Woo that was 600 posts! Who knew that my hyperfixation on these maladaptive daydreams would teach me so much. I didn't know anything about Blender before, and I'm certainly still not good at it, but it's fun to mess around with.

Anyway, here's some lore on the Partisans.

The Outer Belt during the age of decadence was originally home to the missionaries, its location at the edge of interstellar space making their work easier. Over time, however, many former ecclesiastical slaves, both freemen and runaways, came to the Outer Belt to get as far away from their former masters as possible.

For a time, the two groups got along well enough, both having a shared dislike for the ruling hierarchy, but tensions were always bubbling under the surface. Their perspectives on the Bright Way were fundamentally at odds. The missionaries, inspired by Hearthside's success, wanted to get the organization back on track by dissolving the Bright Way's corporate arm while maintaining its religious character. The former slaves, however, felt that whatever new clergy rose to replace their former masters would simply grow corrupt themselves and perpetuate the cycle. This group's animosity toward the Bright Way slowly grew to encompass religion generally, giving rise to the various secularist groups that Firefly would eventually unite under the Partisan banner.

Regarding Firefly's genocide, there is a small but vocal group of historians both inside and outside Partisan Territory who argue that the worst of the genocide happened before Firefly returned to Focus. Rather than instigating the atrocity, only pulling back at the plea of his advisors, these historians argue that the still mostly disorganized secularist warlords were the ones responsible, and that Firefly was the one who put an end to the matter after he returned from his missionary journey and officially constituted the Partisans. This is a very controversial stance, obviously, but the Lichlord is such a magnet for conspiracy theories and historical revisionism that pulling the facts out of the mess of speculation and rumor can be difficult.

Edit:

Silly me. Making up lies about our Great Leader. There was no genocide. It's all filthy Allied Worlds propaganda.

*angry banging on the door and muffled shouting*

Oops, brb looks like I'm spending six minutes in an oubliette.