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Pavitra comments on Epilogue: Atonement (8/8) - Less Wrong
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Comments (179)
Excellent story.
The one thing that felt really out of place to me, literarily, was the passage "You couldn't blame them, could you...? Yes, actually, you could."
In a story about Hard Choices, it seems to me that the narrator shouldn't tell the reader what to feel. It would be better to put these sentiments in the mouths of characters, perhaps the Kiritsugu for the reply, and leave the reader to choose who, if either, they agreed with.
"You could" is different to "you should". In this context "you could" actually serves to reject an absolute normative claim ("you couldn't blame") and leaves the reader more freedom.
If this were a nonfiction essay, then the denotative meaning of the words would take precedence, as you seem to be reading, then I would agree with you.
But here, the "could" in "yes, actually, you could" is a parallel phrasing, a response to the set-up "You couldn't blame them, could you...?"
The tone of "You couldn't blame them, could you...?" is one of moral comfort, of reassuring oneself that the late ships weren't morally culpable. The "Yes, actually, you could", a direct contradiction of that statement, therefore winds up meaning that the late ships were morally culpable -- that they, objectively, did do the wrong thing.
Yes, it's a false dichotomy, but fiction operates by the rules of emotion, not logic. In literary interpretation and in writing, the laws of rationality don't directly apply in the naive sense. Trying to read a novel by the literal denotative meaning of the words is like trying to do economics or sociology on the assumption that all humans are perfect Bayesians.
Yes, I did indeed mean to assign some definite blame there. Just by way of inverting the usual story "logic" where the heroic idiots always get away with it. TV Tropes probably has a term for this but I'm not looking it up.
Probably "Just In Time", although the page seems to have suffered a bit of decay.
"Reality Ensues" is the trope Eliezer used. I'm not sure what the Defied Trope was, though.
I said Just In Time because that's the trope Eliezer was subverting by having the ships miss the deadline.
well, it's not in http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThreeWorldsCollide so you know what to do...
(I haven't ever edited this page myself for obvious reasons)
Done. (On reflection, it's less subversion than deconstruction in TV Tropes vocabulary.)
There's no rule against it on the TV Tropes Wiki. In fact, there's a whole category for Troper Works. However, if you just don't want to have TV Tropes Ruin Your Life, I won't blame you for staying out.
I thought it was considered tacky to mess with entries for your own things on wikis? (If it's not, time to go spam TV Tropes with links to my stuff... traffic, sweet traffic...)
Is EY a troper? I haven't been looking.
Here I was assuming that tvtropes was about, well, TV.
Warning: TVTropes links in this post. Do not click.
WhatTheHellHero, maybe.
I still think the passage would be more effective presented less directly, particularly considering the relatively high intelligence level that the rest of the story seems to be writing for.
For the record, I don't agree - it wasn't subtle, but there's no dwelling on the point, either. It's just a small thing that happened, in the context of the story.
I think the point is that it does not matter whether you blame them or not. They made a serious mistake, and have to face the natural consequences.