The Careless Continent

There is not much point to trying to write a contemporary account of the Careless Continent (short for "I Couldn't Care Less What You Call It", the response of the DAS Secretary to infighting over the name from its residents), owing to the fact that its political landscape changes so rapidly that by the time you write an encyclopedia about it, some of the countries have already ceased to exist. It is, bar none, the Guild of Mapmakers' least favorite continent. Nor is it a surprise that Lepazzia picked up their entire country and left the continent behind in the fourth century — an event that didn't make the Guild any happier.

Why, exactly, the Careless Continent is in a state of constant warfare and regime change is lost to history. More specifically, so many competing histories have been promulgated by the ephemeral governments of Careless that the task of sifting through them for the nuggets of truth is herculean. Actually visiting the continent for archaeology is out of the question: to get to anything that isn't already collateral damage requires trekking through multiple active war zones.

It's not clear that the various nations of Careless even care what the reasons are. For them, instability is simply the way life is. In most of the languages of Careless, the word for "government" shares a root with the word for "temporary structure". Sovereigns rotate in and out of the Disputatious Assembly of Sovereigns so often that the consensus is now that Careless nations only declare themselves a state in order to send a champion as a sovereign to the Assembly to fight another nation's sovereign, because they'll be in an easy-to-find location, and anybody they sent to the Assembly must have been important. Getting used to/dodging the sparring sovereigns of Careless is something of a rite of passage for new members of the Assembly. The Hegemon of Whales, given the great cultural barrier between humans and whales, has still not gotten used to it, and blames Flandre.

Ever since certain events six years ago in the Assembly, the Secretary has quarantined the sovereigns of the Careless Continent in the "Time-Out Corner". Some of the other sovereigns have expressed disapproval with this measure, both at the implication that unruly sovereigns are like so many misbehaving children to Secretary Tomas, and at the consequence that the Careless sovereigns now fight even more, since nobody is in the way. Tomas, in response has pointed out that because they are out of the way, their fighting is quicker and less distracting.