The Thin Red Line.

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 03:13:16 GMT


Gian Gero:
> The Lunar Empire has many Indian (not native American) names: at least
> DaraHappa, Yara Aranis (even the image resembles Kali), Yuthuppa and others
> I don't remember now. Has it, I wonder, also Imperial India connections?

You mean the British Raj? (There are so many Indian Empires, one loses track.) This is definitely a comparison the brain is sucked insidiously toward: when they make Glorantha: the Movie, the Lunar nobles will assuredly have cut-glass English accents -- the roles all traditionally played by Irish actors, of course. Peloria the Beautiful and The Red Menace don't just cut it at this level of popular-cultural resonance, maties. The image of 'imperialism as public service' is also resonant here: either the Lunar Empire is the sort of Empire the British used to like to think we used to have ('white man's burden', to use a phrase that I admit makes me wince) -- or else it just likes to think it has the sort of empire that Britain liked to think it had. Well-meaning 'liberal' Lunars dot the landscape showing self-sacrificing mercy and generosity to natives that respond with incomprehensible superstition and prejudice...

Amid all the Irishmen, I'm sure this filmic opus will have room for a Hugh Grant (bumbling, charmingly ineffectual noble -- Jaxarte?) and a Tim Piggott-Smith (repressed, sadistic and ruthless career officer (but gives good voice-over) -- whichever Lunar faction the director has least sympathy for, either Fazzur, or some Tatian hatchet-man). At some point, someone doubtless says "Steady on there -- after all, Sartar _is_ Lunar..." -- immediately after which the course of the war starts going to hell on a bike.

The clincher is of course the imperial curry. Easily mistaken by the casual obsever for an Indian analogue, it is of course a British one. (Actually I have a hideous mental image of post-Hon Eel imperial cuisine as a sort of bastard grandchild of all things hot and spicy with dead animals inside -- a sort of BritishIndianTexMex, if you will. "I'll have a crocodile syllia massala with maize tortillas, waiter -- and make it snappy." (For the less adventurous, the goat tikka with a quart of special broo is also popular, though please check the area for stray Uroxi before ordering.)

Admittedly as an 'analogue' on the factual-cross-matching clustering sort of measure used in this discussion to date, it's totally hopeless, in so many ways one hardly knows where to start.

> Loskalm = medieval England

A believer in Nick's "malevolent, proto-fascist, and insidiously corrupt" theory of Loskalm, I see. ;-)

Cheers,
Alex.


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