- Dec 17, 2010
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Hi all, I want your opinion on a few key questions I'll ask after my quick review.
REVIEW - WARNING - SPOILERS!
Now we come to the final episode - where all the main heroes of this story sacrifice something. Of course Baba Voss sacrifices himself to destroy the bombs and army. Queen Maghra loses the most. She never wanted to be Queen in the first place - and yet ends up being forced to kill her sister and loose her husband to save her people. Tamacti Jun has completely recanted his old Witchhunter status - and predicts the future of Sight being fought in each city and family as it returns.
But now it gets controversial. Kofun is the Prince destined to be King of Pensa - and he has already proved to be an effective diplomat softening the conflict in the Trivantes talks. He will be blinded to relate to his blind son and help him be accepted as the King the Pensa need.
And Haniwa and Wren leave everything they know and love to follow a mysterious map towards another City of Light in New York Library.
Questions:
What happens next - across the coming years, and then decades? Can the Sighted and Blind make peace? How will Kofun lead the Pensa on this policy? Can the Sighted survive in New York and are there enough of them to grow an independent, self-sufficient town there? What about the threat of inbreeding already mentioned in the show? What resources and discoveries and technologies will they try to use? How fast could things happen? Here are my thoughts - what are yours?
No Peace between the Sighted and Blind
Kofun watched his mother Queen Maghra try and overturn the prohibition against the Sighted. He was at Trivantes as the peace talks between Trivantes and Pensa nearly failed over the status of the Sighted. He has read the culture, and decided to join the Blind to lead them. He might have decades to mature as Prince under his mother's rule. He will learn from Maghra's compassion and Tamacti Jun's realpolitik. He knows what he is up against. Centuries ago the Blind's jealousy of the Sighted got weaponised by religious prejudice into sheer hatred. There can be no peace. He cannot push his people on this.
But there is another way - in secret - to ensure a future for the Sighted. Kofun as King is critical. He was Sighted, has a sister who is Sighted, and has an education and is aware of what the Sighted could bring into the world. He is secretly cheering Haniwa on. The challenge for him is that immunity to the virus is growing, and instead of one Sighted kid born every few generations, there now appears to be a handful every generation. The answer? Kofun will smuggle Sighted kids out. Even if Kofun has to hold a mock public execution of them as a cover - he will smuggle those kids out in their version of an "underground railway". Indeed, I imagine him getting organised and setting up a network of Sighted spies (who unlike Kofun and Haniwa are really good at pretending to be Blind). Their cover story could be as traders. But they are actually trained to spot Sighted babies and toddlers - and groom the parents to prepare them to leave for New York! There would be a cover story and everything. This would avoid the high risk show-trial and public execution in the first place. What would these Sighted traders trade? Who knows what salted meats or new 'herbal medicines' (antibiotics) these traders might bring in, helping the Pensa and Trivantes and preparing the way for goodwill? Maybe these spies from New York might be just too valued to execute if exposed as Sighted. But the bottom line is that all the Sighted that ended up in New York so far followed vague maps and went through much danger to get there. It is probable that many didn't make it. Imagine how the numbers could swell now with King Kofun's spy network smuggling new Sighted kids and their families out with directions and probable way-stations.
New York is a great place for the Sighted!
Think about the rusty twisted ruins of Manhattan from the perspective of the Blind. Go back and watch that last scene (it's so good!) In today's world it is just a 4 hour drive away from Pennsylvania State University where the Pensa capital is. But imagine trying to walk this route BLIND with collapsed skyscrapers and sinkholes and sharp jagged metal and girders and falling concrete? I imagine collapsed basements and rusty scratches and tetanus wearing away the morale of any Blind party going that way. This terrain is for the Sighted only. This City of Light is secret and secure in such an inhospitable location.
I love how Haniwa and Wren are shy when they first make it to the group. They're used to watching and evaluating crowds of the blind - and have never had a such a large group of Sighted people watching and evaluating them! It's a new experience for them - hinting at so many new things they are going to learn about and enjoy in this community.
Food and Time:
How much effort each day would it take to just eat? Is there good fishing around New York? Can they lay nets at strategic points? Would there be good hunting and dried or salted meats? I have read that hunter gatherer societies required just 4 hours a day to eat. Even with some clever fishing and seaweed farming and local farming tech, there would be challenges and busy seasons requiring all hands on deck just to feed themselves and prepare for winter. But in between there would be plenty of time for Research and Development.
Electricity: Did you notice the waterfall as the camera pans back over the ruins of New York? I imagine their electricity is coming from local micro-hydro. It's also quite easy to build primitive wind turbines as their settlement expands. (See Home | Otherpower for more on this.)
Wood gas: I would be surprised if they were not already salvaging parts for primitive wood gas tractors and any other farm equipment they need to power with a fuel-alternative.
Winter: Their winter requirements for firewood would be considerable. But if they insulated their accommodation and used passive solar techniques with thick walls in the right spots, just their daily cooking and hot water requirements could get them through winter without too much extra heating.
What about inbreeding?
Now let's do an initial count before we imagine the decades ahead. In the last scene we see 25 Sighted people in the library. There may be more out hunting or running other errands, maybe some even running a creche for the children they already have? Let's call it 30 to 35. Haniwa and Kofun could convince the Compass to smuggle in all their Sighted kids. That could bring it up to 50ish. Now this next bit is important. Remember when Baba Voss burns the first City of Light library to ash? Haniwa weeps at the loss of knowledge - but is told there are others, plural. There are more Cities of Light. I see opportunities for trading people and knowledge and resources and tools and technology and even soldiers as needed.
Kofun's "underground railway" smuggling new Sighted babies and their families out will keep their gene pool growing. Even just one sighted kid a year across the kingdoms would mean 3 refugees fleeing to New York if you include the parents, 4 or 5 with brothers or sisters. That's a few hundred over 60 years. Add in a few socials between the Cities of Light and even a few old Alkenny style dance dates between the Pensa and New Yorkers - and they could have 500 in 60 years - just a guess - but I think a bit conservative.
New York defences could be impregnable:
They are researching the tools of war. Radios and guns and chemistry! But I imagine it being a while before they get to use those at scale. Manhattan is a huge threatening area they could fortify. Outside the perimeter they would put up wind chimes signposts with rope knots warning the Blind that they are entering a Cursed Zone. Inside they could lay all the low-tech booby traps you could imagine - terrible punji stick pits and spring-loaded spears and blades and falling concrete traps. There are no weapons of the Ancients here - nothing to announce the Sighted are back. Until New York numbers in the thousands or there is a change in the Blind culture, secrecy is their friend.
Finally, if a Blind army did somehow make it through the Cursed Zone - remember one Trivantes army had just 300 people with archery and swords? Just imagine what the Sighted could do from well fortified positions in the complexity of Manhattan? Just imagine the lines-of-fire they could rig up from secret foxholes! Imagine the Sighted lying with mere crossbows. The Blind wouldn't know where the hail of arrows was coming from! They would quickly abandon such a complex maze of a battlefield. If not, as a last resort they COULD have bombs ready to blow - but only if the General in charge allows it.
Are there enough resources in New York for a growing village? Don't forget sailing! Once they get some boats built, America has the largest navigable calm water river system in the world! Indeed - even the coastal waters are (mostly) protected by islands making coastal seas calm. Together it has more navigable water than the rest of the world combined! It's more than 25,000 km in total.
So I imagine the New York colony starts off humbly fishing off Manhattan wharfs. Their community is secret and safe and quiet. There is plenty of fishing - as industrial fishing stopped 5 centuries before. The oceans would be thriving with life. I'm even wondering when they would need their first boat to go fishing?
Once their population is high enough, they could boat around America looking for sympathetic Blind kingdoms to trade with - or even just establish another of their own colonies for farming. It's a big world, and there are only 2 million people. They could just avoid hostile Blind kingdoms altogether by boating right past them.
After Kofun's next 50 or 60 years, I imagine it goes 4X
Have you ever played Civilisation, or the Warcraft strategy war game? These are called 4X which stands for Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate (which hopefully means Exterminate the threat - not the people. This can be diplomatic and peaceful!)
Basically, the idea here is that the more New York grows, the more it can grow. It's exponential. A few more generations later and New York could stop hiding. Their numbers would be in the thousands – and they would largely be Sighted and have industrial output. They're trading with other Cities of Light, and probably have some sort of modified gun-boat and even wood-gas or biofuel refineries for armoured vehicles or buses for moving troops. By the end of Kofun’s reign New York could easily defend themselves. By the time they grow to a few thousand people – they can probably take Pensa and Trivantes.
Sighted Forts: The Sighted might still try to maintain their secrecy by expanding their propaganda of Cursed Zones. They expand the warning chimes and traps. Yet if it did come to armed conflict, remember their Forts have an the incredible advantage of long-distance communication right at the very start. At the most primitive level they can use Signal Fires (remember that scene from Lord of the Rings?) Sight allows that. They could use carrier pigeons. Sight allows that. Then as their technology increases they can easily make Signal Lamps that send Morse code over 8km (5 miles!). One day they'll get radio working. However they do it, communications get limited military resources deployed fast. Farmers and fishermen and teachers are suddenly called into action to defend some distant fort - and are bused in to defend it. The Kingdoms of the Blind would not know how they got there so fast, and could not stand against modern weapons.
The Blind will be conquered by kindness, war, or simply being outnumbered.
Kindness might over time win them over with industrial goods like food aid, medical assistance and even cultural treats like music and other old media that survived. But I doubt it.
Conflict is more likely. If the leadership finally get sick of some latest story of the Blind burning the Sighted, once they reached a critical mass it’s game on! If the Blind do something nasty they might provoke New York into full war mode. With armoured buses and modern guns, it would be over before the Blind even understood who they were fighting or what was even happening! A few key battles would comprehensively defeat all enemy kingdoms in the region. A Sighted police force could move in afterwards, enforcing martial law and curfews till the Blind calmed down and realised the benefits of belonging to the new culture. There is simply no way a primitive Blind militia could stand up to a Sighted army with relatively modern weaponry and communications and adapted transport.
Finally, the least likely outcome is a long stalemate between a growing Sighted community and the Blind. The Blind culture is too intolerant and aggressive – and would provoke the Sighted one day. But even so, I have considered how the Sighted could avoid the Blind for many generations, relying on the sheer tyranny of distance and some Cursed Zones to keep a gap between the two civilisations. Eventually there will be so many Sighted that the Blind live in isolated little reserves - a sad legacy of a bygone era. There might one day even be a vaccine. But I doubt the Sighted would put up with the stories of atrocities against their kind over this kind of time.
How do you imagine all this playing out? Kindness, war, or co-existence until the Blind are outnumbered? What else have I forgotten? What were your favourite bits of the show? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
REVIEW - WARNING - SPOILERS!
Now we come to the final episode - where all the main heroes of this story sacrifice something. Of course Baba Voss sacrifices himself to destroy the bombs and army. Queen Maghra loses the most. She never wanted to be Queen in the first place - and yet ends up being forced to kill her sister and loose her husband to save her people. Tamacti Jun has completely recanted his old Witchhunter status - and predicts the future of Sight being fought in each city and family as it returns.
But now it gets controversial. Kofun is the Prince destined to be King of Pensa - and he has already proved to be an effective diplomat softening the conflict in the Trivantes talks. He will be blinded to relate to his blind son and help him be accepted as the King the Pensa need.
And Haniwa and Wren leave everything they know and love to follow a mysterious map towards another City of Light in New York Library.
Questions:
What happens next - across the coming years, and then decades? Can the Sighted and Blind make peace? How will Kofun lead the Pensa on this policy? Can the Sighted survive in New York and are there enough of them to grow an independent, self-sufficient town there? What about the threat of inbreeding already mentioned in the show? What resources and discoveries and technologies will they try to use? How fast could things happen? Here are my thoughts - what are yours?
No Peace between the Sighted and Blind
Kofun watched his mother Queen Maghra try and overturn the prohibition against the Sighted. He was at Trivantes as the peace talks between Trivantes and Pensa nearly failed over the status of the Sighted. He has read the culture, and decided to join the Blind to lead them. He might have decades to mature as Prince under his mother's rule. He will learn from Maghra's compassion and Tamacti Jun's realpolitik. He knows what he is up against. Centuries ago the Blind's jealousy of the Sighted got weaponised by religious prejudice into sheer hatred. There can be no peace. He cannot push his people on this.
But there is another way - in secret - to ensure a future for the Sighted. Kofun as King is critical. He was Sighted, has a sister who is Sighted, and has an education and is aware of what the Sighted could bring into the world. He is secretly cheering Haniwa on. The challenge for him is that immunity to the virus is growing, and instead of one Sighted kid born every few generations, there now appears to be a handful every generation. The answer? Kofun will smuggle Sighted kids out. Even if Kofun has to hold a mock public execution of them as a cover - he will smuggle those kids out in their version of an "underground railway". Indeed, I imagine him getting organised and setting up a network of Sighted spies (who unlike Kofun and Haniwa are really good at pretending to be Blind). Their cover story could be as traders. But they are actually trained to spot Sighted babies and toddlers - and groom the parents to prepare them to leave for New York! There would be a cover story and everything. This would avoid the high risk show-trial and public execution in the first place. What would these Sighted traders trade? Who knows what salted meats or new 'herbal medicines' (antibiotics) these traders might bring in, helping the Pensa and Trivantes and preparing the way for goodwill? Maybe these spies from New York might be just too valued to execute if exposed as Sighted. But the bottom line is that all the Sighted that ended up in New York so far followed vague maps and went through much danger to get there. It is probable that many didn't make it. Imagine how the numbers could swell now with King Kofun's spy network smuggling new Sighted kids and their families out with directions and probable way-stations.
New York is a great place for the Sighted!
Think about the rusty twisted ruins of Manhattan from the perspective of the Blind. Go back and watch that last scene (it's so good!) In today's world it is just a 4 hour drive away from Pennsylvania State University where the Pensa capital is. But imagine trying to walk this route BLIND with collapsed skyscrapers and sinkholes and sharp jagged metal and girders and falling concrete? I imagine collapsed basements and rusty scratches and tetanus wearing away the morale of any Blind party going that way. This terrain is for the Sighted only. This City of Light is secret and secure in such an inhospitable location.
I love how Haniwa and Wren are shy when they first make it to the group. They're used to watching and evaluating crowds of the blind - and have never had a such a large group of Sighted people watching and evaluating them! It's a new experience for them - hinting at so many new things they are going to learn about and enjoy in this community.
Food and Time:
How much effort each day would it take to just eat? Is there good fishing around New York? Can they lay nets at strategic points? Would there be good hunting and dried or salted meats? I have read that hunter gatherer societies required just 4 hours a day to eat. Even with some clever fishing and seaweed farming and local farming tech, there would be challenges and busy seasons requiring all hands on deck just to feed themselves and prepare for winter. But in between there would be plenty of time for Research and Development.
Electricity: Did you notice the waterfall as the camera pans back over the ruins of New York? I imagine their electricity is coming from local micro-hydro. It's also quite easy to build primitive wind turbines as their settlement expands. (See Home | Otherpower for more on this.)
Wood gas: I would be surprised if they were not already salvaging parts for primitive wood gas tractors and any other farm equipment they need to power with a fuel-alternative.
Winter: Their winter requirements for firewood would be considerable. But if they insulated their accommodation and used passive solar techniques with thick walls in the right spots, just their daily cooking and hot water requirements could get them through winter without too much extra heating.
What about inbreeding?
Now let's do an initial count before we imagine the decades ahead. In the last scene we see 25 Sighted people in the library. There may be more out hunting or running other errands, maybe some even running a creche for the children they already have? Let's call it 30 to 35. Haniwa and Kofun could convince the Compass to smuggle in all their Sighted kids. That could bring it up to 50ish. Now this next bit is important. Remember when Baba Voss burns the first City of Light library to ash? Haniwa weeps at the loss of knowledge - but is told there are others, plural. There are more Cities of Light. I see opportunities for trading people and knowledge and resources and tools and technology and even soldiers as needed.
Kofun's "underground railway" smuggling new Sighted babies and their families out will keep their gene pool growing. Even just one sighted kid a year across the kingdoms would mean 3 refugees fleeing to New York if you include the parents, 4 or 5 with brothers or sisters. That's a few hundred over 60 years. Add in a few socials between the Cities of Light and even a few old Alkenny style dance dates between the Pensa and New Yorkers - and they could have 500 in 60 years - just a guess - but I think a bit conservative.
New York defences could be impregnable:
They are researching the tools of war. Radios and guns and chemistry! But I imagine it being a while before they get to use those at scale. Manhattan is a huge threatening area they could fortify. Outside the perimeter they would put up wind chimes signposts with rope knots warning the Blind that they are entering a Cursed Zone. Inside they could lay all the low-tech booby traps you could imagine - terrible punji stick pits and spring-loaded spears and blades and falling concrete traps. There are no weapons of the Ancients here - nothing to announce the Sighted are back. Until New York numbers in the thousands or there is a change in the Blind culture, secrecy is their friend.
Finally, if a Blind army did somehow make it through the Cursed Zone - remember one Trivantes army had just 300 people with archery and swords? Just imagine what the Sighted could do from well fortified positions in the complexity of Manhattan? Just imagine the lines-of-fire they could rig up from secret foxholes! Imagine the Sighted lying with mere crossbows. The Blind wouldn't know where the hail of arrows was coming from! They would quickly abandon such a complex maze of a battlefield. If not, as a last resort they COULD have bombs ready to blow - but only if the General in charge allows it.
Are there enough resources in New York for a growing village? Don't forget sailing! Once they get some boats built, America has the largest navigable calm water river system in the world! Indeed - even the coastal waters are (mostly) protected by islands making coastal seas calm. Together it has more navigable water than the rest of the world combined! It's more than 25,000 km in total.
Once their population is high enough, they could boat around America looking for sympathetic Blind kingdoms to trade with - or even just establish another of their own colonies for farming. It's a big world, and there are only 2 million people. They could just avoid hostile Blind kingdoms altogether by boating right past them.
After Kofun's next 50 or 60 years, I imagine it goes 4X
Have you ever played Civilisation, or the Warcraft strategy war game? These are called 4X which stands for Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate (which hopefully means Exterminate the threat - not the people. This can be diplomatic and peaceful!)
Basically, the idea here is that the more New York grows, the more it can grow. It's exponential. A few more generations later and New York could stop hiding. Their numbers would be in the thousands – and they would largely be Sighted and have industrial output. They're trading with other Cities of Light, and probably have some sort of modified gun-boat and even wood-gas or biofuel refineries for armoured vehicles or buses for moving troops. By the end of Kofun’s reign New York could easily defend themselves. By the time they grow to a few thousand people – they can probably take Pensa and Trivantes.
Sighted Forts: The Sighted might still try to maintain their secrecy by expanding their propaganda of Cursed Zones. They expand the warning chimes and traps. Yet if it did come to armed conflict, remember their Forts have an the incredible advantage of long-distance communication right at the very start. At the most primitive level they can use Signal Fires (remember that scene from Lord of the Rings?) Sight allows that. They could use carrier pigeons. Sight allows that. Then as their technology increases they can easily make Signal Lamps that send Morse code over 8km (5 miles!). One day they'll get radio working. However they do it, communications get limited military resources deployed fast. Farmers and fishermen and teachers are suddenly called into action to defend some distant fort - and are bused in to defend it. The Kingdoms of the Blind would not know how they got there so fast, and could not stand against modern weapons.
The Blind will be conquered by kindness, war, or simply being outnumbered.
Kindness might over time win them over with industrial goods like food aid, medical assistance and even cultural treats like music and other old media that survived. But I doubt it.
Conflict is more likely. If the leadership finally get sick of some latest story of the Blind burning the Sighted, once they reached a critical mass it’s game on! If the Blind do something nasty they might provoke New York into full war mode. With armoured buses and modern guns, it would be over before the Blind even understood who they were fighting or what was even happening! A few key battles would comprehensively defeat all enemy kingdoms in the region. A Sighted police force could move in afterwards, enforcing martial law and curfews till the Blind calmed down and realised the benefits of belonging to the new culture. There is simply no way a primitive Blind militia could stand up to a Sighted army with relatively modern weaponry and communications and adapted transport.
Finally, the least likely outcome is a long stalemate between a growing Sighted community and the Blind. The Blind culture is too intolerant and aggressive – and would provoke the Sighted one day. But even so, I have considered how the Sighted could avoid the Blind for many generations, relying on the sheer tyranny of distance and some Cursed Zones to keep a gap between the two civilisations. Eventually there will be so many Sighted that the Blind live in isolated little reserves - a sad legacy of a bygone era. There might one day even be a vaccine. But I doubt the Sighted would put up with the stories of atrocities against their kind over this kind of time.
How do you imagine all this playing out? Kindness, war, or co-existence until the Blind are outnumbered? What else have I forgotten? What were your favourite bits of the show? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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