Comparison of Pelted Races

Aye, haikujaguar is good for that, sure enough. But it's always worth the trip. She's been posting a slew of things for sale online; you could make a tour through quite a bit of the Alliance, and a few other places.

>>Pelted races as sex toys...that's not as far fetched an idea genetically speaking as most people would like it to be. <<

It's a classic motif in anthropomorphic fiction, widely used. While some of the worst furryfic is of this type, so is some of the best. Best in Show has numerous examples of the latter.

>>Anyone who thinks the "slaves as sex toys" an impossible concept should read Barbara Hambly's "A Free Man of Color" series. Ms. Hambly does a pretty fair job of describing the mixed-race placees of pre-civil war Louisiana.<<

*sigh* Yeah. That's all over American history and pretty much every other place that has or does practice slavery. Power tends to corrupt; there are always a few decent owners, but most are rotten and some are downright evil. That popped up almost instantly in my dogsbody storyline, too.

>> (I so hate high school history. The amount of history they leave out of those classes could fill a football field-sized library!) <<

My father being a history teacher, I grew up reading his books. By the time I got into school, I knew enough non-whitewashed history to get me kicked out history classes repeatedly. Though to be fair, one of the best classes I ever had, wherein I learned to plot, was a high school history class.

Well, for Western Civilization we had a room that had been used for Deaf students, long ago: so three of the walls were solid blackboard, the fourth windows. Mr. Butler condensed European history into flow charts: causes A, B, and C fed into event D, which led to event F (for which causes A, B, H, and K also applied) and so forth. He typically filled between one and two walls per class. Several times, he filled all three walls, then ran down the hall to someone else's classroom and continued on one of their empty boards, with all of us tagging along behind. It was very exciting.

Also, he never found a history book that met his standards, so he wrote up his own class handouts, which were infinitely more informative. He taught us the raunchy and awkward parts of history, as well as the official stuff. It's where I learned about defenestration ("Oh, so that's what angels look like when you squash them.") and Hrolf the Walker who was too tall for the stubby little steeds of his day, and all kinds of other fun stuff.

And I learned that everything comes down to geopolitics: what you have, what your neighbors have, what they have that you don't and vice versa, and what you're willing to do to get it. Causes feed into multiple effects. Effects have multiple causes. Dominoes tumble for centuries. History is not names and dates, but patterns, which are about as predictable as the weather. The more I looked at the flow charts, the more I started thinking about the news and fiction in those terms. It just fit really well with part of how my mind works. Western Civ was one of the most engaging and useful classes I ever did have.