Headscratchers / The Sea Beast

• How are Jacob and Maisie able to view the outside of the sea through Red's nostril without getting hit by the water?
  • The Red Bluster has a transparent membrane that blocks her nostrils when she submerges. We see the membrane receding when she emerges again.

• What was the specific objective of the royalty by manipulating the people and investing on the hunt of sea beasts? Maisie rightfully points out their greed, but their exact motivations aren't clear. Is it creating more commercial routes?
  • The implication is that they want to sail to further lands and expand their influence into a empire. So, more commercial routes and colonies.
  • But what does it have to do with sea beasts? Is it implied that they attack passing ships on a general principle? Because if they do, well... it's kinda hard to blame humans then, isn't it? Also, if sea traffic is threatened, then why even lie about destroyed cities and such? What is the implication here, that if not for "propaganda", humans would've simply abandoned seafaring altogether, and that that's what they should do? That seems to be what Maisie's conclusion is about, but how is that supposed to be compelling? At the very least, the shown society is multi-racial. There has to be inter-continental communication for that mixing to occur. And what about trade? Is it also supposed to be an evil tool of greedy monarchs? As for colonialism, that's evil, sure, but if that's the true goal, then it strains belief that the desire wouldn't have been shared by anyone except for the monarchs. A lot of people would benefit from exploiting colonies, are we supposed to believe there wouldn't be enough opportunists to become hunters without bothering with invented stories?
  • The general implication is that the sea beasts generally linger around the proverbial "edges of the map" and only head out further into human conflict when humans encroached in their dwellings, causing them to dispute territories or beasts to start actively attacking human communities/ships out of instinct. There are obviously routes that they can (or could) travel without sea beasts given that the setting seems largely made up of connected islands with a shared culture, the Beasts mostly block some routes. As for why the monarchs bother with the pretense, that's how colonialism works in real life as well, there's always bald-faced-lie justifications ("bringing civilization and religious enlightement to the savages", "destroying the godless horde that threatens our very land") entirely spat out to coat colonialism into something more noble, as it's much easier to convince a population to fight for loftier goals rather than simply "so we can be very rich". As for the ethnic diversity of the cast, there's no rule indicating you can only have a multi-racial setting with interconinental communication (it's not even clear if the setting has continents, we only see scattered islands in the maps), particularly in a setting as fantastic as this.

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