(urth) Severian's sex Life

[Sarah Dorrance-Minch]

"James B. Jordan" <jbjordan4 at cox.net> wrote:               Gene's answer to me about Severian in general was that Sev has a horrible background and is only gradually overcoming it.            Hmm. I'm not sure what this says about me, but I've never seen Severian as being a particular bad-ass. I see him as a person who was trained to do a particularly nasty job and who in his professional persona performs to the utmost of his ability. That doesn't make him nasty, it makes him a person who was trained to do a dirty job and who for a large portion of his life saw that job as being a necessary one.      There's evidence from the very first book that he isn't perhaps the best candidate for his job. He violates the laws of his own order to give Thecla a swift death, then turns himself in because he wants to do the honourable thing. He suffers an attack of queasy stomach after his first execution. He does his best to protect Dorcas (oh, heck, I'm pretty sure that's her name, bear
 with me, I'm still recovering from a one-hour labour and delivery and my brain is Swiss cheese. I know I'm skipping ahead, too; I've only read the first, third, and fourth books.) When leaving his post in the prison, when he goes into the uplands, he briefly acquires a young ward/sidekick/son type figure and grieves when the boy is killed and he unable to stop the incident. When he returns to the Citadel and meets with his old mentor, he and his mentor agree that the torturer's guild needs to be dissolved because using twisted men to torture is overly cruel to the victims and using good men to carry out the torture is also cruel to the torturers themselves. In short, I really don't see that Severian is a monster, merely that he had a monstrous job.     Maybe my being an aspie makes it easier for me to compartmentalize. At any rate, I see a lot of compartmentalizing in Severian's life, too. In his case, I see it as his necessary mental defense against the more ugly parts of
 his past.     I did not see much evidence of his being unconcerned with consent in the books that I did read. If anything, he struck me as having something of Lord Byron's problem - if one can call it a problem - of having women throw themselves at him. He doesn't seem to be the one initiating contact. If he is tall, bony, wan, and scary-looking, I find the attraction odd (well, all but the bony part, I find the human skeleton interesting in a sort of way and bony people look kind of elegant to me, but that's just me) but I have heard that many women seem to go for, hmm, shall we say, the sort of boy one doesn't take home to Mother. Or, more simply, that man chicks dig jerks. (Also that there are men out there who have the same attraction for "dangerous" types. Or just flat-out bitches.) Certainly the nice-person-encountering-dangerous-type seems to be a mainstay of romance novels. That is probably a large part of why Severian seems to get lucky so often. And, as has been
 pointed out, he is only twenty one, practically an adolescent. If he is for whatever reason in no need of worry about contracting STD's (or, alas, merely guilty of being adolescent and convinced he is immune), why on earth wouldn't he have sex whenever the opportunity presents itself?      


Sarah Dorrance-Minch
(in SCA, THL Isobel Wren, called "Midori")

Mother to Sophie (10/28/02), Liesl (5/17/04) and Kassandra (4/1/07) and
militant lactivist dairy queen. I should wear a cowbell. 

In a dark time, the eye begins to see
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