Racing Turtles

#I feel as if I should apologize for the fact that the substantive paragraph above is all one sentence#but it is very late here#and I have been at work since 7:45 am and only ceased from work at 9:15pm#teixcalaan#arkady talks about her own work#okay yeah I guess I can just decide shit I write on tumblr is canon now#my god. the power.(via @byzantienne) XD XD XD

I’ve decided to name it Thirty-six All Terrain Tundra Vehicle

I am very sorry to be That Author, appearing unsummoned, but this post was sent to me, and, well:

yes

that is precisely correct

I am made of hideous delight

[extremely three seagrass voice] i'm bored. time to upend my entire life to walk into a warzone so i have an excuse to talk to that cute foreign girl again

[extremely three seagrass voice] got into an argument with the cute girl. after rehoming a kitten and nearly getting murdered by aliens i have resolved to simply fuck my way out of this

as a sapphic sci-fi/fantasy protagonist, i felt like i wasn't in control of my own narrative. that's why, this pride month, i'm partnering with a back-alley brain surgeon

Just finished a Desolation Called Peace and I might still be too insane about it to put this into coherent words, but I am Fucked Up over A Memory Called Empire being, essentially, "I want to be a person, not based on how well I perform being one of you, not based on how I am valued on your terms, but a person, inherently, separate from you, and how do you do that when the empire that decides your personhood doesn't even have the language to describe civilization outside of itself"

And then, in case you missed the point, Arkady Martine wrote another book where there's an alien civilization that literally cannot recognize humans as people if they are not part of their hivemind, that someone literally had to be consumed to make the argument that they had value, they have personhood, they are more than meat - and the aliens are like, "ah, you were a person before you were a person because of your name!" and he replies, "no, I was always a person, and so is the rest of my species, and that should be enough to justify not destroying them. Because they are people also, equal to yours."

And these aliens are foreign and violent and horrifying, and Arkady Martine holds your hand and says, what they do is the same thing that the human empire does, and it's the same violence whether it's with giant fucking claws or poetry. It's the same violence, and if you call one of them monstrous you have to call the other one monstrous too, and if you consider one of them beautiful even as it's devouring you, then you have to consider the other one beautiful too -

and I'm a little not okay about it!!!!

or, the Shard Trick, and what that must have felt like to Eight Antidote.

I wonder if some of it might be cultural overspill? Like, we know Teixcalaan dislikes mental modification (despite the shard pilots and the local police) and Lsel picks up a lot of Teixcalaanli cultural influence, so maybe they downplay imagos because of the Teixcalaanli taboo.

Alternatively, living your life with the expectation of living forever is probably not good for you, as we saw with Six Direction, and downplaying the effects of imagos might be an attempt to prevent the ‘worst case scenarios’ Mahit describes where the imago tries to overwrite the host or relive their old life/rekindle old relationships, which would cause all sorts of problems. Better to go into it accepting that you’ll only be a whisper in the back of someone’s head rather than much of a person stuck inside someone else’s brain. That could turn some people off and entice others for the wrong reasons (selfish desires rather than dedication to the station’s heritage and survival.)

Yes, but I don’t know if it even needs to be that complex, like: Lsel obviously has a communalist vibe and had an EVEN STRONGER one in the past; it needed that ideology to survive on the incredibly thin margins its way of life required, and physically embodying the ancestors played both a practical and ideological role in strengthening that sense of attachment and community(to the point where, in the modern day, the desire to LEAVE Lsel is still seen by many as a kind of moral disease).

But then an Empire comes along, spouting the SAME communalist line about “we all do better together. Cosmic balance requires your conformity” but not as a rhetoric of ego-suppression and communal peace, but rather as a rhetoric of dominance and control and cultural hierarchy, and also centering THEIR culture as the most worthwhile unifying force, rather than Lsel’s.

Now you have a political impulse towards differentiation, towards creating rhetoric and ideas promoting RESISTANCE to sublimation into collective-identities, and once that idea becomes important to the society, people will start considering it in relation to themselves and Lsel, too. So just by existing as a larger, known polity with a similar “communalist” ideology, Teixcalaan destabilizes the ideological&political world of Lsel.

I agree on the second point, too, about how this way of understanding it can act as a stabilizing and directing force in Lsel society. Another thing the merging idea does: pressure imago recipients to listen to their imagos, and start to THINK of imago input AS their own thoughts(and thus: strengthen traditional practices). By telling recipients that the imago isnt another *person* but just data, then the input FROM an Imago becomes easier to conceptualize as your own thoughts, reacting to that data. It encourages “integration” and cooperation from both participants.

Mahit: Imagos aren’t immortality devices. They just share memory; it’s not like we have dead people in our heads.

also Mahit: *spaces out because she’s having lengthy arguments with Yskander, the alleged bundle of memories and definitely-not-a-person in her head*

*reads A Desolation Called Peace and fixates on Three Seagrass with a kitten*

like a million sci fi works: the species with collective consciousness doesn’t understand death and has to learn about individuality

me: omg the species with collective consciousness doesn’t understand death and has to learn about individuality

A Desolation Called Peace went “here are people who divide and depersonalize based on language and culture and here is an entity failing to acknowledge any of them as people because they’re limited by language. And here is someone who destroys themselves further in the name of understanding but still argues that as imperfect as we are, we still sometimes manage to reach out with our imperfect understanding and grasp each other”

and I was like yes I’ve heard this story before a dozen times, tell it to me again

Mahit & Three Seagrass from A Memory Called Empire! I can’t wait to read book two, I love them 🤩

This is pretty niche but I can’t stop thinking about it

Not really sure if it applies to the top-right 3(have not read) but:

Post-Homestuck Literature :| :| :|