George R.R. Martin: dragons are huge ferocious beasts who answer to a master
Tolkien: dragons are annoying, talking assholes
One interesting thought on this:
Fairy tale dragons? They’re like Smaug. They’re arrogant, talkative, they hoard treasure, they eat virgins. They’re amoral rather than evil, but they are intelligent monsters.
The dragon in Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, the one indirectly responsible for Eustace’s draconic curse is along the same lines.
At that time that is what a dragon was. There was a general consensus in western literature that dragons were, well, that.
In Medieval stories, dragons are to be killed by brave men. Gawain fights “wyrms” – a kind of wingless dragon. St. George slays a dragon. So does Beowulf. So does King Arthur. To be a worthwhile myth hero you have, at some point, to slay a dragon.
Early modern and nineteenth century dragons – we see one counter example – Faustus chariot is drawn by dragons in “Doctor Faustus.” The first really solid “friendly dragon” story is The Reluctant Dragon, which became a 1941 Disney film. That is the first story I can find about a dragon that befriends a human – but it’s friendship, not “human masters dragon.”
The second friendly dragon is E. Nesbit’s “The Last of the Dragons” who decides he’d rather hang out with the princess than fight the prince (the first example of subversion of the dragons eat maidens trope that I can find).
But they’re the minority.
In the 1930s, when Lewis and Tolkien were writing, dragons were the bad guys. The rare exceptions were dragons deciding not to act like dragons.
Then something happened.
That something probably started with a 1948 children’s book called “My Father’s Dragon – about a kid who runs away to Wild Island and rescues a baby dragon. Heard of it? If you’ve studied kid lit, sure, it won a ton of awards. Otherwise…nope, and certainly in Dawn Treader, written in 1950, dragons were still bad.
In the 1960s we start to see a couple more “good” dragons. But it’s almost always the same thing. Dragons are bad, except this one. This is a special dragon.
Then in 1967 John Campbell ran a story in Analog named Weyr Search. Heard of that one? Yup.
It was part of a novel called Dragonsflight, written by Grand Master Anne McCaffrey.
And she completely changed what dragons were.
Anne’s dragons were gentle, genetically engineered protectors who bonded to a human rider at birth and were “mastered” by that rider – the dragons offered instinct, but the reason came from the humans.
Anne McCaffrey was one of the first female authors to write science fiction by women about women – and while she had a number of flaws and was honestly a better worldbuilder than writer she inspired a lot of people.
And changed our view of dragons as a fantasy trope.
Since then most fantasy writers that include dragons have them as friendly and willing to be ridden by humans. Even the “good” dragons in the DragonLance novels.
In other words: In the space between Tolkein and Martin, who’s first short story collection was published in 1976, almost a decade after Weyr Search Anne McCaffrey turned dragons on their head.
Daenerys’ dragons owe more in their lineage to Ramoth than they do to Grendel, the dragon slain by Beowulf.
(In other words, literary evolution is fascinating).
Did… did people not assume Daenerys’ dragons came from the lineage of Anne McCaffrey’s dragons (and indeed fire lizards)?
My instinct is that this also correlates to some extent with the
broader
shift (courtesy of increasing urbanization, in part) in cultural views of predators, from “nasty beasts to be extirpated” to “wild & majestic frands,” though of course I couldn’t prove it. Credit to McCaffrey, though, for sure.
The shift is observable in microcosm in Le Guin’s Earthsea series: in “The Rule of Names” (1964) and A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) the dragon is Smaug-ish, whereas by The Farthest Shore (’72) Orm Embar and Kalessin are powerful allies, and by The Other Wind (2001) dragons are not just friends, but family. I dunno whether Le Guin would cop to being influenced by McCaffrey, though; maybe she had in mind that dragons would become family all along.
Actually the dragon in Voyage of the Dawn Treader used to be a man, one of the lost men that the crew of said ship have gone to find. He became one due to putting on cursed jewelry and so Eustace ended up making the same mistake. The only difference is that Eustace eventually regained his human form while the cursed guy, well, died.
Holy shit I have several dragon riders of pern novels that I picked up at a used book store!!
What you say is so true, fantastic world building, not the best writer.
I didn’t know that was the series responsible for changing how we view dragons!!!
Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation.
Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character – let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred – you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different – perhaps wildly so – story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place.
Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity – not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit – the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.
Fanfic does not do this.
Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters – and fic readers – the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions.
The fact that ficwriters en masse – or even the same ficwriter in different AUs – can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative.
So I was reading this rumination on fanfic and I was thinking about something @involuntaryorange once talked to me about, about fanfic being its own genre, and something about this way of thinking really rocked my world? Because for a long time I have thought like a lawyer, and I have defined fanfiction as “fiction using characters that originated elsewhere,” or something like that. And now I feel like…fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters because then we can really get the impact of the storyteller’s message but I feel like it could also be not using other people’s characters, just a more character-driven story. Like, I feel like my original stuff–the novellas I have up on AO3, the draft I just finished–are probably really fanfiction, even though they’re original, because they’re hitting fanfic beats. And my frustration with getting original stuff published has been, all along, that I’m calling it a genre it really isn’t.
And this is why many people who discover fic stop reading other stuff. Once you find the genre you prefer, you tend to read a lot in that genre. Some people love mysteries, some people love high-fantasy. Saying you love “fic” really means you love this character-driven genre.
So when I hear people be dismissive of fic I used to think, Are they just not reading the good fic? Maybe I need to put the good fic in front of them? But I think it turns out that fanfiction is a genre that is so entirely character-focused that it actually feels weird and different, because most of our fiction is not that character-focused.
It turns out, when I think about it, I am simply a character-based consumer of pop culture. I will read and watch almost anything but the stuff that’s going to stick with me is because I fall for a particular character. This is why once a show falters and disagrees with my view of the character, I can’t just, like, push past it, because the show *was* the character for me.
Right now my big thing is the Juno Steel stories, and I know that they’re doing all this genre stuff and they have mysteries and there’s sci-fi and meanwhile I’m just like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care about that, JUNO STEEL IS THE BEST AND I WANT TO JUST ROLL AROUND IN HIS SARCASTIC, HILARIOUS, EMOTIONALLY PINING HEAD.” That is the fanfiction-genre fan in me coming out. Someone looking for sci-fi might not care about that, but I’m the type of consumer (and I think most fic-people are) who will spend a week focusing on what one throwaway line might reveal about a character’s state of mind. That’s why so many fics *focus* on those one throwaway lines. That’s what we’re thinking about.
And this is what makes coffee shop AUs so amazing. Like, you take some characters and you stick them in a coffee shop. That’s it. And yet I love every single one of them. Because the focus is entirely on the characters. There is no plot. The plot is they get coffee every day and fall in love. That’s the entire plot. And that’s the perfect fanfic plot. Fanfic plots are almost always like that. Almost always references to other things that clue you in to where the story is going. Think of “friends to lovers” or “enemies to lovers” or “fake relationship,” and you’re like, “Yes. I love those. Give me those,” and you know it’s going to be the same plot, but that’s okay, you’re not reading for the plot. It’s like that Tumblr post that goes around that’s like, “Me starting a fake relationship fic: Ooooh, do you think they’ll fall in love for real????” But you’re not reading for the suspense. Fic frees you up from having to spend effort thinking about the plot. Fic gives your brain space to focus entirely on the characters. And, especially in an age of plot-twist-heavy pop culture, that almost feels like a luxury. “Come in. Spend a little time in this character’s head. SPEND HOURS OF YOUR LIFE READING SO MANY STORIES ABOUT THIS CHARACTER’S HEAD. Until you know them like a friend. Until you know them so well that you miss them when you’re not hanging out with them.”
When that is your story, when the characters become like your friends, it makes sense that you’re freed from plot. It’s like how many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends. There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that.
Idk, this was a lot of random rambling but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
“fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters”
yes!!!! I feel like I knew this on some level but I’ve never explicitly thought about it that way. this feels right, yep. Mainstream fiction often seems very dry to me and I think this is why – it tends to skip right over stuff that would be a huge plot arc in a fanfic, if not an entire fanfic in itself. And I’m like, “hey, wait, go back to that. Why are you skipping that? Where’s the story?” But now I think maybe people who don’t like fanfiction are going like, “why is there an entire fanfic about something that could have happened offscreen? Is anything interesting ever going to happen here? Where’s the story?”
Yes! Exactly! This!!!
This crystallized for me when I taught my first class of fanfiction to non-fic-readers and they just kept being like, “But nothing happens. What’s the plot?” and I was so confused, like, “What are you talking about? They fall in love. That’s the plot.” But we were, I think, talking past each other. They kept waiting for some big moment to happen, but for me the point was that the little moments were the big moments.
This explains so much about myself to me! 😭 I’ve been a big reader all of my life. I knew at a young age I wanted to get an English degree and become an editor. But then I found fanfiction, a little over ten years ago, and suddenly most regular fiction was too dry for me? I ended up dropping my English schooling after a year because there weren’t the same connections happening for me as there were in fic.
I’m suuuper character driven. I’ll read the same character in a hundred different ships, in all of the different fic genres and tropes, aus or what have you, because I like to see how they adapt to those changes. Those “offscreen” moments are just as important, if not MORE important, to me.
This speaks to me so much!
I’m in grad school rn and have been thinking about the fact that I DEVOUR fic but cannot get into “traditional” fiction unless I’m on break and *sit down* to read a book. Yet I was able to pick up a new Sarah Waters book and read it in two days (during term time!) because I was so invested.
After reading this interesting post(s) I realized I like her writing so much because she is like fic! I’ve long recognized that she is one of the few published authors that write with character driven stories aka why I like her (and Emma Donoghue’s) writing.
It’s also interesting that they are both women and also include lesbian relationships within their writing.
The reason it’s so good tho (and how I try to sell her books to my friends) is that the gayness isn’t a THING it’s just incidental to being human female people. And that’s how fic bills it too –just being people and that’s why we read it and fall in love.
Lots of thoughts on this –thanks for the post @earlgreytea68!
You’re very welcome! Honestly, I wrote this because I was trying to think through things in my own brain, but I feel like it also helped *me* make this huge breakthrough! I’d been having this very unsettled relationship with original writing and my difficulty getting back into it and I realized it was because I was treating it like a completely different genre. It really made me aware of what switches I’m pulling in my writing brain to make me move back and forth and no wonder I’m so creatively exhausted!
Anyway, I’ve really enjoyed reading everyone’s reactions to this post, they’ve been really interesting to hear about everyone else’s experiences and relationships to fic vs. “original” stories. I FEEL LIKE I FINALLY UNDERSTAND AFTER ALL THIS TIME WHAT @knackorcraft WAS TRYING TO TEACH ME, SORRY I’M SO SLOW!!
This is an incredible thread! We DEFINITELY need to talk more and finish that draft we started. ❤️
honestly when the manga bubble was at its peak in america was a really fucked time in comics publishing, especially among (but not limited to) the big 2, where they were simultaneously dismissive as hell of manga but desperately wanted all these readers who were coming out of nowhere. and they just… didn’t understand it! refused to understand it! did no research, didn’t talk to anyone. everyone’s reading CLAMP and inu-yasha and bad yaoi manga and all these other things they never could’ve gotten on the american print market and marvel and dc and a whole buncha indies were going “huh? what? what’s the appeal?”
and like you get marvel’s level of engagement with it, where they made the fucking “marvel mangaverse” and hired ben dunn, the guy behind goddamn oldass Ninja High School, to spearhead the whole thing, and of course that didn’t pay off, because it was all rooted in 80s anime shit while everyone else was moving onto new stuff (not to mention, ben dunn’s stuff kinda sucks to begin with, but). they didn’t even keep up with shit getting hot like Gundam Wing dropping on toonami in 2000, going from what’d been a fandom mostly cultivated through bootleg fansubs to something much, much wider in appeal. it was this incredibly cynical thing where they wanted to cash grab but refused to even learn a damn thing about the readership they were trying to get. people buying and reading shojo volumes by the thousands and they kinda didn’t even know what that was? kinda didn’t want to. again, they didn’t wanna learn about the readership, the market.
and once tokyopop fucked everything up and the manga bubble popped, that dismissiveness really kicked into high gear, and you can hear horror stories everywhere of everyone from big ol’ publishers down to the smallest editor or artist in the industry dismissing anything that looked “manga inspired”. mia schwartz had a whole convo on twitter about this, and how a lot of that dismissal specifically happened to women doing art, in or out of the industry, or even just as early as friggin middle or high school art classes, this vast dismissal of manga influences. since manga weren’t flying off the shelves anymore once the market had been flooded, the industry, from marvel to dc to just about everywhere (with rare exceptions, like at dark horse and such – lord knows a lot of the indie comic biz still would have that dismissiveness, to outside voices in general) felt more assured in just going “none of that, none of that, that won’t work”. you’d hear and see artists and writers dismissing manga and manga influences wholesale, in terms of readership, sales, and even artistic value. lots of “everything is the same there”, probably done through a cursory glance of shonen or whatever, but the mind just springs to “let’s see you motherfuckers try and make and sell a comic about football”.
and the real motherfucker of it is how with that kind of dismissal, they keep pushing out not only vast potential readership, but also creators themselves, people who now grew up on oldass scanlations of just about everything and go “no, no, that’ll never work”. so it goes straight to webcomics and self-publishing instead, where they can garner their own fanbases and stories which frequently outshine the industry publishing.
i’m no fan of attack on titan, but there was a string of articles pointing out how just about every major comic site was not reporting on and generally ignoring how that thing, once published in the US, was already selling millions of volumes, dwarfing anything the major comics publishers were putting out. and that’s while everyone already could, and probably did, read it for free online! that’s incredible!
and so you get this lumbering dinosaur that 15 years later is still looking at manga and people reading it and going “huh? what? what’s the appeal?” and is still playing catch up to that 2000 bubble in terms of content and genre and just appealing to broader demographics. you get marvel, who, after scoring big wins with diversifying both their character variety and their story styles (Ms. Marvel winning big on a slower, more slice-of-life superheroics tone and pacing), come back to post-Secret Wars announcements that look more and more homogenized. and you still hear the horror stories of people with “manga” influences in their work, mostly women, getting their stuff dismissed out of hand by publishers and creators. and it all ties back together in these really interesting but incredibly frustrating ways. a lot of things that seem minor in their connections to each other having bigger bonds in the mess than you’d think.
you got this big industry, this field, that looks at this massive readership, even after the initial manga bubble pop, and it just goes “i don’t get it” or “it’s all the same” or “they don’t matter” and where you’d think they’d chase endlessly after where the money is, they pretend it doesn’t exist.
the american comic industry/field is really fucked up, and really fucking slow to adjust to a damn thing!
I was there in college before and during and after the bubble burst. This is the truth and real.
Seyed-Mohsen Moosavi-Dezfooli,
Alhussein Fawzi,
Omar Fawzi, and
Pascal Frossard has lead to the discovery that there are patterns that can perturb nearly every image enough to cause an image recognition neural net to fail to identify it most of the time.
Earlier research into adversarial patterns required that you solve an optimization problem for each image. The universal patterns don’t need to do this: they can just add the pattern to every image, which saves a lot of time and effort.
Interestingly, despite the universal patterns being slightly different between different neural net architectures, they are still universal enough that one pattern works pretty well on all of the neural nets.
So if you want to fool, say, a facial recognition system, but you don’t know what neural net it uses, you can just deploy one of these patterns and expect that you’ll likely trick it.
It also tells us more about what is going on under the hood of these neural networks.
Understanding why these universal patterns work can help us build better neural networks. The researchers think that the explanation might be because there’s a correlation between different regions of the decision boundary, so the geometry of the decision boundary is what they plan to research in the future.
I like this! It’d make an awful lot of sense, especially the Bail Antilles of Alderaan part. Nice 🙂
I kind of want an AU where Bail actually becomes Supreme Chancelor instead of Palpatine and Palpatine ends up stuck starting the Clone Wars entirely from the other end.
To be honest when Rey said “You’re Han Solo” and he said “I used to be” I 100% thought it was because he changed his name to Organa when he married Leia.
A friend and I were out with our kids when another family’s two-year-old came up. She began hugging my friend’s 18-month-old, following her around and smiling at her. My friend’s little girl looked like she wasn’t so sure she liked this, and at that moment the other little girl’s mom came up and got down on her little girl’s level to talk to her.
“Honey, can you listen to me for a moment? I’m glad you’ve found a new friend, but you need to make sure to look at her face to see if she likes it when you hug her. And if she doesn’t like it, you need to give her space. Okay?”
Two years old, and already her mother was teaching her about consent.
My daughter Sally likes to color on herself with markers. I tell her it’s her body, so it’s her choice. Sometimes she writes her name, sometimes she draws flowers or patterns. The other day I heard her talking to her brother, a marker in her hand.
“Bobby, do you mind if I color on your leg?”
Bobby smiled and moved himself closer to his sister. She began drawing a pattern on his leg with a marker while he watched, fascinated. Later, she began coloring on the sole of his foot. After each stoke, he pulled his foot back, laughing. I looked over to see what was causing the commotion, and Sally turned to me.
“He doesn’t mind if I do this,” she explained, “he is only moving his foot because it tickles. He thinks its funny.” And she was right. Already Bobby had extended his foot to her again, smiling as he did so.
What I find really fascinating about these two anecdotes is that they both deal with the consent of children not yet old enough to communicate verbally. In both stories, the older child must read the consent of the younger child through nonverbal cues. And even then, consent is not this ambiguous thing that is difficult to understand.
Teaching consent is ongoing, but it starts when children are very young. It involves both teaching children to pay attention to and respect others’ consent (or lack thereof) and teaching children that they should expect their own bodies and their own space to be respected—even by their parents and other relatives.
And if children of two or four can be expected to read the nonverbal cues and expressions of children not yet old enough to talk in order to assess whether there is consent, what excuse do full grown adults have?
I try to do this every day I go to nursery and gosh it makes me so happy to see it done elsewhere.
Yes, consent is nonsexual, too!
Not only that, but one of the reasons many child victims of sexual abuse don’t reach out is that they don’t have the understanding or words for what is happening to them, and why it isn’t okay. Teaching kids about consent helps them build better relationships and gives them the tools to seek help if they or a friend need our protection.
I wish this post featured the OP’s name more prominently; it’s by Libby Anne of love joy feminism, and she writes fantastic stuff. A survivor of Christian patriarchal fundamentalism, she writes about parenting from the perspective of someone working through her own traumatic experiences. I love reading her blog.
I met my nephew (codename Totoro) in person for the first time when he was eight months old. Before this, I’d known him only through video calling. A few hours after getting home from the airport, my sister (codename Mystery) was holding him on her hip. I asked her, “Can I hold him?”
She smiled and said, “Ask him.”
“What?”
“Hold out your hands to him and see if he leans toward you or away from you.” So I did, and he leaned away, and I dropped the subject. Five or ten minutes later, he was leaning towards me, overbalancing and almost falling out of Mystery’s arms, and she said, “He’s asking you to hold him now.” So I did, and it was magical, getting to introduce myself to my nephew and the firstborn of the Sybil family.
I am all about respecting children’s agencies and teaching good boundaries. I didn’t ask at the airport, when Totoro was surrounded by new stimuli and needed the reassurance of his mother. I didn’t ask when we first got back either; I gave him time to settle down, get used to his surroundings, and get used to me in person instead of a moving picture on a cell phone screen. I thought I was respecting his boundaries. But it had never occurred to me that an eight month old, who couldn’t speak or even understand most speech, might be able to establish his own boundaries.
A year later they came to visit again, when he was 19 or 20 months old. The weather was what we Northwesterners call “a bit nippy” and what thin-blooded Midwesterners like my sister call “fucking freezing, are you kidding me?” As we were getting ready to leave the house, Totoro objected vehemently to the need for pants and a coat. Finally Mystery had me stand by and hand her things as she near-literally wrestled him into his clothes. He was screaming and kicking and saying, “No pants, no no, don’t wanna, no Mama.”
And as she worked, Mystery kept talking to him soothingly. “I can hear you saying no, and I understand that you don’t want to wear your clothes, but it’s my job to keep you safe and warm. I know you’re saying no, I can hear that, but it’s very cold outside and I have to keep you safe and warm.” Over and over, reassuring him that she understood what she wanted and that she had a good reason for ignoring his wishes.
And it hit me all over again, an aspect of respecting children’s agencies and boundaries that had never once occurred to me. Because sometimes it is necessary to override their wishes. Part of being a good guardian is keeping them safe even when they want to play in traffic or eat nothing but candy. But I’d never thought about it from Totoro’s point of view, how frightening and how helpless it would feel to scream “no” into an unhearing void. Mystery made sure he knew he was being heard, he wasn’t being ignored, he was important enough to have people react to his words.
It’s just, geez. Every time I watch Mystery interact with Totoro I learn something new about agency and boundaries and just plain humanness. It blows me away.
When my kid was 5 we were on holiday at a holiday camp and we were in a play area and kiddo attached themselves to an older girl in the play area.
Kiddo was following her around and chattering at her. I watched for a little while because most of the time things sort themselves out without intervention but then she hid in a tunnel and Kiddo plunked themself down in front of the tunnel effectively trapping the girl. I walked over and knelt down and asked “Are they making you uncomfortable?” to the girl. She said yes so I apologised and removed Kiddo from the situation.
I then explained to Kiddo that their behaviour wasn’t okay because the girl didn’t want to play with them. Kiddo didn’t get it and expressed a desire to go bug the girl some more so we went back to our room and me and my husband had a long talk with kiddo explaining that no means no and that you need to read body language and how to read it.
We got through to Kiddo by relating it back to themself (you don’t like being hugged when you’re not in the mood for it) and Kiddo realised that what they had done was wrong.
What we said was “no one owes you their time or their friendship and no always means no”
Consent isn’t actually hard to teach. You just relate it to a kids own experience “You wouldn’t like it if someone did x without your permission would you?” And kids get that and they learn. Kiddo loves hugging people but we’ve taught them to ask first and to respect the no.
This line is all very cute and witty and everything but I think Garak does believe it. I wouldn’t be surprised if most Cardassians believe.
Heres why:
In A Stitch in Time, Garak describes Cardassians experiencing all memories at all times. All of a Cardassians memories are experienced as the present. If this is true than one may presume that memories do not fade and distort to the same extent as human ones.
NOW here’s the thing about that.
The issue of perception and truth (in something less than a philosophical sense) is presented by scenarios such as those in the show Brain Games.
In this particular example its possible a Cardassian would notice the switch due to the memory of the previous clerk being present. However there are other instances that I can’t seem to find clips of things such as clowns on unicycles going largely unseen on a college campus.
Suppose two Cardassians were walking down a street and they were passed by a unicycle. Both saw it but only in their peripheral vision.
One noticed and got a good look at it and one did not. A good look can be nothing more than a slight movement of the eye, presuming that only a small part of the Cardassian feild of vision is finely focused, as it is in humans.
The first remarks about it to the other but when he turns to look it has already rounded a corner out of sight.
Both have a memory existing in their mind with the rest of their life’s memories in that moment. One features a unicycle. One does not.
The second Cardassian that did not see is left with only a few possibilities
his friend is lying to him
his memory is fake (unlikely to be accepted as a memory that is always experienced as the present would likely be clear as bell)
he and his friends had two distinct experiences of reality that are both experienced as Truth but are incompatible
It gets a lot more messy when you move to more complicated things.
You don’t remember shouting at your mom. She definitely does. Your memories are contradictory.
Now imagine EVERYTHING YOU HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED is subject to this.
You would have to assume everyone no matter how trusted is lying to you.
Or you have to face the fact every person you encounter experiences reality in a way that they perceive as truth and may not be compatible with your own.
Its the “is the blue you see the blue I see?” quandary expanded to all of reality.
If this is the case, its hardly surprising that Cardassians would not believe in an ultimate Truth the way the average Star Fleet officer does.
What I find really fascinating about these two anecdotes is that they both deal with the consent of children not yet old enough to communicate verbally. In both stories, the older child must read the consent of the younger child through nonverbal cues. And even then, consent is not this ambiguous thing that is difficult to understand.
blackash26 