Scales and Tales

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" :(