I would have wiSSSShed... what is missing from SSSS?

[thorny]

To bring everyone to the same page, after effectively declaring the Sami language extinct in the post-Rash world per the Language Trees, Minna presented the in-story explanation that the Sami people have joined the settlements of non-Sami survivors and mixed into the general population there.

But we could posit that while this happened with some Sami individuals, it's not what happened with all of them. -- Some of the ones who've apparently mixed in could even be in on it, keeping an eye on what's happening in the Known World, both so that they can warn the hidden people of any expeditions that might get too close to them and so they can have better information with which to judge whether it might be safe to stop being hidden.

Spoiler: a lil controversial maybe • show

Urk, yes, that's a piece of "lore" I'm aware of and I think most of us too. But the historical motives for the erasure of indigenous cultures and languages are pretty similar to that explanation, so it isn't really a considerate backstory to give them.

Spoiler: show

Indeed. 'Oh, we don't mean any of you any harm, so long as you're willing to stop being you and just become part of us' -- it's an all too common historical behavior, and a way of thinking that still very much crops up in people, including people who get very indignant if anyone tries to tell them that's a form of genocide.

[JoB]

Spoiler: show

Indeed. 'Oh, we don't mean any of you any harm, so long as you're willing to stop being you and just become part of us' -- it's an all too common historical behavior, and a way of thinking that still very much crops up in people, including people who get very indignant if anyone tries to tell them that's a form of genocide.

Spoiler: show

I'd agree with you in any of the (many historical) situations where the superseding culture encroached on, if not outright invaded, the vanished one, but that's hardly what the post-Rash non-Sami can possibly have pulled off. More specifically, if the post-Rash Sami can have settlements where nobody else can, because they're better adapted at cold/solitude/hostile nature/whatever, that pretty much contradicts the theory that the non-Sami would be able to arm-wrestle them into assimilation.

[moredhel]

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I'd agree with you in any of the (many historical) situations where the superseding culture encroached on, if not outright invaded, the vanished one, but that's hardly what the post-Rash non-Sami can possibly have pulled off. More specifically, if the post-Rash Sami can have settlements where nobody else can, because they're better adapted at cold/solitude/hostile nature/whatever, that pretty much contradicts the theory that the non-Sami would be able to arm-wrestle them into assimilation.

Spoiler: show

even the power of the post rash superpower (iceland) is that little, that the other survivor cultures felt no need to adapt. Or everyone would speak icelandic and the gods of the fins would not be a thing. So how could the fins, norwegians or swedes do so? they all do have other problems and cultural assimilation is not a thing that can be done long distance.

[thorny]

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I'd agree with you in any of the (many historical) situations where the superseding culture encroached on, if not outright invaded, the vanished one, but that's hardly what the post-Rash non-Sami can possibly have pulled off. More specifically, if the post-Rash Sami can have settlements where nobody else can, because they're better adapted at cold/solitude/hostile nature/whatever, that pretty much contradicts the theory that the non-Sami would be able to arm-wrestle them into assimilation.

Spoiler: show

Well, I was mostly thinking of Minna, in our current world, giving the Sámi that ending. However:

I don't know that they'd necessarily have to be able to have settlements where nobody else can, though that's an interesting possibility (and maybe their gods are particularly powerful in that world? They're also apparently having a shamanistic revival, so might have had a head start on figuring out mages.)

But only 90 years out from a massive dieoff from the Rash, complicated for at least some time afterwards by starvation due to both the loss of trade and the infection/trollification of non-human mammal species which would, in addition to making dead and trollified animals unavailable for food, have entirely screwed up the planetary ecology: the impression I've got is that the limitation on settlements has very little to do with available cleansable space, and a whole lot more to do with there not being enough people to settle all areas, and not enough food to support any rapid population expansion.

So the Sámi might simply have found or stayed in an area, or areas, which were equally amenable to settlement, but from which any non-Sámi survivors had fled to those settlements which had gotten an early, relatively successful start -- or in which a group of Sámi, forming a coherent group in large part out of sheer luck (which must have had a lot to do with anybody's survival) themselves absorbed any non-Sámi survivors instead of the other way around.

-- As to why they might stay hidden even though the "dominant" culture no longer has the ability to be dominant: it can take quite a while for cultural reactions to diminish once they're well-established, even if the cause for them actually is gone. Plus, of course, small groups of survivors in the middle of that first-century mess might well feel that they don't need any more troubles at all; even troubles that they feel they could fairly easily stave off.

[Jitter]

Thorny, I agree with all of what you wrote  above.

Maybe some Sami happened to have a few immune reindeer among their home reindeer, so they were spared and could start herding again after things settled down a bit. Not all, but many of the Sami have wilderness skills which would have helped in getting through the famine years, as well as in the initial fleeing from all other people. Many non-Sami in Lapland also have he nature skills of course, but as mentioned, they could well have become assimilated with the Sami. And they do / did have different gods, who could well have advised them to keep away from the Finns and the Scandinavians.

[thorny]

Jitter, that all makes sense.

And note that, even in standard canon, we know that immune wild deer have survived, even without human assistance; and also that immune and/or protected domestic sheep, cattle, and dogs still exist. So positing some percentage of immune reindeer fits well even with Minna's canon.

-- do any of us know enough about the Sámi to write some of this without doing a lot of research first? I don't. (Haiz, come back! I think they did.)

[ScrimmyBingusPSVitaPort]

Not on the topic of the previous conversation but another thought I had about the comic: So I know that most of the posts I've made since joining this forum are me being a Negative Nancy (tm) but I've realized something else in retrospect (tbh i think a lot of other people have had this thought too but here's my two cents on it)

Kind of the opposite of what was missing from SSSS, but could have done without. I think the 60-page prologue was largely unnecessary, it was kind of neat to see the modern-day ancestors of the main cast and how the world fell apart and the environmental storytelling at the end was cool but... It had little to no relevance with the rest of the comic. I've heard that most people dropped the comic (pre-Emil incident) because of how slow the beginning was. In fact, Whenever I recommended the comic to people I told them to skip the prologue and maybe go back to it only after seeing the lore page with the family trees.

[lwise]

Spoiler: show

-- As to why they might stay hidden even though the "dominant" culture no longer has the ability to be dominant: it can take quite a while for cultural reactions to diminish once they're well-established, even if the cause for them actually is gone. Plus, of course, small groups of survivors in the middle of that first-century mess might well feel that they don't need any more troubles at all; even troubles that they feel they could fairly easily stave off.

They might not be hiding at all.  They might not even realize that there are any other survivors.  After all, in the wake of the Rash, there must have been small groups of survivors-by-chance all over the planet, but they would have no way to learn of other survivors unless they had a working radio and the other survivors had a transmitter capable of punching through the Black Speech, or else someone physically went from one group to the other.  People along the coasts or on islands in Saimaa could physically meet up more easily than people in the interior, and all the groups we know of (outside of Iceland) seem to be reachable by water.  Someone proposed years ago that there could be survivors in Russia, for instance, but again, there is no way for people in the Known World to learn of them.

So it's possible that the Sami are out there, not so very far from the Known World, but they don't know of the Known World, and vice versa.

[Róisín]

lwise, I like that idea. Because even in the modern real world, with modern communications, it is possible for groups of people of minority races, language groups, religious faiths or cultures to become scattered across the world, never mind just within a single continent, and to lose track of one another completely. I speak from experience, having been for much of my life involved in efforts to help such groups to find one another again.

Plus I have had such a refinding happen to me by pure chance. Decades ago, I was teaching a martial arts class. Among the teenagers present was one boy who looked oddly familiar. He was good at what he was learning, and seemed to be a generally competent person. And he kept looking at me oddly, as if trying to place me, but I was busy and probably not paying as much attention as I should have been.

Then one day after class he pulled out a bundle of papers and photos and asked me if I knew any of the people in the pictures. I did, several of my greataunts, a surviving cousin from the Isles branch of my family who was in America at the time, and a few other relatives. I told him this, and the next thing I know the kid flings his arms around me with a cry of “Hello cousin!”. Turns out that his mother was very interested in genealogy and keen to trace her widely scattered family, so she had made very comprehensive family trees for all of the family branches she could find out about. Her son had shown her a photo of me, and she thought I looked like family, but she had also believed my branch to be extinct. We weren’t extinct, just in Australia.

And so the Irish and Welsh branches of my kin were reconnected. They too were Celtic Pagans like my branch.

[ScrimmyBingusPSVitaPort]

Róisín, that story's so sweet! It's always nice to see family reconnect.

[JoB]

Spoiler: show

Well, I was mostly thinking of Minna, in our current world, giving the Sámi that ending.

Spoiler: show

That's essentially the vibe I got, and it prompted me to point out that Minna neither outright said that the Sami were forcefully assimilated, nor can it be inferred from what she did posit.

Not that it wouldn't be very much possible to have happened in the stated storyverse, mind. I remember repeated discussions on this forum how the near extinction of humanity would very likely lead the survivors to rather extreme measures (by today's standards) to up the birth rate - and Minnas story rather openly contradicts that that mindset ever took hold post-Rash.

... anyway. So we're back to theorizing how and where survivors could, not should, exist that the story's Known World people haven't gotten to know about yet? Not my cup of tea personally, but have fun (and, in fact, Minna's blessing to do so). (We actually have a dedicated topic for that, though.)

even the power of the post rash superpower (iceland) is that little, that the other survivor cultures felt no need to adapt. Or everyone would speak icelandic and the gods of the fins would not be a thing.

Weeeeell, Icelandic is said to be the lingua franca of everyone in the Known World doing "academic" work, and there's a bonus comic showing that even Finland uses genuine (ancient) Icelandic coin. But I guess that we weren't talking about Reykjavík orchestrating such activity in the first place; those living off the same local resources are much more likely to go "we don't have X to waste on that" ...

or else someone physically went from one group to the other.

In that context, it's interesting that most of those prologue people who did become survivors are shown to have left their usual dwellings to achieve that, taking their (rather unadapted for the new surroundings) culture with them.

I would add that it's also more or less what "scouts" have been doing ever since Y0 (what was that about Ukko-Pekka again?), if only I could be certain that that profession actually exists outside of post-Rash Finland (and Finn-staffed expeditions) as well ...

she had also believed my branch to be extinct. We weren’t extinct, just in Australia.

How's that for a genuinely Australian motto ...
[thinking of the flora and fauna there and the reactions of nature researchers after the discovery of the continent]

[catbirds]

lwise, I like that idea. Because even in the modern real world, with modern communications, it is possible for groups of people of minority races, language groups, religious faiths or cultures to become scattered across the world, never mind just within a single continent, and to lose track of one another completely. I speak from experience, having been for much of my life involved in efforts to help such groups to find one another again.

I'm curious, how did this process work? It sounds like some great work, and it really stands out to me for some reason.

My own family tends to keep track of each other pretty well, but I run into a great deal of frustration trying to communicate with them. It's weird.

Kind of the opposite of what was missing from SSSS, but could have done without. I think the 60-page prologue was largely unnecessary, it was kind of neat to see the modern-day ancestors of the main cast and how the world fell apart and the environmental storytelling at the end was cool but... It had little to no relevance with the rest of the comic.

Oh... haha... ok actually I've never told anyone about this because it's never come up but back when I Enjoyed SSSS, I would try to re-read it and I would look at the prologue and just close the tab because no, I would rather do anything other than read this introduction again.

Okay, I think my language skills are failing me right now.

[tehta]

JoB, Sigrun definitely talks about having worked with scouts before (and her 'how's life for you' reaction to meeting Lalli suggests they weren't Finnish ones), and the Swedish Cleanser poster mentions (Swedish) scouts. So it seems to be an internationally known job.

The fact that Tuuri uses Icelandic currency is a good find, but doesn't mean that other currencies don't exist. It could simply be that she exchanged her Finnish money into the Icelandic version, as that is widely accepted (the way dollars and, sometimes, Euros currently are, in many countries around the world).
Although personally I would also theorize that a lot of 'local' transactions in smaller communities would be done through barter, and we have seen that in Keuruu food seemed to be provided on a large scale (by the military?) so maybe she would not have needed to carry around much currency before leaving, anyway.

I don't want to add to the discussion of the Sami as their canonical disappearance is one of my least favourite things about the comic...

[JoB]

JoB, Sigrun definitely talks about having worked with scouts before (and her 'how's life for you' reaction to meeting Lalli suggests they weren't Finnish ones), and the Swedish Cleanser poster mentions (Swedish) scouts. So it seems to be an internationally known job.

I afraid that Sigrun said that she's new to Finnish MAGES.

(But I admit that she must have worked with scouts before adv1, and we don't have reason to believe that the Norwegian troll hunter captain has been on missions outside Norway before (what with running headlong into the language barrier issues), so ... there.)

The poster mentions scouts, yes. To patrol previously cleansed areas. I'm not sure whether that measures all the way up to Finnish scouts going to explore unknown territory, which would be the part relevant to discovering other survivors ... though I have to admit that we have no confirmation that Lalli left the cleansed, or at least rather well-known, areas around Keuruu during his scouting service there ... cannot quite read these guys' stance on going way off beaten paths ...

[tehta]

I know Sigrun says Finnish mages, not scouts! That's why I didn't say that she explicitly stated she had never met Finnish scouts, only that her comment suggests it. (At least, to me. I feel like she has a tendency to overstate/exaggerate her understanding of things, rather than to be precise about what she does not know.)
And, yes, as you say, her working with Finns before seems unlikely. I suppose working with Swedish cleansers (and their scouts) would be possible, since there is no language barrier, and we know from Emil that Norwegians do this from time to time, seemingly for fun.

But  yes, even if the concept of 'scout' exists everywhere (maybe apart from Iceland) it's unclear how far afield they are supposed to explore.  (Although, even in Sweden... I know it's not mentioned on the poster, but, logically speaking, wouldn't some amount of scouting be helpful BEFORE the Cleansing begins? To identify promising directions, dangers, etc? The Cleansers absolutely do not seem like the type of people capable of doing this for themselves. And the boundaries of what is immediately useful to explore would move every year, wouldn't they? So maybe Swedish scouts have more immediate reason to explore than Finnish ones, given the amount of cleansing they do.)

That said: based, again, on my "reading" of that is going on in the comic (in full awareness that I have no proof), the way Lalli immediately slips into a routine of 'memorize a map, go into unknown territory, observe, report your findings' suggests to me that this is something he is very used to doing.