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elfsLast night, while I was taking care of the cat and doing all the usual things I have to do with my pre-bed routine, I had an idea for a story and immediately began sketching it out in my head. I'm not sure where it's going, but then again, I tend not to care too much about the ending of a story until it's time to get to it.
What bugged me most, though, was that the story was clearly set in my Bastet universe, a collection of stories I've never posted. The entire point behind the Bastet series is to explore uncomfortable subjects: racism, sexism, non-consensual sex and power relationships, and so forth.
The setting for the Bastet series is an alternative reality. The first episode is set around 1890, and episodes proceed from there. Mor than two millennia ago, magic worked, but it was fading and was almost entirely gone by the time of Jesus. (There's a side-line to the series that Jesus is remembered because years after the last magic had faded, he could still do it powerfully and well.) Rome, which depended upon magic, collapsed without it, and ever since them humanity has had to deal with the consequences of that ancient past: monumental scars on the terrain caused by great ancient magical battles, and simply the memory that there were great empires predicated upon undeniable powers.
One of the other consequences were the Bastet, a cat/human hybrid species originally bred by the Egyptian Kings as supersoldiers. It didn't work out-- hey, they were cats-- but the Bastet have been horribly mistreated ever since. The Bastet don't get human diseases, and humans can't catch what the Bastet carry. Bastet are very rare; there are less than a million of them by the 1890s, that's .05% of the world's population of 1.6 billion at the time. Bastet tend to remain youthful-looking with a precipitous decline late in their lifespan, although their lifespan is shorter than humans.
All of this combined to make Bastet incredibly valuable as courteseans. Long after slavery had been abolished in Europe, laws covering the Bastet continued to leave them more or less indentured. The U.S. is remarkable in 1890 in that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation granted de jure freedom to the Bastet alongside everyone else, but de facto enslavement continued, and courts continued to claim that Bastet needed "special protections due their primitive natures."
Okay, so far, so good. I've hit just the right note: I can write tongue-clucking stories with themes addressing racism and so forth and so on, disapproving of everything while still writing sex scenes, some of which will titillate people I wouldn't want to meet, and the triumphal scenes hopefully bringing smiles to people I would.
My problem is that I keep thinking of this not as "The Bastet series," but as "The yowlerverse." The problem is that "yowler" is a pejorative term, there. How pejorative? There's a scene in the largest story where the young hero, a teenager who is about to be the first Bastet to go to an upper class school, except in his second week there he is brutally beaten by five boys, one of whom shouts that this is their school and "We don't welcome no kikes, no wops, no niggers, and no fucking yowlers."
I can't tell what my brain is trying to signal me by preferring the pejorative over the ordinary term; I wouldn't use any of those other pejoratives in routine conversation, after all.
What bugged me most, though, was that the story was clearly set in my Bastet universe, a collection of stories I've never posted. The entire point behind the Bastet series is to explore uncomfortable subjects: racism, sexism, non-consensual sex and power relationships, and so forth.
The setting for the Bastet series is an alternative reality. The first episode is set around 1890, and episodes proceed from there. Mor than two millennia ago, magic worked, but it was fading and was almost entirely gone by the time of Jesus. (There's a side-line to the series that Jesus is remembered because years after the last magic had faded, he could still do it powerfully and well.) Rome, which depended upon magic, collapsed without it, and ever since them humanity has had to deal with the consequences of that ancient past: monumental scars on the terrain caused by great ancient magical battles, and simply the memory that there were great empires predicated upon undeniable powers.
One of the other consequences were the Bastet, a cat/human hybrid species originally bred by the Egyptian Kings as supersoldiers. It didn't work out-- hey, they were cats-- but the Bastet have been horribly mistreated ever since. The Bastet don't get human diseases, and humans can't catch what the Bastet carry. Bastet are very rare; there are less than a million of them by the 1890s, that's .05% of the world's population of 1.6 billion at the time. Bastet tend to remain youthful-looking with a precipitous decline late in their lifespan, although their lifespan is shorter than humans.
All of this combined to make Bastet incredibly valuable as courteseans. Long after slavery had been abolished in Europe, laws covering the Bastet continued to leave them more or less indentured. The U.S. is remarkable in 1890 in that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation granted de jure freedom to the Bastet alongside everyone else, but de facto enslavement continued, and courts continued to claim that Bastet needed "special protections due their primitive natures."
Okay, so far, so good. I've hit just the right note: I can write tongue-clucking stories with themes addressing racism and so forth and so on, disapproving of everything while still writing sex scenes, some of which will titillate people I wouldn't want to meet, and the triumphal scenes hopefully bringing smiles to people I would.
My problem is that I keep thinking of this not as "The Bastet series," but as "The yowlerverse." The problem is that "yowler" is a pejorative term, there. How pejorative? There's a scene in the largest story where the young hero, a teenager who is about to be the first Bastet to go to an upper class school, except in his second week there he is brutally beaten by five boys, one of whom shouts that this is their school and "We don't welcome no kikes, no wops, no niggers, and no fucking yowlers."
I can't tell what my brain is trying to signal me by preferring the pejorative over the ordinary term; I wouldn't use any of those other pejoratives in routine conversation, after all.
