actually a thing I’ve thought about commenting on: that MFS has some conflicting elements and Alder is in many ways at the center of those contradictions.

The military lives from hierarchy, obedience and physical dominance and aggression (which is why the Tarim don’t like it), and Alder is an embodiment of this. But Alder (infertile Alder one must say) also calls her soldiers “daughters” or “sisters”. And the mycelium that Alder created sounds a little bit like every feminist’s dream, by which I mean: you have an interconnected network which relies on bonds and symbiosis, basically Octavia Butler’s list of what is sexy:

(picture taken from here: https://twitter.com/LAReviewofBooks/status/805094451475611648)

The same goes for the way witches’ workings function - witches can perform workings on their own but even then the sounds they produce are layered and of a kind that you can only get with two or three others (I’m saying this as a viewer looking at the canon from outside); never mind that a unit is composed of three witches who complement each other.

And witches are not only connected to other witches but they also - in particular Alder - have an intimate connection with nature (which, again, the idea of mother and mother earth and creation is super 1970s feminism, I wonder if Eliot picked it up there).

I’ve been thinking for some time now that Alder really shouldn’t be part of the military and that I would prefer the unit not to be part either. I mean the military is NOT good for Alder’s health or any witch’s probably, it perverts what it means to be a witch in order to fulfill a contract where men promise not to kill witches in exchange for this distortion what witches are actually founded on. In reality, of course, the witch ethos simply does not mesh with the ethos of the military.