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Hey, I saw your posts about Going Through It right now and I just wanted to say that your blog is a delight and I enjoy seeing you on my dash. I hope things improve soon. <3
Thank you, I really appreciate appreciate your kind words! Some things are starting to improve, and I definitely have more hope for the rest ❤️
For this ask, 32 for either Hamish/Sonja or Honor/Paul? (I know it's been a while, but I just found it again and was Intrigued.)
“Do you ever regret it?”
"Regret what?"
"Running out on Janacek, your political party, and the rest of your family?"
Sonja scoffed, and rolled to look at Hamish. "No, I can't say I do, now. Janacek's an idiot, my grandfather isn't much better, and I was only really in the CA because my family would've given me hell if I wasn't, and because it was a little easier to funnel money to where it needed to be if necessary. Ditching them all in one fell swoop made it easier to swallow."
Hope you’re staying safe, Nona!
I’m fine! I live a couple miles outside the DC line in MD, and things are quiet here. Thank you, though. Shit is fucked, but I don’t want that to overshadow the wins in GA today.
You could put the velvet pieces under a cloche, perhaps?
True, but included with never-ending drifts of cat hair (no matter how much we sweep or vacuum) are Kitties of Chaos, who LOVE meandering along where they shouldn’t.
Plus, all flat surfaces covered with books and fuzzy bunnies. And art supplies and tarot decks.
Hey Sarnakh, for the couple questions ask game: Hamish/ Sonja, 1, 2, and/or 11?
oh boy i get to be back on my Admiral LowHaven brainrot! Thanks much stitchlingbelle!
1: family!
hoo boy. well. uh. short answer, there's very few people in Sonja's family Hamish likes, probably pretty close to if not exactly zero. At least that's older than her. She may have some theoretical much younger cousins that I could invent for OC purposes that he might not mind as much but everyone that's in her generation-- looking at you, Janacek-- and older is squarely in the 'CA dumbass' category. The feeling is, in fact, mutual, and frankly Sonja doesn't really care much for some of her family either. I don't think I've ever really gotten the feeling she liked her grandfather, the prior Baron Low Delhi. Though she apparently chose one of her other cousins for her proxy vote so who knows.
Going the other way, I don't think Sonja much minds the remaining Alexanders--Willie's all right, if politically opposed, but Sonja has always been better about keeping national interest ahead of politics and I think there's some things they'd agree on. Haven't quite figured out where they'd stand when he's His Excellency the Prime Minister Grantville, but I think by that point they'd be at least respectful to each other. And Sonja does, I think, like kids, and therefore would like Hamish's niblings. (I have some AU stuff on the back burner where she meets Lord White Haven, Hamish's father, whom she is intimidated somewhat by because BIG and Reputation but is fairly nice when not shouting someone down.)
2: friends!
i have an OC friend of Sonja's, Marie Blaise, who, once she discovers Sonja is actually properly involved w/ Hamish, finds the entire thing absolutely HILARIOUS. Marie is also from Beowulf, which may have something to do with it. There's much consternation in the Navy once things go public, mostly of the 'what the fuck? them???' variety, but everyone's generally rank-respectful enough there aren't any major problems among friends. There's plenty of ribbing, though, and QE3 also finds everything outrageously funny (not that she lets either of them know, however)
11: What good do they bring out in each other?
Despite Honor being the one to deliver the 'reason you suck' speech at the start of book 8, Sonja is ultimately the driving force behind it, and forcing Hamish to recognize that he can't just 'my way or the highway' his way through the war, and delivering a few healthy doses of humble pie to him. She also is a background motivator to him working on his temper (again, fic thing, would love to share more but. first chapter still not done. despite good emotional beats in other written scenes. help)
Hamish's big thing is helping Sonja exit from the CA as a whole. (And also reminding her that all work and no play makes Jill a dull girl. because. she does get very laser-focused sometimes and will forget to eat. or sleep. or do something that isn't engineering/occifering.) Again, fic plot point, again, way down the line in terms of what's actually written (insert discord_lament.png here). It... takes a long time, chronologically speaking, for them to get here. If you haven't read House of Steel, I highly recommend it, and if you can't find it, I should have a post summarizing the relevant ship-bits floating around my blog somewhere
thanks sm for letting me yell about these two, i haven't in a while and it was fun :3
Honorverse question for you, as our resident Grayson expert: do you have any thoughts on how the "fix" for that broken gene are going to change Grayson society? So far as I know, only Joelle Presby's mentioned that it has implications in one of her short stories, and didn't really go into it beyond "guess people will have fewer moms in the future." I can see a whole range of ways it can go. What do you think?
heh, idk if I'm th expert, per se, but i guess if @shannon-foraker is the local Havenite geek and you're a Manty/treecat enthusiast, I suppose someone's got to do it XD
firstly, i think with a much lower infant mortality/miscarriage rate, grayson's population is going to explode. if every one in four babies is a boy, and then that changes to even one in two (1:3 ratio to 1:2 ratio), in about 20 years they're going to have a MUCH bigger population entering the workforce, think Baby Boom writ large on a planetary scale. while this is good for their workforce, military, etc, they're going to need to massively expand their orbital farms and massively expand their on-planet domes, as well as step up the heavy metal filtration industry to try and make the atmosphere less toxic. so there'll be a bunch of economic and logistic-related things to consider. combine that with all the prolong those babies are likely to receive, and grayson may need to shove half it's population into orbit to have enough space, or start leveraging Manty counter-grav tech, but iirc we see in Harrington Steading that the counter-grav wasnt all THAT much employed in hi-rise construction, despite the tech being available to them. (There are some EXCELLENT discussions on the benefits, impacts, and economic discrimination of prolong on the Weber fora, and/or the Pearls of Weber writing pieces, but I dont have them to hand, though iirc Shannon has an account there and may be able to find them easier)
eventually, the population will level off (my friend @hylianengineer knows a lot more about environments and their carry capacities than I do, though ofc ze has no idea what the hell im tagging them about, lmao, hi hylian, imma try and drag you into another of my scifi fandoms), but I don't see that happening for a while.
on one hand, i would like to say that grayson would experience a womens' lib movement. on the other hand, i don't think that the economics of the new population ratios are necessarily going to provide the pressures necessary, because the workforce is going to increase anyway, unlike in the US where the women's rights movement was impactful BECAUSE in part of their participation in the labor force.
obviously, the Lady Dame Steadholder Harrington's very existence is going to strongly push that way culturally, but as more men gain the vote, and assuming a not-insignificant portion of the planet remains culturally conservative (and since some of the older prolong therapies can be applied to non-adolescents, i think that is likely, esp as they raise children to the same ideology), there'd be MORE voting bloc to push against women's suffrage than there would to push for it. And supposing that a hypothetical Grayson man, who doesn't really care much either way, but just wants his wives to shut up about it already, would vote for suffrage because he's getting it on two or three fronts, if he had only one wife, would have less incentive from a point of view of winning or at least not losing an argument.
i dont think we know much about the state of laborer's rights on Grayson, but it doesn't seem late-1800s-early-1900s abysmal, which is where a number of court cases in the USA established anti-discrimination labor precedent, which is another strike against a theoretical impact of increased participation by women in the workforce. (And again, i dont think we know a lot about this, but if there was a Rosie-the-Riveter style push on grayson to free men up from jobs to serve in EXTREMELY-rapidly-expanding fleet, that may be one of the few labor-related impacts in the short term, but with more men entering the labor force in a generation, that has to happen now during the Havenite and Solarian wars to have any effect)
and from a pragmatic, blood-view: If there are more men on grayson, then a woman who oh-so-unfortunately-became-a-widow-oh-isnt-it-so-tragic-he-died-so-suddenly-without-warning with dark sunglasses and heavy makeup would have a LOT more options economically in terms of having a husband to support her.
conversely, a woman who has no sister wives is going to have LESS support in keeping the home (which on Grayson, can literally be a matter of life or death if your heavy metal filters aren't seen to), less support with her children, and no backup against a potential abusive partner. Challenging the idea of 'the wife is subordinate to her husband' will be a lot harder if the husband only has one wife to subordinate. For instance, if a wife wants to implement a more strict form of birth control, and the husband is resistant to the idea, it's going to be harder for her to either win that argument, or have someone in-house help her get around him.
I think Grayson's polygyny does have some benefits when it comes to child-rearing, in the sense that instead of multi-generational households, there's the small 'village' inside the house, but it's not strictly related to the polygyny, and and more to the fact that it's a method of communal child-rearing that would be made difficult by the fact that it's pretty difficult for kids to just Wander Out And Play if they don't live in a dome. And a more balanced polyamory would somewhat do the same thing, too, assuming the Church of Humanity Unchained ever got progressive enough to allow such a thing.
TLDR: massive economic boom about a generation after the fix is widely disseminated across the population, probably a greater pushback against women's rights/suffrage/lib, at least in the short term, and there would probably be an uptick in abusive-spouse death due to additional options available.
For the seven characters ask game: Daniel Jackson, Sonja Hemphill, Nimitz, Protector Benjamin, Sam Rutherford, Ezri Dax, and Jadzia Dax?
Daniel: OBVIOUSLY go to a museum with him. Youre telling me i have unfettered access to a historian and can listen to him ramble? hell yeah
sonja: coffee and starship engineering sounds fun as hell
Nimitz: library. Books + cat = yes
Benjamin: i think it'd be funny to take a planetary ruler grocery shopping. "It's one banana, how much can it cost, M$ 10?"
Rutherford: thrift shopping. This is mostly process of elimination but we might find some cool 22nd century tech stuff lying around
Ezri: +1 to a wedding, mostly because i want to avoid a lunch accidentally turning into me dumping on a MH professional outside of the right setting. But also I do think it'd be fun. Or at least social enough that disengaging and reengaging isn't awkward.
Which of course leaves lunch with Jadzia. I spend a lot of it trying not to make a fool of myself
For the choose violence ask game, Honorverse edition, 1, 9, and/or 22?
character everyone gets wrong:
idk about everyone, tbh, like, the fandom is so small that getting characters wrong doesn't happen often but if i *do* answer this fr it's going to Cause Tumblr Drama so I shall refrain.
9. worst part of canon:
oh my god i hate mesa. so so so sos so sosososo much. Eric Flint you are otherwise a great writer and i loved 1632 but you should NOT Have been allowed to do what you did even if victor is one cool motherfucker.
i hate the 'string-pulling overlords' trope and i hate the massacres they create and i hate the haven-manticore war being orchestrated rather than genuine economic and govermental differences even though mesa has a compelling reason to do what they did and i hate the mindcontrol nanites and. and. yeah. i hate mesa and there's a reason i tend to ignore everything past like. book nine or ten.
The only part of mesa i like is giving Honor people to beat up on while commanding Hawkwing and this one storyline in the comic books where she gets to go rescue her uncle from Mesa on a neutral pleasure station w/ harkness and scotty. and mainly because of harkness and scotty. (and also Honor being a badass depicted in visual instead of in text but Honor orders Harkness to start a bar fight and it's SO fucking fun. we also get Dr. Ally Harrington in visual which is nice)
22: favorite part of canon everyone else ignores: House of Steel. No one knows it exists because it's not free on Baen Books and a) it's SUCH a fucking goldmine for hamish/sonja content (it's also weber contradicting himself w/ their respective ages but i much prefer house of steel's interpretation) and b) we get such a good look at manticoran politics in the leadup to the war and the internals of the navy. And King Roger is such a fun character and baby Princess Elizabeth is adorable and the way she meets Justin is hilarious and more treecats and yeah. i like house of steel :)
also the back half of the companion has a bunch of technical specs for every ship ever built in Manticore and Grayson as well as captured Havenite units as well as armor guns and tanks. *bites into worldbuilding and shakes it to pieces affectionately*
