foreigner saga
25 Sep 2006 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneall the alien women from badasses to servants want to sex up bren in these books. he's totally hot, charming and delightfully sincere and polite, but has no idea of that himself because he's so nervous and overthinky. this is a mary-sue-like element, no doubt, but his own cluelessness about it is well done and goes some way to ameliorating the effect.
there's the blow-ups with ilisidi and the fact that cenedi doesn't like him still (and his eventual miscalculations with mospheira, the ship, and rival atevi factions over time), so everything doesn't always go right, but on the other hand, there's the sexual-tinged flirtation with ilisidi and then damiri. you have to admit that is just really cool, even down to bren's different reactions to the two of them - even if it represents an element of atevi society as opposed to the fact that he's just THAT awesome.
these are really foreign-culture-fetishising novels in a way: they may flirt with culture shock, but they're written for the xenophile, and the xenophile is the one who recognises so many familiar features of experience in everything, the joy and anguish over understanding and learning to belong among the alien, that funny little contradiction by which he eventually comes to belong, in a way, because of his alienness, occupying a position like an atevi lord's, moving in society as one, on the authority of his otherness as a human.
and, oh, god, my mom's pimp speech about this book is so right on the money: the felicitous numbers are surely the most delightfully adorable and hysterical part of this universe, and she uses them with such a light hand, but at just the right time (like jun's well-timed comments: "start what?" XD)
there's the blow-ups with ilisidi and the fact that cenedi doesn't like him still (and his eventual miscalculations with mospheira, the ship, and rival atevi factions over time), so everything doesn't always go right, but on the other hand, there's the sexual-tinged flirtation with ilisidi and then damiri. you have to admit that is just really cool, even down to bren's different reactions to the two of them - even if it represents an element of atevi society as opposed to the fact that he's just THAT awesome.
these are really foreign-culture-fetishising novels in a way: they may flirt with culture shock, but they're written for the xenophile, and the xenophile is the one who recognises so many familiar features of experience in everything, the joy and anguish over understanding and learning to belong among the alien, that funny little contradiction by which he eventually comes to belong, in a way, because of his alienness, occupying a position like an atevi lord's, moving in society as one, on the authority of his otherness as a human.
and, oh, god, my mom's pimp speech about this book is so right on the money: the felicitous numbers are surely the most delightfully adorable and hysterical part of this universe, and she uses them with such a light hand, but at just the right time (like jun's well-timed comments: "start what?" XD)
