Shroom Man 777 wrote:More progressive Institutes of Cosmozoan and Karlack Studies (ICKS) acknowledge that the term is an artifact stemming from older, far more biased, speciesist outlooks on life - which conservatives and ichor industry experts deride as politically correct xenophile nonsense promoted by the Freeworld School, the Zigonist Agenda or even Cultural-Byzonism.
I like you.
I suggest taking a look at the Shepherds' entry too. There might be elements that need syncing up with the new entries.
And speaking of the updates to the Kheler entries, I do have some major ideas in mind which I really ought to run by this thread first.
I want to inject more uniqueness and alienity into the Kheler, because right now they have their political history and their vague filial-collectivist tendencies, but otherwise they feel too much like just people. So I'm introducing something that forms a pretty fundamental part of Khelerene cognition, something that forms their worldview and causes their current cultural characteristics - something I call teleological symmetry.
To a Kheler, all events are symmetrical pairs. Two events separated in time are just mirrors of each other, which are reflected in their qualities (who, where, what, when, how). There is no linear cause and effect, but introduction and denouement; the future event necessitates the past event by its very (predicated) existence and vice versa. Some of these pairs lay in the past, both events having completed themselves and each other. Some pairs lie in the future. Sometimes these pairs themselves are just one half of a larger symmetry, sketching out the existence of a vast interlocking pattern across time. But what informs the motivation of a Kheler most is when they find that one event has occurred and its corresponding mirror hasn't - then in the future, it will be done. It's not that they must make all events symmetrical pairs. All events *are* symmetrical pairs.
Line up all these event-pairs as two-dimensional lines plotted on the y-axis of a graph. Find the fulcrum of each pair, the middle point of each line that indicates which stage of fulfillment the mirroring event is at, then loop a line that intersects all these fulcrums. That line is the Khelerene worldview.
One feature of this teleological symmetry is that the reasons why a Kheler associate two possible events can be nigh-impenetrable to non-Kheler. Sometimes a Kith's ancient navigation logs showed that they once visited a particular planet, so the Kith must visit that planet again: it can be straightforward like that. Sometimes, something happened to them which necessitates them to do something else that doesn't seem to share any apparent qualities, and certainly may not be linked in any butterflies-and-hurricanes causal sense. Of course, to non-Kheler, this can make the Kheler come across as gnomic and prophetic, or fanatically vindictive.
One of clearer associations of teleological symmetry to non-Kheler, however, is who does the things. It's broadly accurate to say that the Myrrans did a lot to fuck over the Kheler in the olden times, so the Kheler are teleologically ordained/obligated to go fuck up the Myrrans for a good long while yet, in what can be translated as a grudge. When people share more qualities/connections, then the event-pairs that occur to them also become more inter-compatible. For example, if all Kheler unite, them one half of an event-pair associated with any Kheler can be fulfilled by any other Kheler, it makes things a lot easier for the Kheler as a whole. Which is why Kheler mate, Kiths amalgamate their immortal ancestor-minds, and the Kiths of Kheler try so hard to form a sacred political union out of all Kheler ever.
While current Khelerene orthodoxy, agreed to by the United Kiths, holds that their joining withe the Samtics is the aggregate midpoint of Khelerne history, the point dividing their BC and AD, it is relatively flexible about the smaller patterns, whether some pairings are already fulfilled and some haven't yet. Only a minority of Kheler believe that the beginnings of *all* possible event-pairings lay in the past and that literally *nothing* new can happen, only the fulfillment of ordainment. Those guys are regarded as fundamentalists.
This teleological symmetry, along with a very, very high context culture developed from maintain cultural cohesion for millennia, has done peculiar things to Khelerene language. Complete messages are all palindromes and magic squares, considered symmetrical forward and back and must be read forward and back for their full import. Statements that break this symmetry, or "halves", are either used as a provocative literary device or for oaths (and swearing). Khelerene writing is ridiculously complex, not helped by the species' incredible visual acuity - an essay would resemble something like a cross between a QR code and those circular patterns drawn by connecting straight lines, with no individual letters and no meaning in parts that can be grasped without understanding the entire thing first - and the longer the text, the more exponentially complex the overall pattern. Even the Kheler themselves use something called 'Flat' for casual communication: smaller and less dense code-patterns mapped onto less dimensions, less precise and data-efficient as a whole but which at least come in smaller discrete chunks that can be combined into bigger messages.
And while Kheler can learn and use non-Khelerene languages that don't have these features, I'm imagining a Kheler who has to compose these broken, one-way statements writing and putting away a mirror for every sentence it makes, just for the sake of its own mental balance. It doesn't even matter if these mirrors never get seen or make sense in their own language.
If this complexity implies a great deal of detrimental inflexibility in Khelerene communication, especially concerning military planning on space opera scales, it might explain why Kiths absolutely need the sheer cognitive power of amalgamated AI ancestor cores to handle high-level communications and serious institutional memory.