Re-reading

[mirrorshard]

I've just completed my first re-reading of Justice (and partway into Sword) and a couple of things in particular struck me.

First, I'd completely forgotten that the non-Radch language at the beginning of Justice explicitly genders Seivarden Vendaai and Anander Miaanai for us, and I realised that despite that, I'd been letting the default "her" colour things all the way through Sword. Characters we don't meet till later, on the other hand, I don't have images of one way or the other.

Second, when we see the original conversion of the ancillary unit that would become One Esk Nineteen, Justice of Toren thinks that that body didn't even know any interesting songs. This is making me really curious about the mechanics of the ancillary conversion process, and what remains. It's often asserted that the original person is dead, but of course Breq is not exactly a reliable source there.

Comments

[axilet]

Seivarden might be biologically male, but the Radch culture seems set-up language- and reproductive-wise so that one doesn't really have to identify one way or another if they don't wish to. So she could think of herself as male, female, genderfluid for all we know since we don't have access to her POV. Likewise AM is probably agender or doesn't care much for identifying in the first place (like Breq who still thinks of herself as "ship".)

I think Ancillary Sword pretty much spells out what would happen if Breq's ancillary implants were ever removed; the entity Breq would be destroyed but the host still wouldn't come back. Instead a whole new being with both Breq's and the original's memories and personality traits would be "born".

[kaberett]

I think one of the interesting things that's come up in other conversations here is that, sure, non-Radch cultures gender SV and AM... but we have no idea what those cultures' gender markers are based on, and how they're assigning gender.

You get a lot of interesting answers to second bit of question (what remains post-conversion) over the course of Sword, and I look forward to your thoughts...