Unsounded

yes hahaha
yes

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>implying big daddy Claggart isn't going to make Vampire his bitch, figuratively and literally.

Never. Claggart is a total bottom.

I can imagine so. Alds don't particularly hate the lizards (there's hardly any in the north at all)

I'm not sure Duane is capable of killing everyone instantly, even with Tacit casting. Plus there's god knows how many enemy wrights there currently.
Not sure what the play is here.

Find out what the traitors and bitch-queen's lackeys are doing there in the first place. Also wait for the Khert to calm down so it doesn't annihilate them all

>plainclothes spec ops milling around looking out of place anywhere but a parade ground
Hey now, vining wouldn't look out of place at your local accountants office either

Calling it, Dhampir is the child of Aldish rebels after the local Khert hub was torn down. His name isn't 4 letters and has some disdain for Cresce

And they should. Alderode is shit.

fuck off whatever continental shitter you are

Has Alderode even been in this civil war that long?

Ten years, plus the “final” few Duane was part of
So still too little time for him to have grown up in the space I think

He might be like "poor" Turas. Perhaps Ethnically Crescian or from a related people but raised elsewhere. Though user's point might still stand, even if it's not about the actual civil war. Cresce and Alderode have been trading land for ages. It's entirely possible he was born during some period where an Aldish town/city was under Crescian control. Hard to imagine Cresce not just genociding all the Alds, but we know the Dammakhert not only makes kids be born into castes, but people know about it. And I think it's implied something else happens too when the towers go up, since it sounded like the Crescian war council was worried about more than just future kids.

So it's entirely possible Cresce does the opposite, and keeps Alds alive and has them pop out non-caste kids.

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So is Cresce
Hell All of Kasslyne sucks, it seems like the closest the continent gets to decent is Shartshane and that certainly isn't saying much.

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>Sharteshane
>decent

Maybe if you enjoy getting shanked in the street while taking a shit.

Turas was Madishanian not Crescian.
There are only two "races" of humans in Kasslyne
White people descended from the Tains and Black People descended from some culture I can't seem to find the name of in the wiki, everyone is descended from either one or a mixture of both of those groups.

Four letter names is specifically a crecian thing stemming from a superstition related to a historical anecdote from when a past queen decided to send relief aid during a famine only to people with four letter names.

You'll notice I mentioned that doesn't account for much, Shartshane is merely better than Alderode and Cresce not good by objective standards.
And really they only get that much because Shartshane has the decency to not care at all about it's citizens rather than try to impose dictatorial restrictions on it's population out of a misplaced sense of morality.

Dhampir neither her real name, nor is she a man.

I don't think the Shartes are much related to the Tains.

I wonder if Will's gonna stab a guy with a sewing needle before the end of this

>Turas was Madishanian not Crescian.
That's what I was getting at. Turas was Madishanian but phenotypically he he looked "Crescian" enough. So Dhampir could be that. Someone who looks enough to pass for Crescian or a Crescian like Jivi who ended up being born somewhere else and thus outside Cresce's cultural influence. Though of course Toby idolizes Cresce, so not quite like that.

Or maybe they're Crescian and just hate the place. Or hated being in Cresce while cool shit was going on over the border and wanted to come back to get to the real fun of civil war.

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IIRC Ashley said that shartes were heavily mutts with some degree of tainish ancestry

Well we know Roger survives past this point. And the khert fire's still going, so there might not be an opportunity for Duane to try something until there's quite a bit fewer rebels around them. He might even be able to convince the salt lizard to help them at that point.

You're supposed to say what's with all the niggers.

>Though of course Toby idolizes Cresce, so not quite like that.
Oops, though I fixed that. Don't know why I was mixing up Toby and Jivi, but that's what happened until I double checked. And then didn't catch it the second time there.

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surprisingly chipper meeting even though they just(?) had a skirmish where a bunch of their plat kids died along with a cave in.

Plats die all the time, user. That's what they're for.

But just like Cresce, don't get all taken in by how seemingly okayish they seem so far. Everyone in this story has their darker side, inextricable from who they are and what they want. They were using child soldiers just the same as the loyalists, and probably just consider it the way things are.

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Which caste has what lifespan again?

I have never read this but that last panel is ridiculously cute. I'm intrigued. But the art and dialogue reminds me of Oglaf and I don't mean that in a good way, since it seems to be played straight.

Coppers up to 400
Golds are normal
Plats up to 25

Red Santa Claus is old as hell and talks weird because of how goddamn old he is. But the comic isn't shy of words. Go read it and find out if you like it, it's free.

Roger looks so happy and optimistic now compared to when his mind has melted away. Present day, I bet a part of him severely regrets ever taking part of the rebellion

Who let the anarchist in?

The most important point is that every caste grows up at the same rate, so that doesn't really matter here if the idea is a shorter lived caste might have "grown up to adulthood" more quickly. Dhampir would've taken the same amount of time to age to adulthood like everyone else in Alderode. It's just the longer lived ones continue on in a slower adult aging period and shorter lived ones quicker. In fact, it's the post adulthood aging that separates the lifespan of the castes. The Plats basically fall apart biologically, their internal organs going through a process like rapid rotting, apparently, around their mid twenties. We don't know how the other slightly short lived cast, the silvers, age and die naturally. Probably just a quicker version of normal human aging, unlike the Plats' crazy deaths. Everyone else definitely ages normally, just stretched out. Except the Coppers, who start getting redder, and I think bigger or more swollen or something? Something kind of crazy, I recall.

Anyway, that's what makes the Plats so tragic and why Alderode has turned to using them as child soldiers. They spend most of their life as children. Once they're grown up, they have only a few years before they die. Quite horribly.

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That's just the best option of places we know much about. If you want the real best places to live you should pick a country with light Crescian influence. Largely peaceful, protected, not batshit insane, low crime rate. It might be a bit backwater but when your choices are between two completely insane countries, a crime filled shitthole, and somewhere uneducated, what would you choose?

Plats may reach 30

This is one of my favorite pages, and a bit of a spoiler, but a good example of how the comic handles different characters, dialogs, and interaction.

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This one's also pretty good.

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Still wonder how the plats are even in a stable population. In medieval times women had to have an average of 5 to 6 children just to keep the population stable due to child mortality. Child mortality due to diseases may be much lower in Alderode, but when you send those plat children into wars it may not be much lower. So each plat women on average probably has to pop out around 4 kids. They have to breed like crazy.

It's a great comic. High fantasy with a lot of world building, an insanely fleshed out magic system, political intrigue, compelling well fleshed out characters with great interactions, and a great author who interacts with the fanbase. Give it a shot and see what you think. You might have a bit of trouble getting through the early chapters if you don't like how this character talks at the beginning, but her mannerisms gets toned down fairly quickly so I'd say it's worth sticking through.

Have we heard about this "etalarche" before?

Yes, in this very chapter.

Plat society is heavily controlled, from what I recall. They tend to live in all Plat communes where everyone is raised together and a local council makes sure everything operates smoothly, given how short their adult lives are. All plats are paired up to make kids, and aside from the whole child soldier thing, they're very well taken care of by the state from what I recall and given certain dispensations in recognition of their lifespans. But this comes with the usual flipsides of being seen as somewhat disposable because they're not going to live long any way. I don't know how many kids Plats are expected to have, but I seem to recall the Quigley side story implying he, his wife, and Matty were somewhat odd not only for her insisting on raising him at home but not having more kids to begin with.

Anyway, not all plat kids go off to war. Certainly not the girls, which matters more for population but I don't think plats practice polyamory anyway. And they're usually used as artillery, because of their extreme distance casting. Duane's group is a bit odd because circumstances have found them in the thick of it, it seems, but he's also pretty good at keeping them alive anyway.

Child mortality does seem much lower in Unsounded all around, presumably helped by their ease of addressing infection.

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>All plats are paired up to make kids
Ashley recently said that plats who serve as prostitutes are not, that they're either sterilized or get abortions so as to prevent intercaste babies.

I mean they outright threatened to knock over Sharteshane by stirring up the local religious nutjobs into a holy war.

How to spot a speedreader

Guilty as charged.

I've found the page where Duane mentions it, but there's no explanation of what it does. I suppose we'll find out by the end of the chapter.

keep an eye out for some pinups

We all know what it does

No we don't.

Maybe if you'd read anything, you'd have noticed it in this very thread

Eh, I've seen better bait. Still, have a (you).

How would (you) know? You clearly can't read

The Etalarche curse is distributed through the Aldish dammakhert and makes everyone connected to it (all non-Soud Alds) react towards the chosen victim with irrational and violent hatred.

Since Vampire implies that the rebels were involved in the decision to use it, it seems that they want it to be distributed while Roger is located in this no-cast zone. Since being surrounded by Aldishmen when the curse is used would be a REALLY bad idea, they clearly have something else in store that involves the salt lizard. Perhaps they've figured out some way to manipulate the curse or fuck up the dammakhert itself.

Everybody who read this entire chapter should know what it does, the only way you wouldn't know is if you started reading less than like ten pages ago

Thank you.

Ashley keeps talking about how much of a nice guy Roger is, and maybe it's just because we've only seen Cresce's dirty laundry so we don't know how horrible the Coppers are in actuality, but I can't find any sympathy with what they're doing. The Foi-Hellick Rebellion is just one noble family getting pissy with the rest because they got charged with running the Shit-Pit, and now they want more than just fabulous wealth and a private fiefdom; they were denied it, they threw a fit, and now they're running to Cresce to escape the results of their actions. Vampire, sure, yeah, I totally get where he's coming from. I find it hilarious that Alderode is "statist" and Cresce is not, but I get where he's coming from.

Roger? I have no sympathy for him, especially given that he's teaming up to destroy Alderode at a fundamental level so Cresce can dominate the entire continent de jure. The entire thing comes off as
>If I can't run Alderode, nobody can

My initial thought was that the plan was for Roger to just enter Shaensigin somehow, and be physically carried across the border in her. We know that Senet Beasts create "null-fields" where the Khert acts fucky, perhaps the plan is to put the vampire in a coffin? But then, why go to all that trouble if you could just tell all Alds to fuck off and have Crescians ferry him around? Yeah, he could get blown up by a Plat from twenty miles away, but then that could happen without the curse.

I don't see how not wanting tyranny makes you an anarchist

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It seems like in Kasslyne you either have your pick of religious intolerance, sexual/racial intolerance, or getting robbed blind for the clothes on your back by filthy sharte children.
Even pacifistic Ulestry is apparently a gefendur fundamentalist nest of religious extremism.

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Right now it seems like that, but I'm sure we will get more of a better reason from Roger some time soon

I'm explaining why the OP thinks they look like LARPers. Because they look like fucking LARPers.

I mean, this is largely true of the real world. There's no place on Earth that doesn't have it's own fundamental, societal problems that can seriously fuck you if you're the wrong kind of person. Ashley mentioned she'd prefer Cresce personally, but that's because Cresce wouldn't mandate she be almost literally barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen all the time. The person Ashley is wouldn't get very far in Alderode, but might in Cresce. But in Cresce if you want to do your dream job, you have to be the best of the best. And I can imagine that, just like in real life, the "meritocracy" thing ends up being less pure than one might hope. Regardless, Ashley as she is now would have a better time in Cresce than elsewhere. She's certainly skilled enough to go far, and even then there's got to be scut work jobs crafting glamors, which would be equivalent to her earlier

Alderode's also about to get super fucked by civil war and has that whole "deadly plague spread by eye contact" shit going on, so it's a bad place to be in general. For me, being a middle class scholar might be okay in Alderode if I don't end up rolling the dice and getting some shit caste. I wonder what archaeology is like in Alderode. I think Ashley's mentioned people are always trying to rediscover Tainish terms, since this is the only way to actually expand what you can use Pymary on. Theory lets you use it in better, more creative ways, but you'll never be able to cast on or straight up do something without the right word. I might get a cushy job with the skills I have, either in the field or academically, especially if my family background, also fairly middle class, highly trained academics and professionals, was transplanted over too. Ashley unfortunately would be saddled with the family circumstances that would most promote Alderode's overbearing religiosity coming down on her, and that's with either of the religions.

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>be equivalent to her earlier
her earlier freelance work before she went full time on Unsounded. Forgot to finish the thought because I couldn't remember the word "freelance."

We still have a lot of blanks about Roger's motivations and you've filled them in with "so Cresce can dominate the entire continent de jure". I doubt very much that's how it'll end up.

What if, for instance, he doesn't really care about Cresce but only wants to see the dammakhert destroyed (despite the fact that he and his ilk benefit from its existence longevity-wise more than any other caste)? I double dog dare you to think of a way to do that that doesn't involve all of Alderode's politicians having a sword at their throats.

>all of Alderode's politicians having a sword at their throats.
And then what? If he doesn't want Cresce to dominate the entire continent he has to bat that sword away, and it seems unlikely with a freshly destroyed dammakhert, his rebellion extinguished, and himself dead by snake holes.

The point I'm making is if you want to destroy the dammakhert you have no way to do it OTHER than going to Cresce. It's a consequence, not the goal.

Are you Ashley trying badly to be Anonymoose, or just an Ashley stalker?
If you are the former, coming to Yea Forums is a mistake.

imagine being this new

I don't know user you sound pretty new if you don't know what Ashley comes here sometimes

Did Ashley draw this?

Been here longer than either of you, and I'm well aware she's dropped in on some threads. In fact in the last one she was telling this cringey bullshit about being "asexual", not uninterested in sex, but horny but not for real people.
It was stupid and sad to read about.

I figure maybe she's going anonymous just to avoid being creeped on, and figured maybe that user was Anonashley because of the autistic amount of "ashley thinks this, ashley thinks that, what ashley really believes is this...".

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Are you one of those dopes who thought everyone in medieval times was some ripped god on the battlefield.

I like how you illustrate the sort of scumbag you say she wants to avoid.

You would think they'd better be pretty fucking super-athletic since the battlefield features actual gigantic monsters and super-wizards.

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EXACTLY my point.
Yea Forums is wall-to-wall scumbags, perverts and autismos. There's nothing of value here for actual content creators, unless they want to indulge themselves in the general degeneracy of the board. Trying to build some stupid premise of being "sexually untouchable and remote" is just silly.
Be a channer or fuck off. Don't hang in the Ocean of Piss and act like you can't get wet.

Oh and if you aren't Ashley, stop with the gigantic posts where you try to sound like her fucking biographer.

jesus christ you really are new as fuck

You can keep chirping that as often as you like, I honestly don't give a fuck.

Funny enough these are probably the most autistic posts in the thread

I want to hear more from the underage retard who thinks that "Akchually, medieval wafare..." applies to a setting where weaponized 7 yr olds can atomize you, and people have flying dragons and mecha.

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Holy shit user fuck off

>posting to only say "I DON'T CARE"
holy shit, you are boiling already.

>sexually untouchable
hmmm
I wonder why user is so upset with ashley all of a sudden

Hmm I like the artist use of colors. It's a free comic, who blames her if she experiments a little ?

Lord have mercy on me and spirit me away to Heaven where I need not look at more posts by a 20 year old electionfag defending his cool epic secret club

Still don't care. Are one of you going to say something insightful about this comic, or just pathetically white-knight yet another content creator you don't support in any meaningful way?
I actually buy her work (I can prove it if pressed to it), and don't need a comic book gf. You just beta-orbit her. All my other points still stand.

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Again, perhaps its just because we haven't seen how the Coppers feed Plat babies to the Dhammakert to keep it running, but I don't feel that wanting to just outright destroy thr Dhammakert IS a "valid" motive. Not in the storytelling sense, but in the moral sense.

Maybe that'll change, however. Knowing Ashley, I'll probably make a post a year from now confirming my 180°, but for now that's how I feel.

Smells like projection

There's simply not enough factual information of how things are the way they are, on a political or supernatural level, to assign any culture the "bad guy" label except for a few exceptionally sociopathic individuals in those cultures.

It's all just allusions to this and "my people's interpretation of the facts" that.

It makes it kinda impossible to root for any one society, since they all feel forced into acting in outlandishly extreme ways (to us), and we have really nothing in the way of facts to support any of their justifications for it.
You can root for individual characters but not Cresce. Only the writer has the actual histories, and of course is only going to reveal dribs and drabs of it as we go. And could re-write it at a whim in any case. I guess that's why I find the politics of this setting the very least interesting aspect of it.
There's no way to actually get the Big Picture, it dampens the intrigue.

Oh and of course since the setting is super-super-magical, any sort of crazy, unlikely explanations are possible, and anyone could be wrong or right, so there's little chance of piecing anything meaningful together.

This is why JRR Tolkien didn't write all this political crap into his works, and GRR Martin just sticks to plain old backstabbin and fuckan.

cool blog

I could go back to troll-posting, if you prefer, and you could call me a new-fag again, if that's your level of conversation.

But honestly the main interest of the story is "who fucked over Duane" and "What is Sette's Dad up to" and not a lot else.
All this wacky intrigue with tertiary characters we don't know feels like padding. I really don't care to explore political shenanigans or Sherlock Holmes mysteries where people can cast Alter Reality. There's just no way to guess.

Ashley could just introduce yet another inscrutable supernatural beast like Titty-bird who's SUDDENLY THE BIG BAD! and ok whatever. Can we get back to Zombie Dad and Wicked Daughterfu adventures pls?

>It makes it kinda impossible to root for any one society
One society is a bunch of freedom hating commies. The other isn't.
I don't see the issue you're having

The very idea of communists vs capitalists in a setting with this High Magic level is cute and silly.

ok cool man be sure to let me know next time you have an opinion

Plats to 30
Bronze can vary
Silver to 50
Gold to 70 (as Alderode understands)
Jet to 250
Copper to 400

Funny enough that was basically the plan for Uaid before the government caught wind of things Vienna was going to give Uaid, with its field spreader in tow, to the March to act as a safe zone for the March’s leader(s) from Dammakhert dangers

Incorrect

>Incorrect
Ok, I just read the comic, I don't follow her blog or personal note-drops.
The comic doesn't really give you much of a sense of why anyone is doing much of anything besided generic consolidation of power.
Some people hold that the Gods are X, other think Y, and people are trying out odd caste or socio-economic systems.

If you have to sit in chatrooms with the writer to get an idea of the WHY of things, they need to spend less time in chatrooms and more time writing?

These threads have been going on for years and nobody seemed to have much of a problem following everything until your enlightened ass came along while searching for some capeshit movie in the catalog and told us all why a thing is bad.

You may need to re read sometimes to absorb more but I really can’t think of much that you can pick up on comic alone
Excepting the recent bit of tacit casting apparently being orders of magnitude rather than we assumed. She didn’t really get that across

I'm just observing that your explanations for things seem to heavily rely on a source that isn't the actual comics.
Movies that require you to read a book to follow the story are also bad, since you bring up movies (for some reason).

Like what
Also he explained precisely why he mentioned movies you illiterate goon

>since you bring up movies (for some reason).
because you act like a nu-Yea Forums subhuman and movies are all they care about since reading is hard

You can read the side stories also hosted on the site though. They may help with some stuff.

Don't bother, he won't bother to read it since he's just stirring up a shit soup

Today's thread makes me sad. Usually everyone gets along and Unsounded threads are positive and fun. No one even asked what's with all the niggers :(

It's just one literal autist. I doubt he'll be back next thread.

Vampire is too sexy. He distracted from the arrival of those Crescians

But hey, Cute Uncomfortable Will faces still on point

>Gold to 70 (as Alderode understands)
Gold don't have unnatural lifespans, they live normally.

What's with all the niggers

It’s probably the “normal” human lifespan with Aldish lifestyle, interpreted as the Soud maximum

I say this out of pure selfishness but if you scroll through, Cope, and see the guy wanting more Sette and zombie dad, know that I'm the opposite. I'm loving this war chapter, especially Lemuel and Claggart and seeing how Cresce and these rebels are working together. It reminds me of the US arming the Taliban against Russia. If you ever wanted to do more like this after this chapter I'm fucking on board.

Not everyone is going to like everything but I like this.

Unsounded isn't medieval; they have advanced magic driven healthcare

>Still don't care.
haha o wow. I think we found the source of global warming right there.

It's really refreshing.

I personally don't think Alderode is nearly as bad as people make it out to be. The consequences of dhammakert fuckery are severe and I feel like most people don't recognize how badly needed the caste system is. It's easy to say "oh, miscegenation laws? I don't like that in real life so I don't like Alderode" but Alderode isn't real life.
The caste systems of India worked well for them for millennia and made their society much more stable. What do you think would happen to modern American society if we all lived under the poverty line like premodern Indians? We can get away with unstable political systems these days but Alderode just doesn't have that luxury so it seems stifling by modern sensibilities. What's important is that it's a relatively civilized and safe place to live, and when they aren't entering a civil war it seems to be pretty alright.

Duane likes it so it must be a pretty sweet country to live in. Cresce doesn't seem that bad either. I think a lot of the people who rag on these places are just rich white westerners who have no idea what a real shithole country looks like.

Not him but that's mainly because a lot of readers in those threads are informed about the extra stuff in said threads from people who have been reading extra notes. If I never read these threads for context or asked questions I'd still be confused on some things.

Hell I remember a few people asking questions that were given in the comic and people weren't this rude about it.

Questions I had but never got to ask in last thread before it archived;

Why is Ssaelit against self sacrifice and what are the parameters of 'self sacrifice'? Like dying violently intentionally for the religion? Or fighting for the religion? Or even sacrificing yourself to save another person's life? It seems to be such a wide phrase and concept.

And considering that the highest caste seem to be more
Genefeder how does that not bleed into the lesser castes more/why aren't the lower castes more up in arms than typical uprisings/moderate unrest about it?

A lot of people like to show off that they read the supplemental shit and bring it up to bolster arguments or add context to what's happening on the page. The truth is it's not needed and the comic stands alone just fine without it. If there's something that's unanswered it's most likely either a mystery the artist intended, or not important.

Fiction is full of unanswered or glossed-over details. Sperging out over a webcomic is, well, spergy as fuck. That's the one thing I hate about Unsounded. Some of the readers are super retarded and read way too into shit.

doing the lords work thank yeh

Sette's my favorite and can do no wrong

I get the vibe of it being a sort of anti-Martyrdom clause of the faith. I feel like Ssael has a sort of Crom thing going on where he expects his followers to help themselves, not for his sake. Plus he has to stand in as the opposite of the traditional gods in order to be unhypocritical

I think this is really going to come down to your background. Not even baiting, but if you currently count yourself among the ethnicity/nationality that is "the default" of your country, Alderode is naturally going to be more appealing because its structural tenets are designed to favor and maintain that status quo.

Conversely, if you're a minority or a woman, despite Cresce's numerous issues, it's still more appealing if simply because it pays lip service to the concept of meritocracy. If nothing else, anything is better than being a woman in Alderode.

Overall though, I appreciate Ashley is capable of portraying two countries in a relatively even handed way. Usually most fiction just goes for the lazy "both sides are awful" route, but in Unsounded, both Cresce and Alderode are at least presented by both the good and bad actors of their respective nations.

Sharteshane too, sort of. Sette and her da are amazing people and they contrast with the evil bitch Anodyne. Still not sure I'd want to live there, it seems like a lot of work.

8/10

>And I can imagine that, just like in real life, the "meritocracy" thing ends up being less pure than one might hope.

You don't need to imagine. They have nobles and a queen.

No, no. It's ruined - it's disingenuous now.

Ashley posted about this a little more in depth recently. Ssael wants everyone to live as full a life as they can so that they can reach Him and all work together to remake the Twins' world into a world that's more humane and good. The tenant is against any form of curtailing your life unnaturally short and robbing yourself from experiences, so no suicide and no martyrdom. But it doesn't sound completely cut and dry either and probably open to a bit of interpretation by religious officials.

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None of the stuff you're complaining about is directly relevant to the story itself, it's background fluff for a unique fantasy setting where most of the pertinent information needed for the plot is illuminated within the story itself when required. There's avenues for interested parties to learn more about this world if they so wish but it isn't required reading to understand the story or characters and it's a better option than just pausing the story for copious amounts of lore dumps.

The story is self-contained, but the author's extra information can be used to make much more educated guesses about what will happen in the future. We're not supposed to know what the Dammakhert does by this point in the story but we can piece together bits and bobs that could give us a platform to guess at what it does with the extra info. None of that info is needed to understand what's happening in the story though, it's just fun for theorycrafters.

That's kind of my point.

I was agreeing with you, seemed more logical to link to you instead of him since I was building off what you said.

>And considering that the highest caste seem to be more Genefeder how does that not bleed into the lesser castes more/why aren't the lower castes more up in arms than typical uprisings/moderate unrest about it?
The Castes aren't linear like that, more horseshoed. The Copper and Plat have the highest status, but it's in different ways. The Copper are fabulously wealthy and super connected, but the Plats live in (by Aldish standards) opulent luxury from state/church welfare. Bronzes and Souds are actually the lowest castes, with the Bronze being mostly Gefendur. The three castes that get the most out of Ssaelism are the Jet (who are by genetics/culture sourpusses looking to improve the world), Souds (who are downtrodden and the same caste Ssael came from), and Silvers (Who have short life spans but don't have the welfare the Plats do).

As to the second point, because Alderode isn't that bad for most people. Most of Alderode's shittiness comes from its weird culture and the general bizarreness of the setting, not strictly because the Aldish state does anything. Alderode is a republic, and in theory everyone is equal before the government. The state government didn't make Lemuel join the army because Duane went to school, his ghers (essentially a super-extended family, a tribe) did. Sure, the Coppers run the show at the geopolitical level, but then who cares? They're literally bred to do that, just like Plats are bred to be inhumanly good Wrights. The non-Coppers have huge amounts of control over their own lives within their proper spheres.

Also, non-Soud Alds also have innate low-level telepathy (based on spell-capability), so they're really good at working out inter-Ald problems. This is part of why Souds are distrusted, because they can't do this.

Man, I can't wait to get to Alderode. All my favorite parts of this comic including the current chapter have taken place there. It's such a bizarre and interesting country.

Fair 'nuff

I tend to think that the amount of human diversity in a large area is mostly a function of travel distance. Modern tech has obliterated travel distance so we think of these things in a context of coming to terms with a sort of entropic decline of diversity.
Alderode has a seemingly tenuous situation where they probably couldn't support the amount of caste diversity without the caste system itself, but somehow they seem to have maintained it for millennia? That shouldn't be possible, it would theoretically only take one successful revolutionary movement for caste abolishment to undo roughly a millennia of genetic dhammakhert divergence. It's theoretically unsustainable and populations like the plats and copper theoretically shouldn't exist

Aside from religion, Alderode is pretty restrictive and kinda terrible. People are prejudiced against golds just because what they were born as, women are expected to be mothers and thats it, men are sent off to war as children, and forget about the gays.

The Castes didn't form over time, they are implemented by the Dammakhert. If there's interbreeding they all average out to be Bronzes but if non-Alds have kids in the Dammakhert the kid can pop out as any Caste. As long as the parents are the same Caste you'll get the same Caste, 100% that Caste. So if there was some revolutionary moment it'd fuck up things for a bit, but as long as the Dammakhert is still around 100% pure Castes would be returned in short order. The Dammakhert overrides actual genes.

Not to mention the castes change more than your looks. No one wants to have a child that will live a third as long as them. It's a strong incentive not to reproduce outside your type, revolutions be damned.

But we're talking about things the comic hasn't gotten into yet, which isn't fair for that poster.

>if non-Alds have kids in the Dammakhert the kid can pop out as any Caste
Wait that's true? Aren't souds essentially unmodified humans? Why do they still exist as a separate population?

They're special. They're like null values in the Dammakhert, they just aren't affected by it.

That's odder than I thought. And it also explains some of the prejudice against them if anyone born in the Dammakhert gets assimilated except for those weirdos, for some reason.

Yup they're very strange. It likely has something to do with them being ethnically Tainish but the exact mechanism of the Dammakhert ignoring them isn't known to us. Why does it ignore them? For what purpose?

Very strange.

They're descendants of the original Tains. While we don't yet have an in universe (or out of universe) reason for why they aren't affected, just that the dammakhert doesn't interact with them, it's probably got something to do with their Tainish roots.

Exactly. Which convinces me that Ssael, who was a Tain, was responsible for the Damma Khert, and he excluded his own people from it to protect them. I think it was an attack on the first Aldish men that fucked up and wound up helping Alderode instead of hurting it. Maybe he was trying to kill everyone who wasn't a Tain but instead it jumbled up everyone's lifespans.

The Tainish were the inventors of pymary, which still uses their language, right? Kinda makes sense that there's some khert fuckery involved with them. I hope we get answers to everything before the story is done.

But hypothetically, let's say this free love movement does happen at some point and a large amount of interbreeding happens for a few generations. Such a situation could easily make plats extinct and the only way to get more of them would be to import a group of people and segregate away the few kids that are randomly born plat, which would not be easy. It's just so much harder to raise those numbers than to lower them and if any given generation on average does more reduction than growth to the plats they should be an incredibly rare minority, like 1/6th of the immigrant population rare.
Coppers have the opposite problem with overbreeding which presumably is why they have a 2 child policy. If unregulated the caste spectrum would heavily skew towards coppers and it would be SO hard to unskew it. The fact that they can even implement their copper birth control plans without castrating near the entire caste is likewise crazy, though knowing Cope maybe they do just that..

I agree with your base idea but I do not believe the Dammakhert was created prior to the Aldish invasion of Tain. Tain was a pacifistic society and much of the Dammakhert deals with war and control over a population, something that Tain with only around 10,000 people wouldn't really have to worry about.

I think Ssael created the Dammakhert for the first King Rortide. Ssael and Rortide were friends and Ssael was the liaison between Alderode and Tain after their conquering. Ssael was a brilliant spell composer and if anyone could create something like the Dammakhert it would be a Tain very near the height of their knowledge, before their culture and country was integrated. So much of the Dammakhert has to deal with control of the citizenry, I think it makes far more sense it was designed by man, for man, instead of created by the gods or another natural occurring situation.

Ssael, being in King Rortide's good graces I feel could have requested his people not be subject to its power. They were small in number, not very warlike, and they were Ssael's people. They didn't need to be controlled like the other tribes.

That's my take anyway, there's a lot of the Dammakhert we still don't understand.

I have a similar view. We know the Tains were conquered, and in large part eradicated (and that one more of the reasons the Soud are isolated is that those more in touch with their roots are off on an island fighting for their independence against Alderode, Duane's surname was even changed to sound less ethnically Tanish, and that isn't uncommon amongst loyal Soud).

So I believe either in an effort to fight back against their conquerors or maybe in a sort of peace deal, they created the dammakhert. They wouldn't have wanted it to apply to their own people though, and so we're left with the Tains remaining largely the same all these years later.

I'm not sure but I seem to recall someone asking Ashley once whether or not the dammakhert predates Ssael. I don't remember her answer, but that could help lend credence to your idea.

Yep. It's also probably got something to do with why there's a higher proportion of tacit casters among them.

>Why do they still exist as a separate population
They continue to procreate. The Dammakhert doesn't CREATE Golds but it doesn't cause their children to be born as something else. They're basically wolves integrated into a pack of dogs. The Soud are differentiated from the original Tains only by time and being absorbed into the Aldish culture, and the other castes/rest of the world consider them Alds, even if they're not very well liked

>If nothing else, anything is better than being a woman in Alderode
But every woman we've actually seen that's from Alderode was extremely happy. Up until her husband and daughter were murdered, presumably

>But every woman we've actually seen that's from Alderode was extremely happy
3rd wave feminism doesn't respect homemakers or mothers and can't conceptualize the position wife being one of any real authority. You're not going to be able to convince other-user that Aldish women are just as important and equally capable of leading full, happy lives as aldish men.

It's not that Ashley made any particular statement in-comic. She's mentioned Leysa takes great pride in being a good gherswoman and has never wanted more
Jivi, Emil and Elka, they think Cresce and its ways are best in the world. Sette wants nothing more than to continue on the Frummagem lifestyle in dystentary robberyville in Sharteshane
It's from out own outside real world perspectives and preferences that shit's fucky

You should read that Vienne story, man. If Mikaila had lived I think she would have grown up into Vienne. And that woman wasn't happy.

Unless it's got pictures attached to it I don't read

There's a great deal of historical revisionism in modern gender politics and nothing Ash has written about the division of rights and responsibilities among Aldish men and women is without real historical precedent. Of course there will be Ald women who want more out of their place in society but other user intimated that being a woman in Alderode was worse than being a two-toe in cresce which is fucking retarded and only makes sense if you have no respect for the responsibilities Aldish women have to shoulder.

Clearly not

>In medieval times women had to have an average of 5 to 6 children just to keep the population stable

These people don't live in medieval times. The average wright can magically sterilize live tissue. That is an absolute killer app for healthcare, these people are healthier than you or I and their child mortality rates are probably Scandinavian tier.

What's with all the gingers?

The thing is it's much easier to derail a good thread then repair a shitty thread. I can attest to that personally

They have no soul. The khert won't take them.

When is someone going to draw this faggot's giant red cock is what I want to know.

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OH DAMN SON
Now that's some gooooood shit

I think you're onto something with the idea of control of the populace. Rortide was the head of a coalition of hundreds of disparate tribes; according to Ashley on either a tumblr post I can't find or a patreon post, the pre-unification period of Aldish history is known as "King Rotide and the Thousand Tribes." Maintaining such a diverse group of peoples with various long-standing rivalries and whatnot would be nearly impossible. Unless, of course, you can figure out a way to magically eliminate all preexisting ethnic differences (physical ones at least), and replace them with a new unified culture. Add in the castes to create a new hierarchy, and boom, you get Alderode. Tains, of course, are excepted because of Ssael, either because he struck a deal with Rortide, or because he snuck in an exception for his people.

They're less of a army and more of a cult terrorist group. They all worship Foi-Hellick like a savior not a king. We are told that the rebels get crush in a fair fight so they're force to use guerrilla tactics which we see like bombings, landmines, and ambushes.

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Actually they were doing pretty okay with Roger at the head
When he fucked off to Cresce for whatever reason that's when the rebels fell apart

PreModern India was actually more fluid in castes than people think because a sub-continent worth of people and politics didn't always match scriptures. It's not until the British started codifying who was explicitly what caste in an effort to identify who everyone was in a mostly stable political system did castes really become very clearly defined beyond the broad ideas.
Also PreModern India had a bunch of low-caste revolts, including a famous one which the India government still tries to suppress the memory of because of how embarrassing it was that some low-caste soldiers defeated an army of their "betters".

That's assuming the lifespans difference between casts aren't linked.

>What's important is that it's a relatively civilized and safe place to live
Hey, remember that chapter where a bunch of guys were talking about releasing Ebola on the general populace so they wouldn't lose some seats in the senate?

>unnatural lifespans
Yeah, on that note: reminder that members of the 'genuine' Aldish castes shrivel up, flake away, and die abruptly within a reliable 10-range based on their color regardless of their individual health.

The Dammakhert is some wicked bad mojo, and I can't wait for our turn to peek behind the curtain at the Aldish madness.

I don't remember that. I got to do some rereading.

Apparently Roger, despite being unable to do pymary and basically having super-asthma (though that hasn't come up in the comic I think), is a pretty great tactician.

Pretty sure they just meant that Cresce was better for any humans than Alderode is for women. Which I don't actually think I agree with, as Ssaelit are apparently pretty discriminated against in Cresce.
Not to mention that there really isn't that much difference between the Crescian state telling you to be a farmer and Aldish society pressuring you to be a housewife. Neither country places a tremendous value on personal autonomy.

>The caste systems of India worked well for them for millennia and made their society much more stable.

You are an evil piece of shit, lol.

Bruh they're a police state that can magically hunt you down for thought crimes

They might not even have been the inventors. Ashley hinted that they lived in close cultural contact with the agib, and maybe they taught them stuff.

You know I feel like the anthropology of this setting would be more interesting than the government politics

I know, I didn't imply they had high child mortality due to the same reasons as our medieval times. But sending your kids off to war as child soldiers must surely result in higher child mortality in plats than a modern developed country.

The agib weren't human though.

Well I don't know the fantasy equivalent for the study of human-nonhuman cultural development

The dammakhert doesn't just fuck with the khert or enforce the caste system, it also gives the state the power to monitor and remotely strike its citizens. It's pretty bad, honestly.

So let's get this straight.
Alderode is a caste-based society where citizens are separated not only by appearance but by life spans, where the most privileged live up to fourteen times as long as the shortest lived groups. While all castes are able to advance in society to some extent the caste segregation is enforced so strictly that you cannot even enter an area where you don't belong, intercaste relationships are strictly forbidden, prejudice and discrimination against certain groups is both common and socially acceptable, large portions of the population (primarily bronzes) live in slums and ghettos and are forbidden from entering the sheltered areas of the cities. Women are systematically barred from employment in most fields. The same system that enforces the castes magical police state that can monitor thoughts and strike its citizens remotely, where dissidence either means torture and death or being stripped of your identity, made into some sort of non-labor slave on a kussen farm, or (admittedly only very rarely) the target of a country-wide hate curse which even makes your friends and family turn against you.
And that's without getting into the religious schism or political situation.

And yet this isn't "nearly as bad as people make it out to be". Jesus fucking Christ.

Also,
>"Alderode isn't real life"
>defends it by using real life examples

Sorry for retarded, meant to reply to

>non-labor slave on a kussen farm
I think human battery is more appropriate of a term for what the kussen are. Don't they power the dammakhert somehow?

We don't know.