minutia_r

Chapter 1, scene 1: How to communicate, Hotakainen-style (pt 1 of probably 3?)
So the other day, in answer to a question about unpopular fandom opinions, I had the following to say: I am kind of tempted to go through the comic and find every time Tuuri translates something, and see if her translations are really as inaccurate as some people say, because I suspect they’re not. I haven’t done this yet, though, so I can’t be sure.

And then @worldsentwined had her own unpopular opinions about Tuuri, and then we talked for a bit, which led to me deciding that I was just going to do it, I was totally going to make an annotated list of all of Tuuri’s translations and settle this question once and for all. So, naturally, I went to the start of Chapter 1 and started a reread of the comic, because how else am I going to accomplish this? I mean, obviously, I was just going to skim with an eye to translations, and not actually do a full reread, but …

Okay, here’s the thing. If you are trying to understand the dynamics between Onni, Tuuri, and Lalli, and you reread their introduction in the light of subsequent events in the comic, there are a number of interesting things going on.

(Cut because this is getting pretty long. And it’s just part one, and all this is before I get to the translations, which I haven’t even started yet.)

First thing: as is eventually established, Lalli does not understand what’s going on even a little. He doesn’t know what the mission is; he doesn’t realize that getting on the boat means going to a far-away foreign country and not coming back to Keuruu until spring. Tuuri, on the other hand, is surprised (though not very surprised, and more exasperated than distressed) that he doesn’t know these things. She tried to explain them to him, and he seemed to be indicating that he understood. (Although, as Tuuri probably has some inkling of by now, Lalli’s “okay” is not a very good indication of anything, except possibly “I acknowledge that you just said something.”)

Now, there is a widespread impression in fandom that Onni is better at communicating with Lalli than Tuuri is. It’s not hard to see how this impression arose; there are a number of factors, but the main one is that Tuuri says so herself.

However, it’s hard to take Tuuri’s statement at face value when the very next thing we see after she makes it is a flashback Onni being frankly terrible at communicating with Lalli–yes, he finds him and talks to him, which Tuuri doesn’t manage to do, but what he says is the single worst piece of advice that he could have given him, and something that has demonstrably messed Lalli up to this day. So I can’t believe that we are meant to take this as an example of Onni’s great communication skills.

Getting back to the introduction, so Kiraly and I were talking, and she wondered–if Onni is actually better at communicating with Lalli than Tuuri is, why didn’t he realize that Lalli didn’t know what the job being offered to him was, and explain it? After all, Onni understood perfectly well what was going on, and if he wanted to discourage Lalli from going, surely a helpful first step might have been explaining what going actually meant.

So I see a number of possible answers to that question.

Onni actually believed, the same as Tuuri did, that Lalli had a basic grasp of what was going on.
Onni thought that explaining what was going on would have made Lalli more likely to want to go, and not less. (This does not seem to be the case, but Onni might have believed it anyway.)
Onni felt no need to explain to Lalli what was going on, because he said that Tuuri and Lalli weren’t going and that ought to be the end of it, and he was absolutely counting on Lalli simply not showing up for the boat.
Now personally, my money’s on number 3, although none of these things are mutually exclusive exactly, and it could be a combination of all three. But the thing is, this illustrates a major principle of communication among Hotakainens–and it goes for all Hotakainens: Never engage in a direct confrontation if you think you can get your way without it.

And he would have gotten away with it, too, if Tuuri hadn’t left Lalli a note.

Continued from here. This one is less about communication styles and more about Hotakainen family dynamics in general, and Tuuri’s issues in particular, but it’s all to do with unpacking what’s going on in that first scene, anyway.

So. When we first meet the Hotakainens, Tuuri wants Lalli to come on the mission with her, and Onni wants Lalli to stay in Keuruu. Here’s the thing, though–why?

It’s pretty obvious that Tuuri wants to get the hell out of Keuruu. But why is she so insistent on Lalli coming with her? Is she just convinced that everyone wants the same thing that she wants, or at least that since she wants to get out of Keuruu, it would necessarily be a good thing for Lalli too? Is she, despite her longing for adventure, reluctant to go out into the world all alone, without any of her family with her?

I do think that both of these things are factors. But I also think there’s a third, more critical factor, which–I’ll get to it.

On the face of it, it seems obvious why Onni wants Lalli to stay in Keuruu. Keuruu is safe, Onni wants Lalli to be safe, pretty simple, right? Yeah, Tuuri might be determined to go, and maybe Onni can’t stop her, but while protecting one out of two of his young relatives that he raised from children is not great, it’s got to be better than zero out of two.

Only … not necessarily. Because as important as it is to Onni to protect Lalli, he’s more focused on protecting Tuuri. (This has been the subject of some discussion on the forum, mostly about how unfair this is to Lalli. Which it is! But what gets missed out is how unfair it is to Tuuri. More on that later.) In his conversation with Lalli and Reynir in the dreamworld, Onni even says that he’s glad that there are two mages traveling with his sister–so if Onni is glad that Lalli is there, why did he try to stop him from going?

It might be that Onni thinks that if Lalli doesn’t show up, Tuuri will lose her nerve and decide not to go either. If so, it just goes to show how little Onni knows Tuuri. And it’s true that the Hotakainens often don’t understand each other despite how claustrophobically close they all are. But in this case I think it’s something else–I think Onni believes that if Lalli doesn’t show up, Taru isn’t going to take Tuuri either. And that’s why Tuuri is so insistent on Lalli coming along–because she believes the same thing.

This is what Tuuri says when she’s shoving Lalli onto the boat: “I can not miss this opportunity!” But why should she miss the opportunity if Lalli doesn’t get on the boat?

Well, here’s the thing: Tuuri’s not a fighter. She’s not a mage. She’s not immune. All her life, she’s been hearing that she’s helpless, that she needs to be protected. And not just hearing it from Onni, or her parents and the rest of her family when they were still around–this is how her entire society thinks. It’s different in Iceland, or even in Sweden, but out at the fringes of human civilization, Tuuri is aware that she’s dead weight. Whatever The Event was, it can only have reinforced that. All her education, her training, her skills–they don’t matter.

But Lalli’s skills matter. And Tuuri can translate for Lalli, both language-wise, and otherwise. This, I think, is why Tuuri pushes Lalli so hard, and why she tries in so many small and not-so-small ways to sort of … render Lalli acceptable to the rest of the crew–it’s what she thinks she’s been hired to do. (And she might even be right.) That everything else she does for the mission is incidental to her ability to, as Sigrun puts it, “herd her cousin to work.”

Which–well. If Tuuri basically sees Lalli as her ticket out of Keuruu, that’s a shitty situation for Lalli, especially since he doesn’t even really want to be there. (Not that Tuuri really realizes that until it’s too late. But then, under the circumstances, is it something she’d let herself realize if she had the option of remaining in denial?) It’s also pretty bad news for their relationship. But it also really sucks for Tuuri, to be selling her own self so short, and to think that her only hope of getting the things she wants is to basically subsume her identity in someone else.

(It’s also, incidentally, a very female-coded dilemma, if I can use that word. Which ties back into some of the things that Kiraly was saying.)

So that’s where we are, I think, at the beginning of Chapter 1.