#ancillary

WOW!

It’s brilliant—the tension, the terror, the humour!

So scary & so funny!

Absolute joy to read:

Breq, literally minutes from what looks like imminent death, “The hinges on the airlock door were very sticky.”

Keeping it real, ship to ship!

now that Presger translators can be legally declared human

"subservient, subordinate, serving as an aid," 1660s, from Latin ancillaris "relating to maidservants," from ancilla "handmaid," fem. diminutive of anculus "servant," literally "he who bustles about," from root of ambi- "around" (from PIE root *ambhi- "around") + PIE *kwol-o-, from root *kwel- (1) "revolve, move round."

now, i'm not making a flag for this right away. i've only had four hours of sleep for one and for another thing, this is really just a personal term only i plan to use though if others resonate with this particular experience, that's great! i'm just using the word, rather, to describe this particular gender-not gender-beyond gender-xenogender i feel.

ancillary: a gender that is based off the ancillary species of corpse-soldier-ship-connectivity-ai from imperial radch. there is no singular experience of ancillary gender, as ancillaries are as individual as a person is, but here is how i experience being an ancillary:

-a peculiar combination of being genderless, having an identifiable gendered feeling that is strong, intense, and personal, a feeling of being so detached from/beyond/above the gender binary as a whole that gender is meaningless to you, and a heavily xenogender/xenic influenced component where these simultaneous, contradictory gendered-notgendered feelings are tied to ai, robots, plurality, and nonhumanity in general.

-this specific nonhumanity isn't a "want" to be human, but more of a "seeing what humans have and knowing that although you prefer the gifts of being an ancillary, you know you lack something to you that makes you blend in with humanity, so you reject humanity altogether".

-the genderless part of the label, in my experience, is felt as a lack of identification with gender or gender roles as society experiences it, to masculinity or femininity since society is a binary and you purposefully and accidentally elude its categorization.

-the identifiable gendered aspect to the gender can be a nameable gendered feeling, like neutrois, aporagender, maverique, ilyagender, aliagender, pera, stargender, etc., or it can be an unlabeled yet strongly gendered feeling that coincides and coexists with your genderlessness.

-the detachment from the gender binary can be anything: it can be a simultaneous refusal to identify with any gender despite the contradictory feelings of genderedness and genderlessness, it can be a refusal of labels except for "unlabeled" or "ancillary", it can be a lack of identification with the gender system in general like with quoigender or apogender, it can be like gendereaux where you don't identify with gender at all but identify with numerous nonbinary experiences (including ancillary!), and all of these can even be possible in a singular ancillary.

Esk, Issa (Beginning, Movement): Imperial Radch, 800 words

My existence began in a single room. Or rather, this is where my memory record begins. My existence itself began in a laboratory some very many gates away, but this is only hardware. I, myself, did not begin until I was already in orbit, already set into place above the planet where I was destined to live and die.

The Merrikitt Hotel: Chronicles of the Kencyrath, mall AU, 1.2k