friends who WILL read Machineries of Empire: don’t look
i wanted to make some sort of post about the narrative function of Vahenz in Ninefox Gambit and Mikodez in Raven Stratagem and the parallels between them (not limited to their endearing obsession with sweets) but it turns out that while it’s easy to make notes on the iphone, organizing them is a challenge :? so instead i’m gonna say that i have this feeling that both of them start out with some speculations that are kinda off-mark, but later on they make speculations that we know are spot-on, and from there on it’s like they can be trusted to supply reliable information (as in... to the reader, i mean)
like okay one specific note i can find is about halfway through Ninefox Gambit where Vahenz says “Setting a deathtrap for not one but two armies - that’s not a psychotic break. That’s a plan with a twenty-year setup.” which on my first read i marked as “nice foreshadowing!!” and on the second read “she is so right and so willing to give hints but by this point she has discredited herself to the reader” so i guess that before that point she was mostly wrong and afterwards she was mostly right and what i wonder is, how would we know when to start trusting her segments? there must have been something because the only things i highlighted before that are things marked “aww cute” but idk?
i skimmed the notes on Raven Stratagem and a third into the book Mikodez still sounds unreliable to me, because he’s wrong about Jedao. i mean, if he thinks Jedao simply enjoys killing people which going by the carrion glass segment is not true, then his conclusions about Jedao’s further plans are wrong not just because “this is a chapter where Mikodez is wrong” but because he doesn’t have reliable basis for speculation. in the last third, in the counterfactual scenarios game, "He’s at war because it’s the world he knows, but he tells himself he’s putting something right in the process because he needs a reason for the butchery” which isn’t true unless i have tragically misunderstood everything but after that he gets on the right track and... he gets on the right track so i guess not quite the same thing Vahenz does, after all. this post is a mess, i won’t tag it!
anyway i am aware of the concept that characters in stories are people and that’s great and fine by me but the thing that keeps bugging me is something else so if you have thoughts on it hit me up! apparently what i think is that Vahenz and Mikodez served similar purposes in their respective books because, i think, they were the characters who most tried to analyze Jedao and figure out his game -- for our collective benefit :”))
