Writing Tips For Later Eras


Question-and-answer session about TTU's development after the first year. This information will gradually be incorporated into the wiki as timeline/event/era pages are formally created.



I have not yet determined the TTU results of the 2008 presidential election. (Bush did win in '00 and '04 - fairly decisively in '00. The shock of The Changes did shift the country toward the political right, but similarly to Earth's 9/11, the magnitude of that impact faded over time relative to other, more recent political issues.) 2008 TTU is certainly more conservative socially than 2008 Earth, but the GOP dominance during a giant economic crash and financial scandals certainly would fuel the same sort of backlash seen here.

Depends totally on the individual. There are none in current canon but the rules absolutely allow it. The current "soft" lower limit on theri size is approximately 1 foot, but if you have a specific reason to want a 6-inch fairie, the limit is essentially arbitrary and I can notch it down a bit.

I was thinking that 9/11 would (for various reasons -- since The Changes were a worldwide phenomenon) not occur, or at least not occur in the same way. However, something similar would probably occur in the same time period. That would also provide a reasonable pretext for the Iraq war that was already mentioned in Dangerous Waters.

Wars of occupation are not speedy things; yes, there would still be American troops in the Middle East in TTU-present, although (like in our world) it would gradually recede away from the foreground of public consciousness.

The stated US agenda for the invasion would probably have been something similar to our world's. The real US agenda is open to speculation depending on your politics. With the caveat that TTU's US government has never been more than merely tolerant of theris; protecting them from oppressive governments wouldn't be a factor, the same way that protecting Iraqi gays from Muslim fundamentalists wasn't even on the radar when our own war started. (And with the further caveat that, just as in the real world, Iraq was not responsible for the terror attacks on the U.S.; a great deal of rhetorical energy would be expended to hint at links between the two while never going so far as to say so outright.)

There's plenty of wiggle room here if you want to help chip in ideas for what might have happened! Nothing would have occurred with magic or theris that would have been traumatic enough to spark off mass outlawings or open war, but that still leaves a great deal of wiggle room - and plenty of tragedies and accidents could have happened that would have had large effects on the world but remained below that threshold.

The raising of New Atlantis in 2007 is without question the most major world event of later eras. (It's the boundary between NWO and OTH, not an era in itself.) See below.

Whatever replaces 9/11 (currently undefined, probably some sort of deadly terrorist attack, probably not using magic) would have had quite a major impact. It would have provided the same pretext for Iraqi invasion and subsequent embroilment in the Middle East. Shortly after the invasion, U.S. armed forces captured Bin Laden in Afghanistan to great fanfare; cynics pointed out that that operation had nothing to do with Iraq and accused Bush of timing the capture for political benefit. Whatever the truth, that was one of the factors that helped Bush win re-election by large margins.

The flooding of New Orleans was minimized by magical intervention and so did not become a national trauma the same way it did in our world. However, the timeline ought to have a destructive event on a similar scale, and Richmond's destruction by fire ought to suffice. ;-) I'm happy to canonize that if it helps you set your scene.

In the 1998 elections, Republicans rallied their base with social issues (promising drastic action on therianthropy and magic); their personal attacks on Clinton still fell fairly flat, but differing voter turnout propelled them to a 15-seat pickup in the House and made the 1998-2000 years a political deadlock. Bush won outright in 2000 (no Florida debacle), but his popularity was dropping steadily until the terrorist attack and subsequent war rallied the country behind him again.

"Dangerous Waters" was set in 2006, while they were still perfecting their methods and choosing a site. In 2007, Tashi and her crew would in fact succeed, raising an island in the remote South Pacific (with the added help of a worldwide network of mages contributing energy via ritual). The island of "New Atlantis" had nothing to do with the old legends of Atlantis, but took the name in homage to the legends. It was quickly claimed and terraformed, and became an exclusive nation of theris and mages, drawing immigrants and visitors from around the world.

(... Oh, huh. I thought I posted 'Dinosaur Gods' last year That's silly of me, writing and finishing a story and never posting it! I'll get it onto the Internet tonight.)

In the present day of TTU, New Atlantis has a disproportionate amount of international influence -- its mages (and its magic university) are second to none. It's a tiny but wealthy nation that almost seems like another world to visitors, and its architecture is designed from the ground up to accommodate theris of all sizes. To people who don't live there, though, it's a distant and unreachable place - immigration is strictly limited to theris and skilled mages, and mercilessly restricted due to the nation's tiny size (less than 1% of applicants are accepted, even though they continually raise new land). Even temporary visitor's passes are incredibly hard to obtain (though theris and mages do get priority). Non-Atlantean theris tend to fall into two camps: those who are dying to move there but keep getting turned down; and those who don't care to try (or dislike the place).

The short explanation of C&B is that there really are gods walking the earth -- and that, left unchecked, they would send Earth spiraling into destruction as they fought for power. The forces that brought about the Changes are embodied in a being called the Archon, and his job is: Allow humanity to write its own story, in a way that doesn't lead to annihilation. He bound the gods and maintains an uneasy truce with them -- and whenever a threat that would lead humanity into self-extinction appears, he deals with it, generally by pulling the root of the problem out of reality's weave entirely and dumping them into a nearby non-existence I call The Shadowlands.

Kiasu is most definitely NOT an agent of C&B. He's the avatar of one of the aforementioned bound gods -- created through one-time use of an obscure loophole in the Archon's rules, and allowed to exist due to clever negotiation on said god's part. The behind-the-scenes war between the gods is defused by the early '00s, and Kiasu becomes an increasingly irrelevant relic of that age (the wandering and fighting was ultimately part of that plot). I'll be telling that story at greater length.

Anyone working for the Archon (or the gods) will have made the conscious choice to become a part of that fight - although they certainly might not have realized what they were signing up for! "Either success or failure would mean his demise, thus restoring the balance" is _very_ much the sort of thing that the powers behinds the scenes would do (unless the hero in question is both powerful enough to make retaining them worthwhile, and committed enough to the cause to make it safe to leave them alive). The big caveat here is that by TTU-present, the gods' war-behind-the-scenes is over, period. If you're interested in having C&B come more directly into play in your story, tell me more of your ideas and I'll try to go into more specific detail.

New Atlantis' government is, by definition, all theris and/or mages. On the other hand - within the United States, running for office as an openly theri candidate is somewhere between running for office as an open homosexual (a major complicating factor in most of the nation) and running for office as an open atheist (immediate political suicide). I can't imagine that a theri city council member would be a political first in 2008 (San Francisco probably beat Richmond to the punch), but it would still be a really, really big deal, and there would have to be some compelling reason why they could get elected in the South despite their species.

Redwing never ran for office; his strength was always as a media figure.

I should also point out that, in the wake of The Executive Order, a U.S. representative was outed as a theri and immediately resigned. So, while he wasn't -elected- as a theri, he did serve as one for a VERY short time. (That scandal was one of the factors that shaped the debate while theris were all busy at The Meeting.)

Regarding a theri vs. human war more generally -- in the last years of the 1990s, a theri extremist group calling themselves the Human Evolution Front released a manifesto that essentially advocated species war. (Their premise being that theris were the next wave of human evolution; those who changed were more enlightened; and those who fought theris were holding back the species.) The group that released the manifesto never publically surfaced, but as the manifesto circulated a few scattered and disgruntled groups took actions under their banner. Among the actions the manifesto advocated were the retributive slaughter of any humans who took place in anti-theri activities.

A later manifesto was released, supposedly from the same group but now calling themselves the Human Extermination Front, calling outright for species genocide: a critical time had arrived in human evolution, and those who did not change were condemning the world to doom, and had to be exterminated for the good of the the posthuman world.

So any theri extremist groups in modern TTU very well might be using one or both of those as a basis.

The largest and most famous human extremist group, formed soon after The Changes but surviving at least through the present day, is called the Guardian Knights. They're similar (in reasoning and practice) to the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK itself follows the same anti-theri stance, but maintains its white supremacist stance; the Knights are, in theory if not always in practice, a group welcoming to humans of all races -- and allowing magic to further their goals, as long as it's done specifically in a Christian context in a tightly controlled (Externalist) tradition.

So yes, there's a very real war simmering behind the scenes of modern American life - albeit a small one around the edges of society, and far more active in the rural South, the main stronghold of Guardian Knight power. Some theri encounter ends badly, escalates, and then a quiet cycle of retributive killings takes place in remote areas (with most participants simply vanishing in rural areas or the wilderness). When it escalates enough to catch actual media attention, the feds swoop in, arrest a bunch of participants, and one side or the other abandons the battlefield, to start trouble elsewhere.

Most humans take it as common knowledge not to wander into rural/wilderness areas in the Pacific and mountain west (except for popular national parks), and most theris take it as common knowledge not to wander around rural areas east of the Rockies. (It's one of those "don't drive around the inner city in an expensive car" common-sense things. Both sides have their turf.) As long as the body count stays low and the fighting stays outside civilization, it's basically invisible to public consciousness - just like urban gang violence is.

All that having been said - something that's specifically a "shadow war," part of a larger and coordinated effort? The odds are probably low, but I'm open to your idea.

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