#sidra and owl occupy very clear mother and grandchild roles
male ai: arcs about the realization of their humanity and independence, what it means to be alive, always the god, sometimes the son
female ai: love arcs despite their naivety regardless of their knowledge oft being infinitesimal, likened to children despite their love arcs, always the daughter, sometimes the mother
me, eternally bitter:
#story shape#sci fi#it’s because male ai stories are about defining humanity#while female ai stories are about defining women (tags via uovoc)
This sent me down a warm spiral of thinking about Breq/One Esk Nineteen.
I think there’s probably plenty interesting to say about One Esq as both a caring parent figure and a helpless child figure to Lieutenant Awn, and the asexual expression of their role as both a pining lover and an object of affection.
One of the things I loved so much about this series was the way Leckie made more generalized care the locus of its ideas about personhood, and so decentralized romantic love as the ultimate expression of humanity (especially in relation to a feminine AI!).
