@LeviKornelsen I’d suggest songs (and stories), especially the types that are sung at the home fireplace, work songs from the fields, etc. Nationalistic stuff was probably forbidden (or subverted, new lyrics to old tunes) but those centered around daily life would probably remain. Lullabies, children’s stories, local legends, musical traditions and styles. Riddles, jokes, popular folk sayings. Oral traditions have a history of being persistent that way.
@LeviKornelsen Living arrangements. Culturally, in the real world, just as soon as cultures can afford for extended families to break up and go their separate ways, they do. (It's practically universal). This despite obvious economic benefits and a lower cost to the environment of extended family living. That wouldn't change.
@LeviKornelsen One great example probably comes back to food. Let's say that the empire brought in cows, so now everyone eats beef. There will now me lots of different culturally flagged ways to prepare beef (Yay, apparent diversity) but no one actually questioning the presence of the cattle or generally moving away from beef. Because that's anti-revolutionary.
@LeviKornelsen You gotta figure the revolution is going to lean heavily into lip service towards diversity, so there will be a lot of visual trappings of the original history and cultures, with a big "Strength through unity" vibe. Different weapons and military traditions. Colors. Architecture. New titles. But the "boring" structures underneath will be remarkably unchanged.
@LeviKornelsen Language becomes the next really interesting question. The Empire squashed old languages, probably quite aggressively, so what is the language of the revolution? Probably more than one language, especially if the empire was so effective at quashing it. I feel like one culture kept is spoken language, another hid its written language, and the revolution tries to jam both of them together.
@LeviKornelsen A couple peopel have called out food, and that was my first thought, but I now want to argue with myself and assert that a lot of what the empire did included rolling in with their own foodcrops and beasts, which were bountiful, but not necessarily long term healthy. The revolution won't give these benefits up, but finding the old ways to grow and eat becomes an effective form of sedition.
@LeviKornelsen Anything that can be reskinned to imperial norms or covered up as mundane stuff.
So of course all the children make flower crowns, it helps build manual dexterity for other skills. The fact that a bunch get done around the solstice is a coincidence - that's when you get the most blooms in this region.
Of course we make roast boar on this imperial feast day. So what if it happens to match up with the Eve of the Great Hunt. It's just a pig.
@LeviKornelsen basically everything about a culture and history would stick around. At least historically speaking that's how it has worked.
You only really get erasure when there's a concerted effort. Taking people and removing them from their homeland, and forced reeducation with a new culture. See: the American model of imperialism. Which is a newer invention. Roman imperialism for example, didn't really work that way.
@ambi@LeviKornelsen and there are plenty of historical examples of conquerors that came, took over, looked and went "you know, this is so nice! Let's keep these things because the people here are onto something!"
@LeviKornelsen@ambi Maybe tie the imperial political structure to a spiritual/religious belief system that links "correct living" with some sort of spiritual reward/doom to get motivation?
Like, say, some version of "as below, so above" where the spiritual Empire can only persist if it's reflected in the mortal world. So if the Empire falls, so does Heaven.
@LeviKornelsen@ambi What if they used to be the Divine Mounts of the gods (or any other variant of God-Beasts with a job) and while the empire quashed anything about the gods incl the Beasts, the revolution co-opted the idea of the Beasts as a sort of "the enslaved overthrow the masters" narrative?
@LeviKornelsen superstitions are pretty hard to quash. Depending on the timescale, they might have been rewritten or reframed. But even stripped of the original context they have a strong memetic quality. What once was an old wives tale becomes “we do that just because we do”.
A real world example is the Chinese 坐月子 where new moms follow a strict regimen of rest and diet after giving birth. Some aspects are rooted in superstition. But taken as a whole, it is viewed as the healthy thing to do.
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