#breqblogging

[gideonisms]

to the 10 billion gr reviewers who found breq's narration emotionless flat and difficult to connect with rip to you but I'm different!! I find her so compelling and her pov is easy to follow along with. She's right making decisions IS like that and interpreting people IS that difficult. furthermore I'm in love with her,

[gideonisms]

One of the things that interested me so much about anc*llary justice was its exploration of surveillance and how that affects the language people use and the identities they construct and it's like. justice of t*rren the ship was an AI built by people so it has the biases people have but then you put all that back into a human body and it's like. Breq has constructed her identity as a human (to the extent that she even acknowledges she has one) based on things she has seen humans do. Which is something I think a lot of us do when we don't fit into our society for whatever reason so it works on that metaphorical level. But THEN it's like. She needs to constantly watch other people in order to continue constructing her identity! Because she's a ship and ships are built to constantly watch citizens. So it's this whole cycle where the people in power use the people who don't fit into society as like? a way to monitor the people who do for any signs of abnormality. You are only allowed to be abnormal if you support the system that suppresses that in other people. It's an endlessly frustrating cycle for breq bc she hates trying to guess what people are really saying but those people have to be subtle bc any direct opposition to their society's strict social rules is immediately witnessed and punished. And that is SO fascinating and relevant! I hope it gets explored in the second book too

[gideonisms]

the bit of ancillary sw*rd where breq is like ah yes these foreign workers were singing a song about a person in love with someone who will never love them back because they've completely pledged themselves to someone else. that never happens in my society though! oh really it Never happens. Never, in your society, has someone ever loved a person who was completely focused on someone else? That doesn't ring a bell at all to you

[gideonisms]

what the citizens in the radch are trying to do is to limbo underneath the tags. A struggle I experience on the daily

[gideonisms]

because it's like! breq has very personal experience of how constant surveillance of citizens can be used against them. Both of the two people she's ever liked have been hurt by this. And her takeaway is, I need to be watching the people I care about constantly or they will die. Which is fair as an emotional reaction! but on a practical level. Babe. Babe. You ever think you might be part of the problem