The Black Friars

For the first few centuries of the modern era, everybody expected the French Inquisition. Dystopian Catholic France would have it no other way. They scoured Farrellitism into paranoid French undergrounds or Occidental exile; to this day, children are terrorized into good behavior by the simple threat "Gardes ta langue": watch your tongue. When the Nestorian Epistles led to the construction of Saint-Thomas d'Indé in Paris, the Inquisitors fought it tooth and nail, driving several Syro-Indian metrans back to the Malabar Coast before the rest were built and burning one or two Heretical Heroes [who?]. During the Guise Golden Age, any thinker or writer of note expected a visit from inquisitors at some point during their career; the first visit by the Inquisition was a commemorated coming of age, like losing your virginity.

After the War of the French Succession, the Burgundian disengagement from the Catholic Church led to the decline of the Inquisition as an arm of the French state. But given how powerful it had been for those first 200 years, is it any surprise that the fear of the Inquistion has lasted to the present day?

In Andalusada, that fear has a name, a face and a mythos: the Black Friars.

The Remarkable Mahr

No Muslim marriage is complete without a mahr: a mandatory expenditure (4:4 aside, it's not a "gift") that the husband owes to his wife, without which the entire nikah is void. I'm saying it here because you, dear reader, might not know it already: Andalusada (where the survival of Moorish Spain has left most of Europe much more exposed to Moorish interpretations of Islamic cultural norms) already does.

In fiction, of course, simply paying in cash isn't gonna cut it. A mahr is an opportunity for the author to say something important about the bride-to-be, and just like the chance for anyone opposed to speak now or forever hold their peace, it's too good to pass up. Any creative works that involve a mahr will, almost of necessity, involve a Remarkable Mahr.

The Backbiting Journalists

This is the golden age of newspapers. They're everywhere, and so are their employees; any newspaper reporter could be a stock character - in fact, most of them are, because Andalusada recognizes the same News Tropes and uses them in the same basic ways.

When you have two of them, however, they transform into a world-specific trope worth talking about on its own: the Backbiting Journalists. Very much like Buddy Cops, Backbiting Journalists come in pairs; what makes them so tropey is the huge variety of ways their relationship (between each other and the rest of the cast) can be explored by any halfway-decent author. Where any other character archetype can show up, the Backbiting Journalists can too, and probably have at some point.

This trope is big, moreso than anything yet discussed.

The Maud Missionary

The Missionary Sisters of the Office have such a widespread colonial presence that they've become a stock character of their own, as recognized as the Great White Hunter. Or, at least, the fully-ordained Sister has become a stock character, the Maud Missionary - inevitably a white-hat character.

Unlike other female stock characters, the Maud Missionary is universally acceptable. Her vow of celibacy desexualizes her even as it locks her into the traditional femininity of a woman religious, and her vow of obedience puts no stress on Andalusada's glass ceiling. Those same vows that establish her femininity, however, also make her a Missionary, a daughter of Holy Mother Church whose job is to go to exotic, dangerous non-Western places and prevent folk Catholicism from forming. Even in environments where proper women have no business appearing, the Maud Missionary not only has an excuse to show up - she isn't necessarily a burden on the men. This ability to go anywhere, and thus fill "feminine" roles anywhere, is a big part of what's established the Maud Missionaries in popular fiction.

The Heretical Hero

In the works he appears, the Swiss Advisor wears a white hat. He is invariably a Good Guy, and the proof of it is that he walks with crowds and keeps his virtue - although immersed amidst the most raw and primitive of the aboriginal world, he pours out his civilizing whiteness upon them like the oil of anointment, and their aboriginality cannot grasp or overcome him.

His shadow, his dark parallel, is a separate but related trope: the Heretical Hero. Where the Swiss Advisor blurs the line between civilized and savage respectably - by bestowing honorary whiteness upon those around them - the Heretical Hero blurs that line the wrong way: making their darkness his own, even into the depths of his soul.

The Swiss Advisor

The world of Andalusada has many places within itself that it considers "exotic." As a rule, most of these are inhabited by colored people full of exuberant barbarism, who by all rights should have been conquered by the world's more civilized races and all that. As a rule, most of those savages have been conquered by most of those more civilized races already.

But it's not true of all of them. There are, in fact, some exotic locales that stubbornly refuse to bow their heads and accept their destiny. It's understandable for some of these defiant aborigines, because they're proud (or cruel) and honorable (or merciless) warrior races. But not all of those holdouts are warrior races - and no warrior race, however noble (or vile) it may be, is actually the equal of the good and doughty soldiery of the Empire, whichever Empire it is that the speaker belongs to. Where the plot takes the characters into the midst of such a foreign people, therefore, it is customary to have them encounter the local Swiss Advisor.

The Taiping Princess

Andalusada isn't just a story, isn't just an alt-history: it's a verse, designed for a GURPS game. And because of that, I've had a certain number of characters - some named, some simply archetypes - bouncing around in my head for a long time now. Today I'm going to start sketching a few of them up...

Inside the cities of many New World cities lies an unknown area, demarcated by paifong. On one side of the paifong is the rest of the city; on the other, a micro-nation as sovereign and distinct as the Vatican City. It is cramped, crowded, confined - but to the world outside, it is perilously, barely, contained. The city's law enforcement can enforce no laws there, because even Chinese immigrants find it foreign; their policy is to do as little as possible, and when they must to do it through the only certain authority they can recognize: that Chinatown's very own Taiping Princess.