now I'm having Belgariad plotbunnies
I guess it was inevitable.
A lot of people have noticed that the Malloreon has - er - a few similarities to the Belgariad. This is a plot point, even! But somehow, although I noticed it with the characters and plot and stuff, I never noticed it with the places until somebody on Tumblr randomly asked people to reblog a map of the Belgariad world with our favourite nations, and I was having trouble deciding between Melcena and Tolnedra. And it struck me, somehow for the first time, that they're basically the same. Melcena got absorbed into the Malloreon empire (well, at the time it's more like Mallorea and the Melcene Empire had a mutually satisfactory merger, but in the event that's how it turned out) and Tolnedra resisted the slightest hint of Alorn domination, but it ends up looking like Melcena is ... AU Tolnedra. They've got the renowned university, the traditional skepticism, the merchant princes, the bureaucracy. (Even the fact that Tolnedrans have a god and Melcenes have either none or Torak doesn't make much of a difference, since Nedra - much more than Belar or Aldur, IMO - is the polar opposite of Torak and leaves the Tolnedrans do their own thing, as long as they don't go around committing genocide against their neighbours.)
And then I got to thinking that it's pretty easy to see the Malloreon sub-nations as fairly analogous to the western ones. The ancestral homeland of the two main groups: Aloria and ancient Mallorea. (They rhyme!) The neighbouring empires with an infrastructure of hyper-competent bureaucrats and hardcore troops: Melcena (elephant cavalry) and Tolnedra (the legions). A handful of small nations, either reinforcing the strength of the Main Group or causing trouble for them: the seven kingdoms of Karanda/Sendaria, Nyissa, Arendia (there's also Dal Perivor for Arendia). The largely decent folk with one tradition that everyone else finds really unsavoury: the Marags (cannibalism) and the Morindim (demon-worship). And the people Not Like Us who mostly hold themselves aloof, have their own agenda, and just go through the forms of engagement in each continent's politics and trade: the western Angaraks and the Dals.
Obviously there are differences! (Especially between Murgos/Nadraks/Thulls on one hand and Dals on the other, lol.) But it honestly does match up pretty well, and it's easy to see Mallorea as a kind of geographical AU of the west. And that got me thinking, well, suppose the political backgrounds of the two continents were switched around?
Suppose that Aloria never gets divided - not into separate kingdoms, anyway. Hm, Belgarath hints that it probably wouldn't have been necessary if Algar, not Dras, had been the eldest son. Okay, that can be the foundation of the AU. We still want three-pronged protection for the Orb at the Isle of the Winds, so instead of literally splitting Aloria into four kingdoms, Cherek sets up four principalities within Aloria, each much more distinct and independent than before, but still part of Aloria and answering to the king and Val Alorn. Algar is heir, but currently prince of Algaria; Dras is prince of Drasnia, Riva in Riva (duh), and there's a prince-regent running Cherek, with the king overseeing it all. When Cherek dies, Algar succeeds him, and he and his heir replace him in Val Alorn, relinquishing Algaria to his second-born and his heirs into perpetuity, à la Gondor going to Anárion's heirs in LOTR. Prince Riva still marries Beldaran, etc etc.
Somewhere along the line, a Rivan prince marries a Tolnedran imperial princess. She's the only daughter, and the prince (being an ambitious sort) is officially acknowledged as son of the Emperor. When the Emperor dies, the prince seizes the Tolnedran throne. He's basically the Alorn version of Kallath - well, Kallath crossed with Garion crossed with Varana. Perhaps the line of succession in Val Alorn is contested, perhaps the guy is just that determined. In either case, he has all the might of Tolnedra and Riva and the Orb backing him up, and as bearer of the Orb, plenty of supporters in the other principalities, too. He's able to bully his way into getting himself declared King of Aloria.
The unification of Tolnedra and Aloria is slow and painful. But as somebody else might have put it, Tolnedran patience wins out over Alorn brutality. Eventually the Tolnedran bureaucracy pervades pretty much every aspect of Alorn life. There are mixed forms of worship - not quite Sendarian-style ecumencisim, but Nedra + Belar leads to some pretty hilarious combinations. And since the Tolnedran bureaucrats and general direct pretty much everything to "the Emperor," eventually his two titles collapse into one: the Emperor of Aloria. Despite this guy's obvious ambition, though, a lot of the political power in the empire is distributed among the Alorn warrior-nobles and Tolnedran grand dukes/generals, who ideally place checks on each other and the emperor. (It doesn't always work like that. It does work when a large part of the Tolnedran contingent wants to invade Maragor, the Alorns check in with Belar and quickly swerve from "well, it might be fun" to "hell no," and the emperor sides with them.)
Instead, they invade the southern kingdoms, absorbing them into the empire but sensibly leaving them with considerable self-governance. This is less a matter of respect and more a matter of the Tolnedran bureaucracy wanting to be able to collect taxes in Arendia without ending up riddled by arrows or slaughtered by Mimbrate or Wacite "brigands." Only once the Arends and Nyissans are subdued do they dare to absorb the Marags into the empire (which is really not much of a challenge, and is ... not awesome because it's a creepy imperialistic thing, but it's not the genocide of canon, either). At some point, power becomes much more concentrated in the imperial throne, and later heirs crush Gar og Nadrak, Cthol Murgos, and Mishrak ac Thull into subject kingdoms.
Okay. Polgara suggests that the attack on the Rivan king and his family was primarily a distraction from Kallath's unification of Mallorea; the sorcerers would have intervened if they hadn't been preoccupied with rescuing little Geran/crushing Nyissa/hiding heirs/etc. Likewise, the only way this all could happen is if the sorcerers are all preoccupied with something epic going down in the east (I guess Polgara was never in Arendia, or pulled out much earlier). Not sure what it is. But whatever it is, they're all over there anyway, and easily able to keep alt!Kallath or anyone like him from unifying the continent. By the time they deal with ... whatever, there's an emperor of Aloria and he's ruling over the entire western continent and looking thoughtfully at Dalasia, but so far it, along with Karanda, ancient Mallorea, Morindland, and the Melcene Empire are wholly independent, and at most unite behind a common cause, kind of. Sometimes. When the moon and stars are in proper conjunction, and Torak raging on their doorstep.
By the time of the Belgariad: Zakath is the king of Mallorea, a relatively small corner of the continent. The Alorns found the Urgas monarchy to be unsatisfactory quite early on and abolished it; Taur Urgas, if he exists at all, is far too minor a figure to have influence stretching to Melcena, so Zakath's youthful romance goes really well and he's happily married to his Melcene sweetheart and a really good king. (And person!) Dangling the Overlord of the East title in front of him is mildly tempting, but not remotely sufficient to get him to consider war with Emperor Belgarion (or Emperor Geran, I guess - he might still be alive; or maybe there's a regent during Garion's minority, where he's fostered out with his aunt Polgara to prepare him for a pretty heavy-duty future). Torak's going to have to prod King Zakath all the way to Aloria. (And if any harm came to his wife/children/cats/anyone in the process, he'll probably send Garion an engraved invitation to come slay his god.) Or, idk, maybe the present day is even more radically different.
A lot of people have noticed that the Malloreon has - er - a few similarities to the Belgariad. This is a plot point, even! But somehow, although I noticed it with the characters and plot and stuff, I never noticed it with the places until somebody on Tumblr randomly asked people to reblog a map of the Belgariad world with our favourite nations, and I was having trouble deciding between Melcena and Tolnedra. And it struck me, somehow for the first time, that they're basically the same. Melcena got absorbed into the Malloreon empire (well, at the time it's more like Mallorea and the Melcene Empire had a mutually satisfactory merger, but in the event that's how it turned out) and Tolnedra resisted the slightest hint of Alorn domination, but it ends up looking like Melcena is ... AU Tolnedra. They've got the renowned university, the traditional skepticism, the merchant princes, the bureaucracy. (Even the fact that Tolnedrans have a god and Melcenes have either none or Torak doesn't make much of a difference, since Nedra - much more than Belar or Aldur, IMO - is the polar opposite of Torak and leaves the Tolnedrans do their own thing, as long as they don't go around committing genocide against their neighbours.)
And then I got to thinking that it's pretty easy to see the Malloreon sub-nations as fairly analogous to the western ones. The ancestral homeland of the two main groups: Aloria and ancient Mallorea. (They rhyme!) The neighbouring empires with an infrastructure of hyper-competent bureaucrats and hardcore troops: Melcena (elephant cavalry) and Tolnedra (the legions). A handful of small nations, either reinforcing the strength of the Main Group or causing trouble for them: the seven kingdoms of Karanda/Sendaria, Nyissa, Arendia (there's also Dal Perivor for Arendia). The largely decent folk with one tradition that everyone else finds really unsavoury: the Marags (cannibalism) and the Morindim (demon-worship). And the people Not Like Us who mostly hold themselves aloof, have their own agenda, and just go through the forms of engagement in each continent's politics and trade: the western Angaraks and the Dals.
Obviously there are differences! (Especially between Murgos/Nadraks/Thulls on one hand and Dals on the other, lol.) But it honestly does match up pretty well, and it's easy to see Mallorea as a kind of geographical AU of the west. And that got me thinking, well, suppose the political backgrounds of the two continents were switched around?
Suppose that Aloria never gets divided - not into separate kingdoms, anyway. Hm, Belgarath hints that it probably wouldn't have been necessary if Algar, not Dras, had been the eldest son. Okay, that can be the foundation of the AU. We still want three-pronged protection for the Orb at the Isle of the Winds, so instead of literally splitting Aloria into four kingdoms, Cherek sets up four principalities within Aloria, each much more distinct and independent than before, but still part of Aloria and answering to the king and Val Alorn. Algar is heir, but currently prince of Algaria; Dras is prince of Drasnia, Riva in Riva (duh), and there's a prince-regent running Cherek, with the king overseeing it all. When Cherek dies, Algar succeeds him, and he and his heir replace him in Val Alorn, relinquishing Algaria to his second-born and his heirs into perpetuity, à la Gondor going to Anárion's heirs in LOTR. Prince Riva still marries Beldaran, etc etc.
Somewhere along the line, a Rivan prince marries a Tolnedran imperial princess. She's the only daughter, and the prince (being an ambitious sort) is officially acknowledged as son of the Emperor. When the Emperor dies, the prince seizes the Tolnedran throne. He's basically the Alorn version of Kallath - well, Kallath crossed with Garion crossed with Varana. Perhaps the line of succession in Val Alorn is contested, perhaps the guy is just that determined. In either case, he has all the might of Tolnedra and Riva and the Orb backing him up, and as bearer of the Orb, plenty of supporters in the other principalities, too. He's able to bully his way into getting himself declared King of Aloria.
The unification of Tolnedra and Aloria is slow and painful. But as somebody else might have put it, Tolnedran patience wins out over Alorn brutality. Eventually the Tolnedran bureaucracy pervades pretty much every aspect of Alorn life. There are mixed forms of worship - not quite Sendarian-style ecumencisim, but Nedra + Belar leads to some pretty hilarious combinations. And since the Tolnedran bureaucrats and general direct pretty much everything to "the Emperor," eventually his two titles collapse into one: the Emperor of Aloria. Despite this guy's obvious ambition, though, a lot of the political power in the empire is distributed among the Alorn warrior-nobles and Tolnedran grand dukes/generals, who ideally place checks on each other and the emperor. (It doesn't always work like that. It does work when a large part of the Tolnedran contingent wants to invade Maragor, the Alorns check in with Belar and quickly swerve from "well, it might be fun" to "hell no," and the emperor sides with them.)
Instead, they invade the southern kingdoms, absorbing them into the empire but sensibly leaving them with considerable self-governance. This is less a matter of respect and more a matter of the Tolnedran bureaucracy wanting to be able to collect taxes in Arendia without ending up riddled by arrows or slaughtered by Mimbrate or Wacite "brigands." Only once the Arends and Nyissans are subdued do they dare to absorb the Marags into the empire (which is really not much of a challenge, and is ... not awesome because it's a creepy imperialistic thing, but it's not the genocide of canon, either). At some point, power becomes much more concentrated in the imperial throne, and later heirs crush Gar og Nadrak, Cthol Murgos, and Mishrak ac Thull into subject kingdoms.
Okay. Polgara suggests that the attack on the Rivan king and his family was primarily a distraction from Kallath's unification of Mallorea; the sorcerers would have intervened if they hadn't been preoccupied with rescuing little Geran/crushing Nyissa/hiding heirs/etc. Likewise, the only way this all could happen is if the sorcerers are all preoccupied with something epic going down in the east (I guess Polgara was never in Arendia, or pulled out much earlier). Not sure what it is. But whatever it is, they're all over there anyway, and easily able to keep alt!Kallath or anyone like him from unifying the continent. By the time they deal with ... whatever, there's an emperor of Aloria and he's ruling over the entire western continent and looking thoughtfully at Dalasia, but so far it, along with Karanda, ancient Mallorea, Morindland, and the Melcene Empire are wholly independent, and at most unite behind a common cause, kind of. Sometimes. When the moon and stars are in proper conjunction, and Torak raging on their doorstep.
By the time of the Belgariad: Zakath is the king of Mallorea, a relatively small corner of the continent. The Alorns found the Urgas monarchy to be unsatisfactory quite early on and abolished it; Taur Urgas, if he exists at all, is far too minor a figure to have influence stretching to Melcena, so Zakath's youthful romance goes really well and he's happily married to his Melcene sweetheart and a really good king. (And person!) Dangling the Overlord of the East title in front of him is mildly tempting, but not remotely sufficient to get him to consider war with Emperor Belgarion (or Emperor Geran, I guess - he might still be alive; or maybe there's a regent during Garion's minority, where he's fostered out with his aunt Polgara to prepare him for a pretty heavy-duty future). Torak's going to have to prod King Zakath all the way to Aloria. (And if any harm came to his wife/children/cats/anyone in the process, he'll probably send Garion an engraved invitation to come slay his god.) Or, idk, maybe the present day is even more radically different.