The Other History of Raptoraem
There is a particularly magical quality to old footage of people dancing that modern choreography does not always reproduce. The steps may be simpler, and the dancers may not be professionals, but they often move with an ease that feels difficult to manufacture, as though the rhythm has entered their bodies long before anyone thought to call what they were doing a dance.
It's plain they've learned from siblings, friends, weddings, clubs, street corners, lovers, or somebody’s auntie who cant sit the hell down when the beat drops, and because they learned by watching rather than by being instructed, they are not visibly trying to remember a sequence of movements. Feet fall smoothly, shoulders understand the rhythm, and they seem less to be performing choreography than answering music.
tl;dr: these folks know where the beat lives.
That quality survives most stubbornly in working-class cultures where dancing remains something people do rather than something they watch other people do. It belongs to weddings, bars, funerals, kitchens, festivals, union halls, religious observances, courtship, drunkenness, and grief, and people acquire it almost as second nature. A child watches older bodies move for years before eventually joining them, learning without explanation what the hips are doing, how long to hold a step, when to lean into the music, and when to allow the rhythm to carry the body somewhere unexpected.
This is one of the reasons dancing and song matter so much in Raptoraem.
The Pitbound are not merely poor people who happen to enjoy a drunken racket. They are inhabitants of a civilization in which culture remains overwhelmingly participatory, something made collectively in the middle of ordinary life rather than produced separately and presented to an audience. Their city has been occupied, exploited, segregated, criminalized, bombarded, starved, flooded, rebuilt, and renamed, and the things that seem permanent in one generation are often gone by the next. Buildings burn, borders move, money disappears, records are destroyed, and people just straight up vanish.
A song and a dance are harder to confiscate.
The Counter-Ledger
Raptoraem is a book obsessed with records.
We have ledgers, accounts, treaties, contracts, dossiers, intelligence reports, censuses, property deeds, financial instruments, military dispatches, court records, and lists of both the living and the dead.
Mordiger himself begins as a bookkeeper, then a morgue assistant, and long before he acquires the steel hand, the mythology, and the political machinery, he understands something fundamental about power: whoever keeps the accounts has enormous influence over what reality is permitted to mean.
Institutions write things down because writing gives their version of events a sense of authority. It allows them to decide what happened, who was responsible, who belonged somewhere, who owned something, who had died, and which version of a name or place would be recognized as legitimate.
However, institutions can also destroy records.
Governments revise archives, armies burn them, occupiers rename places, and victors decide which massacre was a battle and which insurgent was a terrorist. The dead acquire official causes. Neighborhoods disappear beneath newer maps. Languages are standardized until the names people use for themselves are treated as incorrect. A person can be removed from history without being physically erased, simply by ensuring that every surviving document describes them differently from the way their family remembered them.
Against this institutional archive exists another archive entirely.
The Body
A song can preserve a name after that name has been removed from the map. A dance can preserve the movement of people whose neighborhood no longer exists. A rhyme can preserve a massacre long after the government has renamed it, and a drinking song can preserve the public opinion omitted from every official record.
This is the counter-ledger of Raptoraem.
Its entries are written in melody, gesture, slang, jokes, recipes, obscenities, superstitions, rhythms, and steps. It is inaccurate, partisan, and constantly being revised, but unlike the official ledger, everybody is allowed to write in it.
A child can cheerfully alter a chorus, a drunk can invent a verse off the cuff, a widow can change the meaning of a song by refusing to sing one particular line, and an entire neighborhood can preserve a memory simply by continuing to perform a dance that no official record admits ever existed.
Culture Before Performance
There is a distinction between knowing choreography and knowing how to just goddamn dance.
Modern professional dancers may be extraordinarily accomplished, but technical difficulty is not the same thing as feeling the groove, and someone can execute a complicated routine beautifully while another person, doing almost nothing, can seem to be that much more intimately connected to the music.
The difference is often social fluency.
A good social dancer understands that ol' black magic of call and response. They know when to follow the beat and when to vibe just behind it, and they understand how much movement a particular piece of music requires rather than assuming that more movement must always be better. They also understand another person’s body without needing to turn the interaction into highly-stylized choreography, because the point is not to display a sequence of correct movements but to respond to someone else in real time.
That is the kind of dancing throughout Raptoraem.
Pitbound dancing is not principally concerned with spectatorship. It is relational, with people dancing with somebody, around somebody, because of somebody, or at somebody.
A dance can be flirtation, but it can also be mockery, challenge, reconciliation, territorial display, or threat. Two people who cannot safely say what they want may nevertheless communicate it perfectly well across a crowded room, and two people who insist that nothing is happening between them may reveal the opposite through the way they move together when the song kicks in.
This matters particularly in a culture whose inhabitants are suspicious of explicit confession.
The people of Raptoraem lie crookedly and beautifully with language, but their bodies are less cooperative.
The Working-Class Body
A pet peeve of mine is that working-class culture is too often represented in fantasy almost entirely through deprivation.
We are shown what poor people lack: space, education, refinement, safety, political power, good clothing, good food, sometimes even gd good looks, and access to the kinds of institutions that determine whose knowledge is considered valuable.
Much less attention is paid to what communities under pressure can possess in extraordinary abundance: jokes, nicknames, obscenity, gossip, oral history, music, dance, improvisation, codes of hospitality, ways of mourning, ways of flirting, and ways of making twenty people fit into a room intended for eight.
Raptoraem would feel false to me if the Pitbound merely endured.
They have to live, and by god, living is noisy.
The Pitbound body itself is intensely political because the state counts it, searches it, wounds it, employs it, imprisons it, conscripts it, and occasionally attempts to outright slaughter it. Industry measures what it can lift, criminal organizations measure what it can withstand, governments determine where it may travel, and violence leaves its history directly on flesh.
Mordiger’s body is a practically potent political document: the steel hand, the ruined spine, the scars, and the technologies on which he depends to keep functioning. Vira carries war in hers through the Hasta-13, while Stryx’s body becomes a very battleground over magic, memory, survival, violence, femininity, and ownership.
Against that background, song and dance become unexpectedly important, because it is one of the few circumstances in which the body is neither labor nor weapon nor evidence.
It is simply present.
A dockworker whose back belongs to industry for twelve hours can still own it for three minutes when the music starts. A woman whose voice is endlessly legislated, endangered, or silence can make it communicate something entirely on her own terms through a lewd ballad. A soldier can use muscles trained for killing to make somebody laugh with a jaunty jig.
That is not frivolous.
In Raptoraem, frivolity itself is politically significant. Oppressive systems are quite comfortable with the idea of the poor suffering nobly (and ofc in noble silence), but they find it considerably more irritating when the poor are having a marvelous evening without permission.
The Social Body
Communal singing and dancing can temporarily rearrange hierarchy, although it does not erase it.
Power does not evaporate because somebody finds a fiddle and another strikes up a rebel anthem, but its rules become unstable for a while, and the people who matter in one context may not matter in another.
The best dancer in the room may be a dockhand. The richest man may have no rhythm whatsoever. A woman who must defer to a superior at work can make him follow her on a dance floor, while an elderly person may possess knowledge that a younger body cannot acquire through strength alone. Children in the Pit may watch adults become ridiculous, desire turn visible, rivalries rendered blatant, and the relationships people are unwilling to name suddenly broadcasted at fifty feet.
Who dances with whom matters; likewise, who refuses to sing along matters.
This makes song and dance extraordinarily useful for fiction because it can perform social exposition without announcing itself as exposition. Put twenty Raptoraem characters in a room with music and you can learn almost everything about the society without having anyone explain the society.
You can see who knows the old steps and who considers them embarrassing, who has learned foreign dances, who dances too stiltedly for the biography they have provided, who watches instead of joining, who cannot tolerate being touched, who dances with the staff, who expects women to wait to be asked, who knows the vulgar verse, and who stops singing when a particular name appears in the lyrics.
Culture becomes visible through behavior.
Songs as Archives
Song performs a distinct function in this series. Official records belong disproportionately to institutions, while song belongs to everybody, and that creates two histories: the history written by governments and the history people remember singing.
The two will not necessarily jive.
A military defeat can become a drinking song. A massacre can survive as a children’s rhyme long after the government has renamed the event. A criminal can become a folk hero through one good chorus, while a revolutionary leader can discover, to his irritation, that the population has rewritten his great political achievement into an obscene couplet about his sex life.
Memory edits; communities editorialize.
Songs mutate beautifully because nobody owns them for long. A hymn acquires a political verse, a marching cadence becomes a work song, the work song becomes a tavern song, the tavern song acquires an obscene verse, and the obscene verse becomes the only part teenagers know. Fifty years later, respectable people may sing the cleaned-up version at weddings without realizing that the third line originally meant “kill the kings.”
That creates a form of dramatic irony available only to long fiction. The reader remembers which verse came first, which character introduced the melody, and what later generations inside the story have forgotten.
The song becomes a measuring instrument for historical change, and so can the dance.
A dance introduced as vulgar and working-class can eventually appear at a state function. A foreign hymn can become so thoroughly Pitbound that nobody remembers it was imported. A ceremonial dance can become ridiculous to young people. Something prohibited during occupation can become compulsory during independence celebrations, thereby irritating precisely the people who once risked punishment to perform it.
Culture refuses ideological obedience, and that is part of its charm.
The Problem of Self-Consciousness
There is something else I want Raptoraem’s social world to retain: the absence, or at least the reduction, of the modern imaginary camera.
Contemporary people have become remarkably practiced at imagining themselves from outside themselves. We know what our faces look like in photographs, we understand angles, we anticipate being recorded, and we can mentally transform ourselves into content while an experience is still occurring.
That can do peculiar things to the body.
Self-consciousness is hostile to the groove. The moment someone begins monitoring whether they look as though they are dancing well, movement often tightens, because the body stops responding and begins presenting.
Raptoraem certainly contains vanity, spectacle, and performance. Mordiger understands theatricality as an instrument of power, the Strait of Silks understand spectatorship professionally, and the Synod understands ceremony, but much of ordinary Pitbound dancing still occurs before an audience composed primarily of other participants.
The dance is the event, and an event does not need to become evidence that the event happened.
People sweat, clothing moves incorrectly, hair comes loose, somebody misses a step and laughs, and someone else does something indecent with their hips. Nobody stops because the result will not photograph elegantly. The memory is stored in the participants rather than in a recording.
When Revolution Becomes Tradition
There is a final complication that becomes increasingly important as the series progresses. Raptoraem survives long enough to begin institutionalizing itself, and the moment a revolutionary culture acquires institutions, the counter-ledger begins fighting with the ledger again.
The revolutionary song becomes an anthem. The improvised dance becomes a heritage performance. The reluctant hero becomes a statue. The illegal gathering becomes a municipal festival with permits. Someone establishes the approved lyrics, someone decides which verse children should learn in school, and someone produces a respectable historical account explaining what the song “really means.”
Somewhere in the Pit, an old woman says:
“Tfu! That isn’t how it went.”
This is where the motif becomes politically interesting across nine books. The question is no longer simply whether Raptoraem can preserve its culture against outsiders; it becomes whether Raptoraem can survive becoming Raptoraem.
Can a revolutionary society institutionalize memory without embalming it?
Can the people who fought against official mythology resist creating one of their own?
Can Mordiger tolerate becoming folklore?
Can Vira listen to a patriotic version of something she remembers people singing frightened and filthy before the outcome was certain?
Probably not gracefully.
That is exactly why it interests me.
The City That Refuses to Become a Ruin
There is a temptation in dark fantasy to make suffering aesthetically total.
If the world is cruel, everything becomes gray; people are hollow-eyed wraiths, cities rot tragically under a pall of rainclouds, and everyone appears to have recently attended a funeral in distressed leather, with too much eyeliner on.
Raptoraem certainly has its share of ruined grandeur, but actual human beings are much more troublesome than that. People make jokes during wars, flirt during disasters, complain about food during revolutions, have sex during sieges, sing rude songs about dictators who could have them killed, and dance after funerals because pent-up emotion demands the body move.
That contradiction is essential to Raptoraem. Its inhabitants do not wait for history to become kind before allowing themselves pleasure, because if they did, they might never experience any. They continue to laugh, flirt, sing, and dance not because they have escaped political reality, but because those things are among the ways they remain human inside it.
The dance floor is not an escape from the city’s politics but one of the places where that politics becomes most evident, because here are bodies the state has attempted to categorize, exploit, control, and punish, temporarily reorganizing themselves according to another authority entirely.
Freedom.
The Pitbound may lose neighborhoods, wars, names, limbs, parents, children, fortunes, and entire versions of their city. The archive may burn, the map may be redrawn, and the government may change the name of the street, but somebody remembers the tune, somebody remembers the step, somebody remembers the forbidden verse, and somebody’s grandma insists that everyone is getting it wrong.
And when the music begins, the body knows what to do.
That is the other history of Raptoraem, preserved not in the Black Ledgers, but the history that survives when the ledgers burn.
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