The south of the Polynesian triangle u mentioned gets into the Roaring Forties (eastward wind).

You can ride that all the way to America: “Hacia 1837, un grupo de ingleses, sin conocimientos de navegación, escaparon en una pequeña goleta del asentamiento penal de Sarah Island, en Tasmania. La corriente y los vientos los llevaron hasta Chiloé, y luego subieron hasta Valdivia.” – Chiloé and Valdivia are south of the Inca Empire, in Mapuche territory.

I think it’s defensible to say: “Chinese treasure junks + Polynesian knowledge of sailing near NZ = riding the Roaring Forties to America”

The Mapuche and the Inca were just prior to fighting a war at that time, so Chinese contact would doubtless affect that somehow.

PS: Once they hit that, it’s a handy ride to the Inca Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt_Current

Hey look at that! Conflict-resolution!

Yes, Discworld would be a good comparison for the silliness, and it has a benevolent dictator

I’ll just lean into the sinister aspects of matriarchy. I remember an interview where Chuck Palahnuik said that his writing-students always try to solve the problems in their stories, and he has to tell them, “No, don’t solve it, make it worse!” You’re not trying to resolve tension because that leaves you in a serene greyness, you are trying to intensify it. And I already risk making the queendom a utopia, the more tensions I have in there the better.

The guard’s name origin is from the Queen (UmbraVivi’s first thought)). She builds public libraries in pink and issues coins like the Gold Daisy and Silver Star; everything official to the state should be girly to the point of annoying.

Now the reveal: literally the only reason I started this thread was to see if anyone had heard of Benjamin Disraeli’s Primrose League, or if that was obscure enough to be ignored. Fifty comments later I have my answer.

Hmmm you may have redeemed yourself. I’ll answer and trust you to not do cheap low-effort teardowns or sarcasm.

For starters, the tone is silly and whimsical, so it’ll fail a really hard-nosed political analysis. It’s about the realism-level of Shrek. I can’t do what lurkerlady said and get rid of the monarchs coz I want to play with the silly tropes of castles and ballrooms and whatnot.

The Good Guy kingdom have a central state that implements most of the demands in The Communist Manifesto: land tax, nationalisation of the banks. It uses this to fund a welfare state. (That is historically inaccurate: absolute monarchies and welfare states are fairly different things, except for maybe the Inca. But not going for realism.)

There’s no legal wage-labour, instead worker-owned co-operatives like Yugoslavia. The bourgeoisie try to de-regulate this, and illegal wage-labour does happen under the table. In reality, craft-guilds were not necessarily socialist, but in its ideal form the guild-model can approach a kind of socialism. And the idea of banning wage-labour by non-profit-sharing members is historically attested: “Illegal work did not pass unnoticed by authorities at the time, and are documented by police reports and guild complaints. Guild officers were able to arrest people who were working in the trade without guild credentials, and could use municipal law enforcement to aid them in the arrest.” – historical guilds could/should have been more profit-sharing than they really were, especially with non-master-members.

The antagonists include the emerging bourgeoisie. Usury is illegal and they try to conspire and get the crown to legalise it. This compares to how actually the bourgeoisie gained wealth and conspired against the monarchy. The difference here is that the monarch has the class interests of the common people at heart, which I happily admit is unrealistic. The bourgeoisie wants to set up an extractive rentseeking system: the aristocracy wants to keep extracting surplus-value mostly for funding welfare+defense+infrastructure. (Plus admittedly they keep a bit for their own luxury, but imagine the entire GDP gets taxed at 20%, and from that about fifty people are kept in luxury; it’s a much lower rate-of-exploitation than capitalism.)

Another antagonist is foreign invading slavers, who are well-organised like Romans. The Primrose Guard will have to fight them off using Vietcong tactics.

Some aristocrats are less virtuous than others, and consider getting in cahoots with the bourgeoisie or the foreign imperialists. Political intrigue, divided loyalties, back-and-forth.

So it’s like: benevolent welfare-monarch (Inca is the closest historical example, but this is pure imaginative fiction and not history) sustaining co-operativism+welfare+nonslavery, versus the bourgeoisie and slave-trading imperialists.

The critique that monarchs are not in reality benevolent is valid, but this is not supposed to resemble reality.

An orthodox Marxist take would be Monarchy>Capitalism>Communism. In this fictional fantasy lie, the Monarchy is fighting the capitalists FOR communism.

The central state does what Charles Tilly says a state does: levies taxes and maintains itself. It largely leaves the individual alone and focuses on tax, defense, welfare, and infrastructure – the tributary system of the pax romana or the pax mongolica (plus welfare). The way Italian city-states treated the contado might be an analogy here but I need to read more Jacob Burckhardt, Gene A. Brucker, and Lauro Martines to find out.

The state does not do what Michel Foucault says the modern state does: enforce justice on the individual. The villages within the kingdom run their own affairs (much like the barbarian villages in Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid with community-justice) and pay the protection racket in gold and soldiers. Kropotkin says that the model of barbarian villages gave way to the model of walled cities when defense required stone walls. The rural contado of the kingdom are the barbarian villages, while the central state is the walled city that maintains the roads and organises violent defense. Adding welfare to that village-state relationship is a fantasy.

One neighbouring realm (less built so far) may be an anarch like the Old Swiss Confederacy or the Frisian Freedom, I haven’t decided yet.

It’s more like… I get more joy from creating art than trying to convince hostile skeptics or self-appointed gatekeepers.

Can you understand that?

Thais love and adore their monarch IME

I’ll pass on doing that.

It doesn’t sound real is my biggest complaint with it.

Good, yep. Surreal/whimsical is what I’m going for.

noble knights… wouldn’t want to call themselves guards

Good, yep. Non-noble is what I’m going for.

they also had plate-armour and horses and tenant peasants paying them rent

very different intention

thanks though

very small minority of historical swordfighters had armoured boots

What associations come to your mind when you hear ‘Primrose Guard’?

thanks

Buy the novel when it comes out to see how.

This crap AI picture doesn’t look like they ever fight though, you’d never have such an elaborate design on anything but a parade shield and any guard on duty would wear a helmet and some form of gloves.

Good, glad that’s coming across nicely. They’ve never been in a war in living memory before the story starts.

matching boots, this is supposed to be a knightly order and not a circus.

The military I was in we provided our own boots, they were all different. (And I live in an era where mass-production exists.)