Friday Lulz!

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Aaaalright fellers. How was your Thanksgiving, then? Did you massacre the poor bird, eh? :)

So. Today's Friday LULZ thread starts with this.

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Try not to laugh if you can!

"Ten-ten".....
 

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I get what you were trying to say now, and this stuff has already happened long ago by the time the actual events involving the Empire starts. The stories are set post a bloody civil war that's more the Taiping Rebellion than the US Civil War *caused* by all of this. You might say that from the point of views of the actual tales it's ancient history.

You might say that this is akin to explaining more of the nitty-gritty of the background. I might note that the Empire by the point of the tales is over 40,121 years old and has a lengthy sequence of multiple civilizational cycles akin to the Chinese dynasties. The events here are a tiny pittance of an Imperial history that's quite long.

The rise of the AIs has actually nothing to do with slavery in the Imperial fashion, which has a lot more to do with the idea of creating supermen. Then they decide they can up the ante with the supermen, and then they end up with a full-fledged God-Empress Eldritch Abomination after 6,000 years of experimenting with it.

The Empire's rulers have absolutely no desire for Kid Marvelman-style scenes in their cities and when one such scene does happen that's when the Architects of Fear are outlawed. They just keep on doing things due to things like bribery and the difficulty of administering entire planets to root them out. Until their plans Go Horribly Right.

And in any case the Imperial Civil War is by a guy who wants a monarchy because he considers the established diarchy illegitimate due to Imperial dynastic law but it's a Freedman general who is a lot more Ulysses S. Grant than anyone else who finally puts the kibosh on him.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that the Empire is far from a bunch of Mary Sues and in fact they end up really, really buggering the first time they try to fight off an alien invasion, sending troops into a position they couldn't defend against an enemy whose mentality they were entirely unprepared for. The result is that the Imperial force sent is completely annihilated and the Empire spends a few generations under de facto foreign rule of aliens fleeing Lady Death, an immortal kind of Fair Folk who happens to be blond and likes white dresses and is a thinly-disguised expy of a Galadriel from a world where the Elves lost. And who due to immortality became a monster.

And of course the empire also botches what was intended to be a simple repression of the rebellion that happens before the actual stories do, the result turning into 40 years of multi-sided civil war that finally ends after another 50 of small-scale guerrilla warfare by diehards of the losing side.