Big hard to draw girl
Q&A: The Nature of Dehumanization
This may sound a little confusing but hear me out. In my story, I have a character who’s going through a more or less boot camp for a dystopian empire. The ultimate goal of this “camp” is to make killing the enemy less of a regrettable necessity and more like a game, or a challenge- basically twist the morals of the soldiers so they no longer care about who they kill, they just care about the kill. Would this be feasible, or does it go too far into the “hurr durr Spartans are tough” trap.So, you don’t actually have to teach soldiers how to do this. Dehumanize an enemy enough and they’ll do it all on their own. In fact, they’ll dehumanize enemies all on their own. All you need is the enemy killing people they care about in the abstract. It doesn’t have to be people they know, family, or friends. They don’t need a personal stake. After all, dehumanization of the enemy is part of how we stave off that pesky mental limit which leads to psychotic breaks.
What many writers don’t realize is that in this case we honestly don’t have work that hard to justify the behavior. The behavior already exists, and happened in ways far worse than you or I can imagine.
If you have the stomach for it, I recommend looking at the Pacific Theater for WWII (though the Nazis are good too.) Specifically stuff like the “Contest To Kill 100 People Using A Sword” series run by a pair of Japanese newspapers covering a contest between Japanese officers Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda during the Nanking Massacre. The quest to see who could kill 100 people with their sword fastest, this included Chinese civilians and POWs.
And, yes, it happened. That’s not dystopian. That’s history.
Japan’s war crimes during World War II are built on the specific variety of nationalism the country practiced during the period and their outlook on the concept of surrender. Look no further than the extensive list of Japanese war crimes in the Pacific Theater, from The Comfort Women, Unit 731, and I would not look at the POW camps unless you have a strong stomach. However, I will say they did ship POWs back to Japan and vivisected them while still alive. I include this as its probably one of the less disturbing actions toward the treating of POWs during the war. When the men were recovered, they looked like what we’d expect from a Nazi concentration camp.
Japan is not the only example, there are countless others throughout history, and they’re not unique but they are relatively recent. Also, often, overlooked. The revenge Allied troops took on Germany, specifically those from territories occupied by German soldiers like the French is also there. In the words of a German professor from college whose family survived Allied occupation of Berlin, “no woman between seven and seventy was safe” in those quarters held by the French. At the time, her mother was a little girl and she told the story about how German citizens went running for those areas under American control. (The reason, of course, being that the Americans suffered less during the war with their civilians being an ocean away.) In the Pacific Theater, Allied soldiers would cut out the teeth of dead Japanese soldiers for their gold fillings. They called it “Jap gold”.
Kill counts, war trophies, every game you can imagine, and plenty you can’t have all happened during periods of wartime. War is an ugly business, and some wars are uglier than others.
The problem is assuming you need some sort of special training to get people there. The sad truth is such training isn’t necessary, and that’s what makes this topic dystopic. Dystopia is based in human nature, it what could happen in the future when the world is on course. The events and outlooks which led the Japanese to behave the way they did when they went to war are just as present and relevant now in countries all over the world. That includes the US.
Rid yourself now of the idea there’s ever such a thing as a “clean” war. All war is dark, all war is dirty, and all wars involve people doing terrible things to one another.
If you really want to write this story then you need to be learning everything you can about the mindset of soldiers and what they go through while on the battlefield. This means watching documentaries, shows based on anecdotes and biographical experiences like The Pacific and Band of Brothers. You should be reading Starship Troopers as a primer if you haven’t already. Do so while understanding Heinlein is a fascist and that is what he endorses in the novel. You should be going over Vietnam. I’d even watch M.A.S.H., the show, the movie, and read the book. Growing Up Black In Nazi Germany is a stunningly eye-opening read if you’ve ever wondered how the German people were swept away by Hitler and what that looked like within their culture. Read the short story, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch to get a look inside the camps run in Soviet Russia. Then tackle All Quiet on the Western Front. You want as much pro-war and anti-war media as you can get your hands on with history to fill in the gaps. Also, George Orwell’s 1984. Here’s the trick to understanding the best of the dypstopian genre: 1984 may be fictional, but similar events happened in the Soviet Union. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is entirely possible as a future for the United States, and it is plausible. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is dystopic and fictionalized, but the research behind it isn’t. The Jungle is part of why we have the FDA. There’s also Richard Wright’s Native Son.
You want to look at the cultures specifically that produced some of history’s most horrific war crimes and study up on the mindsets which led them there. That is how this happens, and that is what you need to write dystopias: an understanding of human nature.
Look beyond The Hunger Games to Rome. Consider the Spartan children whipped in stadiums to provide entertainment for the masses in simulation of ancient Spartan training, and that is only one small anecdote to the greater horrors of the Arena. See the horror in an entire culture reduced to a themepark attraction.
Remember, all dystopia is political and it is all based as a reaction to the real world. The best dystopias are talking about events that have happened in a fictional context with the warning they might happen again. We may all get upset at Animal Farm but that is a breakdown of how Soviet Russia came to be and it will teach you how the political system took hold.
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. – Animal Farm
Some people are more equal than others, some people are better than others, some people are more deserving than others. Be that their nation of origin, the color of their skin, their ethnic background, their accent, their education level, their economic background, or the part of a country they come from (much less the world). Dehumanization is all you need to justify great cruelty, and human beings do it to each other all the time.
After all, take any military shooter from the genre and do a hard contrast to Spec Ops: the Line. Take your experiences and what you feel while playing a military shooter, then imagine feeling those same emotions while killing real people.
You will. They’re not people to you anymore. After all, when was the last time you thought of the Stormtroopers from Star Wars IV: A New Hope as human beings?
When American soldiers called the members of the VietCong Charlies, what they were doing was taking letters of the alphabet VictorCharlie and translating their targets into anonymous individuals. They are no longer people. They’re all Charlies.
This is the key to understanding the horrors of warfare. Once you figure out how to write your characters from the perspective where they don’t see the people they kill as people, you’re off to the races. The only place you’re off is the idea they need to be trained to not care or turn it into a game.
Give them training.
They’ll make games out of killing their enemies all on their own.
-Michi
Q&A: The Nature of Dehumanization was originally published on How to Fight Write.
What would be some behavioral/psychological differences between a kid who’s been raised for combat and a child soldier? She’s in her mid-teens on what was supposed to be a routine training mission when shit hits the fan and she ends up getting captured. The enemy armed forces that have her assume that she’s a child soldier that’s been otherwise coerced into this and treat her as such. So how would they be trying to establish rapport with her or subvert her loyalties? (and utterly failing) [1/2]
What, if any, chance do they have of actually succeeding, given that
she’s been training since she was 5? Is there any way for them to manage
to turn her loyalties? And what would be going through her head during
all of this beyond disdain and escape plans, regardless of whether or
not she turns? [2/2]
I get what you’re asking here, you’re asking if a child soldier can be saved through the power of friendship. The answer to that, upfront, is no. Child soldiers and children raised for combat are not misunderstood misanthropes who’ve never had a support network but know what it is and can be approached in the same way you would the average loner.
Child soldiers/kids who’ve been put through any kind of brainwashing are a difficult subject to discuss because it is profoundly disturbing and messed up. The assumption is that if they’re kidnapped from their families, they’ll grow to secretly hate their captors and jump when the first opportunity comes for escape.
That isn’t how it works. In the training, they’re driven to hate their parents and view them as weak. As they’re systematically broken down, they grow to love their captors and consider them family. They develop a deep and abiding loyalty to them.
Falling prey to this conditioning has nothing to do with how strong someone is or isn’t. It’s not a matter of mental or emotional strength. Breaking them down and rebuilding them from the inside out is what their handlers do. They are very adept at it. These children are conditioned through empowerment, which is part of why it’s so seductive. They’re taught to believe that they are better and stronger than everyone else, that other humans are weak. That weakness must be destroyed.
You won’t reach them by treating them in any way they’ll perceive as weakness and if you react the way they expect then you play into the hands of the people who programmed them, then you’ve reinforced the child’s conditioning. The mental conditioning is a booby-trap for the people who might try to help them. Every intuitive choice, every choice that feels natural is going to be the wrong one.
You cannot reach them if you come to them with an assumed understanding of who they are and what a human being is. There’s the person they were, who they’ve learned to despise and the person they see themselves as now. Approaching either of those individuals, whether it’s the person they were or who they currently are, will lock you out.
The average person with no understanding will simply reinforce the child’s views and their handler’s views, and shut out of any way to help them by the child’s dismissal. That’s if the kid doesn’t kill them first, which they will because that’s what they were conditioned to do.
A child overcoming this programming requires years and years of therapy, if they’re fortunate enough to receive it at all.
Abuse isn’t cured by the power of friendship.
We’ve talked about #child soldiers and #children and combat on separate occasions, we’ve even compared them to each other and explained the difference. They are not, however, totally separate.
The main difference:
1) Children Raised to Combat are a long term investment. This is someone whose training has been the focus of their life, with the intent to turn out a solid, above average combatant. These children who won’t see combat until they reach their late teens/adulthood.
2) Child Soldiers are expendable assets given a gun, often given drugs like “BamBam”, told they’re immortal, and shoved onto the battlefield on the idea they’ll give the adult soldiers pause, gun a few down, before getting gunned down themselves. They’re not “soldiers” so much as they are distractions. They are also never sent out alone. You’re not up against one, you’re up against many.
Both have the option of having been put through cultish/psychological programming, but the difference between the two is fairly obvious. It’s a disoriented and drugged child violently kidnapped from their village versus a member of the Hitler Youth or another, similar, organization.
They are both psychologically damaged but in vastly different ways, and those circumstances make it nearly impossible for anyone who isn’t a child soldier or comes from a similarly abusive background to relate.
The irony is going that the Child Soldier is going to be much, much easier to turn because they were never really inside the system to begin with. However, even with just a scant few months, the deprogramming is going to take years. They’re never treated as important. A child who has been raised to combat is valuable, they often see joining as their choice, and they know their own worth. They’ve never known any other kind of normal and are in a much better place to evaluate why their side is the right one. They are co-operative participants, rather than forced. They’re going to see the instructors in their lives as friends and family. They’ll believe in the cause.
A good way to look at the thought process of the adults behind these training programs would be to take a look at the French novel/film “La Femme Nikita” where the assassins are all druggies and runaways pulled off the streets, cleaned up, sobered out, and trained to kill people.
Why is this important?
Because it inspires loyalty. You take people no one will know and no one will miss, people who are not regularly getting four square meals a day, and get them off the streets. You give them a safe place to sleep, regular food, and a purpose. From their perspective, you save them. The threat of expulsion comes next, but what you ask them to do next is not that much worse for them than the hell they were living in before.
The problem when most people look at these situations and setups is that they miss the deeply embedded trust, loyalty, and respect these children feel for those who train them. They have a lifetime and a normative societal state to banish their doubts. They will know what the outside world is like. They’ll have been educated. If they’ve been handled by someone skilled, then everything they see will merely confirm their sociological programming. Questions will be encouraged. Pride in their skills, pride in their country/mission, ego, and self-esteem are encouraged.
You’re looking at your character having an attitude similar to the Spartans in 300.
Or, you know, Starship Troopers.
A person who understands their ideology and philosophy is far more useful and capable of independent operation than a blind follower. You want your elites to be capable of independently operating on their own.
You can’t force someone to be good at fighting. You can’t force someone to learn. Like the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
However, the real problem with this question is a critical failure to understand how soldiers operate in warzones, specifically in regards to enemy combatants.
Child Soldiers are still soldiers. They’re enemy combatants and they’re treated like enemy combatants.
This is the concept that’s hardest for most people to grasp.
It doesn’t matter, at the end of the day, whether or not they’re a forced conscript.
Child Soldiers are treated as enemy combatants, not children because, well, they are.The sad truth about them is that they’re not really kids anymore. They’re brainwashed and weaponized. The moral barrier that will stop the average child from killing someone doesn’t exist for them. It’s gone. Their innocence is gone. They are exceedingly dangerous. They’re likely to betray and kill their “rescuers” if left to their own devices then return to those who kidnapped them in the first place.
This is a behavior pattern which does not normally make sense to those who have never been abused, but it is very real.
What’s been done to them can’t be cured with kindness, at least not in the early stages and the average person can’t relate to them. It’s difficult enough for most people to relate to adults who’ve been through your garden variety child abuse, and this is on a whole other level. These kids are systematically broken. That is the point of the breaking. So, that when the average adult treats them like a kid they kill them.
Child soldiers are unpredictable, including for seasoned combatants. It’s hard as hell to tell when they’re going to snap, and there’s a certain level of psychopathy just lingering beneath the surface because (as children) they’re brains can’t register that death is real.
This is true with children and you see it a lot with children dealing with grief, they lack an understanding of permanence and struggle with the concept of death. Minors don’t grasp consequences the same way adults do, and there are different standards regarding their ability to do so consciously.The training child soldiers undergo preys on that. It preys on the limbo. So, they’re handlers feed them cocaine and tell them they’re invincible and they believe them. The important thing about child soldiers is that they don’t know what they’re doing. Their psychology is exploited by their handlers.
You can feel pity for the dog that’s been abused to the point its mind is broken. It won’t stop the dog from killing you.
So, you’re asking these soldiers to take a ticking time bomb with them. Someone who is a direct threat to their lives and their mission. No matter the amount of pity they feel, this is a time bomb they know better than to take. This is especially true if they’re working in enemy territory where she’ll have numerous chances to betray them to her comrades. They’re not equipped to handle her.
She belongs in a POW camp, away from combat, with people who can devote their time to helping her figure out how to be a human instead of a weapon.
Right now, a weapon is all this character knows how to be.
-Michi
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References and Resources:
It is worth remembering that child soldiers exist in the real world, both in our present and throughout history. There is a body of research available on the subject, and worth looking into if you want to do it justice.
If you are a minor, I insist that you approach this subject with the aid or help of an adult. Child soldiers are disturbing material.
The CNN article on Ishmael Beah is an excellent place to start. Beah was a child soldier in the Sierra Leone eventually captured by enemy forces and rehabilitated by Unicef. His memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is worth looking into if you intend to take the true child soldier route.
If you’re interested in being depressed or learning more about the African diamond trade and how it ties into the Sierra Leone then Blood Diamond with Leonardo Dicaprio is a good movie to invest some time into. The movie goes through great pains to ensure the treatment of child soldiers and their training is accurate.
The book Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Path of the World’s Most Precious Stones which the movie referenced extensively, though only two chapters in the book discuss child soldiers directly. Instead, it focuses on the use of diamonds to fund the RUF in the Sierra Leone. You may find this book more helpful for worldbuilding and it’s discussion on the funding a revolution.
Monster an autobiography by Sanyika Shakur aka Kody Scott about his sixteen years spent as a gangbanger may be helpful. Gangs have a different method in their recruitment of child soldiers but, at the end of the day, the attitudes and mentalities end up in a similar place.
Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany by Hans J. Massaquoi isn’t a book about child soldiers per say, but it does document the effect Nazism had on the German people. If you ever wondered how the average person could fall victim to widespread propoganda, participate in such heinous acts, or wondered how the Nazis worked then this is a must read book.
Check out Boy Seamen on Wikipedia, a page discussing the ranking and usage of young adults as sailors in the British Navy and others at the turn of the century. Russel Crowe’s adaptation of Master and Commander: Far Side of the World has an accurate representation of the ages that were put to sea. Patrick O’brien’s series is a must read for anyone interested in doing any writing about the British Navy.
We bring up the Boy Scouts of America sometimes when discussing children raised for combat and while it isn’t a direct 1 to 1 comparison, most of the skills studied and mastered by the Boy Scouts as they gain badges are the sorts of supplementary survival skills you start children on when preparing them for a lifetime of combat.
You don’t have to look far to find the history of children studying and used in warfare. There’s a wealth of information out there, if you start looking for it.
On Writing: Child Soldiers in Sci-Fi
This is the last anon, and thanks so much for your answer! I left a couple things out that I shouldn’t have – for one, the world is a dystopia, and the soldiers actually enlist around 12, and start their training after pushing a lot of different things to accelerate growth. So even though he’s only 24, he’s actually been involved in the military for half of his life, which I’m assuming is enough time for a specialty? I don’t know what that specialty is yet, but thanks so much for your help!
-Anonymous
This is going to be a sensitive topic for a lot of people and as such, we requested for the sake of our followers and all of you out there who’d like to avoid this very traumatic topic that we could put it in a regular post so we could have the “read more” option, beyond just the ability to list it with trigger warnings for child abuse, abuse, and child soldiers. This will be a disturbing topic to go through and we are by no means experts on the subject, we’ll answer this question as best we can and give some help to those of you out there looking to write dystopias dealing with kids. In this post, we’ll be some basic developmental psychology, the technical limitations of messing with human biology in regards to creating human weapons, child soldiers, and with some helpful suggestions for what a writer can do instead, if this topic proves to be a bit too much to handle.
Child soldiers, while very dramatic, are one theme that can go off the rails very quickly. It’s important to remember when dealing with dystopia that the limitations of human nature, psychology, and the world today are very important to the novel’s dramatic elements. A dystopia isn’t a potentially bad future with a totalitarian government. It’s a society characterized by human misery, disease, and overcrowding and living within that society with no hope of escape. Dystopias are not, despite what the current climate may lead us to believe, happy stories.
Some good Dystopias to turn to for reference are: A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, A Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, 1984 by George Orwell, Native Son by Richard Wright (A rare non sci-fi version), and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (slightly lighter than the rest on the list).
Warning: These are all ridiculously depressing books, so prepare accordingly.
The rest is under the cut. It’s pretty long.
Take it away, Starke!
-Michi
I see a lot of writing advice, particularly about giving characters flaws. The main advice is “everyone has flaws! make sure to give your character flaws or else it’s not realistic!” And after thinking about it… I would like to challenge this.
It essentially posits a view of human nature that there are good and bad traits, and that these traits can be neatly diagrammed into separate columns, one set of which can and should be eliminated. It tends to go along with a view that posits character development should be about scrubbing away of “flawed” traits until the character achieves more a higher level of goodness, or else the character doesn’t and falls into tragedy. This is not untrue, necessarily. There are definitely some “flaws” that are 100% bad and sometimes a good arc is about slowly losing them. However, I could call this advice incomplete.
Consider thinking about it this way. Characters have traits and often whether or not that trait is a flaw is purely circumstantial.
For instance, fairy tales I read as a child. In some, when an old beggar asked for money on the road, it was a secret test of character. The prince who gave the old man money or food would be rewarded. But in other folktales I read, the old beggar would be malevolent, and any prince who stooped to help him would be beaten, punished for letting his guard down. Now, in a story as well as in real life, either of these scenarios can occur–a stranger who asks for help can be benevolent or malevolent. So which is the flaw? Is it a “flaw” to be compassionate? or is it a “flaw” to be guarded?
Trick question–it’s purely conditional. Both traits are simultaneously a strength and a weakness. Either has an advantage, but either comes with a price as well. And whether the price is greater than the advantage depends on circumstance. The same can be said for most character traits, in fact!
An agreeable character who gets along with everyone will be pressured into agreeing with something atrocious because it’s a commonly held viewpoint. A character who’s principled and holds firm even under great pressure will take much, much longer to change their mind when they are actually in the wrong. A character who loves animals and loves to shower them with affection will get bitten if they try the same on every animal. As the circumstances change, flaws become strengths, and strengths become weaknesses. And even a trait that’s wholly virtuous, such as compassion, comes with a price and can be turned for the worst.
You don’t have to think about inserting flaws into your character. Your character, even the most perfect “Mary Sue,” is already flawed the moment you give her any traits at all. The problem with Mary Sue isn’t a lack of flaws, it’s a lack of circumstances to challenge her properly, to show her paying the natural price. Your job as an author is to create circumstances in the narrative that 1) justify why these traits exist in your character 2) show what your character gains from these traits and then 3) change the circumstances to challenge her.
Make your character pay the price for their traits, for their choices. And then, when challenged, you can make a hell of a story by showing us how they adapt, or why they stick to their guns anyway.
Second chances are scarier than first chances, because the second time you know how much you’re risking.
Nora Roberts (via quotemadness)
This might sound like a really dumb question but… Why is torture used at all? It can’t get information or cooperation out of the victim, if anything it breeds resistance, it’s time and effort consuming, it’s exhausting even for the torturer, so why is it still used around the globe? What’s usually in it for the torturer(s)????
Essentially? People can
be dicks.It’s all…for much the
same reason things like rape, spousal abuse and child neglect continue: in the
short term it makes abusers feel good. It makes them feel powerful. It makes
them feel like they matter.As you’ve probably
gathered by now I really strongly believe that fiction matters. That it helps us to make sense of and articulate what is
right and what is wrong in the world around us.So I’m going to reach
for Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan
for a moment here and ask you to join me and Spider Jerusalem on a roof looking
down over a riot-‘It’s a show of power. How dare anybody ignore the authority of Civic
Center? How dare a bunch of freaks try and think for themselves? So let’s go
out and stomp on children, lunatics and incompetents, because by damn it makes
our balls feel big.
I can see a blatantly unarmed Transient man with half his
face hanging off, and three cops working him over anyway. One of them is
groping his own erection.
I’m sorry. Is that too harsh an observation for you? Does
that sound too much like the Truth?
Fuck you.
If anyone in this shithole city gave two tugs of a dead dog’s
cock about Truth, this wouldn’t be happening.’That right there?
That’s why.
Because some people in
positions of authority are made to feel powerful
in the short term and because society in
general is prepared to look the other way.Because we tolerate it.
Because we allow our politicians and our newspapers
and our stories to parrot lies about torture’s effectiveness and tell ourselves
that victims deserve it.This isn’t really
something I talk about on the blog very often and by now (less than 300 words
in) you can probably see why.This makes me fucking
furious.And it is on us.
We do this. With our
rhetoric about being tough, with our
disparaging of human rights, with our apathy.We allow this to
continue. By looking the other way. By pretending some people and some parts of
the world don’t matter. By telling each other that some people are just so
horrible they deserve it.We support it with our
votes to ‘clean up the streets’ and our inability to believe that victims might
be telling the truth.Because politicians and generals and police chiefs
know that having a bunch of people from the margins of society beaten up plays
well with voters and because popular culture sends out a constant message that
torture ‘works’, that it’s edgy and cool and what real heroes do when
bureaucracy gets in the way. That message reaches
people with no experience, no training, no effective oversight and tells them
what they ‘should’ be doing.And their bosses look
the other way or actively encourage it because kicking the shit out of
‘terrorists’/druggies/’agitators’/’heretics’/’any racial, sexual or gendered
slur you wish to imagine’, sure makes it look like they’re doing something
productive.It’s ‘enhanced
interrogation’ honest and they’re pretty sure they’ve got the right person this
time.Information is not the
point.Cooperation is not the
point.Public safety is not
the point.Justice is not the point.
The point is power. The
point is that when we’re angry and afraid and feel helpless or threatened we
tend to want to lash out. Little things like right and wrong or effectiveness don’t come into it.Angry yet? I’m so
furious I could go out and hit someone.See what I mean?
And the flipside of
that is the apathy. Because wherever you are in the world this is happening around you.I have close to 3,000
followers at the time of writing. That’s amazing. It’s astonishing and humbling
that I’ve reached so many people from all over the world.Let me take a quick
little over view of the news I’ve collected this year.Taser
use in the USA . Systematic
mistreatment of immigrants in Britain. Rape of a black man by
police officers in France (that was ahead of the election I believe). An Indian minister
advocating the torture of rape suspects. The systematic
torture of a lawyer in custody in China. Another murder over
‘blasphemy’ in Pakistan. A queer tailor killed in a
Saudi jail. The
South African ‘coffin case’.I haven’t actually been
paying particular attention to the news this year and that’s nowhere near my
full list of relevant news reports.How many of these cases
or studies do you think most people are aware of? How many would they click and
read? How many would they throw their time and energy behind as something to
address and change in their society?This isn’t intended to
shame anybody or call them out. It’s part of the answer.We’re responsible for
this. It continues around the world because we vote for it, we pay for it, we
justify it and we look the other way.Reblogging for the other time zones.
The inverse of corruption: the hero has lost, but in a way that forced the villain to face goodness within himself, which spirals out of control and turns him into a hero more virtuous than the one he defeated.
See, see, what I want to see is a villain who actually starts learning good leadership techniques. His Rule Through Fear just plateaus, so he reads some books and is like, “wait, I can make people do what I want without having to micromanage their personal threats and keep track of their families of collateral? Wait what?” So he starts with his sidekicks, and his sidekick turnover time rockets through the fucking roof when he starts listening to them and giving them benefits. He finds that he attracts the COMPETENT sidekicks instead of the bottom of the barrel, so he wants them around. Then he figures out that if he has competent sidekicks that he can DELEGATE. Oh sweet dark goddess, he can hand over an ENTIRE CASTLE AND SURROUNDING ENVIRONS to his second-in-command, and she can more than capably keep it running while he goes off to summon demons for a bit. Because the sidekicks will stick around, it’s also worth investing in them. He sends them for training, lets them in on his secrets a bit, at that works out SO WELL.
His mind is blown. He is so excite. He might have FREE TIME if this keeps up.
Then he’s looking at the rest of his domain going “but wait, is there more?” He sees that his lands’ productivity is shit. They have been shit for a long time because hey, the beatings will continue until morale improves! Instead, he starts (slowly, wouldn’t want them to think he’s going soft) introducing changes. He eases back on restrictions and punishments just a bit, and rewards those whose productivity improves. A few cycles of that, and everything is working so much better. Sure, he has to deal with people being mouthy and ambitious every now and then, but hey, it’s not like he decommissioned the torture chamber, and he finds that the other peasants are more than half likely to turn the troublemakers in, now, because they don’t want to lose their good thing.
His lands go from “that country is a horrible dystopian nightmare avoid at all costs” to “hey, that country offers some free health care, and if you do a good job, you can advance!” It becomes a land of opportunity in a sea of serfdom and grinding misery. PEOPLE START SHOWING UP ASKING IF THEY CAN COME LIVE THERE.
The Evil Overlord is delighted. New workers! Just…walking in!
Not to mention, his existing peasants? Wow, they must be happy, because the birth rate has jumped sky high, ifyaknowwhatImean?
He slowly figures out that making people happy in all sorts of ways WORKS BETTER. Giving women legal standing and rights equal to men’s allows women with talents to move out of the house and oh, work toward the glory of his empire, rather than being locked into one job. Free childcare holy crap allows any woman in the home to take up an outside job or economy-feeding hobby. Stamping out corruption and crime among his minions makes the people happier and makes peasant productivity soar because they don’t have to worry about getting raped or beaten, while at the same time their towns are safer because his minions now have time to go off killing bandits and rogue dragons and hunting down mad serial killers and shit. Giving everyone a village council that has a say in boring, day to day governing takes all that boring shit OFF HIS PLATE. He sends in his emissaries, tells them to work in his interest but let the peasants hash out the small shit, and 9 out of 10 that works fine. It costs him very little and again, everyone feels INVESTED in what they do. They are now WILLINGLY WORKING FOR HIM.
Public works projects improve roads and bridges as well as providing jobs. Raising wages has the same effect on the peasantry that it did on his sidekicks. Allowing limited ownership makes people enterprising and feeds the economy. Social services allow people who get injured or sick to bounce back and remain in the workforce and society, which maintains his investment in them as well as helping morale on the family level. Trading with his neighbors instead of conquering them is much less resource intensive and maintains his investment in his people. Not to mention, when that one upstart country on his southern border decided that they were going to get in a snit, HIS TRADING PARTNERS CAME TO HIS AID. Not that he needed it, but still, it was nice!
And on a personal level, remembering his SiC’s birthday that once started this incomprehensible but incredibly pleasant chain reaction that has resulted in them becoming an incredibly close and effective partnership ifyouknowwhatImean. Which reminds him: must decide whether his proposal gift should be skull-themed or dragon-themed. I mean, she’s a necromancer, so obviously skulls, but is that too obvious? And she REALLY LOVES riding on the dragons, so…hmm.
Inspiration Haven 