Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q70,92

Main entries

7092. Ironblood series -> basically just a reserved item
      motifs: Q70,90 timeline where the International is finished, etc.
7092. Ironblood setting -> crimson to reflect the themes of the first arc, S Item to reflect degree of completion of "series".

Related

7093. Aurora system / IronShard -> card game system designed to support any number of expansions, but specifically for the purposes of "narrative-driven sessions" and "tabletop-RPG-like" gameplay, as well as the concept of "representing history and social transitions rather than just battles".
      reserved Item, but closer to being real

Basic premise

7090. world where the International (pronounced International) is finished / timeline where the Communist International is completed -> the motif of a hypothetical or fictional scenario where the goal of the First or Third International is actually achieved and every country transitions out of capitalism into something else which is at least not worse. field: meta-transitional socialist realism
618. Every form of understanding outside Materialism is amoral; this is to imply that only Materialism can define what is moral, even as Materialism has no need for such categories / Only the alchemist can wield Good / We must neither look to a single God nor to local spirits and abstract harmonies, but into ourselves; anyone can wield Evil, but only the alchemist can wield Good -> so I guess it was Frankenstein that was one of the popular sources for the anti-alchemy/anti-science motif I didn't like. well, this is the anti-Frankenstein motif that says the opposite thing — that while unrealistic science may be scary, realistic science is in some ways its opposite.
     actual science in fact looks a lot like fantasy magic compared with pop-culture science, which is like, this weird kind of semi-Materialist occultism that is shunned as an abomination just like the occult has been in real life. (or like "the Ba'als" had; that's not quite real life but it neatly parallels what happened to real pagan religions so close enough.) I think that whole concept of how you open up a typical fantasy story and you effectively see a world where "witches" are the scientists and "scientists" are the new witches (hello Owl House, hello Pokémon) says a lot about people's understandings of the real world, even if I couldn't quite pinpoint what it says.
     I do not think people should put down "hard magic systems" and advocate a return to unpredictable magic. when they do that you get stuff like Harry Potter which sticks to the principle that magic is unknowable but leaves everything absolutely half (pronounced censored)assed to where people can only ask a lot of questions about how anyone can be 'good at' certain spells or how a magic school could possibly teach anyone to do it better. it's an easy solution to just let people go all out and start worldbuilding a magic system as deep as the periodic table, because then you at least know how somebody could learn it and become better at using it. the other major solution to the problem is... coming to the uncomfortable realization that both in real life and in your story school and education are a bunch of arbitrary garbage. like, think about this. Harry Potter goes off to his special private wizard school that won't be awful. but he's learning about something unknowable. so the purpose of being in school isn't actually to master the material, it's just to grow up and become socialized and hope that the arbitrary stack of education prior generations threw together before you actually prepares you for anything although you can never know if it will. in a sense, the purpose of school is to stall for time while an unpredictable world rockets closer and closer to you and you hope you will learn to spontaneously overcome it through a sufficient number of "learning to be a Subject" lessons before it hits you like a train. so Harry Potter is a wonderful representation of the function of schools within Liberal capitalism; they sort of work on people with naturally good executive function but they totally fail ADHD and autistic people unless you're basically Carl Sagan and you're the rarest type of person who can journey across a continent to find the most elite university professors. capitalism is a cruel system because education can never actually have any value inside it. education and jobs are both one big IQ test that constantly tests you on raw ability to learn before you're allowed to learn anything more. it's always "adaptability", people's favorite empty buzzword to mean that if you can intuitively guess things that are fundamentally unreasonable and unknowable you'll rule over everyone else but otherwise the people who can will rule over you.
     I see this same vague idea repeated in a lot of fantasy high school narratives but of course in Harry Potter it's the most obvious. noticing it has somewhat put me off the idea of magic being unknowable. I think magic turning into a second much more bizarre form of science that powers worlds unlike ours is wired actually. in that case you at least have a world where society providing people with things is useful and there isn't as much of a dangerously clear incentive to abolish state schools or try to keep people from getting into college. worldbuilding is more conducive to Socialist concepts when the world is possible to understand than when it isn't, even on the Menshevik and anarchist sides, while it's more conducive to creating fantasy worlds full of reactionary politics and 'villains' filling up the roles of large fractions of ordinary people if it isn't understandable. now if you really wanted to create a world of villains, that might be a fantastic choice. but I don't. I want to create a world of normal people, so I'd rather create a world that's logical.

Specific arcs or scenarios

(Each of these motif pages has further relevant motifs on it — they just weren't all necessarily going to fit cleanly on this page)

18XX

618. Paris Commune doesn't work... -> the motif of going on some sort of rant or exploration of the idea that "communism doesn't work" but for whatever reason your only examples are things like the Paris Commune that happened prior to the USSR. this could be a non-fictional case of texts that simply were recorded before 1917, or a hypothetical scenario where Marxism has been more successful and "Communism doesn't work" simply isn't a thing people popularly say about the things that happened after the 1910s.

193X-194X

6941. the impending horror of history -> important thought relating to Ironblood series concept, but seen in many existing works. "Come along with me" is a great example.

195X

7080. Trotsky deserting progressive cause (Trotskyist abandoning; forsaking; motif) / (9k)

196X-197X

3197. Q3197/Q31,97 pre-judging yourself out of the feeling that it's unethical or rude to not be mean to yourself and present yourself to others as bad
618. New Leninism (hypothetical movement) -> a modification or offshoot of Trotskyism that doesn't attack "Stalinist" workers' states and instead cooperates with them. (in the stories the first place it appears is China.) cue some very interesting drama as Trotskyists immediately start trying to find all the ways in which this form of Marxism could be revisionist and objectively wrong.
     I'm not trying to make the claim at this time that ICFI-style Trotskyists would be either right or wrong in saying this; this stuff can be complicated, and occasionally you find all the strange little squabbles Trotskyist parties are having really were productive and represented real moments of international-scale filtration where correct parties came together toward a stable Communist International. so yeah, they could be right.
     one thing that occurs to me is that the legitimacy of New Leninism would depend on the kinds of people that founded it, and if people came together for nationalist sorts of reasons or "community" thinking and that was why they defended China, realistically you could see the people inside the instance of New Leninism all turn into Menshevik or Dengist types and end up really obviously defending China because they have bourgeois thinking.
3661. Q3661/Q36,61

      Dengism (pronounced Deng Xiaoping Thought) is a postcolonial theory

      / (9k) -> one of people's major reasons for defending "Stalinist China" in the real world, which now that China has shifted into Dengism, is probably false. whether China is crimson or strawberry is everything in terms of whether New Leninism "should" be supporting it.

198X

618. Stalin except evil / Dark Stalin (fictional scenario) / Stalin as Trotskyists see him (only in the most exaggerated cases of "Trotskyist history"; hypothetical thought experiments, fiction, Trotskyism) -> sometimes the ability to combine utterly any abstract concepts whatsoever into complete nonsense in fiction is one of the most powerful ways to express a proposition, just because of the way it makes it obvious what it's "reasonable" for particular concepts to mean or not mean.
     a "Dark" version of Sonic the hedgehog assumes that Sonic is good, or at least not ferocious and unpredictable. when you see a darkness Sonic it really demonstrates what was good about the regular Sonic. likewise, if a fictional story has a darkness Stalin and it actually made complete sense you'd start to realize what was good about the original.
618. Stalin was not inherently evil / Stalin was not ontologically Evil (sense) / Stalin was not a servant of Cosmic Evil (Satan; The Devil; factors against enlightenment (Buddhism); religion; sense) / Stalin was by far not as immoral as he could have been (sense) -> a bunch of "atheist" philosophers / Materialists actually get this wrong, and show that they're still thinking basically the way Christians do in terms of morality, they've just removed the mentions of God. Ragnarök becomes material rather than metaphorical, or to be more specific, becomes a large-scale event for whole countries to be subjugated or eliminated rather than the small-scale persecution of individuals to form a coherent culture. [1] [2]
618. If you believe in the concepts of Good and Evil driving history at all, which includes any concept of history being moved by Right and Wrong and being driven by moral vanguards, then you have not abandoned overarching or "dominant" narratives which extend the arbitrary beliefs of one specific culture over the whole world

199X

618. Q618/Q618 schizoanalyst party / vote schizo / vote schizo! changing consciousness by making your voices heard -> the motif of schizoanalysts forming a Liberal-republican political party which is explicitly about all minority issues put together and runs against center-Liberalism as a right-wing party. if we say this is Australia, you'd have the the Schizoanalyst Party versus the Labor Party with the Liberal party demoted to third party status.
     ...I know. nobody in the United States in the 2020s would approve the slogan "vote schizo", even if the intention is to reclaim it. but honestly from what I've heard that kind of language seems to be more common in places like Europe and Australia, so I could see an attempt to simply reclaim negative words into different meanings happening there. can you imagine... Australians thinking charging the phrase "vote schizo" with positive meaning is so funny including people with mental illnesses who are slowly getting closer to throwing around some of these words almost like "queer" but U.S. people being horrified.

200X

618. How was the Ironblood timeline affected by 9/11 (pronounced 9-11)?! -> this might turn out to be the only fictional series that actually says "ok, I'll answer the question" and then sits down and gives you a genuinely satisfying answer.
     the answer would of course depend on whether the specific "9/11 (pronounced 9-11)" event happened at all, or what events happened instead. [3] but yeah, if the premise includes wars and talking about the history of countries and what they do or don't transition into, you're going to learn exactly where 9/11 (pronounced 9-11) came from and how the events of that period affected the United Socialist States and what happened to Afghanistan or the UAE or the countries of that region after that

202X

618. Trotskyist versus anarchist class struggle -> if Trotskyists are ever successful they are going to have the biggest uphill battle against this. I am half convinced it's the existence of anarchism that's blocking class consciousness, and if the widespread incidence of wrecking in the Soviet Union and clear similarities to anarchist methods are anything to go by, that struggle against anarchism doesn't go away when you create a workers' state. anarchists will always think they're better than Communists, and in the end it's ultimately going to come down to which one is better at preventing international war versus which one starts the most wars. anarchists are always stuck on moral vanguard theory, so I think "anarchists keep starting wars" is about the Only thing that could dissuade anyone from being an anarchist.
618. aggressives (agorist dystopia) -> the motif of a hypothetical agorist society building itself on the foundation of defining "non-aggressive activities" and then every time somebody happens not to fit into the group of arbitrary identities that happens to have agreed they all belong together, immediately assuming the people who don't fit in are "aggressives" who must have failed to fit in because they are inherently counter-revolutionary to the process of making society more Society-Like and Inherently Human, and treating them as if they were the worst people ever until they go to active effort to become more likeable under the utterly arbitrary criteria chosen by each locus of non-aggression
     am I the only person who thinks blue anarchism is many times scarier than Stalin? just because of how many possible rule violations there are and on how many possible axes people can be persecuted, versus how relatively few things there were you could get in trouble for in the Soviet Union.

Ideologies or fields

• (none)