kiwi wrote:boldilocks wrote:
That's hardly getting uppity, it's a science officer telling a foreign diplomat not to let the superstitions of the soldiery give him a false impression of the loroi as a culture.
Yay culture!
Little does Beryl know that hearing about a few minor superstitious traditions will make Alex more comfortable. Whereas when Talon et al. tell him about the totally normal and widely accepted (who knows what the civilian loroi think) diral training practices he's gonna get very uncomfortable.
The loroi might think it's strange that Alex's family might be
unhappy that he signed up for a species-critical but very dangerous military career. That will be a test to see who's a flexible thinker...
I can't help but think Talon telling off Beryl had the subtext of "don't ruin it for all of us with your attempt at coddling him" - it might be a wake up call for
all of them when Alex realizes that these ladies are, for all intents and purposes, kid soldiers. That ... may be hard to simply put down as a "Loroi thing", much harder than "some superstitions" as Beryl thinks.
On a broader scale, yes, many sci-fi works have the shortcoming of having a rather simplistic view on an alien species. In some cases it's warranted, for example, a human soldier would only see its counterpart on the battlefield, but even beyond that, many books and TV shows describe aliens compared to humans (how they differ, and then maybe a few defining traits, like militaristic, pacifist, highly intelligent, and so on), but rarely talk about
individuals.
So yes, it's definitely refreshing to see that even the Loroi do have different views and even come from different walks in life. In addition, I'm pretty sure that there is another reason to this exercise, to make
Alex see that these aliens are not all alike, far by not.
In the light of the construct's warning, he may come to think that not
all Loroi would be untrustworthy. Or trustworthy. That he should use his own mind to see on a case by case basis.