December: Those Damn Vorbarras (namely, Gregor and Dorca)

[tell me what you'd like to see me post about in December!]

southerncontinentskies:

I dunno if you've already answered this somewhere, but do you have a favorite Vorkosigan Saga character (or a top 3 or something if one is too difficult), and why?

And/or, personal favorite Time of Isolation worldbuilding headcanon?

1) I'm always happy to answer GREGOR VORBARRA, GREGOR VORBARRA, GREGOR VORBARRA to this. That is repetition, not him as three different people to be three different favorite characters, but... look, if we want to split Gregor into three different Shades/Inflections Of His Life, we could also do that. (they would be, mini!Gregor from Barrayar-the-book, depressed!Gregor from WA and VG, and scientific!Gregor from thereon out.)

Gregor is my favorite. Gregor is the best. I read Memory first and it gave me very much the wrong impression of how major a character Gregor Vorbarra is, and I'm forever sad about that, because Gregor should be a main character and not just Emperor Ex Machina.

Because Gregor sure is the Emperor Ex Machina a lot. :(

But he has such potential as a character. He is, deeply, alone. He has relatives, but those relatives are also politics. With the (pointless, I'd argue) death of Kareen, he has no stability in his life. Gregor should have people in his life from his mom's side, but we don't know anything concrete about that. While we see Cordelia and Gregor interact when Gregor is five, to the best of my recollection we only see them talking later once and that's in MD when Cordelia is asking a favor. Does she has a mother-like role in Gregor's life? Who's to say. But she's also married to his Prime Minister, and Gregor is someone who has given Some Thought to the Vorkosigans usurping him. There's Aunt Alys, who is related to him somehow through his mother, and is also related by marriage to Gregor's dead cousin Padma. Ivan is around, but he and Gregor aren't close.

There's a fic to be written, and who knows I may someday, where one of Gregor's uncles on his mother's side becomes his legal guardian during the Regency, instead of the Vorkosigans. The issue with writing that is, well, there's not much difference to that then simply not killing Kareen in the first place, and so I'd rather do that one. But, the thing is, there are opportunities for Gregor to not be terribly alone, and he doesn't get them until he marries Laisa.

Why is Gregor not eager for marriage? He says he doesn't want to marry someone in some pretzel family tree to himself and that's understandable (although personally I see no issue whatsoever with first cousins marrying, let alone more distant relations, I see his point about the limited gene pool in the TOI. It's just, it hasn't been limited in a century; presumably someone out there has diluted their very aristocratic blood enough for Gregor to think it's not too closely entangled, and also, I cannot stress enough, they have Magical Medical Devices to avoid inbreeding issues, so there's also that bright shiny factor. Gregor, just admit your problem is being worried your father-in-law might usurp you or that it would give too much power to some Vor family and upset the delicate balance or really any legit political or personal concern. If "I'm worried they'll die like Yuri" is the real problem, he'd never have married Laisa.) But if he married and had kids, that gives him people who aren't going to leave him because they have a stronger tie somewhere else than they have to him.

So maybe Gregor waiting until he's 35 really does indicate that he's not as lonely as he seems? Because, gotta be honest, he seems very very very lonely in VG. He should have turned around and accepted the next Vor lady that Alys put in front of him. Maybe it's healthier that he didn't. Still, it's weird on so many levels that he didn't marry until he's 35. He knows damn well what happens if he dies without formal named heirs. He seems perfectly happy to Let That Happen. Perhaps that's intended as some revenge on the Vorkosigans, who knows.

And this is off tangent on the topic except for how it's not: Gregor's beating heart is a fundamental requirement to everything that Miles does. If Gregor dies, Miles's life is going to be up-ended, one way or another. I don't see Miles becoming Emperor himself, because Miles is not the type to be satisfied in that kind of job; he'd run away within six months and stay gone, and that's assuming no one assassinated him first. But, yeah. Gregor is the bedrock on which this series is built. If he shifts, everything comes down. Miles gets a military career because of being Imperially shoved into the Academy, and then gets to stay on after the whole mutiny thing because Aral arranges favors and Gregor's fine with that. Miles becomes an Imperial Auditor because Gregor wants him around.

He should get more appearances, for being so vital. We should also have names for his kids. :(



2) I am only 99% sure this isn't canon, so in the 1% chance that it is, let me know, but... the underlying piece of my Dorca Vorbarra Thoughts is that Dorca killed a lot of his own family. Like, the "Dorca inherited through his mother" thing is a Difficulty that must be Surmounted. Did he get picked by some relative and get his place as an inheritance without doing much for it? Or did he kill the other candidates and force his way in? I always assume that Dorca was born a Vorbarra and that his mother and his father were both Vorbarras, in a similar way that Serg was, so there's no reason not to think the Vorbarras weren't marrying in a lot of the time.

The other Difficulty that has to be Surmounted about Dorca is his timeline: he didn't get married while he was Emperor. He apparently got married twice. This is complicated since they both have to be before then. We can maybe do a wavy-hand-motion that maybe one of them was like when Ezar married his wife, so some people considered him the Emperor but it was in the middle of a civil war. Except... it seems that Dorca's civil war was, in certain ways, still going on when the Cetagandans attacked (since Count VorL is literally still dying about it when it happens). And Xav, from the second marriage, was already old enough to be an ambassador when the Betans show up. So depending on how honorary Xav's "ambassadorship" was (I think I've got him as 15 for it somewhere, so he's titularly the ambassador and is the figurehead, but he's also got a lot of people around who are his "advisers", and Dorca is more than happy to see how Xav handles that), it really ties in when Dorca became Emperor. (We are for my purposes, and always for my purposes, waving away any speculation that Xav was a bastard and was later legitimized. Based on the worldbuilding as presented in canon, like, you know, that moment Aral tells Cordelia that she can't sit at the breakfast table and say his ancestors were bastards... if Xav was a bastard, it should have come up. I know this is a series where Ivan, who was raised by a single mother, is a POV character when someone went on about how a woman alone can't raise a child, and Ivan had no reaction to that, despite his mother being a woman alone who raised a child, but... look, I have to maintain a certain standard for this because the TOI stuff is already so sparse. If Xav were a bastard, Piotr Who Hates Bastards would have mentioned it at some point. If Xav was a bastard, Ezar wouldn't be so worried about Aral.)

...breaking out of parenthetical, all that is to say, Dorca's timeline is tight and difficult. I fully believe he decided he was going to be the Emperor, got some allies on his side, and then murdered all or most the other candidates, and had a nice civil war with the others. Once he was done with that, then he went after all the Counts who hadn't already signed on to his plan. Probably the Vorkosigans and the Vorrutyers and everyone who signed on early got better terms than the other ones. I have somewhere a thing where, actually, yes, the Vorkosigans don't have to pay Imperial taxes for their district, because their terms of surrender to Dorca let them set their own Imperial tax rate. Piotr was very happy about that after Vashnoi was destroyed. For the most part, they do pay some Imperial taxes, because of staying on his good side, but there were absolutely some years when Piotr was making a point to Ezar where the only tax he paid was those ceremonial coins.

I have given far too much thought, btw, to the treaties Dorca signed with various counts, and those things having expiration dates and when they can be renegotiated, because, look, Dorca did not expect his dynasty to still be there a hundred years later for this to have to worry about. (To be fair to him, it isn't his dynasty. His dynasty died with Yuri. But Ezar wasn't going to not take the Dorcan fig leaf when his marriage offered him a chance to claim it. But there's a fic to be written where VorL's law went poof once Yuri died, because the Counts agreed to it with Dorca's sword at their throats and then there was the whole Cetagandan War where it made sense to have a unified army, but Ezar's a weakling backed only by the Vorkosigans and we haven't seen the Cetagandans in years. Because you cannot tell me the Counts are not eager to go back to the days when they had their own armies. Who is Count Vorbarra to tell them what they can and can't do????)

But this is also necessary to solve the problem of Where Are The Vorbarras. We barely even answer the question of Where Are The Vorkosigans, and they, at least, had a nuclear blast in their capital. Where are all the goddamn Vorbarras? Why are none of them showing up and Gregor being like, "oh, hey, cool, ready-made heir" and adopting or just designating a third cousin? And so an easy answer is, "all the Vorbarras are dead". And then you have to ask, "uh, okay, when? How?" And so it's easy enough to say, well, first Dorca killed a bunch, then the Cetagandans killed a bunch, and then all the rest of them pretty much died out in Yuri's War because neither Yuri nor Ezar were fucking around here... and even then I am fully confident there are some fourth and fifth cousins with the Vorbarra name hanging around somewhere in the background. But that part does at least answer the question of, why aren't we tripping over them all the time. (of course, if Gregor did pick some random cousin as an heir, that would be giving that heir's close relatives incentive to kill Gregor for the power, but I'm not sure that 25 year old Gregor would mind that too much, and hey, new challenge for ImpSec. Although really, the answer is that Gregor should make Ivan his heir and let Ivan deal with the marriage and children part, if Gregor is really set against not doing that part himself, because either he doesn't want kids because he doesn't want kids, or because he doesn't want kids because of the whole way they killed Yuri.)

(To be fair, there are certain assumptions I make about extended family size, which is just from my own experiences, but from the worldbuilding, you cannot convince me that the Vor have small extended families. That Gregor, Ivan, and Miles are all only-children is something that took killing off three of those parents, and even then, Miles ended up getting some sisters much later on. That Aral, Ivan, and Miles are the closest male-line cousins that Gregor has took Serg being an only child most likely due to his mother's age, took Ezar not having married before and/or had surviving children from that previous marriage, took Ezar's wife not having married before or not having surviving children from that marriage, and a generation above that on the Xav's descendants side took all the rest of them being murdered. So to tie these two parts of this post together: Gregor absolutely has first cousins on his mom's side and we should know about them, because all the closely related Vorbarras got murdered by an Emperor, and that whole murder legacy thing probably traumatized Gregor a lot, but it still makes no sense he waited until age 35 to marry.)



This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1168805.html.