Hi guys, its the newbie again. I'm working on a back story. My MC starts off in a region of his country that has been invaded. The enemies have almost broke through the very last barrier of my armies their destination is the Palace of the Fire-eye collective, they are the heart of religion and politics in my world. Magic is an innate, rare, natural form and there is no great magical power, as i don't want it to become part of the war. The collective are hiding their own agenda from man-kind and the world is facing an ice age (this is inevitable) few will survive and fewer still are privy to that knowledge. I need my collective to be facing threat from two fronts, one from invasion and the other from their agenda being discovered by the people they rule, there will be the threat of an invasion AND an uprising. my biggest religious icon is in the form of a girl worshipped for a symbolic personal connection to the creator. I just cant seem to get my head around why the enemies are invading? Id rather it not be for territory and im worried that the religion vs religion theme is being over done. help!!
You're going about this the wrong way. Before you decided on a plot line, you should have known why it happened the way it did. I.e X group has Y values, thus, X does Z. Not: I want X to do Z, so what is Y? So rethink the invading group. Flesh out a realistic culture for them that would lead to this attack, and make sure that their culture is internally consistent. For ideas, read History.
that's what im trying to work out this isn't my plot this is in the backstory, before the plot begins. This is my why, why were they invaded? the only real relevance this has to my mc is the fact his brothers and father had died fighting. i don't feel i need to be too in depth with the war other than what effects it has had on the populace regarding the collective. once i can figure out an initial spark that triggered it i can neatly slot everything into place.
Can you just refer to it as "the war" without saying why or what it was about? If someone says they lost their father in the war, I'm not sure anyone even thinks about the reasons for the war. Causes of war are few: Ethnic and religious clashes Resources including eliminating competition Power
guys this stuff is great thank you what do you guys think about the invaders trying to 'liberate' my world? Kind of like how the westerners decide that the little ancient self functioning villiage in Africa need to put some clothes on! or what do you think about the invaders, even though they live on the same planet, they do not have magic as the region of this world does? maybe the magic itself could be the coveted resource???? there are only ships in this world, how do they discover the place without being discovered themselves? your opinions are gold to me right now.
Thanks, knew I was forgetting something. Economic ideology is probably the cause of more wars than anything else in the last couple hundred years.
My personal and not unbiased opinion is that "liberation" is 99% contrived excuse for some other underlying reason, typically wars over resources. Look at Darfur, no one is interested in liberating those people, no resources are at stake.
Congrats, you're a marxist historian. Look at the Crusades carefully. The Crusading Lords and Kings risked everything, spent large sums of money, and weakened their position at home to go on Crusade. They gained very little land and wealth, and often died -- not to mention having usurpers pop up at home. The motivation was not economic by any stretch. They went to war over religion.
Your fire-eye collective are the powerhouse of religion and politics, so you can't ignore religion. Didn't God send floods to punish a world of sinners only saving Noah (and his family) and a few hundred animals. Why can't he send the ice-age and save the select few? Didn't Constantine have over 30 (that we know of) gospels to choose from before publishing the all-encompassing 'bible' but only used 10 or so and buried the rest which are popping up all over the Middle East? Could your war be to uncover that knowledge? Religion in literature is only over-done if done badly, then its the same ol' same ol'. Dan Brown made a fortune out of it. I am waiting for someone to write an alternative version of Christianity, the gospels they hid; Why did they hide them? What exactly was in them? Who is your female religious icon? What is her personal connection to the creator? Look up the Acts of Paul and Thecla. Thecla's story doesn't appear in any bible. Her story tells us that she was sent by God to keep a sexual hold on men. She refused to 'hand it over' if you like and encouraged thousands of women to do the same. Of course the men of the time didn't like this, tried her lots of times, tried to kill her lots of times, each time she was miraculously saved, example - the Romans threw her to a pack of lions, the lions smelt blood, a lioness sat in front of Thecla and protected her from the whole pack. This is a really important figure and no-one knows about her, The Gospel of Paul may inspire you. Good luck!
I am highly insulted that you called me a Marxist for speaking the truth about war. Whatever the leaders (or in the case of the Crusades, the Catholic Church) may say to the populous--or client kings and dukes...or whatever--is rarely ever what is actually the reason why they go to war. So...the Crusades were about religion were they? Then the Christians didn't want to control Jerusalem--they didn't think of Jerusalem as a resource...it wasn't a prize for them. And they did not want to control the trade routs either I suppose. War always makes somebody a huge pile of stinking money. And in the crusades, it was the Knights Templar. .
The pope wanted the Byzantines as allies, so when he was asked for a force to help against the turks, the pope obliged. But, nearly all the military leaders and soldiers were not going to get rich, and guess what? They didn't. The Knights Templar got rich through banking in Europe. They started dirt poor, in the Holy Lands, asking for donations so they could keep the roads clear. The donations and later banking were all to fund the crusades. The money wasn't the cause and didn't result from taking Jerusalem. The money was a gathering of resources to try and keep Jerusalem. War is not always about money. Just because somebody gets rich doesn't mean that the cause of the war was to make that person get rich. Also, can you prove that the Pope, the Kings, and Lords didn't believe their so called propaganda?
So when the South, which did have economic reasons for wanting to maintain a slave economy, fought the North in the US Civil War, what were the economic interests of the North? I'm curious and I don't know the answer.
The South...! Bread basket of the Americas at that time. The Taxes. The Lumber. The Cotton. the Booze. The minerals. It would have been devastating to loose the south.
Wow, talk about a bee hive. Here's an idea... the invaders recognize the fire eye collective for who they are and understand the agenda. The people of the FEC have been fed propaganda to the extent that they still believe everything the powers that be say. So, unknown to the people, the invaders are actually liberators.
Very well, I apologize for that assumption. But you haven't supported that universal statement. The north did not need the south economically. If it did, why didn't they suffer severely during the war. The civil war was very much about slavery and law.
Not to go too far off topic, but there were many false teachings that popped up in the second century. This one obviously went contrary to the rest of the Bible, and even Pauls teaching. So much so that it was considered apocryphal and not included in the canonical Bible.
That explains why the North would fight to keep the Union, but why not just ditch the plan for abolition? So it does not explain why the North chose war. Since when is "a marxist historian" the same as "a Marxist"? I took his post to simply say you were repeating a rationale for war that Marxists also believe in. I agree a lot of war is waged under false pretenses and economics is the true underlying motive. I just don't think that premise explains all wars ever.
I would say yes. The North believed in the Union. The North believed in abolition, and the South believed the opposite in both cases. Any economic concerns were secondary.
