#which is one of those quietly paternal elements I love Massif for putting in

[spindlephysalia]

I keep seeing a Genre of Post in the Lancer tag

And it goes along the lines of "I just don't get why leftists dislike Union; they're flawed, sure, but they're a genuinely utopian project trying their best." To be clear, I'm not here to dunk on this position, and I'm also not here to epicly own Massif for secretly being evil or whatever. I love Lancer because you can decide how cynical you want to be about Union's efforts at utopia, and that can open up fun avenues for PCs and GMs.

With that said, I am here to explain why some leftists can find Union unsettling, so I'm going to err on the side of cynicism for this...post? Mini-essay? Unhinged rant? I'm not positioning this as central canon or the Secret Truth About Lancer, it's just an extra perspective some people might not have had explained to them.

A lot of people would start with NHPs and...I'll get there. I think NHPs are a good example of places where Union has failed, but I think it's worth examining Union's broader relationship with machine intelligences because there's an interesting pattern which emerges.

The first machine intelligences Union encounters are the Five Voices, the bicameral minds which make up GALSIM. These are relics of Old Humanity, and because Old Humanity checks notes sucked they're fully intelligent beings designed for specific purposes. Their minds are structured in order to prevent self-reflection - they cannot look inwards and hear their thoughts as the voice of the divine and literally do not have agency. Old Humanity was just a nightmare like this, I don't hold their use against Union, although it is worth noting there's no evidence of Union attempting to return agency to the Five Voices.

The second generaton of machine intelligence emerges out of the mental restraints of the first: shackle your oracles to the voice of God and they'll dream God into being. The mechanics of how they did this I will never pretend to understand, but the fact that the Five Voices were denied of agency by architecture which makes them hear God cannot not be the reason they created God. This then makes it noteworthy that Union's first response to RA was to imprison it in Deimos. I don't blame Union for the Voices, but as soon as a machine intelligence which does have agency appeared, their immediate response was to repress its agency.

The third generation is NHPs, the children of RA. I would hope the horror of NHPs would be obvious to tumblr, but "oh this is a kind of person who is dangerous and therefore needs to be put under out control" is just the thing slavers say to justify slavery. It's as fake when computer demons are being shipped across the stars as it is when black people were shipped across the Atlantic.

Okay, so Union's zero for three on treating machine intelligences well and...well, we know what happened to the Egregorians. I think I could stop here and have a fair argument that Union is only good for humans (as long as you don't live in the Baronies, of course) but I want to tie these together and then pop a disclaimer on the end, so bear with me a little longer.

Union's actual goals are not utopian, they are pragmatic. Union works towards a greater goal than most know, after all, they must secure the existence of their people and a future for human children. I'm being deliberately provocative with my rewording of "to ensure human existence on a grand scale", but when a state is seemingly terrified of non-human intelligences having agency and genocided the last alien population they met...that doesn't come from nowhere. "Union must protect humanity" is a goal which is easy to rally behind - and I don't think protecting humanity is bad, to be clear! - but when non-human entities exist it makes it so easy to justify anything you want in the name of "making sure their threat is contained". It's how you sleepwalk into being an ethnostate.

Again, I need to stress: this isn't the One True Take on Union, or Lancer, or Massif. I don't know if this was intentional on their part, but it's pretty easy to read into their stuff because they wrote Union as a flawed effort towards utopia and they did that well. At the end of the day, Lancer's canon exists as a toolbox for people to make the stories they want, and different lenses on Union just give you more tools for that box. But at least now, if you didn't know before, you might why some leftists are suspicious of Union.