On 27Sept2024 1206, Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml
list) wrote:
> This whole "Lucan immediately 'divines' what is happening & kills his
> twin", & then goes nuts, is just more of GDW's nonsense rationalization.

He saw it happen on a live stream. The way he saw the armed 'courier'
and reacted quickly (but not quickly enough to save his older brother)
was just his version. Whether he killed his brother, or an assassin got
Varian, but was a little too slow to also nail Lucan, who knows.

The guys who claim that he simply killed his brother when he saw the
live stream, that I don't buy. Dulinor would absolutely have had someone
lined up to hit the twins.

> As I've said before;
> GDW seems to want us to believe that, when word got out that Dulinor was
> a cold-blooded, cowardly murderer, instead of widespread revulsion,
> almost everyone concluded, "Hey, if killing the emperor is OK, then
> killing ANYONE is OK &, OH BOY, I've been waiting my whole life to start
> killing anyone I want. Let's get it ON!".

Dulinor claimed he was using 'Right of Assassination', though he
mis-used it. And there clearly was wide-spread revulsion - most of the
Imperium did NOT side with him. If Lucan hadn't immediately dissolved
the Moot and started acting like he had a divine mandate he might well
have been accepted and the irregularities around Varian's death overlooked.

But again, the Imperium was already not in great shape, so this pushed
it over the edge, and 'everyone' with a half-decent claim, and/or a
sense of duty to their people (which was something that had become
parochialised - the nobles no longer saw the entire Imperium as 'their
people') said "No!" to both pretenders and either put forward their own
claim, or said "A Pox on all your houses!" and bunkered up for the duration.

> Example, some year back there was a segment on of the news about
> familial favoritism w/i the Iraqi gov.
> (This was when the US was still in occupation)
> When some Iraqi's were questioned about the morality of that, they replied;
> "To us it is immoral not to favor one's family. It is immoral, when one
> has been blessed by good fortune, NOT to share that good fortune with
> one's family."

And you know what? That corruption had a lot to do with the failure to
set up and get a functional and modern banking and economic system
working in Iraq. There were many, many other reasons, but that was one
of them.

> In short, GDW just kept piling improbabilities upon improbabilities
> until the ability to suspend disbelief was greatly exceeded & they
> finally decided to just burn the whole thing down.
> I guess they never could figure out that a background where almost
> everything constantly keeps going wrong, (ie: "What about Margaret?"
> "What about her?" "We'll just make her a racist &, HAHA, gotcha AGAIN!")
> is just no fun.
> Also, I believe that the part about Dulinor's privilege to carry arms
> was a retcon that had never been mentioned before.

As they'd never mentioned proceedures and ceremonies around the Emperor
before, it was hardly a retcon, and hardly surprising it had never been
mentioned before.

> Also, his entourage was also armed, (gee, seems like anyone & their
> brother had the right to bear arms in the presence of the emperor) &
> they "opened fire upon the military guard", naturally NOT wearing any
> armor, (GOTCHA'! again) & also killed the Aslan ambassador who was
> conveniently present (GOTCHA'! once again).

'Conveniently'. Well I guess. It wasn't convenient as far as anyone
involved was concerned.

You say it was too unlikely for it to be real, but part of the whole
story is that it did go off the rails, and did so pretty much
immediately after the shooting. The ambassodor got killed, Lucan did
not, the military reacted faster than expected, so Dulinor felt he had
to flee (because he was a coward when it came down to it), and thus lost
any moral authority - by running he went from being able to claim he was
the new Emperor by 'Right of Assassination' (incorrectly done, though it
was), to being just an assassin fleeing justice.

Note that I don't think the whole thing is especially plausible, but if
you read of the world events of the past 4-10 years in a novel they'd
seem pretty much BS, too.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>