Oldpelt

All selkies can trace their lineage back to the original inhabitants of the Khilaian Isles, who were blessed by The Chimera during the Divine Era. In those ancient days, the people of the Isles were isolated and only rarely made contact with the Samvaran mainland. But over the centuries, selkies have dispersed around the world as sea nomads, immigrants, settlers, merchants, sailors, and mercenaries. "Biological selkiedom" has expanded wildly and become incorporated into numerous cultures and lifeways. Selkie Culture remains an umbrella term, but it is a very expansive one. Even selkie sea nomads are not rooted to the sacred isles any more, as they depend more on connections, migrations, and business abroad than anything connecting to the old islands. The call of distant profit and the small amount of farmland on the isles themselves have long drawn away the ambitious, the second children, the lucky and the unlucky both. Now the vast majority of the selkies are children of the sea, not children of the Isles, and selkie culture has come to see itself in those new terms.   Oldpelts are those selkie families who never left. Some are the descendants of the less ambitious landed elites and the luckier tenant farmers who never felt the compulsion to chase opportunity over the ocean. Many began as bound farmers or slaves who were forbidden to leave, who formed their own communities and clung to the land while their freer kinspeople took to the waves. Even on the sacred isles, the Oldpelts are a minority. To be born away from the island breaks the chain - it is easy to lose this status, but impossible to gain it. And so the Oldpelt families shrink, unable to manuever in a selkie world that values mobility and drawn into the larger sea nomad way of life.   Oldpelts fight to retain their status for reasons both cultural and economic. Oldpelts are considered valuable as preferred practitioners of the old traditions - what one might call Hamekun - and are more likely to be selected as members of the Hanahai (or sacred bureaucracy). Other members of the Oldpelt class are encouraged to engage in traditional crafts and agriculture, which are both culturally valued by selkie elites and sometimes assigned a kind of semi-magical property in people's minds. So there are incentives for broader selkie society and government to retain some Oldpelts. This is where the subsidies come into play: Oldpelts pay fewer taxes and are exempt from rents on the sacred isles to encourage their continued permanent residency. These economic incentives, combined with a more-or-less guaranteed middle-class job in crafts of bureaucratic roles, tend to make for a lot of pressure on Oldpelt familes to not lose their status. Some people still do break the chain, of course; they struggle to succeed in their allotted role, or they get a very promising opportunity abroad, or their bureaucratic work ironically leads to them being relocated to a foreign land.   Oldpelts are stereotyped as being very snooty and elitist about their status. While not every Oldpelt is, the stereotype proves true more generally in Oldpelt community cultures, norms, and expectations. Oldpelt families are very particular about marriages and courtships, are very exclusive about who can participate in their events, and are quite secretive in their crafts and arts. Outsiders may assume that all of this means that the Oldpelts are old-money rich, which isn't true either. Many Oldpelts are middle class; true power and advancement in selkie politics and business depends on mobility. Since Oldpelts are also stereotyped as close-minded traditionalists with no sense of ambition, they are typically excluded from money-making roles and opportunities and from the higher planes of politics. Politically, Oldpelts tend to be very conservative and relatively anti-business.   Many Oldpelts are present in their own communities. In the great city of Halamahi they are mostly confined to the Oldpelt District.