Virile Member
Hi.
(It was fascinating to learn more about the world of TPRPS).
In terms of historical awareness, the impact would be absolutely zilch. That's because they can be ordered to shut up, or lie, about what they witnessed. Each culture would just use them to further their own nationalistic narratives. Or even on the scale of one family, their house Rivari could "remember" that they were descended from kings, or gods, or be used to establish a spurious connection to a similarly named, prestigious "ancestor" - all things otherwise known as a Wednesday in Earth history. In short, little would change, with one important exception: largely apolitical records of eclipses, earthquakes and the like. With about 10000 years' worth of data, human understanding of astronomy, geology or ecology would have been far more advanced, more quickly than in our world.
Relatedly: Rivari= the ultimate wet dream of any historical linguist! Essentially, any linguistic reconstruction would start from a baseline that's 10000 years ago.
In terms or religion, I think that eternal life only really works as a reward if it exists only in Heaven. The contrast between the unverifiable eternal life promised to the faithful and the very much verifiable eternal life of the Rivari would be especially glaring. People would also come to associate immortality with slavery. Instead, the kind of hopelessly naïve folk theology according to which Divine Providence sends favourable events to reward you and misfortune to punish you would likely remain more respectable than in our world. Esoteric religions that offer the believer a path to Enlightenment during their lifetime while rejecting such "trivial" concerns as power, wealth, good health and a long life could represent the more intellectual and elitist alternative.
edited 23rd Jul '17 1:11:29 PM by InigoMontoya
"Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is 0x29a."
You know that thing where big-game hunters have stuffed trophies of deadly animals on their walls and/or in their sitting rooms? How many 'Riv-Rippers' are there in the world? (Bears and lions and elephants are also respected, but they're also prey to a certain sub-group of humans.)
Since the Rivs aren't plainly of a different race, would killing them be considered terrorism, murder, poaching, sacrilege, impiety, or something else?
Can a Riv be ordered to permanently incapacitate another Riv? And if not, why not? (You don't have to actually injure or kill someone to do this. Fortunato, for example, remained alive and physically unharmed for the duration of the story.)
Is 'Riv' a slur in some languages but not others? (Depending on the culture, you're saying someone - a human - is as slavish or omnipotent as a Rivari when you call them a Riv. Much like calling someone a 'Rhino' for their toughness or for their blind stubbornness - or for their particularly political affiliation.)
What is the difference between a Riv and an Asmovian robot? (And I don't mean in terms of what abilities they have in the setting, but in their use as a plot device.)
Will they attempt to complete Logic Bomb or quasi-impossible oaths, and will doing so prevent them from working on another oath? (If one of the oaths happened to be "physically build me a literal spiraling tower to Heaven, brick by brick!", or "develop free will such that you have no further need for oaths!"...)
...what keeps a Riv from assuming that the story they were told of their Unpersoned relatives is untrue? They would seem to have the ability to tell if someone is lying to them, through their sorcery, if that person claimed to know who their relatives are. (And frankly, it seems really weird that no one would be keeping track, especially when there are only a relative handful of Rivs in the world.)
I have a hard time believing that they would be anything other than state-kept weapons, but that would depend on the species. Tribalism takes over pretty quickly in humans, and in our society they'd be hoarded as nukes to be used or threatened with, their memories be damned.
Or - hah! - you know how AM is an... irate Rivari, basically?
Your friendly neighbourhood Regent
I'm not so sure that what Inigo said about the whole Rivari being used to further 'nationalistic narratives' thing.
Because if I'm reading this right Oaths can last the entire life time of a holding human, but don't really last beyond it. So all that needs to happen for a Rivari to spill all the sordid details of their former holders' lives is for their current holder to give the order 'tell me what really happened.'
And given that Rivari are functionally immortal and loyal until the death of their holder, but only until that death and then they're driven to seek a new master, that means that any romanticism about the past and the current regimes lasts only until the arrival of a new regime with no vested interest in glorifying (or demonizing) the previous regimes.
And with the existence of Rivari in other cultures, including ones that don't have a vested interest in presenting any doctored narrative, positive or negative, about other cultures, one would presume that people would eventually stop bothering to tell their Rivari to recount a doctored history at all, given that people would just be able to point to many different 'neutral' Rivari all remembering the same history.
In essence the presence of Rivari would probably lead to a sharply reduced amount of national posturing, (religious) mythology and culture heroes.
Since exaggerated stories where the whole world flooded or a single hero defeated an entire army alone would quickly be dispelled by a Rivari who has been verified as being ordered to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth explaining that:
No, it was actually just the valley that that culture's most important city was in that flooded and the parts of the culture outside the valley were pretty much fine other than a disruption in leadership that led to stories told by the later regime of the gods wiping the valley clean of the old regime to make room for them, which later transformed into stories of them wiping the world clean of all wicked people, but leaving the good people alive.
And, no, that guy was actually just a squad leader who had five of his friends with him and they didn't so much defeat the entire army as send one or two squads into a rout that led to the army around them retreating... And that, while it was crucial in this instance, that's actually a pretty common occurrence in warfare and it's just romanticised because that event is what gave that squad leader his start to later becoming general of the whole army.
The whole 'unpersoning' aspect seems, at the same time, both a bit overkill and somewhat ineffective for what you're trying to achieve with it (namely explain why they don't form their own society). Sure, the Rivari themselves wouldn't remember who their relatives are and who they've worked with, but the Rivari around them who are still under their old oath (or not yet under a new one) and the humans around them certainly would and Rivari who are bound to the same culture (or the same human family, institution or even person) would probably be required to work together often over the course of several oaths and if their oath holders don't die or release them from the oath at the same time, that would mean there would always be one or more members of a Rivari group that works together often who is able to remember for them. If you want to prevent them forming their own society, a better way would be to just say that they're (pathologically) incapable of forming emotional attachments with other Rivari. They'd remember who their parents, sibling and former co-workers are (and thus wouldn't inbreed with their sibling who would be likely to be nearby and done with their fifty oaths at around the same time), but they'd feel no more attachment to them than the average real life human feels for the plastic bag their groceries come in or the weeds they pull from their garden.
Also, not unimportant: What changes after the completion of their first fifty oaths, besides the one-off fertility?
Angry gets shit done.
Just a quick note: When I saw "immortals everywhere," I didn't expect a hard number of 50,000. To get a sense of scale, that's a mid-sized modern TOWN, or maybe a small modern city. Immortal or not, you wouldn't have enough of them to be "everywhere" unless they have mad teleportation powers or are heads of state, or some other elite group that makes everyone THINK they're everywhere.
I'd advise adding at least a couple of zeroes for five million, so you could realistically get "a home country of 2-3 million, plus a diaspora of about that number."
edited 25th Jul '17 12:39:57 PM by Sharysa
I'm alive! I'm just working full-time. Anyways, these are all awesome things to think about. Thank you! There's a lot I've left out of the OP for the sake of brevity, so I'll fill you guys in. Warning: there's a lot, so I folderized it.
The way that Robrecht put this is how I currently have it- you can't order your Rivari who to take their next oath with because orders don't last beyond the oath, so there's nothing stopping any Rivari from just leaving after their most recent oath ends. Wealthy people may have the resources to imprison their Rivari at the ends of oaths, long enough to make them go mad from the lack of servitude and willing to swear themselves to whoever will take them, but this requires foresight. In addition, several families with long-term Rivari have found that simply treating them like a person, and with respect is a cheaper and easier way to get a loyal family servant.
The linguist's wet dream: They're a hell of a linguistic resource, right? ^_^ Proto-Indo European is estimated to have been spoken something like 6,000 years ago, so having people around who can give you data from further back into the Neolithic era would be crazy. They also pick up new languages incredibly fast, so they make effective translators.
Religion and immortality: This is very cool, and it's definitely something I never thought about. There are other forms of immortality that are known to the public consciousness, but none of these other kinds prevent one from being killed- Rivari are the only known beings with Complete Immortality. And the stuff about the state of organized religion in Rietes is very interesting and definitely gives me some ideas.
Hunting the other most dangerous game: There has been a long-running conflict/etc. between Tefurea and Porint, two major regions of the world located in the southern hemisphere. Tefurea is known for giving Rivari intricate full-body tattoos to signify personal achievement and that also help with sorcery. Sometimes, Rivari living in the regions of Tefurea closest to Porint who stray too far from the cities without protection end up robbed and skinned by Porintean brigands, destroying their tattoos. They commonly do this more as a hate crime or act of terrorism than anything else. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of something like this happening in other parts of the world, but Porint is known for its terrible track record of Rivari rights, and by the time of most of my stories, it'd be pretty frowned upon.
Rivari remains are also notoriously hard to maintain- they draw in magical energy from the air. Rivari remains left outdoors have been known to make the areas around them unusually lush with life, sometimes even producing entire enchanted forests that warp the wildlife if the Rivari was particularly old/strong and their whole body was left. If you skinned some Rivari with cool tattoos, or a Rivari just donated their body to science and you don't have the remains preserved with antimagical materials, you might wake up to bugs everywhere, and moss or bacterial slime growing on the remains.
Rivari 'murder': Nobody has found a way to kill a Rivari in the traditional sense. The closest anyone has gotten to 'killing' a Rivari was a state-organized effort that involved heavy amounts of metallic iron, which is rare on Rietes and has potent antimagical properties that make it like kryptonite to Rivari, and slightly less dangerous than that for dynamism-using humans to handle. That being said, striking them in the heart with most antimagical materials will render even powerful Rivari unconscious for at least a few days, which would make the crime assault or property damage depending on the jurisdiction.
Rivari vs. Rivari: They could be ordered to incapacitate another Rivari, but again, not permanently or in any truly effective ways that a human couldn't also perform. You, a human, could incapacitate the Rivari yourself and get the same results. (Although there is a possibility that a skilled Rivari sorcerer could come up with some spells to use against their own people if they felt so inclined.)
Using words derived from names for Rivari as slurs/insults: Most regions of the world have their own names for the Rivari people in the local language, and most of them refer to them as the people of the sky, or some other heavenly entity. 'Rivari' is a particularly ancient name that's become popular in recent years when the Mialorian Rivari personhood movement appropriated it as a replacement for 'Sodra', a name that long ago referred to the highest class of servants until the Mialorian nobility started taking advantage of them. Slurs are difficult for me to come up with, but that's definitely worth exploring.
Asimovian robots: I've always thought of the Rivari as a mix between sci-fi style androids and classical Fair Folk. They are actually Three Laws-Compliant, but rather than feeling compelled to protect/serve humans in general, they feel compelled to protect/serve their oath-holder. As for how I use them in-story, they're used to explore a variety of things beyond the Asimovian notions of whether they should be considered people. The only other work like that that I'm familiar with is Detroit: Become Human, and that's not even out yet. Rivari are in some ways less human than the androids of that work- they're ectothermic, their hearts are crystalline organs that can be removed and swapped between bodies like hard drives, and their immortality and sorceric abilities set them apart. Although there are debates in-story about their humanity, the narrative never calls their humanity into question and focuses more on what all this crap does to them as people.
Impossible orders: A Rivari won't know automatically if it's possible to carry out a particular order or not, and if they're not sure, they could either dive right in and try, or ask questions depending on their personality. The fact that they have to swear oaths and carry out orders, however, is something that they have no doubt would be impossible to stop, and they'll say so. As for contradictory orders (such as "build a tower to the heavens" conflicting with "clean the house and cook my meals every day"), the default assumption is that new orders override older ones, but an intelligent Rivari may ask their holder if they'd be building the heavenly tower on a schedule, or would still like the old orders to be carried out.
Forgotten relatives: They'd have to know how to use their sorcery to tell if someone's lying, first. More to the point, they don't know intrinsically if anything they've been told about their families is true, because from their perspective, they may as well have never had parents or a sibling.
Hoarding your Rivari: Rivari do not inherently know much more than how to swear an oath, and the fact that they need oaths and orders. They require special and extensive training to use combat sorcery or fight effectively, so as I have it now, many regimes have historically not bothered. Except, of course, for Tefurea, which has its conflict with Porint driving extensive research into making their Rivari practical combatants, teaching them skills that attempt to get around the fact that the Rivari's magic will pass into anyone they harm and heal them in seconds.
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.": If you showed that movie (or Detroit: Become Human, or any other Earthen works featuring hard AI) to a Rivari or someone familiar with them, they'd probably keep expecting a cliche 'twist' that AM or the androids in DBH were powered by Rivari hearts.
Unpersoning others of their kind: It's intended to prevent the Rivari people from not only forming a cohesive identity, but it's also a- deliberately somewhat faulty -attempt at killing rebellions before they happen. There is an in-universe reason why this overkill method is a part of them that's actually pretty spoilery. And the part about potential sibling incest is also covered by them flat-out not finding anything remarkable about each other, while at the same time not buying blood relation as a potential reason for why they "just don't see each other that way".
The situation Robrecht describes of there being other Rivari to remind a former coworker about themselves is definitely something that could happen, except they wouldn't be able to jog their coworker's memory. Let's say that newly terminated Rivari sees the awesome landscaping work he completed with others of his kind on his way out- he may conclude that there must have been others helping him, but his memories will be too fuzzy for him to know exactly how many people were working with him, and who did what. Nobody would be able to convince him that these Rivari did it with him, not even the Rivari coworkers themselves. He may be able to deduce that they're telling the truth, and they may even give him a false memory of doing this work with them, but it won't jog the memories that he just lost.
What happens when they finish 50 oaths: As I have it now, outside of some abuse cases, they no longer crave servitude and are officially done for life, although they can swear oaths if they really want to, adding to their servant marks. One of the biggest things is that they can now take non-Rivari lives, even when under a post-retirement oath, which makes approaching some Rivari very risky, but also has the possibility of getting what is essentially a killing machine on your side. Compounding that is the fact that many have been known to become kind of odd and 'fae-ish' near the ends of their oaths.
Population growth: You guys have convinced me to have Rivari be forced to do multiple terms of fifty oaths of servitude, like needing to rejoin the 'workforce' once their grandchildren enter, and even needing to have children again at the end. Looking at historical population data for Earth, the human population hovered around 5-10 million 10,000 years ago, so upping the starting Rivari population to 100,000 would mean a Rivari for roughly every 50-100 people, which makes sense given the circumstances that brought them into existence. Ten generations later (roughly when most of my planned stories start), by my math with the new rate of reproduction, that'd come out to ~3 million worldwide with half of that in forced servitude, which makes them much more common, especially in a world that sits mostly at a 1920s level of technology. Then again... I'll probably be better off if I refrain from mentioning too many numbers in-story about this.
Recording immortals: The reason why there's few records about Rivari lines of descent and progeny is threefold, and relates to why it'd be hard to control large amounts of them as stated above- they forget their own names after every oath, a good portion of them travel between oaths, and their generations can outlast nations. Mialor, a super-advanced country to the north, has the most expansive records of Rivari in history because their (recently abolished) slave trade brought in a lot of them from around the world, and they use DNA and the resonances of their souls, which are as unique as fingerprints. Tefurea, which has enforced military service for all Rivari, is a distant second- they track Rivari by their tattoos.
Homelands and movements: I didn't make this clear enough in the OP, but the Rivari do not have a homeland- their first generation spawned in scattered evenly across the world. Therefore, their entire population is in diaspora, more or less. Although... there could be some settlements populated mainly with Rivari who are between runs of fifty oaths, for those who want to settle down with others of their kind instead of moving around with humans who they just don't understand anymore.
They do have personalities: Something else that might also not be clear from the OP is that Rivari, when left to their own devices and not micromanaged, will develop personalities that go beyond servitude just like any other sapient species. They can develop non-servitude interests and hobbies, form emotional connections with people outside their households, and as they get older, come to act in ways that aren't just cheery slavishness. Humanity would have initially become familiar with them as just odd-looking people with some slightly different requirements.
I do have some other concerns/thoughts about them that are semi-related to what I've answered here, but to keep this post from getting too disorganized, that'll come after this post.
edited 28th Jul '17 6:26:43 PM by CrystalGlacia
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
Jester of the Birbal Court
I way was going to say extreme prevalence of existentialism in human culture until I read the Servant Race thing.
The Prodigal Son returns.
I read the OP just to make sure I didn't lose anything, and while the "diaspora" and "lack of a specific culture" parts are pretty clear, I can't see anything that explicitly says "they have no homeland at all." That's probably why I got confused, sorry.
@Movie: Existentialism could become a fashionable philosophy in regions where a lot of Rivari happen to retire at the same time, like a few centuries after this occurs. But the Rivari would have to not move away from humans, and also avoid the regions that still hold superstitions about not interacting with retired Rivari.
@Sharysa: No, it's not a problem. In case there's any confusion, I'm bolding text not for emphasis in reading, but so it's easier to find topics when you're skimming.
Rivari in the military: I feel like if you really, really wanted to use Rivari for military purposes, you might get better results if you put them in support roles rather than trying to train them in combat. Most countries don't bother, since it's difficult to find resources for training Rivari in sorcery that goes beyond what skilled human dynamists can do. Tefurea is the only region that's pulled off combatant Rivari to such an extent, and they had a head start of a millennia-long conflict to figure out how to quickly train Rivari in combat sorcery. A different regime also took advantage of the Rivari's inability to kill and hired four of them as torturers, who would go on to use their sessions to fuel a seminal collection of works on human anatomy and physiology.
How this would have all started: The Rivari sort of just suddenly 'appeared' seemingly overnight, naked and unconscious, scattered around Neolithic-era Rietes. This first gen knew nothing of language or human ways- only how to swear an oath, the sorceric ability to telepath this desire without words, and that they need orders. They instinctively picked up on how humans behave so that they'd be more pleasing to those around them, with many doing things like eating and sleeping with their tribes without realizing they could avoid those things for the most part. All of this is the main reason I have for why the Rivari would be generally thought of more as humans who act kind of weird than as dumb machines that you put away in the broom closet, but I'm interested in seeing other ways that 'first contact' could have played out.
But if you really want a dumb machine: You can order your Rivari to never speak unless directly addressed, stand in the same spot all day when not carrying out another order, never feel emotion, never breathe (they don't actually require air) or seek nourishment, and never think about anything other than their current order. They'll do it, and you'll end up with a perfect tool that has all the autonomy of a toaster. Mialor is a far northern region that, around four Rivari generations ago, received a massive influx of people fleeing from conquerors who relied on their Rivari to help them carve out a new home, and whose Rivari played crucial roles in propelling Mialor into a post-industrial age. The wealthy and powerful of Mialor grew increasingly paranoid that they'd lose the source of their success, so they took away their Rivaris' freedoms little by little, for centuries, until they nearly forgot how to be people.
Some little psychological quirks: They have a subconscious desire to emulate those around them, especially their oath-holders- it's not uncommon for Rivari to change their handedness to match them. They often snap to attention when they hear their holder's voice, and can be especially attuned to feeling the resonances of their soul. Young Rivari will visibly crave orders from their holders. All of this can mellow out over time and replace itself with the aforementioned 'fae-ishness'.
Another cool (?) use for Rivari: Their tissues are packed with rivanum, a chemical component that makes Rivari blood, bone, and other body parts rather potent aitheroconductors. Discovered when people tried to burn Rivari remains, a good amount of their mass hardened and left behind a dusky blue-gray material that could hold and draw significant amounts of magical energy. Sure, there's other materials that are even better, but rivanum is renewable. Until relatively recently, all of Rietes's magitech was built on rivanum, and it's likely that it'll go on to power most of the world's infrastructure for many more years.
EDIT: Also fixed my folder because that's being stupid for some reason.
edited 29th Jul '17 5:29:14 PM by CrystalGlacia
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
Virile Member
Glad I could be of (some) assistance.
For the record, what I had in mind wasn't really large-scale, sustained cover-ups that are passed down from one oath holder to the next. More like suppressing things as they become inconvenient, like, for example, having once been allied to a country you're currently at war with. The temptation to "retcon" the memories of the Rivari would be very strong. In fact, now that I think of it, it's just a special case of a much more general problem: unless you're their master, you can never trust anything a Rivari says, because you can never knows who's really talking (them or their master). (Put like that, it's actually a fairly trivial observation.)
edited 29th Jul '17 4:28:06 PM by InigoMontoya
"Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is 0x29a."
For a brief suppression to work, there's still the issue of scale and the political implications of the gesture, if I'm understanding you right, as well as getting other people to do what you want to their Rivari. Some noble chooses not to tell their Rivari to forget about that time when they were buddies with the enemy- supposedly, after giving the order in court for you, he removed the order once they got home -they debate on whether killing the noble and taking his Rivari over this is worth risking a shitstorm, and baby, you got a political thriller going.
And the fact that any sworn Rivari could really be someone else's mouthpiece is a valid concern, but I don't think it would really be that common. Not that it would stop some people from taking everything they hear from a Rivari that isn't theirs with a grain of salt.
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
Your friendly neighbourhood Regent
I do feel that the way you've set it up, a Rivari society wouldn't just be possible, but inevitable.
For one at least some of the Rivari who are past their first fifty oaths would have a history of service that would endow them with the kind of personality that would leave them both disinclined to continue to be sworn servants and disinclined to associate with people whose memories don't also go back thousands of years. And having true immortality and, at that point, full free will, they will eventually find other Rivari who are similarly inclined to believe that only other Rivari really 'get it'.
For another knowing everyone else involved in the society you're part of isn't really a requirement for being part of a society. Just think: How many people in you country do you know personally? Or, for that matter, how many of the people on just your street? And, likewise, how many members of your family do you really know? For most of us, our ancestors past our grandparents, except for one or two great-grandparents if we're lucky, are as just a much 'unpersons' that we have no real direct connection with as a Rivari's parents are, but we're still significantly influenced by them through the impact they had on their children and grandchildren who had an impact on their own children and grandchildren, all the way down to us.
Rivari might not remember the other Rivari who influenced their views and personality, but that wouldn't erase that influence itself.
And then there's the practical matter that sentient minds are, by their nature, very adaptable. The 'unpersoning' effect might make it hard, or even impossible, for Rivari to believe the notion that a specific other Rivari from a previous oath is someone they worked with, but after a couple of oaths/generations of service they wouldn't need to believe, because they would know.
I mean, they still wouldn't believe and therefore still wouldn't know, that any particular Rivari was part of their past, but they would know, for a fact, that they forget every Rivari they knew during their previous oath. Therefore they would know it's not just probable, but even certain that if they remember working a job that another Rivari also remembers working on, they must have worked together on it, even if neither of them thinks they did.
The interaction between two Rivari who've met each other during a previous oath would sort of be like you meeting someone who was a the same fan convention as you several years ago. You might both be convinced you didn't see the other person there (even if, in reality, you both stood near each other in the line to get an autograph from your favourite actor and happened to sit in the same row during a panel), but you both remember seeing at least some of the same panels, the same cosplayers and the same celebrity guests. And you can still bond over reminiscing about that great quip that one voice actor made during that panel you were both at or your agreement that the runner up should have won the cosplay competition, because the actual winner's costume was obviously made by professionals, while the runner up clearly put a lot of effort in making their own.
And then lastly of course there's the human factor. We, humans, have a massive tendency for anthropomorphizing things that aren't, in actual fact, human and that tendency would go through the roof upon encountering something that is obviously not human, but acts in a way that we identify as being like a human, like puppies or kittens (who still act a lot like human babies/toddlers, minus the eventual element of speech)... Or like the Rivari would be.
But we also have a tendency to be xenophobic towards people who are similar enough to us that it makes our differences more noticeable.
Even if the Rivari themselves had no desire to form their own society or sub-culture, human nature would cause humans to make them form one or even several different ones regardless, whether that's the result of humans humanizing Rivari and feeling they, like us, should enjoy the same sense of community and togetherness among our peers or whether it's the result of humans 'othering' the Rivari and putting them on their own layer of a rigid caste system or putting them together into an 'underclass'.
But maybe I've missed the point and that's intentional.
Angry gets shit done.
I'm still not entirely convinced that a culture would develop among the Rivari quite to the extent that you say it would. (Although it is possible that it's just sounding extra-weird on paper.) That being said, the concept of a Rivari society intrigues me enough that there will definitely be communities here and there that are populated mainly with Rivari who are between terms of fifty oaths. In Mialor, when they still had their slave trade, there were even street gangs consisting of Rivari still in the midst of work terms who escaped and hide out in the depths of the underground poor districts, and whose oath and order requirements are sustained by human sympathizers that are bullied into not giving 'inconvenient' orders.
I suppose when I think of 'culture', I'm thinking of things like beliefs, aesthetics, oral traditions, practices, social orders, and technology (here referring to specific usages of tools, clothing, shelter, cooking, etc.), especially when those things are transmitted from person to person, and generation to generation. Forgetting about every Rivari they've ever interacted with is not the only factor preventing a culture from developing that's specific to the Rivari as a people- many Rivari, per widespread human cultural norms, stick close to their oath-holders in case they're needed (which cuts down on transmission), and most importantly, anything resembling Rivari-specific culture that manages to transmit would have its Rivari-originating status forgotten after one oath. If a Rivari came up with a unique prayer for a deity that manages to catch on with other Rivari, none of the others would remember they got the idea from a Rivari an oath later and may come to believe they came up with the prayer all by themselves.
◊
So in a way, they could come up with their own 'culture', so to speak, and even transmit it to an extent, but it wouldn't be a binding force for very large numbers of the Rivari as a people, which does achieve the original intended purpose behind unpersoning other Rivari from one's memories. It'd be a bunch of scattered beliefs, rituals, and practices that have no context for them, which they feel no particular attachment towards, and that are constantly at risk of being dumped and forgotten in favor of the oath-holder's culture. A culture could totally develop in the freed Rivari communities, but it'd be kept alive by people who swear uneven amounts of oaths (extra oaths beyond fifty sworn while one's children are in the workforce allows the parent's next term to be shorter), and lots and lots of newcomers, and the assurance that barbarians won't rush in and ruin it all in the community's infancy. It all ends up sending the message, to potential oath-holders and to Rivari, that their lives and identities will never be their own, they will never truly be comparable to a human, and their only constant in life is their skills and servitude record.
That brings me to why that makes Mialor all the more significant. (Which you helped me realize!) As the Rivari Personhood Act set in, they were urged to seek vocational training and higher education, propelling larger amounts of Rivari than ever out of domestic and agricultural work and into skilled trades and professional work. These skilled Rivari started living more and more in Rivari-subsidized tenement housing, away from their holders and with others of their kind where culture can transmit and grow, they entered mass media, and the internet helped them preserve their culture and communities. Sure, Mialor gets criticism from other parts of the world for not placing them on a pedestal and allowing them to squander their unique abilities, but they're finally in a situation that lets them build an identity, and in a culture that promotes their autonomy whenever possible.
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
I added a humanoid species called the Rivari to my constructed world, Rietes. I think I've worked out most of their physical aspects and some simpler implications of those, but I'm still struggling with the various effects these guys would have had on human societies, and potential reactions human societies have to them. This request used to be a general critique on the Rivari as a whole until my folderized list of information about them got to be over 4,000 words long, so I'll try to keep this focused.
To get some basics out of the way, the Rivari are a humanoid Servant Race that, to the best of their knowledge and what historians and archaeologists can discern, suddenly appeared near human settlements scattered around the world about 10,000 years ago, before the advent of agriculture. They have Complete Immortality, an extremely powerful Healing Factor, and are one of the only known species capable of wielding sorcery, which is theoretically limitless (compared to dynamism, the 'common magic'). Every Rivari that has ever lived is still on Rietes somewhere, either walking it or able to walk it again.
In many ways, they seem to have been 'engineered' to be servants, a duty they carry out in the form of a magical oath that each Rivari must swear to a non-Rivari sapient. They go mad if they try to get out of forming an oath or following their oath-holder's orders, and this doesn't end until the Rivari has carried oaths to fifty different people to completion, which can take centuries as it's common for oaths to last for the holder's entire life. This need for servitude means that Rivari spend the first several centuries of their lives unable to stray too far from their oath-holders, and subsequently human contact and societies. It is also magically impossible for them to bring bodily harm to anything they can swear an oath to (including themselves), even though they can't swear oaths to each other.
There's no such thing as a Rivari 'society' or 'culture'- in those aspects, they aren't much better than animals, united by biology and a shared magical and psychological need for servitude. Rivari are completely infertile until their required fifty oaths are complete, and they will only produce two children before going infertile again. Adding to the Servant Race aspect, whenever a Rivari ends an oath, any other Rivari they might have interacted with during that oath essentially become unpersoned from their memories. Rivari children who swear their first oath forget that they ever had a sibling or parents, and Rivari adults forget all interactions they've had with others of their kind, destroying any chance at a unified Rivari culture or identity existing for any longer than a human lifespan.
Now, here's the meat of their general quality of life, the part that I'm having the most trouble with.
Despite apparently being geared to be happy with even the worst forms of slavery, the fact that Rivari are compelled to follow orders to the letter, will do whatever you show them exactly the way you want it done every time with no learning curve, start out with a boundless desire to please and be of use, and can work ceaselessly on half the amount of sleep humans require without any physical nourishment or rest means they're generally well-respected.
Most societies, at one point or another, have treated or still treat them as gifts from the gods and take proper treatment of them by oath-holders as seriously as Sacred Hospitality. (The definition of 'proper' Rivari treatment differs from society to society.) A number of Rivari have worked as archivists, record-keepers, historians, or have at least provided data for historians. Impeccable procedural memories of languages and day-to-day practices of peoples from centuries ago are the norm among Rivari, and with most, this extends even to memories of events they've lived through and participated in.
So, here's my big questions. I realize that a lot of these are hypothetical, but I'm pretty out of my element with changes that run this deep in society. Do you guys have any ideas for aspects of their lives that I've missed? I'm mostly asking for ideas so I can fill them out more. Since Rietessian human societies pretty much grew up with these guys, how might societies be different? What would really be different about Rietes with so many people around who have witnessed so much history? Just trying to make sure I haven't missed something that'd be big and glaringly obvious to any anthropology or sociology enthusiasts out there. And of course, if you have questions, ask away.
edited 26th Jul '17 7:49:47 PM by CrystalGlacia
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."