vorkosigan | Details of Barrayar I have forgotten

Details of Barrayar I have forgotten

Do we know what Padma's Da's name was? We can presume his father's name was Ivan, as Ivan would have been named after him. Do we know what Aral's older brother's name was, or Aral's middle name?

What are the Vorbarra colors? Are they red-and blue like the colors of the imperium, so that Barrayaran soldiers in parade dress are in fact wearing Vorbarra livery? Would there then be a difference between livery and a military uniform? I'm pretty sure we only see Gregor wearing nice suits and military uniforms, we don't see him ever wear his House uniform. Of course military uniform usually trumps House uniform, but it doesn't always seem to.

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There isn't solid text evidence for any of those things, although lots of people have pet theories. (Vorbarra livery is mentioned from time to time, I think Gregor even wears it once or twice, but the colors are never actually named--it's just referred to as Vorbarra livery, or the Vorbarra colors.)

From what I've read, Lois's standard operating procedure is to leave details like that as unspecified as possible unless they become story-necessary, so that she has maximum maneuvering room later on. Also she hates making up character names. :)

Yep, the Vorbarra livery is mostly mentioned in passing, as in "an Armsman in Vorbarra livery," but the colors are never specified.

Wow, I never realized that. When Gregor is being four years old and wearing dress uniform, Kareen is wearing a black and silver dress. Maybe it came from there?

Vorbarra house colors are black and silver (at least, that's what the GURPS Vorkosigan book says); service parade colors aren't house colors.

I don't believe we know Aral's middle name. I thought we knew Aral's brother's name, but the Vorkosigan Wiki listing for Aral doesn't mention it, nor does the listing for Piotr mention his father. Huh.

Padma's listing is short & doesn't mention his father.

Aha! Black and silver. Hm. And the Vorkosigans (one of the more powerful families, historically) are brown and silver. One wonders about the politics of how the various families got the various colors. And whether there is any symbolism in how ... close the two color schemes are.

Thank you!

I think they were chosen from what was available when the house was founded, so older houses have "nicer" colors. The oldest houses might have color combinations that match traditional European heraldry, before they ran out. A passage from A Civil Campaign, chapter 7:

"Yes, I feel sorry for those Counts who ended up having to pick their House colors last," Mark agreed. "I think the Vorkosigans must have fallen somewhere in the middle. I mean, brown and silver isn't bad, but I can't help feeling that the fellows with the blue and gold--or the black and silver--do have a sartorial edge."

He could fancy himself in black and silver, with Kareen all blond and tall on his arm.

"It could be worse," Kareen put in cheerfully. "How do you think you'd look in a House cadet's uniform of chartreuse and scarlet, like poor Vorharopulos, Mark?"

Wait. Wait. Mark is picturing himself in Vorbarra colors?!?

Well. I suppose, not having grown up there, the political implications of such a thing are less seared in his soul than Miles and Aral.

Wait. Wait. Mark is picturing himself in Vorbarra colors?!?

Yeah, that part always throws me, too.

We do not have Aral's brother's name. We have an entire conversation about him in Cryoburn, but he is, very carefully, never named. I know that LMB doesn't like naming characters unless she absolutely has to, but really...

(I believe Vorbarra livery is black and silver, but I couldn't say where I got the idea.)

We do not have Aral's brother's name. We have an entire conversation about him in Cryoburn, but he is, very carefully, never named. I know that LMB doesn't like naming characters unless she absolutely has to, but really...

I have ALL THE RAGE at that conversation, the whole idea that a dead sibling is forgotten about within a few years and doesn't matter and everyone forgets about them and it's like they never existed in the first place. The underlying sentiment of "he died young, so he doesn't matter", and then the absolute insult of not using his name even though that's the only thing one of the characters in the discussion *knows* about the person in question.

My issues with literature's treatment of dead siblings, let me show you them. (oh, hi, Wordsworth. NAY, WE ARE SEVEN.)

And Aral's sister doesn't even get the conversation. She just gets a grave.

(My issues with LMB's complete failure to turn any of the dead and unnamed women into anything more than fricking cardboard let me show you them.)

(My urge to write the fic where Miles completely screws up an Auditorial investigation, because the beginnings-- the very beginnings-- were during the Cetagandan war, and Aral's elder siblings were involved at the tail end of the very beginning, and he knows so little about his aunt and uncle, and takes Count Piotr's war stories as utter truth, I will suppress it.)

Aral's sister isn't even in the story half the time--it's just Aral watching his mother and brother get killed, and no mention that his sister was even there. I suppose you could try to paper this over by constructing a theory that she died of something else, before the massacre, but it doesn't help much.

And I see no need to suppress the urge to write that fic! I'd read it...

(My urge to write the fic where Miles completely screws up an Auditorial investigation, because the beginnings-- the very beginnings-- were during the Cetagandan war, and Aral's elder siblings were involved at the tail end of the very beginning, and he knows so little about his aunt and uncle, and takes Count Piotr's war stories as utter truth, I will suppress it.)

No, actually, please write that! (I didn't even remember that he had a sister, that's how short shrift she gets.)

Mark sees her grave, in the scene where he's walking through the graveyard. It's all we have.

And it doesn't seem like Aral's First Wife even *has* a marked grave, since Mark doesn't see it. (Does *Mark* know Aral was married previously?)

I dunno whether Mark knows, but under the circumstances I highly doubt she's buried in the Vorkosigan family plot. I will bet you quite a lot that given how short a time she had been a Vorkosigan and the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death, that her own family and Piotr decided to quietly bury her with her Vorrutyer family. (I doubt Aral was in any condition to be making such decisions.) If Piotr was embarrassed enough over the whole thing to possibly kill her, I doubt he wanted to keep her or any reminders of her after her death. And if I had a daughter/sister/cousin/whatever who I suspected had been murdered by her husband or her father-in-law (even if I thought they might have been justified, as might have been the case) I would not have wanted her buried in their family plot.

Yes, I'd expect that her body was returned to the Vorrutyers.

Mark probably knows about her, as part of his exhaustive study of the Vorkosigans. Galen seems to have been pretty obsessed with Aral. I wonder whether he thinks Aral killed her.

It's probably not surprising that I have Thoughts on what happened to her body. (I have been trying to write Petya Introduces Guy To His Mother for how long now?) I don't think she went back to the Vorrutyers for a few reasons, the first being Hello Patriarchy. There are several possible murderers involved here, and Aral's concerns aside, I don't think Piotr should be more suspicious than Count Vorrutyer is. Her behavior wasn't looking good for the Vorrutyers either, and Piotr and Count Vorrutyer weren't just in-laws, they were first cousins. The Vorrutyers were mainstays of the conservatives, Piotr definitely was, so they were close relatives, probably good friends and war allies (they married their children off less than a decade after a civil war; they were probably on the same side), and they'd made an arranged marriage for their children. All very happy and peaceful, and then Pierre Vorrutyer's daughter starts being Sexual Freedom, and that cannot be allowed to happen. Aral's a possible murderer, so is Ges, but I think Piotr and Count Vorrutyer have equal weight when it comes to possibly being the murderer.

Also, considering the Maien: it's the close relatives. The brother. It being the father isn't too far off. It might even be the fathers *duty*, the way they see it: the mother kills the muties, the fathers kill the dishonorable women. And so the patriarchy is maintained.

And now we come to Lady Vorrutyer Vorkosigan. Even if it was suicide, no one is going to be eager to claim her as their relative. Both sides are equally as guilty of the cover-up, but who has to have her in their family graveyard? They can't put her somewhere else, that would be just making the scandal bigger. So, which one, Vorkosigan or Vorrutyer? They weren't divorced. They weren't seperated. She was married to Aral. Olivia is in the Vorkosigan family graveyard, even though she was murdered for being a Vorbarra. It seems that wives are buried with their husbands. If they were divorced, there would be a much better case for the Vorrutyers having to take her, but I think they were probably playing not-it and Piotr lost and had to bury her as Aral's wife, which she was, instead of as Count Vorrutyer's unmarried-or-divorced daughter.

Even Ges, her brother, thinks of her as Aral's wife. The patriarchy is enjoying itself when it comes to destroying this woman completely.

Considering the Vorrutyers, I wouldn't be shocked if Piotr said "hey, she was a Vorrutyer, you get her" and Count Vorrutyer said "hello no, she married a Vorkosigan" and Piotr was overruled.

I dunno. The whole bridal bed imagry in the epilogue to Cryoburn fills me with rage. HE HAD TWO WIVES. And, yes, there are two sides, he could be buried between them, THAT'S NOT WHAT IT SAYS. It's just, her erasure *pisses me off*. Of all of them, that one bothers me the most. Yeah, she was probably honor-killed, no one cares, and even the narrative insults her.

The non-mentioning of Aral's first wife in that scene really bothered me too.

I would wonder if Cordelia would even want to be buried on Barrayar, except that she made a promise to Bothari.

You should write it!

And, well, my rage at the treatment of the Dead Women, I have already showed. ;)

I can't answer the other stuff, but Gregor and Laisa come to Miles' wedding as Count and Countess Vorbarra; I believe he is in Vorbarra colors at that point. (It makes it much easier for him to be there as Miles' foster-brother if he's there in his face as Count rather than his face as emperor.)

((And now I find myself wishing that "melanti" -- from the Liaden books -- were a common cultural concept, since that fits here better than "face."))

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Details of Barrayar I have forgotten

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