#anaander

Chen Lihua, in her backstory, has been drugged and kidnapped at least twice, possibly more, depending on how much more miserable I want to make her backstory. In the current plot, I haven't actually decided.

I can tell you this, though: Yang Haoran has possibly tangled some triad/gang/mafia plot threads by saving Wu Youxuan, but he hasn't cut anything off.

You have to remember that it's been twenty four years since he's read the og novel. Yang Haoran has almost zero memory of actual character names, and a lot of details are either completely lost to him or misremembered.

improv satire

Major spoilers below!

“Sword of Gurat, execute Captain Hetnys immediately.”

“I can’t. Lieutenant Tisarwat has ordered me not to.”

Anaander’s expression at that moment must be priceless. Tisarwat using the Tyrant’s own, unwillingly learned, abilities against her - by genuinely being a pants-wetting medicated mess (because the Tyrant would detect any kind of acting), and then stealing her remaining ships from right under her nose by reverse-engineering the logic of her keys - is a revenge arc worth waiting three books for. And Anaander - who dismissed Tisarwat as “not the sharpest knife in the set” - still doesn’t get it, not at first.

“Just who is Lieutenant Tisarwat?”

“One of those knives that’s so sharp you cut yourself on it and don’t realize it until later.”

Up until that minute, this Anaander - part of what I call The Worst Anaander - thought she was fighting Slightly Less Bad Anaander - and I guess she sort of was, since Tisarwat has that version’s memories. But from the start the Tyrant has assumed Seivarden is the one pulling the strings, because Seivarden looks important - and is confused because Seivarden is ALSO a mess (although a well-bred one in good clothes); she can’t figure out the enemy’s plan at all. Some gangly teenage poet with cheap purple eyes, who doesn’t even seem to know how to arm the bombs she was trying to set, is so far down the threat scale Anaander barely even notices her. Underestimating Tisarwat is easily the worst mistake this copy of the Tyrant makes, right behind underestimating Station.

But Tisarwat is also probably the worst mistake Slightly Less Bad Anaander makes; she’s capable of taking down through sheer guile any other version of the Tyrant, including other local copies of SLBA that don’t have the memory of creating her (in fact, those would be the easiest targets for Tisarwat - she has their codes, and knows them best). And just the act of “creating” her was a ridiculous risk - Breq, given her nature, was highly likely to notice and would be even further alienated if she did, making it that much harder to keep her as an “ally”, while also potentially giving Breq the means to unlock what little remaining hold SLBA has on her mind.

Creating Tisarwat is such a stupid risk, in short, that I really suspect that there’s a fourth* major version of Anaander Mianaai - a part of Slightly Less Bad Anaander that not only rejects her previous actions (the genocide on Garsedd), but which actually loathes herself because of those actions, and wants to die - who is deliberately(?) trying to create the tools to destroy herself.

* the third Anaander is whoever is stockpiling the AI cores, which is neither of the main versions - but there’s not much to go on regarding this one’s motives.

my sister has a d&d campaign to run and stuff to do so I’m planning the alternate universe arc for her!having a lot of fun

man, that’s...such a fun worldbuilding idea, just for a random space colony? I’m so into it. 10/10.

so I actually really disagree with the idea that they fridged emily for the sake of ben’s character development.

ben and emily have a falling out roughly around valentine’s day, and she goes missing in may of that year, about three months later. during these three months, emily specifically and clearly lays out why she is unhappy with him, how he had acted immaturely, and that she genuinely wasn’t sure if she could continue being in a relationship with him (romantic or otherwise) if he acts like a jealous boyfriend (she also says just as much about gr*g). 

almost right away (meaning before emily is abducted), ben starts adjusting his behavior. he makes a point to listen to emily, to emphasize that he trusts her, and apologizes in more than one way for not letting her be her own person in the first place. because of this, on may first (the night she is abducted), emily calls the station with intent to remove some of the distance she had put between herself in ben, not because she feels sorry for him (as would perhaps be what happens in a bad rom com) but because she gave him a chance to make amends and he did so. that formation of trust between the two of them is character development, both on ben and emily’s side, and happens specifically before she is abducted. 

what I’m trying to say is that the trajectory of ben’s character development is put into motion way before emily is abducted. when she goes missing he continues on a character arc that had already started, I would argue, on the night that he met sammy (which is another thing: ben’s character development is just as catalyzed by emily as it is by sammy). ben isn’t “granted” a second chance because he shot down a ufo to bring emily back, and he isn’t a cookie-cutter nerdy male character proving his love for emily by some grand, third-act romantic gesture. he says more than once when she’s missing that he doesn’t care if she never speaks to him after he gets her back, just that she has been abducted and he knows how to bring her home. and this claim that he makes is backed up by his actions when ben steps back and doesn’t really fight emily when she starts dating gr*g (aside from the whole gaslighting thing, which he does at least try and push back on). he puts her health and well-being above any relationship he hopes to have with her, and this is a direct result of development from before she went missing, not while she was gone.