Politics of the Moon Kingdom

[Labster]

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  Not to mention the core Sunni/Shia split, and the fact that the Twelvers who rule Iran think that there are no longer valid Caliphs.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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.