...

It's always Avrana Kern this, Avrana Kern that, but what about my girl/sentient alien microbe Miranda? Who has no real sense of identity and is terrified that one day she'll lose control and start consuming and subsuming everyone around her? What about the Miranda copy that survived a hundred lifetimes in Landfall, trying to save a city and people that never existed, and who was then rescued and brought face-to-face with the version of her that never knew Liff? What about the Nodan entity that remembers its entire past but has to live out a myriad of different presents? What about the dissonance of realizing that you might not be the same entity after all, until you're reunited with the rest of yourself? What about the original Human Miranda, who gave her self over to an alien microbe, believing that it was for the better good? What about Miranda?

ARGHGHG I LOVE CHILDREN OF RUIN SO MUCH

whatever the hell was going on between senkovi and baltiel... baltiel harbouring feelings for sekovi, hastily qualified with 'on a purely physical level' while senkovi is too (canonically!!! tchaikovsky uses the actual word!!!) asexual to care that half the ship has formed a polycule... but that doesn't stop him from breaking down sobbing in baltiel's arms after he threatens to jettison the octopi. senkovi priding himself on his antisocial tendencies, cutting himself off from the rest of the crew, drugging himself awake for weeks at a time... rejecting all human connection until it's too late. baltiel's absence haunting him for the rest of his life... i am very normal about them.

i love the scene in Children of Ruin where Baltiel assumes Senkovi's asexuality renders him immune to interpersonal conflict, completely unaware he's just stayed up for seven straight days shooting up caffeine tablets and trying to convince his mutated pet cephalopods that he is not god. he's just experiencing it on an entirely different plane to the rest of the universe. honestly the most accurate representation i have read in my life

i wish i could convince anyone to start any of these books but theres so fucking many cassie

Absolutely nothing beats Valentine's parenting strategy of "this is my good son who I keep in the house and my evil son who I keep in the shed. They're both named Jonathan"

Considering rereading TMI despite its absolutely cursed plot and im hoping some higher power will intervene if this isn’t meant to be

absolutely iconic

i owned this shirt from justice in middle school