Gee, what a good idea...

[branchandroot]

So, the issue having come up in my circle, I was gearing up to make a trigger map of Bujold's Vorkosigan books and solicit thoughts from my reading list.

And then I made the mistake of mentioning this to my spouse-the-librarian.

Who promptly said that it should be a Bigger! project, encompassing, really, all of literature, and wouldn't a user editable database, possibly using the Library Thing api as a base for this, be good, gee what a good idea for a sabbatical project!

So, real soon now, I will be asking my reading list to contribute trigger categories to seed this thing with, since, for maximum coverage, it should be heavily front loaded and the free-form tagging used to supplement that.

But for now, I do want to do up Bujold. So. Here are the ones that leap to mind for me.



Shards of Honor: Rape (does not occur onscreen, but it's a close call and the build up is explicit)
POW abuse (especially women)

The Warrior's Apprentice: Torture (brief passage, but sharp)

The Vor Game: Rape (not on screen, but explicitly referred to)

"The Borders of Infinity": Incarceration (the setting of the story is a fairly intense pow prison)

Mirror Dance: Eating disorders (almost half the book)
Torture (crosses with the eating disorders)
Rape (off screen and past, but explicitly spoken of)
MPD (not trigger material, I don't think, but something I'd surely want the vulnerable to be prepared for)

Memory: Suicidal depression (brief but intense)

Komarr: Domestic abuse (first half of the book)

A Civil Campaign: Child Custody issues (an issue throughout the book)


What else?

Comments

[krait]

Not sure if it exactly constitutes a trigger, but "custody issues" (slash employee abuse/human rights) is almost the entirety of _Falling Free_; the Quaddies are property and only slowly starting to realise this when the entire project is threatened with shutdown.

(The "kindest" outcome of which is forced institutionalisation: "being forgotten to death" in a surface facility where they will be virtual cripples even before anything malfunctions. The VP of Ops would rather they be slaughtered, burned, and reported as "terminated post-fetal tissue samples" in the official report.)

Come to that, that VP is arguably a eugenist, having terminated four pregnancies for "defects"/mutations and being outright phobic of the Quaddies despite their being engineered, not in any way defective.

There's also forced sterilisation (threatened, narrowly avoided -- rather like Cordelia's almost-rape), and if you want to look at it that way, forced reproduction -- Claire's next child is "rescheduled" a lot earlier than it was originally planned, and it's clear she has no choice in this at all, not even in whom will father it. (For that matter, she had the first one in the same sort of circumstances.)

[krait]

Again, not sure if it's a trigger exactly, but in _The Vor Game_, where Metzov is going to command trainees to deal with the fetaine spill despite their having no adequate protective suits... and then, when refused, institutes a "discipline parade" which involves standing naked at gunpoint in the -40 degree outdoors? I'd call that abuse of authority and torture.