Enthusiasm is a virture!

In the first few chapters we see that the radiant star ideology has six virtues

and that savants give up their past and therefore their gender and use they/them probouns

then! Much later we get a listing basically of all pronouns used in the city and it’s kind of a long list and significant that I think it includes pronouns we had not heard used for particular characters

I did not count the pronouns at the time but if there are seven

And that'd be why she can't use primary/secondary sexual features, because many of those societies probably don't do gender affirmation surgeries or HRT. And if they do, the standards probably vary a lot! Especially with sci-fi medicine and different planets affecting humans differently. There's probably a planet where everyone grows boobs, so top surgery isn't a thing and they focus on hands or something.

*opens Radiant Star*

*genderfuckery in the first paragraph*

Like. JoA is great. It's clearly very conpetent from its 3000 years of experience and spends much of the book silently bemoaning the idiocy of those around it. It's been silently been acting little rebellions via its collecting for a Long Time. It basically decides to adopt this Jonr, this random kid abandoned by the system. Assuming that it is the narrator of the book--which is admittedly not certain, just a likely possibility-- it's whip sharp and snarky and brilliant. Its first order of business upon gaining freedom is to let out a loud guffaw of a laugh.

And yet.

Jonr is just one kid it rescued; there are so many others in Aaa that it paid no particular attention or consideration to. Its "crowd control" killed many civilians. It executed that crowd control under orders it couldn't reject, but again, the narration suggests an attitude of "that's a shame, but hey, trolley problem, what can you do?" Its collection includes random ephemera like cutlery and rocks and an egg, but also tge sacred religious artifact of a religion it colonized. An artefact it helps the colonizers make a forgery of to abett political control of the population. A religious artefact it notably does not give back once it gains its freedom.

Justice of Albis is a person; funny, clever, caring, but also selfish and hypocritical and Radchai.

The blood, the desperate clutch, the crying and the pose all suggest something religious, making the post all the more impactful with its drawing- The caramel frappe does not answer the subject, just as God does not answer the subjects of paintings who depicted the same theme.

It’s also intriguing where OP chose to put details. In amostly minimalist creation, the (relatively) detailed frappe, hands, and face guides your eyes in a a dynamic way- from the frappe to the face, then follows the line of the body out to the end of the legs- making the art more interesting to the eye.

Like when the Radch shows up and calls somebody "she" when they're not, it's not just getting their gender wrong, it's a statement that this entire part of their society doesn't matter and is going to be erased. And even when they gender someone "correctly", it's not any better. Because it's just the word that they're using, not a recognition of identity. It's insulting in a different way, and it must sting for the women who hear it and know that it's just happenstance that they're not being misgendered.

And it's constant. We talk about other people constantly. There's no escaping that violence when talking to the Radchaai.

Citizens of the occupied city: [understandably worried and concerned about the army of super-human corpse soldiers]

But it's also really interesting that, to me, coming back to Radch-adjacent spaces feels like home within the series. I remember reading Translation State and while Reet and Enae were going "Radchaai snobs, are they good for anything other than drinking tea and misgendering every single person?", I was like oh tea! gloves! I'm home!. And Ooioiaa is our first Radchaai-controlled setting since the Ancillary trilogy, and the familiarity was grounding while all my focus went into keeping up with the convoluted Ooioiaan politics (in audiobook form no less). And--like that post I just reblogged says--I was soooo delighted to meet a new Horrifying, Massive Warship Full of a Whole Town's Worth of Puppeted Corpse Supersoldiers.

AND THEN

my familiarity with the series also really rubs in some of the horror of Radchaai things before the book does! I felt genuinely sick to my stomach as the doctor was insisting that it was going to be fine she was going to be careful educating Jonor, and when the narration mentioned that Justice of Albis was responsible for crowd control I was already wincing, because Breq has told us what ancillary crowd control looks like.

Listen, if our beloved Ann Leckie is gonna do ONE THING she's gonna construct a world that is so thought-out on a political and material level. Ann Leckie is running up to your constructed world, pounding on the fourth wall, yelling "WHAT DO THEY EAT? WHERE DOES IT COME FROM? DOES IT MAKE SENSE FOR THAT FOOD TO BE PRODUCED IN SUFFICIENT QUANTITIES TO SUPPORT THE POPULATION? WHAT ARE THE WORKERS CONDITIONS LIKE? HOW DO THEY PRAY? WHAT MATERIALS ARE INVOLVED IN THEIR PRAYER? WHERE DO THE PRAYER MATERIALS COME FROM? HOW DOES THAT DIFFER FROM OTHER SOCIOECONOMIC CLASSES IN THIS PLACE?" And then she fucken skateboards away to play seven-dimensional chess with gender.