poopshit

definitely read books 2 & 3 if you havent yet! i agree with what your friends said. you get a wider view of dickinson's world and the mechanisms behind the masquerade and it's very interesting. baru goes from a scheming, headstrong young woman to someone who now has to deal with the weight of her decisions, and boy are they heavy. the lines between her taranoki heritage vs her incrastic upbringing become blurrier. wish i had a better way to describe it but def worth the read lol

I think one of the best things The Masquerade does is how it, rather than completely disengaging with any sort of gender politics or at least diminishing them to allow its female character mobility across what are or have been considered in the past, masculine domains, approaches and repurposes real world gender politics in this fictional world with different understandings of gender. The Falcresti domains of gender and how they’re influenced by Incrasticism. The matriarchal structure of the navy. The Stakhi construct where gendered role is dependent on how one adheres to a gendered sphere. how Baru’s own gender is mutable, taking different meanings and implications depending on the context she is currently residing within. As a Falcresti agent and product, a lot of who she is, is shaped within that structure; her presentation and role is socially feminine, she keeps her appearance relatively plain and is someone who works behind the scenes in logistics. But her identity as a lesbian and a Taranoki woman complicates this, and the role of Incrasticism, which dictates her as needing to overcome ‘the deficiencies of her race’, which assigns her as a ‘sexually provocative, excessive and indulgent’, and means there’s this constant sexually charged threat of violence in her periphery, that sexually corrective therapy, to break her down and reconstruct her. This isn’t conclusive and I’m not quite sure where I’m going with it, but it’s so fascinating.

she would inflate the price of micron, open, nvidia, and all these other tech giants and then tank the price of ram just like she did in aurdwynn. the common nerd would sing her praises all over reddit for making pc parts affordable again

reading baru cormorant is like. I’m at a party where the most insufferable people I know are playing settlers of catan. they invite me to join I say no thank you. they say oh come on you’ll pick it up quickly. I say that’s fine I’ll just watch. I try to focus but there are three beautiful women attempting to seduce one of the players and this is so much more interesting. and yet she ignores them and continues to play settlers of catan