#honorverse

[stitchlingbelle]

Everyone once in a while I read the description of the scar Theisman got in the battle of Seabring and I just think,

...you people wear helmets.

Like, wtf happened. How close a call was that?

[stitchlingbelle]

So obvs Andrew was deeply in love with Honor from almost their first meeting, but what about the other armsmen? DW mentions that a few have families on Grayson (that they presumably don't see for years at a time), but the real question is:

Which of Honor's armsmen were definitely in a relationship with each other?

[sarnakhwritesthings]

...i could be INCREDIBLY mean to Mike, here

having honor call out in panic to andrew after Mike kisses her...

but this is SUPPOSED to be honor/mike, so why does my brain want to torpedo the moment

[stitchlingbelle]

Borrowing tags from @sarnakhwritesthings on the use of masculine vs feminine prounons as the standard generic (ie, 'if someone needs X, he should...')

#Another win for David ‘conservative white man writing a progressive future’ Weber with all the female characters using she/her for a generic#pronoun/person (E.g. ‘No captain worth her beret would…’ ) and only the men using he/him/his

I really like Weber's system in general, but especially as a great way to cue people about one's own pronouns. In a lot of inclusive SFF you get a visual identifier or 'pronouns in space bio' sort of situation. Just using your own gender in speech is much more elegant.

[google-searchhistory-official]

Holy shit 💡. I'm gonna steal this fucker's writing style. Dude infodumps at the slightest chance when his characters think about something related to the world's history or some aspect of the story he wants to explain.

[stitchlingbelle]

The universal honorverse fan urge to make Honor-based pun titles

[sarnakhwritesthings]

I was thinking earlier today about how an AU of Ashes of Victory might turn out, if Op Hassan had gotten both Elizabeth AND Cromarty. How would newly-elevated Roger IV Winton handle it? But he’s in college, so how do I make this not a repeat of Queen’s Gambit?

well, here’s the thing. Roger is listed as being born in 1900 PD.

He’s fucking FOURTEEN in AoV, MAYBE 15 depending on when his birthday is.

(and since Rivka is around his age, and they’re both in college, we can assume that they’re both really fucking smart even assuming a UK-style college at 16 instead of American university)

like. Has his mother told him that his grandfather was assassinated? Had he been getting the briefings Elizabeth or Roger had been talking about implementing for the Crown Heirs, or was he still too young? Has he been adopted by a ‘cat yet? (Leaning towards no, since his mother is noted as being adopted young and that that is rare. Adrienne wasn’t adopted until she was 21).

Who is picked for his Regent? Has the Prince Consort survived? Justin isn’t mentioned as being on either yacht, so did Elizabeth leave him behind on Manticore or on Grayson? If Justin DID survive, then presumably he’d tell his son about what happened to his grandfather, but if not, then he’s just… adrift. No way he asks great-aunt Caitrin for help/regency AGAIN, not when her husband, son, niece, and maybe nephew-in-law are all dead. Uncle Michael, if possible? He’s then second-in-line to the throne, and the next competent adult since Joanna Winton is, like, barely old enough to take the competency tests, iirc?

Who takes him seriously? He’s a teenaged boy who looks prepubescent (because he probably IS, I forget exactly how prolong impacts that), and High Ridge et al probably either steamroller him politically, or he’s SO out of touch with the political realities his mother had to deal with that everyone underestimates either him or his Winton temper. Can a fifteen-year-old manage to wrap his House of Lords around his pinky, if his speechwriters do a good enough job? Can he override the First Lord and send 8th Fleet on its way anyway, as the one the navy’s oaths are sworn to? (Hell, separately from this AU, what if Benjamin heard ‘you’re not a dictator, Elizabeth’ from High Ridge and said ‘you want a dictator? Fine, I’ll show you a dictator’, yanked all the GSN out of 8th fleet, and sicced the it, and all its MDM SD(P)s under ADM Yanakov—or Harrington if she’s recovered— on Haven, ignoring the ceasefire proposal? If High Ridge can unilaterally negotiate outside the frames of the alliance, why shouldn’t Benjamin conduct further operations unilaterally?)

What even IS Roger’s personality? What does he study? (I like math, personally, but he’s Crown bloody Prince, let’s be real Liz sent him there for a polisci degree.) What are his interests, other than Rivka? (We get literally nothing about him, as far as I recall, except for dating Rivka and then marrying her a few books and eight years later) (talk about a long courtship) Hell, what do his politics look like? His mom PROBABLY influenced him to lean centrist-Royalist, ofc, but how strong was that influence? Does he have friends of the KIDS of the CA/Liberals/Progressives? Does he have the intelligence/guts to maybe pull a wildcat with, say, North Hollow? (Probably not, if Georgia has gotten her hooks into him by this point, but who knows)

And what, ultimately, does he want? Does he want peace? Or does he want vengeance, and a burning, salted Carthage?

Normally when I theorize Honorverse AUs I do it with an eye towards REDUCING tragedy, not increasing it, but I think this could ultimately result in LESS tragedy if done well. Who knows.

(though with the last two monarchs both being assassinated you wonder if he might have some compunctions about taking the job, lol… but again, no idea about anything about Roger. None at all.)

(I also suspect the age thing is another editing fail between Ashes and War, but who knows, and it’s funnier this way)

[thesesnakesaremyfriends]

Someone on here said that while honorverse is about progressives witten by a conservative, the vorkosigan saga is about conservatives as imagined by a progressive, and after reading Shards of Honor I think this relates interestingly to how they portray psychiatry. In honorverse we often see characters who've been through trauma "see the shrinks for a few months" and return healed. Weber is treating it as just another field of medicine, one that he doesn't neccessarly understand but also one that just works. Shards of Honor on the other hand has a terrifying depiction of psychiatric abuse beginning with coerced drug abuse first by just Vorrutyer, though we see it done by Mehta later.