anyways so

it is kind of unfortunate that “is john gaius's nine houses fascist” has become metonymic for “do you think the empire is good or bad” when i think it'd actually be interesting to analyze the political character of empire given that the two perspective characters with the most insight into the actions of the empire are each vantaged not to analyze it from this light (meaning, what they take for granted and what they don't mention are each as important as what is described in detail) and given that its founder has meta-knowledge from an apocalypsed earth on how ideological currents present themselves and that tamsyn muir herself while not infallible is pretty adept at articulating these things through the discourse of her text. like to me it's interesting that john doesn't present his empire with the well-worn mediatic symbologies that define the fictional scientifantasy ‘fascist empire’ while also sharing the veneration of the classical, and it's also interesting that the empire's internal mythos and propaganda allow its characters (and many of its readers!) to ignore that it is, in fact, a populist and idealist system that conceives of itself as a composition of heterogeneous parts which rally around a state of emergency to defend its capital interests and resist a growing might of a militant progressive movement. it's compelling to me that the empire's ideological self-propagation is cogent enough that a lot of readers go ‘it can't be counterrevolutionary, let alone reactionary! there are women in the soldier class!’ and the women in question are abjected therein

please vote twins 🥹

YOU CAN BE STRAPPED FOR CASH??????

they should invent a grief that doesn’t define you in new and strange ways for the rest of your life