Scott Schultz began this subthread with these comments: > What Vlad doesn't yet understand [...] is that Morollan > and Aliera don't think of Vlad as "an Easterner". They > think of him as "A Dragaeran (culturally, not racially) > who happens to have Easterner ancestors." Vlad has spent > so much of his life building an identity around NOT > being a Dragaeran that I almost think it would break him > if he ever truly accepted the idea that he himself is a > part of the Empire and that being "Dragaeran" may mean > something other than being an "elf" or a "dwarf". Maybe > that's something that would be a theme in _Vallista_ if > the series ever gets that far. (Points which I wasn't commenting on, but include here for completeness) Maximilian Wilson wrote: > Aha! That's a very interesting way of putting it. Although > we're going to need a new vocabulary to distinguish "humans" > from "humans," as species go. I (Casey Rousseau) replied (in a vain attempt at irony): > Easterner. Dragaeran. To which Scott Schultz responded: > Actually, that's a Vlad-centric view of things and it shows > how limited his perspective is. A Dragaeran is pretty > specifically someone who is a citizen of the Dragaeran > Empire. An Elde Islander or a Greenairian would likely be > offended at the implication that they are "Dragaeran", though > they likely use the same word for "human" that Vlad renders > as "Dragaeran" when talking about them. They ARE "human" but > they're definitely not "Dragaeran". Vlad, however, subscribes > to this "us and them" attitude that refuses to differentiate. > He's every bit as racist as the Dragaerans that he hates for > their racism. The human v. human terminology was introduced in Jhereg. Forgive me if after 22 years I was perhaps a bit flippant in my initial answer. (I may also need to beg forgiveness for that comment, but let me press on.) Is not Dragaera the name for the world, i.e. planet? I wonder if citizens of Elde or Greenaire would dispute this. Then again, your average Fenarian is unlikely to self identify as an Easterner. East of what? We're talking about names that we, residents of a land entirely apart can comfortably use to differentiate two humanoid species, for that I posit that 'Dragaeran' and 'Easterner' work reasonably well. On a side note, it seems to me evident that in some important ways, the East, like the Paths, are a place very much apart from the Empire. While these places physically intersect, they have such distinctly different properties that you and I might not recognize them fully as belonging to the same "world", were it not that Steve has knitted them together. I wonder, for example, whether Piara included the East, the Paths, and/or Verra's temple/palace? Casey Rousseau