Sniblet's Unathi Application

[Sniblet]

BYOND Key: Sniblet

Character Names:

 

Species you are applying to play: Unathi

What color do you plan on making your first alien character: Teht Mint range; 85-149-85. Not the exact color, but a close shade.

Have you read our lore section's page on this species?:

God you people write a lot. By the way, the Guilds page consistently misuses supplant where it apparently means supplement.

Why do you wish to play this specific race:

Despite being THE meta race for merc gaming, I’m not really thinking about unathi from an antag gimmick perspective – even though they tend to be anticorporate (the Hegemony, despite its status as Hegemony, is an exception to the rule), they have too many problems at home to go bothering the Horizon, unless you’re playing le epik pirate gang again.

Urist McSniblet likes unathi for their hardwired conservatism; a kind of counterculture that comes from a resistance to developing countercultures. As much as the galaxy shifts underneath them, they cling to antiquated religion, politics, technology, xenophobia, methods of work, and literally express themselves like animals do. The old times were always better, and the galaxy’s getting worse and worse every day, yet we soldier on.

Identify what makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a Human:

I’m going to keep calling them unathi, but they call themselves sinta.

An unathi is probably pretty lonely out here. Your home, regardless of which planet, is Fucked by events as recent as your lifetime, and which most of your people easily blame on meddling xenos. Your species didn’t even really leave the surface of Moghes until like 30 years ago. But here you are on the Horizon.

Unathi are just starting to taste the very fringes of shadows of breaking away from what is, with few exceptions, an exact analogue to modern conservative gender norms. Men fight, women support. Men lead, women lie. They’ve also picked up a third option, in the fisherman, which culturally translates to moneymaker and mechanically translates to Pronouns > Plural.

(Moghean) unathi are not breaking away from an exact analogue to ancient guilds and a feudal system. Guilds are their megacorporations, but aren’t strictly comparable to megacorporations because they literally still use charters and everything. Their feudal system means firstly the obvious, that landownership is passed along by blood and marriage, and secondly that everybody answers to lords and elders. In RP, this means that you’ve been brought up in a system of authority nothing like humans’. Trasen has no right to the throne - firstly, she's a woman. What is wrong with you apes?

Character Name: Sdati Thaeahn

Please provide a short backstory for this character

Oureaean (Sahat) / Fisher-female / Hydroponicist / 4-ideal Th’akh traditionalist / 19 y/o

Thaeahn’s clan were among the first colonists of Oureaea, and had since time immemorial existed as peasants without the slightest connection to nobility or power. They were historically fishers, and remain fishers. This sets the pattern. They’ve always been well-behaved and respectful to the system, rightly fearful of the spirits, and fanatically loyal to one another. Like everything else that’s always been, first contact and the Contact War set this askew.

The War was just before Sdati’s time, but they didn’t have to be there for it or to have known anything else in their life to feel the change. Everyone they knew, knew someone else who had burned, decayed, or been lost. Their elders spoke slowly about those years, just after their departure, that Moghes spent engulfed in a quiet, inscrutable second sun. Then the aftershocks, the revolts, and ultimately the Oureaean revolution... nevermind democracy, nevermind that Yiztek was an awful man. The details of the politics were irrelevant to a clan of fishermen. The land of their ancestors was dust, and even Oureaea seemed to be beginning to crumble. Nothing was the way it had always been anymore. Nowhere in Uueoa-Esa felt safe. Each member in their own way desperate and unsettled and lost, the clan of Thaeahn took to the solar winds, and over the years quickly scattered, some to piracy, some to offworlder fleets, some to Dominia and some to Mendell.

Our Thaeahn fell in briefly with the fringe of a Sadar fleet, then said goodbye to the last of their clanmates as they fell with the corporations. They don’t like humans, but nowhere else feels stable anymore. Idris wouldn’t touch them, but NanoTrasen would happily give them, if very nearly nothing else, at least a dorm on the Horizon. They were a fisher, now they are a farmer. They were Oureaean. They saw a future ahead… and now nothing is like it was.

Sdati is really depressed. They are – in addition to other things – a woman, so they should know how to hide it. They try. Their writing helps. In another life, maybe they’d be here with the blessing of the Poet’s Precinct.

Keeping contact with their clan is difficult, but they  intermittently manage remote group meetings. Most of them still show up. The last thing any Thaeahn needs is to lose their name, but the Lord is understanding and hasn't cast anyone out yet.

What do you like about this character?

The backstory was fun to write. Unathi are another race where for most of them, something would have to go very wrong in their life to bring them to the Horizon. Either you’re Hegemony, or you’re fucked.

What I think I’d like playing, though, is more superficial: a hydroponicist character. An unathi character. A character what is sad. A character what writes.

How would you rate your role-playing ability?

Abysmal!

Notes:

Almost every instance of they/them used to refer to Sdati had to be edited from she/her. It’s muscle memory. I can’t stop.

Anyway, like I said, get in line behind diona. I'm applying for unathi last. Scalies are gross.

[Triogenix]

Hi there, and thanks for applying! Sorry it took us a while to get to this application. We have a few questions for you.

1. In the section about why you want to play Unathi, you mention that their hardwired to be conservative, with antiquated things like their religion, politics, technology, and culture. This seems a little to monolithic of a statement for all Unathi. The question is therefore: Could you expand on this, and point out a few places in Unathi lore where there might be Sinta who don't fall into this stereotype, having radically different views?

Also, what did you mean by "literally express themselves as animals do?"

2. In a similar vein to that first question, you seem to see gender roles as supremely important, but also almost absolute. Some Sinta certainly see it that way, but we'd like you to expand on this similarly to the above section, pointing out places or situations in lore where traditional gender roles aren't always absolute or potentially reversed.

 

All in all, it seems like you have a solid basic understanding of Unathi Lore and its foundations. But, from this application, as it currently stands, we're only seeing one aspect of the lore and not a multitude that shows you can make solid characters from any part of it. The goal of these questions is to let you show that you in fact can, and that you understand the nuances/differences between Unathi cultures/backgrounds in our lore, by expanding on what you wrote in the non-backstory sections.

[Sniblet]

In at least two places (I don't want to go and count them), unathi are noted to be innately stubborn. This is that hardwired conservatism - if you extrapolate stubbornness, it means resistance to change, which lines up with the strength of the traditionalist factions among them. Certainly, this can vary, but generally an unathi is more stubborn, therefore traditional, therefore conservative than a human.

Examples of this varying include - you don't have to look far - the Hegemony. Embracing xenos, especially humans, is pretty radical, and is what the Contact War came from. Unathi are capable of accepting or embracing change, but most are pretty bad at it. Which is what the Contact War came from.

There's also the entirety of Si'akh, which is radical by any metric.

When I say "literally express themselves as animals do" I'm thinking about the descriptions of baring and covering the neck as showing outgoing or reserved (respective) emotions. Humans kind of do too, but we also bare our teeth when we're happy, which is not how animals work - unathi expressions much more consistently line up with how an animal would physically express emotion.

Gender roles are not absolute in (all) unathi culture. The human-traditional way is still dominant, but we can again look to the Hegemony for the first hint of difference, in normalized and integrated same-sex marriage. When you say reversed, as far as I know there is exactly one recorded case, which is that tiny wasteland Queendom of Szek’Hakh, but that emerged pretty accidentally and hasn't been repeated - it was a change made out of necessity and it's only managed to stick for about 25 years so far. If Aurora lasts another 30 years, they could go either way.

Edited March 2, 2023 by Sniblet

[Lucaken]

This application is accepted on behalf of the Unathi team.