#sunai archive undying

[sir-libearian]

The song "stay dead" by Aviators giving me big feelings about Sunai (archive undying).

"Go ahead, Bury me, I will not stay dead. Hold me down, Take my breath, I will thrive instead."

"Like the plague, I will spread, 'Cause I won't stay dead."

"Risen from bone as the spirits come home. When I awake with a message to send."

[bookwyrminspiration]

shout out to the ai secretly stuck in the back of sunai’s mind watching every choice he makes with its metaphorical head in its metaphorical hands

[wanderingthroughbooks]

The factoid "The average person in Ghamor makes 3 life-alteringly bad decisions a day" is actually just a statistical error. The average person makes 0 life-alteringly bad decisions daily. Sunai, who is a salvage-rat on the run from everything and cannot be killed, makes 10,000 life-alteringly bad decisions a day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.

[vehicularmotorcycle]

I'm convinced any negative reviewers/DNFs of The Archive Undying are mainly fantasy readers rather than sci-fi. I see people on goodreads complaining about there not being enough worldbuilding or explanations of what things are, that's just sci-fi! In the best sci-fi media we ride on vibes! Lack of exposition is a feature, not a flaw! We learn on a need-to-know basis, and this book is doing a really good job at that; when it's important, you'll find out what it is/how it works in a subtle, non-intrusive way. Until then, it's about people, and emotions, and scary robots with people (and probably emotions) inside, and you're just along for the ride.

I'm only 20% in and it's already so good, I can see this being a comfort book I reread multiple times. I can't wait to see where this series goes, what gets revealed in this book, and what we'll be left to speculate on until the next.

[unraveling-plot]

I think Veyadi should be allowed to kill Ruhi I think it'd make him feel better and also would make me feel better

[ottaboyrei]

Been real busy with work and school lately, but I wanted to document the progress of what will be my semester-long project for my comics class 💜

I maybe didn't prepare a story ahead of time and need to do at least 10 pages, so I decided to adapt the first chaper of The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon (@/emcandon)!

I also haven't had a dedicated drawing area set up in forever, so it's kind of nostalgic to be drawing like this. Anyways! This is my first take on Sunai (MC) and Veyadi; I don't have a ton of time to work on their designs so I don't get to tweak them to death and back, but they're close enough to my mental image for now. Some earlier sketches and illegible thumbnails beneath the cut!

[devirtualized]

I drew Sunai from The Archive Undying! :D if u love mind-melting queer sci fi fantasy PLZ read this book immediately !!

@emcandon hello I love your book so dearly 🫶✨

[mlmshipbracket]

ROUND 1: POLL #26

Sunyadi art by cerebrobullet on Tumblr

Zachary x Dorian art by creeeee on tumblr

ROUND 1 POLLS [HERE]

PROPAGANDA BELOW

Sunai/Veyadi Lut:

NO PROPAGANDA SUBMITTED

Zachary Ezra Rawlins/Dorian:

Look, Zachary's a gamer studying literature who finds himself in a strange world and goes on an adventure. [SPOILER] Dorian's the guy murmuring things in your ear in dark corners at masquerade balls

[xylophonicsynapse]

It seems sunai is that good at handjobs

[cerebrobullet]

me wearing my sunglasses inside the grocery store today: omg this is so veyadi-coded of me

[ihathdroppedminecroissant]

just started archive undying and my initial impression is giving me big rainworld vibes??? these city-states and the almost omnipotent AIs is feeling familiar i want Sunai to have a slugcat

[bookwyrminspiration]

okay just gonna lay down defeat on this one. I do not understand the Maw. or chitin

[napoleanbonafarte]

just finished reading the archive undying and all i can really say is man. what the fuck was that all about

[danieandflars]

sunai calling imaru aunty just really fucks me up

[myriad--starlings]

sinking my teeth into a Sunai playlist my pal made and going absolutely feral off the walls about Sunai and Veyadi and Iterate Fractal. I love you because I am you because I was you, becoming you, transformed by you, loving you I created you to change me because I loved you do you understand yet do you do you understand yet I love you take my hand I'm dying I'm not dead I can never die I am all around I am everywhere I am you I am me I am this body and that body and everyone is tangled together like fine filaments of wire; like the mesh of fascia under the skin.

Saint Bernard sits at the top of the driveway- I said make me love myself so that I might love you don't make me a liar- when I am dead I won't join their ranks- you always said how you loved dogs I don't know if I count

[violetnull]

I've started reading 'the Undying Archive' and I feel the need to talk about it. This book has a lot going on. Spoilers below the read more

'The Undying Archive' is ostensibly mecha sff, but most of it so far (about the first half) is entirely taken up by character stuff, following the protagonist, Sunai, as he navigates life as the chosen of a dead AI god in a nation that hates AI. Which, fair, the AI god that Sunai is the chosen of seems a bit like an all consuming bio-tech monster, something Sunai has some trouble coming to grips with. All of his loved ones, including the two men whom he loves and has loved, are devoted wholly to the god and it's memory, leaving Sunai to deal with his trauma surrounding the god and his sort of "Isaac from the bible" raised-as-a-sacrifice nature on his own. Or at least, he thinks he's on his own. That has been one of my favorite parts of this book: as it introduces more characters that have known him, his own self doubt and self hatred comes into question by me, the reader, even as he refuses to acknowledge that he does in fact enrich the lives of the people he loves, and is not in fact a black hole of destruction and misery as he is so willing to believe. The mecha stuff is also incredibly interesting, with the giant robots in question essentially being the reanimated corpses of other dead AI gods, piloted by people like Sunai, corrupted and chosen in the final death throes of these strange, unknowable machine intelligences.

There is stuff I don't love (the second-person narrative trick has been done better in recent years by others in the "experimental queer sff" track, ie tamsyn did it better), but the world is so fascinating and the characters so compelling that I'm willing to piece together the clunky shifts in perspective to put the whole story together. In particular, I think the part where Sunai is physically incapable of touching the man he loves without forcing them both to relive traumatic and painful memories is going to stick with me for a while. The prose in general is so rich and poignant, it really carries the story when things get messy and/or confusing. I won't lie, I'm also a sucker for gay angst and queernormative sff in general, and with so much of the best of the best in queer sff being dominated by (genuinely amazing and Kind Of Necessary) wlw protagonists and stories, it's really really nice to read a book about a queer man being put into Science Fiction Situations. I am but a bi man craving that sweet sweet mlm romantic angst, after all, and the closest I've gotten with my other favorite books I've read this year has been the wonderfully tragic bisexual political love triangle of Yskander in 'A Memory Called Empire' (honorable mention: 'Cemeteries of Amalo' and everything that Thara Celehar has going on, love that gay elf so much). It definitely won't be supplanting those other titles in the Vio's Faves Folder, but it has definitely earned a place on the list (so far).