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Post by BraveSteelDragon on May 21, 2016 13:19:23 GMT -5
Something that i've come to wonder is... where's the government? Seeing all the things that happen in Dragon City, i'm kinda surprised that the government never instated special policies or things like that. It almost feels like that Dragon City Security is the administration, and thus limits itself to make that what few laws are there are enforced in the best way possible without pro-actively prosecuting criminals (otherwise i'm pretty sure that DCS would have no issues at all in doing a complete search of Down City and Squire's End to look for the city's most wanted). So, here are my theories: - 1. Police-controlled city-state. This would imply that all the executive powers are in the hand of the legislative and judicial 'branches' of government. With this, the administration's main focus would simply try to 'live and let live', making sure that things keep going the way the laws allow, so long that people don't complain.
- 2. Self-regulated popular autocracy. This would imply a lack of a centralized government, making it so that every part of the city has it's own form of self-government, indipendent from one another. This would explain the great disparity between the various 'layers' in Dragon City, where each 'layer' has been dedicated to a specific function to keep the city as indipendent as possible from any outside source. It would explain as well why the furthest we ever go or hear about in the series is in the City's whereabouts, rather than anywhere else on the planet (if we exclude the general plot, that is).
- 3. There is no government. This is the least likely and yet the more believable. It simply cannot be that with all the issues that crop up along the series, only the Academy and Dragon City Security are capable of exerting any actual influence on people's lives. This would also mean that the Down City Council would be the closest thing a true ruling organization as there can be in Dragon City.
Honestly, to me it feels like i wrote down a mad man's ramblings (some people did tell me in the past that i'm rather crazy, so yeah), so i'm curious what do you guys (and girls) think. Does Dragon City have a government? How could it be structured? Why doesn't it react to the events that we see take place in the everyday lives of thousands of people?
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Post by Bluesonic1 on May 21, 2016 21:41:41 GMT -5
Loving the ideas, never thought of this before actually! I think that it's probably mostly the first option, with a mix of the second one in the form of civil groups that bring up issues to DCS. I don't think it's entirely the second option as only certain layers of DC have been shown to have possible "leading groups". Work Town for example is just that, a place where people gather to work, and no mention is made of a group that gathers there to make decisions (why would they either as it's their workplace?). Likewise, Sun City doesn't have any kind of leading group either. I think the last bit of #1 you wrote is what the few groups we see like the Council are for, to collect people's complaints to pass on to DCS.
That said, I have no idea where the Academy fits into all of this. Honestly, I don't see them as an authority figure like DCS, I think they merely command more respect due to being scholars and having practical knowledge about more dangerous things related to dragons and dragon racing, so other organisations respect them almost out of awe and fear in this regard. To me they seem more of a powerful entity rather than authoritative. I think the authoritative aspect comes from the fact that they're the ones who laid down the rules for dragon racing (they may have been the ones to start it in the first place)- but that doesn't mean they have ruling authority in the city, if that makes sense.
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Post by BraveSteelDragon on May 22, 2016 7:31:35 GMT -5
Loving the ideas, never thought of this before actually! I think that it's probably mostly the first option, with a mix of the second one in the form of civil groups that bring up issues to DCS. I don't think it's entirely the second option as only certain layers of DC have been shown to have possible "leading groups". Work Town for example is just that, a place where people gather to work, and no mention is made of a group that gathers there to make decisions (why would they either as it's their workplace?). Likewise, Sun City doesn't have any kind of leading group either. I think the last bit of #1 you wrote is what the few groups we see like the Council are for, to collect people's complaints to pass on to DCS. That said, I have no idea where the Academy fits into all of this. Honestly, I don't see them as an authority figure like DCS, I think they merely command more respect due to being scholars and having practical knowledge about more dangerous things related to dragons and dragon racing, so other organisations respect them almost out of awe and fear in this regard. To me they seem more of a powerful entity rather than authoritative. I think the authoritative aspect comes from the fact that they're the ones who laid down the rules for dragon racing (they may have been the ones to start it in the first place)- but that doesn't mean they have ruling authority in the city, if that makes sense. I think that the Academy DOES have a form of authorative power. It's just not direct power. They cannot act directly upon things by themselves, so they need someone else to do it in their stead. Episode 29 shows such instance. When Phistus gets framed for sabotaging an Academy selection race, the Academy manages to get DCS to go all the way down to Squire's End at the Down City Council, during a council meeting nonetheless! Then again, very little has been exposed of the political workings of the world of Draconis. For all that has been given to us by the Magna Draconis and pre-existing lore, the world of DB is divided in multiple city-states, the most important ones being the former capitals of the ancient draconium empires (Dragon City being the most cosmopolite one, being former center of the gold empire). Beyond that pretty much nothing is known. Question: What's outside the boundaries of Dragon City? Is it a wilderness? What does the rest of the planet look like? Are there other cities like Dragon City? SilverDragon, there are both! There is vast wilderness between cities and yes there are other cities on this planet! They are remnants of the city states that once were the Draconium Empires! One sits near a chain of volcanos (RED), one by a great sea (LIGHT BLUE), one of windswept caverns and cliff sides (WHITE) and so on. These city-states are who compete in the Elite Class Races! It is here in the Elite Class that war takes place on a weekly basis. The Elite Class was designed as a means to control the warring impulse, to prevent future was by allowing a controlled sport version of it. Dragon City is just the oldest and most powerful city and the seat of the vestiges of the ancient gold dragons but for a time, the old city was abadoned to Hydrags and Muhorta as the humans and dragons spread out and became empires. Which leaves a full heap of speculation to try and identify a relatable form of government. While typing it has come to occurr to me that the MD mentioned the draconium empires to be city-states themselves, despite the names. This kinda reminds me of Medieval Communes (Wikipedia). Excluding the possibility of a feudal system and of noble titles (at least in Dragon City's case), it means that the more closely comparable examples of Dragon City's form of government in our time and world would be 'countries' like San Marino, Panama, Leichtenstein, Vatican City, Malta and so forth... If we remove the 'bigger' countries from around these smaller states, this leaves a quite vast 'no-man's land' between the cities, and any settlement, town or city which doesn't have enough diplomatic influence of their own ends gravitating around the diplomatic alignment that most benefits their survival. If we take that there were at least one major empire for each draconium color, this would mean that there are at least 11 (excluding Dragon City) major cosmopolite metropolis of similar extent to Dragon City. Now, extend this to the planetary context on a world that supposedly is roughly the size of Earth, we get that each empire has had a HUGE influence on a HUGE amount of people back in the first dragon-human war. It must've been like 11 (because gold dragons had pretty much become extinct with their empire) medieval-themed soviet union-like city states waging war on one another (without H-bombs, but with mag-blast cannons)! And again, the lack of any current information of 'modern day' Draconis's geographical and geo-political peculiarities leaves us with nothing but speculation. *sigh* The rambling is real! I feel like Parmon. Wow. |
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Post by Bluesonic1 on May 23, 2016 4:54:39 GMT -5
That's what I mean- by your description, they don't have authoritative power like DCS does. As I mentioned before, they have an indirect influence over DC, which I think arises from the fact (as you go on to describe later) that their power comes from "we're stopping all out war here and could destroy the city if we wanted to so you better listen to us because we clearly know what we're doing" kinda situation. They have influential status, as opposed to the authoritative power DCS has. As for the episode quoted, I didn't watch the whole thing, but no where during Phistus' arrest was it mentioned that the Academy sent DCS down to arrest him. As far as it's mentioned, he "committed" a crime, an "anonymous tipster" aka Word sent footage of said crime to DCS and they arrested him. You have to remember that race track or not, those particular actions are crimes against the law, which is DCS's area so naturally they'll get involved (Academy or not). I swear they've done other arrests before related to race crimes but I can't recall any now.
As for the rest of the discussion.... are we discussing just DC or all of Draconis? Because everything I made mention before was strictly for DC only; I'm well aware the little lore we've been given on Draconis goes into detail about the different modern 'Empires' still scattered around the place (this is why people and their dragons are placed in different coloured "houses" when arriving based on their main draconium influence). In the case of Draconis, city states seems a likely explanation for it and the medieval comparison is a good one. I'm leaning towards the latter because supposedly DC is meant to be the "seat of power" to the other states as it was the "first and original" state aka Gold, yet we see no kind of government structure within even DC itself. Yeah planet size though is purely speculative; the planet could very well be much smaller than Earth, much like Mercury or even maybe a dwarf planet like Pluto. Or another complete alternative, is that it is closer to Earth's size but it has a much lower amount of land that is able to be lived on, with the rest being covered by water (just to give you an idea of the amount of possibilities that could explain for 11 empires spanning an entire planet). Don't forget though that Gold does still have an Empire, maintained by the Dragon Priests in the Wastelands of Loan. We already know from the show that Priests come for other colours too- it's likely they used to be the government figures for the old Empires.
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Post by BraveSteelDragon on May 23, 2016 5:26:31 GMT -5
That's what I mean- by your description, they don't have authoritative power like DCS does. As I mentioned before, they have an indirect influence over DC, which I think arises from the fact (as you go on to describe later) that their power comes from "we're stopping all out war here and could destroy the city if we wanted to so you better listen to us because we clearly know what we're doing" kinda situation. They have influential status, as opposed to the authoritative power DCS has. As for the episode quoted, I didn't watch the whole thing, but no where during Phistus' arrest was it mentioned that the Academy sent DCS down to arrest him. As far as it's mentioned, he "committed" a crime, an "anonymous tipster" aka Word sent footage of said crime to DCS and they arrested him. You have to remember that race track or not, those particular actions are crimes against the law, which is DCS's area so naturally they'll get involved (Academy or not). I swear they've done other arrests before related to race crimes but I can't recall any now. True, DCS did make race-related arrests before, but what they didn't do is actively pursue criminals in Down City and Squire's End. The case i mentioned is because Chute (being a representative for the Academy) led DCS (with Captain Faier himself!) all the way to the Down City's Council chamber. Again, there's still not much that we know about the Academy's workings. In fact, we know so little that the Academy may as well BE Dragon City's administrative power. *Sigh* If only the Magna Draconis could enlighten us on the subject... As for the rest of the discussion.... are we discussing just DC or all of Draconis? Because everything I made mention before was strictly for DC only; I'm well aware the little lore we've been given on Draconis goes into detail about the different modern 'Empires' still scattered around the place (this is why people and their dragons are placed in different coloured "houses" when arriving based on their main draconium influence). In the case of Draconis, city states seems a likely explanation for it and the medieval comparison is a good one. I'm leaning towards the latter because supposedly DC is meant to be the "seat of power" to the other states as it was the "first and original" state aka Gold, yet we see no kind of government structure within even DC itself. Yeah planet size though is purely speculative; the planet could very well be much smaller than Earth, much like Mercury or even maybe a dwarf planet like Pluto. Or another complete alternative, is that it is closer to Earth's size but it has a much lower amount of land that is able to be lived on, with the rest being covered by water (just to give you an idea of the amount of possibilities that could explain for 11 empires spanning an entire planet). Don't forget though that Gold does still have an Empire, maintained by the Dragon Priests in the Wastelands of Loan. We already know from the show that Priests come for other colours too- it's likely they used to be the government figures for the old Empires. Retroactively speaking, rambling on and forgetting the topic's focus was kind of a fault on my side. That said! I think that DC's not too far off being a Commune. Something goes on outside of its confines? If it doesn't relate to us, then we don't need to care! (Or at least that's how i would resume it) People are born, live, work and die within the City. There's no incentive for leaving the 'safety' of the City's borders unless there's something that needs to be done and can only be done outside. (Such as the wastelands and the many things that happen to our heroes in there) I would like to think that the reason why the Down City crews are allowed to still persist in their activities (despite having being defined as 'illegal'), is because they're the better alternative. Can you imagine what would happen if crews like the Inner Order, the Grip of the Dragon, or the Dragon Eyes didn't exist? In the general picture of a Medieval Commune, we can safely assume that the Down City crews provide a similar social structure, with 'orders' and 'guilds' providing the commune with specialty work. It was also rather common for the various orders and guilds in a commune to be at odds with one another, so the parallel holds true. |
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I wonder if the forum should host a DB server? Not sure how lively that would be haha
