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"... hating them in general and loving them in particular."
So here's the post pulling together my Thoughts On Dragaerans from my emails with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija while reading the Taltos books. Spoilers up through the latest, Vallista. (In fact, spoilers mainly for that one.)
Title of this post, of course, is Vlad when he says goodbye to his friends at the end of Phoenix: "I'll probably find some place with people around. Probably Dragaerans, so I can go back to hating them in general and loving them in particular." (This is still probably my favorite quote from any of the books.)
Vallista was a fascinating book for all the things we learned about Dragaerans. Most of this has been generally implied and occasionally stated (we've known since Jhereg that the Dragaerans and Easterners were experimented on, and I think we found out in Issola or thereabouts about the "stagnant society" thing) but I think this is the first time it's been clearly laid out in this much detail).
From Vlad's conversation with Verra:
DRAGAERANS CAN'T INVENT THINGS. It's built in. They are essentially stuck in a trap where they spend all their intellectual energy and the focus of their long lives on an obsession with whatever their House is obsessed with: Dragons expend their energy on endless, pointless war games; Iorich obsess on the minutiae of the law, Dzur go looking for things to fight with, etc.
Rachel and I speculated on what, exactly, it was that caused Verra's epiphany in Vallista about "the end of an era ... it ended more than two hundred years ago. I just wasn't sure until today." It took awhile for us to see it, but -- it's the magic house. The Vallista invented something new, something that didn't exist before; they figured out the technological innovation of looping time.
Dragaerans aren't supposed to be able to innovate. But these Vallista did -- they invented something new. Which means (most likely) that Adron's Disaster broke whatever was stopping them from being able to invent and create. There was a magic barrier in place, and now it's not holding them back anymore.
They must be able to innovate a little bit, they have to, because their writing system has changed over time (there's a mention in one of the books that Vlad has trouble reading older Dragaeran books because the writing system is different). And they are capable of creating music and poetry and literature. They are still people and individuals with personalities and desires.
But let's go back to this quote from Taltos:
It's filtered through his general dislike of Dragaerans at that point, which makes it seem like "oh, just another thing Vlad doesn't like about Dragaerans" as opposed to being significant.
But think about all the many things Vlad says Dragaerans don't do, throughout the series. They're not good at cooking, not that they're physically bad at it, but they just don't have very many recipes; Eastern food is much more diverse. They only have one word for "wine". In fact, they only have one word for a whole lot of things. Remember that bit a few books back where Vlad says that the Dragaeran word for "hawk" refers to all kinds of raptors where Easterners have different words for all of them?
At the time, I found that a cool worldbuilding detail, assuming it just meant that their language goes more for top-level categories than having a bunch of words for different things (kind of like some languages have fewer color words than English, so blue and green are both covered under one color word, for example).
But I think that's not what it means, I think all of that is tied together with the Dragaerans, in general, just not being especially interested in, or curious about, anything outside their House's area of expertise. They only have one word for "wine" and one word for "bird of prey" and like 5 recipes they know how to make, because THEY JUST DON'T CARE. Of course they're still people, they're individuals, they have tastes and hobbies and distinct personalities and so forth, but they also are driven by whatever their House is driven by, and don't have much time and interest for anything else. Even the Jhereg, the "outsider" house that collects the misfits, has an overall culture that is obsessed with making money and controlling crime in the Empire, thus neatly removing them from the likelihood of innovating or messing with the established order.
Which is also making me think about the first book in the series and how thematically important it is that:
a) The book starts after Vlad's friend group has already been drawn together, so the introduction we get to their world and these characters is a bunch of people from different Houses and areas of society being friends and fighting to protect each other, and
b) The entire plot of the first book is driven by the nature of Castle Black, that it's a haven for people of any House where they can interact and talk and be around each other - which is something that just doesn't really exist anywhere else in their world. Even the palace is segregated by House.
They mix together in cities, by necessity, but even there we're told they mostly keep to themselves. Vlad is surprised in Iorich, I think it was, to encounter an inn in which Dragaerans from different Houses are freely mingling. Looking back on it now, it's thematically fascinating that the plot of the entire first book is driven by trying to preserve Castle Black as a place specifically designed for different Houses (and even Dragaerans and Easterners) to mingle, and get to know each other, and share ideas. The entire sharing-of-ideas thing is something that Sethra and Morrolan and Aliera (and Vlad) are all really into - their friendship consists in large part of hanging out together and debating/arguing about things. (Often in the library, which is another thing Vlad makes a point of telling us in several books that Morrolan is really into - collecting books, and just generally gathering knowledge from everywhere and accumulating it at Castle Black.)
All of which is such standard fantasy fodder that, like the background worldbuilding of an Empire that's lasted for tens of thousands of years, you wouldn't really think anything about it. The way that they hang out and talk is the way that most people reading the books probably are with their friends too. But Dragaerans aren't. Especially not Dragaerans of the Dragon and Dzur houses, which are explicitly not about that, they're all about fighting, not learning things. Or at least they're supposed to be. But Morrolan and Sethra, in particular, are not like that.
Rachel also points out that Dragaerans ALWAYS wear their house colors. Like the entire thing with the Empire having a 10,000+ year history with nothing ever changing, this kind of color-coding is also pretty typical in fantasy and does not seem like a big deal, until you find out about this thing where Dragaerans are hard-coded to do certain things and not others, and then suddenly it becomes significant.
When we first meet Vlad, possibly one reason why he hates Dragaerans so much is not just because of being fundamentally an outsider (though that's a big part of it) but also because he's spent his entire life bouncing off this brick wall of incuriosity and resistance to change that is more fundamentally alien to him than anything else about them.
Which is probably why, when he does start making friends with Dragaerans, it's with the misfits and weirdos and outsiders, the curious and the different -- Sethra and Morrolan, Aliera and Kragar.
... It also occurs to me that even if the Easterners weren't messed with in quite the same way as Dragaerans, the fact that the Dragaerans are constantly attacking them (in a way that is basically built into Dragaeran DNA) is probably also dragging them down and preventing them from having achieved, say, spaceflight and other forms of high tech by now.
It's just such absolutely wonderful worldbuilding, a really brilliant subversion of a bunch of standard fantasy-world tropes that are turned on their ear and put through a science fiction blender.
ETA:rachelmanija has additional thoughts building off my post; you can read them here. (Also very spoilery.)
rachelmanija while reading the Taltos books. Spoilers up through the latest, Vallista. (In fact, spoilers mainly for that one.)Title of this post, of course, is Vlad when he says goodbye to his friends at the end of Phoenix: "I'll probably find some place with people around. Probably Dragaerans, so I can go back to hating them in general and loving them in particular." (This is still probably my favorite quote from any of the books.)
Vallista was a fascinating book for all the things we learned about Dragaerans. Most of this has been generally implied and occasionally stated (we've known since Jhereg that the Dragaerans and Easterners were experimented on, and I think we found out in Issola or thereabouts about the "stagnant society" thing) but I think this is the first time it's been clearly laid out in this much detail).
From Vlad's conversation with Verra:
"It was the result of their whole effort. No, not effort. Experiment."
"Experiment?"
"They live a long time, Vlad. Long by Sethra's standards, long by mine. And they're observers, and they are absolutely heartless, at least where other species are concerned. This world is an experiment to see if a society can be made to stagnate."
"I am lost."
"Societies develop and change, Vlad. There are inventions, and inventions have repercussions throughout society; associations among people grow and become different."
"If you say so."
DRAGAERANS CAN'T INVENT THINGS. It's built in. They are essentially stuck in a trap where they spend all their intellectual energy and the focus of their long lives on an obsession with whatever their House is obsessed with: Dragons expend their energy on endless, pointless war games; Iorich obsess on the minutiae of the law, Dzur go looking for things to fight with, etc.
Rachel and I speculated on what, exactly, it was that caused Verra's epiphany in Vallista about "the end of an era ... it ended more than two hundred years ago. I just wasn't sure until today." It took awhile for us to see it, but -- it's the magic house. The Vallista invented something new, something that didn't exist before; they figured out the technological innovation of looping time.
Dragaerans aren't supposed to be able to innovate. But these Vallista did -- they invented something new. Which means (most likely) that Adron's Disaster broke whatever was stopping them from being able to invent and create. There was a magic barrier in place, and now it's not holding them back anymore.
They must be able to innovate a little bit, they have to, because their writing system has changed over time (there's a mention in one of the books that Vlad has trouble reading older Dragaeran books because the writing system is different). And they are capable of creating music and poetry and literature. They are still people and individuals with personalities and desires.
But let's go back to this quote from Taltos:
One thing that shed a great deal of light on how Dragaerans think was when I realized that they had no term for brandy, even though they had the drink. They called it wine, and, I guess, just had to know the bottler to decide how strong it was and what it tasted like. To me, brandy and wine aren't even close in taste, and maybe they aren't to Dragaerans, either. The thing is, Dragaerans don't care if they taste different, or that the process of making one has almost nothing to do with the process of making the other; the point is, they are alcoholic drinks made from fruit, so they must be the same thing. Interesting, no?
It's filtered through his general dislike of Dragaerans at that point, which makes it seem like "oh, just another thing Vlad doesn't like about Dragaerans" as opposed to being significant.
But think about all the many things Vlad says Dragaerans don't do, throughout the series. They're not good at cooking, not that they're physically bad at it, but they just don't have very many recipes; Eastern food is much more diverse. They only have one word for "wine". In fact, they only have one word for a whole lot of things. Remember that bit a few books back where Vlad says that the Dragaeran word for "hawk" refers to all kinds of raptors where Easterners have different words for all of them?
At the time, I found that a cool worldbuilding detail, assuming it just meant that their language goes more for top-level categories than having a bunch of words for different things (kind of like some languages have fewer color words than English, so blue and green are both covered under one color word, for example).
But I think that's not what it means, I think all of that is tied together with the Dragaerans, in general, just not being especially interested in, or curious about, anything outside their House's area of expertise. They only have one word for "wine" and one word for "bird of prey" and like 5 recipes they know how to make, because THEY JUST DON'T CARE. Of course they're still people, they're individuals, they have tastes and hobbies and distinct personalities and so forth, but they also are driven by whatever their House is driven by, and don't have much time and interest for anything else. Even the Jhereg, the "outsider" house that collects the misfits, has an overall culture that is obsessed with making money and controlling crime in the Empire, thus neatly removing them from the likelihood of innovating or messing with the established order.
Which is also making me think about the first book in the series and how thematically important it is that:
a) The book starts after Vlad's friend group has already been drawn together, so the introduction we get to their world and these characters is a bunch of people from different Houses and areas of society being friends and fighting to protect each other, and
b) The entire plot of the first book is driven by the nature of Castle Black, that it's a haven for people of any House where they can interact and talk and be around each other - which is something that just doesn't really exist anywhere else in their world. Even the palace is segregated by House.
They mix together in cities, by necessity, but even there we're told they mostly keep to themselves. Vlad is surprised in Iorich, I think it was, to encounter an inn in which Dragaerans from different Houses are freely mingling. Looking back on it now, it's thematically fascinating that the plot of the entire first book is driven by trying to preserve Castle Black as a place specifically designed for different Houses (and even Dragaerans and Easterners) to mingle, and get to know each other, and share ideas. The entire sharing-of-ideas thing is something that Sethra and Morrolan and Aliera (and Vlad) are all really into - their friendship consists in large part of hanging out together and debating/arguing about things. (Often in the library, which is another thing Vlad makes a point of telling us in several books that Morrolan is really into - collecting books, and just generally gathering knowledge from everywhere and accumulating it at Castle Black.)
All of which is such standard fantasy fodder that, like the background worldbuilding of an Empire that's lasted for tens of thousands of years, you wouldn't really think anything about it. The way that they hang out and talk is the way that most people reading the books probably are with their friends too. But Dragaerans aren't. Especially not Dragaerans of the Dragon and Dzur houses, which are explicitly not about that, they're all about fighting, not learning things. Or at least they're supposed to be. But Morrolan and Sethra, in particular, are not like that.
Rachel also points out that Dragaerans ALWAYS wear their house colors. Like the entire thing with the Empire having a 10,000+ year history with nothing ever changing, this kind of color-coding is also pretty typical in fantasy and does not seem like a big deal, until you find out about this thing where Dragaerans are hard-coded to do certain things and not others, and then suddenly it becomes significant.
When we first meet Vlad, possibly one reason why he hates Dragaerans so much is not just because of being fundamentally an outsider (though that's a big part of it) but also because he's spent his entire life bouncing off this brick wall of incuriosity and resistance to change that is more fundamentally alien to him than anything else about them.
Which is probably why, when he does start making friends with Dragaerans, it's with the misfits and weirdos and outsiders, the curious and the different -- Sethra and Morrolan, Aliera and Kragar.
... It also occurs to me that even if the Easterners weren't messed with in quite the same way as Dragaerans, the fact that the Dragaerans are constantly attacking them (in a way that is basically built into Dragaeran DNA) is probably also dragging them down and preventing them from having achieved, say, spaceflight and other forms of high tech by now.
It's just such absolutely wonderful worldbuilding, a really brilliant subversion of a bunch of standard fantasy-world tropes that are turned on their ear and put through a science fiction blender.
ETA:
rachelmanija has additional thoughts building off my post; you can read them here. (Also very spoilery.)
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This comes up more explicitly in Teckla, when Verra is talking about Kelly: "Kelly has his hands on the truth about the way a society works, about where the power is, and the cause of the injustice he sees. But it is a truth for another time and another place. He has built an organization around those ideas, and because of their truth, his organization prospers. But the truth he has based his policies on, the fuel for this fire he is building, has no such strength in the Empire. Perhaps in ten thousand years, or a hundred thousand, but not now. And by proceeding as he has, he is setting up his people to be massacred. Do you understand? He is building a world of ideas with no foundation beneath them."
(One of the interesting things to me about Brust's books is that there is often a character who shares his Marxist beliefs, but he very seldom makes this character a particularly sympathetic one--in an effort to avoid turning fiction into polemic, I assume.)
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I gotta say, if the entire above post is completely me reading things into the series that the author didn't intend, it all hangs together weirdly well!
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I guess I'm just trying to say that from the Marxist point of view, all the forms of stagnation you're discussing stem from that one central stagnation: the economic/political one. Beyond that I think we mostly agree? The end of the Interregnum broke that (and now I'm itching to reread the Viscount of Adrilanka books for more details, because of course that's what it covers--incidentally, the whole Dragaerans-only-wear-the-colors-of-their-house thing is a major plot point in one of the Paarfi books), and the House in Vallista represents part of the progress that's come since.
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I remember reading a blog post or an interview or something about that, actually, and it definitely seems to be an intentional thing he's doing: making the characters sharing his political views not very sympathetic, and including sympathetic characters who disagree with them.
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