WARNING, POSSIBLE SPOILER AS THIS DISCUSSES EVENTS IN THE THRONE OF JADE PREVIEW THAT APPEARS IN THE AMERICAN EDITION OF HIS MAJESTY'S DRAGON
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Might be a good idea to cut-tag this for spoilers, in case anyone here has yet to finish the book.
This brings up another point, why would dragons still be treated so badly (pettions in parliament to esterminate them, huntring for sport, etc, when the dragons have already save England previously by destorying the Spanish Armada as the book also makes reference too.
I suppose the explanation for this is that dragons freak humans out. The humans in the book who don't have much to do with dragons appear to regard them as little more than animals, or as barely-sentient battleships. (And they don't seem too sure about the sentience.) If you thought that way about dragons, it would seem unnecessary to laud them for anything -- after all, one doesn't usually laud the horses that carry the cavalry to victory. And if you thought they were battleships that might go wild and eat you at any time, you might want to have them got rid of.
How could the British Not be "used to dragons after living with them at least 1900 years?dracochroniclerApril 21 2006, 11:47:08 UTC
Well, even if the native Celts didn't have dragons themselves, the book states they were domesticated by the Romans, who would have brought them there in 43 AD with the invasion. Sir Francis Drake's dragon and presumeably others in the 16th century Aerial Corps already "saved" England once before from the Spanish Armada as the book also explains.
After almost 2000 years of living with these talking, music loving, immensely powerful creatures, how could anyone not know they were intelligent? If anything, virtually every culture in Tremeraire's Naoleonic era world, would likely have considered the dragons as their "Gods" in ancient times. And in a way, in order for this world to be plausible, the dragons would have indeed literally be "gods" with the power to destroy the human race at any time they chose.
Not many people actually talk to the dragons, though. Laurence himself has never interacted with a dragon before he meets Temeraire. I imagine Miss Montagu is a typical example of the British population at large, with respect to her attitude towards dragons. I wouldn't think of most of the humans in the books as having lived with dragons; that implies some sort of personal knowledge of dragons on most people's part, and most people clearly don't have that personal knowlege.
I don't find it difficult to believe that humans might be short-sighted and slow to accept that a species so very different from theirs is intelligent and as deserving of respect as other humans. People aren't very good at recognising that other people who happen to be different from them deserve respect, even when those other people don't have scales -- consider the slave-trade.
Re: How could the British Not be "used to dragons after living with them at least 1900 years?kalpurnaJune 16 2006, 20:14:57 UTC
Well, frankly, men have in the real world managed to live for more than 10,000 years with talking, music loving, perfectly intellectually capable beings, while still treating them overwhelmingly as property, and while still professing to be unconvinced of their intelligence. (Hey there, female gender! How's it going?)
Not to mention that Naomi Novik is pretty obviously drawing a parallel between slavery and dragons' rights, from the first book on. There's another situation where people somehow convinced themselves that an obviously intelligent, completely capable category of beings were sub-human and not entitled to any rights whatsoever.
It is even more difficult to a take a troll seriously who thinks a typographical error is enough to disregard someones post. If you didn't figure it out, I was still editing the post at the time you posted. Indeed, I was quite surprised to see three people even reading this at 6.00 am.
When my classes are learning rhetorical analysis, we often use movie reviews as sample texts for said analysis. When we about ethos, misspelling a major character's name is one of the primary examples of errors that damage the reviewer's credibility. That's not just a typo: it's an indication of lack of careful reading.
Please. For the love of GOD. Learn to use the fucking lj-cut! It's not hard, any retard can do it, and frankly I don't appreciate having a main plot point of a future book splayed across my friends list! Not to mention if there's anyone here who hasn't finished the first book yet - way to destroy their reading experience.
See above comment, I had no intention to leaving the whole post up, and was still editing at the time of your latest "attack". As for future plot line, everything I said was based on the information in the first book. Who would have guessed three people would be reading this at this hour.
Exactly. The first book. Not everyone has read it. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that people might come here before they finish the book or even before they decide to read it.
Oh, and I didn't see the passage in the first book where they talked about "giving Temeraire away to China", could you give me the page number?
I'm going to make some suggestions that might help clear up the miscommunications that seem to be plaguing your discussions with other posters to the community. You are free to ignore them; I am not the community moderator, only another poster.
(1) I'm not sure how you're posting to LJ, but whether you're using a client or the Web interface, it might be a good idea for you to draft your posts in a text document and edit them *before* posting, rather than after.
Specifically, spoilers are prohibited by the community guidelines and many LJ users consider long posts extremely rude, so you will set yourself on a better footing by using an LJ-cut in the initial post rather than editing one in later.
(2) LJ is an international phenomenon and so is English-language publishing. His Majesty's Dragon was published as Temeraire in the UK and Australia three months before the US edition came out, and those editions did not include previews of Throne of Jade. Not marking or cutting your post for Throne of Jade spoilers is naturally
( ... )
...add to that that Temeraire can kill hundreds at a blow, so far as we've seen, if and only if those hundreds are on/in some structure the destruction of which is going to seriously injure them. Correct me if I'm wrong but I wasn't under the impression that exposure to his "sonic weapon" directly killed humans or dragons so much as stunned and deafened them.
Re: 4, what you obviously do not comprehend is that while dragons are physically capable of destroying the human race, they are psychologically incapable of it, or at least unwilling/uninterested. Because, as is set forth in the books and as people here have been trying to tell you, dragons' minds do not work like human ones.
Oh, and if you don't want people to assume you're ignorant, it's rather bad form to then turn around and boldly state you know more than they do. One of the fun things about the internet... the person you're debating with might be a semiliterate high school dropout from Hicksville, Missouri, or they might be a history professor from Oxford U. with three shelves' worth of lit to their name.
And speaking of claiming authorship and other credentials - title of this book, please, or your claim isn't going to impress anyone.
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This brings up another point, why would dragons still be treated so badly (pettions in parliament to esterminate them, huntring for sport, etc, when the dragons have already save England previously by destorying the Spanish Armada as the book also makes reference too.
I suppose the explanation for this is that dragons freak humans out. The humans in the book who don't have much to do with dragons appear to regard them as little more than animals, or as barely-sentient battleships. (And they don't seem too sure about the sentience.) If you thought that way about dragons, it would seem unnecessary to laud them for anything -- after all, one doesn't usually laud the horses that carry the cavalry to victory. And if you thought they were battleships that might go wild and eat you at any time, you might want to have them got rid of.
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After almost 2000 years of living with these talking, music loving, immensely powerful creatures, how could anyone not know they were intelligent? If anything, virtually every culture in Tremeraire's Naoleonic era world, would likely have considered the dragons as their "Gods" in ancient times. And in a way, in order for this world to be plausible, the dragons would have indeed literally be "gods" with the power to destroy the human race at any time they chose.
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I don't find it difficult to believe that humans might be short-sighted and slow to accept that a species so very different from theirs is intelligent and as deserving of respect as other humans. People aren't very good at recognising that other people who happen to be different from them deserve respect, even when those other people don't have scales -- consider the slave-trade.
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Not to mention that Naomi Novik is pretty obviously drawing a parallel between slavery and dragons' rights, from the first book on. There's another situation where people somehow convinced themselves that an obviously intelligent, completely capable category of beings were sub-human and not entitled to any rights whatsoever.
We're clearly pretty capable of this.
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Oh, and I didn't see the passage in the first book where they talked about "giving Temeraire away to China", could you give me the page number?
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...I thought it might be interesting to discuss which, from the preview in HMG, what seems to be the main plot of Throne of Jade.
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(1) I'm not sure how you're posting to LJ, but whether you're using a client or the Web interface, it might be a good idea for you to draft your posts in a text document and edit them *before* posting, rather than after.
Specifically, spoilers are prohibited by the community guidelines and many LJ users consider long posts extremely rude, so you will set yourself on a better footing by using an LJ-cut in the initial post rather than editing one in later.
(2) LJ is an international phenomenon and so is English-language publishing. His Majesty's Dragon was published as Temeraire in the UK and Australia three months before the US edition came out, and those editions did not include previews of Throne of Jade. Not marking or cutting your post for Throne of Jade spoilers is naturally ( ... )
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Oh, and if you don't want people to assume you're ignorant, it's rather bad form to then turn around and boldly state you know more than they do. One of the fun things about the internet... the person you're debating with might be a semiliterate high school dropout from Hicksville, Missouri, or they might be a history professor from Oxford U. with three shelves' worth of lit to their name.
And speaking of claiming authorship and other credentials - title of this book, please, or your claim isn't going to impress anyone.
Reply
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