#Ajewen Dzera

[dreamsatdusk]

On Sartorial Choices

I mentioned this on a Discord server a while back, but realized I don’t think I ever posted about it here.  So!

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Hexarchate Stories; “Omens”:

(Jedao’s mother preparing for a first date with Jedao’s father.)

So Ledana donned a tasteful necklace of onyx and black pearls that she’d inherited from her gran, matched it with black pearl earstuds, and slipped into a dark gray dress with a diagonal slash of lavender.

Hexarchate Stories; “Honesty”:

(Jedao as a child.)

The slight figure in a lavender jacket belonged to her brother.

Hexarchate Stories; "Silence”:

(Jedao on a visit to his family while on leave.)

Jedao’s shoes were decidedly unmilitary lavender loafers.

(snip)

Right now Jedao was wearing informal civilian garb in violet and gray, a loose, short-sleeved tunic over well-tailored pants.

Raven Stratagem:

(Cheris, in the scene where she reveals to Brezan and Khiruev that her calendar reset is going to happen in fifteen days.)

She had changed her clothes:  an unexpectedly festive lavender dress and a raven pendant, the one Khiruev had seen once before when she played dangerously with her gun.

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When I first read Raven Stratagem, I thought the dress mention was very interesting, mainly because I wondered why Cheris made that choice at this point in time.  But after reading the various short stories about Jedao, I came to think the colour choice was even more interesting. 

Did Jedao grow up liking lavender and gray because his mother did?  Perhaps she selected that jacket for child-him even. 

Did Cheris decide to wear a fancier outfit on the eve (or near to) of a triumph over the hexarchate that Jedao had been working toward for centuries and combine a colour choice significant to him, along with her own raven luckstone?  Jedao’s mother was murdered after Hellspin Fortress.  Cheris’s mother had just recently been murdered by the hexarchate, along with a great many of her people.  Her outfit selection here calls back to both Ledana and Dzera.

[dreamsatdusk]

The Making of Kel Cheris

More of a series of musings than proposed answers, at least for now.

How did Ajewen Cheris become a Kel?

More to the point, why did she want to become a Kel?

When the raven luckstone is first mentioned in Ninefox Gambit, it is reflected upon as a “welcome reminder of the home she visited so seldom”.  In general, the glimpses we see of her remembrances of home and family are basically positive so far as I can recall.  She was brought up to know of such Mwennin customs as could safely be imparted under the hexarchate and her thoughts of them likewise do not seem to have real negativity. 

And  yet, in Ninefox Gambit:

“My family wanted me to stay home,” she said.  “They don’t approve of the military.” Or the hexarchate, really.  She didn’t say that she had wanted to fit in for once, and that the Kel with their conformism had seemed a good place to do that.”

And in Raven Stratagem, Cheris’s mother reflects:

Sometimes Dzera thought that if she had found the right stories to tell Cheris, Cheris wouldn’t have needed to run away from her own people.

Cheris is in many ways shown as a compassionate person, though one who has had hard decisions to make.  There is more than one point on which the Kel faction is more antithetical to what we see of her nature than anything.  And yet, not only did she choose to serve the hexarchate in spite of her family, not only did she join the military, she also bypassed the opportunity to join the Nirai in spite of a talent that would have been very appreciated amongst them and possibly taken her quite far, all to be a part of the Kel.  The text tells us that it is because she wanted to fit in.  To fit in so very hard apparently, that she joins a faction with a method for outright and near utterly forcing conformity.  (If there were any doubts about how profound an impact formation instinct has, the takeover of the Swanknot swarm blew them away.) And this, on top of everything else, is also a faction that is on so many fronts, a brutal, brutal organization.

I’m going to do a reread and will see if there is anything more to be plucked on this story right now or if we have to wait until Revenant Gun.  But it’s intriguing and even baffling.