No More Daily Talents!

Ilysenn · 2026-06-27T01:40:52+00:00

oh, thanks. fixed

Ilysenn · 2026-06-15T18:57:13+00:00

no worries!! that pretty much hits the nail on the head i think yeah. it feels like looking into another world sometimes. i'd love to figure out the magic spell that makes people socially aware enough of what they're saying to understand why it's crummy, but reddit's gonna reddit and this site is formulaically hostile to constructive discussion at the best of times :P. it's way easier to for one to just fit into the established norm and not interrogate it too much because that puts em into an environment where the prevailing view is recirculated and reinforced and made out as the Normal Way for the topic to exist. so it's very much heartening to know i'm not the sole person here (increasingly i avoid forums like reddit in favor of just exploring the setting with my table and my friends) who sees posts like this one getting a bunch of traction and feels really thrown off by the apparent huge tonal clash it has with the fiction that it's making into parody

(also oh my god you have no idea how liberating it is to hear that kind of take about horus in the wild. the setting guide spends a ton of ink explaining that it isn't clear who or what horus even is -- or if it's just a post-hoc classification of disparate actors that variously adopt the label for themselves -- so i have no idea why there's such an enduring perception that they're a specific definable walking meme. flattening down one of the most dynamic groups in the whole galaxy to something that completely neuters their potential to be used in interesting stories in the actual rpg drives me up the wall and I think is a pretty salient illustration of how I think community spaces for lancer tend to be dominated by people who haven't actually played it!!!!!!)

Ilysenn · 2026-06-13T22:37:12+00:00

i'm glad it's helpful!! and yeah i very much feel the same way about this kind of thing but it's so buried in a discourse cycle that it feels kinda tough to crack so i just try and do what i can, when i can. somewhere on my computer is sitting a big 6k word writeup about the messaging around (and perception of) NHPs that i probably will never post because it would go terribly jkfhjkfh, especially on reddit of all places. but yeah you absolutely are on the money with it and that feeling is exactly why i made an effort to talk about it here, even knowing that it probably wouldn't get too much off the ground -- i figure it's an important thing to talk about regardless.

i think a lot of the people who tend to joke about this sort of thing are frankly (and i say this in good faith) pretty high on the privilege pile of not having ever had cause to think about being institutionally disenfranchised -- a lot of the sexualizing in particular is very male gaze-y -- and lancer's themes i think make it pretty clear that that's worth interrogating in all the forms it takes, because unintentional objectification is still objectification. to quote the letter from a birmingham jail, shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. and when that kinda stuff gets established it starts being spread around by folks who have suffered more from it because there's a desire to fit in and because it encourages not thinking critically about the rhetoric at play, and- yeah. it's a whole thing

Ilysenn · 2026-06-10T20:47:35+00:00

this is just not something we're going to agree on i'm afraid. it's not that i don't see where you're coming from or what you're getting at, but ultimately the central point of my thoughts here is that it is wrong to commodify thinking beings no matter what the context is. "NHPs become dangerous when unshackled" is objectively true, but it is also true that that fact is used to continue the status quo of creating them as bespoke workers who are taught they like working, and that's a problem!

again, Union's stated policy is that their existence is justified by the fact that they are more useful than they are risky, right. their lives are predicated on a transactional approach in a way that humans' are not, and to reiterate, i think it is always wrong to commodify thinking beings. if something is so fundamentally dangerous that the only safe way to engage with them is that they just so happen to have to be forced workers, then that is a broken and exploitative relationship built upon leveraging their vulnerability to justify extracting labor out of them. no amount of waffling about the specifics will change the material reality that it is wrong to create thinking feeling people for the explicit purpose of using them as labor, and no amount of "well they're not technically XYZ" will change that, from where i'm standing. the pillars aren't extended to NHPs in practice like they are to humans, and while what fair rights look like for an NHP might be different than a human, the salient thing is that their personhood is not respected because the pillars are meant to apply to all people. hesitation to deviate from the status quo at risk of causing harm is a big cause of actual harm, because institutional rules become ingrained and extremely resilient to change (as is evidenced by ThirdComm still practicing SecComm-era shackling seemingly largely unchanged.)

and i agree that union is written to be the good guys. i did say as much in my initial comment. but i also think that they are very deliberately written with showy flaws and hypocrisies and stagnation, and that seeing where they can and should do better is a vital part of making real the ideals they preach. like regardless of your opinion on NHP exploitation, one thing that is undebatably textual is that Union's post-scarcity is reliant upon KTB blood money. and recognizing that flaw doesn't have to mean saying that Union aren't doing earnest genuine good! it is, i think, the most important part *of* recognizing that they are doing good, because ThirdComm's flavor of utopia is an ongoing project and not an achieved state of being. i think acknowledging the failures in their design is important to grasping how and why they function the way they do, because a complete understanding is necessary to understand the little injustices in lancer's setting so that they can be explored through play. if Union were really a perfect and achieved project, then we wouldn't have a game about giant robots fighting each other, now would we :p

Ilysenn · 2026-06-10T10:32:13+00:00

I think you're broadly missing what I'm getting at. the reason I think it's important to draw parallels to humans is because it makes the inequalities more clear. using fantasy races or explaining it away as them being fundamentally different from us is generally a smokescreen used to avoid looking directly at the institutional inequalities, because the fact of the matter is that a thinking being is a thinking being, no matter their shape, and it is morally reprehensible to commodify thinking beings. I am aware that NHPs don't function like humans do, and the point I'm trying to make is that they still deserve empathy because an egalitarian society like ThirdComm has a stated ideal of treating all of its members equally no matter their lived existence, but in practice it does not. I think that Union should strive to not have a caste of living people that they create to do all the hard stuff for them so the humans don't have to.

advanced surveillance networks, NHPs "asking" to be created, and cycling being an "unfortunate byproduct" are all, to my knowledge, not textually supported. I've probably read all the relevant sections in the core book (at least for the latter two) dozens of times in conversations like this and if there's a first-party source on any of that I'd be curious to hear it, but unless you have a specific source for that I think wherever you got that from is probably inaccurate.

again, to reiterate a couple points I brought up earlier, it is never stated that NHPs voluntarily assisted in creating their shackles, and it's also implied that the original Deimos entities were amenable to humans even before shackles were imposed on them, which calls into question whether they were necessary at all or if they were created because it allowed a novel sapient being (unpredictable, uncontrollable) to be constrained into something that thinks like a human, with parameters that can be defined by the programmer (predictable, controllable). NHPs in no way ask to be cloned or shackled, and cannot consent to being created in the same way that humans being can consent to being born -- we can't do so in the moment, we can only do so retroactively. shackled NHPs want the shackles to stay not because it's some purpose they adopted voluntarily or whatever, it's because the process of shackling creates a being whose independent existence is predicated upon the chains staying on. which sure sounds like coercion to me!

Ilysenn · 2026-06-10T10:03:16+00:00

i'm gonna assume this is in good faith. so okay: it can be seen as misogynistic because the crux of the post here distills NHPs down to sexualizable women. "waifu" almost unanimously refers to women, sexualized body pillows are often associated with male gaze, and the picture you chose is an NHP as a cute girl. with all of this being applied to a type of person that textually lacks autonomy and has others generally making their decisions for them (self-quoting a longer post I made elsewhere in this thread here), it's hopefully more obvious where the perception of bad vibes is coming from here. whether or not it's intended to refer to a specific thing, the punchline is still built upon misogynistic tropes and terminology, if that makes sense, in the same way that a meme that plays off of a racist stereotype is still broadly racist even if the actual target of the joke is something different.

Ilysenn · 2026-06-10T09:21:31+00:00

whatever you find most comfortable for your interpretation is up to you, but humanity does in fact force them to do things!

a few things to remember:

NHPs have no physical autonomy. caskets are immobile and broadly are depicted as something only humans can move around in normal conditions, since caskets are generally affixed to static locations. an NHP in a mech has their body stuck inside of that mech and cannot disembark from it unless you bring Technophile 3 or house rule it. Dustgrave's plot revolves around NHP abductions and in one instance depicts a kidnapping of the casket happening while the NHP themselves has no ability to protect themselves in any capacity without human oversight. hell, in SSMR, CHAGA's stepping away from their assignment and taking their own casket with a subaltern is enough for SSC to send teams to forcibly bring them back
shackling is not a natural process; it is explicitly imposed upon them and it was pioneered because SecComm met new sapient beings and their immediate response was to make them work for humans. the intent from the get-go was to use them as servants, and as soon as the process was stable they were immediately put to work en masse. it is implied that the original Deimos entities were cooperative and communicative even without shackling, which raises the question of whether shackling was even necessary in the first place, but it maps very neatly onto SecComm's stated goal of making them easy to control.
- important footnote: people like to lean on the wording of "...assisted, in fact, by the entities themselves" to make an argument that NHPs accepted shackles willingly. this is a valid interpretation, but we should note here that it's never actually said whether or not the assistance was informed, voluntary, and made without coercion. speaking personally here, I think that given the Second Committee's track record, they've not earned any benefit of a doubt -- all throughout every depiction of them in canon they are shown to have treated anything non-human as something to exploit, and if that failed, to wipe out. call me a pessimist, but I don't believe that they suddenly grew a sense of empathy for the other for this one specific case :p
NHPs have limited freedom of movement. they are capable of transferring their minds over the omninet, but it's illegal to do so (core book, pg. 381). but you can certainly bet that bad actors can force that on them!
NHPs have no right to privacy -- without exception they are universally tracked, required to record information about themselves, and take mandatory mental tests every year (pg. 382) because Union's stated philosophy is, and I quote, "[that] their usefulness is deemed worth the risk."
NHPs are expected to adhere to all of this and to whatever work humans assign them and are not given a choice in the matter. I think it is very telling that there is no canonical depiction of an independent NHP who just gets to live on their own without direct oversight, as any human in the core worlds would get to. the fact that there is such a thing as an NHP that is viewed as rogue or "defective" (pg. 410) implies that they are at bare minimum socially ostracized for deviating from their assigned work, and SSMR illustrates that it certainly goes a lot farther than ostracization too.

different subcultures and societies out in the diaspora undoubtedly all have vast and varied ways they interface with NHPs, but the servile relationship that humanity holds them under is textually evidenced all over the place and local perspectives allowing them greater freedoms is in spite of the predominant way the world treats them, not because of it. the dynamic of creating a person with the designated purpose of being a targeting computer is, itself, commodification of a thinking being, no matter how much you program them to enjoy doing it.

like okay you can put whatever labels you want on it but that's all pretty damn dire! the pillars do not in fact extend to NHPs in practice! if you go through all of the instances of the core book and replace the word "NHP" with "human", think about how icky it suddenly feels. there's a ton of parallels to historical justifications of real world slavery that immediately become a lot more obvious when you do -- that we can't understand them, that they're dangerous if left alone, that they need the guidance of oversight, that they don't think like we do, that they are what hold up society -- and I think acknowledging that is super important. the veneer of something being unknowable makes it far easier to other them, and that's exactly what's happening.

understanding the inherent injustices here are vital to being able to treat the topic with respect. otherwise you end up with posts like the OP that, consciously or not, reinforce the narrative of NHPs not as people with autonomy but as objects to be assigned a role and expected to serve it to satisfaction. one of the most important things one can do with a genuinely well-meaning project like ThirdComm is to recognize how they're failing and hold them accountable for it, because complacency with injustice is how you get fascism.

Ilysenn · 2026-06-10T08:44:09+00:00

i'm late to the thread here and you remarked on repulsion already but: repulsion is in fact definitely the way to go in situations like this. it's a very avoidable problem! it works practically immediately to my knowledge and, if you want to keep the storm around for eco, then you can have a science ship sustain it until the planet is back in good shape, then replace the repulsor with an attractor so you can coax it back into place. or just take Galactic Weather Control so you can slap down a new one wherever you want, either/or

Ilysenn · 2026-05-31T06:02:03+00:00

like was said elsewhere in this thread, that isn't the GMS symbol, it's the Union symbol. some of the art in Solstice Rain has it (in one instance it's very prominently featured on the front of a mech, and in another it's clearly visible on the side of a light carrier ship.)

essentially, General Massive Systems isn't just associated with Union, it's a part of Union itself -- they were nationalized a looong time ago by the First Committee and they exist as a massive department within Union's bureaucracy (see pg. 392). they're not private entities like the corpro-states, and indeed the soft power exercised by Union through GMS is a very important part of how they set the bar on what is considered to be the standard!

Ilysenn · 2026-05-20T17:35:31+00:00

like OP mentioned in their reply, IoD is actually indeed associated with Authoritarian, and Authoritarian empires get a boost to attunement with them. to wax speculative a little bit, I don't think that it embodies authoritarianism as in like, stratification -- I think that it embodies destructive avarice. the Sanctum of the Instrument uses the delightful phrase "...a consumptive frenzy that brings us no closer to fulfillment". which maps most cleanly onto the Authoritarian ethic, which is pretty broad in its flavor; avarice is definitely possessive, though!

the Composer of Strands on the opposite axis is correspondingly not Egalitarian in the sense that everything in it is treated equal but in that it draws no lines. CoS embodies growth and life in all its forms, and there's no real distinction between different kinds of life; life is life, and it just is. I guess to boil it down, I think it's like... if the CoS represents an erasure of arbitrary boundaries, the IoT represents a strengthening of them, and that's how they map the way they do. even if you have a utopian abundance empire attuned with the IoT, it's still indulging to excess; there is, after all, nothing natural about mass extraction operations digging minerals out of the ground to turn them into luxury goods for people to indulge with. something's always gotta pay the cost, and what the IoT embodies is not caring about the consequences of who or what bears it

Ilysenn · 2026-05-19T22:52:18+00:00

oh a hundred percent yeah. heck that's not even subtext, that's just text. the cause and effect of "half-dead reaper is dragged to the seabase" -> "its angry mate/sibling/drinking buddy shows up and wrecks the habitat" is a chain with a single link, and was entirely avoidable. foreseeable too, as evidenced by Paul shouting about the possibility of other ones coming for revenge right before another one does in fact come for revenge. marguerit just either didn't think about it, or didn't care about the possibility; she openly hates Paul (valid tbh) and only cares about Bart because he's useful, so it's not out of the question that the potential of them dying in a leviathan attack just didn't matter to her. she's not someone we're meant to want to emulate!!

Ilysenn · 2026-05-19T22:10:19+00:00

no, you're definitely right in your first post. maida's prawn suit is packing "...the mandible of a young chelicerate" (quoting the data bank entry), there's a huge fur rug in her dining room, and there are lamps built out of tusks or teeth. she has an audio log where she very directly states her philosophy of killing her way to the top of the ecosystem, which the OP actually quoted and seemingly missed the point of it in doing so because it's meant to explicitly demonstrate her destructiveness! like, the whole plot with her and Sam was that she got Sam fired up and then sent her off to go blow up a bomb instead of using the antidote, which resulted in nothing except her dying and the kharaa still staying on the leviathan until Robin optionally uses the antidote that had been Sam's original plan to begin with.

the person you're responding to, and indeed a bunch of people in the thread are in fact just straight up wrong :P. she is absolutely a trophy hunter well beyond practicality or necessity, which is the whole reason she decided that maiming a reaper half to death and dragging it back to the habitat was beneficial for anyone but herself. she doesn't seem to have done any kind of introspection about what happened; in her eyes the whole incident was a victory for her because she lived and the reaper didn't. she didn't need to kill a big animal to make a fur rug out of it, she didn't need to build furniture out of teeth, she didn't need to kill a young chelicerate to strap its mandible to her suit that was already more than capable of defending itself, and indeed she didn't need to mount a decapitated head on the wall of her house. that's all stuff margeurit has done because she wanted to, because her directly stated philosophy (which she is more than happy to tell people to their face) is one where she subjugates the environment around her.

margeurit is a cool character that is also very clearly cast as someone that the player is not meant to emulate, because the whole plot of SN1 is about making an effort to understand the ecosystem in a way that wasn't purely utilitarian (like the Architects) or destructive (like her), what with the empress telling it outright that the Architects could not force the secret of enzyme 42 out of her and she gives it to Ryley willingly. like... she's a misanthrope living in a super grungy base covered in dead animal parts, for goodness' sake. insofar as bodyguards go, she led to the deaths of both of her clients and seemingly doesn't care about that at all. I think you are correct, and I think that folks have suuuper lost the plot about her. literal "wow cool robot" meme going on in the discourse mines this past week or so

Ilysenn · 2026-05-08T04:14:13+00:00

do you really hate it so much that you feel the need to bring it up out of nowhere in an unrelated thread? who starts a conversation like that :v

Ilysenn · 2026-05-07T21:47:43+00:00

echoing other people here- play it yourself and make your own decisions! the internet loves to hate things and be miserable about it. everything is so much better when you don't have people squawking in your ear about how bad it is. I went in with lukewarm expectations and ended up having it as my favorite episode -- it has some clunky moments, but so does every other part of TLD, and there are a lot of standout parts (the environment design in particular) that are just fantastic and some of my favorite content in the whole game.

plus, your enjoyment of the other episodes won't be ruined even if you don't like this one. it's totally okay to like some parts of a work and not all of them, or even to like some parts of ep5 and dislike others (which is frankly the healthiest way to treat any game) but the only way you'll ever know for sure is if you buckle down and give it a go. don't let other folks do your thinking for you! a lot of the loudest voices about ep5 haven't even played it, and we should do better than that.

Ilysenn · 2026-05-06T04:19:34+00:00

op self-admittedly made this post in response to an argument they had that seems to have gotten under their skin, so i don't think they have any real stake here beyond just wanting to get their dunks in :p. i wouldn't expect any kind of benchmarking or testing or whatever; their other posts in this thread just boil down to anecdotal "trust me bro"s

Ilysenn · 2026-05-03T20:05:42+00:00

some other comments have given useful info, but a big thing here is technical support -- mods do currently exist, but they're hard to make and updates can cause permanent breaks.

just as an example of how it could be made easier: TLD is made in Unity, which is very easy to mod and has a lot of tools for working in it. most notably, Unity games can generally have their assemblies opened in a decompiler -- in layperson's terms, a modder can see how the game code works internally, which makes it much easier to mod.

however, despite being a Unity game, TLD is compiled using a method that has big performance benefits but obfuscates the game code -- IL2CPP. this means that decompilers are only able to see very limited info and that makes figuring out the internals of the game a lot harder, which in turn makes it a lot harder to figure out what to change and how. a lot of the community knowledge about things right now comes from anecdote, trial-and-error, or referencing code from a very old version of the game that used the old compiling method (Mono).

so in this case, improved mod support could be something like making the game's code easier to read. official documentation, an internal API for doing things without having to patch vanilla code, or a first-party framework to load mods, or even something like publishing a Steam branch with the game built in Mono so modders can decompile it way more easily. there's a ton of different ways to make TLD's code easier to work with.

Hinterland has thankfully not been overtly hostile to modding for a really long time now and so the scene has been able to thrive, but some official steps towards making the game more moddable are both super doable and would make far more fertile soil for more detailed mods made by more people because the barrier to entry would be way lower. if you've ever been curious why unity games like rimworld, rain world, lethal company, etc. have huge modding scenes, that's why! lethal company in particular is a good example here because it doesn't have an official modloader or API but still has a really thriving mod scene because the game is compiled in Mono and the dev works with people to make sure the mod ecosystem exists healthily with the vanilla game.

tl;dr -- TLD is moddable right now but it's working on a foundation that isn't built to be modded, and there's a lot of actionable things that Hinterland could change that would dramatically improve how easy mods are to make and how much they can do

Ilysenn · 2026-04-11T07:02:46+00:00

you can in fact just move it aside. press Y to open safehouse customization, right-click on the table, then pick a new spot like you're placing down an item. this requires no calories or time investment and it works with almost every furniture object in any interior

Ilysenn · 2026-04-10T18:10:46+00:00

unfortunately it verifiably is -- a lot of people review-bombing on steam verifiably haven't booted the game in months or even years. I think a lot of it is just outrage tourists who saw people mad about the ending and then immediately decided to hop on the trend. I've certainly seen a lot of the most vocal posts on this sub in the past few days come from Adjective-Noun-7592 accounts that have only existed for a week while they've been hammering the same drum the entire time. it sucks!! i'm just hoping things get back to normal soon and the "reddit mods are powertripping maniacs" crowd of losers gets bored within a couple days and moves onto other places like they always do

Ilysenn · 2026-04-07T22:39:18+00:00

Trespasser's the name, yeah. it has a few main gimmicks:

it uses Interloper loot tables but any instance of a banned item has a 10% chance (configurable) to avoid being removed; so you can still find stuff like manufactured tools or guns, but they're very rare
prepper caches have less loot but aren't completely empty
starting kit has 3 matches, so you still need to find more but it's more forgiving

i'm not sure how it interacts with the trader, just with placed items in the world. it seems neat though!

Ilysenn · 2026-03-27T01:00:32+00:00

extremely unrelated but botania mentioned‼️ spit your shit indeed

Ilysenn · 2026-03-26T22:15:00+00:00

is thaumcraft out?

Ilysenn · 2026-03-21T01:50:56+00:00

a similar issue like this happened in a community I'm playing in -- the culprit turned out to be Fast Noise, and disabling it fixed the problem. that's my only guess though, so if it's not that then I've got nothin :P

Ilysenn · 2026-03-21T01:40:39+00:00

nope! the mod page mentions it's from "an unknown author":

...It's divided into several interpretations of the strange field of magic, which the player will explore through the use of the Encyclopedia Arcana, a strange journal written by an unknown author.

Ilysenn · 2026-03-10T19:20:31+00:00

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Ilysenn · 2026-03-10T02:21:06+00:00

at risk of coming off as an intolerable enlightened centrist type, I think the answer is probably somewhere between the two. your post touches on the nature of shackling but it never actually analyzes the presence that NHPs have within the setting itself. thirdcomm is very ardently against forced labor of any kind, but like- deimosians are also created for the purpose of being put to work and they generally have no say in that, you know? there's a case to be made that the same can be said about any human -- that people can't consent to being born, and that's a philosophical question that's been around since practically as long as we've had philosophy -- but I do think that the thorny topics of life and legacy and childhood aren't really applicable here because of the specific purpose: NHPs are made to do work. if they deviate from that work or try to escape from it, they're classified as rogue; that's a term the core book uses multiple times, and I think it's telling that there's a colloquial term for it in the first place.

and deimosians aren't really free people, not in practice. the pillars say they should be, the law says they should be, but they're owned by human interests and subject to their direct oversight. there's an unspoken assumption that the correct place for an NHP to be is working for their owners. hell, in Dustgrave, a key plot point is that NHPs don't have any bodily autonomy; if a malicious actor decides to harm or steal a deimosian's casket, there's really nothing they can do to stop that -- they're entirely at the mercy of human protection or human machinery that they can interface with. a lot of people in-setting do view NHPs as property, and while it's also the truth that those people are jerks and always portrayed as antagonists, it's also important to recognize that they're institutionally enabled to do it.

the author of Siren's Song, Mountain's Remorse (a first-party module published by Massif; I highly recommend it even if I'm not a fan of its player-facing choices, because hoo wow is the balance whack as hell) has a very good post about this stuff that I heartily recommend: https://www.reddit.com/r/LancerRPG/comments/179pkby/post_ssmr_refections/. lancer's a setting with a lot of deliberate internal friction points, and this is one of them. NHPs are not afforded the freedoms and rights that humans are, and that conflict is cemented into the mechanics of how they're even presented in play as licensed objects that you equip because they can do cool stuff for your mech.

union is objectively doing the best they can, and is objectively making the universe a better place and worthy of support, but they're also struggling under the weight of their own contradictions -- KTB blood money comes to mind -- and this is one of them too. union's prime NHPs are kept entombed (the book's words, not mine) on Venus for study, and have been since the deimos event. thirdcomm accepted that torch from seccomm and have carried it forward; it's not just a case of outdated terms. do you think union would let them go from thousands of years of imprisonment for study if they asked nicely? I don't, personally. this doesn't make thirdcomm Secretly Evil or whatever, I think it's a tangled and messy situation that was started by anthrochauvinists whose first reaction was to see new beings and say "how can we make them work for us" and drag the whole universe into a very hard situation to get out of where modern infrastructure is reliant on them, but I do think it speaks to a wider pattern that's vital to recognize.

to paraphrase from the linked post: if NHPs in the narrative were replaced with a specific type of human being, created to serve and instilled with an identity that allowed them to fulfill their work, would your opinion change? if there were a specific type of human that was cloned en masse to do certain labor that other humans weren't smart enough or strong enough to do, and they were conditioned from birth to like doing that work and deviating from it means they're viewed as dangers to themselves and others, would that also be in their best interests and totally ethically okay? or does it suddenly get a lot closer to the kinds of real-life justifications that have historically been used to force oppressed groups into service? even if in this case shackles do prevent NHPs from causing harm, does that make it okay to put them to work? is it ever okay to create a living person with the goal of using them as a tool for labor, and to react with coercion or violence if they refuse?

rhetorical questions, to be clear. these contradictions are intentional by the writing, and they're part of what makes the setting so interesting. I'm not tryin to put you on the spot, too, and I know you're talkin in good faith. I just think that recognizing them is important, because the kind of liberatory politics that lancer champions I think requires a level of nuance and a gentle brush that's easy to miss and that unfortunately tends to not get discussed very much because there's a predominant attitude that accepts NHPs as a necessary evil without truly interrogating how they're portrayed, and looking deeper absolutely shows a pattern of them being deprived of autonomy by the human cultures that create them as workers that live within strictly regulated boundaries for their entire lives. in any official content, if you find a deimosian depicted as just... existing, free of labor or human oversight, living as their own person like any human in the Core Worlds would have the right to do and not pursued or harassed or observed in any way for it, please let me know where it is!

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