#Seivarden

[queercoldreviews]

I remember when I was reading Ancillary Justice all I could picture whenever Seivarden and Breq were bantering was this lol

[ilovedthestars]

of all the fun characters in imperial radch for some reason the one who has been stuck in my brain the most is Seivarden. what is UP with her. I need to see inside her brain so bad. she got dragged off the street by a mysterious stranger who inexplicably knew her name and spent like a week waiting to run away from her and buy more drugs but then she was like. no actually, instead i think i will be sticking to you like a barnacle forever, thanks.

she was also frozen for 1000 years and it's not like the book doesn't acknowledge that but???? she woke up after being frozen for a thousand years and this is a remarkably small deal relative to the main plot. "spaceship captain loses her ship and gets shoved into an escape pod and wakes up a thousand years later" could absolutely be its own whole story, where the spaceship captain then goes on to save the world or something, except instead of saving the world seivarden got addicted to drugs and this is just all happening in the background of breq's own saving-the-world-adjacent adventure.

i mean for goodness sake she was frozen for a thousand years and then got dragged off the street by the one person in the galaxy who knew her a thousand years ago and is still alive. what kind of luck is THAT. she decided she was gonna stick to breq like a barnacle forever before she even knew that. (i mean, arguably you could put that point in a lot of different places, but to me the bridge scene and the picking-her-up-from-jail scene in AJ are both strong candidates.) i NEED to go find some good seivarden POV fic because i need to know what is going on in her HEAD.

[a-side-character]

I love when a woman is a Captain

[raystarshine]

I recently read The Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie and I’m OBSESSED! 🚀 Here’s my interpretation of Breq and Seivarden 💕

[artbyifer]

Seivarden

A redo of Seivarden from the Imperial Radch series, done in Artbreeder

[a-dauntless-daffodil]

Gem of Sphene: Lieutenant Seivarden.

Breq: Headache.

Gem of Sphene: Citizen Basnaaid.

Breq: Protect.

Gem of Sphene: You.

Breq: Failure.

Gem of Sphene: The Usurper.

Breq: Kill.

Gem of Sphene: Well you seem perfectly normal to me.

[asaethiel]

fleet captain!! are you okay, you've been awake for an hour and you've been crying the whole time 😰

[friendamedes]

absolute nightmare trip

[clemothykesh]

I don't think I have to elaborate on this honestly

[the-anchorless-moon]

Ok ok ok coffee shop au though. Seivarden is on like month four clean and set up with a stupid job on a stupid station selling stupid bitter bean tea to stupid uncivilized hicks who wouldn't know real tea if it bit them on their stupid ungloved hands and she is this close to saying "fuck it" and spending the total savings from her minimum wage earnings on a raging bender but also she doesn't because of Mysterious Asshole Stranger. MAS is an arrogant jackass. She calls Seivarden her personal name straight off her nametag like they know each other or something but also has yet to introduce herself. MAS hums constantly in a voice like she's been gargling rocks for the last thousand years and Seivarden has a lot of time to listen to it because MAS is a regular who comes in every morning and does Amaat-knows-what on her handheld for literal hours but also Seivarden literally does not care because MAS speaks fluent Radchaai in an entirely understandable accent and Seivarden is desperate to figure out what the entire fuck her deal is. She doesn't even wear gloves. Is she Radchaai and doing the equivalent of vacationing at a topless resort? Is she just weirdly good at languages? One time MAS watched Seivarden struggle to get the stupid automated cart with the shitty-tea-bean delivery to work for twenty minutes before standing up, picking up a 40 kilogram bag under each arm like it was nothing, and walking into the back with them. She was singing a song about horses the whole time. What is her deal.

Meanwhile Breq has long since passed "why is Seivarden here and alive" and moved on to enjoying making Seivarden bring her tea while using Space Google to figure out whither next on the hunt for the Fuck Anaander Gun

[laatmaar]

"If that's what you're willing to do for someone you hate, what would you do for someone you loved?"

Again black and white version under the cut as well as some sketches I made of the characters in preperation for this piece!

[mamoriken]

Ancillary Justice, chapter one:

[ilovedthestars]

for the character ask game: Seivarden

(Send me a character ask game)

First impression

I'm pretty sure it was something along the lines of "wait, don't people like this character? Why is she so obnoxious? (also wow this is just like The Left Hand of Darkness)"

Impression now

Genuinely one of the most fascinating characters in the series to me. I wanna get in her HEAD. Everyone who called her a poor little meow meow was so right. She's an asshole and all of her friends will tell you so. She's been found family'd by at least two spaceships. In a less interesting alternate universe version of Imperial Radch she would have been the protagonist but ngl i kind of want to go to the alternate universe and read that version too

Favorite moment

That time Breq jumped off a cliff for her, and Seivarden decided she was going to follow Breq to the ends of the universe, and Breq was like I hate you why are you still here. Or that moment in the throne room when Anaander revealed that Breq was Justice of Toren, and the first words out of Seivarden's mouth were "That can't be right, no one would give Justice of Toren One Esk an ancillary with that bad of a singing voice." She knew Breq/Justice of Toren so well and not at all.

Idea for a story

WHAT HAPPENED when she woke up in that escape pod after A THOUSAND YEARS. I don't know if i'm equipped to actually write this but I need to read it. I would love literally any Seivarden POV, honestly. The hints we get about what she things of Everything are so tantalizing.

Unpopular opinion

Haven't really gotten deep enough into the fandom to know if any of my opinions are unpopular? I think most people aren't interested in that hypothetical alternate universe Seivarden-focused story the way I am, but it fascinates me to think about as a point of contrast. Like that one time the Murderbot Discord made up the Ember Island Players version of the story, or that post about if TLT was a mainstream romance novel. Seivarden fascinates me because she is so protagonist-coded, in a story where the potentially-villain-coded rogue AI is the protagonist. She throws the Choices that Leckie was making into relief in interesting ways.

Favorite relationship

Seivarden & Breq! They have the weirdest messed up codependent kind of queerplatonic thing going on. I love them and how much they mean to each other and also how bad they are at talking about stuff.

Favorite headcanon

Hmm....Is this gonna be the question I always skip? I don't really do headcanons that much, apparently XD

[wordto-thewise]

Ancillary Justice, Ann Lekcie

[vehicularmotorcycle]

Seivarden just wanting Breq.

[scribefindegil]

Obsessed with the POV choice in Imperial Radch as well, both because Leckie does some really wild stuff with how expansive the strict first-person is able to become due to the worldbuilding and who her narrator is, and because it's SO entangled with the central thematic concepts of identity. In the first book flashbacks when the narrator is still a warship, "I" can encompass so many things, and sometimes explicitly refers to different facets in the narration--is "I" Justice of Toren, or One Esk, or a specific segment, or Breq narrating from twenty years in the future? "I" isn't simple, isn't unified, and while this is most literal and obvious with Breq/One Esk/Justice of Toren and Anaander Mianaai's split factions it's true constantly throughout the work at every level of scope. Individual characters struggle with internal conflicts and hit their breaking points--what is it that makes someone decide they have to disobey orders and make a stand or they won't be themself anymore? How do you know who you are if you've been forcibly changed (Tisarwat) or if the world you knew has moved on and become unrecognizable (Seivarden)? How does a character on a colonized world navigate the split identity that comes from the pressure to assimilate to the dominant culture? And then there's the Radch writ large, all the Radchaai so deeply invested in the idea that there is only one true concept of Radchaai society, of civilization, but of course there isn't! It changes based on location and over time, and Breq muses that the Radchaai empire would be largely unrecognizable to the isolated sphere of the Radch itself. In these books, even if you aren't the last remnant of a destroyed spaceship and its legion of bodies, "I" is such a complicated concept and the narrative never lets you forget it.