FOREIGNER: Discussion Post #6

[krait]

This is the discussion post for chapter 9-13.

I am now heartily wishing that I'd looked at chapter content as well as at page-counts, when setting up the reading schedule! (I thought even then it might bite me, and it has!) This reading was composed of a hundred pounds of action, a hundred pounds of disconnected info-bites, a thousand pounds of questions, and half a gram of explanations! My brain was churning faster than Babsidi's legs, but reached even fewer coherent thoughts than Bren manages.


On the other hand: yay, mecheiti icon becomes more appropriate than ever! :D

Comments

[krait]

-- Bren has Major Revelations! While tearing madly across hill and dale on the back of a beast he can't control. Good timing, nand' paidhi! :D

Some spoilerish thoughts about said revelations.

-- As Bren observes, later: they're running to "a man we think is safe" -- man'chi being surer than land boundaries, Association stronger than geography.

-- Spoilery thoughts about nicknames and Ilisidi! Greyed-out, as they pertain to the third (I think) trilogy.

-- The scene where everyone hears the plane before Bren does is one of those small, perfect impacts for me. The way the mecheiti all look first, and the atevi, attuned to them, all leap for cover... and Bren, the alien in the midst, doesn't understand until he hears the plane and someone yanks him down.

-- Running for Banichi! Bren, you idiot, you perfect human idiot. *facepalms* Atevi run to their aijiin in an emergency, instinctively; and now you've just bolted for someone who's not an aiji at all. Every doubt they ever had about you must be boiling back to the surface! Poor Jago and Banichi, stuck trying to explain that their charge isn't a traitor or secret subversive, he's just so differently wired in this essential thing that 'insane' is the only way to make sense of it.

-- We're finally seeing atevi technical advances, and it's exactly the nightmare Bren has mused on how humanity tried to prevent -- mass destruction of persons and property using human-devised weapons, with no finesse and no concept of acceptable targets. That's one genie who's not going to go back in the bottle easily...

-- If atevi don't even swear in decent conversation, what does it take to make one strike somebody across the face? Bren's really put his foot in it -- in something -- somehow!

[cheyinka]

I tend to think getting smacked across the face is probably less serious, for atevi, than swearing, especially if it's at someone who's temporarily non compos mentis and might not be stopped by harsh language but might still stop at getting hit.

[krait]

Good point! :D They seem less interested in keeping their skins intact than humans generally are.

And maybe Jago has figured out that Bren's brain is processing too slowly right now, so she went with the obvious and un-misinterpretable way of conveying 'shut up and pay attention'?

[cheyinka]

Or even that, having done something totally insane like running after a subordinate, he might not understand a rebuke or parse a curse as a curse and not as praise ("if he's crazy enough to act totally opposite of a normal person, he might thank me for calling him a bastard!")

[krait]

Heehee! That's an idea! "He invites people to go to the moon, and makes propositions he doesn't mean, and sometimes believes we're all salad courses, so he'd probably take 'shut up you idiot' as some kind of bizarre Moon-Man flattery!"