I am not cool enough to write this fic but I wish it existed

I recently came across an Honorverse meta post talking about Grayson’s attitude towards women. But this post isn’t about its main point. It included this quote from The Honor of the Queen which I had forgotten about:

[Admiral Yanakov] shook his head sadly, staring down into his brandy.

“Our first generation averaged one live birth in three. Of the babies born living, half were too badly damaged to survive infancy, and our survival was so precarious there was no possible way to divert resources to keep them alive. So we practiced euthanasia, instead, and ‘sent them home to God.’ “

He looked up, his face wrung with pain.

“That haunts us still, and it hasn’t been that many generations since the custom of euthanizing defectives, even those with minor, correctable flaws, stopped.”

Now I really want to read about the Grayson disability rights organizations. How did they start? Was it people who acquired disabilities later in life who first started protesting euthanasia? Was there a small minority of people with congenital disabilities whose parents chose to keep them? What kind of religious and philosophical arguments did the Grayson anti-euthanasia activists use? Where are the present-day Graysons with disabilities who know they’re only alive because of this movement, and how do they feel about that?

Ridiculous mental association of the day

Because I wanted to do something lighter.

So I have this lovely dragon (who I got from a free giveaway the Earth Flight did to welcome new members) named Caldera. He came to me with a very useful battle skill that does a lot of damage, but takes a very long time to save up for. I often find my other dragons having to nurse him along until he can use his big skill. So I’ve started imagining him as an ammunition ship, because in the RMN they all have volcano names anyway (and I could have sworn there was a “Volcano-class”, but if that’s what they are, the wiki doesn’t say so.)

One thing is cute and awesome and joyous about the Honorverse, representation-wise:

There’s a kinky couple. (And they are SO cute.)

Now, my recollection is that the way that the authors fade-to-vagueness for their sex scene is kind of awkward, and kind of shows that they don’t really know what the specifics of their kinkiness should actually be, but– still!

How many other published-by-a-major-publishing-house books have I read that had any kind of kink in them, much less a happy, functional relationship? As far as I can remember, one of the Burke books by Andrew Vachss. (There are some kinky things in other books by him, but they’re pretty dysfunctional. Poor Shella.)

I guess this isn’t something I think about a lot, because I get so much representation out of fanfic, and online original works. So the Burke series basically occupies the same space in my mind as Tales of MU, in terms of representation. But in retrospect– what a thing that series is! A trans woman, a Deaf man, a kinky lesbian couple, assorted former and current sex workers, lots of people of color, of various races including “Jesus, can’t people just stop trying to guess my race from my apperance?” mixed… all of them with these things a legitimate part of who they are, with an actual effect on them, but not the only thing about them. It’s pretty fucking glorious. And the plot and the message are so compelling and so forceful that these books have been a part of my life for most of a decade but it never occurred to me until yesterday that the author was probably deliberately trying to write a diverse cast.

I’m re-reading one of the Honor Harrington books (Honor Among Enemies), and thinking uncomplimentary things about it.

See, there’s a rather unpleasant character in this book, and she’s a lesbian. And as far as I can remember, there’s one other lesbian character in the whole series. She’s a fairly minor character, and the main thing the narrator tells us about her personality is that she has Issues with the fact that she’s surrounded by attractive women who are straight and not interested in her. So it’s been in the back of my mind for a while that it would be nice if there were more queer characters in these books. They’re set some two thousand years in the future, after all. And it would be so easy to include a casual mention of someone’s same-sex wife or husband or partner or crush (the same way one character’s straight marriage and another character’s straight crush have been mentioned in the first few chapters). But apparently it doesn’t occur to the author to include them.

It really tells you a lot about his mindset, and now that I’ve started thinking down this path I sort of can’t stop. For instance, right now I’m reading a scene in which a spaceship that was attacked by pirates has been discovered, floating dead in space. They didn’t have any cargo that was worth stealing, so what did the pirates do? They separated the crew by gender, killed all the men first, then raped the women and killed them later.

I feel kind of weird suggesting this, because it’s creepy to try to imagine a rapist’s motivations, I guess, but… none of these truly terrible, vicious pirates has ever considered that men can be raped too? Really? They’re invested enough in hurting these people to rape all the female members of the crew, but they just ignore the men?

On the one hand, these books are pretty explicitly meant to be the 17th and 18th centuries except in space, so you could argue that it makes sense for the characters to have many of the same attitudes that people did then, just with the exception that it’s normal to have women sailors. On the other hand, thanks to my history professor’s choice of readings and Dr. B. R. Burg, who wrote a book about the attitudes of 17th century pirates and sailors towards homosexuality (and apparently did not consider it necessary to make a distinction between rape and consensual sex, but I can complain about that later) I know that at least some actual 17th century sailors were well aware that men can be raped!

Nope, I think it’s pretty clear that what’s going on here is, it doesn’t occur to the author that men can be raped, just like it doesn’t seem to occur to him to have queer characters unless it’s supposed to mean something about their personalities. It’s a bit disappointing. Things could be so much more complicated. Of course, it’s nice, it’s really nice to have basically a 50/50 split between men and women, even in the Navy, even in the Marines! It is absolutely refreshing to have so many women characters going about their jobs, being capable and awesome and not being treated in any sexist way at all. But it is a bit disappointing to realize how many assumptions the author is still making about what’s normal, when the real world is so much more complicated.