Line #10 YMMV/TheShipWho


1	* AudienceAlienatingPremise: ''The Ship Who Sang'' starts with the statement that because of her birth defects Helva was born a "thing" and would have remained as such if her brain hadn't been tested and found to qualify to become a shellperson, and that her grieving parents had to choose between giving her up for that purpose and [[BuryYourDisabled euthanasia]]. Did this seem less horrific sixty years ago?
2	* FairForItsDay: Just look at that degree of ableism in the way ''The Ship Who Sang'' talks about baby Helva. It's up for interpretation whether a disabled person becoming a WetwareCPU in IndenturedServitude in order to become an active protagonist is fair for 1961, when that first story was released.
3	** On another front, Helva's love for two of her male brawns and grief at their deaths is a defining feature of her stories. That brawns who fall in love with Helva present a serious danger of [[CantHaveSexEver breaking open her life support to have sex with her, killing her in the process]] recalls how rape is ''romantic'' in several of Creator/AnneMcCaffrey's other works. But the Helva stories came out in an era where there were few central female characters in science fiction, and Helva is extremely active and involved in her own story, helping and being helped by other women along the way.
4	* HilariousInHindsight: "Dylanizing". In ''The Ship Who Killed'' we're told that singing in the style of Bob Dylan is ''illegal'' in many places because it's too persuasive - entire planets have ''outlawed {{Protest Song}}s''. Dylan would have been quite topical when the story was written and never had the rather overwhelming effect attributed to him in the story, but his career does extend for longer than ''The Ship Who''.
5	* InformedWrongness: Tia is [[AMinorKidroduction introduced as a child]] living at a dig site with her archaeologist parents, in almost complete isolation. Her parents lavish love and attention on her when present, but are frequently absent working on the dig, and she knows they usually leave their comms off. So she's [[ParentalNeglect often alone]], sometimes for weeks on end if they make a discovery. Various strawmen were set up to say that this is a bad arrangement, even for a child who does enjoy solitude and has never made friends her age (because ''she's never been around kids her age'' for long), and to be dismissed as condescending - she even says statistically she spends more time with her parents than most children, and the strawman doesn't bring up the obvious counter that ''most children have other people around at all''. Then Tia [[ICantFeelMyLegs gets sick]] while her parents are cataloging discoveries, and by the time they feel like sparing any attention for her she's in such a bad state that she winds up a good candidate for the shellperson program.
6	** It's worse than that, they leave her with a medical AI that outright tells her, when she tries to describe her symptoms, that she's makings things up for attention and it should report possible [[ParentalNeglect neglect of her]] to Child Services, so she stops consulting it. She knows she can't call or approach her parents when they're working because they ''will'' get angry at her and cancel "Family Day", something they hold out as a rare treat - an ''entire day'', spent with her. She is seven years old at the time.
7	** Her parents outright boast that they planned so well that they were able to have a child without changing their lifestyle in the slightest. A lifestyle of, again, being out on barren airless planets with no one else for months on end.
8	** Additionally, after they get her to a hospital her parents' work tells them to choose between their career and their child. They choose their career again, [[ParentalAbandonment signing her legal guardianship off over to one of her doctors and leaving]]. This is not portrayed as them being bad or distant but as a tragic thing they were 'forced' to do - and while unlike that doctor they don't directly appear again later, Tia as an adult [[DelusionsOfParentalLove muses fondly about what good parents they were]].
9	* NightmareFuel: Shellpeople, hands down. There is a whole industry dedicated solely to turning those born with crippling disabilities infirm into {{Wetware CPU}}s for ships, buildings, databases, etc. etc., and then have the gall to put those same people in debt so they have to spend several years as appliances rather than people in order to gain a modicum of a life, and how inhuman this all is is ''very'' rarely brought up. Human rights groups who ''do'' are portrayed as useful idiots who can counter [[BullyingTheDisabled bigots]] at best, EverythingIsRacist at worst.
10	* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodCharacter:
11	** As in a lot of other Mercedes Lackey books, ''The Ship Who Searched'' has a large cast of people who're sketched out as interesting but only appear briefly. This makes the world seem bigger and richer, but these are also characters who could have come back and explored their potential.
12	** Guinon, the shellperson who'd been in orbit over Bethel in ''The City Who Fought'', was centuries old and quite a remote person but still dedicated to the safety of the softshells on the planet. He had history with Amos, and when the Kolnari showed up he did his best to help Amos and his followers escape, [[TooCoolToLive dying in the process]]. It's a shame! None of the 90s books portray much connection between shellpeople - Simeon's quite friendly with Nancia and Carialle in their books and boasts of being friends with Helva in his, but what's ''shown'' is basically casual conversation. Guinon is distinct and would have had a very different perspective.
13	** ''The Ship Avenged'' is about Joat ten years after ''The City Who Fought'' and almost no one else returns, though it could have been nice to see how things had changed in a decade. Seld particularly isn't even mentioned.
14	* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodPlot: ''The City Who Fought'' is the longest of the books in this small series and because the primary character is the titular 'city' it can support a stable cast in a different way than the other books. It suggests some very interesting things, like the role of shellpeople in human society - adoption, and Simeon's role in Channa's life. Unfortunately this is also the book with the Kolnari. They take over the narrative and while textually they're not primarily of African descent they're very heavily coded to the point of having ''raised keloid scars''. They pull ''so'' many tropes from 90s fears of black "superpredators" which themselves pull from racist conceptions of black men as violent, hypersexual monsters attacking white women. And they're AlwaysChaoticEvil and compared to cockroaches. After how thoughtful and speculative the rest of the book is, the Kolnari as a threat are much more dated - this is literally a book whose main threat is an army of [[ScaryBlackMan Scary Black Men]] coming to steal things and rape women.
15	* ValuesDissonance:
16	** Just look up at AudienceAlienatingPremise! The 90s novels really try to soften the original concept of shellpeople, with shellpeople describing it as saving and empowering them despite the whole IndenturedServitude thing. Even by then it was a bad look, and another thirty years has made it worse.
17	** "The City Who Fought" opens with Simeon, our protagonist, meeting his new female co-worker Channa and greeting her with "Hubba-hubba! Sexy lady!", then mentally calling her a ''bitch'' for not immediately fawning over him. Channa dislikes him intensely for this. Each talks disdainfully about the other to their friends in a way that makes it look like they're both being equally unfair. While there's more going on and Simeon does get better, to a modern reader this is a shocking opening for someone we're supposed to empathise with.

Context YMMV / TheShipWho