sunlit_stone

I started writing a reply then accidentally navigated away and lost it--which teaches me to write in the DW editor, dammit. The perils of working on a different OS for your work computer than your personal computer, you have all the wrong keyboard habits.... Let's see what I can reconstruct!

I remember hearing from someone that Miles Vorkosigan is supposed to be a Lymond Expy I heard that too, and it's one of the reasons I was so suprised not to like him! I feel like a lot of Vorkosigan Saga fans really like Lymond. But Miles is nothing if not fallible, and it's really important to the books--I mean, you can't have the end of Memory without the beginning of Memory.

But reading your writeup, I'm really surprised it's so common not to like him! That's not really the impression I'd received on tumblr but it's probably a sampling bias, and/or him becoming more likeable over time. (And I likewise like Laurent and--I only got a chapter or two into Fionavar, though I intend to go back and seriously read it someday, but I think I remember meeting Diarmuid and liking him too!) Looking over the parts you liked, one of the moments that make me more inclined to like him is the emotional intensity of his attachment to Scotland, so there's that too. I had totally forgotten about the prosecutor, and I didn't think of shipping them, but I kind of love it XD

(Also, Bujold AMA! oh man!! I really love this observation on romance: [...]it seems to me the essential question the events of a romance story ask and must answer is not, "Will these people get together?" but rather, "Can I trust you?")

(...and drawing these two strains together, I think one of the reasons I don't like the Penric stories as much as her other writing is in part because he does strike me as less fallible than Miles, and/or at least, his fallibility tends to have much lighter consequences.)

There seem to be quite a lot of books these days where the book thinks it's presenting a clear Good Guys vs Bad Guys scenario, and yet there's some unintended implications which are highly questionable, that the book is not at all interested in examining, and that drives me nuts! Seriously!! Not to be all TV Tropes but a lot of works seem to suffer very heavily from a protagonist-centred morality, and/or--and this is one thing that always drives me nuts--a failure to treat the world and the characters seriously, on their own terms, instead of essentially a morality fable which must map directly to contemporary, real-world political dialogue. Even when it makes no sense!! I was thinking of a couple of reviews I've read recently--this one, which now that I go and look at I see you've already commented on XD, and this one, which a friend linked to me as summarizing their objections to the book they'd just, unfortunately, read... I really do hate it when authors (and fanfic authors likewise) don't let the world stand on its own terms. Not everything has to be a directly applicable commentary to the contemporary politics!!

(...though conversely I've been thinking lately about the way a lot of modern SFF seems to take nobility for granted as kind of set dressing in a way which somehow allows the world to be very progressive, which drives me bananas because That's Not How That Works--or maybe not conversely, because I think taking a world in which nobility really means something actually seriously would quickly reveal how regressive it would actually be.... I mean obviously I don't insist that no story can have unexamined progressive nobility but as a trend it does bug me. Up with democracy! One of the very most important things we have, politically speaking! resides, grumbling)

wishing your grandparents all the best Thank you!! Very much the same to yours!!