By and large the wish granting powers had worked together to keep the world as close as possible to how it had. Thanks to the Ultimate force there would be no chaotic Butterfly effects from the retroactive changes. The world was populated by the same people that it had been before and by and large they were doing pretty much the same thing that they had done before. The major difference was that they were now doing it naked.
Some adjustments had to be made to allow for things like the sudden disappearance of the textile industry and related fields of human endeavor, but they were not as large as one might have thought and the majority of those affected adapted to their new roles quite nicely.
Most of the changes that affected people were cultural and not as dramatic. Without nudity taboos lots of little everyday things had subtly changed. Unisex bathrooms were the norm and institutions like public baths and locker rooms were no longer segregated by gender. Ranma of course found other ways to get himself into trouble despite that.
The united granting of the wish had changed the world and still made it stay very much the same at the same time. A lot of effort had been put into making the created reality a coherent whole that to the people in it made sense the way it was.
The world wasn't perfect, but nothing designed by a committee ever was and the minor unintended side effects and unplanned consequences did not really detract from the whole creation.
There had been some small oversights and forces working at cross-purpose. Some miscommunications were inevitable given the unique background of the participants.
Belldandy being a goddess had not given much thought to what the results of the orbital adjustments of the planet would do to the humans and the cultures and religions they would evolve because of it. She was understandably used to seeing cosmology as something fixed and revealed from above and not invented and projected from below. She was in her divine aspects mostly connected to human ideas of fate, followers celebrating certain dates because of astronomical circumstances was something that happened to other gods. So perhaps she should be forgiven for her small oversight.
Thanks to the changes there were no seasons anymore and no cold winters where people fearfully huddled around their fires awaiting the day of the longest night that would signal that the worst was over and the days would finally grow longer again. They did not invent feasts celebrate the rebirth of their dying sungods and generally took the sun, important as she no doubt was to them, a lot more for granted. They still recognized such events as perihelion and aphelion, but they just did not hold the same importance to them as equinoxes and solstices had before. Humans instead started paying more attention to the moon whose cycles were now far more visible than the sun's and who still had a noticeable effect on the events on earth. As a result many a moongoddess rose to prominence eclipsing now relegated sungods in their glory. Humans also predominantly developed lunar calendars counting things in months and kept track of years mostly in terms recurring positions of the stars in the night sky and not the passing of seasons.
The consequences were mostly small and inconsequential from a human perspective compared to the primary changes. Who cared that Shakespeare had to discard several drafts of "Aphel Night's Dream" before finally deciding that the night of the full moon while a dozen times more common was nonetheless a far more appealing and magical setting for his play? But when Belldandy would next return home to the heavens she would discover that there had been some major changes not in the essences of divinity but in the human believes that had shaped them and given them form. Of course she would probably be a bit too busy adapting to her new totally nude life with her sisters and Keichi to visit heaven anytime soon.
The Monkey's Paw had been allowed to squelch any attempts to invent clothing and keep people from evolving purely protective work accessories such as aprons or gloves into decorative garments. Any human who wore the body covering tools of their trade when it wasn't strictly speaking necessary was running the risk of suffering a fatal accident and anyone who toyed with the idea of enlarging and expanding jewelry and other adornments into something clothing-like was tempting fate. Researchers who looked into the possibilities of using thicker, self-hardening bodypaint for the 'uniforms' of soldiers and policemen to give them better protection quickly abandoned their efforts for health reasons when they got close to anything that might resemble clothing. Variations of any of these things involving 'see-though clothing' ran into the same sort of troubles. A clear plastic apron was still clothing if worn after work hours.
The end result was that people in this world had a very justified superstition about unnecessarily covering their skin and hiding their body from view. As with anything some humans took these things far too serious. Many religions made being exposed and on display into a virtue and hiding your body from your community into a sin. Not a few cultures ended up ranking body modesty with greed and jealousy on the morality scale. Some believes evolved to brand all kinds of skin-covering as unclean even if was necessary for a person's profession. There were still places where people like beekeepers and their descendants were looked down upon and discriminated against. Many religions created strict and sometimes quite arbitrary rules about jewelry, accessories, make-up and hairstyles that could and could not been worn. While in some places youths rebelled by growing their hair extremely long draping themselves with beads and chains or covering themselves in tattoos and piercing other more backwards areas clung to their often rather misogynistic traditions and women's rights organizations bemoaned the terrible state of women in some countries who were forced to shave off all body-hair and forbidden from wearing any sort of decorative accessories at all.
But perhaps it would be giving the Monkey paw to much credit when attributing all the bad things that had resulted from its actions to its own diabolic malevolence. Perhaps a lot of it was simply human nature.
Some unintended side effects on the other hand could almost be considered benign as these things went. The foolish mortal that had made the wish would surely not object to the fact that in their attempts to preserve the old ideal of female beauty in a world that offered no support against gravity, Urd and the genie had gone perhaps a bit overboard. The redesign had resulted in an average female built that by and large was far closer to the ideal than it had been before and would stay that way for a longer time. Of course part of the improvements were the result of the physiological climate adaptions made to all humans and cultural phenomenons caused by living in a world where showing of your body was considered a moral virtue and thus extended to both genders, but the difference was more obvious in females and women did not age much visibly and were now enjoying a youthful appearance for much of their life in a world where nobody celebrated birthdays.
There had also been some small technical oversights that could not be justifiably blamed on anyone in particular. The idea had been to change the world in such a way that nobody but the recipient of the wish and those involved in fulfilling it would remember that it had ever been different, this even include deities such as Belldandy's younger sister who otherwise would have had a hard time adapting to the new world. What they had failed to consider was that the wish would affect everyone on earth and that included quite a few entities who were not susceptible to having their memories rewritten by retroactive changes to history. Those with a strong connection to the timestream would be immune as well as anyone actually immersed in the timestream at the moment of change by a freak chance. If applicable their bodies would still be altered, but they would keep the memories of how the world was before the change. And of course even the combined powers of everybody involved could not alter the minds of those very few who ranked above them on a cosmic scale.
In addition to this technical oversight there also were some semantic problems arising from their understanding of the scope of the wish. It had been interpreted to be mostly aimed at the total eradication of the concept of clothing from the planet and leaving mankind in perpetual nudity. The group had had the foresight to extend it beyond just humans to include all sentient native beings that might come up with the idea of wearing clothing to cover their nakedness. For those who had started life as humans the change was automatic for other races it was added specifically. Werewolfs and other shapechangers now no longer had to bother with the post-transformation ripped-pants problem that had plagued them for ages and mermaids would no longer have to spend long hours searching for a matched set of seashells in just the right size. For some creatures the lack of clothing meant a larger change in their lifestyle. (It took the joint efforts of all of them working together to make mummies fit.) But most beings adjusted pretty much the same way as mankind.
What they had neglected was to think beyond the scope of their planet and its assorted planes and pocket dimensions. There was an entire Universe of beings out there and quite a lot of them had not only developed the idea of clothing, but also the ability of interstellar travel.
Being an alien on planet earth made you stand out even under the best of circumstances, but if you were the only one dressed your chances of blending in were pretty much shot.
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(Posted Wed, 23 Aug 2006 08:22)
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