Questions on Carthak

Reading Emperor Mage. I want to visit Lindhall Reed's laboratory SO BADLY. ALL THE LITTLE GLASS HABITATS. I WANT TO SEE THEM. Also Bonedancer.

Also I'd like to see the University library, but naturally Daine doesn't visit it; she's not a very bookish sort of person. (Most Pierce heroines aren't, it seems.) But maybe in the upcoming Numair book...

Is it ever explained why Ozorne pardoned Numair? Or why the Tortallans felt it necessary to test this pardon by taking Numair to Carthak to flaunt him under Ozorne's nose? ("Ha, ha, we have Numair and you don't!" Not a good way to start peace talks with a possessive and spiteful emperor, I would think.) He doesn't seem to be an important negotiator, and Daine doesn't need his help to heal Ozorne's birds, so what's he doing in Carthak?

***

On a completely irrelevant note: do you think the Bazhir and the Carthakis are related? Clearly it's not a close relationship - the Bazhir aren't recent Carthaki settlers - but perhaps they come from the same root stock long ago?

Admittedly my only evidence for this is that both Bazhiri and Carthaki women veil themselves, which probably tells us nothing except that Pierce finds veiling a convenient shorthand for "these people are totally backward." But it would add an interesting new dimension to Carthak's antipathy toward Tortall. Perhaps they don't like the way their Bazhiri cousins are treated.

What do you expect from a character named Ethel?

Ethel walks onstage in season 2 of Downton Abbey with a "Kick me!" sign on her back. Not literally, of course; but she's signposted as a disposable and despicable character.

Ethel starts her career at Downton by being rude to Anna, proceeds to sneer at the other servants for being content to remain in service, and then foolishly falls for it when O'Brien, with transparent malice, tells her that Lady Grantham wants to see her in the drawing room to congratulate her for doing so well on her first day - a prospect that Ethel should know was ridiculous, if she hadn't been so busy sneering during Anna's Country House 101.

With a beginning like this, it's no surprise when Ethel gets caught in flagrante with a soldier (of course nothing happens to him) and summarily sacked, only to wind up having the soldier's bastard child - which of course he refuses to acknowledge or support.

Abstractly I was sorry that Ethel was suffering so much and so unjustly, giving us a crash course in the vulnerability of maidservants. But really I didn't care a twig about her or her storyline, and felt the time would have been much better spent on Sybil & Branson, or on Edith, or really any of the characters we got to know and love in season one.

Extraneous and boring storylines are bad enough. But for a story like Ethel's, which is supposed to be consciousness-raising - being a maid could really suck, you guys! - an irritatingly boring storyline extra-problematic, because it makes the whole issue of sexual exploitation of maids seem unimportant and tiresome. Same tired old story (with an ennui-laden sigh): yet another girl getting taken advantage of. How trite.

(Apparently women's pain is interesting only if it's not about anything women classically suffer over. Bad break-ups, cruel boyfriends or husbands, rape, unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages - trite! I despise the word trite.)

For the storyline to work - to be interesting, and to highlight the issue of maidservants' vulnerability - it needed to feature a character who didn't walk in wearing a "Kick me!" sign. The victim needed to be someone we knew and loved, whose suffering we'll feel like a kick in the gut. Daisy, perhaps?

Of course it would be awful to watch sweet, naive Daisy suffer like that, and I would have been miserable and hated it and thrown things at the screen, but that's the point. If you want to bring home the horror of the sexual vulnerability and exploitation of maids, then the injured maid has to be a character we'll be horrified to see hurt.