sev @sev@witches.town

"...it will be over, even if it can never be right." Return to Rudistal is where Andrej learns to live with himself despite being complicit in atrocity.

Which is an important life skill for all of us.

#Jurisdiction

One lesson of Prisoner of Conscience is that if we are to survive under a corrupt regime, we must be scrupulously careful of others' dignity, when we have been placed in a position of power over them. #Jurisdiction

"...he hadn't wanted to believe it .... Should he have kept a closer watch on things?" Oh, the tender anguish of the newly-woke, and all around the less-privileged have known it all along, helpless to even be heard. Prisoner of Conscience is definitely not my favorite of the #Jurisdiction novels but this time I'm paying attention to how its resolved specifically with this lens.

These early novels are a white-savior narrative; Koscuisko comes in from outside Fleet (but from a culture nonetheless Under #Jurisdiction ), bumbles about, and those less-privileged than he pay for his newly-awakened sense of outrage. But as the series wears on, the larger picture causes the reader to question: do Koscuisko's actions bring any lasting systemic rescue?

Or do his compromises with a corrupt regime just serve as a safety valve for people's outrage against authoritarian rule?

One of the themes of the whole series forms the central tension of this first book -- resistance vs. complicity, of a good man within an evil regime. And because this is the first book, after setting up that tension, Matthews lets us relax into his success on the personal level, without rubbing our noses in the fact that saving a few men using #Jurisdiction rules doesn't change the system at all.

When you bargain with someone firmly above you in hierarchy, you have no choice but to do so within the system. (And w/ someone below you, you are incented to remain in the system that favors you.)

Andrej is a child of privilege & knows how to play the game & never doubts he has something to offer in trade.

#Jurisdiction is about the value of humanity in a system that doesn't value all humans.

Chonis' place on the spectrum of complicity is carefully communicated in the first hundred pages. There are worse tutors, who deny the bond-involuntaries humanity entirely. And Chonis genuinely hopes Joslire will have a better experience this term. But when it comes down to it, they are still Inventory as a whole and he is only performing the semblance of care, sometimes for his conscience, sometimes for a particular bond-involuntary to see. #Jurisdiction

In order to believe the system is as horrifying as he suspects it is, Andrej must have explicit confirmation -- he pushes the issue, *even as he finds that the penalty for exposing the system falls on someone at the bottom of the hierarchy*.

It's never the privileged who take the brunt of the blowback for our own learning process, is it? #Jurisdiction

If Noycannir is being set up to fail, it's not because anyone has anything against her -- it's just that her patron has his goals, and he doesn't care what the cost is to his tools.

With each reread I get more sympathy for her, but I still don't *like* her, not at all. She could be the plucky outsider besting the system, but instead she is realistically bitter, suspicious, and ill-equipped to cope with this role she's been thrust into. #Jurisdiction

I begin to suspect that a suppressed sense of proportion is one of the things required in order to flourish within a dystopia.

(See also: calls to resist normalization of encroaching fascism. If these things are not normal, they are appalling and must be resisted; a habit of resistance is not conducive to happiness under an authoritative regime. Now, it turns out, is a very appropriate time for these #Jurisdiction novels to be reprinted.)

Our hero, Koscuisko: "...an unpredictable Inquisitor with a sense of the ridiculous and an imperfectly submerged sense of proportion..."

#Jurisdiction