Dorcas and Fechin (and Catherine)?

Jeff Wilson · 19 Jun 2008, 20:20 · from 2008-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:20:08 -0500
Subject: (urth)
	=?windows-1252?q?Dorcas_and_Fechin_=28and_Catherine=29=3F?=
In-Reply-To: <485A08A2.1080406 at gmail.com>
References: <BAY103-W520D8B14DDB73BA1E3817BD7AB0 at phx.gbl>
	<485A08A2.1080406 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <485ABF78.2010208 at io.com>

Dave Tallman wrote:
> In Shadow XI, it says, "She was tall and slender, though not so tall nor 
> so slender as Thecla, dark of complexion, dark of eye, raven of hair." I 
> don't see that being shorter than Thecla excludes her from the 
> exultants; there must be some height variation in that class.
> 
> My take on the exultant/armiger distinction is that exultants are 
> descendants of space colonist stock, and their families probably had 
> power under Typhon. That explains their intrigues against the new source 
> of power, the autarchy. The armigers are probably descendants of 
> high-ranking military officers of Urth stock. I don't remember the text 
> saying they have an intermediate height between exultants and commoners.

I think it's been pretty well established that higher classes are 
literally heads above those below them, as average heights go. However, 
the exultants seem to do this artificially by creating a companion clone 
("khaibit") of each exultant and using the clone as a source of 
additional growth hormone ("royal jelly") to achieve an extra several 
inches of height. Thus exultant's aren't really of greater stature than 
armigers, and their bastards and other cast-offs will be equal in height 
as armigers. This also makes them pretenders to nobility who literally 
must put others down to raise themselves up.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net