First Order Culture
Dec. 4th, 2018 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
potboyI’m clearly doing something wrong with the reblogging, so I’m reposting this in an attempt to get it to show up this time.
@darthlenaplant said
[Since it’s All Saints Day and All Dead’s Day and we’re visiting the graves of our families ‘n’ stuff] Now I’m wondering how they generally act when someone dies.
Maybe not in battle, but of sickness or old age, but what are they doing with their dead?
Do they even use something like graves? (Where? Is there a distinct planet that is only used for this?)
Do they put the body in a casket and shoot it out into space, like they do in Star Trek?
Or do they incinerate it and put the urns in some special place? Or is there just a plate with a name sitting somewhere? Maybe they have some sort of family altar in their quarters or something? How are the dead honoured?
I like to think that they still have some sort of connection to their ancestors, but maybe they don’t? Maybe they simply concentrate more on the living than the dead?
And now to something completely different: What is Art according to the FO?
Militaristic or not, art is the signature of a culture, and if they don’t discourage cuddling and other indiviuality, and engineering can also be considered an art, they won’t discourage other means of creativity, would they?
What sort of music is “in” in the FO? I mentioned somewhere that Hux strikes me as the kind of person who’d listen to Kraftwerk, and you said that’s because they sound like lullabies sung by robots (it’s so true tho)
But what else? Is it something like Skrillex, Pendulum, or Gigi D'Agostino or can it also be something “organic” like Rembetiko or our all-known European classical music (I read such an awesome fic about Hux listening to the Star Wars equivalent of Mozart, Bach and I think it was Beethoven? Anyway, that fic was awesome, I need to find it again)
Or is there also something like Metal in the Star Wars universe? (I may or may not just want to see head-banging Stormtroopers…)
What is the traditional Imperial folk music? Is there even something like that?
What instruments do they even use? (There must be so many different instruments, like holy shit)
Which brings me directly to the Imperial and FO culture in general: Is it really that monolithic? I know that I personally read it kinda Austrian/German/Japanese/Persian/Russian/etc. (ok, it basically is everything between Austria and Japan taken and mashed up, maybe with some differences from part to part that simply are about which aspects are more pronounced than others? Like you have a bunch of people who may dress like our stereotypical Tyrolean, but they all have names like Ferenc Oromo or Miyuki Untersteger or Taraneh Artemievna? (OF COURSE they all have various skin colours from black to white) The cooking is probably all over the place, like Ćevapi, Sambar and Khao Soi are recipes within the same “family” (or whatever you call a bunch of people who may or may not share a surname and maybe even live together)
To which extend would families even form? Which name does the kid get, especially if no one is “claiming” parentage? AKA it goes to the nursery, but does it get the mother’s name automatically? Which in turn would kinda make way for a matrilineal inheritance culture. (What’s the kid even supposed to get? Mommy’s ol’ Rocket Launcher?)
Questions over questions spawn in my head because you got me thinking, but let me telly you that I explicitly love you for this. (no romo tho) XD
~
Ooh, cool thoughts! I’m going to be wildly speculative and have a go at some of this :)
Rites for the Dead.
I’m thinking that out there while they were rebuilding themselves with very little aid from anyone, they’ve probably become a culture that is used to scarcity and now makes a virtue of not wasting anything. So probably not firing bodies off into space complete with casket. If a Stormtrooper dies on board ship, their possessions go back into the common pool, and their body goes into the recycling, where its water and useful trace elements can be reclaimed.
But (in keeping with the whole ashes and skulls theme, a small bone from each body is kept and presented to the person in charge of that legion (if you’re FN-4598, your remains go to the FN series chapel, where they’re kept with the remains of the rest of your squad.) That way your essence or power remains at home with your people. (Lots of cultures around the world keep their dead relatives’ remains in the house with them, and French sailors in the 18th Century were buried in the ballast of their ships, so this would be a more efficient, communal version of that.)
If they die off the ship and can’t be reclaimed, then some small possession, or even a plaque with their number and call sign on it will do to go in the chapel instead.
Officers may have a different arrangement, because they’re obviously a class who are considered worth the expenditure of more resources. Also they are the class which retains customs from the old Imperial days.
We know the FO officers are keen on remembering their dead, as they use the names of dead imperials on their rank patches on their sleeves. Possibly these are people whose bodies they couldn’t retain in some way, so keeping the names is an equivalent.
I’m actually quite keen on the idea that really important ex-Imperials get mummified and carted around in the ship’s hall of remembrance. (I quite like the idea of Hux going down there to talk to his dead dad.)
Music and Art.
A lot of the older people (where anyone Hux’s age or over is considered ‘old’) will remember Imperial culture, so there will be (musical, culinary, literary etc) traditions from all over the galaxy represented in whatever datafiles people managed to snatch up when they fled from home. So yes, I think they’ll have their equivalent of Mozart and other composers from the old planets who remind them of the glory that has been stolen from them. There are probably officers who practice the old instruments and write music in the old styles (and draw and paint and so on) in an attempt to live up to the ideal of being proper Imperial gentlefolk. There may even be like string quartets and theatre and opera going on during those long periods in hyperspace with nothing to do.
Also I bet the Stormtroopers will make instruments out of anything and play the kind of folk music it’s easy to dance to. Maybe some of that also harks back to the music the clone troopers played, though nobody kept records so nobody can say for sure. Both officer and trooper kids and teens have their own countercultures with (strictly limited and controlled) sanctioned forms of petty rebellion which have been determined to lie within acceptable levels of minor annoyance but not to be actual threats to public morale.
At the same time, a lot of FO culture is about making sure people believe the right things, so I suspect any art or other cultural activity has to be vetted for its ideological purity by Intelligence Officers before it is either quashed, ignored or encouraged as appropriate.
Families
I think the Stormtroopers just don’t have them - from creche to ashes they’ve got their series and their squad. I mean, they may have children, but their children will be placed into the stormtrooper program in turn and they are discouraged from forming personal bonds with them.
The officers, otoh, are fighting a more personal fight to restore the glory to their family names - to get back what was stolen from them - so retaining their names and genes is going to be important to them, but whether any of them would want to be involved with the chore of actually raising their own children, IDK. They’re all very busy with the war, and it’s much more efficient to put them in the appropriate creche and start grooming them to uphold the family honour only when they’re old enough to follow a decent conversation. I think there’d be a level of toleration there, with officers who insisted on having families being seen as old fashioned and not forward thinking enough, yet tolerated because it was an Imperial custom and they like to think they are still Imperials.
Necessities of life
The FO provides universal health care, job security, shelter, food, clothing and an education to all its members as a matter of course. The education may include brainwashing, the shelter, food and clothing may be a dorm, nutrient puls, and a uniform, but they do value their personnel and no productive member of the society starves or dies of ill health if they can help it. That would be wasteful.
@darthlenaplant said
[Since it’s All Saints Day and All Dead’s Day and we’re visiting the graves of our families ‘n’ stuff] Now I’m wondering how they generally act when someone dies.
Maybe not in battle, but of sickness or old age, but what are they doing with their dead?
Do they even use something like graves? (Where? Is there a distinct planet that is only used for this?)
Do they put the body in a casket and shoot it out into space, like they do in Star Trek?
Or do they incinerate it and put the urns in some special place? Or is there just a plate with a name sitting somewhere? Maybe they have some sort of family altar in their quarters or something? How are the dead honoured?
I like to think that they still have some sort of connection to their ancestors, but maybe they don’t? Maybe they simply concentrate more on the living than the dead?
And now to something completely different: What is Art according to the FO?
Militaristic or not, art is the signature of a culture, and if they don’t discourage cuddling and other indiviuality, and engineering can also be considered an art, they won’t discourage other means of creativity, would they?
What sort of music is “in” in the FO? I mentioned somewhere that Hux strikes me as the kind of person who’d listen to Kraftwerk, and you said that’s because they sound like lullabies sung by robots (it’s so true tho)
But what else? Is it something like Skrillex, Pendulum, or Gigi D'Agostino or can it also be something “organic” like Rembetiko or our all-known European classical music (I read such an awesome fic about Hux listening to the Star Wars equivalent of Mozart, Bach and I think it was Beethoven? Anyway, that fic was awesome, I need to find it again)
Or is there also something like Metal in the Star Wars universe? (I may or may not just want to see head-banging Stormtroopers…)
What is the traditional Imperial folk music? Is there even something like that?
What instruments do they even use? (There must be so many different instruments, like holy shit)
Which brings me directly to the Imperial and FO culture in general: Is it really that monolithic? I know that I personally read it kinda Austrian/German/Japanese/Persian/Russian/etc. (ok, it basically is everything between Austria and Japan taken and mashed up, maybe with some differences from part to part that simply are about which aspects are more pronounced than others? Like you have a bunch of people who may dress like our stereotypical Tyrolean, but they all have names like Ferenc Oromo or Miyuki Untersteger or Taraneh Artemievna? (OF COURSE they all have various skin colours from black to white) The cooking is probably all over the place, like Ćevapi, Sambar and Khao Soi are recipes within the same “family” (or whatever you call a bunch of people who may or may not share a surname and maybe even live together)
To which extend would families even form? Which name does the kid get, especially if no one is “claiming” parentage? AKA it goes to the nursery, but does it get the mother’s name automatically? Which in turn would kinda make way for a matrilineal inheritance culture. (What’s the kid even supposed to get? Mommy’s ol’ Rocket Launcher?)
Questions over questions spawn in my head because you got me thinking, but let me telly you that I explicitly love you for this. (no romo tho) XD
~
Ooh, cool thoughts! I’m going to be wildly speculative and have a go at some of this :)
Rites for the Dead.
I’m thinking that out there while they were rebuilding themselves with very little aid from anyone, they’ve probably become a culture that is used to scarcity and now makes a virtue of not wasting anything. So probably not firing bodies off into space complete with casket. If a Stormtrooper dies on board ship, their possessions go back into the common pool, and their body goes into the recycling, where its water and useful trace elements can be reclaimed.
But (in keeping with the whole ashes and skulls theme, a small bone from each body is kept and presented to the person in charge of that legion (if you’re FN-4598, your remains go to the FN series chapel, where they’re kept with the remains of the rest of your squad.) That way your essence or power remains at home with your people. (Lots of cultures around the world keep their dead relatives’ remains in the house with them, and French sailors in the 18th Century were buried in the ballast of their ships, so this would be a more efficient, communal version of that.)
If they die off the ship and can’t be reclaimed, then some small possession, or even a plaque with their number and call sign on it will do to go in the chapel instead.
Officers may have a different arrangement, because they’re obviously a class who are considered worth the expenditure of more resources. Also they are the class which retains customs from the old Imperial days.
We know the FO officers are keen on remembering their dead, as they use the names of dead imperials on their rank patches on their sleeves. Possibly these are people whose bodies they couldn’t retain in some way, so keeping the names is an equivalent.
I’m actually quite keen on the idea that really important ex-Imperials get mummified and carted around in the ship’s hall of remembrance. (I quite like the idea of Hux going down there to talk to his dead dad.)
Music and Art.
A lot of the older people (where anyone Hux’s age or over is considered ‘old’) will remember Imperial culture, so there will be (musical, culinary, literary etc) traditions from all over the galaxy represented in whatever datafiles people managed to snatch up when they fled from home. So yes, I think they’ll have their equivalent of Mozart and other composers from the old planets who remind them of the glory that has been stolen from them. There are probably officers who practice the old instruments and write music in the old styles (and draw and paint and so on) in an attempt to live up to the ideal of being proper Imperial gentlefolk. There may even be like string quartets and theatre and opera going on during those long periods in hyperspace with nothing to do.
Also I bet the Stormtroopers will make instruments out of anything and play the kind of folk music it’s easy to dance to. Maybe some of that also harks back to the music the clone troopers played, though nobody kept records so nobody can say for sure. Both officer and trooper kids and teens have their own countercultures with (strictly limited and controlled) sanctioned forms of petty rebellion which have been determined to lie within acceptable levels of minor annoyance but not to be actual threats to public morale.
At the same time, a lot of FO culture is about making sure people believe the right things, so I suspect any art or other cultural activity has to be vetted for its ideological purity by Intelligence Officers before it is either quashed, ignored or encouraged as appropriate.
Families
I think the Stormtroopers just don’t have them - from creche to ashes they’ve got their series and their squad. I mean, they may have children, but their children will be placed into the stormtrooper program in turn and they are discouraged from forming personal bonds with them.
The officers, otoh, are fighting a more personal fight to restore the glory to their family names - to get back what was stolen from them - so retaining their names and genes is going to be important to them, but whether any of them would want to be involved with the chore of actually raising their own children, IDK. They’re all very busy with the war, and it’s much more efficient to put them in the appropriate creche and start grooming them to uphold the family honour only when they’re old enough to follow a decent conversation. I think there’d be a level of toleration there, with officers who insisted on having families being seen as old fashioned and not forward thinking enough, yet tolerated because it was an Imperial custom and they like to think they are still Imperials.
Necessities of life
The FO provides universal health care, job security, shelter, food, clothing and an education to all its members as a matter of course. The education may include brainwashing, the shelter, food and clothing may be a dorm, nutrient puls, and a uniform, but they do value their personnel and no productive member of the society starves or dies of ill health if they can help it. That would be wasteful.