tisarwat

Just like. Imagine the ancillaries and the mercy of Kalr soldiers as a chorus (but mercy of Kalr a slightly less coordinated one)

anaander miaannai always represented by multiple actors as well

tisarwat portrayed by a character who has previously played a background annaander. Audience assumed through the first song that this is a simple recast (mercy of kalr soldiers are non-1 Esk ancillaries and the actress for Awn plays Basnaiad so it's not a massive stretch)

when the communication between ancillaries is cut off on Ors, the previously in sync ancillaries start singing on top of each other. Even once they've organised each other a bit, they still miss their cues a bit or come in a tiny bit too early

throughout the flashback scenes the ancillaries always hum in the background, even during crisis situations, so when JoT is destroyed and there's suddenly only one voice singing you feel the same whiplash as Breq

Speaking of which, the actor who plays Breq is introduced late in the flashbacks, so the only way you know they're the same character is that they have the same leitmotif (One Var has a similar but distinct one, as do the other decades, and of course Justice of Toren as a whole is a combination of them)

during the conversation between one Var/anaander; one esk and lieutenant Dariat, and JoT and hundred captain Rubren, each interlocuter sungs a couplet, and then they all finish the verse with "Ship, what do you think" - and then the three "faces" of JoT do the same and end their verse with "I think something is very wrong"

one esk 19's flight from JoT is a patter song, but with each verse sung by a different one esk ancillary with the rest of the decade giving backing vocals - until the ship explodes

Who is Tisarwat? There is a family out there who think they know. They used to know. But they don’t know that their daughter is dead. She died with the first implantation of the device that would make her Anaander Mianaai and she kept dying from there.

Each successful implant was a little death, until Tisarwat was just a corpse full of Anaander Mianaai – and sure, a little bit of herself, just around the edges, just enough to be terrified and sick. But really, Tisarwat was dead before she ever met Breq Mianaai, days before Breq Mianaai forced her down onto the bed in medical and instructed Medic to kill her again.

The person inside Tisarwat died again. Left some of herself behind again, like the scum stuck to the bottom of a tea bowl. She should have felt free but she’d died too many times to feel anything but sick. Much later, Breq would call that moment her birth, and Tisarwat would cry from the shock of it combined with the fear of her mission. Birth? She never thought the Tisarwat she was now had been born, only died, again and again and again.

She hates that original Tisarwat, her vanity and foolishness, her smug surety that her stupid eyes were pretty and that her uniform suited her and that her family was proud of her, and she dreams of holding her in her sleep, arms around her waist, head resting in the hollow of her shoulder. Whose eyelashes brush against whose cheek as they drift off? There are too many Tisarwats to know. How stupid. She is surrounded by people who understand multiplicity, Breq and Ship and Anaander Mianaai, but even though she’s been one of those she still doesn’t understand her own multiplicity, can’t come to terms with it.

Maybe it’s worse because Tisarwat was such a self-satisfied little lieutenant. She never wanted to be anyone but herself.

It's not quite the ten year anniversary of the first time I read Ancillary Justice, but this thing's been sitting in my WIPs for long enough. I first read the Imperial Radch series in the immediate aftermath of a really bad time in my life. It's a series about a grief-stricken AI’s revenge quest, it’s about war and colonialism, it’s about individuality and identity, it’s about politics, it’s about pronouns, it’s about tea. To me, at that time, it was a story about people who had lost everything, cracked under pressure, and had to reconstruct themselves and their life and purpose, afterwards. Breq and Seivarden and Tisarwat all went through their own version of the worst thing that had ever happened to them, and survived it— and harder still, after surviving, had to figure out what to do next. None of them presented a perfect model of coping and recovery, but that wasn’t the point. It didn’t have to be perfect, it just had to be enough.