Assimilating Our Culture, That’s What They’re Doing!

This particular post was inspired by the following passage from a post on Ideas without End:

Indeed, Bogue and Keith’s quarrel with Freyja is that she is a cultural traitor, someone who abandoned the protected national identity of Windermere to side with the “enemy,” a multicultural force that uses soft power (rather than the most absolute strong power of removing free will) to form an alliance. One can imply the perverse logic behind this; assimilation is the opposite of tolerance, and almost works as a kind of revenge. Windermere would not lose its culture to a human empire that simply absorbed alien races and exported stuff to them, so it turned its culture (right down to its national foodstuffs) into a way of war. It is a Zentradi culture that bothered to have civilians, in a way; a single-minded dedication to the preservation of a culture and the subjugation of enemies, albeit without the “race bred only to fight” aspect.

Because it got me thinking more about Windermere and where they come from in their quest to conquer their part of the galaxy and “free” it from NUNS domination. First, we need some deep background.

We knew from all the way back in the original Macross series that half a million years ago there was a powerful alien civilisation called the Protoculture, who more or less ruled the whole Galaxy, who ended up creating a warrior race, the Zentradi, to wage their wars for them which ultimately got them killed off by the Zentradi. We also got hints that humanity was also either descended from or uplifted by the Protoculture. Now in Macross Delta we’ve learned that they actually seeded a hell of a lot more humanoid races throughout, as explained in the intro to episode seven. Humans, Zentradi, Windermerians, those Voldor cat people from the last two episodes as well as the original inhabitants of Ragna are all Protoculture creations, which explains why everybody more or less looks the same and they can all fuck and interbreed with no difficulties even if their partner was originally a twenty metre high giant before they got miniaturised. It’s an old, old science fiction trope, still used occasionally despite that everybody should know better by now.

It’s this background that provides part of the Windermerean justification for waging war agains the New United Government. The races in the Brisingr Cluster were the last upraised, so that makes them the natural heirs to the Protoculture and Windermere believes itself to be the natural leader to lead the other races in the Cluster to their natural place at the top of the Galaxy. From everything we’ve seen about Windermere so far we know they’re a proud, aristocratic warrior culture and you can sort of guess about why they rebelled agains the NUG in the first place. They went from isolation to being forcibly introduced to the rest of the Galaxy and Galactic culture in an eyeblink and they couldn’t take it.

Proud warrior races like this tend to be rather doctrinaire in their warfare, prefering honest fighting to the sort of stuff Windermere pulls off: biological warfare and mind control doesn’t really fit with that, even if the mind control is done through their ancient art of wind singing. They’re not just using these methods because they offer the only possible way to defeat the NUG, there also seems to be a disdain for anybody not like them from at least some of the Aerial Knights, which leads to things like the screencap above. Which all sounds more and more familiar the longer I think about it.

A proud warrior people, pulled out of isolation by a technologically far superior civilisation, trust into a modernity it mistrusts, using underhanded ways to gain the first advantage in a war against said civilisation and cloaking its own empire building in terms of liberation their fellow cultures from foreign oppression and leading them into a new dawn? Hmm, what does that remind me off?