Dragaera

Half-breed citizenship

Fri Jun 20 05:59:15 PDT 2003

On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 07:27, Iván Rebollo wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> Regarding FHYA, some months ago you wondered about the possibility to break 
> the Orb's link in order to keep a prisioner in the Imperial prision. I have 
> been wondering myself the odd situation af half-breed in the Empire through 
> the two main exemples that I can rememenber from FHYA and JHEREG. Both 
> half-breed where in the Jheregh house (and, in fact, in the Jheregh itself).
> 
> That's my open question: if there are just three open houses who accept to 
> include members not born there (Jhereg by selling titles, Dzur fighting 
> seventeen heros and Teckla becaming a servant), a half-breed will only be 
> able to have a link to the orb and thus use sorcery through entering in one 
> of the former three.
> 
> Maybe this is the reason that both half-breed that we know have entered into 
> the Jhereg and, also, why it is such  a social blame to be or to breed a 
> half-breed, specially in the post-interregnum Dragaera where sorcery is a 
> commonly and needed tool in each-day life.

The way I see it, the fact that half-breeds aren't accepted into either of
the Houses they're born into is caused by the unacceptence of
half-breeds, not the other way around.

I'm sure the unacceptence of half-breeds is just an old tradition of
trying to keep the blood lines pure.  In the beginning of Dragaeran
society, the Dragaerans based a lot of their identity of who they are on
which tribe they fit into.  And back then they understood the genetic
differences between the tribes.  So maybe they tried to avoid
half-breeds because they weren't sure how healthy such a creature would
be, or maybe the social structure was to new and delicate then to try to
figure out where to fit in such people.  Either way, I'm sure that the
unacceptence of half-breeds just became tradition, and with Dragaerans
still basing a lot of their identity on their House many Cycles later,
its no surprise that they were happy to keep up the tradition of not
having people who didn't fit into their well-defined social structure.

Jag