Vorkosigan Readthrough: Shards of Honor, Aftermaths

[extrapenguin]

So, we've read the book and are here to discuss! I am unfortunately not all that good at thematic analysis or arc stuff, but here are some jotted-down notes from my read:

• Requests for next Bujold Fest: A treatise on Sergyaran nature.


• Huh, nerve disruptors cause blisters?


• Nuovo Brasil is name-dropped along with Barrayar and Cetaganda – now I'm curious about the Nuovo Brasilians!


• Do they have no blue cheese dressing on Barrayar, or does it taste different from the Betan artificial version?


• Aral's command issues, lol. "Now who in my command is so confused in his thinking as to betray both sides at once?"


• As was mentioned in the Tor readthrough, Aral confesses to 0.6 murders per day on their trek to the supply cache. I like that this is a valid statistic to measure. :P


• Koudelka! Gottyan? Nilesa! (I have no idea what I was aiming at with this note, but whatever!)


• Aral: very abrupt, and not all that good at convincing. "My planet sucks and I fell in love with you while you were puking!" is not the height of romance.


• It seems like Aral's almost trying to sabotage the invasion by telling Cordelia a lot about the plans.


• Cordelia: very ingenious. I can definitely see where Miles gets it from!


• What happened to Cordelia's belt???? It was used to tie up Gottyan, but Aral released him and no further mention was made of the belt. Did Aral keep it as a memento? (Oh, and Aral, get better pants. Yours don't fit. Pants should stay up without a belt!)


• Cordelia: very good at emotional band-aids


• 17 replicators, just given to Barrayar, and some of what was said there makes me a bit uncomfortable. "A couple of them were pretty emotionally divided about abortions." Um. And they were given to Barrayar, with the expectation that... they'd be aborted? They'd grow up to be cogs in the Barrayaran machine, off to kill their fully Escobaran half-siblings should a second war happen?


• How come no-one voted for Steady Freddy?


• Hm, the Betan and Escobaran psychs seem to have done nothing more than give Cordelia a stutter.


• oh Cordelia's daring escape :D (an excellent combination of ingenuity and emotional band-aids!)


• Hm, Aral loathes tiny women? (Another things Miles seems to have inherited...)


• The Bothari bits make me uncomfortable.


• Count Vortala A+ snark. I don't suppose we see much more of him?


• "declare everyone a Vor and be done with the whole bloody nonsense forever" oh, Aral.


• The Escobaran war's called the 120 day war, despite only lasting for 118 days and a part of an hour!


• Mother's Tears charms don't seem to return IIRC?


• Medtech Boni carries around a wedding dress??? Okay this section is creepy.

All in all, better than I remembered, especially re: Cordelia and Aral's relationship. It is still structured so that Cordelia gives up everything while Aral gives up pretty much nothing, but it's more that Cordelia is driven away from Beta than that she walks voluntarily. I wonder what it'd have been like had Dr. Mehta and her colleagues not been such colossal assholes to Cordelia.

Next up is Barrayar, with a discussion post hopefully up on the 18th or 19th.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

My slowly assembled headcanon is that Dr. Mehta was a low-level member of the military with medical aspirations, but who had washed out of actual Betan psychological therapist training on ethical grounds. This made her a perfect target for a certain paranoid faction within the Betan was party (whose star was ascendant at that point) who arranged for her (and a number of others in similar circumstances) to get further training and the promise of a secure little government niche in exchange for occasionally following Special Instructions.

She and her cohort were billed to the rest of the service as sort of a stopgap, people given special quick training to be able to effectively triage and field-treat veterans who had seen combat; I might imagine that Beta Colony's psych programs might not have covered military trauma in that much depth during peacetime in a non-militarized society. Therefore special training would have been necessary. The resulting crew would have spotty training, not super good manner while practicing, and would be trained to focus on some of the more extreme possibilities dreamed up by the paranoid military mind rather than the actual problems of the homecoming veteran.

[stranger]

I kind of like this scenario. It makes sense if we're taking Beta as realistic, in the Shards depiction. The peaceable society dealing with an aggressive new threat probably would panic and shove it all off to the "war party" faction, which inevitably had its own distortions of reality.