Cryoburn

[snarp]

1. Bujold does not know how Japanese names and honorifics work. This is very jarring, because I do know.

2. I don't think that crisis midway through actually made sense. I feel like all Miles' research would have turned up some photographs at some point.

3. That was an EXTREMELY sudden romance.

4. AGH VERY LAST SENTENCE

Comments

[holyschist]

1. Somehow I am...not surprised. *sigh*

[snarp]

She did a little research, but she absolutely had to stick honorifics in there, she really should've tried to watch a Japanese film subbed and listened for them, or something.

And there was some costume abuse in there, too. I'm trying to imagine somebody wearing a haori with a short skirt, leggings, and a tight shirt, and the image is just painful. It's something a very confused American might do - though I would hope a tenuous allegiance to aesthetics would prevent such dreadful behavior - but I can't imagine a Japanese person doing it. Unless there was like, a fire alarm, and she couldn't find her coat.

[holyschist]

I imagine the excuse is "it's the future!" (I was kind of baffled by the quaddies wearing essentially Elizabethan clothes...of all the things to wear in zero-G, WHY? And fashion resurrections don't work like that).

Have you read Scott Westerfeld's Extras, by any chance? His future Japan didn't feel right to me, but I couldn't put my finger on why. The explanations for some of the choices he made in Bogus to Bubbly didn't really assuage my bafflement.

[branchandroot]

Yeah, I accept that it can be hard to parse out the usage of honorifics on casual study, but, um, that's what human resources are for, yeah? Or else what not using them is for. *sighs*

*grins* The last sentence, yeah. I heart the fact that this really is exactly the situation described books and books ago, but that was a definite moment of AAAAUGH.

[rilina]

The ending made me cry, even though the honorifics made me roll my eyes.

[azurelunatic]

I knew it was coming from spoilers ten years ago, I knew it was coming when other people said they cried, I knew it was coming when I saw him in full uniform ...

... and I cried. Both times reading it, and then again when reading it to safe the book for someone who knows what's coming but can't read it yet (she's not over an event in her own family) and then when reading that fic about that day on Sergyar (GRAAAAAAAAANDCHILDREN, PICTURES OF GRANDCHILDREN) and my voice gets wibbly when talking about it, and I'm misting up even writing this now.

[snarp]

Screened for spoilers:

mikkeneko sayeth: 3. Wait, the one between the Barryaran officer whose name I can't spell, and Lisa Sato?

Yep! I think he's in love with her kids, not her. I mean, they barely talk to each other. And on her side, I don't think she's in any emotional state to be making these kinds of decisions. She was still apparently grieving for her husband when she was frozen, and it's not like she somehow worked through that while she was dead.