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Post by aikidoal on Jun 19, 2008 13:58:55 GMT -5
It's post-WWWIII, post-apocalyptic earth. Do you know where your codpiece is?
I'm referring to the other countries in the EQ universe that's named in the script and on the globe in DuPonts office.
We all know how Libria reacted to it...blame of emotions, controlling populace through drugs, totalitarian society, etc.
But what about the other countries? How did the survivors respond and reband? Two of them are specifically named in the script: Xylyx and Entropia. Does Libria acknowledge them or does the populace think they are the only country left? Or were they just isolationist? How does Libria's revolution affect circumstances now?
Obviously some of this has been addressed in fanfic. (In fact, I almost wrote something from the Xylyx point of view.) But I thought it would be fun to discuss.
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Post by Aedh on Jun 19, 2008 23:41:23 GMT -5
I believe Libby wrote something about the Entropians and XylyXans. In my own rather vaguely EQ-based writings--notably "Roses For Maria"--I ignored Entropia and XylyX, and conjured up Amazonia and Koguryo instead.
I dunno ... with all due respect to the creator of Libria, Mr Wimmer himself, I just didn't care for Entropia and XylyX, especially the latter. It's such an obviously contrived name that one conjures up the image of its having been founded either by arrivals from the Barbarellaverse, or a band of refugee gaming nerds, or possibly by a stray group of survivors from a pharmaceuticals marketing department.
I'm not the expert on all the minutiae of the movie, but I don't remember much if anything in it that gave us anything definite to go on. I drew a few general principles from the movie which I have used in my writing ... I applied them to my own "other" societies, and I think one would have to mount arguments against applying them to writing about Entropia and XylyX.
One is that Libria is obviously a large place with a large and thriving capital city. There is industry and economic activity of a sort that makes a large modern city possible. To give two examples: they have an oil industry, if not something even more sophisticated, because that Cleric Cadillac didn't have a donkey hitched to the front. And the production of Prozium points to an advanced medical industry. These two things alone require a large economic infrastructure to support. Libria must therefore have a GNP in the many billions.
You get that kind of a GNP not from being the capital of a large expanse of semi-waste, perhaps somewhat agriculturalised territory like the Nethers (in its widest reaches) would appear to be. You get it from trade--commerce, and plenty of it. There have to be imports and exports. This would imply that there are other societies in Libria's league for size and civilisation.
Two, while commerce happens, these societies also seemingly have to be rather remote in some way for Librian society to be as closed as it is. Proximity of other societies which would certainly have different values would be reflected in the citizenry. There would be foreign media, broadcasts, products in the marketplace, and foreigners in the populace not bound by Librian law to dose themselves, one imagines. But we don't see that, at least not explicitly. Presumably those societies would themselves in turn be remote from Librian influence. Commerce must then be conducted over long distances, presumably, strictly controlled, and probably limited to a certain range of products.
With these factors in mind, one's thoughts are attracted immedately by the likeness between such a world and the East/West Bloc world of the Cold War, or perhaps the tripartite world of Orwell's 1984: distant entities, each large, isolated one way or another, perhaps hostile at times, always suspicious, and yet each recognising tacitly that it depends in a way on the others to keep itself going.
On top of those vague inferences, I don't see why anybody couldn't write Entropia and XylyX as any sort of post-apocalyptic societies they cared to. That's as far as I went with it, and that's about as far as I care to go. Next!
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Prestan
Vice Council in Charge of Flames and Summary Combustions 
Not Without Innocence
Posts: 128
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Post by Prestan on Jun 20, 2008 2:02:42 GMT -5
It's post-WWWIII, post-apocalyptic earth. Do you know where your codpiece is? I'm referring to the other countries in the EQ universe that's named in the script and on the globe in DuPonts office. Two of them are specifically named in the script: Xylyx and Entropia. sorry, I have no idea what you guys are talking about. If you're referring to the EQ script, when are these countries ever named in the movie? and where on the globe does it show them? Help me out cuz I'm really curious now |
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Post by Aedh on Jun 20, 2008 2:15:17 GMT -5
sorry, I have no idea what you guys are talking about. If you're referring to the EQ script, when are these countries ever named in the movie? and where on the globe does it show them? Help me out cuz I'm really curious now You can find it on page 11 of the draft screenplay dude. Right when Preston is looking at the world globe in Dupont's office. |
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Post by clericjay on Jun 20, 2008 5:16:35 GMT -5
I've never mentioned these states before. But I also think that there must be other states. ;D I'll mention this in "Memories of Father" when I'll come to this point of the story.  |
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Post by aikidoal on Jun 20, 2008 9:00:45 GMT -5
Hey, I'm just trying to get some new blood in the EQ discussion area.
In the film, I see a total lack of outside contact with the rest of the populated world, and I believe that Libria was entirely self-sustained, and bordered by the nethers which acted almost like the borders in Planet of the Apes (the original Heston film.) I don't see Libria successfully interacting with any other culture successfully, unless it was held strictly at the council level with specialized delegates.
I can't see free trade between the generic populace that would fit the theme of the film except in one case: extreme cultural nationalism such as Victorian Britain. All trade would have to be done in a spirit of "those poor emotional savages." And I would wonder if they would also inherit Victorian Britain's imperialism. However there is no hint of that in their armed forces. All of their military might is focused internally towards their own population.
To be self-sustainable, I would agree that it would need to be sizable in order to have fuel and a breadbasket. However, it can't be as big as China, otherwise the whole Prozium situation would be hard to control. I could see the principle of the laws being stronger "the closer you got to Shanghai" going into effect.
I would propose that populations were incredibly far apart, and like Libria are in their infancy of slowly coming together. I also further speculate that the population of mankind as a whole is significantly down. At this point if anyone is poised (or informed) to start trying to take over their neighbors, Libria may be ripe for the picking after the events of the film.
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Post by Aedh on Jun 20, 2008 11:16:24 GMT -5
I've never mentioned these states before. But I also think that there must be other states. ;D Yes ... the relevant portion of the draft screenplay mentions specifically, Entropia, XylyX, "and others," which was my admittedly weak but nevertheless existing justification for inventing Koguryo and Amazonia. In my conception, in the world of "Roses" (twenty years after the Revolution, admittedly), Amazonia was in South America and functioned mainly as a source of raw materiels, while Koguryo was situated in the current area of Korea and what was left of Japan, being a nascent manufacturing powerhouse. (Koguryo is the Korean name for the ancient unified Korean kingdom.) Interaction had picked up, and immigration/emigration was taking place, but travel was still difficult, expensive, and hazardous, as even Libria's economy wasn't yet sufficient to support an aeronautical industry such as Europe, America, and Russia now have. Air travel was still conducted over very long distances by fragile dirigibles, which contributes a bit of plot background. I did conceive that Libria had a good working railroad system, however, with several lines through the outer Nethers enabling the city to connect with cargo terminals on the coasts. An idea that might help one think about the picture above could be post-WW2 Europe if there had been no massive American aid in the aftermath. As for your thoughts, AA, we are essentially in agreement. When I speculated on trade and commerce, of course it would NOT have been "free" in any way, but carefully handled by special personnel in the regime somewhere, and the ordinary populace might not even know that the stuff came from somewhere else--I'm thinking it would be mostly in bulk raw materiels anyway, as Libria would need employment in factories of its own. This brings in the colonial-style aspect that you mentioned, where Britain imported raw materiels from the colonies, made manufactures, and then sold the finished products back to the colonies. I agree about lack of interaction. I'm not even sure that ordinary Librians would learn that much about other nations through the controlled media other than that they were populated by "others ... not like us ... sense-obsessed wretches" etc. |
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Post by Libby on Jun 21, 2008 6:40:24 GMT -5
As Aedh mentioned, I wrote a short story called Envoys about Entropians visiting Libria. I went for the Utopian ideal (despite entropy meaning chaos). I recall that JudasFM wrote about Xylyxians in Taking Sides.... |
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Prestan
Vice Council in Charge of Flames and Summary Combustions
Not Without Innocence
Posts: 128
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Post by Prestan on Jun 21, 2008 13:49:34 GMT -5
I've always thought of Libria as the last 'civilized' order left in the world.
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Post by aikidoal on Jun 25, 2008 13:03:43 GMT -5
I've always thought of Libria as the last 'civilized' order left in the world. There's definitely room for that interpretation. |
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Post by kingofsorrow on Jul 14, 2008 21:12:44 GMT -5
reading all your thought on other EQ societies got me thinking about "casshern". i always looked at casshern as a prequel to EQ. the "what" that lead to the creation of societies like the one/ones in EQ.
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Post by Aedh on Jul 15, 2008 23:45:34 GMT -5
reading all your thought on other EQ societies got me thinking about "casshern". i always looked at casshern as a prequel to EQ. the "what" that lead to the creation of societies like the one/ones in EQ. Good thought ... I wasn't familiar with this series or movie, but interesting!  |
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Post by aikidoal on Jul 16, 2008 14:36:42 GMT -5
reading all your thought on other EQ societies got me thinking about "casshern". i always looked at casshern as a prequel to EQ. the "what" that lead to the creation of societies like the one/ones in EQ. Absolutely. The society in Casshern does make a great prequel or sister society to Libria. I often thought of Ultraviolet as being the future of earth post-EQ. |
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Post by kingofsorrow on Jul 17, 2008 3:06:01 GMT -5
I often thought of Ultraviolet as being the future of earth post-EQ. i was going to put forth that view also. i usually watch a block of movies in this order, since to me they flow into each other. 1: V for vendetta 2: casshern 3: equilibrium 4: aeon flux( as a similar to EQ just another side of the world type view) 5: ultraviolet. |
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Post by aikidoal on Jul 17, 2008 8:35:37 GMT -5
I often thought of Ultraviolet as being the future of earth post-EQ. i was going to put forth that view also. i usually watch a block of movies in this order, since to me they flow into each other. 1: V for vendetta 2: casshern 3: equilibrium 4: aeon flux( as a similar to EQ just another side of the world type view) 5: ultraviolet. That's quite briliant. Random commentary: I also made a connection to Casshern when I saw the trailer for V. Of course they used the EQ music so I was pretty manipulated by that point. And the rolling BB balls of doom tech goes nicely with the opening sequence in Ultraviolet. |
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Post by kingofsorrow on Jul 18, 2008 2:16:36 GMT -5
i got my copy from ebay. it is a visually stunning flick. i got interested in it because the girl in my sig had a song on the soundtrack and her now ex-husband is the director. you my able to find it on torrent sites.
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Post by Aedh on Jul 18, 2008 2:30:05 GMT -5
To revise and expand my thought from a previous post ... in EQ, UV, and Aeon Flux, along with a lot of other great films and books I enjoy, like 1984, "WE," Blade Runner, etc ... we open the story with a dystopian society. Those interest me. However, what interests me even more is stories on just HOW dystopian societies come to be. That's what I'm trying to write at the moment. I may need to watch V4V again, but that one comes closer, I think, to showing the process.
NMAL won't be a direct prelude to an EQ-esque society, but if I ever continue where that leaves off ... THAT story could be the direct prelude to one.
To my mind, the best story I've read yet on how a dystopian society comes to be--apart from what I see in the *cough*daily*cough*newspapers*cough* is William Golding's "Lord Of The Flies." That book is an absolute must-read for any intelligent person who hasn't picked it up yet. Ironically ... I first read it as a high-school assignment. LOL!
Puts me in mind of the airline that selected "Snakes On A Plane" as an in-flight movie.
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Post by kingofsorrow on Jul 19, 2008 23:01:10 GMT -5
.To my mind, the best story I've read yet on how a dystopian society comes to be--apart from what I see in the *cough*daily*cough*newspapers*cough* is William Golding's "Lord Of The Flies." That book is an absolute must-read for any intelligent person who hasn't picked it up yet. Ironically ... I first read it as a high-school assignment. LOL! [/sub][/quote] i read this in a school assignment also. i was amazed by the events and characters. i agree with you on the "how it came to be" connection. |
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ihsan
Sense Offender
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Post by ihsan on Sept 17, 2008 10:38:16 GMT -5
Right when Preston is looking at the world globe in Dupont's office. Interesting, that globe - it looks like our earth, but after great tectonic movement (induced by nuclear war I guess) with a big chunk obliterated out of what looks like America. Does anyone have the map design for that globe? Would be interesting to see. As for the discussion of whether Libria is "alone" - Preston's response to Mary that he lives to "safeguard the continuity of this great society", could mean that either Libria is alone as the last "civilised" nation, or lend credence to the argument that there is a rival state, a perpetual enemy as in 1984. |
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Post by aikidoal on Sept 20, 2008 21:38:09 GMT -5
I hadn't thought to interepret it that way, as every cog in the machine thinks they are part of the "great society" and Preston has pretty much drunk the Librian Kool-aid.
If was writing EQ fic (which evidently everyone else doing with their prequels!) I'd have my civilized societies small and largely far away from each other. At this state of rebuilding, anything near each other would get assimiliated by the stronger force quickly...like all those pockets of people living in the Nethers.
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