It'll be alright, in the end

purple, Tapa, chef

[shigure]

power move: reblog an ungodly amount of ask games that use the same emoji and when someone sends you an ask with it you just tell them whatever you want

[shigure]

new ask game send me a 🌻 and ill just tell you whatever the fuck i want

[tilt-me-just-right]

It finally happened: an ex-red tried to sneak through my hiring process.  Ignored the sign, outright lied to me, actually got as far as putting me on the phone with his father, but the father’s accent wasn’t good enough to fool me.  (I’d explain what the mistake was but I don’t want to make things easier for anyone else to pull the same trick and get it by somebody.)  I asked if he’d read the sign and explained that reds weren’t welcome and he claimed he “didn’t see it” and started crying on my backroom desk and took way too long to gather his things and get out of my café.  Like hell he didn’t see it, he knew enough to lie about where he went to school and lie on the first half of his résumé and have his dad prepped to pretend to be a water treatment plant operator and if I’d gotten as far as calling more relatives I’m sure they’d have all had stories too.  You can’t trust them, they’ll tell you anything to get what they want.

[birdverse-best-verse-blog]

wow

good thing you noticed

also, i didn’t want to mention this on the met stabbing post b/c obviously stabbing is worse but, whyyyy would ex-reds want so badly to work in food service of all things?? it’s not like it’s prestigious or anything and there are plenty of jobs they could do that don’t involve directly handling food???

[a-terror-of-shadow-and-flame]

at a guess I’d say it’s because the food service industry is big and you don’t need a lot of experience to be a good waiter or a good dishwasher the way that you do to be a good tailor or a good electrician

(that being the reason I became a bartender and then retrained rather than starting as a mechanic)

[birdverse-best-verse-blog]

retail work is just as big an industry and they don’t directly touch food!

[a-terror-of-shadow-and-flame]

yeah, and I bet tons of ex-reds are going into retail, but retail employers aren’t screening for them as much, and retail employers aren’t stabbing them, so we don’t hear about the ones that are going into retail.

[tilt-me-just-right]

To be clear, I didn’t *stab* him. I just didn’t hire him. That’s not a factor in whether you heard about this particular sneak.

[getmeoffthisrock]

When he says “stab” he’s not talking about you, he’s talking about a case in Met recently where a restaurant owner discovered that an employee of theirs was ex-red and stabbed them to death. 

[flameofcertainty]

why are there people who send hypersensitives harassing pollution asks

why do they exist

[getmeoffthisrock]

[steel-and-toe] amber

If I could change one thing about myself it would be being better at engaging with issues that people I care about strongly disagree on. Like I can handle it when my mom wants me to move back to the city where she and my dad live and my wife doesn’t want to but if it’s not something I Have To Deal With I often...don’t

[openamenta]

Ask Meme

@reflection-in-the-snow

amber: if you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

lilac: what makes you unique?

cerulean: if you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?

metal: what’s something you’re doing to help the world?

sunshine: what’s something you’re proud of?

chlorophyll: what’s something you care passionately about?

sunrise: what’s your earliest memory?

sunset: what do you hope to accomplish with your life?

void: if you could have been born into a fictional universe, which one would you want to have been born into?

[starfireskyglass]

This is terrible! How are people supposed to feel safe criticizing their leaders if their leaders STAB people for saying things that are barely even rude?

omg i didn’t realise Ereith was such a scary place! your king can just straight up murder someone for insulting him?

So your country is ruled by a psychopath huh?

you need help getting out of Ereith? Because living somewhere that your blues can literally kill someone in public for insulting them sounds terrifying. Like, Caladro levels of terrifying. 

[A video: Skyglass, who looks like this, holds her everything in one hand to film herself as she walks down a hallway. It’s the Erethani royal palace, a well-insulated stone castle with modern fixtures integrated as well as possible into the preindustrial architecture. The time is early morning, the day after the fateful duel. She turns a few corners before she finds the king, a black-eyed man with pale skin and medium-dark blue-grey hair, on his way somewhere and trailed by a yellow who could plausibly be a secretary, a bodyguard, or both.

“Good morning! Go fuck yourself!” she says cheerfully in Evaleen.

The king does a very quick, very understated double-take, and then starts laughing quietly. The secretary looks totally bewildered. Skyglass smiles and gives a semi-apologetic half-shrug.

“Good morning to you too,” he says, also in Evaleen, though with a much stronger Erethani accent. “Have I done anything in particular to deserve that?”

“No, sorry,” she says, “I’m just making a point to the internet about whether your citizens have to fear for their lives if they insult you.”

“Ah, of course. Well, thank you for brightening up my morning.”

“You have a very strange sense of humour, sire.”

“It’s been said.” He gives her a little wave and continues on his way. She looks into the camera, raises one eyebrow, and ends the video.]

[getmeoffthisrock]

Why do you have the best king

[starfireskyglass]

I should really have expected the number of clueless foreigners calling it “murder”, and yet.

[getmeoffthisrock]

I mean. This is the same planet that executed King Donakitira on charges of war crimes for not rolling over for the first conqueror who came along. 

I apologize on behalf of everyone, not that it’ll do any good

[starfireskyglass]

I watched Ezio Telvaran fight a duel today.

[not-brighter-but-stranger]

….I’m sure this is all sorts of important political stuff for you but it’s also kind of really awesome.

(I don’t suppose someone got video….)

[starfireskyglass]

Oh, it was definitely awesome. 

Somebody in the audience might have had the presence of mind to catch it on their everything, but it wasn’t me. I’m going to try to describe it as best I can while it’s still fresh in my mind. This will hopefully also satisfy the several people asking me who he fought and about what.

To understand this duel, you will need some background information. 

First, Ereith finished red cleaning not long ago, and we integrated our ex-reds into all the other castes, blue included. One of them married the princess. 

Second, the King of Ereith has not fought a duel in well over ten years. Definitely not since his son died; possibly not since the days of the last civil war. He was known for being very, very good when he was younger, but he’s old now - not much younger than forty - and if you’d asked me yesterday I would’ve doubted he was still capable of holding a sword.

I would’ve been wrong about that.

There was a state dinner this afternoon - I get invited to those once in a while, because of my work with the immigration project - and someone made a snide remark about the princess’s new husband. I didn’t actually hear it; you can assume it was the sort of thing somebody might say about an ex-red blue who married a princess. The King, however, was sitting a lot closer than I was. He asked the commenter to repeat herself, and got a loud, sneering “You heard me” that turned half the heads in the room.

“Are you sure you want to go there?“ asked the King. By this point things were quiet enough that I could hear the conversation clearly.

“Who’s going to stop me? You? Your granddaughter? Her new toilet?”

“Suit yourself, then,” said the King, and he stood up. Silence fell on the room like an axe. I heard a few distant whispers from people who couldn’t see him clearly, and then nothing, until he spoke again.

“My granddaughter’s husband is not without flaws, as anyone who’s heard him try to sing can attest. But he’s a clean blue Erethani, as good as you or I, and anyone who wants to dispute that can come here and say it to my sword.“

The other blue stood up. I didn’t recognize her, and I still don’t know her name, but she had a familiar bearing. I’ve known a few people who stood the same way at that age - five or six, old enough to have gotten used to winning, young enough to still feel invincible. They either grow out of it or they pick the wrong fight and die.

She drew her sword, and the King drew his, and they saluted. She was laughing; he wasn’t. She had a confident stance, moved like someone who does this every day, opened with an aggressive attack - he barely had the strength to knock her blade aside - I blinked and missed him putting his sword through her throat. I’ve never seen someone move that fast in my life. If someone did get it on video, we should teach it in advanced fencing classes.

He made a few more remarks which I was too stunned to catch, and then everyone had to leave so the dining hall could be decontaminated. It’s not even the first time I’ve seen a royal feast broken up by a duel to the death; it’s just the first time I’ve seen the King fight one.

Red cleaning in Ereith is a complex subject I don’t want to get into right now, but I suspect this is going to be the final word.

[not-brighter-but-stranger]

…….!!!!!!!

Thank you for the description. That’s amazingly cool. I am sure I am being terribly culturally insensitive right now, and I apologize for it, but what the fuck, that’s the awesomest thing I have ever heard.

Both in terms of swordfighting, and of standing on principle. Damn.

[starfireskyglass]

I don’t think you’re being culturally insensitive. “What the fuck, that’s the awesomest thing I have ever heard” is approximately how I’d be reacting to this story if I hadn’t been there.

[shadowed-moonrise]

people who do drugs in grocery store bathrooms are valid

[openamenta]

um, people need to use those bathrooms? if you’re going to do drugs in a grocery store, at least have the decency to do it in the actual store. Don’t risk a pollution accident because you want ~privacy~.

[shadowed-moonrise]

i feel like taking drugs in public is kind of rude? like, if there’s a line then obviously don’t join the line if you just wanna do drugs, but generally going somewhere private for a few minutes is the decent thing to do

[getmeoffthisrock]

why are people doing their drugs at a grocery store in the first place?

[steel-song]

I’ll do my drugs where I damn well please, stop policing how people take care of themselves? what the fuck next, don’t eat in areas you don’t approve of

[getmeoffthisrock]

I’m not saying you can’t, I just don’t understand why you would

[shadowed-moonrise]

people who do drugs in grocery store bathrooms are valid

[openamenta]

um, people need to use those bathrooms? if you’re going to do drugs in a grocery store, at least have the decency to do it in the actual store. Don’t risk a pollution accident because you want ~privacy~.

[shadowed-moonrise]

i feel like taking drugs in public is kind of rude? like, if there’s a line then obviously don’t join the line if you just wanna do drugs, but generally going somewhere private for a few minutes is the decent thing to do

[getmeoffthisrock]

why are people doing their drugs at a grocery store in the first place?

[shadowed-moonrise]

sensitivity disorders aren’t as simple as you think they are

i think people need to understand that hypersensitivity doesn’t always make sense

its not always just ‘your pollution instinct but moreso’, and it’s not always just about pollution. my brain thinks that if sugar gets on non-foods they’re a little polluted 

also, for a lot of hyper people, pollution isn’t binary & responses aren’t binary either? hypo and hyper are more similar than people realize, its like…… theyre both maladaptive ways of processing the pollution instinct? for type i hypos they just dont really have one, but for type ii hypos its more that their brain didnt want to integrate the pollution instinct because it hurts so it just decided to feel helpless about pollution. while hyper is trying to look at every last thing and see if it might be polluted and that gets exhausting. for some hypersensitive people it means that they basically react the same way to actually polluted things and things that they worry are polluted but aren’t, because they are just always on high alert for pollution and it’s hard to tell the difference

another thing is that my hypersensitivity is entangled with with scrutinous-chaotic disorder (which is a really common combination, i dont know the numbers but i think like half of the hyper people i know also have scd symptoms (although theres selection effects and stuff)). scd deserves its own post but it’s basically 

i need to know what’s going on around me and i get really stressed out if i don’t understand it—and i need to know to an unsustainable degree, it means that i can’t spend long in messy environments because my paying-attention-to-things just collapses 

there’s a Way Things Have To Be, for like, spatial arrangement of objects, which things can go together, and so forth. like people can’t touch me while im eating and i can’t touch people who are eating, because that’s Wrong. and messy surfaces are Wrong sometimes. etc.

it’s frequently easier to just give up on anything ever being okay again than it is to keep trying, in complicated environments, but that has its own costs

that sense of Wrongness is pretty similar to my pollution instinct, it’s just like: things are Not Allowed To Be This Way. This Is Wrong. This Should Stop. and it just cycles on that, i can’t think about anything else. im not sure if this is how mesos feel about it, ive heard ppl talk about a feeling of horror and i have that but it’s dwarfed by something deeper and more… neutral, which is the fundamental knowledge that the world cannot be the way it is, pollution should not. and thats most of it for most hypers and for type ii hypos. 

hypos get a lot of shit for their mental illnesses and frankly, if youre treating my siblings this way you should treat me like that too

[getmeoffthisrock]

@industrialbruise

[colorjustice]

It's certainly easy to talk about rules and procedures and the importance of following them when your own children will never be the ones murdered by foreigners. Typical yellow.

…caring about legal intricacies even when there’s a lot at stake is definitely yellow, but I’m legitimately unsure where you’re getting ‘your own children will never be the ones murdered by foreigners.’ There is no history of countries killing lots of civilians and sparing yellows in particular.

And I haven’t been talking about the importance of following them! I am not saying Voans shouldn’t commit as many war crimes as they think will help their kids! I am just saying there is a good reason that this is a war crime and that what you want is to get ‘killing babies’ also made a war crime, not ‘enlisting purples’ delisted.

[imperialtrellis]

I think they probably mean that you’re in Anitam and not Imde province, though they could potentially also mean that most yellows have more moving ability than farm-purples. If a technical writer or programmer or so on flees to another city, they can probably get another job there and recover pretty well. If a purple flees their farm, they have nothing.

I’m still confused as to how you find ‘yes it’s fine for you to commit these war crimes, but you should be executed’ to be coherent and not completely contradictory.

Also literally no one I have seen has brought up enlisting purples. ‘I blow up some soldiers with fertilizer I have’ (or whatever else) is clearly not the same as ‘I join the army’. And I guess your argument would be that countries would secretly enlist the purples and pretend they’re acting of their own accord? But in that case they could just do that and have all said purples dye their hair and say they’re grey, it’s not like that’s easier to prove or notice than ‘the government is training these people, paying them, and sending them orders’. 

…Also I have never thought about this but it would actually be an interesting suggestion to specifically decriminalize non-greys fighting on defense but not offense. That sounds like it could help disincentivize invasion, help deal with bigger countries invading smaller countries, make countries less worried that a decreased grey population will mean they get invaded, prevent situations like Ereith’s…

[getmeoffthisrock]

I approve this suggestion! Not least because the Ereith thing was a clusterfuck of miscarried justice.

[starfireskyglass]

Nice to find someone outside Ereith who openly thinks so. Yes, my country would hate the rest of the world a lot less if it wasn’t a war crime for us to defend ourselves if invaded. It wouldn’t erase what happened to King Donakitira, but it would mean we could breathe a little easier about international relations in general.

[tilt-me-just-right]

You could just *have a grey caste*, you know. Kick it off with one immigrant, take your pick, you can have anyone you want if you offer to let them have ten children, right? And then you could have your duels and your anyone-can-professionally-ski and whatnot and no one has a reason to care but you’d have greys for soldiers.

[starfireskyglass]

This would involve inviting a foreigner to come to Ereith and have enough children to found an entire caste. And the new ‘greys’ would be living in a society where everything they were allowed to do except go to war was open to the whole population.

I don’t anticipate either of those things ending well.

[steel-song]

Why would it be bad for grey work to be open to the whole population? Obviously greys would be far, far better at that work, and so they’d succeed anyway. “Oh no the other castes are stealing our jobs :(” is a thing for castes who haven’t had enough eugenics.

Of course, it would still be a massive problem for everyone ELSE that you just…. let violence happen to people who aren’t grey, and expect your whole population to deal with the trauma. But it wouldn’t be a problem for the greys.

If anything the greys would have more job opportunities, since they could protect you from each other, teach you all how to ski properly, prevent you from being shitty idiots and show you how to do stuff safely, etc. There’s probably a huge market for actually decent fighters to teach people how to win your “duels”.

[getmeoffthisrock]

...You realize the reason Ereith doesn’t have a grey caste is that the entire country is genetically like four-fiths or something grey and they overcorrected, right? Please don’t try to model it as a country where everything is perfectly normal except that all the greys got wiped out by a plague or something, it...doesn’t work.

[openamenta]

Unpopular opinion: Ereith did nothing wrong.

There are no non-greys in Ereith. They have always been very clear on this point: everyone in Ereith is grey in addition to their other caste.

A soldier impersonating a civilian is an abomination, but Ereith never made a secret of what they were doing. They deliberately and openly forfeited all protections applying to nongreys in wartime, knowing and accepting the drawbacks of that decision.

Granted, it’s usually seen as threatening to have a high grey percentage of the population, but Ereith is too small to be a real threat on the international stage. Plenty of countries have more greys than Ereith in absolute numbers, and if Ereith ever tried to invade somewhere small, or if they started to grow larger, the international community would come down on them like a ton of bricks.

Again, the choice has drawbacks – they can never become a major player on the international stage – but they have never engaged in any kind of deception about their position, and they have chosen to accept the drawbacks.

[getmeoffthisrock]

The international community never made any attempt to engage in good faith with Ereith.

When Ereith was formed, it was perfectly isolated. There were no international norms for them to worry about, and in their particular situation losing the grey caste made sense.

And their reintroduction to the rest of the world was being invaded by Oahk.

They didn’t have time to recreate the grey caste if they had wanted to. They had a choice between doing things the way they had had no reason at all not to do them for centuries, or rolling over and letting people who forced women to have abortions if they couldn’t magically get a permission fast enough take over. 

If, in the aftermath of the fall of the Oahk Empire, the international community’s reaction had had any traces of sympathy, had been “we recognize that this was an exceptional circumstance but we need you to have greys now”–well. I don’t know that Ereith would have done it. I don’t know that they would have been wrong not to if they hadn’t. But I’d have a lot more sympathy with people who’d say “Ereith will be war criminals if they ever go to war again” than with people who say “Ereith were war criminals for not rolling over and bathing in the blood of their unborn children” in the timeline where the international community’s response was to denounce them and execute their king.

[steel-song]

What the fuck do you mean, losing the grey caste made sense? There’s not going to be any wars, therefore you don’t need greys? As if an isolated society doesn’t need police, athletes, fire fighters, fitness trainers?

Heck maybe if they’d had explorer greys, they wouldn’t have been isolated for so long!

“They had no reason at all to have greys” ….How about they had no reason at all NOT to have greys? You don’t GET RID OF AN ENTIRE CASTE just because there’s less need for ONE of their jobs. Basically nobody has been a pen and paper scribe for centuries but you don’t hear me calling to get rid of all the yellows. That would be GENOCIDE which is WRONG, HELLO?

[getmeoffthisrock]

It made sense for everyone in Ereith to be grey, not no one.

Maybe you should do some more research before engaging in more Ereith discourse, I’m really not getting a good-faith vibe from you here.

[steel-song]

Maybe you should find something better to do with yourself than literal war crimes apologism.

[getmeoffthisrock]

just out of curiosity, do you think that every Insho and their dog is guilty of the Emperor’s crimes, too?

[openamenta]

Unpopular opinion: Ereith did nothing wrong.

There are no non-greys in Ereith. They have always been very clear on this point: everyone in Ereith is grey in addition to their other caste.

A soldier impersonating a civilian is an abomination, but Ereith never made a secret of what they were doing. They deliberately and openly forfeited all protections applying to nongreys in wartime, knowing and accepting the drawbacks of that decision.

Granted, it’s usually seen as threatening to have a high grey percentage of the population, but Ereith is too small to be a real threat on the international stage. Plenty of countries have more greys than Ereith in absolute numbers, and if Ereith ever tried to invade somewhere small, or if they started to grow larger, the international community would come down on them like a ton of bricks.

Again, the choice has drawbacks – they can never become a major player on the international stage – but they have never engaged in any kind of deception about their position, and they have chosen to accept the drawbacks.

[getmeoffthisrock]

The international community never made any attempt to engage in good faith with Ereith.

When Ereith was formed, it was perfectly isolated. There were no international norms for them to worry about, and in their particular situation losing the grey caste made sense.

And their reintroduction to the rest of the world was being invaded by Oahk.

They didn’t have time to recreate the grey caste if they had wanted to. They had a choice between doing things the way they had had no reason at all not to do them for centuries, or rolling over and letting people who forced women to have abortions if they couldn’t magically get a permission fast enough take over. 

If, in the aftermath of the fall of the Oahk Empire, the international community’s reaction had had any traces of sympathy, had been “we recognize that this was an exceptional circumstance but we need you to have greys now”–well. I don’t know that Ereith would have done it. I don’t know that they would have been wrong not to if they hadn’t. But I’d have a lot more sympathy with people who’d say “Ereith will be war criminals if they ever go to war again” than with people who say “Ereith were war criminals for not rolling over and bathing in the blood of their unborn children” in the timeline where the international community’s response was to denounce them and execute their king.

[steel-song]

What the fuck do you mean, losing the grey caste made sense? There’s not going to be any wars, therefore you don’t need greys? As if an isolated society doesn’t need police, athletes, fire fighters, fitness trainers?

Heck maybe if they’d had explorer greys, they wouldn’t have been isolated for so long!

“They had no reason at all to have greys” ….How about they had no reason at all NOT to have greys? You don’t GET RID OF AN ENTIRE CASTE just because there’s less need for ONE of their jobs. Basically nobody has been a pen and paper scribe for centuries but you don’t hear me calling to get rid of all the yellows. That would be GENOCIDE which is WRONG, HELLO?

[getmeoffthisrock]

It made sense for everyone in Ereith to be grey, not no one.

Maybe you should do some more research before engaging in more Ereith discourse, I’m really not getting a good-faith vibe from you here.

[openamenta]

Unpopular opinion: Ereith did nothing wrong.

There are no non-greys in Ereith. They have always been very clear on this point: everyone in Ereith is grey in addition to their other caste.

A soldier impersonating a civilian is an abomination, but Ereith never made a secret of what they were doing. They deliberately and openly forfeited all protections applying to nongreys in wartime, knowing and accepting the drawbacks of that decision.

Granted, it’s usually seen as threatening to have a high grey percentage of the population, but Ereith is too small to be a real threat on the international stage. Plenty of countries have more greys than Ereith in absolute numbers, and if Ereith ever tried to invade somewhere small, or if they started to grow larger, the international community would come down on them like a ton of bricks.

Again, the choice has drawbacks – they can never become a major player on the international stage – but they have never engaged in any kind of deception about their position, and they have chosen to accept the drawbacks.

[steel-song]

Not everyone in Ereith has knowingly accepted the drawbacks of not being a noncombatant! Almost none of those fucking people consented to be considered grey as well as their first caste! Stop talking about a whole country like every single person gets to sign off on its leaders’ decisions!

[getmeoffthisrock]

Have you ever...talked...to an Erethani person?

[openamenta]

Unpopular opinion: Ereith did nothing wrong.

There are no non-greys in Ereith. They have always been very clear on this point: everyone in Ereith is grey in addition to their other caste.

A soldier impersonating a civilian is an abomination, but Ereith never made a secret of what they were doing. They deliberately and openly forfeited all protections applying to nongreys in wartime, knowing and accepting the drawbacks of that decision.

Granted, it’s usually seen as threatening to have a high grey percentage of the population, but Ereith is too small to be a real threat on the international stage. Plenty of countries have more greys than Ereith in absolute numbers, and if Ereith ever tried to invade somewhere small, or if they started to grow larger, the international community would come down on them like a ton of bricks.

Again, the choice has drawbacks – they can never become a major player on the international stage – but they have never engaged in any kind of deception about their position, and they have chosen to accept the drawbacks.

[getmeoffthisrock]

The international community never made any attempt to engage in good faith with Ereith.

When Ereith was formed, it was perfectly isolated. There were no international norms for them to worry about, and in their particular situation losing the grey caste made sense.

And their reintroduction to the rest of the world was being invaded by Oahk.

They didn’t have time to recreate the grey caste if they had wanted to. They had a choice between doing things the way they had had no reason at all not to do them for centuries, or rolling over and letting people who forced women to have abortions if they couldn’t magically get a permission fast enough take over. 

If, in the aftermath of the fall of the Oahk Empire, the international community’s reaction had had any traces of sympathy, had been “we recognize that this was an exceptional circumstance but we need you to have greys now”–well. I don’t know that Ereith would have done it. I don’t know that they would have been wrong not to if they hadn’t. But I’d have a lot more sympathy with people who’d say “Ereith will be war criminals if they ever go to war again” than with people who say “Ereith were war criminals for not rolling over and bathing in the blood of their unborn children” in the timeline where the international community’s response was to denounce them and execute their king.

[staringtowardthestars]

If countries were allowed to declare people legally grey people and legally another caste simultaneously, then all countries would declare all of their citizens, possibly excepting blue and red people, to technically be legally grey in addition to another caste. That’s how we end up with there being no civilians in wartime, and how we end up with death counts ten times those we now see, on both sides of the conflict.

If international treaties say that only members of a certain caste can carry out some action, and a country eliminates that caste, they are forfeiting their right to carry out that action. No one forced them not to have grey people; it was their choice.

[getmeoffthisrock]

THERE WERE NO RELEVANT INTERNATIONAL TREATIES AT THE TIME. Ereith formed in isolation. Obviously countries today can’t declare their other castes grey, but saying that what Ereith did was like that would be like saying that a family magically time-traveled from pre-Oahk Tapa were population control defectors who didn’t care if their babies died for having had seven children with no credits

[openamenta]

Unpopular opinion: Ereith did nothing wrong.

There are no non-greys in Ereith. They have always been very clear on this point: everyone in Ereith is grey in addition to their other caste.

A soldier impersonating a civilian is an abomination, but Ereith never made a secret of what they were doing. They deliberately and openly forfeited all protections applying to nongreys in wartime, knowing and accepting the drawbacks of that decision.

Granted, it’s usually seen as threatening to have a high grey percentage of the population, but Ereith is too small to be a real threat on the international stage. Plenty of countries have more greys than Ereith in absolute numbers, and if Ereith ever tried to invade somewhere small, or if they started to grow larger, the international community would come down on them like a ton of bricks.

Again, the choice has drawbacks – they can never become a major player on the international stage – but they have never engaged in any kind of deception about their position, and they have chosen to accept the drawbacks.

[getmeoffthisrock]

The international community never made any attempt to engage in good faith with Ereith.

When Ereith was formed, it was perfectly isolated. There were no international norms for them to worry about, and in their particular situation losing the grey caste made sense.

And their reintroduction to the rest of the world was being invaded by Oahk.

They didn’t have time to recreate the grey caste if they had wanted to. They had a choice between doing things the way they had had no reason at all not to do them for centuries, or rolling over and letting people who forced women to have abortions if they couldn't magically get a permission fast enough take over. 

If, in the aftermath of the fall of the Oahk Empire, the international community’s reaction had had any traces of sympathy, had been “we recognize that this was an exceptional circumstance but we need you to have greys now”--well. I don’t know that Ereith would have done it. I don’t know that they would have been wrong not to if they hadn’t. But I’d have a lot more sympathy with people who’d say “Ereith will be war criminals if they ever go to war again” than with people who say “Ereith were war criminals for not rolling over and bathing in the blood of their unborn children” in the timeline where the international community’s response was to denounce them and execute their king.