Thread:Easol1/@comment-995426-20180129070634/@comment-995426-20180202150511

Actually, maybe not.

It seems to me that Dimension X's space-faring major planet populations are, for the most part, tightly interconnected in travel, economy, and culture. They're not just globalized&mdash;they're intergalacticized. Even if history remains known and documented, such an existence can gradually permanently change the way its inhabitants see the very notion of civilization. After all, it's not many planets with different civilizations&mdash;it's more like just one or perhaps a handful of advanced civilizations operating over large swaths of travelable Dimension X space. It may be that the current inhabitants can no longer conceive of a world as deeply fragmented as Earth, because any such history is truly ancient history, and it learnt intuition might make it difficult even for learned scholars to fully appreciate the paradigm shift from cultural insularity on a small geographic level to insularity on a much larger intergalactic level. When your world has always been small, it's hard to think big. And so it follows that if your world has always been big, it's hard to think small.

Now consider that the Turtles not only appear comfortable in Dimension X, but also appear as adaptable and tolerant as most people in Dimension X. They have to be. They live on the fringes of society, and it's not in their best interest to go out of their way to alienate potential friends and allies. But many humans live with a kind of social privilege they may not even actively be aware they possess. An assumption of species, an assumption of culture, an assumption of limits. Some people can learn to transcend these limits, but this certainly becomes more difficult with age, which is why so many humans actually find it easier to reject difficult facts than completely recompile their worldview. And this appears not just to be a human issue; it appears to be no different with Neutrinos or Triceratons or Utroms. They may be aliens to one another, but they appear to perceive their surrounding universe in much the same way humans do, and seem to face the same difficulties adapting to huge paradigm shifts. (Of course, part of this is the nature of the fiction&mdash;it's easier for human audiences to imagine that sentient non-humans think the same way they do, except perhaps for cultural differences.)

And since Zenter is judging Earth based on the Turtles he knows, he may have failed to realize that Earth's social and political differences might have been at least as fragmented on just one planet as on an intergalactic level in Dimension X, and that he overestimated the planet's current capacity for planet-wide unity. It may not really be his fault. He's a royal and can function as a judge. But is he a scientist? Is he a sociologist? Is he a biologist? While he may have some education in these fields, we shouldn't be expected to be an expert. He can consult experts if he so chose (and he could have consulted Honeycutt), but in this case, it seems he lacked the imagination to see why he'd need to.

Besides, he was tasked to make difficult decisions that are fair to the parties involved. And as a matter of rights, the Triceratons were wrongly taken from their homeworld, and they deserve to return to their own true homeworld. I'm sure he imagined some kind of world government would efficiently and fairly resettle returning co-natives, as he failed to imagine why they wouldn't. After all, such a resettlement operation on a planet like Neutrino or on many other Dimension X worlds would probably work just like that.

Eh, sorry for the wall-of-text essay. I type 200 words per minute, so this is perhaps easier for me than it looks, as long as I have the time and focus at a particular moment.