Nomad Autonomous-Zone Status

Nomad Autonomous-Zone Status is the policy used to govern nomadic populations who are formally excluded from Imperial citizenship but remain subject to imperial power. Its clearest application is Hoshido City, which Selfia designates a special autonomous zone rather than incorporating its inhabitants as citizens. The arrangement presents itself as a way to preserve local sovereignty, yet its practical foundation is conquest, strategic control, and the management of a population whose legal status is deliberately incomplete.

Legal Definition and Imperial Purpose

Nomad Autonomous-Zone Status begins with a categorical distinction: nomads are not officially Imperial citizens. Selfia explains that changing this status would provoke serious resistance from her supporters, so she chooses an alternative classification for Hoshido City. The city is to become a special autonomous zone, a legal form that avoids the political cost of citizenship while still allowing the Empire to determine the territory’s future.

The policy is inseparable from military expansion and economic planning. Selfia expects General Olivia’s forces to take the region and intends to turn it into a frontier gateway because of its natural resources. Hoshido City is therefore not treated as an autonomous community whose status emerges from free consent. Its autonomy is declared from above, after imperial forces are expected to occupy the area, and serves both as a device for territorial integration and as a justification for extracting strategic value from the region.

Hoshido City and the Politics of Exclusion

Jack recognizes that the policy will transform the community he remembers. When he asks how his people are involved, Selfia answers by separating their political identity from the Empire’s formal citizenry. She assures him that the plan is already arranged, while warning that his small village may look very different from the place he knew. The warning exposes the cost hidden inside the administrative language: the community’s continuity is being subordinated to an imperial redesign.

The category creates what the policy’s language calls autonomy without providing the security associated with full membership. Nomads may retain a distinct territorial identity, but they do so under an imperial order that has already decided the territory’s military and economic function. They are neither entirely outside imperial jurisdiction nor fully admitted into its civic body. The result is an exclusionary inclusion in which the population can be governed, relocated, and reorganized without receiving the political standing that would make those decisions subject to equal representation.

Protection, Coercion, and the Exception

The same logic appears when Jack confronts the surviving Theocracy leadership. He orders the remaining citizens to evacuate to the Flying City and offers settlement within imperial territory, describing the arrangement as a means of saving their lives. Their resources are inadequate, and the approaching demonspawn make continued resistance dangerous. Yet the offer is explicitly coercive: they may accept the imperial solution or die.

Jack then distinguishes his own authority from Selfia’s. He says that Selfia wants the Theocracy’s facilities and research, while his proposed settlement would allow her to study the flying city and permit the displaced population to survive with the sovereignty of a free nation. The promise of freedom is immediately qualified when the paladins object that there is nothing free about living under the Empire’s power. Jack answers that they will not be under the Empire’s boot but under his own, reminding them that he is the king who previously killed hundreds of them after their attack on Frelia and defeated the Green Bishop. His formulation reveals the policy’s central contradiction: protection is offered through the same sovereign violence that makes refusal so dangerous.

Administration Through Force

Nomad Autonomous-Zone Status belongs to a wider political environment in which emergency measures displace ordinary legal restraints. Selfia openly describes a purge across the Empire in which 369 lives, and possibly more, are being extinguished among political opponents, rivals, and dissidents. She presents the killings as necessary to secure mankind’s survival and establish the New Republic. Jack rejects that justification, emphasizing that bystanders and innocents have also died and that the violence endangered Ada’s pregnancy and their child.

The policy’s administrative compromise therefore cannot be read as a purely benevolent alternative to direct annexation. Its operation is surrounded by military campaigns, secret decisions, surveillance, restricted movement, and the threat of mass death. Even Jack, after his marriage to Selfia and coronation as king, spends two weeks confined to a luxurious room with limited visitors, effectively a prisoner despite his title. The contrast between royal ceremony and controlled mobility clarifies how sovereignty functions in this world: legal status and public dignity do not necessarily protect a body from confinement or political use.

The apparatus of rule also favors secure records and controlled information. Jack notices that Leona is carrying paper folders rather than a tablet, reasoning that tablets can be hacked and Intellipads compromised, whereas paper remains secure if kept from prying eyes. His public schedule is likewise managed through an Intellipad, listing appearances connected to the opening of a public academy, Celeste’s reveal, a museum, investors, and a local shop, before the announcement of the heir. These details place autonomous-zone policy within a broader system that governs populations through classification, paperwork, publicity, and restricted access as much as through battlefield force.

Political Significance

The policy’s significance lies in the way it makes domination appear compatible with pluralism. By calling Hoshido City autonomous, the Empire can acknowledge a separate community while denying its people the full civic status that would challenge imperial control. By promising the Theocracy a free nation under imperial protection, Jack can oppose extermination while still claiming authority over the survivors. In both cases, sovereignty is preserved rhetorically but narrowed materially.

The arrangement also embodies the conflict between Selfia and Jack. Selfia treats legal categories as instruments for consolidating power, avoiding backlash, securing resources, and gaining access to valuable facilities. Jack resists her willingness to kill civilians, yet his own solution still depends on an ultimatum and on the authority of a king whose past violence makes the threat credible. Nomad Autonomous-Zone Status thus marks neither a clean humanitarian reform nor simple annexation. It is a compromise produced by empire: a structure that can prevent immediate destruction while preserving the unequal conditions that made the population vulnerable in the first place.