Chelouranya: The Rebranding?

Chelouranya: The Rebranding...?

This page is completely incomplete, and really features no content! Consider it a placeholder! I left Aristasia for the most part prior to it becoming Chelouranya. Because of this, I do need to do some extra research to put together this page. While I know some aspects of what Chelouranya involved because I lurked, there’s still much to sort out. I definitely saw the inception of some of the changes that would eventually result in Chelouranya as a concept, and will cover that, too.

Put bluntly, Chelouranya was a new name chosen for (what ended up being) a sort of final incarnation of Aristasia in the early 2010s. This renaming attracted controversy online from former Aristasians and those who were just following the movement for other reasons.

Some called it a “rebranding” of the movement, and there was much speculation as to why this had happened and its implications. As the following quotation from a related page will make clear, a lot of it centered around a dissociation with the real world and a deeper focus on Aristasia Pura. The matter of Pura’s “realness” was then answered with a resounding “yes,” thus, and Chelouranyans pledged their allegiance there rather than to “Tellurian” concerns.

In fact, one blogger has referred to Chelouranya as "the great Aristasian re-branding". Is that accurate or not?

I think that entirely depends what you take Aristasia to have been, and there seem to be a variety of opinions on that matter. We are essentially children of the Motherland of Sai Herthe. Some of us are Herthelani lost from our Motherland. Some are Tellurians who have adopted the Motherland as their true allegiance. That is what defines us.

Now there are people who take Aristasia to have been some kind of Tellurian club. What kind of club, I am not sure they agree among themselves. Some think it was a conservative club, some think it was a radical feminist club, some think it was a "lesbian s/m" sort of club. They all have this one thing in common. They really don't think it had anything much to do with the Motherland. And to us that is what really matters. We aren't lesbians, we are intemorphs. We don't have a standpoint about Telluria and whether it should be conservative, feminist or blue-spotted elephant-ist.

Telluria is this male/female "earth"?

That's right. Our loyalty isn't to Telluria. We aren't any kind of Tellurian club.

And that is what the "real Aristasia" was - an association of Herthelani, not a Tellurian group?

Now that is an interesting question. Clearly "Aristasia" has meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. We have no intention of getting involved in the "what was the real, old Aristasia?" discussion. It isn't important to us. We are who we are. We are the Daughters of Shining Harmony. Some of the things that have been represented as "Aristasian" are - well, definitely not the kind of thing we would associate with.

We are the Daughters of Shining Harmony.

From a page archived in 2013 on The Chapel of Our Mother God, describing Chelouranya in an interview format.

If I may, the word “chel” in Raihiralan was already established to mean “golden” or “shiny,” and “ouranya” had already been given as a title of Sai Thamë, angel of harmony. So yes, they ain’t lying when they imply that Chelouranya translates directly as “Shining Harmony” in Raihiralan, I suppose. I know far too much about the language aspect of this whole thing, heh. As we'll see later, when I (one would hope?) complete this page, the Chelouranyans were utterly unlike many Aristasian precursor groups, but decidedly not without massively problematic attributes, too. A lot of what I'm going to be writing about them will be less-detailed than other sections, though, given that I, well, wasn't there, and haven't a pile of news clippings to go through. This group existed for a short time compared to Aristasia itself, and was less prolific.

Future updates to this page will include discussions of the changes made to lore concerning Aristasia Pura and other related matters during the Chelouranya period. I’ll explain why terms like Herthelani etc. became important, and what they mean. I’ll also talk about the buckets of controversy caused by the “rebranding” itself, and how it was a natural extension of Operation Bridgehead.

While the screenshot included here (and tons of materials the Chelouranyans put out) imply that Aristasia was always Chelouranya-esque at heart, I argue there were, in fact, huge changes in worldview. I hope to include some notes about how the aesthetics of the group shifted during this, too, and how this related to the aforementioned worldview changes.

Return at a later date for the aforementioned updates, if you’re so inclined.