Ashkera Questions, Answers, and Reference Thread

[Ashkera]

Question from Tharlocchia

From this remarkably fleshed-out backcatalog of content, Ashkera is by far one of the most interesting ideäs I've seen for a country: an anciënt civilization that runs on ambrosia, entirely focused on pragmatism over creed, located on an archipelago where Australia should b⁠—
wait...

Among the many interesting things on this page, what stuck out most to me was the complete aliënness of the worldmap. Admittedly, there's most likely some distortion from centering the projection in an unusual position, but there's just too much about it that's fundamentally strange for it to be anything other than a completely alternate continental configuration. I find this all incredibly interesting, so now that your nation is no longer defunct, my question to you is this:
What exactly changed here, for the world of Ashkera to contain a double-africa, while almost entirely cleaving EuropDychoria from the rest of Eurasia? More pressingly, how did the US and Cascadia still form, despite the timeline differences, and how did the US become a world power without ownership of Alaska or Hawaii? Where even was the Soviët Union?

The worldmap was developed in concert with Vistora who came up with most of the names, and Cumberlanda, who holds Colaria (Cascadia) and planning for its associated bloc, though the physical layout was mostly my idea. It was decided that to conserve resources, the general history of the Earth shouldn't differ too much from actual history, even though all the countries have different names, allowing for historical discrepancies or changes from history without accusations of bias against some particular country. (The world is huge and so is history; there's simply too much to know about it all, so for writing I prefer to be able to make things up.) Since Ashkera doesn't exist and since the borders were going to move, I decided to move the continents around a bit for fun. History is not purely deterministic, so it's assumed that outcomes determined by "chance" guided history towards resembling the old world - though Pelenui is Hawaii. Lidrecia (D-01) is Russia. (Canumaria is Australia.)

Ashkera is originally from the Union of Free Nations, and the original version was a refugee relocation area police state with a secret leadership council, which treats ethnic conflict as a memetic hazard to be forcibly suppressed - similar to its predecessor nation, Northern Bluf. When I realized that the UFN had no Asian-themed nations, I decided to give Ashkera much more of an ethnic identity and a new landmass based on Japan, but larger, to be moved off the coast of the UFN's designated equivalent of Asia.

Originally in the Triumvirate move, Ashkera was to be located off the coast of East Asia, with a new landmass forming another barrier of islands between the Pacific Ocean and Japan. I decided that this would interfere too much with Japanese history, including World War 2, and moved Ashkera to the south and reused the old landmass from the UFN. This had the advantage of isolating Ashkera - the largest distortion - from world history until relatively late (~1500s), as well as all the new countries around Ashkera that would be Ashkeran-culturally-influenced the same way as many Asia-Pacific countries that were influenced by ancient China.

So here's the funny part. Do you know what landmass Ashkera and neighboring Xyanzar resemble, including their relative positioning?

The real life Lost Continent of Zealandia, next to a partially submerged Australia. No one told me because the resemblance was so similar that anyone who knew assumed I did that on purpose. I didn't; rather I generated a desirable landmass that would fit off the coast of Xawin using procedural texture generation tools meant for video games. The large central landmass and calm sea surrounded by barrier islands were intended to be geographically convenient and produce the right cultural outcomes.

Which means, if I had known, making a whole new map would've been unnecessary, as I could have just moved Australia and Zealandia around a bit, an option I'll be keeping in mind for the future.

[Ashkera]

Where is that Ashkera factbook template?

Though I consider it to be somewhat out of date, the original thread with the code can be found here.

[Ashkera]

Kal Daman: I see. Would you say Ashkeran Empresses have Girl Power?
Gal Newlight: Well of course.
Kal Daman: Would you say that when Empress Suzan Kazal Sazan of the Fourth Empire sent one hundred thousand heavily armed conscripts on Gamoraldan* to fight the European colonial powers for control of Africa and subsequently "redistributed" indigenous men in the colonial East African Territories to "surplus" Kalyon women imported to the area, an act she described as "the unstoppable tide of civilization sweeping away the old superstitions," she was exercising Girl Power?
Gal Newlight: Oh, COME ON.

- ambush interview program, 2017
* a potent a****amine-like drug which, after processing with 1800s-level technology, was still lightly hallucinogenic

Hi. Your quote got the perverse historian in me thinking. What happened to the omitted African women?

Great question!

Prior to the reunification of Ashkera under the Fourth Empire, the British Empire colonized a weak kingdom along the western coast of Ashkera, where they traded opium/etc for trade goods. A plague spread, and since that part of Ashkera is comfortable enough for Europeans, they sent settlers for labor. After the Fourth Empire formed and conquered this British colony, the new Fourth Empire government decided to contest the European colonial powers for control over territory globally.

Ashkera
At home, the Fourth Empire (infamously) subjected the European-descended population that did not flee to a brutal assimilation project in which low-scoring whites who could or would not learn cultural materials and mathematics, and/or who would not convert religiously, were used as expendable labor. "Making the Europeans Ashkeran" was partly intended to humiliate the rival colonial European powers, though it also meant that the survivors were among the better-educated. (There is not much of a racial test gap within Ashkera.) This puts Ashkera in a very weird position with respect to current white racial politics, (ex1, ex2) as they were colonized by Europeans and then brutalized the colonizers and erased a lot of their culture. The current Fifth Empire government has, with some success, managed race relations by suppressing racial organizing as Communist (previous white separatist movements received backing from Communist-aligned states in the Cold War) while simultaneously making it illegal to talk about race except in very boring ways suited to scientific journals that regular people don't read. Unsurprisingly, American culture's current racial politics exports are going over about as well as a lead balloon among the government, who view it as essentially trying to split their whites against the broader Kalyon (native Ashkeran) population through the formation of a transnational white identity.

In Ashkera, a policy of intermarriage for three generations remains in place in order to prevent the formation of competing ethnic groups. This policy applies to almost all immigrants.

WORLD MAP

Abroad, the Fourth Empire adopted a strategy of interbreeding with local populations for disease resistance, land claims, and as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy. Their aim was to create a mixed-race population who would have trouble launching / participating in a native rebellion. As for the women, in most regions of the world there is less competition among women than there is in Ashkera, and so it wasn't necessarily that difficult for Ashkeran women to non-trivially displace local women.

Africa
In the African colonies (Q-04 Ahlub, Q-03 Risakia, R-25 Kokedo), many native women continued to have children, and at the time of the Fourth Empire's collapse, natives still significantly outnumbered mixed and pure colonizer descendants. The natives went into rebellion, and the loyalists (composed of the middle and high castes, and therefore high % Kalyon or partially white, as well as some loyalist natives) all fled to the province of the recently-established capital, where they would no longer be massively outnumbered, and formed a stratocratic state (R-25 Kokedo). The subsequent Fifth Empire largely ignored this area until World War 2.

In 2030, natives continue to control Ahlub, and Kokedo remains both heavily-armed and mostly-colonizer-descended. A regional alliance has been formed with neighboring Risakiland on the basis of Anti-Communism (as the locals there split with a Socialist dictator in Risakia), and with Paul Kagame's Rwanda (Intwaro).

South America
In South America, the level of Kalyon and Ashkeran-European-descended mixture was higher, in part because these areas were colonized by leagues of city-states in Ashkera prior to the formation of the Fourth Empire. With no further orders or support, the heads of various armies and various citizens clashed with each other when the Fourth Empire fell, resulting in the founding of a number of competing polities. The Fifth Empire mostly ignored these until World War 2, when they became allied in order to fight off an invasion by the Axis powers.

Xyanzar
The Xyanzarese have had off-and-on Ashkeran colonization since the Second Empire, and are very similar to their Ashkeran cousins. Most foreigners and many Ashkerans can't really tell them apart. The Fourth Empire drove the Europeans to the far end of Xyanzar (C-11 Wright) and to New Zealand (C-12 New Boumland) and Australia (C-13 Canumaria). The Fifth Empire continued to pay attention to Xyanzar and fight off Fourth Empire remnant forces there, but the Republic of Wright continues to be aligned with the West rather than with Ashkera.