History Literature / AlexisCarew

** First, Grandpa Dunholm and Alexis both ponder challenging Edmon Coalson should he try to discredit Alexis's proposed inheritance amendment via an AdHominemFallacy. [[spoiler:Instead Edmon surprises everyone by ''approving of it''.]]

* {{Cliffhanger}}: ''Privateer'' ends on one. [[spoiler:Alexis is forced to AbandonShip during her invasion of the SpacePirate port Erzurum, and the book ends with her and her crew having landed in the planet's jungle.]]

* JusticeByOtherLegalMeans: In ''Mutineer''. [[spoiler:To spare the Navy the embarrassment of Captain Neals' behavior becoming public, the CourtMartial acquits him of wrongdoing in the loss of HMS ''Hermione'' due to the mutiny and puts a gag order on the proceedings. However, Alexis and the other mutineers are also acquitted due to Neals' abusive treatment, and Neals is suspended from service for psychiatric reasons and will never command anything unsupervised ever again, certainly not another ship. To top it off, the captains on the tribunal restore Alexis to the rank of midshipman, then immediately test her for lieutenant and promote her, and the Navy rumor mill means word of what happened gets out anyway.]]

** ''Privateer'' (2017, forthcoming)

* AwesomeButImpractical: Design compromises incurred by the expense of the [[{{Unobtainium}} gallenium]] needed to shield electrical systems from the energy-dampening effects of darkspace (where most combat happens) dictate much of the SchizoTech used in the series. FTL ships' weapons consist of hand-loaded single-shot laser cannons because putting gallenium in missiles would be wasteful, and battle damage could render lasers connected to the ship's power supply inoperable (since the gundeck is open to space during combat). FTL ships also have an upper limit on their size imposed by the size and complexity of the sailplan needed to propel them.

** Man's Fall is composed of neo-Luddites who eschew any technology more advanced than gunpowder firearms (they're also pacifists who only keep guns for hunting and dealing with livestock predators), only maintaining a bare minimum spaceport because, like all New London planets, they're required by Crown law to resupply Royal Navy warships. They justify this with a religious belief that darkspace is in fact heaven and therefore forbidden to mortals.

* HoistByTheirOwnPetard: [[spoiler:The captain of the Hanoverese frigate Alexis fights at the end of ''The Little Ships'' goes down to the gundeck to bitch out his crew for being unable to finish off Alexis' horribly outmatched barque ''Belial''. He's then killed by a lucky shot from ''Belial'' along with his NumberTwo, and the resulting confusion ends in Alexis dismasting the frigate and forcing the third-in-command to surrender to ''her''.]]

* WrongInsultOffense: In response to an UpperClassTwit calling her a "stupid bitch" over the radio, she remarks aloud that "The very worst thing about being a woman in this Navy is that the insults are so very limited. You men get called all the imaginative ones."

** The Republic of Hanover is a stand-in for Napoleonic France, but culturally has more in common with Bismarckian Prussia (culturally and linguistically German, with a manifest destiny attitude towards rulership of mankind), with a dose of the UsefulNotes/SovietUnion.

** ''Privateer'' (TBD)

Appointed a midshipman by the kindly Captain Grantham aboard Her Majesty's Sloop ''Merlin'' while her grandfather lobbies to have the laws changed, Alexis, now the only female officer in the Fringe Fleet, battles pirates and sexist shipmates and superiors alike, as war brews with the neighboring Republic of Hanover. It's basically ''Literature/HoratioHornblower'' [-InSpace-] if Horatio was, instead, Horati''a''. Bot ''not'' if Horatio was [[Literature/HonorHarrington Honor]].

Appointed a midshipman by the kindly Captain Grantham aboard Her Majesty's Sloop ''Merlin'' while her grandfather lobbies to have the laws changed, Alexis, now the only female officer in the Fringe Fleet, battles pirates and sexist shipmates and superiors alike, as war brews with the neighboring Republic of Hanover. It's basically ''Literature/HoratioHornblower'' [-InSpace-] if Horatio was instead Horati''a''.

* JusticeByOtherLegalMeans: In ''Mutineer''. [[spoiler:To spare the Navy the embarrassment of Captain Neals' behavior becoming public, the CourtMartial acquits him of wrongdoing in the loss of HMS ''Hermione'' due to the mutiny and puts a gag order on the proceedings. However, Alexis and the other mutineers are also acquitted due to the extenuating circumstances of ''Captain Neals was a fucking asshole'', and Neals is suspended from service for psychiatric reasons and will never command anything unsupervised ever again, certainly not another ship. To top it off, the captains on the tribunal restore Alexis to the rank of midshipman, then immediately test her for lieutenant and promote her, and the Navy rumor mill means word of what happened gets out anyway.]]

* AMotherToHerMen: Alexis learned to handle men from running a plantation with her grandfather, and tends to win the UndyingLoyalty of the crew under her by directing with a kind word and a smile and by joining in with their work. The horribly sexist Captain Neals wrongly infers from this that she's trading sexual favors for their loyalty. [[spoiler:His busting her down to ordinary spacer and having her flogged for refusing to [[KneelBeforeZod kneel to anyone but the queen]] is ultimately what triggers the mutiny that's been building for most of the book to that point.]]

* MistakenForGay: Midshipman Villar, Alexis' first officer on ''Nightingale'', is attracted to Marie, a single mother Alexis rescued from Giron in ''The Little Ships'', but Marie gets frustrated when he keeps backing off. Villar had caught them sharing a bed on the way to drop Marie off with Alexis' grandfather on Dalthus. Once he finally manages to work around to saying what he thought, Alexis bursts out laughing and explains that no, both of them are straight and they only slept in the same bed because installing a second bunk in the captain's quarters wasn't practical for either of them (Marie had to be able to get up in the middle of the night to deal with her baby, and Alexis is too short to comfortably climb to an upper bunk).

** Notably it's only New London where women's rights have taken a giant leap backward: the first important Hanoverian officer we're introduced to is Balestra, a female commodore. But Space Britain has a habit of encouraging people with backwards ideas to go to other planets instead of combating them, which means that sexism is much more common and accepted on the Fringe, up to and including banning women from inheritance (which is unconstitutional, but enforcement is lax to nonexistent). Naturally, this means that Alexis takes crap from ''everyone'' just for having two X chromosomes, though she tends to win over the common spacers with her AMotherToHerMen tendencies, and it's also noted by at least one New London CO that the Navy has to leave a lot of good officers behind in the core worlds because they're women.

* OffOnATechnicality: In ''Mutineer'' Alexis briefly consults an attorney on challenging Dalthan inheritance law, but is informed that she couldn't, ''yet'', due to a problem of standing: as her grandfather is still alive, she has not yet been personally injured by the nationally unconstitutional law and therefore cannot challenge it.

* ATasteOfTheLash: Flogging with the cat o' nine tails is a standard naval punishment for enlisted crew, but Captain Neals in the second book is noted as a "Tartar", a captain very free with the cat, and regularly orders that the last man down the mast at shift change be flogged. This naturally results in the crew throwing safety to the wind in their haste to reach the bottom, eventually resulting in two of them going overboard and being lost in space. As a midshipman Alexis cannot be flogged no matter how much Neals wants to, [[spoiler:until he disrates her for disobeying his demand to KneelBeforeZod and promptly gives her twenty lashes on general principles. The log of his excessive floggings is eventually his undoing at CourtMartial: it's revealed that he did it roughly twice as often as the tribunal would expect of even a captain with an ''extraordinarily'' unruly crew.]] After gaining a permanent command of her own in book four, the eponymous HMS ''Nightingale'', Alexis is hesitant to use the lash due to her own experiences, but finally orders it in a couple cases to deal with some consistent discipline problems.
* ToThePain: [[spoiler:After summarily executing the pirate leader Horsfall, she threatens his navigator Brightey into getting them home. He assumes she'll shoot him, but she instead tells him she'll stick him in a vacsuit, tie his hands behind his back so he can't dump his air, then throw him out the airlock and hang around just out of reach to watch him die.]]

* TheAlcoholic: Alexis initially hates drinking (for one thing, she's too small to have much tolerance for it), but develops a bit of a drinking problem after the events of ''Mutineer'', which the author openly admits is basically self-medicating for PTSD.

* ThrownOutTheAirlock: Aboard the captured pinnace ''Grapple'', Alexis threatens the pirate navigator that he either get them to port, or she'll throw him out the airlock in a spacesuit with his hands tied and then hang around just out of reach to watch him suffocate. [[spoiler:She does exactly this to Rashaed Coalson in ''The Little Ships'' to avenge her grandmother and parents.]]

** Al Jadiq is ruled by what amounts to Wahhabi Muslims. They have been known to kidnap and behead spacers for chatting up their women, and their leaders initially refuse to even acknowledge Alexis. She eventually retaliates by threatening at gunpoint to declare them to be in rebellion against the Crown unless they release two of her crew they've imprisoned.

* ShellshockedWarVeteran: Alexis develops mild PTSD after the events on ''Grapple'', which are only worsened by her maltreatment aboard HMS ''Hermione'' and the death of most of her crew on ''Belial''. She has recurring nightmares and develops a bit of a bourbon problem. The author wrote in the afterword to ''HMS Nightingale'' that he did this as a reaction to some MilitaryScienceFiction skipping over the effects of war on the personality.

* MistakenForGay: Midshipman Villar, Alexis' first officer on ''Nightingale'', is attracted to Marie, a single mother Alexis rescued from Giron in ''The Little Ships'', but Marie gets frustrated when he keeps backing off. Villar had caught them sharing a bed on the way to drop Marie off with Alexis' grandfather on Dalthus. Once he finally manages to work around to saying what he thought, Alexis bursts out laughing and explains that no, both of them are straight and they only slept in the same bed because installing a second bunk in the captain's quarters wasn't practical for either of them (Marie had to be able get up in the middle of the night to deal with her baby, and Alexis is too short to comfortably climb to an upper bunk).

* MistakenForGay: Midshipman Villar, Alexis' first officer on ''Nightingale'', is attracted to Marie, a single mother Alexis rescued from Giron in ''The Little Ships'', but caught them sharing a bed on the way to drop Marie off on Dalthus, but Marie gets frustrated when he keeps backing off. Once he finally manages to work around to saying what he thought, Alexis bursts out laughing and explains that no, both of them are straight and they only slept in the same bed because installing a second bunk in the captain's quarters wasn't practical for either of them.

* ATasteOfTheLash: Flogging with the cat o' nine tails is a standard naval punishment for enlisted crew, but Captain Neals in the second book is noted as a "Tartar", a captain very free with the cat, and regularly orders that the last man down the mast at shift change be flogged. This naturally results in the crew throwing safety to the wind in their haste to reach the bottom, eventually resulting in two of them going overboard and being lost in space. As a midshipman Alexis cannot be flogged no matter how much Neals wants to, [[spoiler:until he disrates her for disobeying his demand to KneelBeforeZod and promptly gives her twenty lashes on general principles. The log of his excessive floggings is eventually his undoing at CourtMartial: it's revealed that he did it roughly twice as often as the tribunal would expect of even a captain with an ''extraordinarily'' unruly crew.]]

* UnknownRival: In the backstory, Rashaed Coalson for Dunholm Carew. When it was Dunholm's turn to pick first on land claims during the colonization of Dalthus, several times he happened to pick out claims that Rashaed wanted. Dunholm insists to the Coalsons to this day it was pure coincidence, but Rashaed became convinced Dunholm was deliberately screwing him and taught the hatred to his sons and grandsons. [[spoiler:Later Rashaed sabotaged the colony's antigrav hauler when it was headed to the Carew estate to bring Dunholm's wife to Port Arthur for treatment, leading to her DeathByChildbirth. Later his son Daviel made a high-speed pass over Alexis's parents' buggy, spooking the horses to a crash that killed both of them.]]

** ''HMS Nightingale'' (2016, forthcoming)

* AwesomeButImpractical: Design compromises incurred by the expense of the [[{{Unobtainium}} gallenium]] needed to shield electrical systems from the energy-dampening effects of darkspace (where most combat happens) dictate much of the SchizoTech used in the series. FTL ships' weapons consist of hand-loaded single-shot laser cannons because putting gallenium in missiles would be wasteful, and battle damage could render lasers connected to the ship's power supply inoperable. FTL ships also have an upper limit on their size imposed by the size and complexity of the sailplan needed to propel them.

* JusticeByOtherLegalMeans: In ''Mutineer''. [[spoiler:To spare the Navy the embarrassment of Captain Neals' behavior becoming public, the CourtMartial acquits him of wrongdoing in the loss of HMS ''Hermione'' due to the mutiny and puts a gag order on the proceedings. However, Alexis and the other mutineers are also acquitted due to the extenuating circumstances of ''Captain Neals was a fucking asshole'', and Neals is in effect retired from service due to psychiatric reasons and will never command anything unsupervised ever again, certainly not another ship. To top it off, the captains on the tribunal restore Alexis to the rank of midshipman, then immediately test her for lieutenant and promote her, and the Navy rumor mill means word of what happened gets out anyway.]]

* ISurrenderSuckers: Notably this is considered a violation of the rules of war: if you strike your colors you are not allowed to rejoin the fight or resist boarding parties, and if you are captured and give your parole you may not attempt escape (but can be rescued).

* NoWomansLand: Notably it's only New London where women's rights have taken a giant leap backward: the first important Hanoverian officer we're introduced to is Balestra, a female commodore. But Space Britain has a habit of encouraging people with backwards ideas to go to other planets instead of combating them, which means that sexism is much more common and accepted on the Fringe, up to and including banning women from inheritance (which is unconstitutional, but enforcement is lax to nonexistent). Naturally, this means that Alexis takes crap from ''everyone'' just for having two X chromosomes, though she tends to win over the common spacers with her AMotherToHerMen tendencies. {{Exaggerated}} in ''Mutineer'' when she is taken aboard by Captain Neals, who makes it his personal mission to drive her to resignation.