Minor Spoilers, here and there... On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Greg Morrow wrote: >David Silberstein wondered aloud to the group: > >You seem to have entirely misunderstood Aliera's nature. She doesn't > >care in the least for convention or propriety. As long as it is not > >actually forbidden, she'll do it - and quite often even if it *is* > >forbidden - e.g., Elder Sorcery - she'll do it if she wants to. > > > >She is what is quite often described as "willful". > > > >If she finds Mario attractive, she will, without a shadow of a doubt, > >boink him regardless of his House. > >How the heck was she confirmed as Heir by the Dragon Council? Well, she *is* the daughter of the previous Heir. Whatever it was that allowed him to become Heir presumably still holds for her. > It would seem that the Dragons place a high premium on propriety >and status. There is a difference between propriety and status which is especially important when considering Dragons: Propriety means doing those actions that one's peers consider proper, and doing nothing that one's peers consider improper. For Lyorns, status is directly and strongly linked to propriety. For Dragons, status means demanding respect *regardless* of one's actions. There is a link to propriety, true, but it is not as strong as the demand for respect itself, which I would guess is founded on the personal and/or military strength of the Dragon concerned. Otherwise, Adron & Aliera would never have studied Elder Sorcery (or if they *had*, they would most certainly would not have flaunted said knowledge & artifacts pertaining thereto in the capitol itself), Aliera's room would not have been searched, and Adron would not have caused the Disaster. I have been pondering the matter of propriety, though, and I think that given what we have seen in /Yendi/, Dragon Heirs do seem to be held to a higher standard of behavior than that of any other Dragon. With Aliera, perhaps being able to take whatever lovers she pleased was the true incentive to her to find another valid Heir to take her place. Note that the scene in /Jhereg/, where Steve said that she had just been with Mario, came *after* she was no longer the Dragon Heir. Something to ponder, perhaps? I have also been wondering about Norathar. Was she just the Sword of the Jhereg before she met Cawti, or did they become a team only afterwards? What did they do besides kill people for money (note that Vlad runs an area as his cover)? Is it even remotely possible that Norathar was in fact a tag in a brothel before Cawti inspired her to do something different with her life? That, or for that matter, Cawti & Norathar *both* being tags, would certainly help explain Cawti's antipathy to prostitution. > Even Morrolan snaps at Vlad when he gets too familiar. True. As a Dragon, he demands respect regardless of how proper his actions are. I have also been wondering about Morrolan being tentatively confirmed as the Heir by Zerika. She mentions other potential Heirs who were killed in the Disaster; presumably at least one that she thinks is dead is Aliera. But I have been wondering how the Heirship swings over to Morrolan - was it decided that the e'Drien line was the nextmost acceptable after the e'Kieron (and he's the head of the e'Drien line), or does he inherit that from his mom (whose name we still don't know, I think), since she was an e'Kieron daughter? Or perhaps both? >Of course, to answer my own question, I suppose Aliera would have >dueled anyone on the Council who suggested that she wasn't fit to be >Heir. I am not sure it would have been quite that simple, but there's a lot we don't know about how the Dragon Council works.