Ok Ok Ok Coffee Shop Au Though. Seivarden Is On Like Month Four Clean And Set Up With A Stupid Job On

Ok ok ok coffee shop au though. Seivarden is on like month four clean and set up with a stupid job on a stupid station selling stupid bitter bean tea to stupid uncivilized hicks who wouldn't know real tea if it bit them on their stupid ungloved hands and she is this close to saying "fuck it" and spending the total savings from her minimum wage earnings on a raging bender but also she doesn't because of Mysterious Asshole Stranger. MAS is an arrogant jackass. She calls Seivarden her personal name straight off her nametag like they know each other or something but also has yet to introduce herself. MAS hums constantly in a voice like she's been gargling rocks for the last thousand years and Seivarden has a lot of time to listen to it because MAS is a regular who comes in every morning and does Amaat-knows-what on her handheld for literal hours but also Seivarden literally does not care because MAS speaks fluent Radchaai in an entirely understandable accent and Seivarden is desperate to figure out what the entire fuck her deal is. She doesn't even wear gloves. Is she Radchaai and doing the equivalent of vacationing at a topless resort? Is she just weirdly good at languages? One time MAS watched Seivarden struggle to get the stupid automated cart with the shitty-tea-bean delivery to work for twenty minutes before standing up, picking up a 40 kilogram bag under each arm like it was nothing, and walking into the back with them. She was singing a song about horses the whole time. What is her deal.

Meanwhile Breq has long since passed "why is Seivarden here and alive" and moved on to enjoying making Seivarden bring her tea while using Space Google to figure out whither next on the hunt for the Fuck Anaander Gun

while im on the subject can i just say also that one of the funniest story arcs DW has ever has has got to be 'the Doctor tries and fails to go to Heathrow airport for an entire season'

while im on the subject can i just say also that one of the funniest story arcs DW has ever has has got to be 'the Doctor tries and fails to go to Heathrow airport for an entire season'

As much as I adore conlangs, I really like how the Imperial Radch books handle language. The book is entirely in English but you're constantly aware that you're reading a "translation," both of the Radchaai language Breq speaks as default, and also the various other languages she encounters. We don't hear the words but we hear her fretting about terms of address (the beloathed gendering on Nilt) and concepts that do or don't translate (Awn switching out of Radchaai when she needs a language where "citizen," "civilized," and "Radchaai person" aren't all the same word) and noting people's registers and accents. The snatches of lyrics we hear don't scan or rhyme--even, and this is what sells it to me, the real-world songs with English lyrics, which get the same "literal translation" style as everything else--because we aren't hearing the actual words, we're hearing Breq's understanding of what they mean. I think it's a cool way to acknowledge linguistic complexity and some of the difficulties of multilingual/multicultural communication, which of course becomes a larger theme when we get to the plot with the Presgar Translators.