LukeinNE wrote:Amazeroth wrote:LukeinNE wrote:Just a question resulting from the name request thread:
A minority royal family per se is not a problem. But how would you explain them being able to remake the country in their image? Especially if it goes as far as changing the language to something only 3% would be able to speak? The RP could be interesting, but such a royal family could not just appear over night and change the country in one go. (Also, there are close to none RL examples of such a language change, at least I wouldn't know of any).
I'll attempt to answer your challenges and if they don't convince you, we'll do something a little different.
Where did the Royal Family come from?
The existing cultural protocols state that there's a Dundorfian minority due to a history of colonialism. These people would come from that legacy.
How would they have the power to do this?
As in many countries that were once under colonial rule, the Dundorfian minority represents much of the upper class (note: the current cultural protocol mentions nothing about this either way, but the new one will) and is therefore wealthier and better educated than the general populace. Additionally, the fall of the Communist government in Malivia is drawing thousands of Dundorfians back to Malivia now that a sympathetic (perhaps bought and paid for?) government has been seated. Finally, I'd point out that each 24 hour period represents 6 months of game time, and that the pro-monarchy government has now been in power for a little over 4 years, and with no opposition, will likely stay there much longer than that.
The Dundorfians might well be part of the upper class (although that's rather unlikely after centuries of Malivian God-kings, sects, and last communists ruled over them - they really should have just barely survived all that, and not been able to retain all their wealth), but the colonial times were several centuries ago, so there wouldn't be a direct continuity for a rule not only by Dundorfians, but by Dundorfians powerful enough to make the country itself Dundorfian as well. They are, after all, dealing with a culture that has now been independent for centuries, and couldn't be displaced by the colonialists in the first place.
What about that language thing?
I should have worded this section differently. The end goal is the same, but schools, government agencies etc, would remain thoroughly bilingual during the transition period, but the schools would shift their emphasis from Malay to Dundorfian, much like in many American schools, bilingual teachers are required to educate Hispanic students, but the end goal is to make them competent in English and therefore better-functioning citizens in their country. European countries have achieved widespread multi-linguality through their education systems, this idea just has the added nasty twist of displacing the indigenous culture over time.
The problem is not with multi-linguality, but with the twist of displacing indigenous culture. Such a feat would only be imaginable if it went together with genocide and totalitarianism, and even then, you'd have to work hard to find examples of such a (successful) undertaking in RL. I highly doubt that any of the South American countries would ever even try to convert their culture to an English/North American one. And as for India and South-East Asia, which are the RL counterparts for Malivia, the situation would be even more unlikely.
I don't object, at all, to a Dundorfian royal family. I don't object to a resurgence of Dundorfian upper-class - it stands to reason, that the Dundorfian minority would get extra benefits. But a complete cultural conversion from Malivian to Dundorfian, language included, is completely unrealistic - at least without a few hundred years of RP behind it. The only other way this would be possible is by totalitarian means, and then it would usually just mean that Dundorfian becomes the official language, but Malivian wouldn't disappear.