G2HGE Part 1 : Canon-Gleaning - Post 5c : Political Geography of the Milky Way (Attican Traverse and Earth Systems Alliance Space)
The present post (Post 5c, April 26) immediately follows yesterday’s post, Post 5b. For more information on the change in schedule and format, please refer to Post 5a.
2.3 : The Attican Traverse and Earth Systems Alliance Space, so-called
Like I said beforehand, the Attican Traverse’s defining political characteristic is that it’s officially claimed by the Citadel but contested in places by the Terminus Systems. “Unwilling to engage in an all-out war against the Terminus Systems, the Citadel has adopted a military non-interference policy in the region.”
Geographically, the Attican Traverse is a buffer zone between Council Space and the Terminus Systems. On the Galaxy at War map, the region is the only one to span the diameter of the galaxy, extending from its “westernmost” point to the “easternmost” one. In that regard, the name “Traverse” is apt, as “traverse” can designate an element extending across a larger structure, from side to side.
While the Attican Traverse on the map is a single continuous region, it’s worth noting that functionally there would actually be two separate Attican Traverses, thanks to the mass relay network : a “little” Traverse to the “west” of the Galactic Core, i.e. the Ismar Frontier and the Eagle Nebula, connecting Council Space in the “south” to the Terminus Systems in the “north” ; and a “great” Traverse - i.e. the rest of the Attican Traverse, to the “east” and “southeast” of the Galactic Core
With the mass relay network we’ve been given (keeping in mind that we are ignoring if we can the ME2 map), this “little” Traverse does not directly connect to the “great” Traverse at all. The links between the “northwestern” and “northeastern” quarters of the map… basically boil down to the Omega Nebula which actually makes sense given that the Nebula’s gateway system hosts the Collectors’ access point to the whole galaxy. This means that the people who live in the Ismar Frontier or the Eagle Nebula are likely to be more influenced by what’s going on on the Citadel, Illium or Omega than by parts of the “great” Traverse, which are much farther, even though they are all technically in the same region.
This is the most succinct description of the Attican Traverse as a region : “Located near the lawless Terminus Systems, the Attican Traverse is the true frontier of Citadel-controlled space. The area contains many worlds once inhabited by the Protheans, and many mass relays are located throughout the systems of the Traverse. Colonies established in the Traverse are subject to constant raids and attacks from the nearby Terminus Systems, but the presence of multiple worlds both rich in resources and Prothean ruins, continues to draw colonizing interest.”
So that’s it, right ? Wrong. There’s more. The problem with the Attican Traverse and Earth Systems Alliance Space is that basically everyone outside of the Alliance appears to treat ESASpace as part of the Attican Traverse : in ME1 for example, the volus merchant Expat describes Noveria as “the corporate capital of the Attican Traverse”. This, alongside other elements*, suggests that in ME1 the parts of the galaxy the player can explore - divided, in ME3 terms, between ESASpace and the “great” Traverse - were all considered parts of the Attican Traverse at the time. “Earth Systems Alliance Space” isn’t older than ME3.
* : ME1 Codex entry “Uncharted Worlds” : “Humanity’s early expansion into the Attican Traverse was haphazard; a desperate race to claim habitable planets where populations can be economically settled. Ignored in the wake of this land grab were thousands of less hospitable worlds, each potentially rich with industrial resources. The wealth of entire solar systems lies untapped, waiting for corporate survey teams or independent pioneers to discover and exploit them. This, however, is not an easy task. In addition to the environmental hazards, the fact that uncharted worlds are largely ignored makes them popular bases for criminals, revolutionaries, cults, and others who wish to remain unnoticed by galactic society.”
Description in the Journal of the ME1 assignment “UNC: Valuable Minerals” : “To maintain its fleets and continue to expand, the Alliance must find new resources wherever it can. You've recently surveyed an important deposit and claimed it for the Alliance. There must be more like them in the Traverse.” The worlds with valuable minerals are all over the ME1 galaxy map.
Lastly, the regular comments in ME1 that Eden Prime and the Exodus Cluster are in the Attican Traverse make a lot more sense in that regard. In practice, they are. (The comments that the Terminus Systems are close, mentioned in Post 5b, still don’t make sense.)
So what even is Earth Systems Alliance Space ?
Doylistically, I’m pretty sure it’s whoever designed the ME3 galactic regions map deciding, for gameplay reasons, that the Attican Traverse was too large and needed to be split notwithstanding the fact that this would put the Batarian Hegemony in space claimed by the Alliance. In the simplest terms, Earth Systems Alliance Space is an ME3 invention, papering over parts of what had been, up to that point, the Attican Traverse.
In Watsonian terms, it’s probably the equivalent of such or such IRL political entity making itself feel important by placing itself at the center of the world, sometimes literally*. Given that the Alliance has spent most of its existence trying to prove it’s the equal of the other Citadel races, a self-aggrandizing geographical trick sounds perfectly in character. It’s the Alliance showing this map of the galaxy to its fellow Council members and saying, “We are a big deal ! We are just as big as all of you combined !” and the non-humans in the room saying, “…your worlds are part of Citadel Space. Why did you represent yourself outside of Council Space ?”
* : The only reason Europe is at the center of the standard world maps today is because of the lasting impact of colonialism, and the supremacy of European empires in the recent past ; it’s no less an arbitrary choice than a world map where the Pacific is shown in full and the Americas are shown to the right of the map, or even an Americas-centered map with Eurasia split in two.
All of that to say that I doubt anyone outside of the Alliance actually thinks of “Earth Systems Alliance Space” as something other than wishful thinking on the Alliance’s part, and that the Attican Traverse, for non-humans, includes that region of space.
Context ? Context.
Those pretensions actually make sense in light of the way the Alliance has always related to the Attican Traverse in the lore. In ME1 and ME3, we are told again and again that “the Council makes no objection to the Systems Alliance's expansion in the Traverse, because the large Alliance Navy can settle unstable regions without the Council needing to get involved.” In other words, the Council can (and did) use the Alliance to actually substantiate its claim to the Traverse. As for the Alliance, we saw in the last Codex entry I quoted (“Uncharted Worlds”) that the Alliance’s “early” phase of “aggressive expansionism” into the Traverse focused on the best worlds, and by the time of ME1 the Alliance is edging its bets by exploring more carefully the largely uncharted Traverse, looking for valuable resources.
As we saw in Post 1, one of the biggest plot holes in the lore of Mass Effect is that the Exodus Cluster, colonized by the Alliance as early as 2152 CE, is directly connected to the Kite’s Nest, the Horsehead Nebula and Hades Gamma, which by this point have all been accessible to the various non-human races of the galaxy for some time. The only way for the humans to avoid making first contact with everyone ahead of schedule is if, somehow, for some reason, the Exodus Cluster is completely cut off from the aforementioned clusters (and probably the Petra Nebula as well, because they’d have eagerly jumped on Elysium otherwise) at least until 2157 CE.
This is supported by the colonization dates we have for Alliance colonies : the colonies founded before 2157 are Demeter, Terra Nova and Eden Prime (all established in 2152), Benning (in 2153), Tyr (in 2156) and Shanxi (at some point). The first five colonies in that list are all in the Local Cluster, the Arcturus Stream or the Exodus Cluster ; as I mentioned last time, Shanxi’s system had the Shanxi-Theta mass relay, that led to uncharted space, from the human point of view, which was the periphery of turian space, from the turian point of view. Given that the Turian Empire is in Inner Council Space (see above), this means Shanxi and human expansion were both in that direction, toward the “west”, whereas the Traverse was in the “east”, somehow inaccessible.
Fig. 2 : Personal attempts at representing early Alliance expansion, for the ease of your visualisation. An anomalous astronomical structure, somehow resembling an enormous cat hair, is also depicted drifting between the Kite’s Nest and Hades Gamma clusters. The lore does not attest the existence of such a thing ; it should be disregarded.
With no cluster to expand into past the Exodus Cluster and the Attican Traverse cut off until 2157 at the earliest, the only places left to expand (beside the secondary relay bubbles) are the other two clusters* branching off the Arcturus Stream and the clusters branching off them. In that context, the choice to make Arcturus the center of the Alliance’s administration and eventually government makes a lot of sense, as it was in the geographical center as well. The only things I’ll venture to guess is that Shanxi, and the eventual link to turian space, are somewhere down one of those branches ; and that one of those two mysterious primary relays, Relay 202, “leads into contested space.”
* : for the number of primary mass relays in the Arcturus system, see here.
After the First Contact War of 2157, however, humanity’s expansion possibilities… expanded (sorry). On the basis of the dates we have, the next colonies to be established were Bekenstein (2158), next to the Citadel, and Elysium in 2160. Elysium is the first human colony in the Skyllian Verge (another region difficult to delineate, see below), and that makes it one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Alliance colonies in the Attican Traverse. After that point, most of the Alliance colonies whose settlement dates is known are to be found somewhere in that region*. The sense one has is that, since the Alliance’s expansion to the “west” would inevitably run into Inner Council Space, and since the Alliance was so desperate to play catch-up, then the Alliance did a 180° turn and started focusing its expansion efforts in the actual frontier, the “southeastern” Attican Traverse.
* : Intai’sei (2166), Therum (2167), Ontarom (2170), Feros (2178), Proteus (2179), Gilead (2180), Chasca (2183). Mindoir (settlement date unknown) is also said to be in the Traverse. Since Akuze (2177) is on the “outskirts” of the Alliance, it’s probably in the Traverse as well, but that’s not confirmed. Independent human colonies (e.g. Horizon) are not listed, but there’s also a fair number of them in the Traverse.
If I were to headcanon why the line was drawn where it is on the map to encompass 10 Attican Traverse clusters - the Petra Nebula, the Kite’s Nest, Artemis Tau, Hades Gamma, the Voyager Cluster, Attican Beta, the Maroon Sea, Gemini Sigma, the Horse Head Nebula and Argos Rho - in Earth Systems Alliance Space, I’d probably say ESASpace actually represents the Alliance’s confidence in its ability to project its strength and safeguard its interests, its zone of military influence if you will. But quite frankly, I have no idea why the Maroon Sea is included but not, say, the equally distant Kepler Verge, where the Alliance actually has a colony (Ontarom).
All of this blabbering to say that if the map was made by anyone outside of the Alliance, it probably would look a lot more like this :
Fig. 3 : A flawed reinterpretation, but a likelier one. This isn’t meant to be an actual map, let alone a perfect one. Artemis Tau, which is as much Alliance as a cluster can be this far outside of its Arcturus-centered domain, finds itself… in the Batarian Hegemony in pink (should I headcanon that Artemis Tau connects to batarian space ?), though as previously noted Elysium’s Petra Nebula is also very much inside officially batarian space. Though I guess the Batarian Hegemony after 2171 would technically be part of the Terminus Systems as a “rogue state”, I elected to make it stand out, given that it’s such a particular case.
What really matters on this map is that if you put all of 100% Citadel Space in blue and expand the Attican Traverse in green to encompass what’s called the Traverse in ME1 - i.e. Noveria and all the ME1 systems and clusters - one can see that the Traverse is slightly less than 50% of the surface of the explored galaxy, while Council Space and the Terminus Systems are each slightly over 25% of the map’s area. The size of the actual, bona fide Alliance territory also stands out.
Final note : I have no idea how Attican Beta and the Attican Traverse are related, other than Attican Beta being in the Attican Traverse - but why Attican Beta out of every other cluster in the Traverse ? Where is Attican Alpha ? Where is Attican Gamma ? Why did the Alliance have this craze with Greek letters ? And why are some of the ME1 clusters (Maroon Sea, Kepler Verge, Armstrong Nebula, Voyager Cluster) bereft of Greek letters ? Whyyy ?
Tomorrow : the Nemean Abyss ! The Perseus Veil ! See you there !
G2HGE Index :
Post 0 : Presentation and Purpose
Post 1 : Methodology and general lamentation over the incoherent state of the lore.
Post 2a : Oldest canon date for activity in every single cluster
Post 2b : Organization and Visualization of the above
Post 3 : The oversized impact of the asari, and a surprising amount of stuff to discover.
Post 4 : The Problem with the Galaxy Maps
Post 5a : The Regions of the Milky Way : Overview and Council Space
Post 5b : The Regions of the Milky Way : The Terminus Systems
Post 5c : You’re here !