[Dragaera] No traffic since February?

[Scott Schultz]

>I need to re-read, but I'm under the impression that Cawti never
>differentiated between human and non-human assassinations - and
>that this bothered Vlad.  But perhaps you're correct and he was her
>"first".

>I think that reading of her bothers me more though.  She was OK with
>killing non-human sentients - despite her "best friend" being just that?

Vlad was Cawti's first and only.  I'm taking the risk of commenting without 
books handy, but my recollection is that during the Teckla/Phoenix 
situation, Vlad threw that in Cawti's face one time. IMO, what he didn't 
seem to "get" is that the experience of doing that and the shame that 
attached to it for her was one of the factors that eventually drove her to 
Kelly's "revolution" looking for a kind of absolution.

Cawti's willingness to kill Dragaeran's arises from causes unknown, but when 
her partner was a Dragaeran who was willing to do the same thing, I see it 
being less of a moral quandry for her. Both Vlad and Cawti (presumably) had 
grown up in South Adrilankha where life was cheap, and the signs of "evil" 
underbelly of the Empire were always near at hand. It would hardly be 
surprising that neither of them would feel particularly fondly about 
Dragaerans in general or feel a great deal of compunction about murdering 
the people who sneered at their own people, kept them down, beat them and, 
yes, murdered them indiscriminately whenever it suited them. In fact, that 
sense of cultural identity is what would make it "criminal" to turn against 
your own kind, while condoning or at least absolving violence against the 
oppresors. The fact that each of them had made fast friends with individual 
members of the oppressors wouldn't matter. It's a mark of the human race 
that we can easily develop one set of rules to cover a certain subset of 
humanity while still allowing for exceptions to the rule for members of that 
same subset who recognize our own humanity.

Compare their upbringing with that of an Easterner family who, say, was 
brought up in a household like Khaavren's. Still servants and lower than 
low, but treated fairly and, more importantly, treated as people and maybe 
even treated as semi-interesting people. These theoretical Easterners, whose 
short lifespans relative to Dragaerans would insure several generations 
passing within the lifespan of a single Dragaeran lord, would probably grow 
up revering "their" Dragaerans in much the same manner as a Teckla revered, 
feared, and otherwise dealt with his lord. In fact, our theoretical 
"country" Easterners would probably BE Teckla for all practical purposes, 
whether they'd officially joined the House or not.

Vlad and Cawti are products of the inner city slum and their attitudes 
reflect that. Here again, part of the conflict each faces is that they have 
become prosperous enough to move up in the world and the world they have 
moved up into is not their own. Cawti, whatever her reasons, has seen this 
and deplores it while Vlad, much as a doctor must become hardened to the 
suffering of his patients in order to perform his duties adequately, has 
become hardened to the sufferings of his fellow Easterners in order to 
survive at his chosen vocation.

Cawti's flaw is that she gets roped into Kelly's proletariat revolution. She 
is not cut out to be Lenin or Marx. With her background and conviction, she 
should have been Malcolm X. Vlad could even have approved of that and joined 
that crusade alongside her, I think. Maybe she'll make that intuitive leap 
one day, and realize that there's more than one way to stage a revolution 
and that you can change the world by forcing it to change the way it deals 
with you instead of changing the world by attempting to destroy it and 
remake it.