Let's shine a light on Nandi... (Thanks people! YOU RULE!)

[wytchcroft]

 

So...

...i'm trying to clear my head and start from scratch about Nandi and see if the story i have in mind is right for her. Sometimes they don't fit the characters i hope they will - or that inspire them in the first place... Inara's done that to me - and Book - and River too.

So... my primary question is about time;
How much time between the Guild and the palais de tin foil in Heart of Gold.

I'm interested in where the girls came from - were they on the planet already - or did they come with Nandi? (yeah yeah, that's the ears on my plot bunny sticking up)...

The Dulcimer story;
I don't buy it, too neat and too funny, so what incident(s) caused Nandi to detach from the life of a Companion?

And lastly of course Nandi herself.
Who is she, what is her character and when did it chrystalize into the Nandi of HOG (Oh and there's the bunny's whiskers!)?

So - a lot of questions... I'd like to thrash em out on someone's lj age but shoot, everyone's disappeared!

Advice would be shiny!

Discussion would be the thing that comes after shiny!!:)


 

Comments

[preyforhuntress.livejournal.com]

I always conjured the girls were there already, least some of 'em.

hello there:)

[wytchcroft.livejournal.com]

yeah - me too, but then Nandi must have really had some magnetism for them to cluster round which she may have done! she's pretty magnetic!) but it means (IMHO?) she must've been on planet bacalite for quite a while... i mean she aint the kwisatz haderach, no miracles and a sudden following... so that's time a bunny could chomp happily maybe... maybe...

Re: hello there:)

[preyforhuntress.livejournal.com]

she got to Mal - that's magnetic

[reginaclarejane.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I have no idea what you are talking about but I wish I did!
I look forward to all your stories- your women characters are always so strong and courageous and, dare I say, fun!
:)

[wytchcroft.livejournal.com]

Flattery will get you everywhere! :D

[reginaclarejane.livejournal.com]

Oh, it comes in handy every now and then...;)

[charlie-bz.livejournal.com]

I just messaged you but for the sake of discussion...

Time. Must be after the war. Can't think of anyone other than Jayne interested in interstellar travel during a "devastating" war. Inara has to be old enough to be on track for House Priestess position. I'm thinking 3-4 years since Nandi banged up that dulcimer and headed out.

I think the other girls/boys were all Rim folk. Maybe from nearby planets shipped in to fill vacancies. But! Nandi may have befriended one or a few during her travels.

here comes the bunny

[wytchcroft.livejournal.com]

i'm wondering whether the original girls were a 'reward shipment' (ick!) to the foil planet - depending on how close in time to the war it all is...
and maybe, maybe... maybe Nandi was working as a Companion then - and jumped ship.???

feasible???

Re: here comes the bunny

[charlie-bz.livejournal.com]

she had to do something bad enough to get the shunning treatment from the Guild. Far bigger than breaking a dulcimer. she may have been on one of those fancy luxury liners that Mal refers to in the OoG.

Love the idea of "reward shipment"!

[wytchcroft.livejournal.com]

did Inara recommend her for the job??? Hmmm, i like the friction in that...

[charlie-bz.livejournal.com]

friction is always good! :)

[wytchcroft.livejournal.com]

So G.H. just got me thinking - Nandi is tough etc but we see her, where? in a little fortress in the back of beyond - the reason i keep wonddering 'how would she react to different people?' is coz she's avoiding doing just that!

i'll have to go re-read what i've got about Sheydra and opinions on the shunning thing (no training moon for our Nandi) but even so - does it tell us something i wonder, her reclusive life...

[charlie-bz.livejournal.com]

ooo, yeah! She's hiding. Woman like her could do many, many things. But why live on a deserted moon run by a guy like Rance?

She's hiding from the dulcimer manufacturer!

[agent-rouka.livejournal.com]

How much time between the Guild and the palais de tin foil in Heart of Gold.

Since leaving Sihnon, maybe five, it must have been a while for her to have lost touch with Inara, but after the war, so... Queen of the tinfoil house no more than two years, since she seems solidly established but the memory of the guy before is still fresh. In between? Finding herself-type travel, I guess. No solid jobs, no fancidul romances. She was looking for a place to belong and eventually found it saving those girls and their house.

I'm interested in where the girls came from - were they on the planet already - or did they come with Nandi?

Nandi says they were there before. She took over the house from another guy.


The Dulcimer story;
I don't buy it, too neat and too funny, so what incident(s) caused Nandi to detach from the life of a Companion?

I think she just had no drive to succeed within its structure but liked belonging there and the spirit of the profession, which led to a long stretch of repressing her own sense of inadequacy and failure, which led to the explosion of the dulcimer destruction. Nervous breakdown. Then she took off trying to find a path for herself. Like a college drop-out touring the world, in a way.

And lastly of course Nandi herself.
Who is she, what is her character and when did it chrystalize into the Nandi of HOG?

I figure she was always a Mal-type nurturer, very independent but also longing for a true family, possibly because she came from a neglected home. Which is why she entered Guild training. She thought she could belong there, but she couldn't. I guess it had to do with an inability to be completely at peace with herself. She's scattered, instead of protected she feels pressured, instead of advancing she wants to be done with the training, she doesn't confide anyone in. Maybe she entered Guild training at a later age and always felt like the slow kid in class. Or maybe she came from a poorer, culturally different background. Something made her feel like an outsider.

Travelling on her own was probably a wonderful experience. She gets to use her skills of observation, her privilege of education and her openness to other people, but without any of the outside pressure. Be a Companion in her own way. I think prostitution became a logical step in her mind in that way, until the conditions of the less fortunate on the Rim caught her attention and her stubborness grew into brave strength.

And she is totally in love with Inara 4evah! *G*

hey you:)

[wytchcroft.livejournal.com]

///I figure she was always a Mal-type nurturer, ///

except Mal pretends (to himself even) not to be!


///very independent but also longing for a true family, ///

which i think she found, come HOG

///possibly because she came from a neglected home.///

yeah... could be - and in the real world things to play out many more times than once, they become patterns - so maybe tht's what happened during her guild time, and like you say, mayybe Nandi woke up to herself later, when she was on her own...

Hey yourself. :)

[agent-rouka.livejournal.com]

except Mal pretends (to himself even) not to be!

I'm not so sure. A lot he will try to pretend away with the business front, but some levels of his fatherlike qualities, I'm sure he will openly admit to being "the right thing to do" if someone asked him without pressure. I don't think it's so much a case of denial but a case of hiding it from others because he doesn't want to open himself up to all the consequences of caring.

That's why Nandi is such a pretty mirror for him. He knows why she does what she does, and it's not business. It's easier to try and open up based on her example, but that's when the sum of his cowardice ends up having consequences of their own: Inara leaves. Which makes him question the sense of the whole thing, hehe.

which i think she found, come HOG

Absolutely, I would have loved more interaction between her and the whores. :)

yeah... could be - and in the real world things to play out many more times than once, they become patterns - so maybe tht's what happened during her guild time, and like you say, mayybe Nandi woke up to herself later, when she was on her own...

Patterns in Nandi's life.. hmm. What do you think there might have been?

[browncoat2x2]

Oh, late to the party again! :o)

Time, time, time. When Mal suggests they all run, Nandi tells him 'it took her years to cut this piece of territory from other men's hands, to build this business up from nothing. It's who I am, and it's my home...'

So, years implies a significant ammount of time. The series is set five years after the war, so I would think that she must have left the Guild around that time, or shortly thereafter to give her the 'years' she's spent getting the Heart of Gold to where it is at this point. She also tells Mal she 'was gone long before' Inara left Sihnon, and if we assume that Inara has recently left Sihnon when she rents Mal's shuttle, which was 8 months before the beginning of the series, (which puts the war only 4 years and a few months from done) then I would think this lends weight to Nandi leaving shortly after the war, so that those 'years' could exist between then and now.

Why she ended up on the moon where the HoG is, I have no idea, but I believe the girls were all already there; Nandi tells Mal she 'trucked out to the border, learned to say ain't, and came looking for work. Found this place. ... It was a dung heap, run by a pig who had half the girls strung out on drops. There's no Guild out here, they let the men run the houses and they don't ask for references. We didn't get along.'

So basically, I think she came here, found the conditions the girls were working in deplorable, and went about changing that - how exactly she did that would make a good story too ;o) Grit, determination, hard work, and an iron will I'd bet, not to mention a keen business sense and her talent for readin' folk. But I digress :o)

The Dulcimer Incident, I think, was a last straw sort of thing. She tells Mal that she realized then that 'a Companion's life might be a little too constricting', but I think it's more likely that she'd been feeling that way for some time. I think she chafed under the structure of the Guild, I think she's too independent and willful, too impatient to sit through the day to day 'monotony' of training and practicing. I think she began to feel dissatisfied within the confines of that structure, until she reached a breaking point. I think, like Mal, she balks under 'oppressive' authority, and she has that same natural-born-leader characteristic that Mal has, and the same protectiveness of her 'family'. To me that speaks of a certain confidence of self - whether she obtained that after leaving the Guild, or if it was something she possessed already (and was why she felt so confined within the Guild) could be debated, but I think I tend toward the latter. Or a combination of the two. Those characteristics must have been somewhat present in her before leaving, but she may have been 'forged' and 'tempered' into the woman she is now through her struggle to wrest control of the Heart of Gold from the men of the moon.

I do like the idea of her entering the Guild at a slightly older age, I think that's highly plausible.

As to the shunning, I would think that Nandi obviously had to do something more than just smashing a dulcimer. There are a multitude of possibilities there: an extreme 'tantrum', destruction of property, screaming, yelling? Something political, related to the War? to her beliefs and background? Publicly embarrassing the Guild? It would have to be something pretty big to result in a shunning I would think - or... here's a thought. Maybe when she took up work as a whore, using her Guild taught skills, maybe *that's* why she's been shunned, for taking the 'trade secrets' outside the Guild, lowering to that standard, shaming the Guild that way, that sort of thing... hmm. Actually, I kind of like that idea, for my own personal take on Nandi and the Guild. I'm going to have to think on that some more.

Great discussion! I love Nandi *SO*, and now I've got a new idea to think about!!! Yay! Thanks, darlin'!

[wytchcroft.livejournal.com]

yeah - i believe Nandi is being emotionally honest about the Dulcimer event, but I think she's making the actual anecdote up. If you follow?

Seems we're all agreed about the time fatcor, shiny!:)

What you say about disatisfatcion is really interesting! And I mean, she reinvents herself from top to toe, she's not living the life of an ex-pat Companion, that would be Sheydra possibly - not Nandi.

As for what you say about her finding the women and it being a good story etc - well, watch my bunny jump!!:)

hee hee - thanks so much your reply, there's a lot to ponder on actually... :):)

[browncoat2x2]

i believe Nandi is being emotionally honest about the Dulcimer event, but I think she's making the actual anecdote up.

Hmm, I don't know. I think her response, what she says about a 'true companion never stops practicing', is too real to be made up. I've always thought that the dulcimer incident was probably real, but basically the lightest, simplest, and easiest version she could tell someone, without going into all the real details. But of course, it's open to interpretation :o)

she's not living the life of an ex-pat Companion, that would be Sheydra possibly - not Nandi.

Yeah, exactly.

As for what you say about her finding the women and it being a good story etc - well, watch my bunny jump!!:)

Yay! Colour me excited! :oD

[wytchcroft.livejournal.com]

in fact you and charlie and Roua have given a lot here - i'm printing this for my files! thanks again sweety:):)

[wytchcroft.livejournal.com]

Rouka, i mean - whoops!
Don't want the wrath of the frizzy on me!

Here's a related question

[wytchcroft.livejournal.com]

how many companions were spies in the war do you think???

none? some? lots?

It's never mentioned but attitudes could be explained by exploring the idea.

maybe...

[charlie-bz.livejournal.com]

Holy Frakking Cow!!! You go to sleep, go to work and look what happens!!

I wonder why Nandi waved Inara of all people. If they haven't spoken in a long time how did Nandi know about Inara's situation? Maybe Nandi isn't shunned en mass like Rouka or 2x2 guessed. Maybe just Inara. Which would be so much more interesting if it was just her.

Ok, now I must attempt to focus on work. Thought of Inara and Nandi cannot be entertained. But they will be! :)

[wytchcroft.livejournal.com]

Yeah - it could be just Inara - or a peer thing, like been cast out of your college fraternity or whatever. Hmm... i guess this depends on what kind of overall Guid picture you fancy for your verse, and what sort of Inara you are drawing,

And whether you worship the Holy Frakking Cow - m'wha ha ha!:)

[browncoat2x2]

And how did Nandi get word that Inara was in the area? Kinda implies she's got contacts out there, and has been keeping some tabs on Inara... *someone* told her about Inara leaving Sihnon too... I wonder who they might be....