Hornblower wrote:cthia wrote:Considering Honor's relationship with a treecat strengthening her resolve at an even tender age, I'm really surprised that she couldn't and wouldn't come forth with the truth straightaway and report Young as soon as "the incident" in question happened.
Storyline always supported the fact that bondings made the human half of the bond mentally stronger. In fact, I always thought that that was one of the special ingredients that made a human's mind glow so appetizing. Certainly a coward of the Houseman variety wouldn't have an appealing mindglow. Honor had a strong will which would have been magnified with her being one half of a bonded equation.
How could she have held out against the mental and emotional onslaught of right and wrong that had to be constantly emanating from Nimitz so strongly that no bond was needed to detect it? I'd've thought that Nimitz' emotions would've relentlessly bombarded her to do the right thing.
Certainly Honor should have been internally ashamed of her actions being reflected in a treecat's sense of honor (pardon the unintentional pun). I suspect that it would have been terribly difficult, emotionally, for Nimitz to bear. My niece once stated that she didn't understand why Nimitz never needed therapy.
Of all the decisions Honor made, this one alone seems so uncharacteristic and alien of her. I have a hard time buying it. Factor in how her mother and father raised her with their acute sense of right and wrong and their abundance of love...
shrug
It was needed for the storyline
WeirdlyWired wrote:1) Two-legs have always baffled The People. All the customs and rituals, "diplomacy" ...
2) Honor's self-image as an ugly cow, especially compared to her mother, coupled with the difference in social status, the inevitable "he said, she said" all conspired in her mind to disuade her from speaking up.
1) Yes, but in the present discussion, the geiger counter is set to detect the bonding's effect on a human, Honor, and how Nimitz and his species' overall worldview would affect how a human, in this case Honor, assimilates her dilemma. A bonded human is always in a treecat's "peripheral vision." The human is always being watched. A human loses one very important intangible -- that of privacy. The need for privacy is synonymous with being human and is a basic need -- in complete opposition to a treecat and a treecat's world.
Rest in peace Joan Rivers. I miss you. But can we talk? Can we talk?...
To explain it without a doubt, a human should find it quite difficult to masturbate after becoming bonded.
<I know what you've been doing. I can appreciate your trying to hide the fact from me somewhere in your intense concentration. But you've got that same old shit eating grin on your face as you always do when you're avoiding eye contact -- even without the alarm being sounded in your mind-glow that's screaming at me>
There's an implied relationship that a reader can miss. Treecats are not pets, but they are constantly in your sphere, like pets but totally unlike what another human would be allowed to do. We take a break from our friends, our lovers, our spouses and our parents. If not, someone would always be there to judge us or make us feel self-conscious. Yet a treecat, a person not unlike a human — even worse since they can peer inside your mind via your emotions — is always present. "Seeing" with inhuman-like clarity your every move and misstep.
IOW, being bonded means there is always someone in your business.
The light that you shined on how a bond might effect a treecat in conjunction with being confused about two-legged weirdness is in chapter two, but just as important.
2) Under the surface I find Honor's "ugly cow syndrome" hard to swallow as well.
a) She wasn't ugly. She was simply in a weird place in the prolong stage, hardly an uncommon phenomena.
b) Even though she couldn't sense other peoples emotions around her then, Nimitz could. And it would have been obvious in short order after spending so much time with Nimitz when he was perturbed by someone for thinking bad thoughts about her.
c) No one ever told Honor she wasn't beautiful.