[Dragaera] Jhereg genetics

Damien Sullivan phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu
Thu Jan 28 13:04:00 PST 2010


Vlad think of the Jhereg as a mish-mash, Aliera says a mish-mash for
long enough get distinctive.

In their own way, Jhereg are rather honorable.  They'd rather lose their
soul than break a contract (or so they like to think; not quite, in the
test), and the Council is willing to keep going after someone who has
friends in the highest reaches of the Empire -- Heirs, Great Weapon
holders, the Empress and Sethra Lavode -- and now has a Great Weapon of
his own, when someone more selfishly inclined to value their own skin
might declare that good reason for letting well enough alone.

The founder of the Jhereg was a Dragon, and Aliera claims lots of his
followers were themselves disgraced Dragons.  It's not obvious why most
Houses would kick out their own members, short of half-breeding, but we
know the Dragons do.

So I wonder to what extent the Jhereg can be summed up genetically as
"Dragons with some contamination", with a lot of Jhereg behavior being
Dragon honor gone criminal, rather than the opportunism they like to
imagine of themselves.

Separately... Dzur told us the Left Hand were a rather recent
development, right?  Not a co-equal but separate part of the
Organization, like we might have imagined, but basically a bunch of
renegade sorcerers who borrowed the House as an umbrella for their own
organization.  The Jhereg is the House of illegal stuff; it used to have
the Organization, and now it has the Left Hand as well, as a basically
completely independent thing.

That makes a lot of the mystery more plausible to me... but one question
is highlighted instead.  What's up with the gender roles?  Dragaerans
are really egalitarian, so why are the Jhereg different?  The Left Hand
might get an excuse of being founded by sorceresses and being a weird
mystical secret society, though it's still odd.  But why is the
Organization mostly male?  What do their daughters *do*?  Especially
before there was a Left Hand?

-xx- Damien X-) 



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