Oops, it's been a few days again!

[lilyhargrave]

Hello Dreamwidth, I am back! With a post! : )
There will be more fanfic chapter imports/updates as well, soon. For now, more of a journal thing? 

Well, with regards to fanfic... Do you (general, non-specific, metaphorical you) know how hard it is to make Stargate Goa'uld society make sense from a "behind the scenes" perspective?? Like! We know nothing! Who even runs things? Supposedly, the Jaffa are all warriors (males) or priests (females). And the humans are all slaves kept in a "all technology is magic" state. So... so who does the shopping? Who does the building of technological things? Who makes the weapons, the ships? Where do any advancements come from? Yeah, so a System Lord will have minor Goa'uld in their court under them, but... but they're still not going to be soldering things together? Are they? Producing microchips, sorry, crystals? Like... you need skilled labour?? And if your human slaves aren't allowed to understand how any of it works... who's doing the skilled technological labour? I think... I think the most reasonable answer is "the Jaffa". So, yeah, so much for "they're only warriors/religious functionaries".

Yeah. Anyway. That's things I'm trying to figure out for my fanfic right now, : ) 

Comments

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Do you (general, non-specific, metaphorical you) know how hard it is to make Stargate Goa'uld society make sense from a "behind the scenes" perspective?? <<

I'd look for a worker caste of some sort. And the reason you don't really see them onscreen is because, in the type of stories Stargate tells, they would be boring. You don't see the human plumbers either.

Jaffa would make sense as skilled labor, but so would a worker class of Goa'uld. After all, there are many larvae but few System Lords.

As for simpler tasks like cooking, cleaning, shopping -- those can be done by slaves, or by younger people or older people who are not of a warrior age, as another option to a worker caste.

Remember the only way to have someone at the top of a pyramid is to have the rest of the pyramid underneath. Even if you don't see it, you know it has to be there and even what its shape is. So we're seeing 3 layers: the System Lords (top), the Jaffa (second layer), and the human slaves (bottom). I'd call the technocrats the third layer. In between them and the slaves is probably at least one more layer that maintains technology and handles things like economics.

Re: Well ...

[lilyhargrave]

Well... we see at least techs at the SGC on screen, and lots of scientists. But yeah, not very exciting for the military sci-fi show to figure out how Goa'uld ops works, XD

Now, we do know that minor Goa'uld work for other Goa'uld, and it's canon that they actually like having defeated foes do that to, like, lord it over them, I guess. But all Goa'uld are arrogant with delusions of godhood, so I can't see them as a proper "worker class"- upper management, though, yeah. Some research and science- we do see Tok'ra scientists, and it's not like they're a different species.

So, yeah... Minor Goa'uld as managers and for less labour-like labour, and otherwise, it'll have to be the Jaffa. Right, I wanted to rewatch that episode with the fake SGC, where they pretend to all the SG-1 members that the others are dead, because I think we see some hints of there...