1): It depend in how much this effort to hide the truth was made, if it was efective then a hundred years is right.
2) I will said they will be a a best a slave cast and people will be belive it was their right on conquest and that slave race need to be slave otherwise they will rise again.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"Some considerations to make that I think are really important:
1) How is the access to information in your setting? If it's similar to medieval times, I think it should be pretty easy, since information is pretty scarce, and people only knows what "officials" or their relatives says. If they have access to books, news, internet or any kind of massive media, probably pretty hard to cover something like this.
2) How much control is done over the slaves? If they can have children, spend time with then and give them some sort of education, probably the thing would not be forgotten unless some pretty restrictive and punitive system was in place to prevent people to talk about it in any way.
![]()
@ unknowing: There is an immense effort by the powers that be to hide the truth, to the point that it is a severely punishable offense to study the history of the world outside of the version approved by the nation's Royal Government. The problem is that they weave this command into other more reasonable laws such as forbidding the study of magic (since it caused the disaster to begin with). The number of individuals who know even part of the true history are in the single digits and only one person at all knows the chain of events that led to the disaster and the destruction of the world.
@ Rod Warrior:
1. The setting is akin to early 1900s Europe in terms of technology, though there is some variation. For example cars are just starting to become an accepted method of transport, though trains and airships have been used for some time when the tale begins. Information is disseminated through books and newspapers, and the government heavily alters these to suit their agendas to the point where there is even a department dedicated to doing this. Ironically the disaster that started all of this happened in the world's equivalent of medieval times. That, combined with the fact that most of the civilizations present at the time were destroyed within two days means that there is little record of what really happened.
2. There is a large amount of control over the slaves. According to the nation's law, there is no such thing as a free member of that race; all of them must be owned by someone, whether it be a private citizen or the state itself. Every city and town in the nation has what are essentially publicly built ghettos to hold the slaves who either cannot be housed by their masters or who work for the state itself. They are allowed to have children but those children and families can be sold and transferred away from one another at a moment's notice.
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace
I had to look up a years-to-generation calculation to understand this one. As far as I can tell, ten is just a little over one hundred years? That sounds about right I guess. I may go a little over it, but that sounds like a good baseline. Originally I had it at about 300 to 500 years before all knowledge of it was wiped out.
I think that forgetting the truth could happen very quickly, as quickly as a single human generation growing up knowing nothing more than the official story (say, 20 years), and once established, changing the legal status of the slave race would be extremely difficult and long lasting, esp if there were some economic benefit from the enslavement (ie, a couple hundred years isnt out of the question).
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.I'm going to point out that if these people are a slave race, the idea that they're inferior is going to proliferate as an excuse anyway, and the idea that they are owed reparation for whatever the slave's ancestors did is going to be used as part of the justification for considering them inferior as well as potentially dangerous if they're not tightly controlled.
Seriously, when you've got a whole group that is literally slaves, then the whole sense of superiority over them is going to baked into the culture regardless of original reasons for the original action.
@ Aceof Spades I guess the reason I took inferiority out of the question was because the supposed reason for their enslavement would naturally cancel it out.It seemed more like fear and hate, if anything, would be what someone would feel towards those they think destroyed the world, even if it was that race's ancestors.
![]()
@ De Marquis This is a good point. It's especially apt since (in-universe) the enslavement didn't happen instantly but happened some time after the original disaster.
Edited by Swordofknowledge on Jul 8th 2018 at 11:42:56 AM
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar WalllaceAnd if buying into the system is more convenient than the alternative, then the average free citizen/slaveowner probably would have little incentive to question its moral or political background.
A good historical example is the aftermath of Caesar's Gallic Wars, which ended with the entirety of Gaul being ruled by the Roman Republic and millions of its inhabitants brought into slavery. Caesar entered the conflict with a pretty valid casus belli: the Aedui, a Gallic tribe allied to the Romans, was getting invaded by the Helvetii and the Suebi, and his legions counter-attacked those enemy tribes in response. And there was an existing hostility towards the Gauls in the Roman society: the sack of Rome by the Gallic chieftain Brennus was an important part of its foundational myth, and just fifty years before, a large host of Gallic tribes had staged another invasion that they narrowly beat back under the leadership of Gaius Marius.
But things were different this time around: most of those enemy tribes had been destroyed in past wars, and the ones fighting Caesar's army were only doing it either out of regional enmity with his local allies or to drive the Romans out of their country. And the folks back home likely wouldn't have cared about the politics on the ground either: all they knew was that their friends and relatives in Legio VII-X were suddenly coming home with hoards of jewelry and chaining up a bunch of people looking just like them and speaking a language not much different from their own, and hey, it's cheap labour for everyone. Gaul was subjugated, Caesar wrote seven best-selling books about his version of the events (effectively doing what your humans seek out to do in a few short years) and the enslavement of its people would go on unquestioned, even after the spread of Christianity.
(Admittedly things might have been different if the Gauls had been eight feet tall and had giant Wolverine claws, but you get the point)
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.![]()
@ De Marquis: Very good point.
@ eagleoftheninth: That was, if nothing else, an interesting historical lesson; I really don't know much about ancient Rome or Julius Caesar for that matter. You are right though; economic rewards and convenience can wipe away any thoughts of injustice, especially when your populace is convinced that they're not committing an injustice at all, but the opposite.
A bit of a side note, but was the eight-feet-tall-with-claws thing a reference to something? I haven't read Caesar's tales of the Gallic Wars, so was that some sort of embellishment that was made to the story? Or was it a whole different subject...? .
Edited by Swordofknowledge on Jul 8th 2018 at 1:29:17 PM
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

I asked this in Writer's Block, but thought perhaps it would get more traction here.
I'm reworking a story I'm writing and had two aspects I just wanted to discuss. In my setting, the world's human nation has enslaved an entire race. The justification for this action is that, centuries earlier, this race caused a magical disaster that claimed millions of lives and scarred the planet itself in a failed attempt to Take Over the World. However this is actually a lie perpetuated to justify the actions of the human kingdom, and the true history has been forgotten by nearly everyone.
My questions are:
1. What is the time frame that would cause the population to forget the true circumstances of how the system came to be? Current timing is several hundred years, but would it need to be longer or shorter? I don't want to use some sort of cop out like magical memory loss on the whole population, keeping this aspect more realistic.
2. The second is a little more tricky (and far more important): What would the average citizen's attitude be towards the enslaved race. Their servitude isn't based on a sense of inferiority as much as it is on "reparations" for their ancestors actions. I didn't quite think humans would be actively hateful towards them after all these years, but the whole point is that everyone thinks they murdered nearly the entire world, so...yeah. Ideas?
Edited by Swordofknowledge on Jul 3rd 2018 at 11:41:42 AM
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace