[Dragaera] No traffic since February?

[Matthew Hunter]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 06:05:01PM -0400, Margaret Young <myoung at albion.edu> wrote:
> 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>

Perhaps you out to have said "like an assassin", or even 
"like a mob enforcer", rather than "like a man", so you can 
avoid condemning half of humanity as violent uncaring brutes and 
settle for condemning those whose profession is illegal violence 
as violent uncaring brutes.  

Even so, I don't know that there was much stereotype-challenging 
going on with regard to his profession.  Vlad gets up to a lot 
of mindless violence in Teckla.  It's just sort of in the 
background.