History Headscratchers / CrestOfTheStars

* I know it's just artistic coventionality that exists in loads of shows(see WhatMeasureIsAMook) but that really got my attention because ''Crest'' is much more realistic than most sci-fi and military series in terms of character psychology and behavior. In real life, few soldiers(and Jinto and Lafiel are, without doubt, professional soldiers) actually shoot to kill enemy soldiers, and when they do, it's a pretty traumatising expirience, especially the first times. Now, take a look at the climax of the first series. While on the run, Jinto and Lafiel kill dozens of United Mankind soldiers and show no psychological shock from it at all. In the final scenes of the anime(or final chapters of the novel) they are happily chatting like nothing bad happened. Yes, they were defending their lives, but even in self-defense it's hard for ordinary person to kill another, let alone dozens of them, especially without any combat experience whic these two did not have. And they are not sociopaths - they are people with empathy and compassion who honestly hope that Abh victory will bring eternal peace for humankind and stop bloodshed forever. In contrast with the rest of the series, these scenes look like one ugly BigLippedAlligatorMoment.

* Why are the Abh seen as [[DesignatedHero Designated Heros]] - for all their non-interference after the fact, the Abh Empire is conquering all other space colonies to maintain their monopoly over interstellar travel, and the benefits that come with it. Not to mention the fact that the rulers of half of mankind were created by humans and murdered their creators in a fit of genocidal fear. So now these traitors want to 'protect' mankind and end war? And reason they aren't like war-loving humans because of their 'genetic superiority' that leads to mass murder? So the main character just follows along with these aliens just because he meets a pretty one? (I have no problem with this but that second part seems more in fitting with a just bugs me page).

*** The viewer is shown practically nothing of UM apart from its military so it's not really possible to say just how much nastier (if at all) they really are.

*** You can read the Peloponnesian War analogy both ways - it's unclear whether ideology (Abh as Spartans) or geopolitics (Abh as Athens) are the driving factors behind the assignment of the sides to their counterparts, or if something totally different is going on. That said, this troper is one of the few people rooting for the United Mankind, since (IMHO) the Abh are thinly-veiled Japanese revanchism and that's gross. Also, from a story perspective it's much more ''interesting'' if the United Mankind eventually wins, as opposed to a continuation and expansion of Abh hegemony.
*** The Ahb are like Spartans in other respects, Lacedaemon was set up with autonomous cities (planets) while the Spartans owned the countryside (outer space).

** The Abh are probably overly romanticized imperialists on screen (despite various hints of being willing to kill off populations, and a Hellworld prison planet) but the UM occupation talks about re-education camps and how they'll ban smoking and talk rather too much about being "democratic". Like People's Democratic Republics. Yes, it's the military, but "re-education camps" are never a good thing.
*** "We're going to spread democracy and United culture at gunpoint!" actually sounds like a slam at American international politics. (Not passing judgement here.)

* As much as I cannot believe that this series actually has one of these (honestly, enough people have seen this show for their to be a contingent who have anything negative to say about it? And for that matter, there are negative things to say about it?), I feel I must make use of it, because this has always bothered me. Authentic Baronh spellings. What. The. Hell. Baronh has its own alphabet, right? Then why is there also an "official" spelling using latin-characters, and why do those spellings not make any phonetic sense at all? Did Morioka make up what characters should be used in the English spellings and just randomly decide to do stuff like change ph=f to mh=f (as in Lafiel's name being properly spelled "Lamhirh")? It's not like there's--as near as I can tell--any in-series basis for what Baronh should look like in latin characters, and anyway isn't the idea when crossing alphabets almost always to recreate the pronunciation of a word (I mean, I know Chinese to English gets weird with stuff like this but even it isn't that bad)? So you shouldn't -have- to make up new diphthongs, because you may as well leave it in the original language if you're going to change the rules of pronunciation that govern the target language (mind you English pronunciations make no sense anyway but...). Anyway, does anyone know where all these official English spellings came from and why they're incomprehensible?

*** Furthermore-Furthermore if you actually stop to think for a minute it's not even that unreasonable. Most indications are that the FTL system they use seems to require a power density only anti-matter can provide. The entire economy is outright stated and shown to be based around it much like oil today, if that's the case... there are some pretty damn good reasons to impose highly draconian controls on all interstellar spacecraft! These go rather beyond any concerns regarding philosophy, and starts with things like the fact that basically every single FTL freighter in use is the flying equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb (at least!) if say simply pointed at a planets atmosphere and flown into it.

*** The Abh Empire ''is'' an oppressive state. Their stated goal is to rule over all of humanity forever because they're [[CantArgueWithElves just better]] and Lafiel at one point makes casual mention of ''burning off a planet's atmosphere'' as a method of quelling anti-Abh rebellions. And Jinto's whole conflict in Part III of ''Banner'' was finding a way to get Martine to stop rebelling because he knew the planet would be toasted if they didn't (Martine quite simply did ''not'' have the resources to resist the Abh, period). We just don't see much of that side of the Empire because the protagonists are in extremely privileged positions within it. The reason the Abh are still often seen as the "heroic" characters is because 1) a lot of the individual Abh are usually decent people, and 2) the United Mankind is [[GreyAndGreyMorality not really any better]], permitting no cultural freedom and officially seeing the Abh as outright ''subhuman''.

*** "We're going to spread democracy and United culture at gunpoint!" actually sounds like a slam at American international politics. [[InternetBackdraft (Not passing judgement here.)]]

----
<<|ItJustBugsMe|>>

** Well, this Russian troper sees some resemblance, but only slight. Here's basically how Tsarist Russian expansionism worked: if they arrived to a land inhabited by some primitive indigenous tribe, they set up some forts manned by Cossacks, put taxation on the locals but otherwise leave the local system intact; the tribesmen were included in the ''inorodtsy'' estate (literally, "ones of other birth") and as such exempt from army service or any other service to the state, only having to pay the tax; however, the important people were converted into Orthodox Christianity and legally considered Russian after that, sometimes with nobility included in the package. The Caucasus region became infamous for the number of princely families created from local chiefs. However, the Russians usually didn't arrive uninvited in regions with already estabilished statehood, and included such territories in their borders if the local rulers specifically asked them to (that's how Georgia and the Kazakh clans were annexed). After RedOctober, however, every ethnicity was granted semi-autonomous nationhood and allegedly full equality with Russians; some of these semi-autonomous nations were granted the Soviet Republic status which eventually allowed them to secede from the Union, and some were merely Autonomous Republics and stay such to this day.

<<|ItJustBugsMe|>>

*** Furthermore, furthermore if you actually stop to think for a minute it's not even that unreasonable, most indications are that the FTL system they use seems to require a power density only anti-matter can provide. The entire economy is outright stated and shown to be based around it much like oil today, if that's the case... there are some pretty damn good reasons to impose highly draconian controls on all interstellar spacecraft! These go rather beyond any concerns regarding philosophy, and start with things like the fact that basically every single FTL freighter in use is the flying equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb (at least!) if say simply pointed at a planets atmosphere and flown into it.

*** Furthermore, furthermore if you actually stop to think for a minute it's not even that unreasonable, most indications are that the FTL system they use seems to require a power density only anti-matter can provide. The entire economy is outright stated and shown to be based around it much like oil today, if that's the case... there are some pretty damn good reasons to impose highly draconian controls on all interstellar spacecraft! These go rather beyond any concerns regarding philosophy, like the fact that basically every single FTL freighter in use is the flying equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb (at least!) if say simply pointed at a planets atmosphere and flown into it.

*** Furthermore if you actually stop to think for a minute it's not even that unreasonable, most indications are that the FTL system they use seems to require a power density only anti-matter can provide. The entire economy is outright stated and shown to be based around it much like oil today, if that's the case... there are some pretty damn good reasons to impose highly draconian controls on all interstellar spacecraft! These go rather beyond any concerns regarding philosophy, like the fact that basically every single FTL freighter in use is the flying equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb (at least!) if say simply pointed at a planets atmosphere and flown into it.

*** Furthermore if you actually stop to think for a minute it's not even that unreasonable, most indications are that the FTL system they use seems to require a power density only anti-matter can provide. The entire economy is outright stated and shown to be based around it much like oil today, if that's the case... there are some pretty fucking good reasons to impose highly draconian controls on all interstellar spacecraft! These go rather beyond any concerns regarding philosophy, like the fact that basically every single FTL freighter in use is the flying equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb if say simply pointed at a planet and fly into it.

** Lakfakalle isn't a Dyson Sphere, it's a gigantic group of large spacestations that all orbit their sun together. If the group completely encircled the star, then it would qualify as a Dyson Sphere as Dyson originally imagined it (a vast "cloud" of artificial objects surrounding the star), perhaps, but they don't: they are described as most often being in a formation that resembles the blade of a scythe.

** Because you're CompletelyMissingThePoint? Nowhere in the whole canon it was said that Abh enforced "No Space Travel For Muggles," as you put it. Quite the contrary, being a spaceborne race that ''doesn't'' tax their subject planet, Abh are critically dependent on trade between them, as Freight fees and duties are literally their only source of income. It's just that they insisted that all traffic through the Empire must go on Empire-registered, and, preferably, owned vessels. Preferably, because there are a lot of cases when they didn't even require their subjects to surrender their ships. Being a ProudMerchantRace they respected vested rights, and when a newly-conquered planet turned out to have an independently-developed FTL, or was settled using it in the first place, they didn't require it to surrender its merchant fleet. They just formally transferred the ownership to the Empire, made all spacers citizens (instead of subjects), put a token observer aboard and required the previous owner to pay a (quite reasonable, mind you, given that they didn't require any direct taxes) rent. What they ''did'' take is any FTL-capable warship, and any FTL ship if the planet has bought the technology from someone else, though even in that case there were some compensations. Intra-system spaceships didn't concern them at all. Admittedly, a lot of people would resent this arrangement, but it's far less oppressive than the picture you're trying to paint.

** Because you're CompletelyMissingThePoint? Nowhere in the whole canon it was said that Abh enforced "No Space Travel For Muggles," as you put it. Quite the contrary, being a spaceborne race that ''doesn't'' tax their subject planet, Abh are critically dependent on trade between them, as Freight fees and duties are literally their only source of income. It's just that they insisted that all traffic through the Empire must go on Empire-registered, and, preferably, owned vessels. Preferably, because there are a lot of cases when they didn't even require their subjects to surrender their ships. Being a ProudMerchantRace they respected vested rights, and when a newly-conquered planet turned out to have an independently-developed FTL, or was settled using it in the first place, they didn't require it to surrender its merchant fleet. They just formally transferred the ownership to the Empire, made all spacers citizens (instead of subjects), put a token observer aboard and required the previous owner to pay a (quite reasonable, mind you, given that they didn't require any direct taxes) rent. What they ''did'' take is any FTL-capable warship, and any FTL ship if the planet has bought the technology from someone else, though even in that case there were some compensations. Intra-system spaceships didn't concern them at all. Admittadly, a lot of people would resent this arrangement, but it's far less oppressive than the picture you're trying to paint.