Since the Corsair alliance has watered down the Gaian movement to the point of being ineffectual by bringing the majority of Gaians to believe that maintaining the alliance is the best way to keep the movement alive, I see parallels in that, & with how most Americans view themselves as American.
For example: The Gov't tells us that the 'terrorists' hate our freedom & way of life...& so best way to maintain our way of life is to give up our freedoms in the name of saftey.
A number of Americans agree with the government on this, & think that it's perfectly reasonable.
& a number of Americans disagree w/ the gov't on this & think that the principals the country was founded upon is systematically being gutted to maintain simple societal consumerisim.
Both sides believe themselves to be on the patriotic high ground & see the other as fools.
I'm thinking the Gaians would have the same basic issues.
'Sair supporting Gaians see themselves as no less Gaian than the other ones, who believe that the alliance has over time, destroyed their primary purpose, all in the name of financial support to keep the Gaians running.
Old-School Gaians who stick to the principals that their entire movement was founded upon would be seen as foolish for being inflexible & not changing with the times, because to the neo-Gaian, maintaining their current way of life is more important than their root cause, & think that calling themselves 'Gaians' is all they need to feel Gaian.
OK, so, I have an uncontollable urge to speak up again about the Gaians
For those that pay attention, it's very clear that I absolutely HATE the hippie stereotype, & we have been trying to break that... I always wonder to myself why we suffer from that stigma...is it because people prefer to equate environmentalsts with tye-dyed peacesign wavin' pacifists?
You silly, ignorant bipedal monkeys....Gaians are killers.
In my mind, the faction is fanatical. & imho it would be wise when dealing with a Gaian to not think of 'Woodstock' but the 'Environmental Liberation Front' or 'Greenpeace' instead.
Sure, Nature is serene & peaceful, but more than that, Nature is cruel, & speaking for MY character, he'd sooner rip your throat out with his teeth than attend some protest to save the whales.
I'm just waiting for the Gallic folks to blow up your Rainbow Warrior.:P
Aside from that, sure, the Environmental Liberation Front might be violent and mean, but they're still anarchist hippies that was even less.
What I want to know is why Gaians ally with Farmers' Alliance. See, the Gaians attack Planetform, who are out to terraform planets, largely due to a need for a new food source for Bretonia, and an unwillingness to go Synth Foods. The Farmers' Alliance attacks Synth Foods.
In Bretonia, Synth Foods has no foothold, at all. Bretonia has enough food at present, Planetform attempting (and failing) to make sure this remains the case. I see very few links between the two groups, apart from Corsairs and their background as criminal groups with legit government lobbies.
What I'm interested in is detail on why the Gaians would ally themselves with any Kusari group. Kusari are trying to invade Bretonia, which would surely threaten the Gaians. I've probably just missed stuff, but any info would be useful.
As for the Hippy tag, it's there because it's known to aggravate certain elements..........:P
Ok, apparently my presence has been called for, since this is probably my fault. Blunty, Samura is Kusari's PlanetForm, Samura just does the work in much more environmentally friendly ways. As to why the Gaians and FA have such close relations. We this is really a development of the RP. Way back when, between the first attempt at the AFA and the second one, I continued to play Ze'ev, I was basically the only Farmer on the server at that point. Somehow, I ended up with a bounty on me (who would have thunk it? ) and being all alone as I was, I needed to take a little vacation from Kusari, as for some reason it wasnt safe for me at that moment. Where to go? where to go? I could have fled to Gamma, but there really aint much to do for the Farmers cause up there. Hiding out with the Hogosha was basically like trying to hide in a crowd of two. So that really left me seeking shelter with the Gaians. I had already established a RP relationship with them, one that was friendlier than the relations with other factions. This is where the close relationship between the FA characters and the Gaian characters started.
I point you to this thread, and notice that next week will be the one year anniversary of the alliance between the player factions AFA and NLH. This rp is actually more important in the relationship than the one listed on the info-card.
In lore terms, the FA and Gaians are neighbors across the Tau's. The FA fight against the Bretonians as do the Gaians. The Gaians can look at the beauty of the environment in Kusari, a pristine star scape, largely do to the ecologically friendly practices of Samura and it's farmers. The Gaians can see a life under Kusari rule where Gaia and Harris are protected from pollution , and where the amount of pollution in Bretonia would hopefully be reduced drastically.
As much as i'd like to wow people with a stellar reason as to why the Gaians buddy up w/ a couple of Kusari factions, the simplest bottom line answer during a time of war is that 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend' & from our perspective they are more 'green oriented' than the Bretonians & the lesser of two evils.
After Bretonia has their rumps handed to them & the war ends, we will see what happens after Kusari install their puppets into office.
As far as the AFA alliance, Zel said it best & i'd just be redundant to add more to it.
Now, I will say that in my mind, it is not the Gaians ultimate goal to simply clean up Bretonia...It's a major goal to be sure, but the primary purpose of the faction is to force Bretonia to not mess with the natural order of evolution.
Back in the day, the Gaian movement started as a small group of Cambridge-based scientists studying Gaia's unique ecology, & became digruntled at the government for opening up a tourist industry in Edinburgh that they felt interfered with not only their work on the planet, but also that an abundance of human presence on the surface would horribly scar the planets' natural balance. It ended up getting to the point where a number of them began to sabotage tourist transports, only after their constant pleas to the beaurecrats for stoppage was ignored.
Later, when BMM began to lobby the Bretonian government for mining rights on the surface of Gaia, something in them began to snap, & people began to die while Gaian propaganda started to become a common sight from one end of Bretonia to the other, as the Green Front came into existence. Their lobbying power, coupled with the governments desire to put priorty on tourisim, forced BMM to eventually abandon their efforts.
Emboldened by that, & viewing it as a major victory for the movement, their numbers expanded with an influx of members with increasingly radical ideology as they constructed their hidden base & expanded their efforts beyond Gaia to include resistance to the terraforming of planet Ayr on the other end of the system. One thing led to another until they eventually became the bane of the Planetform corporation & BMM as a whole. For a while, life was good.
...Then the Corsairs took notice & ruined the movement by throwing money at us.
As much as the 'grass roots' Gaians tried to block the forming alliance, they couldn't stop the Zeitgeist as their numbers exploded with an oversaturation of rebels without a clue.
Enter the NLH:
In a nutshell, the NLH exists to give the Zeitgeist a swift kick in the teeth & get the eye of the Gaian movement back on the ball.
Still, it seems to me that Planetform, like Samura, are somewhat in opposition to Synth Foods, whom the Farmers are against.
I wouldn't say that this would break any alliance, but I can see it causing friction, as the Farmers begin to take note of some of the anti-Synth Foods logic behind Planetform's (and therefore Bretonia's) positions.
And if Harris was free from man's involvement, it would be a lifeless rock. No food, no nothing.
Blunt has summed up my confusion really rather succinctly. Why are Gaians anti Planetform?
The BMM makes plenty of sense. Planetform..well, it takes lifeless rocks, and tries to build new Gaias. I've no idea how that could possibly be taken as environmentally damaging. Cold rock->Livable World...one would think they just did something incredibly environmentally friendly. You could even argue that planetform are the opposite of BMM, who turn livable worlds into horrid disasters. And, if you had a bit of vision, you might even imagine Planetform trying to fix Leeds.
At the moment, that is not an issue. The Farmers have more in common with the Gaians than not, & when I said:
Quote:After Bretonia has their rumps handed to them & the war ends, we will see what happens after Kusari install their puppets into office.
I meant it to mean that we will simply cross or burn that bridge when we get to it. There are so many things that can happen between now & then that will affect all of us involved... both in front and behind the enemy line.
@ Unselie: I guess my confusion stems from thinking that it's obvious why we are anti-planetform.
They artificially accelerate evolution & that is the epitome of unnatural & worth killing over
The Gaians are like Green Peace. Only with guns and a small bit of training how to use them.
Anything that upsets the "natural balance" is wrong, evil, and must be stopped. Terraforming isn't -just- taking lifeless rocks like Harris and making them livable. It's taking any bit of land, dead rocks or not, and making it livable for humans, current ecosystem be damned. That planet off in Omicron Alpha? Or the one in that huuuuuuuge Omega system, next to 49? Those are also planets that could be terraformed. And the Gaians would be just as angry then.
Besides, Harris isn't going to be a big eco jungle world. It's a tourist and mining planet, meaning lots of construction, and -very- little in the way of nature. Whatever that may be.
This is the real true story of rock and roll; it was not about anything more then, how to live your life, as a gangster, in sartorial splendor, and turning the world into a place where normality would never return again...- Malcolm McLaren
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