cthia wrote:One other thing I think bears mentioning. During Houdini there were entities (I forgot the name of them (Scrags?)) who were tasked with riding herd on some of the more risky charges. It reminds me of the People's Commissioners tasked with riding herd on some of the officers. Perhaps the same sort of ingredients from the human element could come into to play. Sympathy and empathy.
To be fair, the People's Commissioners spent lots of time with the officers, where in this case, time for the herders to bond with the riders may be absent. But still, emotional weakness can happen at the drop of a tear.
Dauntless wrote:I believe those guards were called GAULs and were very carefully trained/conditioned to make sure this exact problem did not happen
cthia wrote:Yes they are carefully trained/conditioned. But so too are the pleasure slaves and Jeremy X, and we both know the disappointment there. I don't think anyone could have been as "trained/conditioned" as is portrayed in the hideous info dump regarding the sex slaves.
Even within the GAULS lurks a bit of humanity. Hard to dispense with that element.
There's a substantial difference there. The way the pleasure slaves were treated was intended to break them. The GAUL's training would be exactly the opposite: deadly fighters who are carefully conditioned to have serious tunnel vision for their mission. They're basically portrayed as the death of the party.
The reason for breaking pleasure slaves before selling them is to insure that they won't have the self-confidence to do to their eventual masters what they richly deserve. Even so, they're still very dangerous property.
(I've seen nothing to suggest that Jeremy X was subjected to the same treatment.)
We've seen at least two people in the same general mold as pleasure slaves, and neither of them seemed to be particularly oppressed. Quite the opposite.