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ways_back_room2015-11-11 03:19 pm
yakalskovich) wrote in ways_back_room2015-11-11 03:19 pm
Entry tags:
DE: Rare items, poor folk, and the economy of Fantasyland
Please tell us something about the part the economic concept of scarcity plays in your characters' canons. Examples of (but by far not restricted to these!) an application of the concept would be:
I am fairly certain that most canons provide some sort of example for these, or other applications of the concept.-
Please ignore the numbers on my examples; the template for the bar and backroom automagically numbers all lists, even then the bullet point ones. Thanks!
- rare items
- valuable objects driving the story or quest
- importance of characters being poor or rich
- what is it that everybody wants?
- results of poverty in the world-building
- poverty or privilege influencing your character's childhood
- abundance and feasts
- black markets
I am fairly certain that most canons provide some sort of example for these, or other applications of the concept.-
Please ignore the numbers on my examples; the template for the bar and backroom automagically numbers all lists, even then the bullet point ones. Thanks!
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Sunshine began her life very well-off, as her father's family was quite wealthy. When she and her mother left her father, they had nothing. No money, no prospects, a now-single mother and a six-year-old child, living in a cheap basement apartment with whatever wards they could get (Rae still isn't sure how her mother paid for them) to keep Rae's father from finding them. They were often hungry. So Rae grew up in Old Town, helping her mother (and later, her mother and Charlie) to scrimp and save enough to keep them afloat. Even as a child, she knew very well they weren't the only family struggling, and she knew there were plenty of people worse off than they were.
During the Wars that stretched from when Rae was ten to when she was seventeen, the world economy collapsed, and a large percentage of the world's population was killed. Instead of "bucks," dollars started being called "blinks," because that's how fast they disappeared. Most major cities were heavily damaged, some abandoned, during the Wars, and even a city like New Arcadia which had relatively quiet Wars still shows signs of the destruction ten years later (barricaded rubble-heaps, crumbling pavement and damaged buildings), because there isn't enough money and aren't enough people to fully rebuild. Even a decade after the Wars, the major cities still have a kind of No-Man's-Land surrounding them, instead of suburbs. The idea put forth by politicians is that the world is slowly recovering. Through her contacts with Special Other Forces, Rae knows the opposite to be true.
Though Sunshine's own financial situation is less dire now than what it was when she was growing up, she is still existing check-to-check, with no real plan for the future. She isn't putting much back in savings, and the idea of saving for retirement is a pipe dream. Even so, she still cares for those less fortunate (the local Old Town derelicts know to come to the coffeehouse's side-window at closing for whatever didn't sell that day) and has a dislike and distrust of the overtly wealthy and people in civic authority.
In Sunshine's world, there is social stigma attached to being an Other, or Part-blood Other, rather than fully human. There is privilege in being human, of being assumed to be human. Magic handlers, at least registered Magic Handlers from known magic-handling families, enjoy privilege above normal humans. There are a number of black markets targeting various Others - illegal anti-change drugs for weres, and at least a few mentions of illegal experiments being done to possibly allow vampires to walk in daylight.
There is a lot more on this subject (see also: most of Rae's canon), but this covers the gist of it.
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The solution was to alter the human genome to allow photosynthesis and cloning to spike the generational numbers. In fact, I suspect Izana herself is a clone, though it is never revealed in canon.
(Sorry to recomment with Izana's journal, but I suspect more answers from other pups and wanted to keep them straight.)
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I do find it hysterical that 'rare items', 'valuable that drives the story' and 'what is it that everybody wants' can all be answered "Clark".
How any of this pertains to Tess is her poverty in childhood. She is described as having grown up in a "swamp shack" who taught herself to read at age 6, which indicates she was not in school. She grew up very self-sufficient, as she also had absent/alcoholic parents, and rather respectful of money. When she attains access to the Luthor fortune, she doesn't go on a spending spree, in fact, she seems to keep it to a minimum aside from when it comes to business.
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...But yeah. Seriously, everyone wants him.
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Lesgle and Feuilly - Welp, that's what their canon is about. Victor Hugo would like to talk for 1100-1300 pages on the subject of poverty and privilege. I don't even know where to start. But on the level of these two individual characters and how scarcity has driven them...
Lesgle is in a sort of economic no-man's land. Only 17 years ago his father pulled the family into an upwardly-mobile path, managing to score a cushy civil service position and eventually owning a house and land. And Lesgle promptly lost that as soon as he inherited. Deliberate rejection? Just his legendary bad luck? Probably a bit of both. Sometimes he comes up with money, and he throws it around at once on fun; he's rocking the Bohemian lifestyle at the moment. He's genuinely broke. He's also living on a certain degree of class privilege--he has middle-class student friends to live with, he could finish up his law degree and go be a probably-unsuccessful lawyer. (That said, even if he did get his degree, he's not automatically on a path to be rich. And he certainly doesn't qualify for, like, voting. And, obviously, he's chosen not to head in the middle-class route.)
Feuilly, uh. Is an orphan who never knew his parents and never went to school and works in a Paris fanmaking workshop. Now, Victor Hugo is pretty crap about representing workers in LM; Feuilly has to stand in all by himself for the very large historical population of self-educated politically-active French urban workers. (While also representing Romantic nationalism of the 1830s and 1840s. And all this with hardly any spoken lines DAMMIT HUGO.) His daily wages by the time we meet him in canon are pretty livable, for a single healthy young man with no one to support. Good thing he was able to teach himself to read and write and somehow manage the networking required to learn a skilled trade! And uh good thing he was killed in violent government political repression before he had to support himself in his old age!
Gredya - Economics gets talked about a fair amount in the Crossroads books! Things are very low-tech in Crossroads itself; there are standardized gold coins and they get used, but there's also a lot of barter. (One of the questions that comes up is "how does the veterinary school get paid in gold from a fantasy land, anyway.") People there are largely working on a subsistence level. It's somewhat romanticized--the main character finds it pretty cool to be living in a barter system--but real-world and fantasy-world poverty come up a lot. There's the badguy army building itself up, taking on people without much else to support themselves and eventually running on company-store style scrip to keep recruits trapped; there are all the humans in Crossroads who have gotten there fleeing war and disaster. And out in the Western Virginia setting, there's a fair amount of talk about the interplay between city people and hill-country people.
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In terms of how it affects them: Fantine's life has been defined by the struggle against dehumanization, exploitation, abandonment, and lack of opportunity. She's abandoned as a child, doomed to a life of drudgework as a seamstress for extremely low wages, falls in love with a rich student only to be abandoned by him and left with their child, fired from her good factory job because her employers disapprove of her single motherhood, sent back to drudgework as a seamstress except it's not enough to pay her kid's medical bills, and finally resorts to prostitution, only to get tuberculosis which turns fatal when a rich bored bully throws snow down her back. Aaand then Javert arrests HER for it because she fights back.
Combeferre is a middle-class student, and Jehan Prouvaire is a rich one, and they both want to fix the rampant inequalities in their society, and end up dying for it.
Brienne of Tarth is also in a world where scarcity plays a huge role. It's a feudal society with a large poor population, and winter is coming, so the poverty's getting worse. There's also a growing religious movement among the commoners focusing on economic inequalities. Brienne herself sees it as her duty, as the daughter of a minor lord and as someone who thinks of herself as a quasi-knight, to defend the rights of commoners.
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Henry: Not quite so much poor or rich as power versus not, specifically magical. (Regina, Gold.) Everything's about that, basically.
Evelyn: ahahahahahaha oh lord I might let another Dragon Age person take this. In some ways it isn't addressed enough; on the other, if we had a Sera I'd just not bother and let that player take that question.
Lois: *points at what Steph said for Tess*
Anakin+R2: ...I am not entirely sure how to phrase it. I mean, the rare items tend to be Jedi artifacts (or Force-sensitive kids). And lots of people want Anakin (playing the Chosen One kind of leads to this). And Luke and Leia, later; I guess it's a Skywalker thing. R2 is pretty valuable for a while due to the tin can's databanks. There's actually a fair amount of interplay of stuff in the Clone Wars show, given how many planets devastated by war play into things, and black markets are crucial... And, of course, Anakin has some issues around slavery (and saaaaaand *hides from everyone*) due to his childhood.
Tavi: Amazingly enough, for a very tropic High Fantasy Series, there is no McGuffin as such (or rather, the only McGuffin is one no one knows about and gets destroyed anyway). For that matter, Tavi does not spend much time as the McGuffin due to him actually being kept secret. There's not as much about economic stuff as I'd like, although admittedly the focus of the story isn't on that; that said, Tavi's perspective from both sides of the Uber Privileged line explicitly shapes his policy and agenda as First Lord.
Oh yeah, and everything is now covered in wax and they're going to eat it to survive at least the first winter, and Tavi actually refuses to skip that himself just because he could due to rank because dammit if his people have to he'll do it too so there.
Needless to say I will be addressing this way more in post-canon than Butcher had room or reason to within canon.
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Charles grew up rich and privileged, all of his experience of not having comes from knowing Erik and Raven and his telepathy. He's very compassionate but there are a lot of things that he will never truly get such as true hunger. He wants to help those without but if he's not careful, it can slip into a touch of noblesse oblige.
Quentin has never had to worry about not having as he grew up in a titled Fae family, but as a blind foster he doesn't have a lot of control of what happens at times. He's more aware of making sure there's enough food now that he's living with Toby because she's spent time living paycheck to paycheck and on the streets.
William has never lived in a point where his family was truly doing well. There might have been one when he was younger but the Civil War happened when he was about 10 to 14 and that affected everything. Also his brother being sick and living on the frontier means scarcity is a part of life. He's hugely aware of what he doesn't have but much more what his brother and mother don't have. At the moment, he's saved enough for Mark to go to a good school and they do own their water rights, but all it takes is one bad year and it gets harder. In Milliways, he's aware that he doesn't have the options others do, and he tries to fill in what gaps he can and doesn't get too hung up on any hopes that are offered. He loves to read which at times makes it worse as he knows what he's missing. His family is also on the lower social rung in Bisbee and that's why canon is so painful for everyone and canon and his father's death happens because they need money.
Sameth has never known scarcity as the prince of a royal household, the lack he's always felt was not feeling he could do his duties properly. Scarcity is a bigger player in Ancelstierre than the Old Kingdom and as a prince, Sameth has to pay attention to how his people are doing, but its not a defining force.
Moist for all that he is a thief doesn't do it due to a lack of anything, for him its more about this call for adventure. On the Disc, there are all types of social situations from slums in Ankh-Morpork to the vampires with too much money. Moist grew up in a situation of landed gentry and so he's used to having what he needs. There have been points when he first ran away that he was more on the edges but need doesn't drive his crime.
Jane is very aware of money and class as they define what levels of society anyone but especially a woman can interact with and how much mobility is possible. Her books capture those points where a family is respectable but not rich and how its complicated and every choice is fraught. Canon presents it that her mother married below her and that she wants her daughters to not have to worry the way that she has. For Jane to do what she wishes and wants, it would be better if her family had more money but they don't so they all must compromise.
Ivan has never known need in terms of money or food as he grew up in the highest level of the most privileged class on Barrayar. He's a soldier but an officer so he's had some moments of not having a lot and he doesn't live as extravagantly as he actually could. He's not portrayed as too horribly tone deaf about poverty because of the people who raised him but he's one of those people who only partly gets how different the world he inhabits is from others. I appreciated in Vorpatril's Alliance how Tej noticed that and had those moments of wait, this is your context.
Demeter is connected to fertility and agriculture, two parts of the life that waver dangerously from good to horrible and it only takes a little to shift them. As a goddess, a lot of what she tries to do is help the balance be righted when she can through blessings and help, but she knows there's also only so much she can do. It breaks her heart when she can't fix something, she hated, hated not being able to fix Battlestar Gallactica canon for Felix and make things better in the way she knew how.
Tumnus grew up in the cold of the Long Winter in Narnia, watched his father die fighting and only had dim memories and stories of before. In an interview, James McAvoy described Tumnus as someone living during an occupation and I think that's the perfect way to think about him. The bad choices he made were tied to worries about surviving. He's constantly amazed and blessed by how Narnia is flourishing and wants to keep it that way.
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As a result, he despises the idle rich and anyone else who has comfort and luxury he perceives them not to have earned for themselves. (Mr Norrell is exempted from this because although he's rich, he's not flashy about it and he certainly isn't idle, and he lets Childermass get away with unconventional household hiring practices.)
It's also specifically noted in canon that although Norrell pays him generously, he's thrifty to the point that nobody knows what he does with his money. This might mean he gives it away to those in more need (since Norrell also provides him with food and lodging) or that he's got it all stashed away somewhere in case of disaster, or some of both.
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Gielinor is a superabundant world; purposely created to sustain and encourage a very abundant biome. Plus after it was created, it was tended to by a nature god who didn't even know the creators had gone away (in a sense), he only sensed that it's lifeforce was trickling away. Metallic elements are very accessible too and metalworking has been well developed for a very long time. Even precious metals like gold and silver are abundant, so much so that gold is relatively worthless but still used for currency because it is still something that doesn't tarnish or rot away. There was a time during the fourth age that gold was scarce but only because no one was mining it because it had become unimportant/perilous to do so after several centuries of war. There are only a few mines that have been abandoned because the ore is depleted. As for food, well, a superabundant biome means a lot of flora and fauna that could become food. Farming is easy (though dependant on the Zanaris Fairies for some reason) and the sea is bountiful except in some places.
But there is poverty and places with such poor soils that are hard to live on. The cities of Varrock, Falador, Keldagrim, and Ardougne canonnicly have large slums. Rimmington, despite being close to the sea and surrounded by decent farmland, is very poor, probably because there is no port there but possibly because it is still recovering from the natural disaster/dragon that brought down Crandorian kingdom. Edgeville/Fronterieza/Paddewa keeps on getting burnt down and turned into a ghost town so it is noticeably depressed economically. The Kharidian desert is a desert because it was literally nuked to glass to end a war. Forinthry was magicallly nuked and turned into a volcanic wilderness near the end of another war. Morytania is a mostly swampy unfarmable mess because of the Kharidian desertification and the vampires messing with the climate. On top of that sports a huge blood ghettopolis because the human population is too anemic to do anything about it or fix anything up and the vampires can't decide between being civilized or sticking to their predatory roots. Oh, then there is southern Tirannwn, which is an ecological disaster zone due to Arpdosandran factories.
So yeah, when I said that scarcity on Gielinor was partly a distribution problem, I meant that resources don't get distributed because people are horrible to each other because of religion, tribalism, racism, or just plain greed and power-hunger. There is therefore room enough for criminality, black-markets, and piracy even on a world as abundant as Gielinor. As for the lack of mass manufacturing, it causes absurd things like coloured paper crowns being super rare and valuable.
Just kidding, that's just an accident of game mechanics and artificial scarcity.
As how this all affects my pups:
Well, for Fixit, the problems on Gielinor don't really affect Zanaris, but Zanaris's problems do effect Gielinor. This puts Fixit in a privileged position in canon, but likely not in Zanarian society. Well, maybe male Zanarian fairies are in a disadvantaged strata in Zanarian society and that explains why they readily joined the Mafia, but that is speculation. There isn't any visible poverty or exorbitant wealth on Zanaris and Fixit is likely not sympathetic to the plight of the poor as a result but she wouldn't refuse to help someone out if someone asked. One quirk of the economy on Zanaris is that it runs on gemstones rather than gold, though.
Amascut... well, she is one of the present causes of poverty and misery in the Kharid mostly through the promotion and escalation of animosities between people. Being a goddess puts her in an extremely privileged position and being the judge of the dead and the daughter of the head of the Kharidian pantheon elevated her status even more. In the Kharid at least. The most recent canon reveal about her implies that she and her brother Icthlarin were brats and that they were put in charge of the Underworld as punishment, but that they were still minorly disobedient afterwards up until the point where they both abandoned their posts in the underworld in order to search the universe for help in the first Kharidian-Zarosian war. She was likely dismissive of the suffering that her disobedience and fun caused to mortals and totally blind to any suffering her father caused as head of the Pantheon. Her disobedience to him was not in protest for the benefit of mortals.
She was present for the end of the second round of Kharidian-Zarosian wars, somehow making it back to Gielinor after being abandoned on the far end of the universe, and it sounds like she tried very hard and passionately to stop her father from nuking the Kharid. It wasn't out of concern for mortals or the Kharid; it was because her father was the nuke. That being said, she has become sensitive to the plight of the disadvantaged since then. After all, she is very low in the godly pecking order, only being more powerful than her adopted siblings. But she is still a goddess and only uses her new sensitivity to the plight of mortals and the disadvantaged among them to foment revolution and to promote war and suspicion. Sometimes her meddling results in good things, though.
She's also involved in the international black market through her Lady Keli alter-ego.
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I am firmly convinced that Vault 101 included storage rooms with stacks of spare parts for things. Its role in the Vault Experiment was to serve as a long-term study of humans in an isolated environment with an essentially absolute leader and no way to escape or bring anybody else in. Vault-Tec would've provided supplies for that- if they wanted to see how people survived with limited supplies in a sealed environment, that would've been on the records in the computer, because that would be exactly the kind of thing Vault-Tec would pull.
Anyway, in Ellen's canon we see her tenth birthday party. Her friend- she has all of one, canonically- gives her a comic book as a present. It had belonged to her friend's father, and the fact that it has all its pages is a major thing. Ellen's other tenth birthday presents are an ancient baseball cap from the Vault's maintenance engineer, a BB gun that her father and his assistant managed to restore to working order using scrap material and stolen parts, a sweetroll that comes with a direct order to keep for herself and not have to share with anyone, and an incredibly morbid poem from the Vault's resident argument for making sure any closed environment includes at least a therapist or two. There's a cake at the party. It's made from several weeks' worth of saved-up ration coupons' worth of ingredients. Everything consumable is rationed in her environment growing up, and prizes at Vault competitions tend to be things like a week of water ration coupons.
There's scarcity of people, too. Ellen's father was not born in Vault 101. The only reason he and Ellen were allowed in at all was because the Vault's only doctor hadn't trained up a replacement before their death, and Overseer Almodovar's insistence on returning to the Vault's experimental purpose had to be temporarily put aside to ensure that his people had a chance at survival. There are multiple incidents where it's made abundantly clear that the Overseer despises James and would just as soon see him and everything related to him run off, but since James hasn't finished training an actual Vaultie as a doctor- and the Vault apparently doesn't include enough texts or educational computer programs to make up for this- he's stuck with the guy. There are Vault security people who can't be younger than sixty or seventy at one point, because a number of security members were killed during James' and Ellen's escapes and somebody has to fill those roles.
On the surface, in the rest of Ellen's canon, there's a lot of stuff that's in short supply or missing entirely. The whole game revolves around the concept of water scarcity. Ellen's father's life's ambition was to build a purification system that would make safe water feasible for everybody in the DC area. (Ellen still resents the fact that her father's life's ambition never included building any kind of distribution system for that water; the Wasteland's infrastructure is, to put it bluntly, absolutely crap.) Food is also rough to come by. Brahmin cattle are massive investments. Hunting animals is probably the major source of food for a lot of people, and given the nature of Wasteland wildlife, it's a ridiculously dangerous one. Scavenging the remaining sealed food left over from two hundred years ago tends to feed the rest. Armor and weapons are vitally important to survival outside walled or otherwise defended communities, and they break down with repeated use and have to be repaired with spare parts from others of their own kind. Medicine's in damned short supply, too, since Rivet City- the most advanced settlement in the region other than maybe Vault 101- doesn't appear to have a medical production lab on the premises and there's no way to make your own stimpaks. The only person known to be producing new chems of any kind is a ghoul making an extra strong version of the recreational chem/combat enhancement drug Jet. People more or less have to hope that the stuff from two hundred years back is still good.
I have Millicanoned that the currency of the Capital Waste, the bottlecap, is backed by water. The first Fallout game said that water merchants in a settlement called the Hub backed the local caps with water, and I see no reason not to replicate that in the Capital. Pure water has a value of 20 bottlecaps for a bottle that weighs one pound. For reference, a bottle of beer has a value of 2 caps, a combat shotgun in usable condition has a value of 200 caps, and a suit of power armor has a value of 739 caps. A stimpak has a value of 25 caps. That's how rare clean water is. Given that as of the end of the game the Brotherhood of Steel is in control of the water purifier and the only known ongoing source of safe water in the Wasteland, I've been working with the assumption that their influence has been rising sharply. Especially since the Enclave had been planning on taking the purifier for themselves and using it to distribute a virus that would kill anybody or anything mutated- they took it as a given that the whole Wasteland would flock to them for the water. I've millicanoned that the Brotherhood has another clean water source now, because the raiders at Evergreen Mills in the game outnumber virtually any other two settlements' populations put together. I can't see a population that size not having a water supply, so when Ellen and the Milliways folk who came with her got the raiders wiped out, the Brotherhood came in afterwards to secure the place and its waters.