#kalr five

[thereisnocorrectanswer]

Kalr five! She just loves good tea sets so much and feels so much pride in them and honestly same. I think we would get along very well <3

[githjanken]

on to ancillary sword and like. kalr 5 re: has hetnys been offered tea/breakfast

"Yes, sir. She said she didn't want anything." A trace of disappointment there—no doubt she felt deprived of an opportunity to show off her dishes.

she is so cute! i love kalr 5 and her precious dishes

[insert DO IT FOR HER meme here, but it's snippets of kalr 5 being kalr 5]

[klinefelterrible]

So who was male in imperial radch trilogy?

Let’s hear those theories!

[lurking-latinist]

think I will reread Ancillary Justice & series, I think the first time I read it I mainly absorbed worldbuilding and now I need to remember the names of like. characters

[hms-lurking-latinist]

🚀

[theygotbitchesinmedia]

Wahhhh... kalr five....

[phagodyke]

ARURGRGRHHHHH

[swallowtailed]

i make this post several times per imperial radch book, apparently, but it continues to be true so i will say it again: truly beautiful control of the emotional arcs, made all the more impactful by their inherent connection to the worldbuilding. this is what speculative fiction is meant for.

[chaotic-neutral-knitter]

I described the imperial radch trilogy to my partner as "people passive aggressively drinking tea at each other in space (affectionate)" and I don't think that's technically wrong but on my re-read I am remembering how much of that is due to Kalr Five, who appears to primarily express admiration and affection via dish selection. I love her so much.

[dryad-lesbians]

lyrics under the cut for ref

1. My heart is a fish

Hiding in the water-grass

In the green, in the green.

2. It all goes around

It all goes around

The planet goes around the sun

It all goes around

My mother said it all goes around

It all goes around

The ship goes around the station

3. A thousand eggs all nice and warm

Crack, crack, crack, a little chick is born.

Peep peep peep peep! Peep peep peep peep!

Nine hundred and ninety nine eggs all nice and warm

Crack, crack, crack, a little chick is born.

Peep peep peep peep! Peep peep peep peep!

4. The person, the person, the person with weapons.

You should be afraid of the person with weapons. You should be afraid.

All around the cry goes out, put on armor made of iron.

The person, the person, the person with weapons.

You should be afraid of the person with weapons. You should be afraid.

5. Betrayer! Long ago we promised

To exchange equally, gift for gift.

Take this curse: What you destroy will destroy you.

6. One, two, my aunt told me

Three, four, the corpse soldier

Five, six, it'll shoot you in the eye

Seven, eight, kill you dead

Nine, ten, break it apart and put it back together.

7. Memory is an event horizon

What's caught in it is gone but it's always there.

or Bo decade's approximation:

Oh, tree! Eat the fish!

This granite folds a peach!

Oh, tree! Oh, tree! Where's my ass?

8. Death will overtake us

In whatever manner already fated

Everyone falls to it

And so long as I'm ready

I don't fear it

No matter what form it takes

9. I was walking, I was walking

When I met my love

I was in the street walking

When I saw my true love

I said, "She is more beautiful than jewels, lovelier than jade or lapis, silver or gold."

10. Jasmine grew

In my love's room

It twined all around her bed

The daughters have fasted and shaved their heads

In a month they will visit the temple again

With roses and camellias

But I will sustain myself

With nothing more than the perfume of jasmine flowers

Until the end of my life

11.Oh, have you gone to the battlefield

Armored and well-armed?

And shall dreadful events

Force you to drop your weapons?

12. Who only ever loved once?

Who ever said "I will never love once"

and kept their word?

[flintandpyrite]

Has someone already written about how Breq and Mercy of Kalr are both disabled, in different directions? Mercy of Kalr without ancillaries now lacks the tools to interact with its world. It’s powerful but unable to effect change on its environment directly. It’s effectively a brain in a jar, paralyzed and almost completely reliant on its relationship with its soldiers to perform its function. And Breq/Justice of Toren One Esk who once had the parallel processing power capable of independently operating literally thousands hands now finds herself operating on one squishy fallible human brain. How could I have missed that? She asks herself about five times in the final act of Ancillary Justice. Talk about a traumatic brain injury. And they can’t fix or complete each other the way Mercy of Kalr brings up in their first meeting, no matter how much the Mercy longs for it. But they can be allies. I like that.

[klinefelterrible]

Can I just add that this all wouldn’t be sufficient for my love without Zeiat/Sphene relationship and the idea of an ex-ship befriending an ancient ship during hard times and the ancient ship befriending this weirdest human-shaped alien creature who seem to be a diplomatic ally or something else AND SPEND TIME PLAYING GAMES while Five Kalr only cares about the tea set is utterly fantastic and I don’t remember reading anything even remotely as entertaining and weird in the vibe

Sphene and everybody expecting Breq to have a plan and then being shocked about her pulling the republic out of her hat despite the fact that Breq has never created a complicated plan in her life..... She shook things up so much on Athoek and has such a mysterious past that it seems like she should be some kind of tactical genius, but her "genius" boils down to having a broad range of experience and a fuck-you attitude. She's old, dude! She's been around forever! She has experience at both ends of the social spectrum and an intimate understanding of how every person serving on a ship thinks feels and behaves and twenty years wandering around outside raadchai space. So for everyone she talks to, she has an alternative perspective, and for every stupid assumption and thought people have, she has the willingness to tell them they're being stupid, and for everyone who's just uninformed she has a piece of advice for them. Her "social genius" is basically having common sense and a basic understanding of empathy. She has no family to answer to, assassinating a body of the god-emperor was the interview that got her a title and a ship, she's adopting people willy-nilly, she throws hands on sight of any anaanders, she's having an emotional breakdown because she has friends for the first time in twenty years but figuring out ship-to-ex-ship relationships is kind of hard while she's tethered to the outside of a spaceship sniping four other spaceships with, I cannot emphasize this enough, the magic gun she spent twenty years hunting down so she could basically give the god-emperor a haircut and die giving her both middle fingers.

[itrvahn]

Kalr five is my baby girl.

[lurking-latinist]

I did pick up Ancillary Sword at the library and am a little ways in (no spoilers please) and really enjoying it. Especially having had this Age of Sail phase recently. The tropes are super recognizable. The gangly 17-year-old officer at risk of motion sickness? The captain’s steward obsessed with fancy dishes and eavesdropping? I know those characters now! I know where they come from!

[coquelicoq]

in light of certain translation state events i'm thinking again about sphene and kalr five trying to fix the shattered notai tea set in ancillary mercy:

"Fleet Captain!" Translator Zeiat came into the decade room. Looked at the table. "Oh! Our game looks very different today!" "It's still packed away, Translator," said Sphene. "This is a tea set." "Ah!" [...] She sat down in the seat beside Sphene. "These are not for eating," Sphene said. Translator Zeiat made a brief moue and then turned her attention to me. (chapter 13, page 227)

i can only imagine what's going through sphene's head when translator dlar eats a smashed tea bowl and then regurgitates it in front of the committee on the treaty administration facility...like damn. i guess they are for eating. who knew.

[friendamedes]

Top five Seivarden moments, ranked? For science??

i have Holes In My Brain, so i've almost certainly forgotten some i loved (every seivarden moment is my favorite moment!!! i just love Seeing Her!!!!) but doing my best:

4. all her sopping wet cat moments in justice. when she watches breq kill four people & complains that she's cold. babygirl,...

3. in the beginning of sword, when she keeps asking breq abt sex. and breq is like wow... she must just want to sleep with Someone. which is more of a Breq Moment than a seivarden moment but i love how pathetic she is abt it.

2. at the end of sword, when seivarden brings in mercy of kalr and saves breq's life, and then says she's "look[ing] forward to being reprimanded." that's embarrassing for her. and when she IS reprimanded & seivarden is very Obviously in love with her. like, she asks breq if she KNOWS ("Do you see what Ship sees?") & breq is, per usual, absolutely oblivious re: being loved & cared for. Peak Comedy. seivarden is having the Most Time Ever and breq is like - how odd, i wonder what's up with her.

1. and i think it's everyone's favorite seivarden moment, but after she falls off the bridge and asks breq that if that was something she'd do for someone she hates, what would she do for someone she loves?? (plus every conversation they have about ship favorites. Ships Hate Her!!!)

this is missing a #5 because i've only just started my re-read of mercy and i want room to add one more when i come across it.