{"id":13817,"date":"2011-08-27T00:18:50","date_gmt":"2011-08-27T07:18:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2011\/08\/27\/13817.html"},"modified":"2011-08-27T00:18:50","modified_gmt":"2011-08-27T07:18:50","slug":"omnicompetent-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2011\/08\/27\/omnicompetent-world\/","title":{"rendered":"When everyone understands the implications"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I'm reading A Song for Arbonne<\/cite>, and though I'm liking it (more and more as it goes on), there's one repeated trope that I'm rolling my eyes at a bit because of the repetition, even though I mostly like each individual instance of it:<\/p>\n

Person 1 says x. Person 2, the viewpoint character for that scene, thinks Oh. The implications are y and z.<\/i> Person 2 then looks at person 3, and sees that person 3 has also seen the implications. Person 2 then looks at person 4, and sees that person 4 has also<\/i> seen the implications, which makes person 2 realize that person 4 is smarter than previously believed. Then someone else says something else and the whole process repeats.<\/p>\n

I think it's great that there are all these smart people running around in this book. They're all aware of the implications of everything; they all see almost immediately where any given new piece of information leads; they're all clever (and witty) and aware of subtlety and nuance; they all gain respect for each other as they notice that the others are also clever and understand implications. I love characters like that, and I like these particular characters quite a bit. And in general, when I'm reading fiction, I don't like it when characters are slow to figure things out, or spend a lot of time being wrong about other characters.<\/p>\n

And yet, I'm finding that when almost all of the important characters are like that, and nearly every chapter has a scene or two that follows the above outline, I begin to tire of it. It's not that I want the characters to be dumber or the situations to be less full of nuance and implication; I just want a little more variety in the characters' reactions to things and in the presentation of those reactions.<\/p>\n

(Come to think of it, I think I'm having the same reaction I sometimes have to conversations among Heinlein characters. But perhaps I'd better not pursue that line of thought any further.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m reading A Song for Arbonne, and though I’m liking it (more and more as it goes on), there’s one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}