Cleaning Up Pollution

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

(Sorry to be so unholy late with this.  I woke up knowing exactly what I wanted to write, but not sure how to phrase it.  Took me forever.  Now I’ll have tea, and write the book, instead.)

 

Lately I’ve become aware of a tendency in myself and I wonder if other people have the same problem.

I’ll be writing a book, and going along, and suddenly the idea comes for a plot twist that will make it… Well, the way it feels is relevant and meaningful, but if you turn it around what it really is is… meaningless and grey.

You’re running along writing your hero, and suddenly you get this strong need to give him not just flaws (every proper hero has flaws) but fatal flaws.

Look, we’ll call this the Lord Bane issue, shall we, after the leper who is taken to a fantasy world, miraculously cured and his first act is to rape his guide. And there are no consequences of this act in the book. (One of the reasons the book took a flying lesson out of the train window somewhere between France and Germany.)

Or you have a character who is a mentor and a great guy, and suddenly you feel the need to reveal something awful about him.

Look, we’ll start by admitting that my characters tend to have very dark backgrounds. By nature, I’m not a sunny happy-go-lucky person, and I write characters I can relate to. BUT all the same, my characters might have their down moments, but mostly they fight and are active and don’t give up (until you kill them. Sometimes not even then.)

So…

Whence comes the sudden need to “make it all go dark, make it al meaningless.”

Training and immaturity. There is an immature desire to make things “serious” by making them dark. Most people grow out of it at the end of adolescence. Except of course those trained to educate our young.

It starts early. Look at what stories get the most praise in classrooms? The ones where the characters solve the problem and move on, or the dark ones with no solution? And what books do you tend to study in school?

Everything in our culture praises the darker stories, the ones where humans either don’t win or where humans shouldn’t even win, because they’re bad and evil and deserve to be exterminated.

It wasn’t always like this. Mark Twain, while skewering a lot of garbage about his time, writes engaging interesting characters who are not meaningless nor live in meaningless worlds.

In fact, before our current era, the worst offenders in the dark and dreary sweepstakes were the romantic poets and seriously, those people had, as they say, the issues. But even they usually held out a good form of conduct and a bad one, even if in the end the “reward” for the good guy was to die a tragic death and be mourned.

I’d say that the fact that our darkest stories are favored is a sign of a culture in decline, only I don’t really believe that. It’s not the culture but the elites. The people are not despairing nor do they hate humanity, it’s just that the “intelligentsia” wishes we would.

The problem though is that THEIR problems get in your head. Get praised for dark, meaningless stuff, read dark meaningless stuff, get told that only dark, meaningless stuff is good, and you start to fall into it.

How many book series have you read where the author slowly makes the main character unlikeable? (This is particularly awful with funny series, because some people don’t seem to understand that certain things stop being funny and become horrifying.)

I realized, as I was writing a story and this “great twist” occurred to me (short story for the Baen Valentine’s collection) that it not only wasn’t a great twist, it robbed the story of meaning and made it a dime a dozen, but if I went THE OTHER WAY then it actually was a great twist, because given the dark and dreary stories out there (even though this one has… maybe a happy ending, eventually, the characters are both decent people) anything that breaks that mold is innovative and “oh wow.”

And there you have it. The attraction to dark and hatred of humanity of our (coff) “betters” has made their favored grey goo endings the yawn inducing ones.

Reject their pollution trickling into your thoughts. Write good and startling stories.

Dare to be meaningful. Dare to have a favored mode of conduct. Dare to write admirable people.

And as a reader, feel free to praise meaningful books and even (just?) happy books.

Reject the pollution of the dreary.

Doing it p*sses off all the right people.

 

338 thoughts on “Cleaning Up Pollution”

          1. But that’s what made him so funny: he had the power (of the white gold) to change his circumstances and avoid danger, but he was convinced that by accepting the alternate reality he’d be admitting to insanity. So he refused to use it. Brilliant touch.

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            1. Oh yeah, I’ve often heard Donaldson describe Thomas Covenant as an attempt to write a series where the lead character was a horrible person. Which I’ve since come to regard as a form of trolling the audience. Yes, it was a best selling hit, but while I made it through the first book, I vowed never to touch another in the series.
              (Although I did read the two-book “Mordant’s Need” back in the day. Something I chalk up to youth and relative inexperience now.)

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              1. IIRC, Tommy Covenant came out in a period when there was not much else to read. Okay, there was also Sword of Shannara … and The Silmarillion … and Philip José Farmer brought out yet another Riverworld, losing the storyline ever more … We’re talking a dark decade here, and a dark year. Sure, Dianna Wynne Jones published Charmed Life but that was not given any kind of push from its publisher and let’s face it, a “good” book store back then was B Dalton or Walden’s, neither of which were in danger of overwhelming you with SF/F choices.

                I read the first Covenant trilogy; I’ve enjoyed root canals more but you just couldn’t believe anything so dreary wouldn’t eventually provide a reason to read it.

                Now that I think on it, that was just before I took one of my SF/F sabbaticals, reading nothing in the genre except old favorites …

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                1. Nothing else to read… enhanced by being on a week-long family camping trip where it rained. I made it through both series, but I didn’t really enjoy them. In my youth, I missed SOME of how horrible they were, but they definitely didn’t fill me with joy.

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                  1. Care to spoil the endings? Was there ever any good solution to anything, or did he just keep muddling through while not improving at all and things mostly just getting worse?

                    Yep, I tried them, then sold them mostly unread to one of the local used book stores which did take English language paperbacks back then. And at that time I usually refused to give up on anything, I saw giving up on a book as a personal failure. But I could not finish them (I had bought them as a set, used, and tried to start a couple, only to give up with both, and I didn’t even feel like taking a look at the endings at that point, but I have gotten a bit curious later).

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                    2. Now, remember that he has been transported to an alternate universe:

                      I can’t remember the ending to the first book of the first series, but the second book, he finally gets backed into a corner and goes and destroys an important evil artifact, sending him back to “reality”. In the third book he (again after being baked into a corner) confronts the Evil One and while he doesn’t really destroy him, whittles him down to a nub, again sending him back to “reality”.

                      In the second series, there is really no resolution till the third and final book, where he accepts that he has to die to defeat Evil, and allows the Evil One to blast him with his ring of power, then his ghost taunts him to keep attacking and absorbing the blasts until he is again whittled down to a nub, but Covenant is going to remain there as the protector to keep the Evil One trapped for all time.

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                    4. The second book ended with Covenant’s daughter (from the rape) dying after doing something incredibly stupid (specifically, summoning the ghost of the guy that Foul beat waaaaaaaaaaaay back when), and the other guy from the real world (the insanely skilled but blind armchair general) agreeing to be the not-a-druid’s apprentice in exchange for the latter saving his army.

                      I can’t really remember the other endings.

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                2. The fantasy genre was really scarce before — well, about then. The way Sword sold convinced publishers to try fantasy.

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                3. One of many reasons I’m glad I started reading in the genre when I did, right around 1980 or so, and I had my mom’s collection to work through – LOTS of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Barroom, Venus, SO MUCH Tarzan), the early Xanth novels, also a lot of Alan Dean Foster (Oh, geez, the Humanx Commonwealth books, Spellsinger…).
                  Then I was finding things I loved like Robert Lynn Aspirin’s MYTH-adventures, the Belgariad (and I loved it so much, I read it again as the Malloreon).
                  There was so much good stuff back then, (and a lot of it is still available).
                  And we need more of it.

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                  1. Something easily overlooked is the fact that, for most of us, when we first discovered SF/F there was a tremendous available backlog of truly enjoyable material for us to dive into. When I started in the late Sixties there was already 5+ decades of fun awaiting my discovery and it took me ten years to come up for air. There were Burroughs, Howard, Leiber and Moorcock for the sword & sorcery, Heinlein’s juvies and early mature works, Asimov, Sturgeon, Kuttner, Bloch, Lovecraft, the Smiths (Cordwainer & Doc), Blish, Clarke, Silverberg, Tolkein, Dunsany, Baum, Lewis and so many more, an all-you-can-read buffet on library and bookstore shelves awaiting my discovery. There was never an issue of something to read, there was an embarrassment of riches.

                    But for an avid reader the backlog of wealth eventually runs out and you start looking around for new things, new authors and you learn that they aren’t so common as you had thought. And if your arrival at that point corresponds to one of the industry’s periodic grey goo purgatives … you find yourself reading Thomas Covenant and wondering why there isn’t anything else out there.

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                    1. And up to latter part of 80’s was also the time when the old stuff was still getting reprinted. But after that there seemed to be a dry spell, at least in my country you could only find newer books on the stores, and since internet had really taken off yet… Bad years. Especially since there weren’t that many readers of English language sf & f here either, so finding that in used books stores was rather hit or miss too. Back in the 80’s and 90′ there were only two stores in this city which took them in, and they never had a particularly big selection at a time – actually, for a while in the 90’s when I had to get rid of lots of books due to having run out of shelf space in one of those stores more than half of the books were ones I had sold there. :)

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            2. I’m not sure I can call it brilliant when it seemed to be an excuse to have a despicable character who they don’t even attempt to redeem masquerading as a hero.

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              1. People kept giving me the boxed set for birthdays and Christmas! Yeeee!!!!! Kill it with fire! I made it to the rape scene, the first time I tried. Should have quit earlier. There was no second try.

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                  1. I found it fascinating listening to Dan Wells talk about the challenges of writing a full-blown sociopath as a protagonist in such a way that readers would connect with him. Given the nature of the character, that’s a tall order, but the bits of I Am Not a Serial Killer that I’ve read were entertaining. Not my usual oeuvre, but very well done.

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                    1. Dexter is outside my usual reading preferences as well, and I can forgive the slightly purple prose because it’s an internal narration and helps me keep up the strange mental setting that Dexter has.

                      The blurb for I Am Not… sounds entertaining. Popped onto my wishlist/to buy list, and thanks for the recommendation!

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            3. I always thought that was kind of a cop-out. If he refuses to acknowledge the reality of the world he’s been shunted into, why does he eat? Why does he walk around? (Seriously, if it’s a hallucination he might be blundering in front of a bus in the real world.) He goes along with the fantasy reality just enough to be a bastard.

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          3. iirc, the rape had consequences in the second and third books, though it’s not clear how much of that was specifically due to the rape and how much would have happened anyway (aside from the victim’s eventual insanity, of course). And it’s been so long since I read the books that I can’t remember much. Covenant himself certainly gets off rather lightly, all things considered.

            I was introduced to the series through the third book. Didn’t care much for it at all. And of course it also had the side effect of spoiling the rape in the first book. But since I didn’t much like it, I didn’t immediately follow up. Quite a few years later I ended up reading the first two books and the second trilogy. The first two books made some elements of the third book make sense. And the second trilogy was definitely better. Not only was Covenant pro-active in that book, but the overall tone was also more positive (though the books still tended toward bittersweet at best).

            iirc, a while back Donaldson published more books set after the second trilogy, but I haven’t read them. The only other books by Donaldson are his two Mirror Knight books… which ended up as easter eggs in Final Fantasy XIV, of all places (there’s a FATE event in the game called “A Man Rides Through”, which is the title of one of the books; the event has you fighting creatures called “Mirror Knights”).

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            1. That last paragraph should read, “The only other books by Donaldson that I’ve read are his two Mirror Knight books…”

              /sigh

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          4. Concur. Didn’t finish that one, never looked at Donaldson’s stuff again.

            In contrast, re comments further down, I’ve read several of the “I Am Not a Serial Killer” books, and the angle is almost exactly the opposite of the Donaldson dreck – The MC is trying with all his might to remain not-Evil, and generally succeeding, in spite of his impulses. I’d call struggling with temptation and generally succeeding in being not-evil is pretty much anti-goo.

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        2. The biggest problem I had with the first trilogy was that he maintained his sullen depressivism through an entire three books, until the end of each one, where he manned up and did the right thing.

          The second trilogy simply wasn’t as interesting to me, but I read them all anyway.

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      2. But yes, your point is a good one. Flaws to make you character realistic = good; fatal flaws which make you want to ounch the character = bad.

        LOTR was a prime example of this. It took me about a dozen tries to finish the damn thing because Frodo was such a whiny little wuss.

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        1. Aaaaargh. “You” = “your”; “ounch” = “punch.” Sometimes, I think auto-correct wouldn’t be altogether a Bad thing.

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        2. Maybe part of the problem is what folks think of as “normal” or “flaws”?

          Some writers seem to think that if a character isn’t a horrible person, then they’re “unflawed.”

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          1. Cards older books do the opposite, which is one of the things that I liked about them. He’d put his characters through horrible situations so that his characters could grow and develop into better people.

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        3. Aristotle observed we like characters to be as good as us, or a little better. Lots of variation in the flaws we will put up with — or demand.

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        5. I read LOTR in one night (yes, I was like 180 lbs. of condemned veal the next day). I have to say that I found the sections on Frodo and Sam the hardest slogging, but once I got it in my head what Frodo was wearing on his hand – about 400 years of deconstruction seminars – I could forgive him.

          I think that Tolkien bought the Progressive tripe about Industrialism a tad uncritically, but I don’t let that spoil the books.

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          2. In his time, that was still a conservative position against Industrialism. Progressives were still Yah Industry, Yah Science, etc.

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              1. Industry at the turn of the 20th century was a polluting dirty mess. The times Tolkien grew up in, also his experience in WW1 greatly effected his writing.

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        6. Yep, I tried at least three times to read LOTR, never made it nearly halfway through the first book any time.

          I’ve been listening to a lot of C.J. Cherryh’s books while driving lately. She is a very talented author who is very good at writing suspenseful books… most of which I don’t really like (although I always finish them, because she is good at suspense and making me want to know what happens) because she very seldom has a character I don’t despise. If the character isn’t a whiny, angsty, spineless sniveler they probably are the ‘bad guy.’ If they have a spine they are probably a rapist, which the other characters don’t really like, but even their victims are likely to overlook it, because they happen to be good at whatever their job is.

          An exception to this rule is her Channyr (sp?) Saga* books, those are very good, but those characters are non-human (except the one human, who is a secondary character I don’t like… because he is an angsty, spineless sniveler; but at least he doesn’t speak the language well, and we don’t spend much time in his head, so we don’t have to listen to him too much). On the other hand her aliens are more human and much more respectable than the humans she writes in other books.

          *Warning: the first four books of this “series” are basically just one really big book broken into four bindings. They must be read in order to make sense.

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          1. I don’t really remember if I tried to read LOTR after I read them aloud to my boys, sometime around when the first of the movies was released, so I’m not sure how I would like them reading them for myself.

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            1. LOTR can be depressing at certain points, but you have the power to skip those points. Know yourself and how strong you are feeling. If you want to skim your way through the Dead Marshes or Mordor until you get to stuff happening, nobody is going to prosecute you.

              Personally, I ducked out of the tunnels of Shelob at every reading from second grade until the age of thirty, because it was too scary.

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            2. I don’t much like Frodo either, but I love the world. Although that is one of those rare books where I much prefer the Finnish translation to the original, that translator was very, very good.

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  3. You threw a Thomas Covenant book out a train window? LOL you are my HERO! Oh my gosh, what a wretched and miserable creation he was – leper outcast unclean! I wanted to shake him and yell, get over it already, you moron!

    I think part of this whole “flawed hero” ethic comes from, first, way too much deconstructionism, in which scholars try to force every weirdly shaped story tool into a specific-sized hole. The one that they liked using most, second, was the Greek tragic hero.

    I don’t like a Mary Sue any more than anyone else. But when I read a book, I also don’t want a self-loathing hero who claws his own eyes out and then kills himself on top of a hill, all due to things that were beyond his control. I want a hero who confronts the slings and arrows and, by opposing, ends them. I want Beowulf, not Hercules., the Mabinogeon instead of the Mallory version. I want a hero who teaches me how to struggle and overcome and create my own destiny, not one who tells me to lay back and accept my fate. THAT, I think, was the real rape in the White Gold Wielder books: the rape of the unsuspecting reader.

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    1. “I think part of this whole “flawed hero” ethic comes from, first, way too much deconstructionism”

      No argument there. It starts with calling Washington a slave-owner, and ends with there being no true heroes in modern literature. Read any Annie Proulx story as evidence of the latter.

      Fortunately, some modern writers (e.g. John Sandford) buck the trend — and their books sell far more than those of the PoMo pukes, which makes me feel better..

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        1. I’m pretty sure that they are saying these particular books took the notion of a “flawed hero” too far.

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          1. The characters in ‘The Searchers’ may be flawed, but they’re motivated. Hence, the willingness of the viewers to watch the movie.

            Thomas Covenant is both flawed and unmotivated. And it makes for a depressing combination. Further, those around him who are motivated typically come to bad ends after accomplishing little or nothing (and sometimes after making things even *worse*).

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        2. I prefer a flaws hero but there is a limit. There is a point at which flawed becomes vile. That is where I stop.

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  4. Don’t remember trying to change any of my heroes to an anti-hero but there have been some “weird turns” in my attempted stories.

    Like having my main character finding out his potential *male* friend is turning into a woman with an uncontrollable lust for him. Oh, the “uncontrollable” lust then “infects” my main character.

    I’ve managed to purge that weird turn. Still not sure of how his story is going to go but I got rid of that mind-worm. [Nervous Smile]

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    1. Oh, I had a weird turn to one of my books, which I think faintly disturbed my business partner (a woman who loved my books and edited them from a spirit of championship). I had a romantic hero, the spouse of my heroine, who fell in love with him and married and had what my heroine thought was a perfect marriage through thick and thin and various historically-based adventures – save that it had been predicted that romantic hero would die of consumption after ten years. (My plan, and as I was locked into this by previous books.) I was coming down to the point where I would have to write the chapter(s) where consumption would carry him off, and I just did not want to write that. So, I thought – have it happen off-stage as it were. And then I had a brilliant thought; a plot twist which would carry him away … offstage. A back-story which would make him a bigamist. This let me set up the whole conflict in the follow-on book This established the emotional conflict for that book, and let me work out certain residual resentments in real life … but my editor had rather liked that character and was horrifically disappointed that he turned out to be a bit of a cad. Some good reason for such – but still a cad.

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  5. Y’know… The weird thing is, when I read the Thomas Covenant books, lo, these many years ago… I thought they were supposed to be a parody of some kind. I really did. I kept looking for the confirmation, and that was what kept me reading them. I could never find it, so I kept reading. I’m still not sure if the whole thing wasn’t an elaborate “take that”, to be quite honest.

    I’d love to sit Donaldson down with a set of bamboo slivers, and find out the truth. I really think that if he were to admit it, the whole thing started out as a self aware joke, and then it was taken oh-so-seriously, sooooo…

    Kinda like poor John Ringo, who is forever going to be remembered as that guy who wrote the Kildar series, and nothing else. I’d bet money that in a hundred years, that’s the only thing that people are going to remember of his, if only for the “Oh, John Ringo, no…” thing.

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    1. Unless he’s remembered as a prophet for what he described in the home-front plot arc in _Last Centurion_. Or the guy who finally wrote a decent zombie series. But yeah, the Kildar books are a touch too memorable.

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      1. There are a lot of books out there that I’d really, really love to know what was behind them, at least in the author’s mind. Some works seem to have lives of their own, and entirely singular viewpoints when compared to the rest of that author’s works. Kinda like changelings, you know? Did some fairy drop off a manuscript, one wonders…

        The real reason I want there to actually be alternate timelines is so I can find a world where H. Beam Piper didn’t suicide, or where Terry Pratchett dies of old age at about 110, without ever having developed Alzheimer’s. Can you imagine the fun, if you could mine those timelines for the works we don’t have, in our own? Maybe one where Heinlein never had TB, or never had the health problems that make some of his later works obviously a bit… Er, distorted would be a good word.

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          1. Ah, true… But, we don’t know that he’d have never written had his naval career gone on. I would love to have had him write up his version of WWII action as he saw it, had he gone on with that career.

            Writers write. I think Heinlein would have found an outlet, no matter what.

            Of course, you never know: Perhaps him getting medically retired kept him from a rendezvous with a badly-driven cab in Hong Kong, or a bomb during Pearl Harbor.

            I still think his memoirs of actions during the war would have been memorable. And, had he gone into writing during his post-war years, who knows how that would have influenced his work. You can almost feel the pre-war Navy in most of his work that touches on the military. It’s an atmosphere/mentality sort of thing that might have lent a different feel to his characters and situations had he been in the Navy for the wartime expansion and build-up.

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              1. I was going to mention that. Only found one copy online (so far), and I’m wary of that because it looks like it’s on a Russian site. Plus there’s the copyright issue.

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        2. I don’t remember the issue, but I remember Flagship once ran a short story where a couple goes through the Bermuda triangle and winds up (very temporarily) in a parallel universe where Star Trek got five seasons, and the last episode was written by Frank Herbert.

          As well as a Star Trek: JAG, Star Trek: Midshipmen, and Star Trek: Vulcan Academy series…

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          3. I want to visit the one where Fox doesn’t cancel Firefly, and there’s more than a single season of it available.

            Of course, given the underlying factors, finding a universe where Fox isn’t run by a bunch of ‘effing idiots is rather a low-order probability. Wherever that place is, it probably doesn’t speak English.

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            3. Given some of Joss Whedon’s remarks lately (comparing the GamerGate folks to the Klan? Seriously.), I plump for the AH where Mal Reynolds meets his creator… and puts a bullet in him.

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              1. Whedon’s been a loud, idiot lefty* since…forever. Part of why I’m not as big of a fan of his stuff; even if the power of the story often overwhelms his philosophy, you know there’s going to be a loud Because The Author Says that promotes something incredibly dumb, ignorant or flat evil.

                *I’ve got relatives that are non-idiot lefties, with “lefty” in this sense meaning someone whose life is organized around the elements of philosophy, kind of like how I’m Catholic; it doesn’t matter which came first.
                These relatives may be crazy, but they at least check for internal consistency in what they’re promoting, even if that often takes a lot of twisting. (Like considering a married 19 year old having a kid to be the same as a 12 year old having a kid, because Teen Pregnancy Bad.)

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                1. And he seems to think that stories should always end with some sort of tragedy. The Avengers is great, but he was not in full control, so it seems he can make great stories as long as there are restrictions on what he is allowed and not allowed to do with the story, but do not leave him to play all by himself.

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                3. I have a theory that Whedon suffers from multiple personality disorder; because I have problems reconciling that the personality that opens his mouth and spouts of in public and the one who wrote a libertarian themed show like Firefly, being one and the same personality.

                  Either that or he is attempting to write satire… and is really, really bad at it.

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                  2. Libertarian is much easier to write than conservative, for a raging liberal– they can have the characters do all the stuff that they’re “supposed” to, and still have the satisfying and realistic story-lines that are inherently conservative.

                    He’s honest enough to tell a good story, kind of like Sir Terry P, but I don’t know if he’ll grow up enough to come around to the meaning of them even from the wrong side around.

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                  3. When you control the world, you can have both the good-for-story freedom to act, the attractive-to-you personal interactions, and you control all the consequences so it’s emotionally satisfying in import but also emotionally satisfying in not taking any harm from things you WANT to be true.

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            1. I presume you mean Berman and Braga? Or do you mean Abrams? (Who controls Star Trek, really?)

              But it’s an interesting thought experiment…

              Star Trek began as pretty much a leftist utopian fantasy. Militaristic society, no money, etc.

              What if someone who was a closet Randian got ahold of it? Or… *shudder*… a conservative Christian?

              I mean, back in the day, I wanted (and apologies if I’ve ranted on this before) the Star Trek series that followed “Voyager” to be something non-Starfleet. Sort of a Star Trek: Free Trader show. Instead we got Enterprise. Then we got (what we did) of Firefly.

              Star Trek: Free Trader? Or even Star Trek: Pilgrims?

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              1. I believe Berman is the one I’m primarily referring to. I’d read somewhere that he hated being second fiddle to Roddenberry, and killed off Next Gen as soon as he could. Not really sure about how it all played out from there.

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                1. Well, I do remember cursing Brannon Braga’s name as I walked out of the theater after watching “Generations”, so yes. Maybe I’m misallocating my ire. CURSE YOU, BERMAN!

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              2. *puzzled* I didn’t get the impression that Abrams hated Star Trek, actually.

                (And yes, I cheerfully admit I like the reboot.I like Pine’s Kirk better than Shatner’s, oddly enough. Probably because Pine is capable of laughing at himself, both in and out of character.)

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                2. Oh, no. I don’t think Abrams hates Trek, but I was wondering if Wayne had heard something I hadn’t. Of course, Abrams is reportedly a bigger Star Wars fan than he is a Trek fan…

                  And now, thanks to this conversation, I FINALLY have something percolating for NaNoWriMo. Just the first glimpses, though. I usually get setting / milieu first, then go from there to character / goals.

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                  1. I kinda put Abrams as a sci-fi fan, period. I personally enjoyed the effort the individual actors put in to both retain the personalities / voices of the original cast while making it their own interpretation at the same time. (Scotty and Bones are a delight to me; even more so, this time around.)

                    Having followed quite a bit of the Zahn novels after the movies of old for Star Wars, I’m rather sad that Jacen and Jaina aren’t making an appearance- though I’ll confess that I haven’t really been paying that much attention. I still count The Courtship of Princess Leia as one of the more entertaining reads of my teenage years, because of the sheer hilarious crap that poor Han has to go through.

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                    1. My recollection of Abrams is that before his first Trek movie, the info was that he was mostly disinterested as far as Trek was concerned. But after the movie was released, he let it be known that he’d been lying when he made the earlier statements, and he was really a huge fan of Trek. I can’t remember the details of his rationale, but it had something to do with managing fan reactions.

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                    2. I vaguely recall something like that as well, and that’s totally understandable. Trek fans are… very… involved, to say the least. Just listening to whenever Star Trek Online gets updated is a good example. That game really listens to the fanbase.

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                    3. As someone who started reading SW books essentially with the young jedi knights and junior jedi knights books, given what was done with Anakin, Jacen, and maybe Jaina in the EU, it would leave me just as happy if movie canon overwrote the EU.

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                    4. I’d heard that things went pretty bad after I stopped reading. The Young Jedi Knights and Junior Jedi weren’t so bad in my memory (kinda wish I could track down some of the Jedi Academy ones for son to read, he’s fond of Star Wars – and the rebooted Star Trek. One of the things that Housemate tried to get him into with some moderate success was ST:TNG, and the little boy’s favorite character is Data.)

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                    5. Yeah. There’s a REASON I haven’t read past the New Jedi Order books. And the books where Vergere is explaining things to Jacen? “Choose, and act?” All of that? That was great, I thought. Then… (sigh)

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                    6. I’ve read some of the post-Jedi Star Wars books. I like Zahn’s stuff. I enjoyed Truce. I couldn’t stand the Jedi Academy books. And I’ve never really cared all that much for Salvatore (I know, that makes me a bit odd…) even when he’s not killing beloved characters. I think that’s the extent of my expanded universe reading.

                      On another note, in the most recent Harry Dresden book, the angel Uriel notes that he prefers Star Wars over Star Trek (yes, an angel of God – and a high ranking one at that – states which of the two big sci-fi franchises he prefers; and it’s plot relevant :P ). I think he explains that it’s because of the ‘good vs evil’ plot lines of the former, which are largely absent from the latter.

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                    7. Guessing he’s one of the folks who say “What three movies?” then…. Watching Star Wars seriously is freaking disturbing, especially in treatment of the droids, but partly in the “good” Jedi’s actions. Order and Chaos(or maybe destruction), not good and evil.

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                    8. I like Salvatore’s older stuff, before he started killing off beloved characters. Stopped reading Star Wars before he started writing for it, and I heard about what he did, and haven’t read any SW since.) I giggled a LOT at the end of the latest Dresden Files.

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                    9. I don’t remember if Urial mentions the prequels, but I think it can be safely assumed. Jim Butcher seems to take his nerd references seriously – to the point that even ‘The Black Hole’ is acknowledged in the most recent Dresden book.

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                    10. Rachel Griffin also takes pop references seriously. A character asks whether the magical deliver messages by owl; two characters discuss “Beauty and the Beast”, and one’s read it and the other’s only see the Disney version.

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                3. ” I didn’t get the impression that Abrams hated Star Trek, actually.”

                  What really throws me about the reboot is the way Starfleet is now a pirate organization.

                  How else does a Captain just get to appoint his successor?

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                    2. It does not follow that any organization would give charge of multi billion dollars worth of equipment and the gods know how many lives to an untried kid.

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                    3. Well, but the Fed don’t use money, right? So your “multi billion dollars worth” might as well be “blue” equipment. Can’t see much evidence of the Federation putting a particularly high value on human life, either, so why not put the green recruit overflowing with outside the box thoughts in command?

                      The real surprise is that they haven’t structured the Fleet as a non-hierarchical diverse community. ST:SJW is just waiting to be written, complete with Deanna Troi and her Glittery HooHah.

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                    4. The thought of ST:SJW causes my brain to cringe then switch off in self defense.
                      Even if they don’t use money, time and resources go into construction of the vessel and training of the crew and would probably not be lightly tossed away.
                      As for running a vessel with some sort of revolutionary committee, it’s been tried. Check out the French Navy between 1789 and the rise of Napoleon. It really doesn’t work.

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                    5. Doesn’t work? With the kinds of committed writers, directors, actors and FX this would have? OF COURSE it would work. Heck, they already sold the idea the Federation doesn’t have any money.

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                    6. IIRC one of the writers for NG said that he thought the “no money” was foolish but Roddenberry had “decreed it” so if he wanted to write for NG, he had to go alone with it.

                      Oh, NG is part of the reason that I refer to the overall universe as “Star Drek”.

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                    8. B5 had its weak stories but yes it was much better than Star Drek.

                      I heard that some people complained about B5’s communicators on the “back of the hand”.

                      They claimed that it “was established” that in the future communicators would be chest badges. [Very Big Facepalm]

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                    9. They claimed that it “was established” that in the future communicators would be chest badges. [Very Big Facepalm]

                      …said combadge carefully positioned so that answering a comm beep for female crew does not involve an odd self-molestation maneuver…

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                  3. And Pike’s recruitment pitch:”In two years you’ll have your own ship!”

                    Talk about a massive expansion of StarFleet! Where the heck are they going to get all the enlisted for a fleet that has to use 2 years in service JOs as Commanding Officers? Even the Napoleonic Wars Royal Navy had the time from new middy to first independent command more like 10 years vs. 2.. And what does young CO LtJG Kirk get to command – the warp drive equivalent of a PT boat?

                    Don’t get me wrong, I’d sign up for that if that was what was offered, but I’m not sure what’s supposed to be in it for everyone else.

                    Not to mention the fact that Abrams has the entire bloody command staff of the big-E except for Spock being newly minted ringknocker Ensigns – I’ll let some of the Navy vets explain how much work the NCO crew would have had keeping the young officers from walking out the airlocks or blowing everything up.

                    Roddenberry and the production team for ST:TOS all were WWII vets, so their structure made sense. JJ Abrams needed a military advisor on his scriptwriting team, just to walk them through the implications of their goofy Facebook-leadership-inspired advancement choices in a military command structure.

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                    1. I read Pike’s comment regarding Captaincy to be for something small. And only if he were really, really good.

                      And my take on the Enterprise’s crew was that the ship hadn’t actually launched yet, and thus hadn’t been assigned a regular crew. The only reason that it wasn’t staying in orbit for another six months was because of the emergency at Vulcan.

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                    2. *blink* None of the cadets, so to speak, were in lead roles when they got plunked on the ships. Uhura was assigned to somewhere in the depths of the ship until Pike told her to keep an ear out for Romulan/Klingon and take over; her skills vouched for by Spock; McCoy didn’t become chief medical officer until the actual Chief died and Spock promoted him – he was one of the general assisting doctors, I gathered and the only reason why Pike was listening to Kirk in the first place was because Kirk had a gift for very quickly understanding the situation and was the only person there able to warn the Enterprise what was going on (and he twigged that Kirk would work as a counterbalance to Spock’s regulation-bound hide by making very logical factual arguments that Spock would have trouble arguing against – and a First Officer is supposed to be able to argue with the captain, to my general understanding.) I did not get the impression either that Sulu and Chekhov were cadets, but were already officers in their own right but Sulu had gotten the bump up to helmsman because the guy who was supposed to be there had medical issues. Out of the bunch, it’s Uhura and Chekhov who are noted to have special gifts. Heck, Scotty didn’t even join them till halfway through the movie, and he’s not a cadet either.

                      So, loose as it is, I didn’t see normal command getting usurped but “You guys have what I need RIGHT NOW so I’m making you do the job in a crisis” decisions made by Pike – who IS a seasoned, experienced officer – in a serious crisis situation.

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                5. You don’t seriously think Shatner takes himself THAT seriously, do you? My problem with him has always been that, in addition to getting his own joke, he’s laughing at the groundlings. I mean: The Transformed Man? Really?

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            2. OT, but is O’Bannon a Studebaker guy or what? Every show he does, he sneaks in the stylized Stude “s”. The s in Farscape was done that way, and on Defiance, guess what Datak Tar’s front door has for a handle?

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                1. SyFy Thursday nights, they’re on hiatus right now. Post alien invasion St. Louis, humans and aliens living together.

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              2. …now I have a strange image of a Vulcan NCIS investigator Gibbs-slapping subordinates. Impassively, of course.

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          7. I remember when they were talking about the “new” Trek (what eventually became ST:NG) and having the thought that the best thing to do with the series would be to use the (then popular) umbrella program format (you know: The NBC Mystery Movie, featuring Columbo, McMIllan & Wife, McCloud, Banacek, Whatever) with a different 2-hour Trek each week. Original Trek the first Friday of the month, Captain Sulu of the Space Marines the second Friday, Next Gen on the third Friday …

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          8. The “only lasted one season” TV series Middleman had an alternate universe episode in which the protagonist mentions ‘Star Trek’ to someone she meets. They exclaim that it’s a great TV series with George Takei.

            :P

            No clue TOS had multiple spin-offs like in the short story that you mention, or got the sequel series, but the take on it with Sulu being the star was amusing.

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  6. I did not make it though the first book due exactly to what caused another copy to go flying off the train (hopefully to its destruction and not into the hands of an impressionable youngster). I will say though that it gave me a better knowledge of leprosy. I had not known that leprosy was a disease of the nerves.

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  7. It’s like cussing.

    Kids think it makes them sound important, because adults do it when things are actually important, and if you’re exposed to it enough you start doing it even when you realize it’s utterly unsuited. (I ALMOST got out of the Navy without acquiring the cursing habit.)

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    1. Some people like to claim that they were coarsened by their service.

      Personally, I rather fear that it was I who coarsened the service…

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      1. *grin* I can still remember one day when I said something about “and get the damn paperwork right” and everybody stared at me, half of them went pale, and one said “Holy f* shit, you cussed, this is serious.“

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        1. I’m going to know I’m probably going senescent when my speech patterns start shifting and I slip into “Army” when in polite company.

          One of my guys brought his parents and siblings around the unit when they came out to visit. He had to come into work for something, and since he had the only vehicle, the family wound up coming in with him, and rather than have them sit waiting out in the car, I had him bring them into the company headquarters building, and put them up in the platoon office. Had some rather good conversation with both parents.

          I rather realized I might have a bit of a problem with profanity in a workplace setting after his parents mentioned to me that they thought their son had me all wrong–They’d been warned, you see, that I was a bit prone to excessive use of expletives, and not to take offense. Being as I hadn’t used one word of profanity in their presence, they were apparently a little disappointed.

          As was he–It was rather like taking someone to the safari park, and finding out that the bears and wolves were lolling around in the sun like housecats, I gathered. I guess I was supposed to be filling a stereotype, because one of the things his mom said to him as she was leaving was that he’d gotten me all wrong…

          Context shifting. Apparently, I do it really noticeably.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I was on a date last year and the lady told me, “It’s so nice to be around someone who doesn’t curse.” I was shocked that she was right. I hadn’t swore the whole night. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good thing, but it showed how much the “Army” had rubbed away.

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            1. Watch yourself slip right back to your old ways, in the right environment. Took my brother over to visit an old Army buddy, and after we were done, he spent the ride back looking at me like I’d grown a second head. After re-playing some of the conversations he’d been hearing in my head, I can’t say I blame him, either–The humor is a little hard to get, for outsiders.

              It’s weird how context can take you unaware. I took my Mom over to the PX to do some shopping once, when she visited me. While we were there, I ran into a couple of my guys, and introduced her when she walked up on us. After the fact? “I almost didn’t recognize you…”. Apparently, my body language, demeanor, and tone of voice had shifted so far from “me with Mom” to “senior NCO with junior troops” that she didn’t recognize me at all, and only figured out who I was when she walked around in front and saw my face.

              I’ve been told that the mere act of putting on a uniform can change your entire personality, and I believe it. Hell, I’ve watched it happen with my own behavior. It’s also contextual, because you’re very much donning a mindset along with it. I suspect that there’s probably something deeply symbolic about certain features of specific uniforms that perhaps influence behaviors, and I wonder if those responses are hard-wired or culturally acquired…

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              1. I think they may be culturally focused, but generically hard wired. The need for a ‘warrior as warrior’ mode and a ‘warrior with tribe’ mode is pretty common. It lets us build in mental safeties. I’ve seen it in a couple of other professions as well, so it probably isn’t just restricted to military. But the need to turn certain ways of dealing with the world on and off seems pretty universal to me.

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                1. Reminds me a bit of dogs- different breeds have different ranges.

                  It pops to mind because one of the ways my folks explained vicious dogs– especially ones that have a very strong, very large notion of “tribe”– is that they’re driven insane.

                  Those dogs that will attack everyone? They’re crazy. Induced psychopaths.

                  Can happen with people, too. Probably the same way, though not as fast as they show in TV, and not as common. (The human mind can be a defense.)

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                2. Working as an ER nurse … there does seem to be a real and strong shift.

                  Had a full scale medical emergency at home a couple of years ago (my oldest stopped breathing and did not have a pulse — big pulmonary embolus, fortunately survived). My at that time 17 year old daughter latter made a comment to my wife how different dad was. I was in full on emergency response mode, including directing the EMTs when they showed up and taking charge of the scene (they were trying to figure out how to move my disabled daughter from her bed to the guerney, I just told them to hold the guerney and then lifted her 125# over and encouraged them to get a move on).

                  The time for ‘dad’ came later, with the shakes and tears. It was a close thing.

                  I’d expect the same kind of drastic dichotomy for LEO’s, fire, etc.

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                  2. The fact that you did – could – shift modes likely saved her. This is why I encourage people (and self) to seriously dry-run train themselves for emergencies they could handle, but never encounter… to develop enough of that contextual mode-shift skill to be able to do it at need.

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              2. Had a run in with civilians not getting military humor this past weekend. Went to see Fury with my oldest brother (former tanker) and oldest nephew (22). There was one scene in the movie where there were 4 people laughing out loud – the three of us and an older gentleman with a WWII Vet ball cap on.

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              3. Putting on a suit and tie can change your whole personality, so it wouldn’t surprise me if a uniform would potentially do even more.

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              4. It does – my daughter noticed that when I was in uniform, I took up much more psychological space. I looked taller, and as she said, “scarier”. It sets you aside, into another entirely different category of person. Along about the time I made E-5, I was working in a public affairs office, and we drew upon graduates of the basic navigator course for casual labor. These were 2nd lieutenants, who had done ROTC and lasted the year-long navigator course, but had otherwise had little to do with the working Air Force. Two of them were detailed to the section that I was assigned to, and essentially – even if I had to salute them, and address them as ‘sir’ or ‘Ell-tee’ – they were in my charge and care. One afternoon at the end of the duty day, I had a date, and changed into a pretty dress and high heels in the ladies room. The two lieutenants were still working at something when I came out of the ladies, and I swear, their eyes about bugged out like a cartoon character’s from shock. “OMG – she-she-she’s female! She’s datable!” It was very clearly something they had never considered, all the days that we had worked together and I was in uniform. I took good care not to appear before them in civvies after that, though. The boundary was something that just had to be there, if we worked together.

                Another funny thing I noticed, early on – and that some of my peers in Basic Training looked “right” when they put on a uniform for the first time. And some of them didn’t – they looked like children putting on a costume. I often wondered if those of us who looked “right” were the few who made a career of it or stayed longer than one enlistment.

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                1. “Another funny thing I noticed, early on – and that some of my peers in Basic Training looked “right” when they put on a uniform for the first time. And some of them didn’t – they looked like children putting on a costume. I often wondered if those of us who looked “right” were the few who made a career of it or stayed longer than one enlistment.”

                  That’s something I’ve noticed over the years, as well. You can almost judge someone’s abilities and potential as a Soldier by looking at them with a weapon in hand. There’s a body language, there, something not quite quantifiable. Does he look as though he’s comfortable with it, does he carry it like a weapon, or like some sort of stage prop that he’s been handed?

                  Some of it may be training and experience. Sometimes, though, it isn’t. I was at a range with one of my young female medics, and got to witness her handle a pistol for what I was later to learn was the first time in her life. She watched the demonstration, did the practical exercise for the dry-fire part of the training, and then shot high Expert (really not that hard to do, on an Army qual course for the pistol, but… Still…) the first time out. She was a complete natural, and watching her handle that weapon was really disorienting once she told me she’d never been around guns in her life before joining, and had never had a pistol in her hands until that very day. I’ve done a good deal of shooting, and I initially took her for someone who’d shot extensively, maybe even competitively, in civilian life.

                  It was that noticeable. If I believed in reincarnation, I’d be looking for her to have been a gunfighter in a previous life, or something. She definitely had that quality about her, which you just don’t see that often in even long-service soldiers. It’s not easy to describe, either–There was a certain almost sensual sort of casual grace with which she handled that weapon, along with an assuredness and confidence that would have scared the bejeebers out of me if I’d been on the bad side of that. You are supposed to pick out and prioritize the real killers in a melee fight, and I guarantee you that if I was on the other side, she’d have been the number one target I picked out as the greatest threat. Just the body language alone, in conjunction with her weapon, spoke volumes about how much of a threat she could be with it.

                  Still sticks out in my memory. And, I’ve trained hundreds of people, maybe thousands, with all sorts of weapons over the years. She’s really the only one I recall being a first-time “natural” to that degree with what she was getting trained on. I made a point of watching her with an M16, the next time we drew them. Same thing–She looked more natural with that weapon in her hands than she did without it, to be honest. Kind of an odd thing, in a girl her age, and with the personality she had–Bright, bubbly, very feminine. You’d stereotypically expect brooding gloom, with that body language, but there was kind of a “merry killer bunny-rabbit” quality to the whole package that just kind of made you go “Uhmmm…”.

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                    1. Yeah. That.

                      Look at her face, and all you saw was “cute blond”. Watch her with a weapon, and pay attention to what she was doing with it? You’d be going “WTF? This does not look right…”.

                      Neck up, if that was all you ever looked at, you’d never get past the “cute” part. Neck down, and watching how she handled herself and her weapon? You’d pick her out of a crowd as a potential threat. Watch the eyes, watch the hands, and ignore the appearances: She looked switched-on, and had the same sort of quality you normally associate only with people who’ve been doing the job for a good deal of time. Maybe she was a natural mimic, or something, and was just copying what she’d seen other people do, but… She was mimicking all the right moves, and none of the wrong ones. I wasn’t the only person that saw this, either, when I pointed it out.

                      And, you’ll wonder what I’m talking about, if you don’t know what I’m getting at. Here’s an easily understood example: You put an M16 into most kid’s hands, and they treat it like it was some kind of awkward-ass stage prop, banging it into everything they walk by, and never paying attention to what they were doing with it. It’s not an extension of their body; it’s something they have to carry around as a burden.

                      My young lady from above? You never saw her bang her weapon into anything; she was aware of where her muzzle was at at all times, and would unconsciously and perfectly move to keep it from hitting things. Other people would beat the crap out of their weapons, carrying other stuff while under arms. She wouldn’t–You watched her move through the medic’s cage with a rifle slung, and she’d gracefully maneuver through the entire obstacle course with it, never once hitting it on anything, and avoiding all opportunities to sweep someone else with the muzzle. It wasn’t something you’d immediately pick up on, but once you started watching for it, it leaped out at you. The few times we had her under arms with a weapon for something like guard mount, it was… Interesting. A lot of the time, when you watch someone in the service do things like practice doing vehicle and prisoner searches, you have to walk them through and constantly reinforce what to do, how not to cover the guy doing the search while you do overwatch, all that. With her, I don’t think we ever had to tell her what to do–She’d watch the guys and girls ahead of her do their thing, and then she’d go right through it without needing an ounce of coaching or pointers. You can usually tell who the new private is, just by body language and the awkward way they handle their weapon and gear. I never saw her do “awkward”.

                      The other odd thing was how quickly and easily she figured things out, with weapons and other military gear. The Army was transitioning to the more complicated two- and three-point slings at about that time, some of which required a bloody manual, an instructional video, and a good half-hour to figure out how to put on the weapon, let alone use. They threw her a weapon, and one of the new slings, and five minutes later she’s standing around with it on her weapon, ready to go. No instructions required, she just figured it out on her own. If you’ve ever had to spend an hour or two teaching someone new how to set up their gear, you’d get why that struck me as being unusual. Some people are just gear-challenged–They can’t see how to make web gear and other stuff like helmet harnesses and chin straps work. With her, she just looked at it and figured it out with her hands, like she’d been doing it for years.

                      I’ll give you an idea of how spooked it made me–I went through her personnel files that we had in the unit, wondering if she was a ringer someone dropped on us for some unknown reason. As best as I and the PAC NCO could figure out, she was legitimately just a teenage girl from the suburbs who’d decided to join the Army to pay for college. Child of a single mom, too, so there was no way for her to have picked any of that stuff up from her dad or brothers.

                      Weird deal, with her, and I can’t quite get across how or why in terms I think that would be understandable. It was like taking someone out to go rock-climbing, and then watching them put a harness on for the first time without help, and then go scrambling up the face without a single bit of coaching or instruction, finding out afterwards that they’d never done any climbing of any sort whatsoever in their lives.

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                    2. So you’re saying she was Mu’ad Dib? Did her eyes turn a freaky blue?

                      OK, I just “had” to say that, but seriously, damn. I’m good at picking things up, but not THAT good.

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                    3. ” You can usually tell who the new private is, just by body language and the awkward way they handle their weapon and gear. I never saw her do “awkward”.”

                      I’m not military, but I’ve spent my whole life handling firearms, and yes most people look “awkward” with them. Not sure I’ve ever seen someone who had never previously carried them that looked natural, but there are those (myself I’ve been told) we carry a rifle like it is an extension of their arm and never seem to think about it or even notice it; while you would swear that carbine that others are carrying is a 12′ 2×8 the way they manage to get it hung up in every bush, truck door, fence, backpack, etc. that they get within five feet of. I understand what you are trying to describe, and it stands out by the very fact that THE WEAPON doesn’t stand out, it seems a totally natural extension of the person. I’ve just never seen it in a newby.

                      By the way, is she married? ;)

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                    4. @ Bearcat

                      Last I heard, she was very married.

                      I thought of a better way to describe what she was doing that made her stand out. If you’re familiar with the manual of arms with the M16/AR-15 family, you know how the drills go for reload, immediate action, all of that, right? You watch the average new soldier do that stuff, and it’s literally painful to watch them do things with the weapon; they take their right hands off the pistol grip, and reach around to manipulate the safe-fire-burst switch, they do weird things changing the magazines, they can’t do things with the weapon without stopping and looking at it while they do them, and it’s just flippin’ painful to watch them struggle. A guy or girl who’s fully comfortable and proficient just does it with a minimum of wasted effort, and makes things like magazine changes look graceful and easy. Their eyes don’t leave the target, while their hands just do the necessities, seemingly all on their own.

                      You usually don’t see that manifest in even someone who’s got a knack for that sort of thing until they have a couple of years in. She figured all that stuff out right off the bat, and that was what was weird about it. She’d just kind of watch someone else do something, figure out for herself why they were doing it that specific way, and then smoothly pick that up for herself. She’d ask questions about things most other people never noticed or paid attention to: “Hey, why do you have your magazines set up like that, Sergeant K?” “Oh, OK… That makes sense…”. And, then, the next time I saw her, she’d have taken that little technique and made it her own, making whatever changes were appropriate for her own use.

                      One of the ways you can assess someone in the Army for their proficiency is looking at how they set up their web gear. If everything is tight, properly adjusted, and doing the right thing in the right way, you know you’re dealing with someone who had some time invested in them by an older, more experienced soldier. With her, she’d just pick it the hell up through osmosis, or something–Which was really spooky, when you’re used to having to show someone how to set their gear up three and four times before they “get it”.

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                    6. @Statish Josh:

                      I was going to say “she will know our ways as if born to them” and wonder if her nickname was Muad’dib.
                      :-)

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                    8. Yeah, it’s one thing to read it in a work of fiction, and another entirely to observe it in real life. The other strange thing was just how under the radar it flew, because you might not have picked up on it unless you somehow got clued into it by finding out her history–To the uninformed eye, she was just a proficient veteran with some experience under her belt, and who’d been properly trained by someone. Then, you found out the young lady was fresh out of Fort Sam Houston, and had none of that. Plus, there was the personality–She was, in a word, “perky”. You put all that together, and if you were watching for it, it jarred your expectations.

                      I’ve only ever seen that sort of thing once before, with one of the kids of a friend of mine. He came out with us on a “recreational” rock-climbing day, and the kid was completely at home with everything–He tied the knots, put his harness on, and all that other minutiae that went into getting set up like he’d done it before. The guy we had running things that day was a guy who’d been dragooned from us to go work up at Huck Creek Mountain Warfare Training Center, and he assumed from watching this kid gear up that he’d been out climbing before–So, he used him as the demonstrator for his class on lead climbing. Kid went straight up the face, no issues–And, it wasn’t an easy climb, either–Probably about intermediate.

                      His dad watched all this, and wandered over to our instructor, scratching his chin: “Hey… Ya know this is his first time doing this s**t, right?”.

                      Which got a “Holy c**p…” out of our mountain man, who was not someone who was at all easy to impress.

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                    9. I saw this in my own daughter, at the age of ten or so, the first time she got up on a horse – a real, well-trained Spanish bull-fighting horse. Guy who owned the horse was killing time in a campground near Seville, where we were staying. He asked if daughter wanted to ride the horse, boosted her into the saddle and shortened the stirrups for her and showed her how to hold the reins and command the horse … and she rode around the campground for about two hours; walk, trot, canter, up and down the hill. I was blown away, actually. She had never had a lesson, or had anything more than a brief pony ride, led around. But she was on that horse, as totally assured as if she had been getting lessons since she could walk.

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                  2. Somewhere (and I really ought to remember where) in Gordon Dickson’s “Dorsai” series / setting / whatever, he says of them: “The weapons of war came to their hands like tame dogs.”
                    Reading this, I’m pretty well convinced we have here your real-world example (realization? embodiment?) of exactly what he was describing, whether he ever even knew it 100% himself or not.

                    The pointer works the other way, too: to understand his Dorsai a little bit better, just picture an entire planet-ful of people mostly (not totally, but mostly) just like her, in this one particular way. (That’s most of what “Splinter Culture” means, I’d guess.)

                    I’ve never seen anyone anywhere like her myself, in person or on film etc. — but the mind still boggles a little bit at the very thought.

                    P.S., it might be “tools of war” instead, it’s been a while…

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              5. My father and my uncles, war vets, as well as several other men of their generation, tended to do something similar when they got drunk together. They also usually never talked about war except then.

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        2. One of my company commanders in boot camp never cursed (although it didn’t make him any less intimidating). One day he was telling us a sea story, and dropped the f bomb. We didn’t say anything, but our stunned expressions must have been enough. He said, “Oh, get over it. There’s always cussing in sea stories.”

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          1. My father really surprised my wife one day when he had come over to the house to work on installing a shower stall in our house. He didn’t know she was there, she didn’t know at first that he was there, because she didn’t answer when he knocked (she was upstairs asleep when he knocked), so he just came in. A little later, she came downstairs to where the computer was, but just assumed he knew she was there. At some point, when he was finding out how much of a mess the job was going to be, he reverted to his Navy days. My wife said he looked kind of embarrassed when he realized she had been there the whole time.

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          2. I used to know an older guy, retired non-com, Christian. He never cussed, but he could turn the air blue and make a sailor blush without ever using a four letter word. He had it down to an art form.

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            1. A priest who said at one point that he was the head of a monastery showed me that he could do that, too, when he called the helpdesk again after being told to send his printer in for repair for the third time.

              He turned relatively pleasant (couldn’t expect a complete turnaround after all that) after I determined it was his parallel port that was the problem, rather than the printer.

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    2. Because cussing is NOT the same in your non-native language that’s one thing in which I raised my kids very badly. And in the last six years… well… air turns blue.

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      1. Ah, but you do have the added side benefit of being able to really let go on third parties, in Portuguese, and get away with it.

        I had a Bulgarian woman working for me in the Army, for a little while. Now, I can understand quite a bit of several Slavic languages, particularly the profanity. Benefit of growing up with an Eastern European stepdad who didn’t have much of a social filter, I guess. But, it was amusing as hell to hear my favorite Bulgarian sweetly and politely say horrible, horrible things in Bulgarian to people who were giving her a hard time, and be the only other one in the room who understood that she’d just sweetly called someone a miserable c**t. With a smile on her face, I might add.

        Of course, when she figured out I knew what the hell she’d been saying, that sort of put the kibosh on the whole thing, for her. Apparently, she’d never run into an American who had the first clue about Slavic profanity, and was aghast that I’d heard her say that stuff.

        When you speak a foreign language in the US, you’re usually pretty safe in assuming that nobody else around you is likely to “get” what you’re saying. Although, that only works until it doesn’t…

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        1. The guys who spoke Tagalog on the ship pulled that– we’re talking from master chief on down. (Yes, people filed complaints about that breach of regulations…until they noticed that the CO never seemed to get the complaints, and anybody who put a complain in the “totally confidential” box just incidentally got retaliated against. Really ugly was the guy who looked like he was from the Philippines, and his grandparents all were, but he’s straight American.)

          They were really, really not happy when the very Irish looking girl in my department let them get enough rope and then then really let loose on them for their… ah… “discussion” of her appearance. Still kinda disappointed she didn’t take it as far as she was tempted to, would’ve taken down a rather poisonous environment.

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          1. Now, that’s one thing that’s totally different, with the Army–Our Filipino Mafia is nowhere near as widespread or insidious. It’s more of a fraternal club, than anything else. Where you start running into problems like you’re describing is more often found with the “Korean Wive’s Mafia”. You marry a Korean, and God help you if you don’t act right. The rest of them will deal with you in very unpleasant ways. And, there is a network.

            While I was at Fort Sill at the start of my career, one of the senior NCOs in the company was suffering through a rather ugly divorce from his Korean wife. She’d stayed at Fort Polk, along with their business, which was a bar. He’d never hear from her, unless she was really pissed off about something. The divorce had dragged on and on and on, for about six-seven years. While I was there in the unit with him, he was finalizing the whole thing, and in the course of doing that, he went over and changed the beneficiary on his military life insurance. Now, witness this: He did that on Fort Sill. She was at Fort Polk, and had never been to Sill in her life, and to his knowledge, didn’t have any friends there, either. That very night, he gets this outraged phone call from his soon-to-be ex-wife, and she reads him the riot act about taking her off the insurance policy.

            Somehow, she’d found out about that within hours of him signing the paperwork. How? You tell me… This was the early 1980s, and he was paranoid enough about making that change that he’d looked around for another Korean in the office before he did the paperwork. Sooo…? Clairvoyance? Whatever the hell it was, he spent the next couple of months looking over his shoulder, for fear she’d have a hit put out on him before the divorce was finally finalized. And, whose name did he try to put the insurance in? Their daughter’s…

            Submissive Oriental wife, my ass. The only thing you’ll find with these so-called “submissive little Asian wives” is that they’re a lot more subtle and much more insidious than your typical American-born version. I kept telling guys this, every time some idiot would start talking about marrying his Korean girlfriend, but they still kept right on marrying the girls, thinking they were getting into a “good, old-fashioned relationship, where the wife knows her place…”.

            Yeah, sure: She knows it, all right–Her place is clearly in charge, and you’re just not smart enough to realize it, bud…

            The amazing thing is how long many of these idiots manage to fool themselves, thinking that they’re the ones “running things” in their marriage. Which, I suppose, is probably not a bad thing, given how questionable some of their own decisions were. Not to mention, the sheer humor of it all, as an outside observer, witnessing an unconsciously bigoted idiot realize he was being run like a business…

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            1. I think a lot of the problem was a weak series of captains, and we hit the PI every year– so the folks who were most likely to be a problem were all on that ship. (Never had the problem at any other command, even the one that was near a large PI expat community– how large? One of my friends in that area didn’t speak English when he joined the Navy, because he’d never been exposed to it. Third generation American.)

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            2. *snort* The ‘submissive oriental wife’ is a smokescreen for women who’ve been trained since birth to rule with an iron fist, and a dagger hidden in silk, and get the men to do what the woman wants by making it seem like it’s the guy’s idea in the first place – and yes, it does sound exactly like having absorbed Sun Tzu in childhood and applied it to male-female relationships. That’s why even in old stories, a wise man knew when to listen to his wife, especially when it came to the matters that men tended not to be privy to. Hell, even now the Japanese Salaryman gives his earnings to his wife and she doles out an allowance for him to play with, so entrenched is that mindset. I had friends describing watching hard as nails military men turn into absolute pussycats where their ‘little Asian wife’ was concerned – one of them distinctly remembered growing up watching this big, muscled man quietly and subtly submit to his little Japanese wife’s slightly hardened glance of disapproval when he was getting a bit too drunk or rowdy or loud.

              I do Rhys the kindness of not using that smokescreen, because I don’t feel the need to micromanage.

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              1. Well, I don’t think it’s “just” oriental wives.

                In Dorothy L. Sayers’ _Gaudy Night_, Lord Peter is talking with a former soldier (that he knows from WWI service) that works at the college Lord Peter is visiting.

                The former soldier tells Lord Peter that a senior NCO they both know has gotten married to a “little woman” that has taken control of the former NCO’s life.

                May be not as “quietly” as those little Asian women, but the little English woman had taken control of him.

                Admittedly this was fiction, but I’m sure Sayers’ readers could have seen real life examples of the “little women” controlling their husbands. [Smile]

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                1. Agreed. Not just the fine ladies of the far East, indeed.

                  I’ve always wondered about this one aunt of mine. Looks *very* oriental, always has, as have her daughters, and granddaughters, and so far the fourth generation seems to follow in the same fashion.

                  Publicly, Aunt Francine was the soul of decorum. Sweet, kindly, and never one to put herself forward. So one would think.

                  Officially, the county PD, sheriff’s office, the local boys at the bar, the old ladies knitting circle (notorious gossips), the kids at the park, and most *especially* anydamnbody in the family know absolutely nothing about how that boy what tried to force himself on Aunt Francine’s eldest got his butt beat up one side and down the other of Main Street within bare hours of the incident. Not if they’ve got the sense God gave baby ducks, that is.

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                    1. *chuckle* I know. But I’ve gotten fairly inured to it’s timesink capability now. As in, skim the description to make sure it was still what I remembered, and linked. Close tab.

                      I will read it for timesink capabilities as a means of easy relaxation if I want to though.

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                3. I don’t know about real life examples, but I’ve seen any number of story lines in books where “the woman gets the man to do what she wants by making him think it’s what HE wants” is presented as the natural order of things.

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                1. *snort* *snigger* *sporfle* …Submissive… *snirk* Latin… I’m sorry, bwa hahahahahahahaha! Oh… oh my gods and all the little godlings, oh, the thought of you being a submissive little doormat… laughing hurts… would be a pose that’s only a trap for some SERIOUS whoop-ass afterward!

                  Every culture has these blossoms with sharp blades for petals.

                  I’ve long ago developed the opinion that today’s bitchy feminism is the whiny whimpering of those who didn’t master the art of feminine power.

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                  1. Never met a submissive Filipina either. I know one about 4’11” who threw her ex-husband down a flight of stairs.

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                    1. My introduction to Regular Army barracks life back in the 1980s consisted of me hearing loud, high-pitched screaming in the hallway of our recently-converted-to-dormitory-style-rooms open-bay barracks, sticking my head out the door and seeing a rather scantily-clad leather mini-skirt wearing Korean bar girl pounding on someone’s door with the butt of a sawed-off 12 gauge shotgun. She was still wearing her barmaid’s apron, and had a French chef’s knife about 12 inches long stuck through it like a Samurai sword. She’s screaming something like “Wuuulf!! You sumbitch!!! You come out, now!!! Sumbitch!!!! Wuulf, you come out!!! I know you here, bastahd!!! You come out, sumbitch!!!”. She looks over, sees me down the hall, and does a total demeanor shift, going all sparkly and friendly: “Oh, hai!!! You know Wulf? I’m looking for Wulf… You see him?”.

                      My response, being as said SPC Wolf was most senior to my lowly self, was something along the lines of “Uh… No…”. And, that was an honest answer–I barely knew what the guy looked like.

                      She went back to pounding on his door and screaming. We were on the second floor, and the doors were locked with a bail-style gate lock and a padlock, so you’d know someone was inside if they were home. Wolf’s door was padlocked in the “open” position, so denial that he was there was kinda-sorta impossible. She kept that up for about an hour, and then went off hunting “Wuulf” somewhere else. From what I was told later, she didn’t give up for a couple of days, and had deputized other Korean girls to help her.

                      Turns out that what had happened was that Wolf had been wining and dining her for many months, and had made promises of marriage. Now, he was supposed to have re-enlisted for Korea, and taken her back with him. What actually happened was that the re-enlistment NCO had pulled a rabbit out of his hat, and offered Wolf the Berlin Brigade for a re-enlistment option, which Wolf had glommed onto like an eagle seeing a crippled rabbit out in the middle of a meadow. This rather major change in plans was not mentioned to his girlfriend, naturally enough, and he kept right on stringing her along, telling her that he was re-enlisting for Korea in a couple of months, and he’d take her with him. What I saw was the night she found out he was lying to her, and that he’d actually be leaving in a couple of days for Germany. How she found out, nobody really knows, but the suspicion was that one of the Korean women who worked over at personnel where they did the paperwork had noticed Wolf going around clearing, and… Well, you can extrapolate: The Korean Wive’s Mafia may move somewhat slowly at first, but when they do get moving…? It is with stunning speed and great vigor with which they deliver the divine justice.

                      She’d gotten word that night, and had “borrowed” the shotgun from the bar she worked at, then taken one of the kitchen knives with her. There were two other Korean girls out in the car waiting for her, and I have no idea how things would have ended for Wolf, had he not had the presence of mind to leap out his second-floor window and run for it. He almost didn’t make it, because he damn near broke his leg when he jumped, but the guy on Charge of Quarters duty was a buddy, and got him under cover in the trunk of his car, taking him off-post to a safe location from which Wolf remained in hiding. I swear to God, the Koreans had the company staked out for a week afterwards, waiting for him. Supposedly, the car taking him up to OKC and the airport was followed, too.

                      Do not, I repeat, do not ever piss off a Korean girl. They like knives, and they rage like nothing you’ve ever seen. One of the utter dirtbags in that unit with me back then made the mistake of beating up his Korean girlfriend. Apparently, he didn’t like her telling him he shouldn’t fool around on her with another girl. She waited until he passed out, drunk, and called over two of her friends. The results weren’t fatal, but I think he spent several days in the hospital wishing they had been. Those three tiny little girls went to town on his ass, and turned him into a walking, bruised scab.

                      Stories I heard later were… Epically horrifying. Apparently, they tied him up, and let him come to, sober. What greeted him upon waking up was a cute little Korean girl with a big honking knife squatting next to his head, smoking a cigarette she later put out on his face, and crooning things to him in Korean, lightly running the tip of the knife over his now-open eyeballs. The other two were over in a corner, sharpening knives.

                      He beat her up Friday night, woke up with her Saturday morning, then didn’t get away from them until sometime early Monday morning. And, apparently, what pissed her off the most wasn’t the beating, it was him foolishly telling her that yeah, he screwed around on her, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it…

                      Dude was never the same, after that.

                      And, yes… There are reasons I remained celibate during my two Korean tours. Good ones.

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                    1. Yep. So it should really be no surprise that these feminists see the ‘power’ that is ‘wielded’ by the other women who were raised properly, ‘over’ men, and can’t figure out / will not make the effort of the back and forth trade and partnership that it actually requires.

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                2. A submissive Latina is there really such a thing? Get one mad and you’ll find how “submissive” they are.

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              3. Exactly.

                There are few things in the universe that are funnier than watching this situation play out when the male in the equation is your stereotypical Western “I don’t want anything to do with a corrupted Western woman…” type. I’m almost guaranteed to have trouble keeping a straight face in later years, when dealing with them, because it’s almost always painfully obvious who wears the pants in that household.

                ‘Course, it does generally result in positive results. I’ve watched some awfully feckless young men become domesticated and much, much better off in life with their Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese/Filipina wife running their lives for them. It just cracks me up to hear them talking trash about how they love dating the “obedient Asian girl”, and then watching them a couple of years later, when they look over at their wives for permission before even cracking open a beer at a unit function.

                And, they never even notice it happen, either.

                Which is also why I want to take your typical Western chick who’s railing on and on and on about Social Justice and the Patriarchy, and shake the shit out of her: “Lady, you’re just not doing it right…”.

                I did get to listen to one of these types get put in her place, at a unit function. Hysterical, in retrospect–She’s standing there talking trash to another American-born wife about the “subservient Asian wives” that a lot of the guys brought, as if they weren’t there and/or able to speak English. She’s going on and on about the inequitable practice of marrying little brown foreign girls, and making fun of both the men and the women involved.

                Now, her husband was a loud, boorish creepy kind of guy I couldn’t stand to be around, despite the fact someone had seen fit to commission his sorry ass. So, he’s there doing his thing, being a general nuisance, and drinking way too much beer, while their kids are doing the free-range unsupervised wrecking job you might expect from such a couple.

                So, there’s this little, soft, harmless-looking young Korean wife standing nearby, riding herd on her kids while her husband was off doing something productive like running the barbecue. The annoying American wife finally goes too far, and I can’t remember precisely what she said, but it was offensive and obviously pitched for others to hear. The Korean girl just smiled politely, and said softly, yet carryingly, in perfect English something to the effect that while she may have been a good little brown Oriental, at least her husband and children weren’t public embarrassments…

                You could have heard a damn pin drop, after that. And, the expressions on the two American wives who were gossiping were utterly, utterly priceless.

                Yes, I laughed my ass off afterwards. That young lady had presence and poise, and I could clearly see why she’d attracted her husband. What was funnier, still? Supposedly, she’d started out as a bar girl. I think her husband retired as a Master Sergeant or Sergeant Major, a couple of years ago. All three kids went to college, as well…

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                1. Which is also why I want to take your typical Western chick who’s railing on and on and on about Social Justice and the Patriarchy, and shake the shit out of her: “Lady, you’re just not doing it right…”.

                  Exactly. Hell, my dad, despite being one of those boomer kids, would turn to my mom and consult her on a wide variety of things, from editing his articles and speeches, to “Marcos’ relatives are offering me a massive bribe to get the hell out of the way. Do I take it, or do I do the right thing and possibly make you a widow soon afterward?” and “Do I take on the Israeli Knesset and probably torpedo my career, doing the right thing?” (Answer: do the right thing.)

                  And HAH! That’s a glorious story, thanks for sharing. Something neither Rhys nor I expected to hear were the congratulations from a number of random strangers – men – who told him he was smart for taking on an Asian wife. A number related how their own wives were more steady and resilient in a crisis, where their previous girlfriends would have pitched a fit and dumped them at the slightest sign of trouble. A few others said they’d become much better men/people overall after getting together with their significant other (one outright said that he stopped being a ‘right reckless wanker’ because she wasn’t as likely to throw hysterical, manipulative tantrums and instead communicate her disappointment in more subtle, but lasting manners – see, feminists? We don’t get what we want by screaming.) These guys were proud of their ‘little Asian wives’, not ‘just’ because their households ran smoothly and their children, they knew, were well looked after and raised well, but because they were aware that their wives also managed them in ways that helped them grow the hell up without snipping off their balls. Result? Happy family.

                  I get comments about how good 7 year old son is, then they blink when I look surprised, because in my opinion he could be more behaved. Well, okay, he does chores, which is more than most kids his age these days, apparently. Kind of a shock to me, since at 7-8, I was helping my mother look after my younger siblings and doing the ‘run down to the store and get this on the list for me, please’ errands. (Is that actually odd? I haven’t the foggiest. Most of my friends were doing the same thing.)

                  Funnily enough, I’ve had the COs grumpy at me for ‘not calling for help’ more often. They were frankly shocked to find out that I was in the hospital a lot for health issues last year, and when they did finally get a request of ‘please send down Rhys because his wife is in the hospital’, it wasn’t me who put it in at all, it was the doctor, who made it sound like I was likely to die suddenly. (A possibility, but I deemed it unlikely, and I was keeping Rhys informed as much as I could.) I only found out later how much effort was put in to find him from poor Housemate, who kept getting updates of “We haven’t found him yet but we’re looking for Rhys” roughly once every 15 minutes. My threshold for ‘Ok, can’t handle this any more’ is far, far higher, it seems, than the norm… which puzzles me.

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                  1. If your wife has a subtle but firm hand you never notice you’re being housetrained. In my own case I never noticed until she passed that she was running the show.

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                  2. …doing the ‘run down to the store and get this on the list for me, please’ errands. (Is that actually odd? I haven’t the foggiest. Most of my friends were doing the same thing.)

                    My mother would have had me doing the same thing, except that the road from our house into town was too dangerous for frequent walking trips, and even more so for bicycles. Then again, dad used to tell of the time his father sent him to the store two miles away to pick up something before the school bus came that morning (He had 20 minutes, and made it, including another half-mile round trip from the road to the house and back).

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                    1. The local shopping center and a diner were in a plaza right outside the apartment building, but we were quite capable of going to others. And, if we felt so inclined, jumping on the strassenbahnto Alexanderplatz if needed.

                      Yeah, we were all less than nine years old. As much as I’d love to teach my children that kind of independence, I’m not sure it’s allowed any more. Mind, current youngest knew how to get home from school on his own at the age of six and said I could let him do it on his own. He was so proud too, of being able to do so. I was told by the school ‘no.’

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                    2. Main reason we stayed in the little mountain town till Marshall was 8 and then moved to a walking neighborhood. Kids walked to school through high school except for younger son’s dual highschool/college program, because it was FIVE miles away.

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                  3. My threshold for ‘Ok, can’t handle this any more’ is far, far higher, it seems, than the norm… which puzzles me.

                    I think it’s related to the “must control to show power” screwed up thing.

                    Since your family is an arch, instead of a net, you don’t have to spend as much energy being in absolute control so you can spend more coping.

                    I know that after something Really Big where I have to take over has happened, I’m tired afterwards– if I though that I had to do that all the time, because I’d been taught anything else was unacceptable? Good heavens.

                    Buildings on rock are more stable than sand, too, and from what I’ve heard your folks gave you a very good foundation indeed.

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                    1. *ponders, frowning* I… don’t remember not having to be in charge of things since before my dad died. Heck, the day after we got me and the little newborn home from the hospital, the first thing Rhys and I did was go do the groceries and make sure there was food at home to feed to the rest of the family, because Dad was in the hospital for cancer treatment and nobody else had ‘time’ to do those particulars. That’s almost eight years ago now and I don’t really recall anything since resembling a vacation except that trip to Guam, which was a working trip as well. Seems to me that it’s been full tilt one thing after another.

                      =/ It’s not really a ‘been taught to have to handle this because anything else is unacceptable’, and more ‘that’s the reality, push through, and when going through hell, keep moving or you’ll never get out.’ And I’m quite fortunate that Housemate is here to help in case I’m hospitalized.

                      It’s been an interesting topic when Rhys and I talk that we realize that our generation is even more socially isolated in terms of being able to have the help of neighbors and family. I occasionally look up how parents deal with stress, and I find myself snorting in derision. Common suggestions involve relying on giving the parents time to be adults, grown ups, without the children, or ‘indulgent little coffee meets’ with other mothers. Not really an option if one is constantly moving around.

                      But the derision is more that the suggestions, well meaning as they are, still assume that the ‘old traditional mores of the neighborhood and village’ exist, unchanged, despite the sheer effort of progressives to tear those things down.

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                    2. Ah! But you’re not in total control, you’re “just” in control– like the difference between carrying a hobbled horse, and leading it or riding it.

                      There really are people who think that if they’re not in charge of each detail, then they’re not actually “in charge” of a job. Working together means that they tell the other person every single thing they need to do, and how. It’s not just about not trusting people, it’s a power thing.

                      I’ve only been recently figuring this out from a couple of sort-of fights I’ve had with my husband– he’s trying to help, but he’s been carefully taught that “helping” an annoyed woman means her telling him each and every step. Which, since I get annoyed when I’m feeling overwhelmed, doesn’t help matters. (Heck, part of why I don’t ask for help is that it takes longer to explain what I want done, and the important parts of how so that I don’t spend even more time than it would take to do to FIX it, than to just do it myself.)

                      The “it needs to be done, so I’ll do it” mentality seems healthy to me. :D

                      (I stopped reading the “dealing with parental stress” stuff along time ago. It all seemed to boil down to “first, aim to simulate being single.” I have much more luck taking the kids to something distracting, or when it’s really bad banshing them to The Play Room where all the noisy toys live.)

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                    4. Yep. That’s how it is, and unlike my parents, I don’t have household help to help out with the day to day tasks. So all the big stresses that I have, that other people would be taking therapy or drugs for kind of just have to be pushed aside into a basket of ‘can’t indulge in that’.

                      When going through hell, keep on going.

                      (The funny thing is, I’ve tried to see some therapists – if nothing else, maybe I’d learn a few new coping mechanisms, maybe something I’m missing or overdoing, because when you’ve been down in the trenches for so long, y’know? So far, I’ve seen no useful response other than ‘oh my God. I have no idea how to help you.’)

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            3. From what I’ve heard, such marriages work out well for the Korean wives. After a couple of friends of mine – who were both Korean – got married, I heard about how the thoroughly acclimated to the US newly-wed wife was having lots of issues with her traditionalist mother-in-law. Apparently in Korea, the MIL is supposed to have a lot of power over her DIL, and the new wife was constantly butting heads with her as a result.

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              1. Having had a Korean mother in law, I can tell you that she was quite unhappy with the fact that I was 1) her social superior because I was an Ambassador’s daughter, and 2) didn’t consider me a ‘proper’ wife as a result and pestered her son to divorce me and marry a ‘good Korean girl’ so much that he stopped visiting her and restricted himself to the occasional phone call.

                Even after the divorce, I remained amicable, somehow, to my ex, and encouraged him to enlist. He’s much happier now.

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                1. Yeesh… That’s doing “cross-cultural marriage” with the difficulty level set to about 11. Korean family dynamics are very “respect for elders”-dominant, and the expectation is that You. Will. Obey. Period.

                  Which is why a lot of girls like to marry GIs–They’re short-circuiting that entire “marry into familial servitude until I’m the eldest myself” thing by doing so. What’s odd, however, is how thoroughly they take over the idea for themselves, once they’ve got their new family established.

                  From what I’ve seen of Filipino family structure/tradition, that must have been hard as hell on you, too. Watching the Filipino “thing” from an outside perspective, it often seems as though you’re not marrying the girl, you’re marrying her entire family, and they’re adopting you as closest kin. What’s kind of neat is that most of the Anglos I’ve seen marry Filipino girls wind up being almost totally assimilated and accepted–You’re just that big, clumsy white honorary Filipino that their daughter married. That doesn’t happen with a lot of cultures. This sort of thing doesn’t happen with a lot of “mail-order bridal” situations, but when it’s a true love match, it’s pretty much SOP.

                  Downside to all that, though, from the Anglo perception is that you’re suddenly responsible for helping all these people you barely know with all these issues.

                  Which, when flipped around again, is stunning: One of my friends was married to a Filipino girl, and she got really, really screwed up with her second pregnancy–Forced bed rest for the last trimester and a half, huge problems for her and the baby after the very difficult birth, and just sheer hell for about three years. At the end of it, though? He was in shock, because of all the extended family that came out of the woodwork, almost literally, to help. They were in Tacoma, about 2000 miles away from his family, and while her immediate family was mostly still in the PI, there were hordes of aunties and cousins of hers who’d just show up out of the blue to help with the baby and the house. He almost didn’t have to lift a finger while his wife was sick, and never had to miss a day of work.

                  He sat down with his wife and figured it out, when it was all over with, and over the course of the three years that they were going through all that hell, they’d had around a hundred and fifty different relatives of hers show up and provide significant help. She was like “What’s the big deal, anyway? They’re family; they help out…”.

                  She just didn’t get how… Unusual that sort of thing appears, from an American perspective. We’ve got family, but Filipinos have Familia; the most you’re going to get for help from most extended American family members is an understanding ear to talk to while you’re dealing with the shitty hand of cards you got dealt. Not too many families are close enough or big enough to organize an effort like the one hers did from the Philippines, and they did it almost without even thinking about it.

                  So, yeah… A Korean-Filipino marriage? I get how insanely hard that had to have been. Wow.

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                  1. I will cheerfully admit that I was quite grateful I lived outside of the country when that crazy creature started encouraging my then husband to cheat on me. It did not help his own paranoia and possessiveness, and his sense of ‘not being worthy’ of me was cemented by the mother’s own insecurity of one-sided lack of social ‘rank’ – something I don’t pay attention to when it’s not necessary for me to.

                    And yes, the clan perspective of ‘family’ can be daunting for most Americans because that’s not something practiced any more (the closest I can think of in relation to that are the Irish and Italian communities). Lucky for the guy and the girl that they have those connections because we don’t, and I don’t know most of my extended family relationships anyway. (I know I have a ton of aunts and uncles on the maternal side, maybe 50 or so, but I haven’t met most of them.) Sometimes I think it would have been fun to have knowledge of that, that belonging, but ah well…

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                    1. …the clan perspective of ‘family’ can be daunting for most Americans because that’s not something practiced any more

                      Well, perhaps not in urban areas (though I can think of a few exceptions here in Silicon Valley), but the clan thing is definitely still in full force in rural areas of the US. I know back in SW Indiana/SE Illinois where my I have family that the small town “everyone knows everyone” thing connects directly to “…and her grandfather is Ex-County-Commissioner Redacted, and her cousins make up approximately one third of the high school football team, so leave her be.” This also goes along with “her Aunt insulted her Grandmother’s pecan pie twenty five years ago, so those families can’t be seated anywhere near each other at the annual parish social dinner, and you can only put that family in the buffer zone, since they are still on speaking terms with both families”

                      …(the closest I can think of in relation to that are the Irish and Italian communities)…

                      Oh, yeah. Lots of Italian and some Irish immigrants settled out here pretty early on, and there are major power structures that run through the Italian and Irish extended families. I saw the Italian clan thing going the whole time I was growing up, though being raised Catholic I was perhaps overexposed to those slices of the local community, vs., say, the local Scottish immigrants.

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              2. My cousin married a girl from Laos. Even though her family moved to the US before she was a year old, and she grew up pretty much only speaking English, her mother was very traditional, and my cousin did NOT get along well with his MIL. His wife actually appreciated this, because she did not want her mother running her life (she left home at 18 because she didn’t want to marry the mid-forties banker her mother had arranged, read sold for a couple years wages, for her to marry). It isn’t just that the mother of the boy thinks she should be running their life, but the mother of the girl thinks so as well. The really have a strong respect your elders theme in the culture, and where the female elders are concerned, this translates into the female elders holding almost absolute power.

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                1. In Korea’s case it’s been less than 100 years since that was the accepted way of doing things. The women ran the house (including the men when they were home) and the men ran the rest and people survived. Korea didn’t really start to industrialize until after the Korean War. From what I hear from friends with Chinese and Japanese parents/in-laws the Koreans are handling it reasonable well. It’s interesting to watch the range of reactions and changes between generations and across the cultural boundaries.

                  A joke that was relatively common when my grandfather was growing up in Korea (translated) speaks of a King who called all his nobles and scholars and councilors together and instructed, “All those of you who are hen pecked by your wives step back.”

                  All but one of the men did. The King called him forward and asked quietly, “So how do you do it?”

                  To which the man replied, “Oh! No, my wife just told me never to stand in crowds.”

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                  1. That cracks me up, and it’s the first time I’ve heard that particular joke–Which is something that hasn’t happened in awhile. Thank you for sharing.

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        1. Oh, I was a right salty swearing thing at that age myself. Before that though I was more prone to making snarling noises to express displeasure. I’m just ‘annoyed’ when swearing. I’m royally pissed off if I start really throwing the insults – and those tend not to have many swearwords when I get to that point.

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          1. Now that I’ve got a wee bairn at home, I have to be very careful indeed. It’s normally not a problem, unless I’m driving – because THOSE miserable such-n-sos now represent more than annoyance, but an actual threat to my child’s safety with their honkin’, swervin’, tailgating tomfoolery. I do not like this. And 20 years around hockey rinks have taught me some horrible vocabulary.

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            1. I find it useful to describe, in detail, what they are doing and why it’s wrong.

              This has resulted in my three year old yelling “dum-dum hickup! Wed means THTOP!!!!” and similar events, but…well, my mom did it, and it seems to have improved my driving over at least half of the folks around me…. (Yes, I’m that annoying minivan that isn’t going right on red, even though if she pulled out the oncoming traffic would probably slam on their brakes, and who is yielding to the pedestrian in the cross-walk.)

              Liked by 1 person

  8. (One of the reasons the book took a flying lesson out of the train window somewhere between France and Germany.)

    Careful, there’s no statue of limitations on dumping toxic waste into the environment.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. The Thomas Covenant series is nothing but redemption and the struggle to acknowledge and accept responsibility. The reprecussions of his rape go on for literally the entire series. It’s a beautiful, harrowing tale full of characters – the hero included – who struggle against the darkness, rise to the challenge, accomplish things and wrest a better world from the fight.

    And every action within that series makes perfect sense, given the context. It is a story that is utterly the opposite of ‘grey goo.’

    I’ve said my piece. I await the hate.

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      1. I get the same kind of vibe reading these comments. The consequences of his actions dog him for the entire series – the Land is nearly destroyed over what he did.
        I get why people hate Covenant, but there’s no excuse for describing it as a book with no moral consequences. You’d have to be blind to deny that.

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    4. I’ve said my piece. I await the hate.

      If the best defense of what you think is to try to preemptively discredit those who disagree, then you clearly don’t think you’ve got much to support it.

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    5. See, I’m kinda on the fence with this one. I don’t remember if I was in elementary or high school when I read the series, but…I didn’t fling it against the wall. But I also didn’t devour it like I did Red Storm Rising or some of the other stuff I read at the time. There were aspects of the story and that world that I liked and enjoyed, but it wasn’t a series that I’d go back to and read again (nor, have I) – and that’s very unusual for me.

      Covenant himself was a whiny B**** that I want to kick repeatedly, and stomp, and kick again. Especially after the rape scene. And while there were “repercussions” for that later in the story…they were a plot device rather than consequences – rather than walk down the street to the objective, he had to go down the alley, sort of thing. His penance for the act wasn’t much more than, “I shouldn’t have done it. I was wrong. I’m sorry, please forgive me.” When he deserved to have his nuts cut off and fed to him. With ghost peppers.

      Looking back, I’d have to say that I enjoyed them, but I also have to admit that they left me…hollow and unsatisfied. They didn’t leave me wanting more. And they did not fill me with hope for tomorrow, which, to be honest, was something that I was severely lacking in those days.

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    6. “I’ve said my piece. I await the hate.” Clearly, you are new here, the SFWA blogs are at the other end of the line.

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    8. No hate. I have been struggling to find the word that sums up my opinion of the book: disgusting. I felt hollow after reading it.

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  10. I first read Thomas Covenant as a teenager (the angst was strong in this one), but for some reason it didn’t have an overwhelming impression on me–it was just something that all the fantasy geeks were reading at the time.

    Fast forward about four years, and I’m working at a university library on a Saturday. Slow day, and I saw the first Thomas Covenant book on the shelving cart. I picked it up and started reading, and fell into that zone of deep empathy with the main character. I didn’t realize how bad it was until the end of the day, when one of my co-workers said, “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I’ve never seen you more miserable, and it was tough working with you today.” I said it was the book I was reading, and it was. But I have never wanted to read anything from that series, or that author, ever since.

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  11. I’ve had two or three books over the years that I’ve read expecting comedy (that’s how they were pitched to me), and found nothing but horrible people being awkward and/or horrible to each other. I can’t speak for anyone else, obviously, but that’s not what I find humorous. The only one I can remember the name of was Sir Apropos of Nothing. I read all the way through it, waiting for the sociopathic scumbag of a protagonist to have a change of heart. Never did. Utter drek, it was, and the only reason I didn’t heave the thing into the rubbish bin was that I’d borrowed it from the library and couldn’t afford the replacement fee.

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    1. horrible people being awkward and/or horrible to each other

      That’s a really good summary of why I can’t get into most “humor” shows. I just don’t find writhing in empathetic pain all that amusing– nor watching someone being horribly embarrassed through no fault of their own, or by something that shouldn’t be embarrassing but everyone treats as a reason to be horrible to them.

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      1. Same. This is largely why when people mention situation comedies they watch on tv, my response is either a blank look or “…what?” It reminds me most of, well, high-school attempts at humor, and I’d really not like to turn the clock *that* far back, thanks. *grin*

        Of course, I adore puns and dry wit, so things I find funny usually fly right over folks heads or is deemed so low-brow it has to look up at toenail fungus. *shrug*

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Makes you appreciate the other sorts of humor all the more. And the other sorts of humor typically get regarded as the higher quality movies, as well. The Incredibles and The Princess Bridge are highly regarded. What “bullying humor” movies are considered to be on their level? I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

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          1. “What “bullying humor” movies are considered to be on their level? I can’t think of any off the top of my head.”

            The awesomeness of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” runneth over.

            http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095031/

            But you have to use Steve Martin and Michael freakin’ Caine to make it work properly. It doesn’t work with lesser talents, but it can be done. Another way is to avoid using people. You’ve just described all of Looney Tunes, which is genius.

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            1. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels also works because –

              1.) The bullying is largely directed at two individuals who are both scoundrels and are themselves the ones doing the bullying (i.e. Steve Martin and Michael Caine spend most of the movie going after each other), and

              2.) The twist at the end, which suddenly defuses all of the negative things that they aimed at their mark

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        2. Puns, dry wit, call-backs to previous situations, or references to classic ones… I’m sure we’ve all had things where we’re laughing ourselves sick and everyone else is looking confused, and when you finish explaining they just look bored or are confused why you found THAT funny.

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      2. “Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence, it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is ‘mean,’ but if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer ‘mean’ but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humourous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful — unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man’s damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke.” C. S. Lewis

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        1. EXACTLY. Lewis – a fellow of excellent humor, if one can judge from his work – really knew his stuff on this score.

          Of course there’s a healthy variety of the self-deprecating joke. One twits oneself to deflect praise, accept a criticism, or to generally show a human and compassionate side. It shows you’re not standing on ceremony but you’re willing to laugh at your own foibles, not take yourself so seriously.(Small example – I tumbled during my most reason game and was down, briefly unable to catch my breath. When the ref asked if I was OK as I went to the bench, I said I’d be fine, my own gut had knocked the wind out of me.)

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      3. This.

        Why is horribly embarrassing others supposedly funny? Well, maybe in those special circumstances when the victim is a horrible person who really deserves the bad karma, but other times – and often the victim is even more or less sympathetic in these shows.

        And let’s not talk about any kind of ‘candid camera’ shows. The only acceptable use for practical jokes for me is if they are between people who know each other well enough to know that the victim can handle it as a joke.

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        1. “A practical joker deserves applause for his wit according to its quality. Bastinado is about right. For exceptional wit one might grant keelhauling. But staking out on an anthill should be reserved for the very wittiest.”

          Lazarus Long

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        2. There’s a short story out there – can’t remember the name – that I read a while back. I think it was written a few decades ago. The narrator spends most of the story talking about a guy in the town who’s always joking around with other people. The jokester’s a real funny kind of guy. Then at the end of the story, another character kills the comedian.

          When you read between the lines of the story – i.e. read what the narrator is actually saying versus what he thinks he’s saying – you realize that the comedian was actually the town brute, who’d been picking on his killer for quite a while. The last straw was when the brute’s attention started extending toward a woman that his killer was sweet on. But the brute always couched his thuggishness as “just joking around” and “having fun”, so the narrator never understands just how horrible the brute really was.

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          1. That often seems to be a preferred method for mean people to bully others, pretend it’s all just one big joke, then accuse the bullied of having no sense of humor if they complain. Seems to be a bit more prevalent with female bullies, you accuse one of them of acting mean and you will suddenly get the doe-eyed innocent pretending to be so sorry you so completely misunderstood her (you probably will not get an apology from her for hurting your feelings, she’s just sorry that you didn’t get the ‘joke’. Your fault.).

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        3. My family are the kinds of folks that make “Candid Camera ‘Jokes'” a hazardous passtime.

          If the lights start going strange and some guy jumps out at me with a bloody knife? His health insurance better be paid up.

          The phrase “Can’t you take a joke?” should usually be answered with a variation on “try being funny, first.”

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            2. Roughly 45 years ago, my mom found out that you do NOT walk into the house late at night… on Halloween… after having coasted the pickup into the driveway… with the lights off… when your little sister is the only one home.

              There’s still a large hole in the door frame where mom dodged the poker.

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            3. During the ’90s when there was a revival in the “Candid Camera” type shows, I remember seeing the start of a gag involving a guy (the mark) keeping an eye on some storage units at night encountering some “zombies”. While I didn’t see anything beyond the basic setup, the thought that crossed my mind was, “What if he thinks it’s real, and he’s carrying?”

              On a similar note, one episode of the TV show “Castle” had Castle and Beckett unknowingly stumble into a Zombie Walk. Fortunately, Beckett was more skeptical than Castle…

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              1. Like the guy who dressed up as a murderous clown to “prank” people– and got shot, because attacking someone with a kitchen knife is still illegal, even if it’s a fake one? (that’s why you can be charged with robbery with a deadly weapon when you’re using a fake gun– people can’t second-guess about if it’s a real weapon or not and thus if they are defending themselves from being shot or being bludgeoned with foam.)

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              2. That was my problem with the Scobby-Do Mysteries. All these fake Monsters and no farmer ever met the fake Monster with a shot-gun? [Very Big Evil Grin]

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                  1. The Mystery Machine pulls up and the gang piles out, but the person that called them for help is there to meet them. “I’m sorry, I thought we really had a monster problem, but there was this loud boom late at night last weekend over across the north fields, and ever since there’s been nothing spooky going on at all. Sorry to have dragged you out here for nothing. Here, I baked you some cookies for your ride back.”

                    Shaggy says “Cookies!” and grabs the bag before Scooby can get them, and they all pile back in the van.

                    “Well, there’s nothing here for this week’s blog post,” says Velma as she slams the door.

                    “You might have to do another cat photo post,” says Daphne.

                    “Noooooooooo,” cries Scooby as the Mystery Machine pulls away.

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                2. That was your problem with the Scooby-Do Mysteries? To quote Tommy Lee Jones, “My, my, my, my, my, what a mess.”

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              3. I’ve had a similar reaction to some of those shows. There was one whose whole premise was scaring people, and I always thought it would be a bad thing if they did it to someone like me. Largely because I’m way out of shape, so I figure that if I have to defend myself, the other person has to go down fast and hard, or I’ll lose.

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          2. The phrase “Can’t you take a joke?” should usually be answered with a variation on “try being funny, first.”

            Nothing wrong with, “No.”

            Questions about losing your sense of humor should perhaps receive the response that you never had one.

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      1. There is right now a mystery for free on Amazon, something Chop Suey. IT’S AWFUL. They’re tyring to make it funny but the main character comes across as mean spirited and (through his eyes) everyone else comes across as freaks of nature.

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  12. Your advice is well timed.

    There’s so much effort being put forward to try to make us see darkness, and hear darkness, that it becomes a real effort not to think or say darkness. It almost becomes reflex.

    Heard a story a few weeks ago in church. The speaker was at the beach with his family, and all of them except the mom went out into the ocean. They played and swam and had a great time. and everyone around them when they got in was still around them a half hour later when Dad said “Let’s go in and check on mom.” In the time that they’d been in the water, because of tides and currents, they (and everyone around them) had moved down the beach a half a mile. No feeling of motion. No sign that they were being moved, but the result was the result. That’s a lot like the culture we’re swimming in now. With so much pushing in a certain direction, we run the risk of shifting without being aware of it.

    That’s why the Human Wave and Superversive fiction movements are needed. Let the Cultural (Counter) Revolution begin!

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    1. That was an excellent story, Zachary. It’s very true, too. Just in our lifetimes (I’m 57) our culture has shifted noticeably; I hate to think what my great-great grandparents would think if they could come to our time for a visit. I suspect that it’s more noticeable to me than to many people because I don’t have a TV, and have spent most of my life without one. Since most of the people I know are the folks I go to church with, and pretty decent people for the most part, getting out of that milieu can be a shock. Well, IS a shock. I remember when I first got a computer, in December of 1999, and figured out how to get on the internet. It wasn’t long before I was seeing forum posts (on HomesteadingToday and a couple other similar forums) from people who spoke hatefully of Christians and churches, and nobody was even calling them on it. It was like, in their world, this was accepted as truth. I had no clue at that time that this country had turned so far away from it’s roots. Now, of course, we are heading into outright persecution and a situation prophesied in the Bible, where people call good evil, and call evil good. Yes, there has been a huge culture shift.

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  13. I happen to think that our culture, and consequently our people, is declining in many ways, on the whole. But that doesn’t detract from your point one little bit. Readers need and want positive characters doing positive things despite the forces acting against them. I won’t read or watch depressing shit…
    Nice toss, hope the EU doesn’t prosecute!

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  14. Lev Grossman’s The Magicians took the opposite route. In the first book the central character is wavers between venal & vile, occasionally verging on villainous. I described the result as thus: “The overall effect is as if the author has taken [a] mental picture of Narnia and drawn over it a penis graffito.”

    On the recommendation of a friend, I kept reading. In the second book, most of the character’s worst traits have mysteriously disappeared—and the result is a much more enjoyable read. (It’s not so good I’d suggest reading the first book to get at the second & third, but if you’ve suffered through the initial volume the others will wash away some of the bad taste.)

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    1. I had very much the same reaction to The Magicians as you did, if perhaps even worse: The Magicians struck me as being in the same mold as Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned (and a mold that Thomas Covenant very much is not in, though you have to read all the way through the first trilogy to get there) — I call it Bites-the-Hand Fantasy, or fantasy whose primary theme is to tell us how pointless fantasy is, and by extension how pointless is any kind of investment in the impossible or the supernatural as a source of meaning (a thesis that as a devout Catholic I reject in toto). Quite frankly, I consider Grossman to have cheated me out of my time and my money with that book and I am profoundly disinclined to reward him with further patronage.

      A much better saga about the magical academy trope that isn’t J.K. Rowling is L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Rachel Griffin series, the second book of which I understand has just become available on Amazon.

      Liked by 1 person

  15. I recently started (and didn’t finish) the third book in Lilith St Crows “Bannon and Clare” series. She had the characters get hung up over something I thought was minor and the angst was making me nuts so I stopped reading. Not sure why authors do that. “She did it to save your life. Get over it!”

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  16. Moved down for space:
    Star Trek: Free Trader?

    I would SO want to see this– we know the culture exists, from Mudd in the original and Worf’s human brother in TNG.

    My theory is that’s where all the religious folks, and the Star Trek versions of the Human/Romulan married to a Vulcan/Orion and their half-dozen kids live. (We know that quarter-breeds exist, too, because it was a major plot point that a guy was hiding his Romulan grandparent… there should be entire ships staffed with Kirk’s grandchildren’s families alone.)

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    2. Welcome to the first hints of my NaNo book for this year. :-P

      That whole “we don’t have currency” thing from TNG STILL bothers me. If you don’t have currency, and you do have replicator technology, how do you still have TRADE and FREIGHTERS?

      And for that matter (I blame you all for this), now I’m wondering about shore leave. Starship pulls in to port. We know that there are things like Wrigley’s Pleasure Planet (Star Trek TOS Season 1, Ep 1 – “The Man Trap”), and that various entertainments can be had there, including… intimate companionship. So… who pays the hookers? I mean, Picard’s blathering on about “no one works for money, we all try to improve ourselves and the species” really takes on a whole new consideration if you’re adding that segment of the non-economy.

      And why would you set up a pleasure planet if you weren’t going to be separating midshipmen from their gold-plated latinum, or whatever the equivalent is?

      Not that any of that gets explored in a story with overtly religious characters… well, I suppose they’ve got eyes and ears and are breathing… hmmmm…

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      1. I don’t think “we have no money” nonsense existed in the original series.

        Of course, the Federation of NG didn’t seem to have any religions.

        Religions were things that only “lowly non-Federation” species had. [Frown]

        Oh, don’t get me started on the Bajorans of Deep Space Nine.

        There was only one Bajoran Religious Leader who was shown as a nice person and she was abandoned on the other side of the Wormhole.

        ::Hey where did this soapbox come from?::

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          1. I said the Original series. By the time that movie was made, the movie makers had “drunk the koolaid”.

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          2. I hand-wave that by interpreting it as they don’t use *currency*, but rather “credits”… a cashless society where everyone uses their debit cards.

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      2. We have seen the Federation delivering replicators and similar technology supplies, and we know that they have requirements (such as a one-world gov’t) to join. I believe (former) Lt. Eddings even accused them of using replicators to buy off planets? Or was that Garak when they went in with relief supplies to Cardassia…. been too long. It was a really obvious script writer rant, even though it worked OK when I saw it. (read it?)

        In addition to getting direct-from-the-Federation supplies, betcha there’s some version of a Buy Me Drink bar effect here, where the pretty girl will be just so pleased to get this or that trinket…..
        (and they do have “credits,” they’re just not accepted by anybody who translates to latinum, which suggests they’re for something like direct Federation resources)

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      3. Pfagh! The “no money” thing was obviously calculated misdirection, an effort to convince the Federation’s competitors to take a false route and cripple themselves.

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    3. “there should be entire ships staffed with Kirk’s grandchildren’s families alone.”

      As an aside… I played the Star Trek MMO for a while. IIRC, One of the “fleets” (the equivalent of player guilds/ clans/ whatevers) had that as their theme.

      Liked by 1 person

          1. Just hit the memory alpha site, there was also his Space Indian wife who was stoned to death while pregnant.

            Which brings up two things: one, he was not shooting blanks, and two, there’s a decent amount of evidence from absence for a bias against half-breeds. (Probable real reason for that is that it’s not as dramatic to have a half-dozen different characters who are “in conflict with themselves” because of a split ancestry; still, there only being one half-Vulcan in Star Fleet several generations after Humans meet Vulcans?)

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            1. I could see it being more of a Vulcan thing toward half-breeds instead of a Federation thing against half-breeds. TNG seems to bear this out somewhat. Troi’s a half-breed, but the topic rarely comes up.

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              1. If that’s so, then the logical choice for a mixed family would be to live among Humans– or in really mixed groups, which do exist in at least some places. (Wouldn’t work for Ambassador… Surak? But in general….)

                Look at the Half-Elves in various stories, if one group is really horrified by it, then almost all the families choose the other. (And the main character is stuck in the horrified one, because.)

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        2. Only son that *he* knew of and he may have had daughters that he didn’t know of. [Evil Grin]

          Oh, there was a story about Casanova (the famous lover) that he got involved with a young woman but before it “went too far” he met the young woman’s mother.

          Apparently he had an affair with the older woman years ago and the young woman was *his* daughter. [Very Big Grin]

          I wonder if Kirk ever got “involved” unknowingly with his own daughter (or daughters). [Very Big Evil Grin]

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          1. The DC comic book ‘Impulse’ had an interesting take on this. Impulse’s mentor, speedster Max Mercury, occasionally traveled forward in time by running really fast. Early on in the series, Max becomes extra solicitous of his single, female next door neighbor. The reason is non-romantic, however. Turns out she’s his biological daughter, though she’s initially unaware of the connection.

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        3. The one son that he knew about was killed.

          Much different.

          Even that son’s mother didn’t want him to have anything to do with Kirk, and she knew where to find him; for those who didn’t, or who were successful in keeping Kirk from knowing about the kids? Who, say, didn’t let their kids know they’d ever even met the guy?

          We had a chief that lived the “girl in every port” thing. He had a half-dozen children by ex-wives, was paying for three illegitimate children, and knew of but couldn’t be pinned down on several more. Nobody–especially him– has a clue how many other kids he might have scattered around.

          (Here’s hoping none of them inherited his personality. IQ and looks were fine, but what a disgusting excuse for a human.)

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  17. I wonder if maybe its a euro-centric idea that has taken foothold in America? If you listen to old Irish/Scottish Songs/stories, the OLD fairy tales, Russian folklore, Japanese and Chinese old stories, etc. You see lots of pathos, disappointment and tragedy. More of a moralistic, be good or else, toe the line or else attitude. Was it because they were still in more a a tribal mode, and therefore, everyone needed to pull together to survive and thus the boat-rockers were a problem? It’s very fatalistic. Whereas American stories, especially westerns, romances, sci-fi were all, much like early Americans, very upbeat, and beat the odds. So, the signs that America feels like its sliding into an enui? Or just that they want us to think that we are? Zombie stories are often much the same thing, there is no hope in the world, and all you can do is survive.

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    1. You might have a point. After all, every single American is descended – be it 20 generations or zero – from someone who looked at their terrible life and said “F**k this, I wonder what’s over there.”

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    2. It’s probably Christian, from what I remember of the analyzing of old stories; the Greeks and Romans thought that those depressing stories about Everybody Dies In The End were uplifting because it showed that you could at least TRY, even though it was doomed to failure.

      Christianity OTOH has “try, you could get a miracle.”

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  19. The key thing to remember about inserting a “fatal flaw” into your character’s back(story) and twisting it hard is that it is such an easy thing to do. Going dark — oh my, never seen that before. Much harder to write is the nice kid who grew up in idyllic life (although likely not aware) having to “man up” and face down problems undreamt. Heinlein did that with Kip and multiple other characters without having to insert a single “fatal flaw” … other than a certain naivete and slight slow-wittedness when it comes to comprehending the bad guy.

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  20. I see the tendency to give “heroes” fatal or near-fatal flaws as a reflection of the old saw: “You should never meet your childhood heroes” — the implication being: The Reality will *never* measure up to the Dream.

    Similarly: Let’s face it — we all remember a time when we thought of a historical or sports figure as “perfect”, then learned he wasn’t. (In my case, look up “richard petty” and “southeastern dragway”. :P ) But, to quote Gallagher: “Life’s a bitch, I’m tellin’ ya — but it’s how you *deal* with the bitch that gives you your style.”

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    1. In America the “feet, ankles, knees and crotch of clay” aspects of our public characters seems to have really kicked into high gear around 1998, when we had our collective noses rubbed into the idea that everybody lies about blue dresses.

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      1. Well, that was the time when I got into high gear about the hypocrisy of the News Media and the Democratic Party.

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    2. Similarly: Let’s face it — we all remember a time when we thought of a historical or sports figure as “perfect”, then learned he wasn’t.

      Not sure if I’m misunderstanding it, but I really can’t; I’ve always known that people are… people. Sometimes been startled that my estimation of them on this or that was too low, and sometimes I’m shocked by how far above they go what I thought, but the constant TV show “I thought My Hero was amazingly perfect and then I found out he’s a person, not God” storyline never hit it off with me.

      It’s possibly that between having rather honest parents– they tried to be good, not perfect– and every single time anybody in a story meets one of their heroes, it’s going to disappoint them, the experience isn’t so universal.

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  21. I’ve been accused of being a misanthropist and a pessimist very often. But the people who say that have never read my fiction, so that should tell me something.

    The urge to debase the human race to the cultural equivalent of boiling tar has yet to be recognized as a mental illness, unfortunately. It definitely can be linked to a host of societal ills, the Great White Guilt, the All Men Are Guilty, the You Are A Traitor To Your Gender/Culture/Ethnicity/Religion/Local-Chamber-of-Commerce, and the Because I Said So, to name a few of society’s worst enemies.

    Seriously though,why do some teenagers (aged 10 to 90) have to cast everything as The End Of Life As We Know It?

    Frankly, I think part of it is the bastardized version of the “American dream” many people have embraced (“I want my kids to have everything I never had” – Does Smallpox count?).

    Let me illustrate: At 15, I was very frustrated over figuring out where my life was headed and how to improve my chances of succeeding. I was trying to figure out how to choose a college, what major to choose (because Creative Writing wasn’t a “real job”), how to study for the barrage of scholastic achievement tests, which summer jobs would look better on a college application (and how to get those summer jobs), etc. I tried to explain this frustration to my parents, and asked for their assistance. Bear in mind that a lot of these questions had been caused by my parents constantly harping on getting into college and getting a degree.

    My parents’ solution was to send me to a psychiatrist. Supposedly, this was because they wanted me to have more compassion and understanding than their parents showed them. What it proved was that they were just as skilled as their parents at ducking any hard questions.

    Since my generation, a lot of kids receive their first car, not through hard work, but as a gift (and no longer as a birthday or graduation gift, it seems). They get their first computer (which in the 80’s was harder to get than a car). Many of them get their college paid for, in full, and I have seen quite a few who left for college with their parents’ credit card(s) in their hands.

    It goes beyond a poor work ethic. It is a poor life ethic.

    They do not know what delayed gratification is. The idea that they have to work 40 hours *before* getting their paycheck is foreign to many of them. Delayed gratification, i.e., working for it, has become The End Of The World As We Know It, because if it isn’t *right now* it will never happen.

    And if they can’t get their entertainment from whatever is going on, then Life Is Bleak And Pointless. And frankly, we have generations of teenagers that invented planking, happy-slapping, and Mean Girls as a source of entertainment.

    They are so deprived of basic life lessons that their attitudes border on the sociopathic (and there’s a term most people do not understand).

    If you don’t believe me, check out the god-awful fiction written by Anne Rice’s son. Yes, Virginia, it does get worse than Anne Rice.

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  22. The thing that struck me about the inCovenant series was that the main character despised himself and was pitied by those around him (the ones that weren’t putting razor blades in his food, anyway – a terrible way to start a book IMHO).

    I was 14 the first time I picked one up (and how that got into the public school library in a small town so intensely Catholic they got together to vote whether to accept the latest Pope, I will never comprehend). I really could not understand why anybody would go out of their way to hurt him when it was so much easier to ignore him.

    I don’t recall finding any justification for pitying him either. Pretty much everything I read (and I don’t think I read more than half of either of the two books I found) said that he had caused his own troubles and was wallowing in them.

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  23. The secret is that heroes don’t need flaws. Heroes need struggle, which usually comes from flaws but can also come from the lack of power. That’s why so many more people wanted to read about Frodo Baggins than Thomas Covenant. (I’m another of the people who quit after the rape scene.)

    I think the difference could be effectively illustrated with Peter Grant’s Maxwell saga, which was criticized for the hero’s lack of flaws. If Grant gave Steve Maxwell a new flaw, like occasionally saying “and Steve got sloppy drunk”, but didn’t make him struggle to deal with the repercussions, it wouldn’t help a bit. But think if Grant didn’t give Maxwell a new flaw, but instead described struggling with the repercussions of his laser focus on career advancement. Maxwell starts out with a work ethic that exceeds everyone around him and then Grant just keeps turning it up at every new career opportunity, telling us over and over that Maxwell resolved to work harder and smarter than ever. Imagine if we heard about the fuzziness from lack of sleep, the disconnection with friends for lack of time, all their pop culture references going past, the lack of knowledge of art or non-military history, the temptation to JUST THIS ONCE skip studying for that OCS exam and go out with friends or see a movie.

    Even with that criticism, I’m going to keep buying and reading Peter Grant’s books, but I never bought or read anything else by Donaldson. (The first one was a loan, so I couldn’t throw it out a window).

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  24. I slept on this, so I’m coming in late. I propose we revive a good word that has gone out of fashion. I think that it has gone out of fashion because it pictures so many of the SJWs puffed up egos. That word is “Tiresome”.

    The thing is; what’s wrong with so much writing these days is not that it proffers one point of view. I can read and enjoy works by people with whom I disagree, if they can freaking WRITE. I love LOTR, despite the fact that I would hate to live under the rule of any of the people Tolkien obviously believes would be good rulers, and I think he bought into the whole “The Industrial Revolution Was Bad, Bad, Bad” narrative for too completely. What’s wrong with so much writing these days is that it is unrewarding to read. It doesn’t inform, it obfuscates. It doesn’t entertain, uplift, or enlighten; it preaches in a superior and wholly annoying tone.

    The thing is, too many people set out to write something Serious and Important. And while mediocre pulp can be pretty fun, mediocre Important Serious and Relevant is painful to wade through. In a word; tiresome.

    It isn’t that the SJWs are Evil incarnate. They are tiresome. They wouldn’t MIND being Evil Incarnate; that’s glamorous. That’s why they still get moist in the groinal regions over the likes of Lennin and Che. But they’ll HATE being called out as tiresome, because tiresome is, pretty much by definition, unimportant.

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    1. Holy cow, yes. I’d go beyond that to “expected, regurgitated, boring,” but that gets people’s danders up a bit more than I expect “tiresome” will.

      Proposal is hereby seconded.

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      1. It also makes the point so much more effectively. With many words you have put effort into classifying them… they can say they got your dander up. ‘Tiresome’ is so much sharper… it dismisses their efforts with all the consideration they are due: none. Rather like my favorite insult to date is “your existence bores me.” of course they must be said with the appropriate attitude. Long suffering works. Disdain is also effective. ;)

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        1. I have long employed the word tedious for such drivel. (On my inner ear it gets pronounced with a slight British drawl as teed’jus.) Sorta like cleaning the toilet bowl, it is tiresome, unpleasant and lacking all interest, entailing some slight drudgery but not especially challenging.

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  25. During the late 70’s in some school class we were told to write a story about future, and the teacher promised she’d read the best one. The story she chose was about the last man alive after a nuclear war, sitting alone in some bunker and pondering how this had happened. As far as I remember the reason given was that people were just that horrible.

    I remember feeling kind of bad. Not because my story had not been chosen, but because that was one more confirmation that that type of stories did seem to be appreciated more in general than more optimistic stuff was, and that made me feel depressed.

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    1. Then the forensic archeologists come in, talking about all the interesting things lone survivors did in these off the books bunkers, all the while hoping for a valuable development.

      They eventually give up, deciding it had been boring, and fruitless except for the student learning experience.

      However, tattooed on the man’s back was the final part of something that ended up being publishable.

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        1. I’m someone who finds that Kate’s latest at MGC resonates with me a lot.

          I’ve also never really cared for the subgenre of the original.

          So when your description matched up with my thoughts on the standard stories, and a setting I’ve been messing around with, it just came together.

          I’m thinking of trying to expand it some. Could you tell me a Finnish word for wimp, pansy, bloodless, spineless, gutless or the like that can pass for a surname?

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          1. Hm. Hiiri and Löllö are existing surnames, Hiiri means mouse and Löllö can be used in slang for something like limp. Veretön would mean bloodless, I don’t know if it is in use but several similar names exist. Sisuton would be a good one, that would mean something like gutless, (without sisu) and would also fit quite well into our naming traditions although again I don’t know if it is actually in use. We do have several real embarrassing surnames like Nivus (groin) and Vuoto (leak) here (some seem to exist because they started out as nicknames for somebody and the descendants then got stuck with it, some because they come from something once in use which was originally way less embarrassing). Pansy, well, since it is also a flower, how about ‘Orvokki’ (the flower), even if there is no similar slang meaning to that it would still be funny to a Finn as a name for a man who acts in a less than manly manner.

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            1. And yes, Kananen is an existing surname which also would be funny to us as the name of an obviously spineless man, one of its meanings as a word is “little hen/chicken”. :D

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            2. Thank you.

              I’m thinking my whiner is going to be Kananen. Could I use Orvokki as his given name?

              I think Sisuton is going to be a girl in a near by bunker, who died well, and was found at least a decade earlier.

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              1. Hm, flower names are not usually given to men, so that might be overdoing it if you make him a him. But among the currently embarrassing male first names would be Kaino. Means shy, bashful. It was in use about a century ago, and was then used for both girls and boys, but more often boys. Well, depends a bit if you want the story to sound even half serious, or full on satire, Kaino Kananen does sound very much like a joke name. :)

                As for names currently in use, Onni is a common one, means luck and might be suitable for this. And something like Viima (means cold wind) is often tagged as ‘hippie parents…”. Would also go with something like Pippuri, which is used but mostly for girls (means pepper). And if you take anything from something like Lord of the Rings… yep, child of more or less hippie parents again is going to be the first impression. So you could also perhaps use Frodo or Legolas or Bilbo…

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                1. I’m thinking he is going to be a Kaino. Hippie parents won’t quite work, as I’m partly ripping off Hunter Biden for his family background and character. Perhaps with apologies to Hunter Biden.

                  I dunno how comic the implementation is going to be, but I’m trying for English names that can pass for normal usage, and having fun with the rest. I figure someone caring enough to give me grief will count as a partial success, and the history of the setting may be traumatic enough to change naming habits.

                  The story may cover a period of eighty years, or more. I’m thinking there is a gap of at least forty years between the end of the war, and archaeologists finding Kananen’s body.

                  The site being investigated was never important enough for the Finnish government to do it. They got to the Sisuton site much sooner, and published documents from it. This expedition was put together by experts from friendly countries who deduced the site, and got permission from the Finnish government to investigate.

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    1. Maybe you could at least mention that he had been named after a war hero grandfather or great grandfather or such, so that the first impression to Finns is not that his parents were sadists. :)

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      1. Dunno if I will have the space.

        Plus, given my timing, there’d be a good chance that his grandfather and great grandfather would’ve been active during the cold war, and I don’t know how involved Finland was in that.

        I’ve a fun little model that twists the mish-mashed magic systems of the original bigger setting very little.

        Back during the late nineteenth century, there was a Finn who anticipated a future need to kill communists. So he cut a deal with something, agreeing to be possessed for the purpose. To continue the deal, his son was given the same name. And so it went. When the Soviet Union fell, they decided that maybe there was no more need to be hag-rid by malefic blood-lust, and named the next in line something else. This was premature and his son was given the old name, however the deal had already been voided because they hadn’t murdered enough communists.

        Issues are that this is too interesting and useful for Kaino, and timing problems.

        I figure a combination of Kaino being named for a political patron of his father’s, and using surnames for much of the cast.

        The Japanese grad student, a major speaking role, currently has a given name which is a bad translation of red-white-blue. For in the grim darkness of the near very alternate future, there can only be better relations between the US and Japan. He’s not that intimate with the rest of the cast, and would be comfortable being on a surname basis with them.

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