dysislament

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Onora PoisonStudy I love you sooososo much

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“to yelena, our newest food taster. may you last longer than your predecessor”

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the best lesbian side plot

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breq babygirl im obsessed with u

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Finished Ancillary Mercy today and I just want to say that I am keeping Seivarden forever. I love her so much. 1000-year-old recently defrosted career popsicle. Professional-grade snob. Her hypercompetence is marred only by the fact that she cannot do anything right. In love with/utterly psychologically dependent on a human-shaped spaceship that doesn't like her very much & fucking the lieutenant the spaceship likes better. Canonically great in bed.

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Lieutenant Tisarwat is A Character of All Time. She’s thousands of years old, she’s seventeen, she’s less than one. She has a horribly embarrassing crush and the keys to every warship in the sector. She wants to kill herself (first person) and she wants to kill herself (third person). She’s the universe’s most ambitious political mastermind she’s an impulsive baby and she’s angling for governor of a system near you. 

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You’re in her DMs. I’m always aware of her heartbeat, respiration, blood oxygen levels, hormone levels. We are not the same.

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Valerie Marston the horrible, terrible woman that you are. She is just as set in her ways as Kyr 1.0 but with the added flavours of rationalising and political correctness. She's one of the good ones, you guys!

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One thing I especially appreciated about Girls Made of Snow and Glass is Felix as a mirror for the entire allegory. That he is Mina's creation (that Mina and Lynet are creations of/for their fathers) until he defies her (they defy them). Mina made him, but he made himself a human person. It's just such a lovely tie-in.

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this interaction made me chuckle

Kyr: I want to die for the war 

Avi: I want to win the war 

Kyr: you’re so fucking weird 

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The morality that Some Desperate Glory touches upon is genuinely so mind boggling. Is it ok to kill 14 billion people over and over again in a sub reality if it’s the same 14 billion? Do their deaths matter if it’s a universe that is created and ends for the soul reason to run doomsday? Do they exist in the same way that the other characters exist? When Mags beat doomsday, did earth survive past when the simulation ended?

If you kill the same person over and over again have you killed once or many times?

Emily Tesh takes utilitarian ethics to places I’ve never imagined 

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I'm surprised by how many people are questioning theis one part of the ending of Some Desperate Glory. Not that the book was perfect, and the third act seems to be considered the weakest for a reason, but I've seen so many posts about how 'nobody actually believed Gaea Station's principles' when that is not how I read it at all!

The way I saw it, of the people in Nursery, only Sergeant Sif knew that there were no majo attackers. That is the children, as the most vulnerable group, explained. And the rest were given a choice: death or escape. We see how shocked Kyr was at the amount of humans on Crysothemis who are just living normal lives. The people of Gaea consider themselves the last of humanity, minus some maybe fifty traitors. Even taking away the urge to survive at all costs, they may very well feel a responsibility to live as representatives of the human species more than anything. And that's the ones who truly believe in the cause, which obviously can't be all of them.

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The Worsties + the error message

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Further into Some Desperate Glory and honestly appreciating the existential horror potential of finding out you live in a hyperreal simulation or alternate universe or lotus eater trap or something and your sister gets her original memories returned and suddenly becomes a massive bitch and starts talking about assassinations and sabotaging reality, but looks at you, flinches, and says it's probably best if you just get given the necessary info secondhand.

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It's just, Kyr loves her messmates! They're her team, her family, she dedicates so much of her time and effort to trying to help them thrive on Gaea, and they fucking hate her! And she has no idea! It clobbers her in the face when she hears "I never liked you" said as if it were obvious. And it should be! Valkyr Marston is the worst! Her best idea of how to express love is to act like a god damn drill sergeant! She reduces Lisabel to tears repeatedly and thinks nothing of it! Hell, I've known people like Kyr, people who have twisted and contorted every part of themselves around a dogma, an institution, who filter every single one of their impulses through that lense, and they're always so god damn smug about it! Even ignoring the way it warps her good and kind impulses, she just radiates fragile, violent pride. How else could she function? How could she tolerate the harm she's done herself on behalf of Gaea except to treat it like a test that only she was strong enough and brave enough to pass, and to hold herself above everyone else who doesn't meet the invisible standards she judges herself by.

And fuck is it satisfying when she is finally able to see herself through her messmates' eyes. The sense of loss is palpable. But she makes the effort! She tries to do better by them! And we get to see that they were ready to love her, to embrace her, to be her friends. All she needed to do was act more like a person and less like a fascist ideal.

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Eliza Clark, the woman that you are. Discussion/comparison/analysis under the cut.

I'm certain I got all turned around, because She's Always Hungry was my first Eliza Clark, and then I went back, first to Boy Parts, then to Penance, and found that She's Always Hungry was only the conclusion to Clark's many master theses. The main being, living in a man's world.

I'm relucatant to use the term male gaze, as it's been bastardised to hell and back, but considering Irina's photography, it fits. By definition, it refers to art made by (heterosexual) men that presents women as sexual objects and sexual objects only. It only concerns itself with the world from the eyes of the man.

And so begins Boy Parts, and Irina's quest for impact. You can #womeninmalefields #womenswrongs #icouldfixher #shecouldmakemeworse all you want — fact is, however commically villainous, however stereotypically mean and literally violent a woman is, the worst men will let her be is a bitch.

Whatever she does, whatever big disaster she tries to make in order to prove to herself that she can... all that is less important than her being A Woman. An attractive woman, at that. There is additional baggage.

Penenace continues the legacy beautifully, yet more discreetely. Still, it is everywhere. From the very start of the book, with the I Peed On Your Face podcast, to Penance itself being the work of a male journalist, and even the way Simon Stirling-Stewart rebrands his hotel using the death of Ellie Miller, an employee in the second Empire hotel.

The prosaic parts of the novel are fundementally an intrusion — these are not the girls' real thoughts. Not their real words. Again a sense of humanity, a softening and sanitising of murderers, because they are women. Girls.

I could eat these books.