka and Michiru were willing to kill the Senshi of Destruction from the very beginning -- and it's not a shallow belief either, as they are quite willing to kill themselves to find the talismans. They are like Spock, saying that the needs of the many outweigh the few. Usagi as the nominal leader presses on, ignoring their message, Mistress Nine awakens, and things get really dangerous.
And then the end of that battle is inconclusive. Usagi does save nearly everyone, but at what cost? We don't get to see this fight on screen, but Usagi returns with an infant Hotaru, at once the image of the Holy Madonna and simultaneously someone suffering PTSD, or at least shock. Put aside your bias for Usagi for a moment, and look at the other point of view: She risked literally everything to save that one life, the disaster was one step way from extinguishing humanity, and that life she "saved" is just an infant now. Everything and everyone came this close to utter destruction for this?
And so they do the thing that disloyal vassals do: they challenge her for leadership. Usagi tells her loyal vassals not to intervene, because the fight becomes far less meaningful if the monarch cannot control her vassals alone. And so they do battle to prove their beliefs. And as soon as it is clear that Usagi has the upper hand because the heavens are on her side, the duel stops. They now offer their fealty to the daughter of Queen Serenity, for so long as she has the mandate of heaven. (Yeah, I mixed in some Eastern thought here, but Europeans also thought kings ruled by divine right.)
In any case, we get a couple things from that battle: the Sailors are acting as Princess Electors and also accepting vassalage to the true queen. In the later events of the Amazoness Quartet -- the so-called Asteroid Senshi that reappear in manga!Stars -- we see that there are Sailors Senshi who are not electors, but other smaller vassals. This makes sense, since there's a lot of land in the Solar System, even though no planet offers quite as much land as Earth.
At the same time, it's hard to imagine children of the twentieth century are going to recreate a feudal monarchy in the precise image of the HRE. They want all of the romantic castles and parties and clothes, but none of that peasant uprising crushing or succession war stuff. But Sailor Moon is postmodern, so why not just keep the stuff we like, and throw all of the bad old stuff away? New Age crystal spires are in, Salic Law is out. I don't see any of the Sailor Senshi being particularly interested in "kinging": solving disputes, enacting laws, and assigning taxes. They are interested in the military roles of monarchs and nobility, though.
For most of the government, especially at lower levels, they're going to want to have elected representatives taking care of the business of governing, along with a civil service. This is good, because republics are stable, they have lower levels of unrest and high levels of legitimacy, usually less corruption, and they really do not like to go to war with each other. These are all good traits, at the cost of giving up some personal power over people. Since our nobility all have a power in their own person, this isn't the same risk it would be to real life nobility.
These would likely become a parliamentary democracy, largely on the Westminster model. (No country seriously tries to duplicate the U.S. model this century, since the flaws are too apparent. You can have the upsides of federalism and a written constitution without the downsides of very divided government.) Not only are they familiar with this model, but so too will most of the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, who will be our initial citizens in this setting.
But for a second, let's get back to that point that Usagi is a goddess, or nearly so. There's a certain cognitive disconnect to having an incarnate goddess leaving all of the decisions to the people under her, isn't there? The classic theocratic structure would place the church at the head of the government, as in Tibet and the Papal State. That's kind of an interesting question, of whether a church of fen would rise up to worship Her Holiness Neo-Queen Serenity. I feel like she might be saddened that she had more girls worshiping her than cute boys, you know?
In any case, that's not the right model. We need something more modern and innovative, that still recognizes the holiness at the center of the state. And as promised last post, I'm bringing it back up: The Islamic Republic of Iran.
Iran's government is actually kind of cool. It has all of the trappings of a normal republic: elected President, elected assemblies make all of the laws. But above that lies a council of clerics (Assembly of Experts), and a Supreme Leader. The Assembly can impeach the Supreme Ayatollah, but of course they are always selected by him in order to qualify for public election, so that never comes up. Some of those Experts become a Guardian Council. So in a way, it's this postmodern combination of a classic theocracy with a modern presidential republic.
But, like, if you squint, doesn't the Supreme Leader look like a elected king, and the Council of Experts like a House of Lords, and the Guardian Council a Privy Council? Other than having a directly elected head of government, it all looks a lot like older versions of Westminster. The monarch's authority is more explicitly divine, rather than military, but it's still both. Which feels a lot like Sailor Moon, except for the whole part where Iran represses women while the Moon Kingdom is established on principles of feminism... but more on that later.
We also have one faction in our fanfic setting, the undines, arguing fairly loudly for a Serene Republic. She's going to take the name Serenity, right? So why not look at the old government of La Serenissima, Venezia. It was quite a stable government, lasting roughly a thousand years. A doge (Latin: dux -> duke) was elected in the most complicated process imaginable from amongst the council, but all of those votes did manage to ensure that there really couldn't be vote packing or bribes, because you wouldn't know who you needed to bribe until the very end, when it was too late.
The Doge was not much of a monarch; though he did rule for life, he could be checked by the council and could only exercise authority in the presence of other officials. Later on in the Republic, they restricted new families from joining the council, which certainly limited the democratic aspects of the state.
Our other group of initial settlers in our setting come from Moonbase Alpha. Commander Koenig, whose name literally means "king", is a red-blooded American and will want to live in a republic. Most of the rest of his crew seems to be British for some reason, which probably has nothing to do with where Space: 1999 was filmed, right? So we should have a good mix of republicans, monarchists, and "who cares I'm just an engineer".
If we throw all of this in a blender, we end up with the Serene Kingdom of the Moon. The earliest incarnation of the Neo-Queen-in-Council will pretty much just be Usagi sitting in a room with John Koenig, Victor Bergman, and Michiru with Ami taking notes. As we grow, the government also grows to meet the demands.
Eventually, the titles like Princess Jupiter will become geographical titles, as other planets and moons become terraformed. With enough magic and technology, anywhere can become livable. Other Earth nations will dispute this sovereignty, but the Moon Kingdom will have gotten there first.
At this point, the outlines of an entity resembling the Holy Roman Empire become more clear. Princess-Electors choose the Neo-Queen, to whom they owe fealty but they are so far away as to be functional sovereigns. You can also see it as a federation of constitutional monarchies, with the Lunar government determining foreign policy for the federation, but less so on domestic policy which is determined largely by elected representatives.
You might also choose to see it as like the Commonwealth of Nations, but that's wrong. In fact, in our setting, the Moon Kingdom a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. There are already six different monarchs of Commonwealth members; why not a seventh? Due to their Canadian citizenship, the senshi are all subjects of the Canadian Crown in the person of Elizabeth or Charles while in Canada, yet are monarchs in their own right.
(If you think this sounds weird, you are not thinking feudally enough. The Burgundians paid homage to both the Holy Roman Emperor and the French kings, in their respective lands. The English kings once owned lands in Normandy, Gascony, and Aquitaine, which meant that they paid homage to the French king as well.)
It's a complicated structure, but constitutional monarchies tend to be the most stable of all government types, balancing the short term interests of voters and politicians with the long term interests of the royalty and nobility. They are inherently classist, which feels like a problem, but what if your leader is literally a goddess? Usagi is definitely my better -- and that's not just because she's a Brigadier Saint in the Discordian Church.
Immigration and Culture
Culture will be a contentious issue in the Moon Kingdom, just as it is in all nations in the modern era. And, naturally, immigration will be a big issue. The earliest days of the the Moon Kingdom will be resource limited, as well as separated by a good piece of vacuum from the nice environment of Earth; much like Svalbard is now, anyone can come, if only they can actually get there and survive. These people will be all be immigrants of a sort, and have original national identities, which they may choose to maintain or disavow.
But as things develop, the Moon Kingdom will develop its own culture, starting from our astronaut community on Moonbase Alpha, which will come preloaded with certain assumptions about authority, environmentalism, and the grit it takes to survive in space. This will mingle with our Sailor Senshi's own opinions -- as well as their own Japanese cultural assumptions -- and eventually merge into something new. Given enough time, this always happens.
I was just reading an article on Wikipedia on where Romanian culture comes from. Or rather, no one actually knows where Romanian culture comes from, and how a Latin speaking isolate survived in Roman Dacia, despite the mass migrations of Slavs, Huns, and others that inundated the Balkans as Roman power declined. Some researchers think a group resettled in Romania from the south, because Dacia was only Roman for 325 years, given that it took other Roman provinces at least 500 years to fully convert to a Latin language. Others think it was a Roman soldiers and settlers who just stayed in the area, which is rather mountainous, and stayed isolated that way.
In either case, 500 years is a very long time for cultural integration! In modern times, it's much shorter, as nationalist forces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took advantage of new technology and state power to enforce new languages and cultural norms on people. But even in the old days, look at the Basque language isolate in Iberia, one of the most thoroughly Romanized provinces of all. And not only that, it seems to have also survived the invasion of Proto-Indo-European speakers!
Honestly, in Sailor Moon fanfic mode, I would definitely use PIE as a starting point to explain something about the Earth during the Silver Millennium. There were people everywhere before PIE started spreading -- and certainly the invasion theory of "Kurganization" is more dramatic (and also, oddly enough, rather matches Aleister Crowley's ideas about Aeons). Perhaps the first speakers were those who first tried to harness the horse youma, and imposed their culture on the people they conquered?
In any case, cultural change takes a long time, and while cultures obviously evolve, they have relevance thousands of years after they first came about. Certainly Americans think of themselves as having the American culture, but there have been books written about how the source of immigrants has deep political effects on the regions of the United States today.
Even totally determined, and using her not-brainwash stick, Usagi is not going to build a Lunar culture overnight, or even within two generations. But they will get there.
Still, the first wave of immigrants will be of a few types that will make a protoculture: hopeless romantics looking to join the cause of the Holy Moon Rabbit, hikikomori otaku who think being stuck in a moon base doesn't sound so bad if there are some animu there, adventurers and capitalists looking to make money off of lunar resources, and friends and family of the above.
By the time Kingdom gets bigger, and expands to other planets, immigrants will largely be just like immigrants to every other country. Except for, perhaps, a few space aliens. I don't think it's a stretch to think that Usagi will want to take all of the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses. Her response to pretty much every invader from another planet was an attempt to make friends.
Which brings me around to Haruka and Michiru, who were definitely not about making friends with the outsiders. In fact, any time anyone new showed up, their first reaction is to mistrust them. Which is actually pretty normal? Distrust of outsiders is definitely a thing.
I think it's easy to miss if you're not looking for it, but Haruka and Michiru are the conservatives of the Sailor Moon cast. Don't believe me? Well, they're immediately distrustful of anyone new that shows up, they're totally rich, Haruka likes to drive fast cars to show off. One time they take a helicopter just to cross town; find me a liberal who does that. They think that it's noble, even necessary to sacrifice lives in war. Even their patrons are the old gods, the Titans. Their literal job is to protect the border (of the Solar System).
Okay, they're lesbian, and some people have a trans reading on Haruka. But so what? Conservative gays are a thing in real life. They're going to have feminist attitudes about everything, but so does everyone else in the Moon Kingdom. Feminism is a fundamental part of Lunar culture. At some point, Princess Uranus is going to complain to the Privy Council that these fundamentalist immigrants are a threat to the national feminist culture, and therefore immigration needs to be reduced. (See first post: even canon had a group exiled, and unsurprisingly one of their leaders was a giant incel chauvinist.)
Immigration is one of those intractable problems that will continue long into the future, because culture change is real, resources are limited, and immigrants are intrinsically as good as natives. There are always valid reasons for and against immigration, and I would expect it to remain a major cleavage in Moon Kingdom society for a long time. Even in the canon future where Earth is also ruled by Serenity and Endymion, we know there's enough aliens out there for Uranus and Neptune to worry.
Once settlements happen on the other planets and moons, and Princess is less of an honorary title than an actual principality, there will probably be some geographic (?) sorting, similar to our red state/blue state dynamics. I don't think deep partisanship will be tolerated, or all that successful in their government, because of the long-earned respect that Usagi will have.
And Usagi is a classic bleeding-heart liberal. She wants to befriend everyone, she wants to save everyone. And as I made clear in the first section, she wants to forgive. At the same time, she and the other Inner Senshi know that unforgivable things happen, and that some enemies are beyond the redemption that is offered to them, and must be destroyed. As a monarch, that is her duty.
I talked about the events at the end of season S before, but not from Usagi's perspective. Ultimately, what happened off-screen with Pharaoh 90 is instrumental in her taking up and winning the battle with Haruka and Michiru. Usagi had to choose to destroy Pharoah 90, and had to choose to save Hotaru, and paid the price for both decisions. Unlike the past season-enders, she feels the weight of her decisions, the heavy cost written on her face. And for the first time, steps into the role of a monarch in earnest.
And because this is a society that takes military leadership seriously, the Moon Kingdom will definitely believe in having a strong military, often leaning towards militarism. Being a warrior of love is a core part of the identity of the nobility, so how could it be otherwise? At least they will lead from the front. (Honestly this matches my own ideals of being a liberal socialist who also wants a strong military, but I think the evidence led me to this point, not my own wishes.)
There are plenty of other aspects of the culture that will develop, most of which I haven't thought about yet. But culture will pull the Moon Kingdom in new directions, as it always has. It will, at the very least, pull it outward, as there will definitely be a belief that they are destined to rule and protect the Solar System, with the possible exception of Earth itself.
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - robkelk - 09-11-2023
(09-10-2023, 10:34 PM)Labster Wrote: Government Structure
A thought that I don't have time to develop at the moment so I'll just drop it here unconsidered: the monarch of the UK is the temporal head of the Church of England, which SI-Rob will mention if it ever comes up in-story. This isn't (quite) the same as the situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran, IIRC (and the "IIRC" is part of why this thought needs some consideration).
(09-10-2023, 10:34 PM)Labster Wrote: Immigration and Culture
Hoo boy, this is going to be a mess at the beginning, what with Japanese "unconscious racism" meeting Canadian "multiculturalism"... and that's not taking the Alphans into account. Again, something that needs to be considered.
(09-10-2023, 10:34 PM)Labster Wrote: and some people have a trans reading on Haruka.
I don't, so I won't be writing her that way. Just FYI. The rest of your analysis of Haruka and Michiru looks good to me.
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Dartz - 09-11-2023
EDIT: I'm not in the right frame of mind right now.... and this wasn't fair
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Labster - 09-12-2023
(09-11-2023, 07:40 AM)robkelk Wrote:(09-10-2023, 10:34 PM)Labster Wrote: Government Structure
A thought that I don't have time to develop at the moment so I'll just drop it here unconsidered: the monarch of the UK is the temporal head of the Church of England, which SI-Rob will mention if it ever comes up in-story. This isn't (quite) the same as the situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran, IIRC (and the "IIRC" is part of why this thought needs some consideration).
It's not really the same because in Islamic political thought, religious judges are more directly tied to the judicial system, which is where Sharia Law comes from. Not to mention the core Sunni/Shia split, and the fact that the Twelvers who rule Iran think that there are no longer valid Caliphs.
Anyway I think it's more important to say that the head of the Church of England is a Protestant church, which means that every worshiper has a personal relationship with God. The Crown does not and has never issued theological judgements, which is the province of the Archbishop of Canterbury, where the Ayatollahs have always issued fatwas.
(09-11-2023, 07:40 AM)robkelk Wrote:(09-10-2023, 10:34 PM)Labster Wrote: Immigration and Culture
Hoo boy, this is going to be a mess at the beginning, what with Japanese "unconscious racism" meeting Canadian "multiculturalism"... and that's not taking the Alphans into account. Again, something that needs to be considered.
Minako in particular is going to be in the middle of this, since she spent a lot of her life in other countries.
(09-11-2023, 07:40 AM)robkelk Wrote:(09-10-2023, 10:34 PM)Labster Wrote: and some people have a trans reading on Haruka.
I don't, so I won't be writing her that way. Just FYI. The rest of your analysis of Haruka and Michiru looks good to me.
Yeah. I'm thinking through the worldbuilding/nation building here, partially because I'm in a worldbuilding kind of mood, but also because I've searched for these questions online and no one seems to have thought these things through very deeply before. I hope that this thread might serve as a starting point for other people working on fanfiction to start thinking about what a new country could look like.
(09-11-2023, 12:51 PM)Dartz Wrote: EDIT: I'm not in the right frame of mind right now.... and this wasn't fair
Oh cool, I can throw away that response I wrote.
Language and Secret Prehistory
The Language of the future Moon Kingdom is English. I think this is telegraphed pretty hard, with everyone's titles being "Princess" or "Neo-Queen" in English, the magical attack names being in English, Chibi-Usa being called "Rabbit" by the people in the future. Even future!Usagi doesn't ever bother to learn kanji. Names from the future are "Wiseman" and "Nemesis", and they have droids. The Moon Stick. I mean, come on, these are pretty much all English words.
The only counterfactual I can think of is Luna-P, whose activation phrase is "Luna-P Hen-ge", which I hyphenated because it's not a henge, stone or otherwise. It just means "change" in Japanese. But there was also "Luna-P Magic", which is another English word.
One might be tempted to say that Takeuchi-sensei was using English words the way that English writers use Latin: to sound magical. But she even writes the name Crystal Tokyo in Katakana, as if the name itself was foreign. Even a kid is going to have no problem recognizing 東京 as Tokyo, because that word is literally everywhere. TV Tokyo broadcasts come to mind as an anime watcher.
The evidence for English is overwhelming, so let's just accept it. In our setting, this will obviously happen, between an initial population of scientists all speaking English, and the leaders all having lived in Canada. Sorry everyone, but English wins the future, too.
Which means that all of us still using Sailor Senshi should really be using Sailor Guardian as their titles.
I guess because this is a politics thread, I'll just mention that this makes them natural allies of other English-speaking countries, which includes the US, the Commonwealth of Nations, and strengthens ties with India and South Africa. It makes other space-faring nations like China natural rivals. All of those still exist in our fanfic, but probably not in the ending of manga Sailor Moon. Who knows if you're going for the ending of anime Sailor Moon, which I still maintain is a hot mess.
Since I'm here, I might as well address the language of the Moon Kingdom in the Silver Millennium, but there's really no evidence at all of what they would have spoken. I mean, if you go up to the Moon Castle they must have actual inscriptions, right? But we don't see any of those.
Mercury's cyberdeck "Super Computer" has an English interface in the anime, which is even more evidence for the first section, but in terms of the language spoken on the Moon really just means that there's a translation convention going on here, either magical or programmed by Artemis. What we don't see is any language or writing that survived.
Serenity talks in Japanese so Usagi can understand her. Beryl also talks in Japanese (while having an English name). If you take the anime story of them being sealed underground for a few thousand years, this can simply be translation convention. If you take the manga story, Beryl is a reincarnation who stumbles upon the ruins at D-Point of the old fortress of the Dark Kingdom (I call it Angband), which means she of course speaks modern languages. Either way, we don't learn very much about their language. Youma names tend to be puns, which is probably the magical Law of Sympathy at work, and has nothing to do with BSSM animators having funsies with their monsters.
What we should probably do is try to place the Silver Millennium in time, so we could guess what kind of language would be spoken then. Because of history, we can really only write our epic stories into places that are unknown, or into other universes entirely. Here, we have a setting with a Japan, China, United States, England, and Greece all seen or referenced in canon, so we have to assume a very substantial similarity to our own world.
I suppose this is the part where I mention Graham Hancock, who will tell you that he is not a historian or archaeologist, but would you like to hear his theories on prehistoric civilizations anyway? At the end of a the last ice age, a great civilization bloomed, but then met destruction at the hand of a comet that caused the Younger-Dryas climate event, c. 11000 BC. Because of subsequent warming, many of the most important sites flooded, like Sundaland and Doggerland, but sages visited the remaining people to rebuild civilization after the catastrophe.
Whether you believe a story like that is immaterial — something like this must have happened to create the backstory to Sailor Moon. People of the past had a war with the people of the Moon, and actually went there in large numbers — large enough to defeat the Lunar defenders, and of course defense is so much easier than offense. They had the technology (or magic, same difference) to get to the Moon, but in the cataclysm that engulfed both worlds, they lost it forever. And the only thing that survived were stories of people who fell in love with a princess from the moon. The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter does mark one of the very oldest works of science fiction in our reality.
But let's go into Sailor Moon canon, where we see a Moon Kingdom that looks very classical, with Greek columns and Arabesque minarets. I suppose I should actually say Neoclassical, because everything is white, rather than the vibrant colors that these buildings would have been painted originally, long washed away. But I suppose it makes sense for the moon to have a silver color theme and have plain marble columns. Takeuchi took inspiration for her ruins from the ruins of Palmyra (which have since been ruined much further by Daesh). It definitely looks like a Mediterranean culture on the Moon. We have names like Endymion, and Serenity calls herself Selene, which also recalls the classical Hellenic world.
But from this architectural similarity, you'd expect a civilization to be much younger, likely occurring in historic times, or very close to it. Obviously we can't actually set it in historic times without a vast coverup. However, there's a reasonable case to be made for the Late Bronze Age Collapse in 1200 BC, though it's hard to see how some people would get to the Moon while others could only manage pyramids (c. 2600 BC) and galleys.
There's also some Moon Kingdom dudes in the anime wearing full plate armor that looks suspiciously medieval, and like nothing that could have come out of the Bronze Age. Sure, why not?
For writing a fanfic, any date between the first and the eleventh millennium BC is probably fine. If you see it as the the small Golden Kingdom of Elysion, whose inhabitants were cultists of Metalia who led a sneak attack on the small Moon Kingdom via magic, a later date is probably better. If you see it a full interplanetary war, with the Earth Kingdom leading an assault on the Moon Kingdom's hegemony of the Solar System, empowered by Metalia's evil and its own space-faring capabilities, you definitely want the earlier date. You need the disaster to be big enough to devastate all the planets, and for the people on Earth to lose access to and forget all of the ancient tech in the disaster unleashed in the final battle between Metalia and Serenity.
The latest possible (but implausible) date for the Moon Kingdom is in the 1870s AD, when the Mud Flood destroyed the Tartarian Empire, causing a huge loss in knowledge as people died. This is why we have so many old buildings that look so nice, since modern architecture cannot hope to replicate these old buildings with the lost technology so we build boxy concrete and glass things. Because our civilization has so regressed, we had to make a vast global conspiracy to cover up the truth. (Tartarian conspiracy theory seems to be entirely based on the fact that people don't like modern architecture, when it comes down to it.) This also makes a neat reason as to why D Point is in Hyperborea in the first place, though it's exceedingly unlikely Takeuchi-sensei knew this secret truth... or did she?
Other dates are possible in different fanfic crossovers, especially if you want to include some Nadia or Evangelion stuff about the real First Impact. But knowing you guys, we're more likely to see someone fall into Cursed Spring of Drowned Moon Kingdom. Very sad story.
In our fanfic, well, we have archaeologists investigating the site on the Moon, so we should be able to determine much more about what really happened and when.
If I had to pick a writing system for the Silver Millennium, it would be Linear A, just because of how mysterious it is. But likely in real life, hieroglyphs are much older.
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Bob Schroeck - 09-13-2023
That's much the same reasoning, if in far more detail than I bothered with, when I did my planning for DW-S, and mostly why I settled on the 8th millennium BC for its version of the Moon Kingdom. (The rest was to be able to say "ten thousand years ago" and not be grossly inaccurate.) For my purposes it needed to be pre- (surviving) written history, but not nearly as long ago as ... oh, geeze, I can't remember the author's name, but they put the Moon Kingdom half a million years in the past. That just seems excessive to me.
Once I'd settled on that, and I eventually got around to actually thinking seriously about language, I settled on working with Proto-Indo-European because a) there's been a goodly amount of work done on reconstructing it; b) its cognates with modern languages would explain some of the linguistic weirdness Takeuchi created by using English for things that otherwise make no sense (although I do like your point that it serves as a "magic language" for her); and c) because there's so little of it, I can slot my own linguistic extrapolations into it without too much suspension of disbelief required.
As far as writing systems go, I don't remember if it's in a released part of DW-S or not, but I decided the written form of the Moon Kingdom's language would be analogous to PIE's vocabulary -- traces of it can be found in later writing systems. So when Doug looks at it, he can't read it, but he can recognize things that showed up in some of the earliest known writing systems. Ah... went looking, found it in chapter 3:
Quote:What Luna's message was written in looked like a bastard hybrid of Harappan, Linear Elamite and Early Sumerian.
But what meets the needs of DW-S doesn't necessarily meet the needs of our project here. Still, it's interesting to see how similar our thoughts ran in these cases.
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Labster - 09-14-2023
That's a good point. One thing I forgot to note is why the Silver Millennium isn't much, much older. I think this is pretty unlikely, and the first reason is Doylist: Takeuchi's name with "millennium" in it is telling us to think in terms of millennia, not in millions of years. She thinks about geology a lot, since most everyone is named after some sort of rock, but she doesn't use geological time scales for the story events. Similarly, Crystal Tokyo is definitely on the site of modern Tokyo, because of the Crystal Points and Dark Points; the time scales do not expect radical changes to geography.
Plus, we learn about the ruins of the Dark Kingdom and Silver Millennium both, and if there are actually ruins to be had, it can't be in the multimillion years. The Moon is not really a static place — all those craters you see happened over time. See the Silurian hypothesis, which talks about how hard it would be to detect anything at all from a civilization this old. (I mean, maybe the Earth Kingdom was originally lizard people? Seems kinda unlikely based on what we saw on-screen.)
To me, though, the biggest reason for it to be in the last ten thousand years or so is social. The names of the planets actually relate to the personalities of the Sailor Guardians who represented those planets. The names seem to be partially preserved in Western tradition, while the elemental alignment is preserved in the Eastern traditions. For instance, Jupiter has more to do with lightning in Roman tradition, but in Chinese thought it's associated with the element of wood, which explains her flower power. In Norse tradition, they preserved it as Odin's special association with Yggdrasil, etc. (Well, maybe not in our setting on the last one, because we're using AMG.)
You could reverse that argument though, and say that that ancient people could notice the power of the planets, and each senshi's power comes from their alignment to the planet. Therefore their elemental powers are unsurprising. But it's our setting and we can assume causality however we want!
Can people remember cultural information across multiple millennia without writing? Well, let's head out to Oregon to get our answer, to a place called Mount Mazama. It's more often known as Crater Lake these days, since 7700 years ago Mount Mazama erupted catastrophically, leaving a giant hole with a conical island in the middle. The Klamath people though, still remember the eruption, and talked about what happened there, so long ago. The first person in history to have his name recorded saying that this was the site of a volcano was a Klamath native, not a geologist. Apparently some Australian Aboriginal groups remember volcanoes out to 40000 years (but I haven't been there).
There are other examples, like how people like to link different cultures' narratives about mega floods together, and say they are a memory of that one time the Black Sea flooded. Of course if you're Graham Hancock, you say that there's was actually a global flood event, something something Atlantis. Floods are pretty common, though; people saying that this particular mountain exploded is a precise fact.
Because of cultural memories, including the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, it is most likely that the Silver Millennium took place in a time within the bounds of oral tradition, which probably has a horizon of around 50000 years. Combined with the things I talked about above, I still believe the sweet spot is three to fourteen millennia before present. This is actually double the amount of time in history at present writing, so it should be enough.
None of this post is on-topic for "Politics" though, which is probably why I wanted to wrap up the last bit fast. Although, as I get into nationalism, maybe it is on-topic? Every nation has to have a national myth.
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Bob Schroeck - 09-14-2023
Before we abandon geology...
Quote:Plus, we learn about the ruins of the Dark Kingdom and Silver Millennium both, and if there are actually ruins to be had, it can't be in the multimillion years. The Moon is not really a static place — all those craters you see happened over time. See the Silurian hypothesis, which talks about how hard it would be to detect anything at all from a civilization this old. (I mean, maybe the Earth Kingdom was originally lizard people? Seems kinda unlikely based on what we saw on-screen.)
The fan author I cited (something St. Seika something? I still can't remember and I forgot to look in my bookmarks last night) actually had an in-universe discussion of this, with some mention of the earth-based civilization (who were immigrants of some kind) being required to basically put all its construction and trash and whatnot in subduction zones so they'd get wiped out and leave no anomalous artifacts to cause problems for the next sapient species to evolve on Earth.
Quote:Although, as I get into nationalism, maybe it is on-topic? Every nation has to have a national myth.
Heh. In Desperately Seeking Ranma, the Silver Millennium is the myth. <grin>
Later incarnations of Sailor Moon have started portraying the moon folk as humanoid alien refugees who settled the moon because the Earth was already inhabited, unlike the earliest versions, where they are humans who somehow "magically" happened to develop and found a civilization on a dead world with no biosphere. Since we're taking Serenity I's claim to be a goddess literally (and we're explicitly using original anime continuity), then the foundation of the myth would probably be something along the lines of a "chosen people". Humans obviously couldn't evolve on the moon, so Serenity or a predecessor (serial reincarnation?) must have taken a population from Earth to the moon to be her people there. There would certainly be no small amount of arrogance built in, which as the Moon Kingdom grew in power would probably cause problems with diplomacy. "She chose us, and we grew to fill the system, while you're still stuck on your one planet." (And if the Kingdom's rise from "small colony" to "interplanetary power" happened fast enough, there would certainly be resentment on the part of the Earthbound nation or nations, which ties in nicely to the SM backstory.)
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Labster - 09-14-2023
(09-14-2023, 07:34 AM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: being required to basically put all its construction and trash and whatnot in subduction zones so they'd get wiped out and leave no anomalous artifacts to cause problems for the next sapient species to evolve on Earth.
This makes no sense, and is not how people act. Yes it could explain it, but I prefer explanations that don't require people to act completely differently than they do in real life. Like, find me one person who wants to clean up all of our trash so that we can leave a nice planet behind for the AIs.
(09-14-2023, 07:34 AM)Bob Schroeck Wrote:Quote:Although, as I get into nationalism, maybe it is on-topic? Every nation has to have a national myth.
Heh. In Desperately Seeking Ranma, the Silver Millennium is the myth. <grin>
Later incarnations of Sailor Moon have started portraying the moon folk as humanoid alien refugees who settled the moon because the Earth was already inhabited, unlike the earliest versions, where they are humans who somehow "magically" happened to develop and found a civilization on a dead world with no biosphere. Since we're taking Serenity I's claim to be a goddess literally (and we're explicitly using original anime continuity), then the foundation of the myth would probably be something along the lines of a "chosen people". Humans obviously couldn't evolve on the moon, so Serenity or a predecessor (serial reincarnation?) must have taken a population from Earth to the moon to be her people there. There would certainly be no small amount of arrogance built in, which as the Moon Kingdom grew in power would probably cause problems with diplomacy. "She chose us, and we grew to fill the system, while you're still stuck on your one planet." (And if the Kingdom's rise from "small colony" to "interplanetary power" happened fast enough, there would certainly be resentment on the part of the Earthbound nation or nations, which ties in nicely to the SM backstory.)
Honestly I had already been thinking along those lines: in my Tolkien crossover, they're literally space elves on the Moon. Well, space half-elves, which are surprisingly a canon thing. Arrogance comes with the territory
There were lots of chosen people in the past, and each city had its own kami, like Athena for Athens.
The story above does feel like a nationalistic story. In a feudal society, a royal marriage between Endymion and Usagi Serenity seems like it would solve the problem entirely, especially so because it's a love match. Resentment is more of a nationalist idea; early conquest is about security and economy, not about whether a Volk deserves more land due to their special destiny. If Metalia is a stand-in for the forces of modernity, nationalism, and imperialism, then it ties into Tolkien even better, ne?
Since it was a love match, I wonder why they weren't officially betrothed. Serenity grants it to them in the next life, so she's not against it as a mother, but she may have had political reasons to oppose it at the time. Is it because they're goofy teenagers? I mean, we see them do the Romeo and Juliet thing at a balcony, then the masqued ball thing. Maybe it's Prince Endymion's father preventing it? But why take the Moon by conquest? Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube – Let others wage war: thou, happy Austria, marry.
... Yeah, I really do need to make a post here on nationalism.
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Bob Schroeck - 09-14-2023
In at least some versions, Beryl was a courtier with a thing for Endymion. Maybe she wasn't just sitting there pining with no real hope, but had a valid claim of her own, only there were precedence/diplomatic issues that needed to be ironed out before anyone could be betrothed to him. (And Beryl jumped the gun when it looked like she was bound to lose...)
Hm. I might add that to DW-S. I have the Endymion-crush, but nothing else for Beryl's motives yet.
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - robkelk - 09-14-2023
Just had a thought ...
All of this is important for what kinds of things Yuuno and Fujitaka discover once they start excavating the ruins of the Moon Castle, but there are some folks (such as Kuroko) who are going to say "let the dead past stay dead and build a better future with what we know works, ignoring what we know doesn't work."
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Norgarth - 09-14-2023
Labster Wrote:There are other examples, like how people like to link different cultures' narratives about mega floods together, and say they are a memory of that one time the Black Sea flooded. Of course if you're Graham Hancock, you say that there's was actually a global flood event, something something Atlantis. Floods are pretty common, though; people saying that this particular mountain exploded is a precise fact.I've read a theory that the global flood myths come from the end of the last Ice Age (Estimates are that sea levels have risen around 400ft/122m since then. loads of communities that had been built neat/on the coasts back then are now utterly drowned.
Bob Schroeck Wrote:Later incarnations of Sailor Moon have started portraying the moon folk as humanoid alien refugees who settled the moon because the Earth was already inhabited, unlike the earliest versions, where they are humans who somehow "magically" happened to develop and found a civilization on a dead world with no biosphere. Since we're taking Serenity I's claim to be a goddess literally (and we're explicitly using original anime continuity), then the foundation of the myth would probably be something along the lines of a "chosen people". Humans obviously couldn't evolve on the moon, so Serenity or a predecessor (serial reincarnation?) must have taken a population from Earth to the moon to be her people there. There would certainly be no small amount of arrogance built in, which as the Moon Kingdom grew in power would probably cause problems with diplomacy. "She chose us, and we grew to fill the system, while you're still stuck on your one planet." (And if the Kingdom's rise from "small colony" to "interplanetary power" happened fast enough, there would certainly be resentment on the part of the Earthbound nation or nations, which ties in nicely to the SM backstory.)I recall a fanfic or two that suggested the Moon Kingdom was settled by Juraiians
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Bob Schroeck - 09-14-2023
(09-14-2023, 07:34 AM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: The fan author I cited (something St. Seika something? I still can't remember and I forgot to look in my bookmarks last night)
Warren Roberts, aka St. Suika Roberts, currently posting under "ssfr" on fanfiction.net, with a number of variations on their name. The particular story I was thinking of was something called "Shin Silver Millennium Monogatari", in which Ranma was the reincarnation of Beryl's little sister, and a member of Serenity's court. That's not on the ff.net site, but at least part of it can be found here. It's... odd. But not in a bad way.
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Labster - 10-05-2023
Nationalism and State-building
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The Moon Kingdom of the Silver Millennium is, if you think about it, perhaps not the best state to model from. One of the most important things to a state is the survival of the state; not only did it not survive, their last stand failed in perhaps the most horrible way possible: the killing of all its inhabitants, and the destruction of the cities and the entire environment. The only thing saved were their souls.
It's hard to think of a historical parallel to this. Though ancient peoples were capable of immense cruelty, extremely punitive wars rarely make sense when you could just enslave the inhabitants. Rome's sack of Carthage did demolish the city, but after a week of mass murder they finally did enslave the remaining inhabitants. The Biblical Battle of Jericho is recorded as leading to the slaughter of every inhabitant, including their livestock, save one family who helped Israelite spies. Only once slavery was universally banned in the 20th century did mass murder and genocide become the norm.
However, a story like the Fall of the Moon Kingdom is perfect for a national myth. All national myths are structured much the same way:
1. Back in the old days things were great and we were all together.
2. Then some outside force came and ruined things, and we're living in the aftermath.
3. Through our struggles, some day we will restore the nation to its glory.
The manga version gives us all three phases of a national myth, showing a brief glimpse of the founding of Crystal Tokyo. Which is unusual because we only ever see the first two of them come to pass in reality. But who is "we" in this story, and who are the outsiders?
It turns out that "we" is formed by intentional acts of nation building. While culture and language do exist, sharing it does not mean you share the same nation, like Germany and Austria. Or how much variation in speech really counts as a new language, or is it just a dialect? Right now, Ukraine is fighting a war against Russia to prove that Ukraine is a nation.
And being a nation means that the people are involved in the destiny of the state. Not just a noble class, but all people born in the same place -- natives of the nation. This more or less implies modernity, and the forging of a new group identity that is only partially based on a place or a state. It's more fuzzy, yet more powerful.
I've been throwing these words around: state, nation, and country. But they're all subtly different. A state is simply an apparatus that governs people, with the implied legitimacy to govern. A country is an area of land, that may or may not have clear boundaries. But a nation is a place of natives — the ethnic people who make up the state. Nation states are something of a nineteenth century invention, a reaction to both colonization and a more educated, politically active population.
I could go into all sorts of detail on nationalism, but the most important fact is that the national myth often implies a very deep history of a state and this is simply not true. Nationalism is a new concept, and nations are new! The United States is one of the very oldest nation states, even though it claims to be a young one. Nationalism is a powerful concept, strong enough to have been at the heart of the most massive wars of the 20th century, but that doesn't make it true. Nations are a perfect example of what the prophet Bokonon would call a granfaloon — everyone says that a nation shares a purpose and a destiny, but that doesn't really make it so.
Going further back, it's really hard to tell much of anything about the politics of the Silver Millennium, both on Earth and its Moon. As a fanfic writer, I think you can fill in just about anything you want here, keeping in mind what I said earlier. It wouldn't make sense for a nationalist state to exist in the Bronze Age, for example, though it could have existed in prehistory, and we repeat our mistakes. One thing to note is that Serenity's retainers are from the planet Mau, so even back then being from the Moon did not fully determine citizenship.
Honestly, on the topic of the Silver Millennium, just read what we said a couple posts up-thread, but bear in mind that worry over the size of your neighbor's imperial conquest only needs personal greed or nobility fears, not national resentment. Kings were doing this long before there were nation states. This post is mainly concerned with future development.
In canon we see the outlines of a nationalist narrative — the fall of the Silver Millennium, the defeat of the Dark Kingdom et al., the birth of Crystal Tokyo — so I think it's safe to say that the Moon Kingdom of the future will be a nation. And that means that the early leadership has to choose to create a nation. Because unlike the Silver Crystal, a nation or even a state will not just be handed to Usagi. And it will not be an easy task.
Which comes to a core question: why even make a Moon Kindgom at all? Why not just, like, let people vote and figure it out themselves? Why even attempt state building and nation building, when both are known to be so hard? The case to build a nation is pretty easy, when you have such a ready-built national myth, and leaders with such a strong sense of purpose. The case to build a state around which to build the nation in the first place is much harder.
Canon, for once, gives us essentially zero clues on the genesis of the state. The only thing we know is that the Sailor Guardians have a lot of power, and they use that power to protect people. It's not a huge leap to see what they do as Max Weber's definition of a state which involves legitimate violence. If beating up on Youma and space aliens is legitimate violence, then they're all acting like a state from the first time they said "Make Up!" It's technically vigilantism, but I don't think anyone in government is going to tell them to stop doing it.
In my view, there is not a huge difference between a group running a "protection racket" and a government -- especially in feudal and pre-feudal systems. Mercenary companies could and did conquer territory for themselves, which were eventually seen as legitimate kingdoms. The yakuza are largely descended from the nobility of Japan that lost the war of the Meiji Restoration; they actually do some measure of real protection, and not just protection from themselves.
It's not to see the Sailor Team, essentially a vigilante gang with clearly structured leadership, has the potential to evolve into a state if they keep protecting people, and if other people begin to follow their orders. Modern states are formed for a variety of reasons, including for security amongst dangerous neighbors, for the promotion and safety of trade, and to have an official way of conflict resolution. My first post on Crime handled the last case, and it's obvious to see that these women are a defense against hostile aliens. I don't think any of these gals have a clue how to run an economy, though.
In our fanfiction though, there won't be a grand moment where people suddenly decide to found a state. In the distant future of the setting, they'll probably identify it as the coronation of Neo-Queen Serenity, but that's just ceremony. I'm not saying that ceremony isn't important, it's just not close to the whole story.
There will be two habitable places on the Moon early on in our story -- Moonbase Alpha in Plato Crater and Moon Castle on the "shore" of Mare Serentiatis. They are only close in a relative sense, with ~1320 km of lunar surface between them, roughly the distance from New York to Chicago, or Paris to Madrid. But much, much closer than any other settlements, and reachable within an hour or two of flight by both sides (no sonic booms in no atmosphere).
I'm sure we're going to write chapters on the first meetings, and how things start at the castle. But if those settlements become permanent, which they will for various plot reasons, they will face common problems: obtaining resources, trade, tourism, and security from the Earthly states that come to visit. Eventually, the states of Earth will come knocking, looking for resources. And so the people of the Moon will have to decide what to do, collectively.
This collective decision will look a lot more like a committee meeting than a stained glass window featuring Usagi bearing the scepter and tiara beneath the Moonbase Alpha mission patch. We're deconstructing, after all. There will be some Zoom meetings in there too, not just the Founders around a table doing heroic Founding Things. (The stained glass will come later.)
As we move on to larger settlements, the people running the state will try to build an identity out of the people who come up to the Moon. (Not all states form this way. Many nationalists are outside the state trying to remove the colonizers, but there's no reason for that to happen here.) It's not an ethnic identity, but is more likely to be a cultural one, as Americans and Canadians have. I think Princess Mars, in particular, is going to advocate that their new beginning is a chance to start a revolution in people's hearts, one of love and passion. Probably joined by Princess Uranus, who will want to guide a new era. (See! It's canon!)
But let me bring up an old era first. There's been a meme going around about women being surprised how often men think about the Roman Empire. I admit that I am male, and I have brought them up here an awful lot. But they're useful, because they cover a lot of different peoples and governments, and they lasted a thousand years! If your state has Millennium in the name, there aren't many other examples to think of. (There is only one state today that has lasted over one thousand years, the Republic of San Marino.)
But you know who else thought about the Roman Empire? Pretty much every other state. There's probably no more widely claimed thing than being the true successor to the Roman Empire. Pretty much every nation in Europe has claimed to be the successor to Rome, trying to reclaim lost glories, even while Rome itself still existed over in the Eastern half. The Germans claimed to be Rome, having not really ever been a part of Rome, but who cares when the Pope says it's okay? Russia claimed to be the Third Rome, while the United States' symbolism and architecture is intended to evoke the Roman Republic. While it's a bit about recapturing past glories, it's also about claiming new greatness.
More or less the same thing is going on with the nation building project in China, where the newly invented people of the Han nation are reflecting the ancient Han Emperor. Nationalism is a story that says that the people who live in a place are the ones that belong there, because they always have lived there.
But if you step back to our national myth for a new Moon Kingdom, it's not quite the same. First of all, it's not going back to Rome or Han, it's inspired by something much further back and more mysterious. Only Minako and Setsuna really remember much more than the occasional glimpse. No one really wants to bring back the glorious state quite the way it was. In fact, Princess Pluto will be deeply worried about trying to resurrect the Silver Millennium too closely. After all, it turned out very badly for everyone. All states must eventually end, but it ended up failing utterly.
What the nation-building exercise then becomes is a reflection of the desires of the people of the Moon, and especially its greatest people. If they're going to be guiding into a new era, then they will build a culture by example, and it will become part of people's identity. There's no legitimacy to be gained by following ancient traditions or Rome, so they can build a truly feminist state without worrying about the past.
Our new Moon Kingdom will not be an excessively nationalist state, largely because leadership does not need the legitimize its rule the way. With the power in their persons, and the claim on what is an actual uninhabited territory, there's less need to justify themselves as an autochthonous people. At the same time, I don't see how they could escape the forces of realpolitik at our current level of development. People want to belong to things, be it nations, political parties or sports fandoms. (I've mentioned the Romans enough, but you can get all three of these together in the Nika riots.)
The one thing I don't get to is: what's beyond nationalism? Maybe the European Union just keeps getting bigger? Right now, nationalism is kicking the EU's ass, though. Marxists theoretically wanted an international revolution, but all of the communist states in real life eventually became staunchly nationalistic. Star Trek hints at a postnationalist world, but doesn't really have any way to get there. And then treats other alien species as other nations. Post-scarcity seems to be part of the equation, but I don't really know. I don't know if I can know.
Perhaps in the Crystal Tokyo of the the canon future, there's no need for nationalism. It's hard to say much at all; the only political activity we know of is the partisanship and terrorism of the Black Moon Clan, and we'll never get rid of all of those kinds. Neo-Queen Serenity is said to rarely leave the palace in this future, representing the beautiful but static End of History. I don't believe it. Takeuchi is feeding us a nationalist myth, not the real future of the world.
Don't assume that the Moon Kingdom will become this static, beautiful, unchanging place of eternal happiness. Because that is simply not a real place. The end state for both our fanfic Moon Kingdom and our canon Crystal Millennium can't really be static. What it means to be a subject of Her Royal Bunnyness will change over time, and that's a good thing.
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - robkelk - 10-06-2023
This won't be particularly detailed, even for me.
(09-12-2023, 07:15 PM)Labster Wrote: Language and Secret Prehistory
The Language of the future Moon Kingdom is English. I think this is telegraphed pretty hard, with everyone's titles being "Princess" or "Neo-Queen" in English, the magical attack names being in English, Chibi-Usa being called "Rabbit" by the people in the future. Even future!Usagi doesn't ever bother to learn kanji. Names from the future are "Wiseman" and "Nemesis", and they have droids. The Moon Stick. I mean, come on, these are pretty much all English words.
The only counterfactual I can think of is Luna-P, whose activation phrase is "Luna-P Hen-ge", which I hyphenated because it's not a henge, stone or otherwise. It just means "change" in Japanese. But there was also "Luna-P Magic", which is another English word.
Possibly a case of the translation convention... or Luna-P serving as a translator with Chibiusa speaking English all along.
(09-12-2023, 07:15 PM)Labster Wrote: Which means that all of us still using Sailor Senshi should really be using Sailor Guardian as their titles.
On the other hand, there's always Tradition to take into account. (We still have sheriffs instead of police chiefs in some places, after all.) And Rei can be very Traditional.
(09-12-2023, 07:15 PM)Labster Wrote: I guess because this is a politics thread, I'll just mention that this makes them natural allies of other English-speaking countries, which includes the US, the Commonwealth of Nations, and strengthens ties with India and South Africa.
One current and once historical counter-example at the end of that list, I see.
(09-12-2023, 07:15 PM)Labster Wrote: Other dates are possible in different fanfic crossovers, especially if you want to include some Nadia or Evangelion stuff about the real First Impact. But knowing you guys, we're more likely to see someone fall into Cursed Spring of Drowned Moon Kingdom. Very sad story.
Which reminds me of a reasonably-successful (in that it didn't get derailed or abandoned) tabletop RPG where the nasty GM had Minako fall into the Spring of Drowned Penguin. I was using her way too much as a GMPC.
(10-05-2023, 03:43 PM)Labster Wrote: Nationalism and State-building
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The Moon Kingdom of the Silver Millennium is, if you think about it, perhaps not the best state to model from. One of the most important things to a state is the survival of the state; not only did it not survive, their last stand failed in perhaps the most horrible way possible: the killing of all its inhabitants, and the destruction of the cities and the entire environment. The only thing saved were their souls.
It's hard to think of a historical parallel to this.
The only thing I can think of is the hypothetical MAD scenario, once the Doomsday Clock strikes midnight.
I agree that we don't want to do this to a "live" setting.
(10-05-2023, 03:43 PM)Labster Wrote: The one thing I don't get to is: what's beyond nationalism?
So far, federalism.
AFAIK federalism is completely unknown in Japan, so somebody would need to teach it to Usagi. And she is not the type t soak it up from newspapers or high-school homework. ("Go audit some Poli-Sci courses, Usagi. Or major in Political Science, whichever you prefer." Then she comes back with more questions than she started with.)
If we go with federalism, we could use either federalism within a single country (the Québécois "form a nation within a united Canada", after all) and multi-country federalism (such as the EU).
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Labster - 10-07-2023
(10-06-2023, 12:29 PM)robkelk Wrote:(09-12-2023, 07:15 PM)Labster Wrote: Which means that all of us still using Sailor Senshi should really be using Sailor Guardian as their titles.
On the other hand, there's always Tradition to take into account. (We still have sheriffs instead of police chiefs in some places, after all.) And Rei can be very Traditional.
I feel a song coming on...
I don't really have somewhere to sneak this in, but maybe Sailor Guardian is redundant anyway. Tangentially to some research for the last post, I noticed PIE *ser- means something like "guard". So possibly Sailor Mars literally means Guardian Mars. So Sailor Guardian is like saying "ATM machine"? I think Bob already covered something like this in Drunkard's Walk S — we really do not know how the PIE words were pronounced.
(10-06-2023, 12:29 PM)robkelk Wrote:(10-05-2023, 03:43 PM)Labster Wrote: The one thing I don't get to is: what's beyond nationalism?
So far, federalism.
AFAIK federalism is completely unknown in Japan, so somebody would need to teach it to Usagi. And she is not the type t soak it up from newspapers or high-school homework. ("Go audit some Poli-Sci courses, Usagi. Or major in Political Science, whichever you prefer." Then she comes back with more questions than she started with.)
If we go with federalism, we could use either federalism within a single country (the Québécois "form a nation within a united Canada", after all) and multi-country federalism (such as the EU).
Of course the birth of modern federalism happens at essentially the same time and place as the birth of nationalism, in the creation of the United States. So it's really hard to say that this comes beyond nationalism. The thing is that states with autonomous areas, or amalgamations of nations are still fundamentally right in the center of a nationalist framework. It assumes that a culture or ethnicity exists, then boxes off some land for self-rule of that group to some extent. (How well these boxes work is another thing entirely. Post-colonial Africa is kind of famous for no one wanting to redraw the colonial borders, despite how obviously unrelated they were to cultural geography.)
What's weird about nationalism is how it tells you this myth about how it was always there, and it really feels like it was, but it is in fact one of the newest ideas in governance. I've been talking about the classical Greeks, and the feudal Middle Ages. But nationalism is an idea of incredible power, and things like federalism, Marxism, communism, and fascism are all reactions to the idea. And it only works with mass literacy, which is one of the reasons why it's so new.
I haven't mentioned Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri yet (actually by Brian Reynolds, never mind the title), but I suppose this is as good a time as any. At least Reynolds gives it a try. The seven factions are not based on ethnicity at all, but on the ideology of the people in that each state. At least it's an attempt to show a radically different form of politics in the future, though one didn't evolve from a preexisting state system, but instead from a space colonization mission, where the guy everyone liked, let's call him Captain Bruno J. Global, got killed.
It's not too bad a metaphor for what our Moon Kingdom will turn into. I think we all know that there will be more science academies on Mercury than on Venus, for instance. People will gravitate to the leader they like, and take up the ideology of their Princess to some degree — but of course not entirely, and children are often different than their parents.
Back on the note about Usagi: Yes, she definitely needs a degree in political science. She's pretty good for a novice, but a novice politician can only get so far. Politics is a profession like any other, and to advance you either need education, experience, or both. (Those of you reading this who are against professional politicians: you are deluding yourself into thinking novices will be good at this, and that those who call themselves outsiders actually are outsiders. If you don't like professional politicians, also avoid professional doctors and professional contractors, and see how that works out.) I feel sorry for whoever will be Usagi's statistics tutor.
On federalism in Japan: Oddly enough the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was nominally federal and for national self-determination, though the IJA was pretty much making all of the calls for everyone, including the puppet states. Much like the Russian "Federation", which continues centuries of tradition where Muscovites have imperial rule over other cultures. Imperial Japan did fund a few nationalist rebellions, which, well, every country is for national self-determination except in their own land or their allies. But you're absolutely right that modern Japan is a very strong unitary state, where prefectures don't have that much authority to make decisions. Even city zoning is done by national law; local officials can determine which of the nationally determined zones apply.
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - robkelk - 10-07-2023
(10-07-2023, 04:26 AM)Labster Wrote: I feel sorry for whoever will be Usagi's statistics tutor.
*cough**cough*Ami*cough*
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Labster - 07-10-2024
Class and Service
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I had mentioned before that the Moon Kingdom would end up as a parliamentary democracy with a House of Lords. Does that mean a house with literal lords, though?
In our setting, I made Tomo a baroness, so we will have literal gentry. But I think that this is true in canon as well. Nobility is a social class in basically all monarchies, and if the Moon Kingdom is a kingdom, then a baronial class comes with the package. In feudal systems, one man might be able to conquer a lot of territory, like let's take Charlemagne as our example. But Karl the Great couldn't hold that territory himself, so he appointed his companions, his comes to administer local holdings for him. Those comes became counts (a position we don't have in the English system, because they adopted the Norse title jarl as earl). And then those counts would get their own people to run villages, making the lower grades of nobility.
I think it would work nearly the same for a Moon Kingdom that settles the solar system, as I hypothesized earlier. And even to a alternate canon one stuck mostly on Earth, those with power are going to be seen as having a higher class.
Social class exists in every society on earth, except perhaps a few of the very smallest. It even exists in America, where we like to pretend it doesn't because we're so democratic. But here, it includes things like wealth, race, and education, as well as subculture. Donald Trump, for all of his wealth, does a really good job of presenting as lower class, which explains a lot of his appeal.
But the American conception of class is really different from the English one of explicit membership in the nobility or the commons, which is different from the Indian castes which still lie beneath today's social structures in India. Or ancient societies like Sparta, which had a few different degrees of slaves. So the kind of class system that the Moon Kingdom would come up with is not obvious, and if you're writing a fanfic you have a lot of flexibility over what form it could take.
So let's look at the personality of our early leaders, to get an idea of what society they would build. I guess this is inherently adopting the Great (Wo)Man view of history, but I think that this is likely the best starting point for the writer, rather than trying to build a social history of the future using psychohistory (which doesn't actually exist).
First, it's hard to see Usagi adopting a fixed class system. A system where someone is penalized for marrying the person they love is absolutely unforgivable, if I am to use the term of art. For the sake of love and justice, there has to be a certain amount of social mobility. Marriage would be one way to gain status, as it always has been.
I expect it will work somewhat like the British system in modern times, where if you do enough on behalf of the nation, the nobility will decide that actually you were one of them all along, and get to join their parties. The system is not perfect, which is how we ended up with Lord Lebedev (who originally wanted to be called Lord Moscow, but this title was declined for reasons), but it's not as if corruption among the political upper class is a new phenomenon.
I expect that the commons/lords/royalty split will represent most of the layers of class in the lunar society. I think they will try really hard not to have an economic underclass, but just a class that gets to go to glamorous parties and wear nice outfits -- oh, and have a whole house of Parliament to themselves.
On worlds and territories controlled by Outer Senshi, we'll likely get an additional underclass: immigrants. This is a pretty typical underclass, and there are often divisions based on where the immigrant was from, or what class they had before immigrating. It's really easy to see someone like Michiru wanting an immigrant to prove themselves before becoming a citizen. In these places, you'd probably have to be significantly culturally assimilated before earning citizenship.
Actually, it says more about the Inner Senshi ethic that they'll try to avoid treating immigrants differently. This happens a few times, with the Akakashi Sisters and the Starlights, so I think there's canon support. (Note immigrants are not always at the bottom rung, they just happen to be so here.)
I think that societies of the Moon Kingdom will end up at least as collectivist as Japan, if not more so. While some of the romantic elements lend themselves to rugged individualism and choosing your own destiny, I think that there are limits. Using the Black Moon Clan as an example for the second paragraph in a row, the core of it had to be a movement of social dissent where people felt they had to leave to be themselves. Sure it was also a cult of an Elder God and all that, but one imagines an early phase in which misfits were attracted before being corrupted with dark energy.
I think one could make an argument for a more individualist territory under Neptune or Uranus, since they employ some lone-wolf tactics in the story. But I think that more comes under the heading of policy dispute, and ageism against the middle school Inner Senshi.
In the KanriKyara setting, our other founders will largely come from Moonbase Alpha, which has a cool American leader which is of course an individualist society. But putting that aside, it's a pretty collectivist group. Space is not an environment that rewards individual action, and everyone knows it. They may not be military, but they still have a chain of command, and following it can be a matter of life and death.
I have to say that this whole post was inspired by Rishi Sunak, who can be described as one of the Prime Ministers of all time. One of his last-ditch efforts to save his ill-fated and poorly-run campaign was to announce support for the return of national service. (I'm sure there were some very good poll numbers in support.) Certain nations do this, like South Korea and Israel. It's fairly uncontroversial in Korea, where it's possible to defer service. In Israel, until about a month ago, it wasn't mandatory for the religious class, who instead of joining the military got government stipends to pray.
I think that the Moon Kingdom might be a country that has a national service year for the young men and women, coming from this collectivist, quasi-military background. Given the feminist background, it definitely includes women as defenders of the realm. But like Israel of last year, I don't think it applies to everyone. Everyone can choose to do national service, but it's optional for most people; only the nobility is required to do it -- or at least so it is in our setting.
I think that if you want to go all-in on both nobility and postmodernism, you have to come up with something that hasn't been tried before. Blood alone as a source of nobility is not going to cut it. I think Chibiusa is evidence of this, as her royal status is valued, but not enough to make her ready to do royal duties. Her going back in time is her year of national service, where she gets to mature as a person.
So instead I want to learn heavily on noblesse oblige. Nobility is for those who are noble of character. If someone wants to go off and make money instead of service, then they are free to lose their status. But the best of the country should, in theory, be shaped by the camaraderie and spirit of service that the Sailor Team had back in their founding myth/anime.
Just like in other countries, this public service could be military or civil. Working as a medical assistant in a remote outpost would qualify, for instance. (I can imagine the romance books written about such postings.)
Service as a requirement for advancement and class mobility is not really hinted at by canon, but I think all of the ingredients are there for this to become an element of society, long after the era when the country is so small that it will need all of its young people for defense. I don't think that birthright alone works for Usagi or the modern era, but needs something more. Strength and nobility shown by actions, not blood.
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - Dartz - 07-10-2024
Service Guarantees Citizenship?
Would you like to know more?
RE: Politics of the Moon Kingdom - robkelk - 07-10-2024
Heinlein was of the opinion that people should have to do something in order to get the franchise -- he put it in his nonfiction as well as his fiction. "Serve a term" was one of the options he proposed.
Don't know whether our Usagi would want to do that, considering she'll at least be exposed to the Senate of Canada. No hereditary members, and nowadays no "life peers" either; there's a mandatory retirement age.Buit one gets into the Senate by being noticed in a good way. I'll grant that a lot of the time "being noticed" means "because you're a party insider", but it doesn't have to be.