AS: Part 3: Chapter 10 - Chapter 13

[Rob, Mayor of Ghost Town]

Section 3

Please keep all discussion and speculation to the events of Chapter 10 - Chapter 13.

No spoiler tags required. Though it would be highly appreciated if you Uncheck Add to my Update Feed to avoid accidentally spoiling this for your good read friends.

Please do not discuss events from later chapters/books. Referring back to events from a previous section/book is fine.

[Rob, Mayor of Ghost Town]

Ch 10 Translator Dlique was a bizzare character. I'm at a loss as to why they shot them, if not intentionally.

The Governor and the captain of the Sword of Atagaris failed to mention them and its ancillaries were very quick on the trigger.

[Rob, Mayor of Ghost Town]

Ch 11 I like the notion that the Station's AI is unhappy and has therefore been negligent in telling things to the Station Administrator.

[Lindsay]

Breq is Lieutenant Awn.

Awn set up house in the "wrong" village in book one and proceeded to champion the lower classes and native inhabitants all under the eyes of deeply loyal ancillaries.

Of course in Breq's case it's an ancillary playing Awn's role with a bunch of humans pretending to be ancillaries who are the loyal ones. (I love the symmetries in Leckie's books).

I'm interested to see if Breq is going to experience the same epic smackdown that Awn did.

[Rob, Mayor of Ghost Town]

It's been too long between books. I didn't notice the similarities at all.

[Suzanne]

I didn't notice that either - I'm loving your insights Lindsay.

I like the Station AI doing its job but only to the letter of the law too. The whole notion of AIs - ship, station, etc. is probably one of my favorite parts about this series.

[Rob, Mayor of Ghost Town]

Ch 13

So the Sword of Atagaris seems to be involved in smuggling antiques from the other side of the Ghost Gate. Captain Hetnys is definitely hiding things.

[[deleted user]]

Ah, that does explain a lot Lindsay. I was a bit annoyed at Breq's sudden, unexplained need to play defender of the the downtrodden, but you're right, this is probably Awn's influence.

The translator was an annoying character and I wasn't sorry to see her go. I should have seen her death (and the manner by which it happened) coming, but I didn't and it was quite a shock to me when it did happen. If and how the Presger find out and react to that will be a shadow hanging over everything else.

The gender identification stuff is obviously something everyone talks about with this series. I've gotten used to having everyone identified as "she", but Leckie did an interesting thing in these chapters (I think it was in these chapters - may have been right before): when it came out that Raughd had been physically abusive to Piat, I immediately assumed that Raughd was male and Piat was female. But then later there is a reference to both characters as "daughters". Could it be that both are female, or do the Radchaii use "daughter" to identify all children in the same way that they use "she" for everyone?

[Lindsay]

I think the latter. The Radchaai language has no gender and for reasons both mischievous and illuminating the author has chosen the default translation of Radchaai into whatever we're reading it in to have a default gender of female.

[[deleted user]]

Yeah, that would make sense. I was really envisioning it as a male-female relationship due to the physical abuse (and because Raughd seems to have personality traits that I associate more with males), but seeing the word "daughter" applied to both characters really opened up other possibilities for me. The gender thing can sometimes feel gimmicky in this series, but in this case I think Leckie achieved her goal of making me as a reader think differently about gender. She did a better job of it than Kameron Hurley did in The Mirror Empire with the physically abusive relationship in that book, that's for sure. I get extra points for bashing Mirror Empire in this group, right? ;)

[Suzanne]

I had the same reaction to the word "daughter". And some of the verbal abuse described certainly happens from either sex TO either sex. I agree about this one vs. The Mirror Empire. Mirror Empire to me seemed too obvious - just give all of the women 'typical' man traits and make them abusive to all of the men, who had stereotypical female traits (weak, powerless, etc.) Spoiler for Mirror Empire (view spoiler)[ I rewrote it in my head a few times, thinking if the sexes hadn't been reversed in that book there would have been a huge outcry among readers because of the rape scenes and how the author kind of showed the victim at some level liked it. (hide spoiler)]

[Lindsay]

Flipping it to a conversion from English to Radchaai, English "daughter" would translate to something like offspring-who-is-biologically-female which you'd think a Radchaai would react to as very rude if not radical over-sharing.