#solari

god i love chee tan’ka so much, this prelude has been so instructive in understanding her character and her hunger and drive and cleverness and who she is - literally nothing I wouldn’t do for her

seeing Z be so neurotic about such small details, seeing his home and how much his life is not his own OOOOH makes it all hit so much harder

XL-ZL and the tragedy of his people, GOD it’s so good

and of course aabria iyengar, who continues to never fucking miss

XL-ZL has it easiest, in a way, because his ideals and his love and his burning outrage are shared with his choir and with his mother. His hurt is the collective hurt of the Eirynna.

(Which: boy oh boy am I eager to find out what makes an Eirynna an apostate. Haronak is fifteen kinds of fascinating, but that's for another post.)

But Chee - oh, Chee. She wasn't naive, exactly. She just didn't get that her bosses were the kinds of people who prefer coercive control over everything, including profit. It didn't matter that the garden would have benefited Teleghen - what mattered is that it would have given their employees ideas about creating benefits for themselves that weren't trickled down from their corporate overlords.

And even when she lost the fight she didn't want - even when she gave her life in a final futile scream of frustration - even that was co-opted by corporate interests. That sliver of freedom she had on Ghenopaar was the same as her aunt's - given by the grace of Three Points.

The whole story of Chee the revolutionary, the bloodplay scene in the first episode - it's so grotesque, in an amazing story way. The actual Chee never wanted to make waves. She didn't even want to leave Teleghen. She never called for revolution. And when she stabbed that executive in the neck, it was with his own stylus, just to deprive him of the pleasure of seeing her dead. It was desperate and gory and sad. But now she's the famous Chee Tan'ka, whether she likes it or not.

Zee and Lou are holding their cards closer to their chests, but there has to be a reason Zee went from being seemingly ready to apprentice with his mother to needing a full hallucinogenic trip to deal with her most innocuous phone calls. He went on his hedonistic gap year for a reason - there's something he's trying desperately to avoid. There's something with that inkling of doubt he had about his father's work, something with the loss of the Eirynna sun. Whatever his wound is, he's hidden it very, very well.

Heronak is labeled as "apostate" by his own kind. The Eirynna believing that their job is to experience and know, would probably find incredible selfishness to be apostasy. So what is Heronak doing? Something with the Dison swarm for sure. But is he wanting to halt the comeback of Orm? Destroy the 40 suns? Wipe out humans bc of their selfishness in breaking up the hive mind?

OR