Part of the problem was that the Affront had the disturbing habit of treating every other species they encountered with either total suspicion or amused contempt, depending almost entirely on whether that civilisation was ahead of or behind them in technological development. There had been one developed species - the Padressahl - in that same volume of the galaxy which had been sufficiently like the Affront in terms of evolutionary background and physical appearance to be treated almost as friends by the Affront and which yet had a moral outlook similar enough to the Culture’s to consider it worth the effort of chaperoning the Affront with the other local species, and, to their eternal credit, the Padressahl had been doggedly endeavouring to nudge the Affront into something remotely resembling decent behaviour for more centuries than they cared to remember or admit.

It was the Padressahl who had given the Affront their name; originally the Affront had called themselves after their home world, Issorile. Calling them the Affront - following an episode involving a Padressahl trade mission to Issorile which the recipients had treated more as a food parcel - had been most decidedly intended as an insult, but the Issorilians, as they then were, thought that ‘Affront’ sounded much better and had steadfastly refused to drop their new name even after they had formed their loose patron/protégé alliance with the Padressahl.

However, a century or so after the end of the Idiran War, the Padressahl had had what the Culture regarded as the gross bad manners to suddenly sublime off into Advanced Elderhood at just the wrong time, leaving their less mature charges joyfully off the leash and both snapping at the heels of the local members of the Culture’s great long straggling civilisational caravan wending its way towards progress (whether they went wittingly or not), and positively savaging several of the even less well-developed neighbouring species which for their own good nobody else had yet thought fit to contact.

Suggestions by a few of the more cynical Culture Minds that the Padressahl decision to hit the hyperspace button and go for full don’t-give-a-damn-anymore god-head had been caused partially if not principally by their frustration and revulsion at the incorrigible ghastliness of Affront nature had never been either fully accepted or convincingly refuted.