Madacaek: Heh, I managed to use "various skills", "various points", and "skill points" in the same sentence. It wasn't even intentional.
Chuckg: Actually, Honor Harrington has never shown a skill in any of the books that she has not spent a minimum of months, if not years or decades, practicing and studying. It often
appears that she's only spent a couple of hours studying them, as that's how much time she's spent doing so
on camera, but a close reading will reveal that in every single instance, what training you see on camera is only the vast minority of the training she's doing. Remember, only a couple of the Honor Harrington novels
aren't separated by months or years of down time... the series as a whole covers a 20+ year period of her life, and she's already over 40 years old at the start of the first book.
Since an error of this magnitude -- claiming only a couple hours of training when its actually months or years -- is beyond even the power of a
Justifying Edit to explain, I just excised the entry.
Mister Six: For the record, here's the cut bit:
Honor Harrington from
The Honor Verse quite often has skills that are expert or near-expert level with just a couple hours of training appear every book, only mentioned when its convenient to the plot.
The Red-
Hatted Plumber: Actually, the series covers forty years, which gives her even more time to practice those skills. I have to agree that she usually gets at least some backstory that
justifies her skills - especially
coup de vitesse which is her favourite pastime. I think the
one instance I might have trouble accepting is her skill with the katana in
Flag in Exile - yes, she's stated to have been training for months under an expert, but according to most of my friends who practice kendo, it takes
years for you to get any good. Lord Burdette's defeat can be justified by his having been a moron and assuming she'd fight to wound, not kill, but you'd think he would've been able to parry a couple blows. Then again, Honor
is faster and stronger than most other characters in the books - which raises a question. Is there another Meyerdahl Beta lying around somewhere? I haven't seen one since that particular
Ret Con.
Burai: Removed ...
Learning in
The Matrix involves, again, downloading information straight into a person's brain.
... because it's on the opposite side of a Handwave from this trope — a situation where explicit
Applied Phlebotinum justifies the quick learning process.
