Ooh, Shiny!

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.

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.

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.