Ixdopol

Ixdopol simply means "the great Redistribution" or the "Redistribution of large scale" in High Sunekan - it is a plain term with very little moral intonation. The Ixdopol simply exists, like taxes exist or voting exists. It can be inconvenient, but it is understood in the Suneka as a necessary part of a functional and harmonious society. Ixdopol is seen as fundamentally connected to Ixutopet, or the communal distribution of necessary goods - and the two words come from the same root. This is, to Sunekans, simply the world working in a clean and neutral manner, the movement of people and things to where they need to be.   The Ixdopol is the largest state-operated system of kidnapping and forced relocation in the world, and is associated with a litany of heinous crimes.   In essence, the Ixdopol is a system in the Suneka by which people who do not fit into their communities are identified, removed from their community and family, given new names, and assigned to a distant community from which they are forbidden from leaving. Their new home becomes their prison: the community watches them, disciplines them, surrounds them and pushes them to assimilate. To form friendships, to gain status, to have anything more than the barest minimum to survive means to adopt some elements of Sunekan life, at least outwardly. Once integration into the Suneka begins, the institutions of the community work to quietly internalize Sunekan behavior through things like formal schooling, relationship mediation, and marriage. Even if the outwardly-obedient target of the Ixdopol does their best to resist in their mind and heart, very few actually act on those passions by the time that they are allowed to leave their assignments for travel. Perhaps if they were simply deviant but from a Sunekan community, they'll go and visit their old home to have tea and catch up with someone they once knew from time to time - it will feel as if they've won something, doing that. If they were from an entirely deviant culture or minority, though? For them, returning home means risking everything they've built just to be confronted with the permanence of their loss. Their old house would be demolished or perhaps occupied by Sunekan strangers; their old family, friends, and neighbors would all be redistributed as well, scattered to countless foreign villages and towns. Some priests and Ixdopol agents even directly enable such trips, coordinating them to avoid any encounters with familiar people to best snuff out any hope before welcoming them back to their new lives with such gusto that the person feels that they are making the choice to walk away from their old life voluntarily. These coordinated trips and ventures are too extravagant for most priests, but are a useful tool in the priestly arsenal for high-potential Ixdopolos.   Such "quiet, internal resistance" can live with a person all their lives. Most Ixdopolos are discouraged from ever leaving their new home and stop being a flight risk after a certain span of time. The Suneka only needs their obedience, not every fiber of their internal being. Ixdopolos cannot meaningfully pass on their culture to their children - not only are their biological children nearly always given to someone else to raise (in exchange for adopted children from another couple), but Ixdopolos are discouraged from marrying anyone or raising children with anyone who has any history of deviance similar to that person. Given the social pressures at work, it is unlikely that their partners would encourage any significant transmission of deviant culture or behaviors (Sunekan prejudices aside, the threat of losing a child to re-assignment usually keeps any generationally cultural transmission subtle). While the Ixdopolo might still fantasize about rebellion in their old age, they will be outwardly Sunekan, in a Sunekan community, bound to Sunekanized children, grandchildren, friends, and colleagues. Their love, their ambitions, and their happiness will all chain them to the will of the Suneka.   Those who resist find themselves objects of hatred and acceptable targets of petty cruelty; for these most-resistant people, the community often becomes a source of active torment. Such high-resistance subjects ironically find solace and protection from religious authorities and community teachers, who play the role of benevolent teacher and work to ease the subject into compliance. Teachers tend to be more successful in this role, as their less-explicitly-religious position makes them more trustworthy to those who might see the priesthood as responsible for their exile and detention. For those who are won over by this tactic, they may eventually re-introduced into the community in a ceremony intended to ease their transition and mark them as no longer rebellious.   There are those who never stop fighting their re-assignment. These perpetual rebels live difficult, isolated, and statistically-shorter lives. Continued escapes might mean that they end up restrained or imprisoned in their homes, treated more explicitly as prisoners and dangers to the community. After years of spitting in the faces of "kindly" teachers and priests, few would object to them being given the most dangerous, difficult work - they become something between pariah, slave, and prisoner. Those who do escape often become outlaws - Hatwi, bandits, people whose existence is illegal and who are assumed to be dangerous to any innocent people. And it is true that even the least-aggressive outlaws of this sort often steal livestock and supplies in order to survive in the periphery; some outlaws fully inhabit the negative stereotypes and engage in robbery, raiding, slaving, and general banditry. All are assumed to be dangerous criminals anyways. Long-term rebellious Ixdopolos are essentially understood as captive outlaws, inherently criminal and destined to prey upon the vulnerable if allowed their freedom. If the community feels it can neither assimilate nor contain a re-assigned person, they may ask for that person to be re-assigned to a more tightly-surveilled post - but if they cannot get that in a timely manner, communities have been known to resort to outright murder (often brushed under the rug as suicide - which is also common for this population).   There are several other words for this system, such as Tlutluka (person-correction) or the Yuxtox (arranging or ordering those who are wrong). These words are a little different in their meanings, though. Tlutluka refers to both the redistribution of people, their education, and the re-education of those who have strayed from the path of correct action (which doesn't necessarily mean redistribution). Yuxtox tends to be a little more moralistic and large-scale in vision, though, referring to the eradication of foreign cultures and the evangelizing of the Suneka abroad.   People in the Ixdopol are encouraged to use the word Yentis as much as possible for both the system and those affected by it - a phrase meaning "a new assignment" or "reassignment". This is seen as the most neutral phrasing and the most appropriate for interpersonal interactions. It is far more polite to refer to someone's redistribution as Yentis rather than referring to the person as an Ixdopolo (a subject of the Ixdopol), which highlights the persons mistakes rather than their eventual assimilation. Still, newly assigned Ixdopolos do carry stigma and can often be subject to higher workloads, intense scrutiny, and social hostility. Many people call these Ixdopolos 'Yenyens', as a cutesy way of distinguishing the Ixdopolos from people who simply have been reassigned for other reasons (though these other reassigned people may still carry stigma-by-association to the Ixdopolos, depending on the community). The priesthood discourages any kind of discrimination that might impact assimilation, though there is a clear understanding that the enhanced scrutiny and surveillance just needs to be subtle rather than stopped - the Ixdopolos must be watched by everyone until they are "domesticated" ('Evlin').   Rebellious Ixdopolos are often called 'Yuxyens' (taking the 'yenyen' phrase and connecting it to the root-word Yux, meaning incorrect or wrong or misplaced), which are differentiated from yenyens as a whole. A Yuxyen is understood as childish, stupid, wicked, and even dangerous, and they are not subject to as many social protections as yenyens are. While public cruelty towards a Yenyen is frowned upon by all but the most hateful and bitter folk, casual cruelty towards a Yuxyen is often assumed to have been provoked by some misdeed. However, the line between Yenyen and Yuxyen is often ambiguous and the status of each Yuxyen is basically individual: nasty neighbors or rivals might try and slander a normal Yenyen as a Yuxyen, and there is a huge gulf between a Yuxyen who just can't seem to fit into their assigned role and a Yuxyen who constantly lashes out violently. "Acceptable cruelty" towards the former might mean a rude reprimand, while the latter might be vulnerable to open violence and intense abuse. Again, being Yuxyen (or even recognized as Yenyen) is basically a matter of reputation in most communities rather than a formal legal status - though Sunekan courts have historically considered these reputations as legally impactful in some lawsuits. There is no singular administrative body or bureaucracy that manages the entire continental Ixdopol; like much of the Suneka, this is a decentralized system composed of autonomous regional organizations and local groups that operate cooperatively across the continent according to standards defined by the Sunekan Sacred Assembly. Most large republics have their own Ixdopol administrators (often called Topetis Officers or Assignment Officers), who are hired, paid for, and organized by that republic's state priest (or Aziletzen). Smaller republics will typically be lumped together under a single regional priest (or Olatahan) that manages regional clerical affairs, and is paid annually by each serviced republic to manage the Ixdopol there.   Assignment Officers are useful for handling numerous cases as specialized personnel (as there are many logistical hurdles involved as well as personal, social, and economic elements to consider) but they aren't strictly necessary. Where there are no structures to hire and maintain Assignment Officers, priestly networks often work to handle the Ixdopol on their own - organizing the community into small caravans to transport exiles to the next village over, maybe keeping one or two for themselves. This local "take one political or religious exile to assimilate and pass them around" model is the basic machinery that even the more sophisicated Assignment Offices rely on for many routine transfers. When Assignment Officers are not available, this traditional mechanism simply continues unsupervised.   So what do Assignment Officers actually do? Well, they basically keep track of local supply and demand data from various government agencies, track and classify reassignment cases by cause, keep track of problem cases, track school openings, and coordinate assignments accordingly. An Assignment Officer might identify that where there are labor shortages that reassignments could fill, while also making sure that the people sent to fill those shortages are properly mixed (as to avoid people of the same background ending up in close proximity, which would disrupt the system of social pressure) and ideally of the correct skillset. At the same time, an Assignment Officer might make sure that people ended up in villages and towns where there were sufficient teachers and school openings, to allow for them to take classes, and sufficient housing. The Officer might coordinate a long-distance person-swap with a different region or republic, to further diversify the pool of Yentis. They might collect letters from local priests about Yenti problems to be directed to other offices for further action - or if a village or town has frequent issues, they might conduct a site-visit for any obvious problems. And, of course, an Assignment Officer would coordinate caravaning resources to make sure all Yentis as safely transported and fed on the way to their new homes. By every new year, an Assignment Officer usually drafts a brief report of notable trends and cases for their superiors, to be reviewed with all the other reports for overarching trends. So they are basically analysts, social workers, and coordinators who optimize the system.   Who gets taken, how they are taken, and where they initially go is often more of a local matter, which then gets routed into that regional/state-level system that the Assignment Officers handle. Individual Sunekan priests and communities assess who is deviant and when outright re-naming and re-distributing someone is warranted. For someone to get fully Ixdopolo'd, they are usually pretty un-Sunekan or at odds with the community; this kind of radical redistribution is not done lightly. There are other forms of education and re-assignment that don't go as far that are usually used instead for cases of mild deviancy. The full Ixdopol is the ideal tool for fully heathenous, heretical, otherwise unfixable people who need to be fully integrated or re-integrated. That is if the system works as intended, of course. Particularly elitist, brutal, or corrupt elites might leverage the Ixdopol against mildly-deviant local Sunekans as a way to break up resilient communities, punish defiant workers, or persecute local traditions or ritual groups that more lenient priests or elites write off. While the Sunekan Sacred Assembly has issued guidelines to try and clarify what 'solution' is to be used when, these guidelines aren't always acted upon in good faith. In theory, Assignment Officers are supposed to detect and prevent this kind of systemic abuse, but these sorts of things can be hard to discern (and that is assuming that the Assignment Officer both takes that part of their job seriously and isn't corrupt or pressured into silence).   Given this, the Ixdopol is what one might call a "cultural process" that is as much "bottom up" as "top down". There is no top Assignment Overlord that can be killed to end the Ixdopol or persuaded to reform it - the closest one there is would be to get the Sunekan Sacred Assembly to pass new procedure or guidelines, which would then be passed to the State/Regional Priests to be distributed with a plan of action to the Assignment Officers, to be actually enforced on local communities by those Officers. But actually blowing up the Sacred Assembly wouldn't meaningfully impact this system. Individual Lunar Gods have tried to pressure the Assembly to scale down their re-assignments, but the Assembly has generally redirected this pressure towards their own efforts at "perfecting" the system as an organ of assimilation rather than pseudo-slavery.   Ixdopol could also be phrased as 'Ixopol' for the purpose of player ease of pronunciation