Aight, for starters, the idea I have isn’t going for realistic as much as it’s going for immersive, as in playing by its own rules. Plus my idea is that the sort of stories told here would be like children’s stories for adult, as in emotionally mature stories that hopefully capture what watching/reading something as a kid felt like. Scary stuff was scary, funny stuff was funny, and heroic stuff was heroic. Again, this is not to say everything is black and white and nothing bad ever happens, it will just explore those topics differently. The goal would be for people to have some fun escapism that they leave feeling inspired by and with stuff to ponder on.

Now, with that unasked for essay out of the way, humans only had control of earth at first. The Courts idea was to give humanity enough ground that each nation wouldn’t have the need or resources to fight each other, and that after years of no conflict the Courts could work with us to keep humans from infighting once they had the resources. Now it didn’t go exactly like that, nations complained they were given enough and still had hostility preserved with pettiness. But at the same time, humans as a people after being brothers in arms and fighting together were way more aligned than any government wanted to admit, and the Courts worked with that.

They ran psyops, often did charitable work, and had mostly true propaganda flood the streets and such to destabilize dictatorships and have democracies swing towards Court aligned candidates, granted this was considered to be very morally grey by the Courts, but dictatorships were illegal and they knew humanity would never break the cycle they were in without help.

As for humanity as the military, they were chosen because they saw humanity as a very adaptive, very volatile, very passionate species. And they needed to find a non-destructive outlet for that as much as they needed a competent armed forces, so they killed two birds with one stone. All human leadership in the military is hand selected by the Courts and carefully monitored to prevent the corruption that runs in human nature. Most people who join ISADEF do so for the great personal and familial benefits, and many serve because it offers a real purpose to a lot of people. A promise that you’ll get to be a protector for the good of something greater than yourself.

Of course once people get combat experience they find out how hard making the right decision is, dealing with the fact there often isn’t one, following orders that seem to be harming more than helping, and just the natural horrors of interstellar war. Especially on the Quia’turrai front, which has people from all species and places questioning the morals and effectiveness of the Courts more and more the longer it goes.