no longer fretting over my ocs being buckwild. bc tisarwat is out here, a 17 year old/3000 year old lieutenant, with her purple eyes she bought with her first paycheck, her having been temporarily possessed by god, simultaniously being one person yet thousands of persons, depressed, and charmingly fond of fish. and she rules. so.

Actually hilarious that Breq found out that Anaander hijacked Tisarwat's brain and instead of getting the fascist tyrant out of her ship straight away, she made the Lord of the Radch, Lord of Mianaai, The Tyrant, do a bunch of gross chores first.

going back to my parallel between thistle dunmeshi and tisarwat, i think tisarwat's situation is an allegory for living after life-altering abuse and violation. she's so disassociated from herself that she and breq sees herself as pre-ancillary tisarwat and post-ancillary tisarwat, and in a way, it's true. she is forever changed from the experience of having someone else crammed into her consciousness to the point her previous psyche was snuffed out. she, in breq's words, was dead the moment the operation started. she is grieving who she was and never got to be. she is someone else entirely. she spends two-thirds of ancillary sword floating through a miasma of PTSD and self-loathing, wishing she'd died and wishing so desperately to do something with herself to make the violation - not worth it, but to do something past it. finally mentioning the elephant in the room has her breaking down in tears, a cathartic end to months of dwelling on it in the background. she cannot go back. she cannot go back to being the other tisarwat. one step, two steps, she can only move forward.