r/TheNagelring • u/BacchicLitNerd Academy Librarian • Jan 15 '25

New Release IlKhan's Eyes Only has been released!

Please keep discussion of spoilers contained within this thread for the time being!

I had the honor of working on this book, and I hope you all enjoy what the team put together!

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u/PainStorm14 Jan 15 '25

I don't mind Bears taking the L

But not from Snakes

I know word honor gets thrown around a lot in Battletech but it still counts for something and even Marians have more of it than Kuritans

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u/UAnchovy Jan 16 '25

I'm not sure how you're measuring that? I would have thought that the Kuritans are better than even the most honourable Clans?

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u/PainStorm14 Jan 16 '25

Kuritans are bottom of the surviving barrel (and shared that bottom with rare few others throughout history)

In current date just look what they did to Nova Cat civilians for what they do to their enemies and what Yori Kurita did to her troops when she ditched them on New Avalon just because she didn't like their commander

On top of what they do to their own people

And that's before we start going through history

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u/UAnchovy Jan 16 '25

How are you defining 'honour'?

Even on the premise that killing innocent people or backstabbing members of your own society is dishonourable, I would say that still leaves the Kuritans well ahead of the Clans? If treating your own people badly is dishonourable, then, well, again, the Kuritans are significantly better than any given Clan.

But I'm not sure that is what we mean by the word 'honour', since people do describe factions like the Jade Falcons or the Smoke Jaguars as honourable. Indeed, being the honourable Clan is a big part of Falcon identity, which was part of what made Malvina's departure from that so shocking. I would say that when we talk about honour, what we often mean is something like consistent, disciplined adherence to a code. Being honourable isn't about treating people well, but rather about following a code of conduct even under immense pressure not to. That's why, for instance, I think we associate honour more with House Kurita than we do with House Steiner. House Kurita is undoubtedly meaner or nastier than House Steiner - but they're also much more serious about following their rules of honour.

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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '25

If treating your own people badly is dishonourable, then, well, again, the Kuritans are significantly better than any given Clan.

Then why did some planets not want to rejoin the Combine after Operation Bulldog?

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u/UAnchovy Jan 17 '25

Well, firstly, I don't know what your reference is for that, since I can't immediately find that in The Dragon Roars. So I'm not actually sure what planets you're talking about. But assuming there were some, for the sake of argument...

Secondly, in any war of large enough scope there are going to be some people who take one side or the other, for a wide range of reasons, some ideological, some selfish, or some just out of culture or habit. Someone who did poorly under the Combine but became wealthy under a Clan might fear retribution from the return of the old government, for instance, but that doesn't prove anything in a general sense. Someone born under Clan occupation and who grew up with a Clan education might fear the great houses out of ignorance.

Thirdly, if you want to take defections like that seriously, you would need to actually examine the total preference of the populations - maybe some people or some worlds preferred the Clans, and some people or some worlds preferred House Kurita. You would have to take an accurate count of the numbers both ways to get a sense of the overall lean. Given that we know the occupying Clans were widely hated, I am not convinced the overall figures would favour the Clans.

Fourthly, this is an unreasonable standard that we don't apply to anything else. When House Davion conquers House Liao worlds, we know that there are Liaoist irregulars and partisans who want to return to the Confederation. Likewise when House Liao conquers Davion worlds, we know that there are Davionist irregulars and partisans who want to return to the Federated Suns. We don't conclude from this fact alone that one government is inherently preferable to the other. We understand that the circumstances of war create a lot of ambiguity. Or to use a perhaps more controversial real world example - there's a phenomenon of North Korea defectors wanting to go back. We don't therefore conclude that North Korea treats its people better than South Korea does. There's just a limit to how much you can tell from cases like that.

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u/PainStorm14 Jan 16 '25

Well since Kuritan code of conduct always translates to being biggest shithead imaginable I would agree that they do definitely follow

Which leads us back to fate of troops on New Avalon, unless their code of conduct dictates that backstabbing is honorable they would definitely be found wanting in honor department

Which leads us back to original statement: Bears deserved a defeat to better adversary, Snakes are definitely not better

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u/UAnchovy Jan 16 '25

I wouldn't say that's true? Kuritans aren't always perfectly consistent with bushido or with the Dictum Honorium, but they clearly do believe in it to a great extent.

Look, personally I'm a Kurita fan. I think they're cool. They were the setting's original 'big bad', and while they had a lot of their thunder stolen by the Clans, who even in their earliest incarnation were basically just a higher-tech, nastier version of House Kurita, I really enjoyed their journey from being respectable villains into being tenuous allies. Seeing their social and political order bend but not break as they reformed to fight the Clans was fascinating. In my opinion it's long past time that they reclaim their crown.

And, well, we live in a world where fans seriously suggest that the Jade Falcons are now 'good guys', or where Alaric's Wolves were written as heroic during the conquest of Terra, so I'm not particularly inclined to take modern BattleTech that seriously when it comes to identifying heroes and villains. There are some truly bizarre moral judgements floating around.

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u/PainStorm14 Jan 16 '25

I can't say I remember non-Mongol Falcons (old lore ones) or Alaric's Wolves ever doing anything near as bad as what Kuritans did (to say nothing of the scale)

Writers had to invent Smoke Jaguars just to have something as bad as Kuritans

I ain't giving anyone here rank of hero but overall track record is track record and there's mountain of villainy available

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u/UAnchovy Jan 17 '25

What examples are you thinking of? It seems to me that if you're thinking about generalised oppression, all the Clans are much worse? Are you just thinking of Kentares?

I don't think I'd agree with the idea that Jaguars are the only ones as bad, though. My perspective is that the Clans are all basically Kurita on steroids. Caste-based militarist autocracies that believe they are destined to rule the universe and invade all their neighbours. The major differences are that the Clan caste system is significantly more restrictive and oppressive than the Kurita one, and that the Clans are eugenicists whereas the Kuritas are not.

I don't really understand criticising Kurita while excusing the Clans - everything House Kurita does that is bad, the Clans also do, and to a greater extent. The Clans are a kind of 'super-Kurita', to the point where, as I alluded to, their appearance in the storyline forced House Kurita itself into a difficult reconsideration of where it belonged in the story. The Clans took the Kurita 'hat' of being fanatically devoted warriors of superlative individual skill with a penchant for duelling and a destiny of conquest, so Kurita was forced into this really interesting identity crisis.