QUOTE (Xombie @ Jul 19 2004, 04:43 AM)
Who would set up a system where only a few families are eligible to put up nominees for rulers? How about the families themselves if they originally held all the power and were forced to make painful compromises to hold onto power against the threat of larger egalitarian reform.
Well, I can think of all sorts of problems with this. For a start it's difficult to imagine these powerful families being willing to share power in the first place - wouldn't you inevitably end up with a power struggle, from which one family would emerge victorious? This is what always seems to happen in real life. And then there's the question of why a restless populace would accept 'reform' that doesn't have any obvious advantages over the previous system. As for the Britney Spears thing, that's precisely why no one would ever give 12-year-olds the vote!
But in any case, all of this is beside the point. When you're trying to come up with a political system - or any other kind of system - for a fantasy world, you shouldn't dream up some wildly unlikely scenario and then come up with a convoluted explanation for it (which would only bore people anyway). You should start with something familiar and realistic and make subtle changes to it. Terry Pratchett is a master of this - for instance, take the city of Ankh-Morpork in the
Discworld series. Its system of government is different from any you'll see in real life, yet close enough to reality that you can still see how it would work (with some minor suspension of disbelief - it is a parody, after all).
I don't see any need for the Star Wars galaxy to have a particularly 'exotic' political system. When you think about it, apart from the Jedi and all the aliens and technology, virtually nothing else in the Galaxy is all that different from present-day Earth - which I think is part of the attraction of Star Wars. We know that it's a Republic - fine, so have a Senate, just don't talk about Supreme Courts and term limits and thing like that. We know Leia is a princess - fine, so make Bail Organa a constitutional monarch who represents the planet in the Senate. This is simple enough that you don't have to bother with complicated explanations, and anyone who wants to can fill in the details for themselves.
This post has been edited by Helena: 19 July 2004 - 06:27 AM
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The sandpeople had women and children. We know this because Anakin killed them how could he tell? The children might be smaller but I never saw a sandperson with breasts. Did they hike their skirts and show him some leg or something?
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Also, I can see the point of wanting to kidnap a human and use her as a slave, but they didn't. They tied her to a flimsy easel for a month. It's assumed they had to feed and give her water. What for? Was she purely ornamental? I can understand them wanting the droids, you can sell those for a lot of money, but a chick who's only skills are finding non-existand mushrooms and getting randomly pregnant, you're not going to get much.
- J m HofMarN on the Sand People