We’ve wrapped things up with our first lead of TTWC3 and now it’s time to take a deeper look. While Rowland is placed in the “king” role opposite to Solon and the Monarch Lich, he actually has greater affinity to the “knight” characters Ionathas and Caligo. Whereas Solon is the idealistic wise old king and the Monarch Lich is an archetypical evil overlord, Rowland is a very different sort of leader, bold and brash yet not without a good share of cunning. He takes a force of a few hundred and and manages to defeat one of the greatest strategists of that time backed by a military superpower. Now, admittedly, if the full strength of either the Zephyrian army or the Army of Light had been brought to bear against him, he probably would’ve been defeated. Similarly, he wouldn’t have been able to emerge victorious if the Dominion dispatched the sort of forces the Zephyrians contended with in the Darklands. However, success is as much a matter of skill as it is luck.

Rowland was a more interesting character to write than either Solon or the Monarch Lich because he was morally grey. Both Solon and the Monarch Lich have complexity to them, but they’re situated close to poles of the white-black spectrum. Rowland, however, is listed as a chaotic neutral in that he does whatever he pleases to benefit himself (and to the degree that he thinks outside of himself, his cause). You might be forgiven for doubting his sincerity when he speaks of working for Notos’ benefit. I do believe he’s a patriot, but not to the point that he’d serve the motherland to his own disadvantage. He refused the crown, but he still rules as a king in all but name. That being said, he didn’t go for hereditary rule because he cares enough about the country to not entrust it to anything so unreliable as his own progeny. If this all sounds somewhat contradictory, this blend of the selfish and the selfless, it’s because Rowland himself is riddled by such contradictions. It might be a problem for him if he stopped to fret about it rather than just charging on ahead.

I’ll save a discussion of his relationship with Simona for her section. I will say, though, that he uses people so cynically that he has little notion of true affection for anyone else. You could blame losing his mother at a young age, having a father obsessed with the cause above all else, and being raised primarily by a fanatically loyal and deeply infatuated servant. That’s not to say he lacks any redeeming qualities in his interpersonal relationships. He generally gives as much loyalty as he gets and while he may have his share of unsavory deeds, he’s far removed from the list of my greatest monsters.

Loss is a common theme throughout the Trident War series. Victory comes at a price and that’s for the lucky ones. However, of the entire cast, Rowland is perhaps the lead who gains the most and loses the least. That might make him something of a Karma Houdini in the eyes of some, but it’s something interesting to note.

Well, that should do it for Rowland for now. We’ll be back in seven weeks to discuss Simona. Stay tuned.

Medusa is a character that hails back from my now lost original concept for what would become The Trident War Chronicles. I’ve been a big fan of Greek mythology ever since I was a child, so it’s little surprise that I’ve woven it in so tightly with my own mythos. Much as Arachne originally had little more going for her besides being a menacing monster, so too was Medusa until I spent some time to give her more character development. I’ve already talked about her relationship with Arachne in an earlier post and there’s not much to add there. I’d probably say Medusa is a little more emotionally dependent on Arachne than Arachne is on her, but that might be because her background is a fair bit more traumatic.

Something I wasn’t expecting in her character until I really got into writing her section was the aspect of her as a tired bureaucrat. She doesn’t serve the Monarch Lich out of any great fear or loyalty, but more because it’s just a job. Basically, when Arachne submitted to him, she had no reason to put up a fight and was given her job as an inspector of the realm. You might think there was a punitive aspect to the Monarch Lich sending her to Notos, but it was simply a matter of him putting her powers and experience to use. As someone who made the rounds all throughout the Darklands multiple times during the Lich’s reign, who better to survey the land of the enemy?

As an interesting side note, there are three degrees of petrification that get covered in more detail in TTWC3, where the characters are on the receiving end and it seemed appropriate to talk about their origin here. Total petrification is fairly familiar and what most people associate with Medusa. Petrification of the flesh, where only a victim’s body is turned to stone, is actually inspired by the Medusa Transducer in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In my universe at least, I make the rationale that living tissue and dead matter react differently to the spell. This also make a convenient way to loot the victims. The way the Ancients were turned into bronze statues in Everyday Magic follows the same principle. Surface petrification was inspired by the Metroidvania Castlevania games like Symphony of the Night where it looks like total petrification but is ultimately just a shell that you can break free of. This form of petrification has previously been seen in KoG3 when Brenok petrifies Adrienne.

That does it for now. I’ll be back again in a couple months to start our treatment of the leads of TTWC3 with Rowland. Stay tuned.

I’ve stated before that I have trouble clicking with most of the leads of TTWC2, which is a terrible thing for the author to say, but Xargos is one of my favorites. While Orguz is the most sympathetic and Caligo the most interesting (particularly with regard to his backstory), Xargos is one of the most fun as a total dirtbag villain. Vain, greedy, cruel and cowardly, there’s almost nothing redeemable to him and he’s so blatant that he’s pretty fun to write. Now, perhaps the most fun villain to write was Brenok from the KoG series because you take all the above vices and add diabolical cunning. Speaking of which, the fact that Xargos veers into being stupid evil is another part of his charm.

As despicable as he is, I actually feel a bit sorry for Xargos. He’s so arrogant and he’s so much dumber than he thinks he is that he just blindly charges down the path to his own destruction. Compare him with Ophis Python, who was just kinda pathetic. For Python, circumstances were largely out of his control, but Xargos is almost entirely the author of his own ruin. It’s a bit sad, but you have a hard shedding any tears genocidal psychopath.

Well, that’s it for now. We’ve just got one more to go and that’ll be it for TTWC2. Stay tuned.

My head’s been so full of Star Wars that I very nearly forgot to give Ophis Python his due now that he’s left the stage. If I’m not mistaken, he dated back to the lost prototype of the story. If you’ve seen the cover of Life Force (Salamander in Japan) for the NES, you can see the image that was the inspiration for what Python is supposed to look like. My love of classical mythology factors in heavily with Python’s backstory, which also provides a connection to Arachne.

I’ve commented before about the challenge of writing nonhuman characters, particularly ones that aren’t humanoid. The further you distance yourself from the character, the greatly the challenge to portray them. Python mourning the loss of his family and the decline of his tribe are relatable enough, but there isn’t that much else to his character. I’ll admit that he’s pretty weak as a lead and if I had to do it again, I might consider replacing him with the Herakles Queen Basilissa.

It doesn’t feel like I’m giving him much of a fair shake and if I as the author don’t have much investment in him, that doesn’t bode well for the reader’s reception. Well, so it goes. I’ll have more to say when Xorgoth’s turn comes up, so look forward to that. Stay tuned.

Contrary to what the title might imply, this isn’t going to be a broad discussion of racism in general or even to how it applies to my characters as an extension of “On Values Dissonance”. Rather, I was wanting to specifically address the Blackamoors of Junker Jorg. The name itself will elicit the titular cry of this post and it’s entirely intentional. Though the country of Byrandia is largely inspired by pre-WWII France, it’s rather plainly goose-stepping its way down the path of fascism.

The basis for Junker Jorg stems from two separate dreams that I connected. The one relevant to today’s discussion basically follows the events of Chapter 1 of the story. I was occupying the character who would be Root, watching all the various monsters roaming about in the ruins in the distance. One of the large ones, I noted, would’ve been voiced by the late Daisuke Gouri if it actually could speak. This made me think about Gouri’s role as Bask Om, commander of the fascistic paramilitary group known as the Titans, in Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. Sure enough, who would appear on the horizon by the Titans themselves. The rest played out mostly how you saw it on the page. (As a side note, Margie was largely inspired by Lili Stecchin of Pumpkin Scissors, her torment quite possibly fueled by my annoyance at the idea of a little girl being a sergeant major. I was rather pleased with the justification I came up with in the story proper.)

Well, I couldn’t very well use the Titans in the actual story, so I took inspiration from the Italian Blackshirts, the German Brownshirts, and the Spanish Falange to craft an organization of my own design. I don’t know why, but I decided to incorporate Laurence Olivier’s disconcerting blackface makeup from his performance of Othello as a distinguishing feature. Now, if you haven’t seen the movie itself, just checking out a screenshot will reveal how off-kilter it looks. The funny thing is how much faith Sir Laurence had in its verisimilitude. Just look at this article to see how much he was applying his powers of observation (or attempting to, at least) to affect a genuine portrayal. Anyway, with that inspiration, it was just another step to go from a depiction of the Moor of Venice to the archaic term ‘Blackamoor’ that became the organization’s name.

So, yes, if you think the fascist gang of thugs from the story is racist, you’re right on the money. Ironically, the blackface allows them to minimize any potential racial variance in members (to the casual eye, at least), so while their rhetoric is virulently racist, they’re pragmatic enough to take in just about anyone willing to do the terrible things they do. I suppose it’s not unlike the yakuza being fairly willing to accept Koreans into their ranks.

Anyway, hopefully this post shed some light on things. I doubt it’ll spare me the barbs of some social justice warrior, but I seem to be obscure enough to be free of such attention.

It isn’t apparent now, but Dox is a rather special character in that he appears in many stories in the Tellus Arc. In fact, he happens to guide a lot of the events on the Planet from the date of his genesis on. He wasn’t originally in the Trident War Chronicles but was added in when the story was revived and I was working to better integrate the nascent Tellus Arc.

Much of Dox’s story gets filled in elsewhere, but I’ll go ahead and give you the basic background here. Dox was once a human archmage obsessed with the then-extinct Dark Race. Through his agents, he was able to uncover the Tome of the Black Lich, a spellbook sealed with the power of titular Black Lich, the last of the Dark Race. Through the power of the Tome, Dox became the Dark Eternal, a sort of noncorporeal entity of overwhelming dark power. This bypasses the key weakness of the Liches themselves, that their physical bodies become unable to contain the vast power they develop. Ironically, Dox continues his quest to perfect the Dark Race without realizing that he’s already achieved the nearest approximation to perfection that’s possible.

Dox powers himself by absorbing the souls of living things. In my canon at least, just as with the laws of conservation of mass and energy, a soul can neither be created nor destroyed, so each time Dox consumes a soul, he adds a perpetual energy generator, though the law of diminishing returns applies, hence his need to continually claim new souls for the multitude within.

In Dox’s epilogue, there are oblique mentions of a “her” interfering. I’m not going to go into the details here. You’ll learn more about her eventually, but I will say that in all the multitude, there is one soul that continues to defy him, not quite to the degree of parity but strong enough that any slackening of control can be exploited. That’s why his projection in the Darklands was destroyed. Otherwise Xanthe wouldn’t have stood a chance. Rest assured that this mystery benefactress will appear again.

It was interesting juxtaposing the dual nature of the Monarch Lich, who still retained much of his humanity, with the more inscrutable Dark Eternal. As I said before, the irony is that Dox already represents the perfection of the Dark Race but is completely unable to see beyond his goal of achieving that through new generations of Liches. The Liches themselves are an untenable species. That’s why they went extinct with Black Lich thousands of years earlier and that’s why they’ll go extinct again. All Dox has is his mission, but his view is so blinkered (contrary to his conceit that his vision extends far and wide) that he’ll never truly achieve it. That’s all the better for the world.

As a fun tidbit, it was actually Dox who was behind Shadowblight’s betrayal of the Shadow Clan and all his efforts to unify the Southern Continent. I think you only get an oblique reference or two from Brenok of “my master’s master”, but that’s who it is. Expect to see a lot of more of this guy. He plays a direct role in seven more books slated thus far and has some influence in several others. Next time we’ll be visiting that most tragic of serpents, Ophis Python. Stay tuned.

Ahead of my zombie movie reviews, here’s a little spiel about how zombies work in my canon. I use “zombie” for the convenience of contemporary audiences. The word isn’t used in the Tellus Arc as it would’ve been wildly anachronistic. (Yes, there are plenty of anachronisms in my stories, but I try to cut back on some of the most egregious ones.) The word you’ll typically hear is “revenant”, “the dead that walk” or something similar. We’re going to restrict ourselves to a discussion of undead zombies, which are all raised by means of the magic arts.

Zombies can be divided into their physical type and intellectual type. You can mix and match these with varying degrees of success. First, the most basic physical type is an ordinary dead body. It is subject to regular decomposition and its physical limitation can be overcome relative to the power of the magic infusing it, but eventually its usefulness will be completely expended. A flesh-eating zombie can delay the rate of decomposition, not by the physical means of digesting the flesh it consumes but rather by absorbing the life-energy within the flesh. A preserved body, such as in the manner of Egyptian mummification, can function for longer, but this depends on the manner of preservation. For instance, physical preservation is subject to physical limitations. You wouldn’t be able to keep a traditional mummy from decaying for long if you took it to a tropical swampland. Magic-enhanced preservation could be virtually perpetual. A patchwork zombie is crafted from multiple bodies (not unlike Frankenstein’s monster), which can yield a stronger amalgamation, but these are difficult to do will and the different parts make it difficult to bind a spirit to the flesh. The final type is a Copy Golem, made from bones (or ashes) and grave soil (think Kikyou from Inuyasha). Though essentially a clay doll, by means of advanced necromantic arts, it takes the likeness of flesh. Caligo’s Companions were revived by the Monarch Lich in this manner. It is the most resilient type of zombie and the most ready vessel for holding a person’s soul.

As for the intellectual types, the most basic is a mindless drone, animated entirely by magic. Every action must be directed by the necromancer. This is sufficient if you’re just trying to send waves of the walking dead at an enemy. The slave type is more advanced, capable of following simple commands. They are made by binding a soul with the zombies body. An animal soul of sufficient intelligence will suffice. The most advanced intellectual type comes from binding a sapient soul to the body. If available, the original soul will be the best fit. A fully sapient zombie is the most difficult to control, which make them dangerous to necromancers punching above their weight.

When it comes to stopping zombies of any type, there’s no particular virtue to aiming for the head. Depending on the power of the magic animating the zombie in question, you may have to completely destroy the body before it stops, and that’s assuming the necromancer behind it hasn’t enchanted it to regenerate (which isn’t usually a risk but does happen). Merely being bitten by a zombie won’t turn you into one, though the bite is likely to fester fairly quickly and kill you (and that’s not even accounting for any particular dark energy or curse that may be transmitted via the bite). Being recently dead does make it easier for you to be raised as a zombie yourself and it’s possible that the curse can be transmitted via the bite to activate upon your death, but strictly speaking, it’s not the bite alone that makes more zombies. (For that matter, the curse could be transmitted by scratching or via other fluids.) The risk of the curse spreading is mostly restricted to high order necromancy, but naturally you’d want to keep your distance as a general rule.

Lastly, when it comes to shamblers vs. fast zombies, it again falls to the magic animating the body. As you might imagine, dead tissue isn’t apt to move too quickly. A relatively fresh body still in rigor mortis isn’t going to be moving very fast without damaging the tissues. However, once rigor wears off, the flexibility of the flaccid state makes it easier to move the body more quickly. Generally speaking, though, zombies aren’t likely to move all that quickly as it requires more magic to push the body that hard and mitigate the damage. This of course means a fast zombie is that much more an unpleasant surprise.

That should do it for our coverage of some of the creepier denizens of my stories. I may or may not do a follow-up post on vampires. Otherwise, we’ll move on to other topics. Stay tuned.

I said I might follow up on my post about vampires in my canon with similar coverage of werewolves and so here we are. My vampire lore is far more extensive, I’ll admit, to the point where I really need another post of two to cover further details. Werewolves, on the other hand, are much simpler.

Werewolves come in two types: natural and cursed. A natural Werewolf is simply a variety of Demihuman (or Beastman, if that’s the term you prefer). In other words, they’re just a more humanoid sort of wolf. They’re capable of walking on two feet and have a degree of manual dexterity roughly on par with a chimpanzee, but besides these particular physical qualities and the mental capacity to establish the rudiments of civilization, they’re not so different from their four-legged cousins.

The cursed Werewolf is no doubt what you’re most interested in. The curse of the Werewolf is tied to the phase of the moon. The fuller the moon, the more wolflike you become. By the full moon, a cursed Werewolf appears much like a direwolf. The curse can be transmitted via a Werewolf bite (but only when the curse is active, i.e. during the night while the moon is at least partially in phase), though this isn’t usually a concern because victims of a Werewolf attack rarely survive. A cursed Werewolf is mortal and can be killed by ordinary means, but the curse greatly boosts their physical abilities and so it’s much more difficult. Silver has the effect of weakening the dark magics behind the curse and therefore increase vulnerability, but it’s not a matter of silver being the only means of killing a Werewolf. It would, in theory, be possible for a high-level white mage to remove the curse, but only by possessing power greater than the curse (or by artificially boosting the mage’s power above the level of the curse).

That’s really all there is to it. I told you there wasn’t nearly as much to talk about on the subject. I plan on reviewing zombie movies in the last week of the month, but I may do a commentary post about how they work in my canon sooner than that. Stay tuned.

Given the theme of this week’s movie reviews, I thought it might be nice to go into detail on the rules for vampirism in my stories. At present, vampirism only exists in my Tellus Arc stories. I suppose in a roundabout way it crops up in a few Earth Arc stories and could potentially present itself in the Cross and If Arcs as well, but for now, it’s restricted to the Tellus Arc, hence the title of the post.

I’ve already depicted the process of turning into a vampire twice: with Flavia Sapphira in The Three Warriors and with Narkissos (better known as Sir Caligo) in TTWC2, so let’s start there. First off, to become a vampire, you must drink the blood of a vampire. Typically, you are first drained of blood to just shy of the point of death as the admixture of essences eases the transition. The process of being reborn into unlife is very traumatic and it takes great force of will to maintain your mind. Should you fail, you’ll becomes a ghoul, a mere ravening beast. Ghouls have all the powers of a vampire, but they don’t tend to live very long because they have nothing more than animal instinct to guide them. Hunting them is comparatively easy.

The powers of a newly born vampire are relative to its sire. In other words, should you be turned by an ancient vampire, you would start out much stronger than if you were sired by a younger vampire. There is also the matter of your innate abilities. A turned archmage will have even stronger magical powers, though someone like a white mage would have their alignment flipped, but more on that later. The basic abilities include increased strength and speed and heightened senses. Other abilities such as flight and shapeshifting manifest later. Lestat’s comment from Interview with a Vampire holds true. “The Dark Gift is different for each of us.” Different abilities will manifest for different individuals. For instance, if you are a latent telepath, that ability would manifest itself after you were turned. Even the slightest latent potential will be drawn out in the due course of time. As your vampiric powers grow, all your abilities, both natural and supernatural, are amplified and enhanced.

As for weaknesses, light is the great vampire killer. Sunlight is the most obvious, but light magic is also effective. Even for a newborn vampire, exposure is not immediately fatal, but the resistance depends of the power of the individual vampire. Vampires are also vulnerable to water, the purer the better (hence the effectiveness of holy water). The same applies to silver. For wood, it must be fresh, no more than a day or two since it was cut, ergo a makeshift stake broken off from a piece of antique furniture wouldn’t do you much good. Garlic and certain pungent herbs can have a warding effect on weaker vampires but will not stop a determined one. As for the effectiveness of holy objects such as crucifixes, it is the person’s faith rather than the object itself that has the warding power. (As a result, a committed atheist can’t expect to hold up a cross to save himself.) The vampire’s heart is the source of his powers. Using a wooden stake blocks the flow of energies that sustain the vampire, but this isn’t enough to kill it. If you remove the stake, the vampire will reanimate. Cutting out the heart is more effective, but if the heart is reunited with the body (or even the ashes of the body), the vampire can be restored. To completely and permanently destroy a vampire, you must stake the heart, sever the head, then burn it all in the light of the sun. However, less thorough measures are normally sufficient as the average vampire isn’t going to have anyone working to restore him.

The vampire’s thirst for blood is the basic means by which he gains and sustains power. The longer a vampire goes without drinking, the weaker he becomes and the more susceptible to a vampire’s vulnerabilities. It is also important that the blood be fresh or else the life energies will dissipate, which happens quickly as the blood is separated from the body or the body approaches death. (As a result, the modern vampire drinking from blood packets wouldn’t be viable under this system.) The more potent the blood, the more power is derived from it. The blood of the young has more vigor than that of the old, the blood of a mage more than that of a commoner, and so on and so forth. All else being equal, a vampire who feeds on humans is going to be stronger than one who feeds on rats. It is possible to slow the atrophy by entering into a state of hibernation and there is also something of a rubber band effect where an atrophied vampire can regain power faster than it was first acquired. Beside basic life energies, abilities and experiences can be transmitted via the blood. We saw this in KoG3 with Adrienne picking up Byrnan by drinking Mark’s blood and in TTWC2 where Caligo was able to completely read Sir Telemachos’ mind via his blood. As a result, the drinking of blood is more than just a matter of acquiring energy and makes active vampires all the more dangerous.

Dhampirs, or half-vampires, are an interesting case. They are as varied as full-blooded vampires in terms of their abilities and vulnerabilities. It’s an oversimplification to describe them as having half the power and half the weakness, but it provides a conceptual starting point. The more blood a dhampir drinks, the more their vampiric side comes to the fore, but only by drinking vampire blood can they be fully turned. Only some ancient vampires have the ability to breed, so typically the only way a dhampir can be born is if the human mother is turned while pregnant, as was the case with Flavia Sapphira. Unsurprisingly, dhampirs are exceedingly rare. The Cadmus twins shouldn’t be seen as typical examples of dhampirs because of Shadowblight’s extensive experimentation on them. Vincentian had a natural affinity for regeneration, so this was amplified to the point where he could regenerate more quickly and completely than even many full vampires. Adrienne pushed the physical limitations of a dhampir’s body without a significant increase in vulnerability, but she lacked any higher level abilities like shapeshifting and suffered a thirst for blood nearly on par with a a full vampire. Before Shadowblight’s experimentation, they both had a higher thirst for blood as a product of habit because their mother raised them as full vampires.

Lastly, we’ll discuss psychic vampires. These aren’t necessarily vampires in the traditional sense, though it’s possible for a conventional vampire with psychic abilities to become a psychic vampire. Basically, a psychic vampire feeds on the astral energies of others as opposed to blood. This could kill the mind just as extensive exsanguination can kill the body. For dual vampires, there are two options for gaining power. A dual vampire could hibernate with his physical body while continuing to feed psychically and awaken even stronger.

When I had a friend read T3W, he noted the peculiarity of Flavia Sapphira being able to see herself in the mirror after she was turned, as opposed to the common trope of vampires casting no reflection. At first I considered going back to change it but decided instead to leave it in. My post facto reasoning is that only vampires of a certain power level cease to have reflections.

Well, hopefully this has served to be an illuminating post (apologies to the vampires for whom illumination isn’t a desired state of affairs). Perhaps I’ll make another similar post on werewolves later in the month. Stay tuned.

Once again, I find myself taking a current events topic to make a commentary post about how society functions in the Earth Union. Marriage is a contentious issue, at least in my native country, to say the very least. (But then there’s scarcely a topic that isn’t fraught with bitter and irreconcilable differences in these troubled and sharply polarized times.) I’m going to begin with the disclaimer that I don’t consider this the ideal solution for the real world or even for the fictional world portrayed. This is simply the solution employed by the government of the Earth Union, for better or for worse.

One way the Earth Union chose to sidestep the controversy was by removing marriage as a legal construct. That isn’t to say there’s no marriage. It’s just not something the government chooses to define. That isn’t to say there’s no government involvement either. You see, the legal construct is domestic partnership and this has no real value judgment applied to it. Any two adult citizens can enter into a domestic partnership and for such matters as taxation, division of property, inheritance rights and visitation rights, it is more or less analogous to the legal trappings of marriage (at least in the American context). A domestic partnership need not involve any sexual relationship or even cohabitation. (Cohabitation at least is typically implied but not strictly necessary.) For instance, a single parent may choose to forge a domestic partnership with an adult child to extend insurance coverage. (You have a five-year grace period after reaching the age of majority [20] to remain under your parents’ insurance, but should a parent enter into a domestic partnership with an adult child, that insurance coverage could remain shared.) The conventional concept of marriage as a union between man and woman for the purpose of procreation does not need to be covered by a domestic partnership. Unless otherwise waived, biological parents have full rights to their offspring regardless of domestic partnership status. This would mean that technically polygamy is legal in the Union. You could, for instance, have a domestic partnership with your first wife and still maintain parental rights to your children by additional wives, but these additional wives wouldn’t enjoy the same legal protections as the wife who is also your legally sanctioned domestic partner. The most an additional wife could claim from you is child support. They would have no automatic rights of inheritance (though these could be secured by a legally binding will) or visitation in such instances as hospitalization (or the related authority on life-or-death decisions in the case of incapacitation unless granted by some additional contract). Officially, the Union discourages polygamy, but the government tends to turn a blind eye when it’s practiced.

Marriage as a religious or secular rite is entirely superfluous as far as the law is concerned in the strictest sense, so the government pretty well leaves it alone. Matters like age of consent and the like are a whole ‘nother can of worms and I don’t plan on getting into it here. However, as marriage doesn’t have the legal standing of a domestic partnership, you couldn’t get away with child marriage, at least not if the marriage is intended to be consummated. No matter the rite or ceremony, age of consent laws would still apply and marriage alone wouldn’t give legal sanction to a sexual relationship involving a minor.

You may find this an elegant solution for a one-world government to smoothe over the range of cultural differences across the world or you may see it as a corrupt and/or morally repugnant system prone to abuse. As I said in the initial disclaimer, I don’t necessarily consider it to be an ideal solution. It’s just the solution the Union opted to go with. I sometimes feel like I’m poking at a hornet’s nest bringing up hot-button issues like this, but maybe some of you will find it an interesting intellectual exercise. More to come, I’m sure.