Quaddies!
Bonus Nicol on her double hammer dulcimer* *idk what that is an I had no internet so did whatever I felt like
+cursed Quaddies
Oh my fucking god. A Civil Campaign has so many just incredibly satisfying scene in it. There's of course the disastrous dinner party, and Miles letter, and Ivan being introduced to Lord Dono
I'm reading the scene with Cordelia and the old couch. Holy shit I love Cordelia as much as I am deeply grateful she is a fictional character who can't do this sort of thing to me. Woman knows about every skeleton in every closet and keeps them dancing to her tune, for everyone's best interest of course.
Okay, last headcanon and I'll stop harassing y'all after this.
So you know how Mark Vorkosigan has been trained to have the same body language as Miles Vorkosigan, whose body language is really a less effortless rendition of Aral's? And then Dono is told to just imitate Aral whenever he's scared he isn't passing well enough and, well, do you ever imagine these four men being somewhere together and just accidentally striking the exact same pose or making the exact same gesture at the same time?
Like someone is explaining something and they are listening attentively, brows elegantly furrowed, hands in their pockets and feet spread apart in a manly, assertive way, and when the particularly complicated part comes along they all rub their chins in contemplation and it goes from manly dignity to absolutely fucking ridiculous?
I love this to pieces
BUT ALSO - consider! That Ivan’s primary make Role Model was also Aral Vorkosigan.
Wait. Shit. So was Gregor’s.
(Duv Galini sees is happen exactly once, with all six of them in the same room. After his brain stops gibbering nonsense about it, his first coherant thought is hm. There’s a Doctorate Thesis in there somewhere.)
Aral Vorkosigan has single-handedly changed Barrayaran body language to the point that 50 years later nobody will remember that people didn't use to regularly flip chairs and sit on them backwards. The Cetagandans use it to weed out Barrayaran spies, like the way they signed the number three would give away people in WWII.
Miles does do abject with the same bombast he does everything else, though, you have to give him that.
Everytime I read a Vorkosigan saga book I am hit by the realization of just how bad Miles needs adhd meds
Alys Vorpatril/Simon Illyan is one of my favourite ships, but I can’t make my mind up if I prefer the version where they only got together after Illyan’s chip malfunction and retirement, or the version where they have been friends with benefits for twenty-odd years, in their own quiet, respectable, very efficient way.
Wait, my actual favourite might be the version where confused, traumatised, memory-damaged Simon thinks they must have been together for ages, and Alys knows they’ve been together for a week. Has anyone already written this? Will I have to write this?
In the latter half of the Vorkosigan saga, almost everyone gets married and has babies, which makes sense because this series is, in addition to being a space opera action adventure military sci-fi mystery, also a pretty classic historical romance.
So it strikes me as pretty interesting that we see two Barrayaran women who want a serious relationship with a man, but still outright reject the institution of marriage: Kareen Koudelka and Alys Vorpatril. Kareen makes sense, she’s from the new generation, she studied off-world on Beta Colony, and she’s dating Mark Vorkosigan of all people, of course she wants to forge her own path. But Alys Vorpatril is the picture of respectable old-school Vor decorum, and she still doesn’t seriously consider marrying Simon Illyan. He’s her lover, her partner, her gentleman friend, not her husband. Of course there are various security and protocol issues, marriage to a prole would strip her of her Vor title, marriage to the former chief of the secret police would saddle her with additional surveillance nightmares, etc., but if she really wanted to marry him, she wouldn’t let any of that stop her. It seems more likely that she doesn’t want to marry him. She’s spent thirty-five years grieving her first husband and also being angry at him for dying the way he did, so she might be a little bit ambivalent about the idea of marrying again. She’s very pro-marriage in general, she wants her son to get married, she wants her nephew to get married, she really, really wants her ward the emperor to please get married, but she’s not getting married herself. Which makes her a very self-actualised person and also a massive hypocrite.
Mark Vorkosigan: The reason why I am completely different from my brother Miles is that I'm excellent at business machinations while Miles hasn't managed to earn a penny in his life.
Miles Vorkosigan, who at age seventeen bought himself a space ship through a shady business deal that involved half-fraudulently mortgaging radioactive land: Damn right, we are nothing alike.
Miles Vorkosigan, who has somehow managed to adopt every pitiful and lonely creature he ever ran across even when it completely destroyed all his other plans: Mark and I literally have nothing in common personality- and values-wise, it's shocking that we're even related.
Mark Vorkosigan, who threw all the money he had at saving a bunch of slave children slated for death despite knowing that the slavers would just make more children to kill: And what a good thing that is!
Mark Vorkosigan: I do wish I had Miles's gift for always getting people to do what I want, though.
Miles Vorkosigan: I left my brother Mark with this group of people who have been at an inimical financial stalemate for decades, twenty minutes have passed since then so I fully expect him to own all their property and possibly their souls by now and will plan all my actions accordingly.
Mark Vorkosigan, watching his brother with his fiancee: So clingy and obsessed, if I weren't so happy for him it'd be kinda cringe.
Miles Vorkosigan, watching his brother with his girlfriend: So clingy and obsessed, if I weren't so happy for him it'd be kinda cringe.
Miles Vorkosigan is exactly Caleb Widogast's type (hyper-intelligent, driven, personality is five fronts in a trenchcoat, could murder him). Caleb isn't quite Miles's type (tall, competent: yes. brunette, woman: no), but he would fit in great with Miles's string of lovers, eg "when I met him he was a homeless vagrant and when I left him he was chief of research ethics at imp mil", etc. In this essay I will....
The first time I’d read Diplomatic Immunity, we didn’t have Falling Free easily accessible so I hadn’t read it yet, just known a general outline.
Having read it this time, I’m definitely going “Yay, thing from Falling Free!” every time they come up.
Quaddie zero-g ballet is of course awesome either way.
“Mark . . . why do the air holes have screens in them?”
The first time I read A Civil Campaign, this exact conversation was the MOMENT I realized what an absolutely wild book this was going to be. Yes I’m rereading it again for the 50th time.
Okay, last headcanon and I'll stop harassing y'all after this.
So you know how Mark Vorkosigan has been trained to have the same body language as Miles Vorkosigan, whose body language is really a less effortless rendition of Aral's? And then Dono is told to just imitate Aral whenever he's scared he isn't passing well enough and, well, do you ever imagine these four men being somewhere together and just accidentally striking the exact same pose or making the exact same gesture at the same time?
Like someone is explaining something and they are listening attentively, brows elegantly furrowed, hands in their pockets and feet spread apart in a manly, assertive way, and when the particularly complicated part comes along they all rub their chins in contemplation and it goes from manly dignity to absolutely fucking ridiculous?
Lois McMaster Bujold: okay so the A plot is an intense political romance dealing with slander and healing from abuse
me: cool cool and the B plot?
Lois: bugs
me: sorry, what?
Lois: B U G S
Vorkosigan headcanon poll! The amazing fanart that I linked below has exposed me to many reblogs concerning Aral's Hawaiian shirt(s), and I feel like people have different headcanons as to its exact nature. What I remember is that we see him in a floral shirt at the end of Shards of Honor, and then definitely again in A Civil Campaign, and I don't remember many other instances, really, soo... Do you think it's the same shirt that he's kept for 30+ years?
Or do people keep buying him floral patterned shirts as a gag gift?
Or did he embrace his love of Hawaiian shirts and started buying them on his own as an integral part of his leisure wear?
Okay, last headcanon and I'll stop harassing y'all after this.
So you know how Mark Vorkosigan has been trained to have the same body language as Miles Vorkosigan, whose body language is really a less effortless rendition of Aral's? And then Dono is told to just imitate Aral whenever he's scared he isn't passing well enough and, well, do you ever imagine these four men being somewhere together and just accidentally striking the exact same pose or making the exact same gesture at the same time?
Like someone is explaining something and they are listening attentively, brows elegantly furrowed, hands in their pockets and feet spread apart in a manly, assertive way, and when the particularly complicated part comes along they all rub their chins in contemplation and it goes from manly dignity to absolutely fucking ridiculous?
@shiringreen ...I couldn't help myself, this was just too good of a mental image