Vatta's War: Difference between revisions

 

----

* [[Absent Aliens]]

* [[Action Girl]]: Kylara Vatta, [[The Captain]]. Knows her way around both space and hand to hand combat due to her military training.

* [[Depraved Bisexual]]: Osman Vatta, family blacksheep and pirate, who, according to Ky's one crewmember who knew him, "liked pretty faces, didn't matter what gender".

* [[The Ditz]]: In her youth, Stella gave a lover family codes that enabled him to steal from them, and got cursed with a reputation as "the idiot Stella" for years after, but Aunt Gracie took Stella under her wing and [[Character Development]] ensues. Now she uses the beautiful ditz personality as a facade to charm people for favors and info.

* [[Family Business]]: Kylara Vatta enrolled in the Slotter Key [[Military Academy]] specifically to avoid getting roped into her family's shipping company. She ended up getting shanghaied into being a ship captain within days of being forced to resign from the Academy within weeks of graduation.

* [[Gentleman Adventurer]]: Ransome's Rangers play this ''very'' straight at first, weirding out the rest of the characters. {{spoiler|[[Planet of Hats|Their hat]] is sudden and abrupt [[Character Development]]; Ransome [[Catapult Nightmare|wakes up in the middle of the night]] and realizes that he needs to be far more calculating and careful in what he does. He continues to help Ky, but he is far more responsible from then on.}}

** Deconstructed as well. Most of the Rangers die (or are implied to have died) in the course of the books due to their adventuring, usually while taking reckless courses of action.

* [[Indestructible Edible]]: Aunt Gracie's fruitcakes. They're also good for smuggling things...

** Brief mention is given of the previous generation's Uncle Evar's Sausages, which were "hard as a rock" and even used as a weapon at one point.

* [[Intrepid Merchant]]

* [[Laser-Guided Karma]]: One particularly [[Jerkass]] mole gets himself the death penalty by [[Disproportionate Retribution|being rude]] towards Ky in a Cascadian court, [[What an Idiot!|despite being familiar with the local laws]] [[Too Dumb to Live|and being warned repeatedly]].

* [[Law Enforcement, Inc.]]: In ''Victory Conditions'', the last book in the Vatta's War series, it is discovered that the ''actual'' military of {{spoiler|Nexus}} has been gutted out by long-standing corruption because everybody knew that nobody would ever dare to attack them, and so the defense of the homeworld against [[Space Pirates]] ends up falling to the corporate security forces of the planet's dominant [[Mega Corp]]. They're [[Redshirt Army|poorly equipped and not trained for the task]], {{spoiler|but they ''do'' have [[The Cavalry|outside assistance]].}}

* [[Mega Corp]]: InterStellar Communications Corporation, which operates a stranglehold monopoly on all instantaneous faster-than-light communications in the known galaxy {{spoiler|at first}}.

* [[Military Academy]]: Slotter Key's space force acadamy.

* [[Non-Idle Rich]]

* [[Noodle Incident]]: Passing reference is made to the first run that Ky's father and uncle went on, which is later detailed in one of Elizabeth Moon's anthology collections. Later books indicate that the Vatta family may have quite a few of these they'd rather outsiders [[Old Shame|not know about]].

* [[Obfuscating Stupidity]]: See [[The Ditz]].

* [[Oblivious Adoption]]: Some bastard children of family turncoat Osman Vatta were tracked down young and quietly adopted into better Vatta families. {{spoiler|One of them turns out to be Stella, who doesn't take the discovery well.}}

* [[Protocol Peril]]: Being in contempt of court on Cascadia carries the death penalty...and the thick manual of politeness protocol that Ky, her crew and other visitors to Cascadia have to learn is a daunting obstacle.

* [[Retired Badass]]: {{spoiler|Aunt Gracie}}.

* [[Secret Test of Character]]: Ky's trip in the ''Glennys Jones'' was supposed to let her father and his brother see how Ky will take inititive; they don't actually expect her to scrap the ''Glennys Jones'' without trying to buy it for herself. They went through much the same thing when they were her age. Getting stranded in a war in Sabine wasn't part of the plan however...

* [[Space Is an Ocean]]

* [[Tuckerization]]: Many of Moon's real life friends get cameo appearances in ''Victory Conditions'' as they die valiantly in battle.

* [[Used Future]]: The ''Glennys Jones'', some of the more backwater planets, but not the whole universe.

* [[What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?]]: In the Cascadian system of the Moscoe Confederation, where Ky travels in ''Engaging the Enemy'', the Cascadians have the ''death penalty'' for being rude and in contempt of court, but you can set clandestine bugs on someone's dock with the correct, easy to obtain permits. (If the person you're bugging is a citizen you have to politely inform them of your intent, which kinda defeats the purpose). Politeness and protocol are [[Serious Business]].