Background info

2017-01-18T19:00:01Z

OUT OF CHARACTER:
Name/Handle: Amry
Contact: soonerbee, or PMs to this journal.

IN-CHARACTER:
Character name: Lieutenant Seivarden Vendaai
Series name: The Ancillary trilogy of books by Ann Leckie
Species: Human
Age: Biologically, in her late forties; appearance-wise, in her thirties; in actuality, a little over a thousand years old. Cryosleep's a bitch.

“I’ve seen Seivarden referred to as a cinnamon roll, but I think she’s, like, one of those cinnamon rolls that comes in a can in the refrigerator case where you find the pilsbury biscuits, but when you took it out you dropped it and it came all unraveled and didn’t quite go back together the way it should have so it’s kind of misshapen.” --Ann Leckie

( A cut for spoilers through Ancillary Mercy! )

Notes: I’ll generally be playing Seivarden from the third book in the trilogy, Ancillary Mercy.

A note about gender: The Radchaai language has only one gender pronoun, which for Hugo-Award-winning purposes is translated as “she.” It has no association whatsoever with typically-female physical characteristics or feminine presentation; in fact the concept of "typically-female physical characteristics" or "feminine presentation" would be very difficult to explain in the Radchaai language, which simply has no words for the idea. Seivarden is biologically male, but uses “she/her” pronouns - both for herself, and for every other person in existence. She can adapt if corrected, but it doesn’t come naturally to her ("learning languages" and "consideration of others' cultural norms" both being low on her list of skills), and she has no read at all on what gender people around her are trying to perform.

What this means: Regardless of your character's appearance, Seivarden will use the same pronoun for them without thinking about it. If for any reason you don’t want to play out (or see) your character getting misgendered, please just drop me a line and I will gladly handwave Seivarden having been notified of this and getting your character’s pronoun right. But also: If you’d like to play out Seivarden being completely and bafflingly wrong about this, or are fine with seeing her struggle, I am also completely down for that - drop me a line if you’d like to see it played up re: your character, as well!

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