Ahri empire question.

[Anders48]

Hi. While working on my deconstruction of isekai narratives deconstruction of the idea of a coherent dichotomy between magic/religion/mysticism and technology/reason   deconstruction of deconstructioning things   alternate history fever dream  black comedy crackfic thingie I decided to check up on DHS...and ended up reading I think the entire archive? The last week is kinda a blur.

Anyway, during that binge I naturally ran across discussion of the Ahri Empire (They say it's an empire somewhere, right?). This seemed pretty relevant to what I was doing because they're cute and I love them they're a multiversal society and my fic revolves around multiversal weirdness that becomes increasingly prominent and concerning as the story goes on. I was interested in incorporating them to the fic as more of a minor element to establish that there's some kind of multiversal 'normality' that the cosmic-horror-by-way-of-Borges-and-Tegmark chaos going on in the 'real world'/Earth wouldn't be representative of. However, what I realized was that before I thought about trying to fit them in the narrative, I needed to know what they might be doing there in the first place. This means answering questions like:

What are the Anri trying to accomplish by venturing out into the multiverse in the first place?
Is it conventional expansionism? Some kinda mercantilist dealie? A sincere desire to seek out new life and new civilisations with no ulterior motive? A government driven policy to boost economic growth by 'adapting' technologies from other universes? Existential angst, somehow? Someone higher up on the multiversal food chain told them to?

Most likely it's a mixture of multiple motives, but since I'll likely end up characterizing them as a group with goals that has to deal with the aforementioned chaos potentially derailing those goals* it'd be useful to know what sort of modus operandi they might typically have.
 
*One of the more more notable factions active on this version of Earth follows the philosophy of an obscure turn of the century thinker called Georges Sorel, who (to vastly oversimplify) basically held that violence against outgroups was an intrinsic force for moral renewal regardless of how those outgroups were defined or what the violence was nominally supposed to accomplish. In fact, he held that asking too many questions about what positive goal the violence would achieve (again I'm oversimplifying) was a sign that you/society had been corrupted by The Intellectuals.

Since this particular faction would represent a subset of his following that lucked into knowledge of the wider multiverse and has already designated one group of nonhumans as The Outgroup (clan Inanna), it's likely that the Ahri would end up viewing them as an active concern. I don't really envision a grand scene where the Ahri burst in to save everyone, but since the faction's whole arc consists of accomplishing nothing with an increasingly large body count it's likely they'd end up losing to the Ahri specifically at some point.

[ProfesseurRenard]

I don't recall happening across any mention of the Ahri at any point (though, to be fair, I haven't binged the archives all that much), but I wish you luck on finding what you're after. Also, this Monsieur Sorel sounds like one evil fils de pute.

[Tapewolf]

I don't recall happening across any mention of the Ahri at any point (though, to be fair, I haven't binged the archives all that much), but I wish you luck on finding what you're after. Also, this Monsieur Sorel sounds like one evil fils de pute.

The Ahri are Bluff's race. I figured it had to be that since "Somewhere Far Away" is one of the few stories dealing directly with races used to multiversal travel, and it mentions this right at the top of the archive page.

[Merlin]

HRMMM well I hope you had a good time on the archive binge!! hehe

Ahri are indeed a multiversal society! Despite not getting to do much with them in the comic for most of the time I thought about them way too much, lol. I figure their home universe is relatively small and they looked outwards pretty quickly all things considered. They're a high tech society focussed a lot on scientific discovery, to the point of looking down on others for not being as smart as them (regardless of if they are or not...). But they're also rather militaristic, and in places near their home system like to play multiversal cops.

They're not really expansionist, as they really love their home universe and have space travel within it. Their universe is just theirs so they don't have resource problems or anything. They have strong alliances, embassies and exchanges with a lot of other high tech nearby universes, but they typically don't let any offworlders in their home universe if they can help it. They do like exploration and scientific discovery, but they have very strict rules around it. Not like star trek constantly breaking the prime directive, they have a very hierarchical society and love bein lil cops. Huge fans of law and order.

They think of themselves as the good guys (of course, don't we all?) but they can be kind of dicks sometimes. I guess they're like a mix between andalites and vulcans lol. Big ol science jerks.

the ideas you're working with sound super fun and I've love to hear more about them!!

[Anders48]

this Monsieur Sorel sounds like one evil fils de pute.

I wrote more about him here, but the TLDR is that Sorel is almost like a cryptid for intellectual historians specifically because he kept trying to mainline different, seemingly contradictory belief systems simultaneously apparently based on nothing other than his perception that they promoted violence, while also somehow being influential enough among other intellectuals (I know, ironic right?) that he keeps popping up randomly in other fields. 

However, from an artistic perspective he very useful because you could make his belief system stand in for basically any violent, dehumanizing ideology (including a nominally good one that's been corrupted, which is where the stuff people have tried to write in support of him comes in handy). I mean he would be much less useful if I didn't have to conduct academic research on him anyway, but actually I have no idea where I was going with this sentence and even less idea why I'm still writing it what is going on help aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Because I love deconstructing things so much I'm mainly using my fictional band of Sorel followers as a deconstruction of the 'human supremacist faction that the narrative treats as reasonable' trope, but they could probably also stand in for everything from religious fundamentalists [Sorel rejected belief in the supernatural pretty early in life but he really loved his inquisitions], to Stalinists or even Ayn Rand types [At points Sorel seemed like he was trying to be like prototype version of both, simultaneously. Yes, you read that right].

HRMMM well I hope you had a good time on the archive binge!! hehe

Ahri are indeed a multiversal society! Despite not getting to do much with them in the comic for most of the time I thought about them way too much, lol.

I like them. I think you think about them just the right amount, and look forward to seeing you do more with them.

I figure their home universe is relatively small and they looked outwards pretty quickly all things considered. They're a high tech society focussed a lot on scientific discovery, to the point of looking down on others for not being as smart as them (regardless of if they are or not...). But they're also rather militaristic, and in places near their home system like to play multiversal cops.

They're not really expansionist, as they really love their home universe and have space travel within it. Their universe is just theirs so they don't have resource problems or anything. They have strong alliances, embassies and exchanges with a lot of other high tech nearby universes, but they typically don't let any offworlders in their home universe if they can help it. They do like exploration and scientific discovery, but they have very strict rules around it. Not like star trek constantly breaking the prime directive, they have a very hierarchical society and love bein lil cops. Huge fans of law and order.

They think of themselves as the good guys (of course, don't we all?) but they can be kind of dicks sometimes. I guess they're like a mix between andalites and vulcans lol. Big ol science jerks.

Yeah I def got more of a not-necessarily-particularly-nice vibe from them.

For what it's worth, the other main group contending with the Metaphysical Sorelians* would essentially be various manifestations of The Cubi Establishment (or rather a specific subset of it during the mid 20th century), so not necessarily particularly saintly themselves. They aren't going after the Metaphysical Sorelians because of some idealistic commitment to the rights of every sentient being to live in peace**, but because the Metaphysical Sorelians have decided to go after cubi specifically and That Makes it Our Problem. Also I personally feel like the plot of my fic works better if it isn't about conventional heroic do gooder types and more relatively normal people/institutions trying to deal with a situation/situations that exists in flagrant defiance of everything they thought they knew about the world. 

the ideas you're working with sound super fun and I've love to hear more about them!!

I've actually written a lot down in the story notes thread, which I realize in retrospect was 100% at the expense of actually writing the story and also never quite accurate to what I was doing anyway because my ideas kept changing. However it does include a page's worth of worldbuilding from the perspective of 'This is what some Clan Taun envoys managed to reconstruct from what a nominally anti-consumerist(?), explicitly anti-cubi (to the extent that they understand what cubi even are), and implicitly antisemitic screed written by the Metaphysical Sorelians preserved from a pro-Mongol propaganda piece written by a heterodox 12th century German monk which was nominally a translation of a 5th century manifesto[?] in favor of converting to Zoroastrianism by some kind of high ranking figure from the ranks of the exiled cubi.

Writing it was a bit like swimming in that it's very fun until you suddenly realize that your limbs are all completely fatigued and you've lost sight of shore. I'm not sure what this would be an analogy for exactly but I feel that it is accurate.   
*I. E. the guys I was talking about in the footnote of the first post no I don't have a footnote problem I can stop at any time I swear
**Not that they're necessarily opposed to such ideals (I'm not talking Destania types here), but they aren't going to try and stick around to 'fix' they problems of any old non-cubi community, let alone an entire parallel universe. Which in many ways is probably a good thing.