[Dragaera] No traffic since February?

[Margaret Young]

I wasn't evoking cultural stereotypes, I was interested in the fact that
Brust was himself specifically choosing not to evoke them — that he
had given Vlad a "job" around which there are clear cultural stereotypes
and then chose to have him act (within his character) in ways that
challenged popular cultural understandings of the how to respond.

In other words, look at detective/hard-boiled fiction — see the
patterned way of responding to the situation and then look at what Brust
chose to do.

<frustration> I felt I was clearly stating not what I thought Vlad
SHOULD do, but what genre tropes would have had him do </frustration>

Margaret

>>> Matthew Hunter <matthew at infodancer.org> 3/13/2008 5:56:26 PM >>>
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 03:23:26PM -0400, Margaret Young
<myoung at albion.edu> wrote:
> Thanks Michele ??? and my sympathies (concerns?) for what you went
> through.
> 
> One of the things that I found fascinating about the way in which
the
> Vlad/Cawti breakup was portaryed was the way in which Vlad wasn't
shown
> as responding "like a man" if you know what I mean. So, here he is,
an
> assasin, an enforcer ??? and yet there was only a sense of how
powerless
> and physically ill he felt about the whole situation. He couldn't
(and
> didn't think) he could make the problem go away by being tough, he
> didn't feel that his pain diminished his manhood ??? it just hurt. 

... one of the things I found fascinating about Cawti's behavior 
during the breakup is how she wasn't behaving "like a woman", if 
you know what I mean.  So here she is, a wife and possibly mother 
(depending on the timing), and yet she's completely callous about 
Vlad's feelings, fails miserably to handle their interpersonal 
relationship, and in fact it could even be said that she caused 
the breakup *because* she wasn't interested in talking about the 
relationship for hours on end like we all know women tend to do.

</sarcasm>

Let's be careful with the stereotypes here.  I'm not sure exactly 
how you're expecting Vlad to respond "like a man", but I have an 
inkling it would involve domestic violence, acting like a tough 
guy, pretending he didn't care about the situation, and otherwise 
being an ass to everyone and especially to Cawti.  It's not nice 
to perpetuate a harmful and derogatory stereotype for women,
why should it be ok to do the same for men?

I found Vlad's response to be very realistic without being at 
all emasculating.  He's hurt and he's angry and he's confused.  
He takes it out on basically everyone around him, to a greater 
or lesser degree, and recognizes that it's wrong to do so even 
as he does it.  He'd like to solve the problem, but doesn't know 
how, and when he's angry it sometimes seems more important to 
hurt back than to do something helpful.  He's operating on 
autopilot for just about everything else in his life; 
unfortunately that involves killing people who bother him, thus 
making the problem worse.

There's no need to invoke gender stereotypes to understand that 
both Vlad and Cawti were portrayed realistically as individuals 
rather than faceless, stereotyped representatives of their 
gender.


_______________________________________________
Dragaera mailing list
Dragaera at lists.dragaera.info 
http://lists.dragaera.info/listinfo.cgi/dragaera-dragaera.info