FOREIGNER: Discussion Post #6, Spoiler Edition

[krait]

If you have discussion points for Chapters 9-13 you wish to bring up but which include spoilers, please post them here. Then link your comment in the general post, so those who want to avoid being spoiled can do so!

Comments

[cheyinka]

There is something very wrong with Bren that, when he thinks he's going to die, he imagines being alone, away from work, his family, and his girlfriend, just alone. Maybe that's why he ends up so dependent on his aishid and his servants - they don't pull on his human emotions, so they make him feel safe?

And then he realizes he skis because it's dangerous, not because he's alone - but I still think he feels the need not to be around people, not to have their needs pulling at him, now that he's been around atevi, who just don't have the same emotional effect as humans do. That is really not good for a human who needs to interact with humans, which explains why he pretty much stops doing the mediate-between-sides thing after a while!


Also, it looks like Mospheirans believe that FTL involves time-dilation, but that doesn't appear to be the case in later books, or if it is, it's not very dramatic - Cajeiri returns about as much older as he would have been if he'd stayed, etc.

[krait]

which explains why he pretty much stops doing the mediate-between-sides thing after a while!

It's already starting, subtly! (I read ahead, so this thread may be spoilery for the next couple chapters.) He finds out what the fuss is, finally... and he gets a phone link, finally... and he calls up Mospheira and tells them "I'll be negotiating FOR THE ATEVI in this situation, and you can join us and present a united front, or you can ignore us and be kicked off the planet by the aiji". Not "Hey, how can I help?" or "Okay, what's the official human position on this?" He is planning that they should benefit, somewhat (strong front versus the Guild, and the right to stay on the planet) but the terms he presents it in are all about the atevi, their right to be involved, and the ways it will affect them.

Interesting!

[krait]

-- Bren's danger!kink, while unexpected in a man whose job we've seen so far to involve mostly being polite and going along without recourse (the repeated "there's nothing he could do about it" scenes), does make sense now -- his job has suddenly become quite dangerous, and if he had courses in painless suicide it's obvious he knew that going in. Only a man with some affinity for danger could hope to be paidhi, given the unpredictability of atevi reactions and politics -- there's always a risk that a peace paidhi will become a brink-of-war paidhi, and they can't risk having someone who can't function be the man-on-the-spot when that happens.

-- Though really, the humans don't seem to see it, if they're letting Hanks run things! I think there needs to be much more careful screening for the position than just "who has the best maths + Ragi grades"!

-- I feel Bren is being too hard on himself regarding his human relationships. (A convenient target for his self-anger to vent upon, perhaps?) With the power of spoiler!foresight, I have to say: aside from Toby, maybe, none of Bren's human "relationships" are anything I'd want to die thinking about. D: All of them seem to be really good reasons to take up skiing on really remote mountains and a job as far away as possible. I hardly blame him for dreaming about being alone when the only options his life has given him are the aliens who've betrayed and wounded him physically, and the humans who've betrayed and wounded him emotionally. *makes face* A nice, openly-hostile but navigable, unemotional mountainside sounds lovely and straightforward by comparison.

-- So Jago and Banichi have been at least partly betrayed by Tabini, too. (Well, they might not see it that way, but.)

It's my gun, Banichi had said, and it was. He'd been used, Banichi had been used, Jago had been used -- everyone had been used, in every way.

I take that to mean Bren is fairly sure Banichi wasn't in on it, if the assassination attempt was in fact a setup by Tabini; he covered for Bren in good faith, trying to shield Tabini's gift of the gun and protect Tabini's valued advisor, unaware that Tabini had some deeper plot in mind for both.

It would go some way toward Jago's "I will not betray you" moment, too -- perhaps she just found out she was being ordered not to interfere in Ilisidi's potential kidnapping/interrogation of someone she's nominally protecting. Someone, in fact, she's gone to great lengths to protect thus far, and whose outward assignment (and thus her honour as Guild) is bound up in protecting...

-- Jago calls him "Bren-ji" for (I think) the first time! Aww. :D

-- Bren does seem to find some ways to convey at least a little of "like": his words to Djinana ("Please see that you're here when I come visiting, or I'll be greatly distressed.") were touching, and moreover Djinana does seem touched.

-- Bren notes that Tabini calls the dowager 'Sidi-ji, and that she has no man'chi to anyone.

Who else calls her that? Cenedi. Who's very definitely one of her foremost has-man'chi-to-her people (and possibly her lover!).

Bren doesn't seem to have my immediate, paranoid thought (all those machimi: "the unexpected man'chi" that turns the tables!) that Tabini might possibly have some secret man'chi to Ilisidi... These books encourage my paranoia, what can I say. :D

Still, it does hint at what Bren picks up hints of in later books: Tabini and Ilisidi aren't as fiercely inimical as they appear -- that they cooperate rather well, in fact, in controlling and forwarding the Western Association despite Ilisidi's technical nonmembership. A combination of usefulness for steering would-be rebels and her own aiji-nature, I imagine. Tabini's calling her by an intimate/familiar nickname here is our first sign that they might ge along better -- or at least have closer political goals -- than it seems!

[cheyinka]

I feel Bren is being too hard on himself regarding his human relationships. (A convenient target for his self-anger to vent upon, perhaps?) With the power of spoiler!foresight, I have to say: aside from Toby, maybe, none of Bren's human "relationships" are anything I'd want to die thinking about. D: All of them seem to be really good reasons to take up skiing on really remote mountains and a job as far away as possible.

Sure, but is it impossible he could have had, I don't know, friends in the department or something? He has a strained relationship with Toby because their mother preferred Bren, an emotionally-abusive relationship with his mother because she prefers him and he's rarely on Mospheira, and a not-even-friends with very-infrequent-benefits relationship with Barb, & sure, I probably wouldn't want to die thinking about folks like that, either. But I think when I realized, hours later, that my dying thoughts had been of Anything But Them, I'd have gone the route of "and I didn't even have thoughts of humans to console me, because all the humans I'm close to suck" or even "and I screwed up all my human relationships so badly I couldn't even comfort myself with them", not "and I didn't even think of people, because all I want is to be alone in the cold" :(

[spaceoperadiva]

This was like Bren suddenly got plunged into a machimi, only with Atevi, even when they're playing play pretty rough. Bren's PTSD for the next few chapters is very grim.

Bren's absolute shock at the ship arrival at the station was amazing. And in that moment, he's throwing his man'chi in with 'Sidi by way of Tabini. Very machimi indeed.

I love his constant fussing over his computer too, which becomes quite delightful and a bit diabolical in the next section.