Yeah I'd have to take some exception to your characterization of the Aral/Cordelia and Aral/Jole relationships. Bujold works very hard to give Cordelia a lot of agency and present the whole Jole thing as a relationship he wanted and chose and all that, but if you look at what's going on it's really troublesome. Cordelia is literally Aral's prisoner the whole time of their romance. She's literally depending upon him for her survival. Bujold makes it more like mutual support for mutual survival (at least in the first prisoner instance; the second's much more one way), but that doesn't actually decrease the inherent problematic nature. And maybe they would have ended up together one way or another, but in the story it happens only because Beta treats Cordelia even worse, which they had to work really hard to do.
There really isn't any justifying the Jole thing. He's in this military-worshipping, authority-worshipping, Aral-worshipping, absolute authoritarian society, he's a lieutenant in his 20s and Aral's in his 60's, an admiral and Prime Minister. There's nothing about that that's OK, except Jole thinks so, and if we go with everyone gets to judge their own lives, OK, then we can go with Jole's fine with it. But from the outside it's much more likely that fine or not, Jole has minimal power in that situation. If he declines Aral's advances, he's absolutely entirely dependent on Aral not fuck him over, or sideline him. Which Aral wouldn't, we know, because he's got Integrity, but that's not situational, and it's the situation that's the problem. Not least because everything in that situation/society is going to tell Jole in his own head to be fine with it, whether he would have been otherwise or not. But that's pretty complicated, cuz Jole's whole nature is going to have been shaped by growing up in that society, so there's little use trying to detangle that mess.
In Uprooted Novik deals with the power thing by making it the young female protagonist who pushes for the sex and intimacy every time (and she's far from powerless once the sex thing starts - it's her very great power that makes her sexy at that point). The wizard constantly resists, until I was really unhappy with the actual sex scene. The girl does give the wizard one time to say no, when she's already a) in his room, b) in his bed, c) on top of him, d) woken him from sleep he desperately needs (and he needs her help to fight the army outside); all of which he explicitly did not consent to. So the last consent in my mind doesn't have a lot of meaning. If we give Jole the autonomy to say that he was happy with the Aral thing start to finish, we need to give the wizard the autonomy to say he doesn't want intimacy or sex with the girl, and not keep making him say no again and again til she wears him down for his own good. Ugh.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2022-06-25 03:44 pm (UTC)There really isn't any justifying the Jole thing. He's in this military-worshipping, authority-worshipping, Aral-worshipping, absolute authoritarian society, he's a lieutenant in his 20s and Aral's in his 60's, an admiral and Prime Minister. There's nothing about that that's OK, except Jole thinks so, and if we go with everyone gets to judge their own lives, OK, then we can go with Jole's fine with it. But from the outside it's much more likely that fine or not, Jole has minimal power in that situation. If he declines Aral's advances, he's absolutely entirely dependent on Aral not fuck him over, or sideline him. Which Aral wouldn't, we know, because he's got Integrity, but that's not situational, and it's the situation that's the problem. Not least because everything in that situation/society is going to tell Jole in his own head to be fine with it, whether he would have been otherwise or not. But that's pretty complicated, cuz Jole's whole nature is going to have been shaped by growing up in that society, so there's little use trying to detangle that mess.
In Uprooted Novik deals with the power thing by making it the young female protagonist who pushes for the sex and intimacy every time (and she's far from powerless once the sex thing starts - it's her very great power that makes her sexy at that point). The wizard constantly resists, until I was really unhappy with the actual sex scene. The girl does give the wizard one time to say no, when she's already a) in his room, b) in his bed, c) on top of him, d) woken him from sleep he desperately needs (and he needs her help to fight the army outside); all of which he explicitly did not consent to. So the last consent in my mind doesn't have a lot of meaning. If we give Jole the autonomy to say that he was happy with the Aral thing start to finish, we need to give the wizard the autonomy to say he doesn't want intimacy or sex with the girl, and not keep making him say no again and again til she wears him down for his own good. Ugh.