Dara Happan Depravity

From: David Gadbois <gadbois_at_cs.utexas.edu>
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 15:52:16 -0600


Pam Carlson takes issue with my characterization (caricaturization?) of the Dara Happns as having inbred snobbery, secret depravity, and overwhelming uselessness. I don't really disagree with anything she has to say against this (there is only so much you can put into six words), but I shall try to illustrate how my characterization macroexpands out.

   When you get lusty Lodril festivals every season and all the beer    you can brew, life doesn't look so bad.

Good points. Lodrilite culture sounds rather appealing. And it provides a way for the Yelmites to let off some steam: At the big festivals (shades of Mardi Gras or Day of the Dead), the nobles don masks, wade into the crowd, and party down. Perhaps that it one use of the gazzam: Socially and politically oriented "krewes" sponsor maintenance and decoratation of brontosauri, which they parade down the boulevards of Raibanth and from which the masked initiates toss cheap imitations of the Sacred Vestments of Yelm to the wild drunken crowd.

   A virtuous Solar (Yelmite, Dendaran, Yu-kargzant worshipper,    Yelmalian - you name it)- is valorous, chaste (pure), honest, just,    and generous.

Sure, but just as I wouldn't trust those Greydog scum any farther than I could throw them, there is always that big chasm between what is said and what is done. Certainly there are some goody-two shoe Dara Happans who really do sit in their Dayzatar towers and stare at Yelm all day or organize Junior Celibacy Clubs. But I think the mass of Dara Happans lead lives of quiet desperation. They are forever torn between their carnal desires (and they have lots of Lodrilite examples to guide them) and the rigid strictures of the cult of Yelm. Guilt and shame are their primary motivators. So while they do sometimes act like Markus Eagle Scout, they just as often succumb to temptation, which, given the extreme pressure not to do so, often takes extremely ritualized and deviant forms. Remember, Mathiman's epithet "The Impaler" was not based on his homicidal tendencies.

I like the idea of a Dara Happan noble coming home from a morning's debauchery and spending the rest of the day desperately trying to ritually cleanse himself.

However, I do think that the Dara Happan's current stuffy attitude is partly a conservative backlash against Lunar liberalism and partly one of those strange demographic forces that push things to the right as the population density increases dramatically. A good part of Dara Happan history has been a story of disaster or subjection to the various invaders and the recovery therefrom. So I think that in the Good Old Days, the Yelmites were considerably looser than they are now.

   What? Magistrates, architects, astronomers, historians, healers,    and warriors are _useless_ ? Not to mention those Sunspear,    Sunripen, and Cure Disease spells...

Do the full-citizen Dara Happans actually do anything besides loll around gossiping in the esplanades of the Triopolis? Sure, there are some bad apples that actually do something, but my guess is that most of the work is done by the half, quarter, and eighth citizens who themselves, as fully supported by the peasantry as they are, really don't do that much in total. It is a matter of degree: the Glorious Office of the Architect of Yuthuppa may get that pothole repaired within a century or so while in the meantime the Hwarin Dalthippa Corps of Engineers will have built several major metropolises.

   I picture the Lunars as a BIG threat to Solar society.

I agree: the Dara Happans see the Lunars as the biggest threat to their society. Well, the biggest right after the Carmanians. But the Lunar revolution is nothing if not subtle, and I think that, even with all the overt signs of Lunar domination, the Dara Happans are oblivious to the big picture. They cluck about the ever-shortening hemlines of Lunar fashions while missing the fact that they have been largely disenfranchised.

BTW, I asked Greg what the real gazzam (dinosaur) situation is in Dara Happan. He said that some are still around, but there are not very many of them: the (human) population is just too dense to support a whole bunch of the big guys. The ones that are there are imported from Dragon Pass and Balazar, so it appears that gazzam do not breed well in captivity or perhaps it is just to dangerous too attempt to do so.

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