"Too much welfare means you can't vote" sounds like something that should appear in the actual 18th or 19th century society. Having it appear that far in the future makes it seem like there is a deliberate effort to disenfranchise a section of the populace.
Let's Read: David Weber's Honor Harrington
- Thread starter The Victorian
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Somewhat off-topic, but I keep seeing people say this about the Safehold books and I genuinely do not understand the complaint. It's like someone from Late Antiquity complaining about James, Hamish, and Seamus being "weird bastardized versions of the proper Iacomus".
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
That's fine for unattached names. GRRM barely even tries with the alt-names and nobody cares. But the second you do that to an actual semi-contemporary person it automatically makes it feel like a political cartoon.
Though I do kinda like the idea of doing it with nicknames a la Ronnie Raygun. Maybe Ricardo Trichier has enough separation from the original to get away with it.
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- Mid-Atlantic
I wouldn't mind at all except that to me the names just register as badly spelled. It may just be that the letter substitutions seem rather arbitrary and often intended to allow the reader to just pronounce them the same way. Which entirely defeats the purpose, because then there's no serious attempt to reflect linguistic drift.
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Well, yes, but for some reason Martin's weird alt-names don't come across to me as being just plain misspelled to me. It's just a vibe thing, but it feels like they're trying to be actually different names, rather than trying to be regular names and failing.
I'd have the same problem if a book was full of characters named "Rogre," "Wedny," "Jospeh," and "Mlidred." I'd be feeling this constant low level reflexive itching of the brain constantly as I read the names of the characters, and it would make the book irrationally repulsive.
This is just a 'me' thing, not something I'm trying to talk other people into feeling, to be clear.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
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- Jerkville
The big bad being a bastardized misspelling of Clinton really tells you everything you ever didn't need to know about it
I mean, to be very honest, Weber might have just thought it funny. Sadly, his other books tell you you can't even assume that.
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Yeah this is basically the same reason why it makes me twitch. Also it just kind of feels like Weber is going "don't you see how CLEVER this is?".
I mean, he is. You can tell as he regretted it after book 1 or 2. That's usually the sign of a writer going "I outsmarted myself."
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Very true.
Also on the steward front, it is super anachronistic in the sense that the steward is the captain's personal butler who tends to their every whim personally like a billionaire's personal servant. Modern steward/equivalents are just regular logistics people who handle everybody's stuff.
Honor having a personal one is definitely why people called her a 'Mary Sue' because as far as I know, no one else has one like she does. Also I will note that there's actually a few 'types' of Mary Sue, they aren't all 'never takes a single damage' type. Instead one type instead gets constantly hit with tragedy and loss and is badly hurt but it doesn't ever hold her back when the cards are on the table. Which is I assume the type they mean for Honor. Usually they die heroically/tragically and everyone weeps over them and talk about how amazing they were.
I'd be cool with a different term for it, but it's hard because the original story that invented the term nailed the concept perfectly.
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The thing that gets Harrington called a Mary Sue (imo) isn't her effortlessly breezing through; we do see her work and struggle for everything. (Although that defintiely suffers from a "show, don't tell" problem). It's the fact that she's the Moral Center of the Universe. Everyone is either in her cult or is evil/stupid/weak.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
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TBH, I'd say it's not Honor, but Manticore who's the sue here.
People's moral worth as well as technological capability wax and wane as they align against or with manticore;
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I think they both are. Since Manticore turns to shit while Honor is hanging out with Manticore, but when she returns they become good again. EDIT: Grayson, not Manticore, but I'm still wrong, explained in next post
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I would disagree, but that's largely because the term Mary Sue is irrelevant in canon. It's barely applicable in fanfiction. The other reason is. High Ridge Government.
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Weber does a good job of making Honor work for her prizes, but she's still the genetically enhanced, heavy-world-strong, daughter of two super scientists/doctors, with a rare empathetic cat sidekick who rarely loses a fight and never loses an important one. Compare that to say, the son of a fourteen-year-old prostitute, raised by the state to be a military drone but somehow managed to assemble a functioning moral compass and enough competence to survive two-totalitarian governments and stand against the magic technology people...
Look, I'm just saying that Thomas Theisman might have been a better protagonist.
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I mean, it's not really out of keeping with the way Manticore works for a senior officer to have personal bodyservants like that.
I don't think that MacGuiness is the main reason.
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Oh it is definitely not the MAIN reason, but it's one of those things where you notice she just gets special things that nobody else gets. It's not out of character, but you never ever hear about any of the other Personal Captain Butlers, even for the other Much Richer Manticore Captains.
It's perfectly applicable in fanfiction, but it's not like terms have to be iron-clad locked to a single thing, when you can notice how it applies to other stuff. (Of course, way more male protagonists in canon stories nail the tropes better than female ones. It's just that female protagonists were way more canon in fanfiction at the time, for some reason....)
Also I was talking about that but I got my dates wrong. But it still basically aligns with what's been said because the High Ridge Government is made up of People Who Disagree With Honor.
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...Well, let's take a long list of Honorverse secondary and tertiary characters...
and do a search for 'steward,' looking only for named stewards to RMN officers.
List of characters in the Honorverse - Wikipedia
Joanna Agnelli is personal steward to Aivars Terekhov.
Clarissa Arbuckle was personal steward to Michelle Henke, but was killed in action during the Second Manticore-Haven War. Chris Billingsley replaced her after Henke was released from a Havenite POW camp.
Clorinda Brinkman was personal steward to the tactical officer aboard HMS Hexapuma during Storm from the Shadows.
Tatiana Jackson is Hamish Alexander's personal steward, first mentioned in Book 8; I was pretty sure his steward must exist as a named character because he's the RMN character whose domestic arrangements have gotten the second-most attention after Honor.
Alex Maybach is or was Alistair McKeon's personal steward, first mentioned in Book 7.
So...
Uh, it's not strictly true that Honor's the only person who gets a personal captain butler. It's just that most RMN officers don't get the level of focused attention from the narrative that brings their personal life and the question of who's doing their laundry into relevance.
I think "Mary Sue" herself stood out because she was such an excruciatingly stereotypical specimen of the problem (absurdly young age, absurdly always right, absurdly gets a romance with the charismatic male canon character, absurdly this, absurdly that) that it just burns itself into the memory.
Honor doesn't even begin to reach the level of absurdity as the 'real' Mary Sue, but then, the category is named 'Mary Sues' and not 'Honors' for a reason.
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- Location
- Penn
...Well, let's take a long list of Honorverse secondary and tertiary characters...
and do a search for 'steward,' looking only for named stewards to RMN officers.
List of characters in the Honorverse - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Joanna Agnelli is personal steward to Aivars Terekhov.
Clarissa Arbuckle was personal steward to Michelle Henke, but was killed in action during the Second Manticore-Haven War. Chris Billingsley replaced her after Henke was released from a Havenite POW camp.
Clorinda Brinkman was personal steward to the tactical officer aboard HMS Hexapuma during Storm from the Shadows.
Tatiana Jackson is Hamish Alexander's personal steward, first mentioned in Book 8; I was pretty sure his steward must exist as a named character because he's the RMN character whose domestic arrangements have gotten the second-most attention after Honor.
Alex Maybach is or was Alistair McKeon's personal steward, first mentioned in Book 7.
So...
Uh, it's not strictly true that Honor's the only person who gets a personal captain butler. It's just that most RMN officers don't get the level of focused attention from the narrative that brings their personal life and the question of who's doing their laundry into relevance.
I think "Mary Sue" herself stood out because she was such an excruciatingly stereotypical specimen of the problem (absurdly young age, absurdly always right, absurdly gets a romance with the charismatic male canon character, absurdly this, absurdly that) that it just burns itself into the memory.
Honor doesn't even begin to reach the level of absurdity as the 'real' Mary Sue, but then, the category is named 'Mary Sues' and not 'Honors' for a reason.
We never see any of them acting like the Personal Butler that Honor's is presented as, which is what I was getting at. Sorry for not being clear at all it seems. This is perhaps because nobody really gets any sort of focus outside of Honor and a few precious others.
I looked them up the best I could but most of the stewards only get a mention or perhaps one line - Tatiana Jamieson gets a couple of lines in a scene where she pours some wine and leaves.
Which kind of goes with what you said, where Honor's is so THERE constantly that he makes a much bigger impression than everyone else combined, like Mary Sue does for the term. And you are correct there! Mary Sue is by and far away worse than Honor at her worst... mostly. Honor in the last few books, such as she is there, is pretty something.
Though this was because Mary Sue was a parody of what was fairly common in Star Trek fanfiction at the time. She was intentionally suppose to be all of those traits in one character turned up to 20.
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I suppose you could call it protagonist-centered morality. Which i wouldn't mind so much if the author didn't feel the need to TELL us, at least once per book, about how she's THE BEST and everyone who fails to grasp her righteousness is a filthy coward/inbred aristocrat/greedy oik. The one time we hear some of her (newly arrived) crew give a more balanced opinion (she's a glory hound who'll get us all killed), they were promptly declared Stupid and/or Evil. Seriously, is she EVER wrong?
"Steward," in the US Navy, is just a duty for the cooks; one or some of them gets detailed to the Officer's Mess, to cook, serve, and wait on the officers, in addition to their other duties. Presumably a Senior Chief (senior in rating, probably been in the Navy longer than Honor) has other tasks besides waiting on ONE officer. Oddly, this would make sense; he spends most of his time doing paperwork, handling logistics, and training/yelling at the junior cooks; this is his chance to actually do what he enjoys, so he puts a personal touch to it. No way he'd be following her around, though. It's not like his character ever develops.
"Steward," in the US Navy, is just a duty for the cooks; one or some of them gets detailed to the Officer's Mess, to cook, serve, and wait on the officers, in addition to their other duties. Presumably a Senior Chief (senior in rating, probably been in the Navy longer than Honor) has other tasks besides waiting on ONE officer. Oddly, this would make sense; he spends most of his time doing paperwork, handling logistics, and training/yelling at the junior cooks; this is his chance to actually do what he enjoys, so he puts a personal touch to it. No way he'd be following her around, though. It's not like his character ever develops.
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... Uh. Okay, here's the thing, that's not a balanced opinion. It's made very clear that Honor is uncompromising (hah) which is a completely different contextual problem. And sure, Weber does hit the same well over and over again. But, kinda the thing is, most of her enemies .. are kinda cowards or greedy.
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
Honestly, I way prefer the later Imperial Remnant in Star Wars (or hell, the Kraut Empire) as sci-fi Good Bad Guys over Manticore. Atleast there the evil Empire is being less evil on the boundaries of not laserfucking planets to death anymore, and not being controlled by evil space wizards.
They're not an actually existing world empire ported forward into a space opera that tries to operate within political realism. Then just have them uncritically accrue imperial power for their nation with no assessment of the laundry list of crimes those guys committed in meat space.
Like I'm not against Manticore as a concept, but it's inherently going to come with historical baggage that the author has to (or not) reckon with.
It's just way easier to do this sort of this sort of thing in less historical more sci-fi factions, so you can keep control over the ethical boundaries the universe operates within and not letting any of the real bad shit you don't want to talk about.
Gundam is a great example of this, where it's about straight near future earth wars, and often has tons of themes of the reality of war and space geopolitics. But's also a cartoon, so the creative team has total control over how deep they get into things.
Compare with stories like Webers, which is trying way harder to be more photorealistic and grounded, and thus it automatically drags in baggage beyond the scope of the writer's capacity to handle well.
They're not an actually existing world empire ported forward into a space opera that tries to operate within political realism. Then just have them uncritically accrue imperial power for their nation with no assessment of the laundry list of crimes those guys committed in meat space.
Like I'm not against Manticore as a concept, but it's inherently going to come with historical baggage that the author has to (or not) reckon with.
It's just way easier to do this sort of this sort of thing in less historical more sci-fi factions, so you can keep control over the ethical boundaries the universe operates within and not letting any of the real bad shit you don't want to talk about.
Gundam is a great example of this, where it's about straight near future earth wars, and often has tons of themes of the reality of war and space geopolitics. But's also a cartoon, so the creative team has total control over how deep they get into things.
Compare with stories like Webers, which is trying way harder to be more photorealistic and grounded, and thus it automatically drags in baggage beyond the scope of the writer's capacity to handle well.
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10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
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- Present
She's noted to be mistaken about Hauptman, the diplomat, and the Grayson's, IIRC.
But in most cases, they also suffer from being written as stupid right up untill they align wiht Honor, after which they become better. So, it's a question of whether it's Honor being wrong, or reality turning around her.
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If we're talking about Honor being wrong... I can't remember if the narrative ever acknowledged it, but wasn't Honor introduced as a member of the traditionalist faction of military development in the Hemphil vs White Haven dispute from the early novels? The idea that 'wonder weapons' are folly and the best route of military development is regular incremental improvements to the current weapon systems like energy weapons. She was completely off that mark on that one. By the time I bailed on the series, new wonder weapons had completely revolutionised space combat multiple times.
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