Sorry for the long absence, personal and technical issues have abound, some of them are kind of resolved now, so hopefully I'll be back on the horse, please accept this paltry article as the resumption of the path.
Character Study of the Week: Thelos Auburn
Who: Thelos Auburn
What: Court Historian, Lyran Commonwealth
When: Unknown, circa 2980s – 24 December 3042
Weapon of Choice: History
This week’s choice is an interesting one, being neither a warrior nor a politico, and barely even a presence in the novels, to say nothing of an entity in sourcebooks, this time the subject is historian Thelos Auburn.
We have little of his life other than that he became close to Katrina Steiner and her family, and that he died relatively happy, not surrounded by family as he may have wished but in a restored Star League facility, a legitimate second choice of his, with friend Cranston Snord, who happened to reveal the oncoming storm of the Clans to him, knowing Thelos would never tell anyone in his condition.
His life had been lived in academic pursuit, studying and publishing history.
It’s a short, truncated existence in fiction, Thelos is characterised more by his writings rather than any actions or discussion about him.
What’s his purpose?
Thelos is a framing device, in more ways than one.
The first, most obvious way, is as a narrator of historical events. He sets the stage for us, acting as the introducer to the larger setting.
Any contemporary commentator, or even a series of them, could tell us about Hanse, Max, Takashi, Katrina and Janos, a historian puts them into a broader perspective, letting us know there was an Ian, an Alessandro, a Stephen and Hohiro, another Ian of another house entirely, not to mention an entirely different Stephen that brought it all down.
Thus a historian tells us how and why we are where we are, a dark age where technology is failing, cruel feudalism is rampant and war is the norm.
Why does this need a human voice? The question answers itself, a human voice makes the setting personal.
Why are we getting behind one or other faction? Because there’s something about the current leader we like, the nation, the nature of the forces, or the background.
A dry brief can give us this information, a human touch makes us want to be a part of it.
Since the setting has moved on though, has Thelos become irrelevant? His writings were in the context of the early game setting quite accurate, however the setting has moved on, the history been deconstructed.
Actually, whether intentional or not, this has only made Thelos more of a framing device.
The history he told was one of a long lost Golden Age, when humanity was united, technology was so far advanced it was the absolute end of what could be achieved, and there was freedom and prosperity for all.
Thelos quite freely admitted that while he was devoted to academic and honest study of history he would have a bias. Naturally, of course, it’s human to have some sort of bias and while it’s never quite as strong as his critics would claim he does have a slight Steiner bent and a definite Star League bent.
For instance while he could admit that the League was essentially founded by a war it started those histories feel truncated compared to the deconstruction recent source materials have shown. If anything in the current writings the Star League starts coming across as a corrupt morass of humanity made little better for the more peaceful, if no less vile actions it takes compared to the 31st Century Successor States.
How is this a framing device? Well it means that Thelos neatly frames his time, the 3020s.
Compared to then, the tail end of a century of slow grinding warfare, continued degradation of technology, petty raids and such, the Star League, even if never really at peace, was at relative stability and didn’t have hundreds, thousands or millions die due to feudal lords who quite often simply didn’t care even if the resources were available.
So in a way the 3020s are a relatively innocent time, and Thelos comes across as naïve to current readers as a result.
However Battletech was, at the time, a different game in terms of setting. The big stompy machines aspect has never changed, even with the addition of other units, but the fiction itself has shifted from pulp sci-fi and into pulp military in a sci-fi setting. That may not sound like much of a difference but there is a significant change in approach to the writing between the two.
Pulp military tries to be grittier, grimier, populated with less perfect individuals trapped by their failings rather than simply flawed characters who struggle to overcome these flaws.
And if this is what the fiction is then supporting materials, which is fiction supporting the larger setting rather than telling an individual story, must follow suit.
Regardless Thelos lays the groundwork for what follows, and while surpassed by setting and material all things have a beginning, and outgrowing that does not render those beginnings illegitimate or irrelevant.
