I guess what I meant to ask is whether the Star Gods would have replaced the Mantu had something along those lines been worked out in 1994.
Well, knowing something like that is an impossibility. As I said, the references to the Mantu are a result of a conversation Dr. Forstchen had with the people in charge of Wing Commander in 1993. He was not asked to include them, and he created the name himself. Whoever he spoke to (it may have been Starr Long) told him that they were considering a story about a new more powerful alien enemy for Wing Commander 4, and Forstchen went forward from that fact. That story didn't happen, though a largely different group of people ended up doing something similar a few years later with Prophecy.
Reasonably speaking, the ICIS Manual could have taken the Mantu either way -- instead of giving them a direct historical background, it could just as easily have said that 'Mantu' was the Kilrathi word for 'Star God', and that the pre-historic Nephilim were what they'd been afraid of for so long.
No, that would be the most awful thing that could ever happen to Wing Commander.
It seems like there's something else to this. I can understand not liking Prophecy for a variety of different reasons... but it really feels like ike you're insisting that the story is something it's not in order to criticize it on something other than a personal level. I can't find any fundamental wrong with the idea that there would be an alien race that inspired the Kilrathi to create their doomsday prophecy. The Kilrathi *think* the Nephilim returning is the end of the universe -- the game is not promising this.
To be honest, I think any future Wing Commander game that takes place after WCP will simply do its best to ignore the events from WCP, because ultimately the Kilrathi are far, far more interesting than the Nephilim. Of course, that's pure speculation on my part, but it does seem more likely, for the same reason that a Kilrathi War game seems more likely in the first place than a post-WCP game. And, well, if that does happen, then it really will come down to a "pseudo-academic forced perspective read on specific elements of the continuity", as you call it.
That's not what I mean by a pseudo-academic forced perspective -- that would be simply not addressing the Prophecy era in favor of returning to the more succesful Kilrathi games. The forced perspective would be doing a direct sequel to Prophecy, but basing it only on what we think the characters know rather than looking at the whole narrative. Of course, no matter what we think, EA won't necessarily agree -- we sohuld table this discussion, as the answer may become clear very soon.
...Except that the person writing it has no reason whatsoever to make the connection. If an alien race was to appear above the Earth right now, would anyone look back to the Biblical Nephilim to explain it?
... seriously? If aliens suddenly came out of a space hole and started killing people, I'm pretty sure we'd have more legitimate sociohistorians looking at all kinds of old conspiracy theories (and you'd *certainly* have anyone remotely religious turning to their bible...).
There's a guy out there, named Erich von Daniken, who's made a career out of books that "re-interpret" folklore and archaeological findings to prove that Earth has been repeatedly visited by aliens. This guy has raked in millions of dollars from his books, because they're very enjoyable... but nobody in the scientific world actually takes him seriously. He's regarded as a crackpot - and that's exactly how Confed would look on any intelligence officer that tried to submit a report arguing that a previously unknown alien race had visited Kilrah before, because the Kilrathi have myths about gods coming down from the stars. More than that, though - it's exceedingly hard to believe that it would even occur to anyone to make the connection. As a general rule, intelligence officers are by far the least likely people to try to connect a current event with a most likely fictional (as far as this intel officer would be concerned - most people, particularly those whose job requires them to always think rationally, tend to reject five thousand year old myths as fiction at best loosely inspired by fact, and certainly not as historical records) event from five thousand years earlier.
You're making several bad assumptions here, chief among them *who* is responsible for the report (the ICIS manual doesn't say), and *how* he is regarded by Confed. The entire package begins with a disclaimer directly addressing that -- "all data and analyses are based on
unprocessed primary sources. Conclusions and recommendations should be regarded as HIGH TENTATIVE." Their punctuation, not mine.
We also know absolutely nothing about a million other factors -- you're assuming, for example, that Kilrathi mythology is exactly as undefined as our own. It's equally possible that this is some long-standing xenohistorical analysis and not something that's suddenly been decided. What if the Kilrathi have elaborate drawings of spaceships instead of mysterious rock formations, and futuristic graduate students have been doing legitimate research into the origin of the Prophecy since the war ended? This goes back to the old trap, that they're not just furry humans.
Ok, but imagine today's U.S. military being transported back in time only 65 years. The whole combined might of the Axis would be lucky to last a month. Now take them back only another 80. A single Abrams would devastate the entire Confederacy in a week. Even if the Nephilim were really really slow learners, they still have the jump on us by not hundreds, but thousands of years. Earth should be a great big bugfarm.
First, we should let the record show that the report we've been discussing does directly address this... there's a paragraph about it (page 20, third paragraph down).
Your post isn't entirely accurate, though. Technology doesn't advance at a steady rate... it jumps quickly, and it levels out, too. We've had quite a few advances in recent years... but there are long periods of time where that was not the case. 50 years between the biplane and the jet is interesting, but it doesn't mean that we also didn't spend 10,000 years trying to build a slightly better stone axe.
We also don't know enough about the Nephilim. If, for instance, their ships are truly "grown" (as suggested by their designer, Syd Mead), then perhaps they need to 'evolve' better weapons. If they're actually a "membership test", then maybe they're kept at a particular level of technology to treat evey race they encounter the same way (a galactic SAT). We also don't know exactly what level they were at when they impressed the Kilrathi -- appearing magic to primitives doesn't require a fighter that can go toe-to-toe with a Vampire.
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