#era two

[addictedtowords16]

"Logic doesn't work on Wayne." "I bought a ward against it off a traveling fortune teller," Wayne explained. "It lets me add two 'n' two and get a pickle."

The Alloy of Law

[browncoatforever]

Wayne???

[roodles03]

Era Two

[mysweetmedusa]

  © ystizar

[addictedtowords16]

“Then tell me this, God,” Wayne said, pointing at him. “Was that the biggest damn explosion a person ever made?” Harmony raised an eyebrow. “That’s your last question? Your final request of God before you pass into eternity?” “Hell yes! Figure now that I’m dead, I’ll get the other answers right soon. You ain’t going to trick me into asking a useless question. So tell me. Was it?” Harmony smiled. “Ah, Wayne. I suppose that most other things that could rival it–like the detonations of the Ashmounts–would be categorized as acts of God. Therefore, I declare that is is. Yes, Wayne. You exploded yourself in the biggest damn explosion a person has ever made in the history of our planet.” “Make sure Steris knows,” Wayne said, grinning. “She’s always complainin’ about my exploding things. This time I saved her hide by doin’ it. Plus, I made the explosion smaller. That’s gonna break her brain. I made it smaller, and it was still the biggest one that ever was.” He felt himself really going now. So, he held out a hand to God. Who, smiling, shook it. “I knew you’d glow,” Wayne said, with a wink. With that, Wayne stretched into another place, into another time. He stretched into the wind. And into the stars. And all endless things.

The Lost Metal

[deathpigeon]

Era Two Peridots and Discipline vs Punishment

It’s struck me that a lot of people seem to be taking Homeworld at their word that Era Two Peridots are weaker than Era One Peridots because they’re running low on resources, particularly using that to say that this means that Homeworld is now having a resource crisis, or something along those lines, but I think that there’s ample reason to question that.

To begin with, even accounting for Yellow Diamond’s anger toward the Rebellion and Earth, if they were in a resource crisis, it seems likely that she’d, at the very least, be far less flippant at the thought of wasting Earth’s resources. Indeed, projects like the Cluster, which they were trying to prototype on Earth in order to create more of, would be incredibly resource intensive, both in the resources used in the project itself and in the opportunity cost of what it would do to the planet it is incubated in. If the Cluster destroys the Earth, then it would take more time, energy, and resources for them to harvest materials from it, and they have little reason to assume that much remains of the Rebellion after what the Diamonds did to the planet, so, to them, it wouldn’t be particularly resource intensive to cancel the Cluster project and return to Earth to rebuild a colony, there. All of this seems to contradict the idea that they are running low on resources.

But, if they aren’t running low on resources, why, then, are they making Era Two Peridots markedly weaker than Era One Peridots?

Well, Era Two Peridots are probably much easier to control. Following the Rebellion, when the Diamonds don’t need to focus on the war, anymore, they surely would have taken the time to consider what the Rebellion meant to their power. The Rebellion was, fundamentally, a sign of weakness in their power over the other gems. To compensate for this, they’d have to change and evolve.

By making Era Two Peridots weaker, they would be able to do less if they rebelled, so rebellion is much easier to deal with. But, more importantly, by telling Era Two Peridots that they are weaker, and that it’s because they lack the resources to make them stronger, this gives them a sense of inferiority and aligns their interests with the Diamonds in getting more resources.

The Gem Empire is an expansionist operation that’s constantly seeking out new planets to mine for materials and use for land, but the Rebellion showed that the way they were going about it created resentment among those lower in the hierarchy and that they didn’t have strong motivation to fight for the Diamonds, rather than fighting for themselves. By telling the Era Two Peridots they’re weak because Homeworld is running low on resources, now Era Two Peridots will be fighting for themselves as much as for the Diamonds when they go out to colonize new worlds. This means that Era Two Peridots need less supervision and the Diamonds don’t need to exert as much overt control over them. Instead, the Era Two Peridots would engage in discipline. To explain what I mean, I’ll turn to the philosopher Michel Foucault.

Foucault famously wrote about how, historically, there have been two sorts of methods for control people in power to control those below them, discipline and punishment. Punishment was an older method which worked through direct threats of violence and direct control over their subjects. Kings would do absolutely brutal things towards their subjects who stepped out of line, but they’d do them publicly where everyone could watch and turned them into spectacles. The Romans would often send prisoners to fight for public spectacle is grand arenas. This serves to show people that, if they step out of line, then they’ll be punished brutally.

But these shows of power were costly, and didn’t work all that well. Kings would experience peasant rebellions when things went bad. The Romans had a tumultuous history with many insurgent movements and slave rebellions. Because of this, as we moved from the structures of feudalism to modern, industrial capitalism, people in power started to exert their control differently. It was in this time that prisons as they exist today became a thing. Rather than brutal displays of violence and power done in public, prisoners today are placed where they can’t be seen by the general populace and most people try to pretend they’re not there. In the place of these overt shows of power and violence, people with power turned the people on themselves. Average citizens are given a say in the political process (whether or not that say actually did anything was unimportant, just so long as they had it) which allowed them to get an investment in the political process. People are taught that laws were there for them and that it’s wrong to break them. But people are also told that, if they do wrong, they will be sent off to prison, out of sight and out of mind.

The philosopher Jeremy Bentham dreamed up a prison he imagined to be more humane where prisoners would be placed in cells like a honeycomb around a central tower with light shining at them all the time so that the people in the tower could see what happened in the cells, but the people in the cells couldn’t see what happened in the watchtower. This meant that you never had to have anyone in the watchtower because the prisoners would never know if someone was in there, so they’d just assume someone was and govern their own actions. He called this prison the panopticon because everyone was always being observed, even without anyone in the central tower, because they were always checking themselves.

This, to Foucault, was what our society had transformed into. Everyone was always watching themselves, both because they thought they had an investment into the system as a whole and because they thought they were always being watched, which led to people controlling themselves. This method of control he called discipline and served to be much more effective and efficient. Just like the panopticon didn’t really need anyone in the tower, a panopticon society doesn’t really need to watch everyone all the time. While discipline is less brutal than punishment, Foucault saw it as more dangerous because those in power had more control for less cost, which meant they could more easily centralize and rule without any fear of rebellion.

To get back to my point, we see this transition from the Diamonds as well. They changed their methods after the rebellion because they saw that their old methods weren’t working. In place of overt shows of power, they taught people that they were weak because they were lacking in resources, so everyone had reason to work toward the same goal. But this also meant that every gem was now watching each other, so they would always be in danger of being found out if they rebelled. This means that the Diamonds could be more hands off and use resources more efficiently, so, ironically, they probably make better use of the same resources now than they did before. This can actually be seen in how their technology has improved. Peridot remarks about how primitive the technology they left on Earth is, and things like her limb extensions are more advanced than anything that they had back when the Rebellion first took place.

This means that Era Two Peridots are weaker, not because of a lack of resources, but because making them weaker and telling them that it’s because of a lack of resources allow the Diamonds to have more control over their subjects for less cost because the newer gems would control themselves, rather than needing some external force to control them.