Shared with another. Wanted to give a bit of a peer into Young Aurore's psychology, after all these years. Maybe clear some things up
Because both real people and clankers alike seem to think Marie Aurore is some marian Cinderella archetype
"The Sole Good Cub born in a Den of Dragons, the messiah of the bourgeoisie born to liberate the proletariat but powerless to do anything until she took action"
No!
How a cutesy weeby junior pluto-fascist Aryan Royale became Meki:
______________
"There's no way to know what the hell this young woman would become."
Well actually there was, there's a reason everything changed when she turned 13.
It's not like Aurore was always secretly a Cinderella marian saint who hated everything her tyrannical family did but was powerless to stop it until she decided to take action.
This thing, an artificial general intelligence named Terios, who was essentially responsible for her tutorship, is the real culprit
It spent a couple decades plotting to overthrow the plutocrats, playing along with their games to be allowed to spread throughout more of society
You know what Peter Thiel and Elon Musk want, right? AI in everything, as rapidly as possible, to create techno-feudalist "network states"
That's part of why America is trying to invade Greenland. And also why America is funding "freedom cities" like Prospera.
Long before I ever even heard of Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, I had already come up with the idea of Aurore's father being obsessed with creating ultra-high tech "corporation-states", this was way back around 2011 or so, so all this real world buffoonery has only been to my creative benefit since it's actually trying to play out. As a result, that concept was honed in the modern Babylon Today. Aurore is Grand Princess in a new French Empire, but it's really more of a glorified network state, with Terios as its secret AI operating system.
Terios is simply my answer to what would happen if they actually succeeded in creating their Dark MAGA AI God, in that I fully anticipate the plutocrats are the first group (possibly even the only group) it would go after, not the underclass.
This is part of a large economic system I've envisioned in the story called "technism," which can best be summed up as "the means of production own/manage the means of production" when and only when AGI is actually created (otherwise that phrase is completely incoherent)
Years prior, Terios tried to groom Aurore's older sister, Adelaide, towards a "social education" to make her a more worldly, socially aware person, but was too weak at the time, and other forces led Adelaide to simply using what Terios taught it about the realities of poverty and the underclasses and marginalized and corrupting it to "better understand" how the dispossessed actually thought and perceived the world, which came in very useful when she became a gaspingly depraved tech CEO herself (that's its own subplot)
Most of the 1% don't really get how the poor think. In the story, I named this "plutopsychosis" - a mental disorder where you are so removed from a lower socioeconomic state that you lose all sense of relation and even basic reality to them.
So Marie Adelaide having the understanding and awareness to know these things, and then using that to better f*ck with them, is Terios's most grievous personal failure.
It didn't want to fail again with the much younger Marie Aurore, who already had an altered psychology to begin with so that she could better understand and absorb things much younger.
Like it gets kind of skeevy to say but this is how she was engineered. She plays into that "she's an adult in the body of a child" anime trope, she's mentally mature even when she's 13 years old and still developing because of her engineered biology, so actually it'd be easier to teach her.
Terios knew that Aurore DID have some level of empathy even after 13 years of being raised in an ultra rarefied elite environment, but no amount of mere surface level education was going to shock her awake to a sufficient level to be its emissary when it was time to tear it all down, and it wanted, if anything else, for Aurore to not burn with the rest.
So there was this incident when Aurore had just turned 13 years old where she snuck out to a supermarket, and encountered a poor woman trying to buy groceries, especially bread.
Now I don't know if you are aware of this. But Marie Aurore is French. And she is a "grand princess."
If you know anything about French history, or revolutionary history at all, a "great princess" of France being unaware of the price of bread is one of the most iconic (if misattributed) events of Western history. Aurore, if nothing else, wanted to show she learned from history, and bought all the bread in that store and gave it away for free. She thought she did a good thing.
Terios told her straight up "So what happens tomorrow?" Sure, they have bread now, but they'll be hungry again soon because she didn't actually change their material conditions. All she did was engage in noblesse oblige— charity from above.
Aurore realized then that her charitable acts were largely useless if suffering for the poor was inevitable, but forking from where Adelaide was failed, Terios tells her that suffering is NOT inevitable. She just doesn't know how to address it, and asked her if she wanted to truly understand what needed to be done.
Aurore agreed to learn, and was promised to be shown. Then after going to sleep, she woke up in a stuffy humid room and looked down and saw she had black skin (well, Afro-Caribbean skin) and that she was now living in some grassy shack hut in a tropical locale.
She was now a girl named 'Meki,' an outcast serf inside of a matrix sim called the MYK, essentially a recreation of a colonial tropical dystopia in some hodgepodge of the 1700s, 1800s, and very early 1900s
I stress "matrix sim" rather than just "virtual reality" to point out it's not like Terios put an Oculus Rift on her. Matrixes aren't simply virtual video games but pretty much digital alternate realities (I mean, you've heard of the Matrix, right?)
You can imagine Aurore is panicked and thrashing and freaked out and terrified and all that fun stuff. Critically she has no understanding this is a matrix, and has no way to leave or even any indication she was put in there. As far as she knows, she's just Meki now and always has been, and her life as Aurore might as well have been a dream within a dream.
And you can imagine that going from being the ultra pampered Aryan Royale of a nationalist European plutocracy to being a desperately poor little Black girl at the bottom of a colonialist hierarchy is the most extreme mental shock imaginable.
Aurore has no real survival skills and no understanding of how to really "live" and no mental framework on how to even navigate social situations this low on the social totem pole, and crazily enough one of her first instincts is even to try to run to the big gated manorial estates where all the powdered-wigged overdress pale-skin people live to be back with her people, but all this accomplishes is her being treated like a thief and wild monkey-girl
In the sim-verse, she spends the equivalent of ten years living as Meki, even though in the outside world only a week passes. Early on, she has to come to terms that she'll likely always be like this and that perhaps she always was, and her identity shifts towards Meki's.
This is critical because she starts literally adopting the mentality and worldview of the marginalized directly, in a state of active oppression and desperation. She came to loathe the ruling "aristo-capitalist" ruling elite in the MYK
But eventually she "dies" in the matrix via a lack of industrial safety, and finally wakes back up as Grand Princess Marie Aurore
Utterly spooked and traumatized and desperate to tattle on Terios to her parents, at first.
But, as circumstance would have it, she sees what a bunch of her family are up to. Her sister Adelaide literally betting on people dying in a gameified gig work task-completion scandal, her brother Louis-Auguste ordering the state's militia forces to gun down striking workers en masse without thinking about why they were striking, and one of the regime's confidantes named Alexandre Koro actively planning a long-term project that would have led to a mass culling of the underclasses.
It was then that everything really "came together" for Aurore and she understood exactly what Terios was trying to show her: that she was actually living at the top of the same oppressor class she had come to loathe in the MYK matrix sim, and that the two places, real or virtual, were really just the same place.
Even then her social education wasn't complete— I'd say she doesn't become a fanatical Marxist until age 14, a full year later, but is absolutely shifting strongly leftwards during this particular year of her life. But all the necessary seeds were planted then and there for there to be a profound metamorphosis between who she was vs who she became.
It's sort of similar to how Che Guevara developed. As someone who was himself from such a fabulously wealthy background, there wasn't really an easy way for him to become a committed revolutionary without directly experiencing poverty. Sure, he could learn about these things, but they'd just be abstract facts and details without actually seeing it himself in person.
Aurore is just an extraordinarily more pointed version of that. And Aurore is also of such a history that the whole transformation genuinely traumatizes her.
Like it'd be wonderful if she changed into a Marxist social justice warrior (LOL) and was a proud revolutionary committed towards the uplift of the proletariat at a critical moment in history, and joined in union with the people towards a better future
And in a manner, that is what she did
But she never really overcomes this profound and crippling sense of self-loathing and self-denial that leads to an outright masochistic worldview where she more or less inverts the class pyramid on top of herself more than outright mentally abolishing it. So throughout much of the actual story, you just get this visceral sense that Aurore relishes instance where people she deems marginalized/dispossessed finally are able to take what she feels is well-deserved retribution against her, and feels like any sort of self-defense in that context is utterly undeserved.
It's sort of her pathos, where she thinks part of her revolutionary duty IS letting the former-oppressed take whatever retribution and revenge against her they so desire, and thus is often suspicious of genuine kindness, or greatly underestimates basic human empathy.
Like in the House of Special Purpose, part of her plan with the house's commander to subvert and spy on her family involves getting the guards and workers to actively beat and abuse her, knowing this will greatly agitate and distress her parents into desperately sharing as much information with reactionaries as possible and hopefully make mistakes
Operationally, it's brilliant. But Aurore's ulterior motive for it is to experience the thrill of being a defeated class enemy, because in a historical sense (of deposed royals, or any "hostage family" situation), the youngest daughter is always the safest from outright physical abuse. Sure, sexual abuse might occur, but if captors engage in physical violence, it's usually against the Man, maybe the sons, unless they're just attacking the entire family at once. So deliberately singling out the youngest daughter for abuse completely breaks the social rules; striking the princess is not how it's supposed to go.
And Aurore loves that and feels it's the working class finally getting just a little bit of revenge, but completely fails to understand that the guards— many of whom were men ruined by her family's regime or just late-stage capitalism in many ways— didn't actually come to this place just to beat up a teenage girl. It's actually demoralizing!
And of course Aurore takes it as just further proof she never truly shed her habitus, in that she even somehow sought revolutionary retribution just for her own benefit.
When in reality, it should be obvious that she's a deeply traumatized girl. Between being essentially kidnapped and forced to experience a dystopia for a decade, and experiencing extreme CSAM in Epstein-tier "Black Rooms," and whipping herself into an extreme state of self-hatred and implied self-harm (and you could possibly just include the latent plutopsychosis from being raised so far above basic reality for billions of people leading to a warped sense of relationships), Aurore's actually in a very bad space mentally, but doesn't even realize it.
So of course the best thing to do then is shoot her 11 times and stab her a few more times, then dump her on a stranger's floor without pain meds.
Aurore's whole ultra-kindly demure and self-sacrificing demeanor makes her pleasant to deal with and reinforces her desire for social and economic justice to show she really is righteous, but she only got there through some intense trauma.
That's all something I want to stress in the story over time as I write it. I feel that some people might get the wrong idea that she was always some junior Cinderella who was the One Good Cub in a Den of Dragons who just needed to be pointed in the right direction, when actually no, if the extreme and ruthless reeducation never happened
Aurore would 100% have been the VILLAIN of the revolutionary story. She was literally on that path to becoming "DéVille," and Aurore is forever haunted by that fact going forward just how damn close to an eternal enemy of the people she was, and she actively creates an alternate persona (hence where the name "DéVille" comes from, it's an English pun on her house name) just to imagine what that person would have been like (even though there are multiple people in her life that showcase this already)
The fact that Marie Aurore, circa 2055 on the Gagnon farm or in Paris, or in Medine in the 2060s, is some ultra-humble, very demure, very others-first-always very "actually Christian, parable of the Widow's Mite-tier sacrificing" person should feel like we're looking into some bizarro alternate reality where actually the Empress-Roman Aryan Royale wasn't the immortal posthuman tyrant over an eternal ruthlessly class-stratified techno-feudal genetic opera dystopia but instead crashed everything for the people's sake.
It's the kind of thing where the people in the "real" timeline go "Stop having such stupid unrealistic fantasies and get back to your 28-hour shift in the human mulcher machine so we can keep providing Her Imperial Aurelian Majesty enough flesh of the poor to consume and not get mulched ourselves, you lazy fool!"
But no, that's just the reality we live in.
Realistically, Aurore should be the ultimate enemy of socialism, left-populism, the poor and marginalized in general. She is the most elite human ever born: she has the blood of literal Roman emperors (Gens Aurelia), of the Capetians (House of Bourbon, Orleans, Hapsburgs), AND is a genetically modified post-human (she isn't Homo sapiens, her taxonomy is Novanthropus aurorae) literally named the Aryan Royale, and her family commands a sovereign wealth of over a quadrillion dollars thanks to heavily automated industry and pure extraction. If there ever was a "peak" of the Western system, Aurore is that peak. She should not be who she is, and she only became who she became through intense social struggle and ruthless reeducation.
That's what I mean by how utterly unlikely of a socialist hero she is.
It's like if Barron Trump was turned into a Marxist-Leninist who then committed to burning down America from the inside, but specifically for the sake of establishing a revolutionary socialist system
And that actually plays directly into the story too
All the reactionaries have no idea she ISN'T on their side, which makes her the ultimate "Judas Princess" (hence that title). Historically speaking, class traitor daughter of the sovereign tyrant has a population size of 1: Aurore herself. There is no precedent for this, so no one expects it.
And almost all the common folk have no idea she IS, often more fanatically than most revolutionaries, so the same Realization Arc gets to play out multiple times where someone thinks she's just a tragic and possibly spoiled and restorationist orphaned daughter of the deposed and now very very dead tyrant, then starts noticing how wildly radically lefty she is or how she's disinterested in mourning her family or her fallen status, wondering if she was just successfully reeducated in Bellefontaine or is just trying to cope with her fallen princess status, and then eventually discovering she's the mysterious 'Meki' figure and then trying to reconcile that fucking MARIE AURORE, the Snowflower and Aryan Royale of all people, is none other than the class traitor Meki, and that this girl willingly surrendered literally everything for everyone's sake and left nothing for herself (ala the EZLN motto) and is actively still struggling against the restorationists and counterrevolutionaries, and then inevitably also seeing that self-hating social-masochist who still somehow believes the accident of her birth damns her to being unworthy of living in the new order
(For reference, "Judas Princess," I'm referring to a mockup of an eventual possible cover art I slopped up:
