A very long time ago, (on a different blogging platform for a blog that is now long gone) I wrote about my feelings concerning Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series. Specifically, my feelings about the relationship between Vlad and Cawti and its evolution. It was also about my feelings about dudebros I kept encountering who blamed Cawti for the divorce. (Said dudebros spent a lot of time saying she was a bitch and so on because apparently they couldn’t separate their relationship shortcomings and personality faults from the shortcomings and faults of an entirely fictional dudebro. In other words, I suspect they were blindly siding with him and identified with him because sexism.
I, on the hand, am used to often disagreeing with my protagonists view point, so my analysis is skewed more toward “Vlad is angry and upset and confused because he ignored the warning labels/Cawti is angry and frustrated because she has had to hide a lot of her actual thoughts and feelings because Vlad dismisses them,” rather than “Cawti is a crazy bitch.” <==This last was generally their entire argument, either boiled down or blatantly stated. Not much analysis going on there!
My argument is: This is a classic no fault divorce. These idiots literally got married to each other without really knowing or understanding each other and they were young and stupid. Yes they were probably in their twenties at the time; they were still young and stupid.
Unfortunately, due to catastrophic computer problems and Google Drive deleting all of the old documents I stored there, I no longer have the original post. So I’m just going to have to write it over again, though with some new thoughts as influenced by later books. (Except for Tsalmoth, which I haven’t at the time of writing this gotten very far into yet.)
So, the original post was inspired by arguments I have had with dudebros over the Cawti/Vlad divorce. They seemed to feel that Cawti was being horrible and unreasonable for having goals, thoughts and aspirations that differed from Vlad’s. Likewise, they felt Vlad’s belittling of those goals was completely justified. (It really wasn’t.) My take for the situation was that it was deeply sad and messed up because Vlad didn’t really know anything about Cawti, and didn’t understand her. (And also, very specifically, Cawti didn’t really know or understand anything about Vlad.) The lack of an ability to relate to each other or communicate is what results in the divorce.
This inability to communicate is seeded throughout the other books in the series. In Teckla, which is the breaking point of their marriage, Cawti is frustrated because Vlad’s personal philosphy is opposed to hers. (Vlad has a tendency to a more conservative “bootstrap” everyone is out for themselves way of thinking. Cawti is more of a “let’s actually level the playing field” type of person. My Feel About This: Yeah, this relationship is doomed.) They never acknowledge this difference in viewpoint in a concrete way. This results in a lot of misunderstandings and leads to the eventual break up.
The earliest sign that there will be trouble in the future is a scene in one of the earlier books, where Vlad makes some offhand bigoted comment and Cawti calls him out on it. Vlad however, fails to understand there is a problem, or that in fact had been called out. (I can see where some people might sympathize with Vlad over Cawti, but no, Vlad was being a bigoted dipshit.) There are other small bits here and there where we see that while Cawti and Vlad do still care for each other that they are not actually compatible in a marital sense. (Or in a basic world view sense.)
This lack of communication is not entirely their fault, but in many ways it is absolutely both their faults. Vlad and Cawti very much rush into their relationship headlong and they don’t really take the time to think about what they’re doing. They also very much fail at communication on just about every level.
If marriage counseling existed in the setting, it might have helped. Then again it just might have caused the breakup to occur faster. Because really, Vlad and Cawti only have a few things in common and are two very different people…who probably shouldn’t have gotten married to begin with, at least not without a lot more interaction than spontaneous mutual infatuation–which while sexy, doesn’t seem like a great reason to choose a marital partner.
Now, the new book Tsalmoth apparently deals with, among other things, Vlad and Cawti’s wedding. I may or may not change my mind about their relative compatibility depending on how Tsalmoth goes. So far at the point of my reading, Vlad is being a space cadet dork about his impending marriage while trying to collect a debt. Even with knowing how the relationship ends, this is stupidly adorable and endearing. We’ll see what I think when I finish it. The first iteration of this post was written when I had read up to Phoenix IIRC, but I don’t believe my position has differed very much since then.
Leave a comment