It actually WAS Dulinor the Black in several publications on both MT and TNE, notably Rebellion Sourcebook. Dulinor wore black because he was a non-Virasin from Dlan so had to wear black as did most secular nobility and military in the Ilelish/Dlan region.
It is not surprising to find him as Dulinor the Black in MT. That game is written from the point of view of several different factions all competing for the Iridium Throne. Of course they are going to denigrate each other. Lucan is called Lucan the Black or the Black Emperor because people blame him for the Collapse.
Right, that's exactly the reference I was thinking of, so don't need to read it when I get back.
If that's the reference you thought helped you, you're wrong again. Not only did I explain why already, but the materials further back me. I quote from page 5:
"The fact that "lucanic" and "imperial" have emerged
throughout human space as emotion-packed epitaphs indicates that the public consciousness is not yet prepared to accept Lucan's reign as a legitimate historical topic." (emphasis mine)
Note what that quote is telling us. Lucan and the Imperium are both so hated that people cannot even talk about them. Interestingly, the quote indicates that "lucanic" and "imperial" are derogatory "throughout human space" which would seem to include the Regency.
Again, as I have pointed out many times, and as you have yet to find any evidence to rebut, Lucan is so hated, and the Imperium so maligned (at least outside the Regency) that real world analogies are simply insufficient. Lucan is not Kaiser Wilhelm II. He is not even Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or any dictator/murder we can reference.
He is blamed for an event that destroyed everything and killed everyone. He is so hated that 130+ years after his reign, people destroy everything related to him not as a rational precautioin against rising "Lucanism" or Neo-Lucan parties, but in an irrational and "exorcistical" frenzy. Note the word there, exorcism. Hatred of Lucan is not rational. It is deeply rooted in the collective consciousness of the Wilds as a result of the Collapse. It is almost religious. This is the man you think of as the Kaiser? Are you kidding? Can you find even one person today, a mere 93 years after his death, who destroys Kaiser related artifacts, papers, and other associated items in a bizarre outburst of quasi-religious hatred?
Your attempts to cast Lucan in the mold of an "ordinary" despot/murder simply fly in the face of everything we know about the universe from TNE canon materials.
Are you aware of the legal prohibitions against Nazi symbolism in Germany?
Of course I am aware of them, that's why I brought them up and how they are completely unsuited as an analogy. In Germany, the anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi laws are completely rational. They stem from a desire to prevent the rise, however unlikely, of the Nazi party or Nazi sympathies, and to discourage Neo-Nazi types from traveling to Germany or gathering there. Of course, there is also a guilt component as well, which is not entirely rational, but understandable.
Hitler associated sites and artifacts are not destroyed in an irrational, emotional, almost religious outburst of hate in Germany. Why are you unable to reconcile yourself to the canon materials?
Depends when. Retrospect shows that the US could have come off pretty well from a nuclear exchange during, say the Cuban Missile Crisis when the amount of strategic weapons the Soviet Union had were actually quite limited (somewhere around 20 that could hit the US IIRC). Europe would have been very hard hit, as likely would Canada. Eastern Seaboard and most of the major cities would be gone, of course, but not the entirety of the United States.
Great discussion of that here:
http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=65071
Following along that timeline, I don't think JFK or Krushchev would be seen all that bad, actually, at least if the truth ever got out. It's not like Lucan personally ordered every Black War strike.
Wow, I don't even know where to start. I guess first it's best to mention that since you're claiming that a nuclear exchange really isn't all that apocalyptic to you, I'd have to insist you use some other mental analogy and combine nuclear exchange with a total global pandemic that kills almost everyone, because that's what the Collapse is. It is a total societal kill event that wipes out almost everyone and much of everything. It is the complete end of interstellar society in the Wilds, and if the resulting government codes are to be used as information, it is also the end of most pre-Collapse world governments.
Also, that scenario is simply one person's (very detailed) theoretical events. I'm sure other people can be found who are not as sanguine about the results of nuclear war. Additionally, that scenario uses only rational targeting objects for American and Soviet nukes. i.e., the attacks are targeted against major military and political objectives. Virus was not so kind. It killed everybody and destroyed everything because it was crazy and angry. Since the Collapse was an apocalypse, a limited nuclear exchange is by definition insufficient for comparison purposes. You need a nuclear scenario of total and absolute devastation.
Additionally, even in your scenario the related leaders would be bitterly hated. AT BEST, they might benefit from some kind of jingonistic reaction in their own countries.
It's as theoretical as the discussion of Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot's many millions of victims. The order of magnitude is higher but many people are antiseptic to deaths that don't actually witness, much less 70-80 years after the fact.
Already dispensed with this argument above.
I wouldn't. But my great grandson would probably be much more inclined to accept coordination in his day, especially after the President of his era signs the Amendment to the Constitution granting said animated life form citizenship.
Except that your great grandson is still trying to dodge vampire SUVs that are trying to run him over. Except that your great grandson's most common interaction with technically sophisticated people occurs either as a) an oppressive government, b) traders of varying and often dubious ethics, c) an RC who very well may take the tech they need by force, depending on the characteristics of said oppressive government, and so forth.
You really do imagine the Collapse as a "cozy catastrophe" (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalyptic_and_post-apocalyptic_fiction#Cosy_catastrophe and that is the root of our disagreement as to how bad things are in the Wilds. Except I have canon on my side.
What made you interpret the atrocity as being especially unpalpable in the Wilds as opposed to the strongest reaction being in the Regency or even the Coalition? I've proposed the annihilation of Capital as being especially egregious by the Regency and that the mixed reaction in the Coalition would make defenders of the action stand down, regardless of how bad they actually thought it was or not (a mega-amplified version of the controversy over Cosmic Fire, for example).
Because Dave says it "destroys their ability to work productively with other human factions." Other by definition excludes themselves, so the RC is out (or at the very least, it implicates the effect as being on people outside the RC, independent of what it might do to the RC itself). And factions is plural, so the effect must reach beyond the Regency, even if it includes the Regency. There isn't anyone else, hence the Wilds.
Your proposed scenario fails completely in even considering the Wilds, which is bizarre as the Wilds are a) huge, b) the whole field of contest for the RC and Regency, and c) arguably the entire point of TNE.
Love Roman and medieval history and the Byzantines are central to many of my areas of focus, so I can, too. Right, but your brought that up as a point that they were still calling themselves Romanoi when the arcane maze of titles in the Byzantine aristocracy and even military would have been seen as completely bizarre to a Roman of just about every earlier era from the Megas Domestikos and Sebastos to the Kataphractoi to the Exarches and Strategos and Merarches or Taxiarches. In retrospect, Byzantium only very superficially resembles anything from Imperial, much less Republican Rome.
You've already forgotten the point of this line of discussion. I was rebutting your claim that people would remember the 3I fondly. Then we got sidetracked because you erroneously claimed that average Byzantines called themselves Hellenes. I think we have enough to discuss without historical tangents. If anything, since the Regency is the closest analogy to the Byzantines, their increasing use of different titles would distance themselves from the Imperium, reducing their lingering affection for it.
