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Topic: Ur-Quan... Hierarchy? (Read 10084 times)
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Indeed. Good catch -- it seems that there is a Kzer-Za Primat, though I still maintain it's odd that we don't hear more from him or her and that the Kzer-Za Lords seem able to make so many of their own decisions.
Though "Primat" isn't defined for us, if we assume that it's an English translation and an alternate spelling of "primate" and not some random Ur-Quan word that sounds like "primat", then it does have the connotation of a leader or at least the most respected of a group -- "primate" literally means "first", or by extension "highest", "most noble", "most important". (Hence why it's the name we give to animals that are most like humans.) In the churches it means an archbishop who not only controls his own province but also has ranking power over a whole bunch of other archbishops with their own provinces. It may therefore be used as an appropriate parallel term for how the Kzer-Za and Kohr-Ah might work -- the archbishops of England are all technically equal in rank, as archbishops, but nonetheless the Archbishop of Canterbury is the "Primate of All England" in that he's more respected than all the other archbishops and has the implicit authority to lead them. It could be that Ur-Quan are all fundamentally equal in rank and have to respect each other as such, but nonetheless they pick one to make the most important decisions.
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The real-world "primate" is an English bastardization of the Latin "primas" or "first one" (it's a back-formation, from the fact that the plural of "primas" in Latin is "primates"). It's, IIRC, not associated with any particular gender, though in the context of the real-world Christian priesthood obviously all primates are men. "Primat" from "prima mater" is possible but, in my opinion, a rather more convoluted explanation than just an alternate form of "primate". (Interestingly "primat" is how you would spell "primate" in German, if that means anything to anyone.) I don't think we should read a whole lot into the fact that the Kohr-Ah Primat is a "she"; that betrays our *own* gender presuppositions (that leaders are naturally male, and when a leader is female it must be because of some special rule). I don't see why having a female Primat tells us any more about the Kohr-Ah than their having a male Primat would.
And yes, again I say I doubt the Ur-Quan are as hung up about gender as we are; if they evolved to each live as individuals, only coming together to hunt, instead of having a mother/father family structure like humans do, they'd have a lot less reason to have differences between males and females. They probably do have something like male and female sexes, though, given that they do choose to use the words "he" and "she" for different Ur-Quan rather than using a single generic pronoun for all Ur-Quan.
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I meant "mate" in that last paragraph, not "hunt". (Given Ur-Quan habits they probably avoided each other as much as possible while hunting.)
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Many very solitary, individual animals have special social rituals for mating season (and only for mating season) that allow males and females to come together -- in some cases the territoriality switches off long enough to raise the children, in others just for the mating to take place (and the female bears and to some extent raises the children alone). The Melnorme, I think, explicitly compare the Ur-Quan to polar bears and praying mantises (which is eerie, come to think of it -- when did they ever have an opportunity to learn about Earth animals? Hmm...)
The interesting thing is that there could be some degree of learning and culture among such animals; the parents could stay with the children just long enough to teach them the basics of survival, but there'd be no large, extended family -- no clan or village as with humans -- for the culture to live in.
It seems like it'd take a while for the Ur-Quan to develop a culture at all, and probably wouldn't have a very complex one. Maybe that accounts for how easily, after the Slave Revolt, they encoded their culture so simply and brutally as a single command, and were able to keep it pure for so long. If tradition is always transmitted directly from parent to child in the child's formative years and social interaction is minimized afterwards, you don't have much opportunity for heresies and reform factions to develop.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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They know your social security number and your favorite color and ESPECIALLY know how well you do in supermelee.
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