History Characters / BattletechClans

Unfortunately, the pair would suffer a major tragedy after their son was murdered in one of the many riots leading up to the Exodus Civil War. Electing to join Nicholas Kerensky in his Second Exodus, Sandra and Hans would go into temporary exile after refusing the Great Founder's demand to take up command of separate units, refusing to be parted from one another. Eventually returning from the wilds of Strana Mechty with tales of how they were sheltered by a family of ghost bears, Sandra would take up the role as Khan of the newly established Clan Ghost Bear, with Hans serving as her ''saKhan''.

** Like the Draconis Combine, they're an aggressive, ultramilitaristic culture that embraces [[ProudWarriorRaceGuy a brutal warrior ethos]] and makes absolutely no pretenses of being a democracy and finds the very idea of constitutional government absurd. They both tend to favor lighter, more heavily armed mechs and a ritualistic approach to combat and war brought on by resource issues and a limited economy and both have profound logistical issues. They even both fetishize the number five and incorporate it into all their military organizations. But the Draconis Combine clings to Earth culture like nothing else and still has a robust set of cultural achievements, while the Clans have completely discarded seemingly all human ties in the revolutionary pursuit of an alien new morality and "downtime" is barely a thing that exists. While the Combine can ''sometimes'' discard hidebound honor for expediency, the Clans had their whole way of life shattered trying to do the same. And while the Combine has lost wars because its troops were ashamed of the things they did out of BlindObedience, the Clans barely see civilians as people and have instead lost wars because the people they're conquering quickly grow to hate them more than even the heaviest-handed Inner Sphere powers.

** Like the Federated Suns, they [[{{Hypocrite}} claim to be the true heirs to the Star League's idealism while actually representing a twisted mockery of it]]. Both profess high-minded equality but don't live up to it in practice, the Federated Suns through a constitution that doesn't actually offer popular government and the Clans through the official assertion that all castes are equal while in practice the Warriors' monopoly on actual political power means that they're more equal than others. But while the Federated Suns have their flaws, with a government that looks a lot more like UsefulNotes/ImperialGermany than EagleLand, they can at least argue that their constitution functionally protects many individual rights and liberties, so they're generally ALighterShadeOfGrey compared to their neighbors. The Clans make no pretense of any of these things, enslaving and even committing genocide on every world they conquer, and until the Blakists started flinging nukes around like they were going out of style, they ''were'' the greater evil beside whom everyone else was ALighterShadeOfBlack. And while the Federated Suns are failing to live up to their positive ideals, the Clans' extermination of the Not-Named Clan happened because the Not-Named Clan was shirking some of the more oppressive and authoritarian rules of their civilization, and the rest of the Clans and their founder murdered them all rather than admit their cruel ways [[AllForNothing might not be]] NecessarilyEvil.

* ScrewThisImOuttaHere: During the Wars of Reaving, Clan Hell's Horses was split in half. One half became Clan Stone Lion, used by Clan Star Adder as a means of keeping Clan Steel Viper at bay. The other half grew sick of the constant infighting and backstabbing, leaving Clan space entirely and settling in the territory they'd seized during the Clan Invasion. And again when they were press gang into an alliance with Clan Jade Falcon. They were disgusted by the atrocities Khan Malvin had committed, they break off from them as soon as possible.

** Like the Capellan Confederation, Clan culture almost always builds a totalitarian police state, where individuals are sorted into castes and those in the lower castes are basically enslaved to feed the war machine. But while the Confederation only puts the lowest caste into indentured servitude and has a civilian government, most Clans operate as a de-facto military dictatorship where every caste but the Warriors are slaves of the Warriors, and there's a pretty good argument the Warriors ''themselves'' are slaves of the system they serve. The Capellans also have a robust welfare state where the citizens' needs are dealt with while every Clanner can expect to be all-but worked to death; even the Warrior caste tends to be literally used up young to feed the war machine. While Capellans actively encourage citizens to try to advance through their caste systems and achieve social mobility, the Clans' obsession with fatalism and eugenics instead traps individuals in castes from the day they're born, and while the Capellans' elaborate system of meritocratic exams attempts to test how well the applicant would perform in their ''new'' position, the Clans' trials and honor-duels only test how well those seeking advancement would perform in a very specific set of skills that might or might not translate at all into their higher rank, leading to [[ThePeterPrinciple overwhelming institutional problems]].

* FreeLoveFuture: Downplayed. The Clans have a pretty casual approach to sex, especially among [[BrotherSisterIncest members of the same sibko]]. Sexual fidelity is a bizarre concept to them, courtship is limited to walking up to someone and asking if they're interested in sex, and marriage doesn't exist (among the lower castes, procreation partners are assigned, but people are free to bang whoever they want outside those arrangements).

* LetsFightLikeGentlemen: The Clans follow a code of honor called ''zellbrigen'', which emphasizes fair combat, from hand to hand duels all the way up to the conquest of entire planets. The code was formed to minimize loss of life and resources after the SLDF fled known space and settled on resource-poor planets. It essentially prohibits using overwhelming force in the name of honor, which makes sense to Clanners and completely baffles Spheroids, who are more interested in winning than fighting honorably and tend to use everything they've got in a fight regardless of what the other side has on hand. Notably, most of the Clans are willing to suspend ''zellbrigen'' and get serious against foes they deem dishonorable, which usually happens right after said foe breaks the code themselves. Clanners will challenge targets and focus on single combat, while the Spheroids make free use of massed fire - which tended to cause problems with the technological advantage the Clanners had in weaponry.

* TheLastDJ: [=McEvedy=] refused to simply fall in line and blindly follow Nicholas Kerensky's vision for a new society, implementing her own version of his reforms that preserves some of the pragmatic discipline of the old SLDF methods. Unfortunately for her and her Wolverines, Kerensky was in no mood to tolerate anything or anyone that could possibly undermine his iron grip on the Clans.