The Sword and Laser discussion

SDG is explicitly marketed as a "queer space opera" so I believe it's possible to discuss that aspect without any explicit spoilers from the text. In the Listen In conversation, Emily Tesh says about Kyr, "the rep is ace-ish but it's complicated and I hate labels and I'm really uncomfortable with my gender and I don't want to talk about it. The short form of that is queer." Tesh also notes that Kyr repeatedly rejects sexual feelings.

So Kyr is canonically asexual. The ace/aro spectrums are inherently complicated to navigate so the "complicated" bit is almost a given if the representation is any good. Most people don't even realize there *are* two distinct spectrums since they assume sexual and romantic attraction both exist for everyone and are always aligned. That's how the author wrote the character. We can discuss whether or not Tesh executed her intent well in Kyr, but there are no questions about author intention. That's the Kyr Emily Tesh was trying to write and convey to the reader.

And from my perspective while I believe the writing and character development are very well done, I didn't find the ace portion especially subtle. I was picking up on the ace vibes by the second chapter. Kyr doesn't have language for any of it any more than she has language for any complex set of experiences or emotions. And that also was deliberate by the author and by the culture in which Kyr was embedded. If we don't have language for something as human beings it's hard for us to even form the ideas, much less express the thoughts. (That's also discussed in the interview. For instance when Kyr is trying to process a horrible experience at one point, the only words she can find are that "it tastes like salt".)

But it doesn't seem like most readers picked up that Kyr was ace. (It's a spectrum. Even "ace-ish" is ace. But honestly, I didn't see much "ish" in Kyr's character.) I mentioned it on the discord when I was first processing my thoughts and before I found the Listen In conversation with Tesh and nobody else who responded had noticed. I went looking through reviews on multiple platforms and I couldn't find any reader review that even mentioned Kyr being ace. But it's a critical aspect of Kyr's character and is part of what shapes the way all her relationships function and develop.

I also very much appreciated the way Kyr's issues with gender didn't fit in any neat, simple boxes. That's an entirely separate discussion, but I thoroughly enjoyed the ways that showed up in her internal experience, interactions with others, and growth over the novel.

Where any reader reviews discussed Kyr's queerness, they focused on the one event involving overt romantic attraction for a cisgender woman. Those who have read the novel will know it since Kyr wrestles with what it means in various moments across the rest of the book. As a result, it feels to me like a lot of people missed a core element about who Kyr was and therefore some of the ways the character developed over the course of the novel.

I have a lot more thoughts, but I think I'll stop there and see if anyone else has any thing to add.

Thanks,

Scott

Good thoughts. I read this a few months ago and was trying to comb back through my thoughts again for this representation. I must admit that while I remember the scene where Kyr is attracted to a woman I'm not sure if I would have coded her as ace in the opening section of the book. I wonder why that is exactly? It seems like everything else in Kyr's life at that point is secondary to her drive to succeed as a warrior - that includes sex/romance, but isn't limited to that. For example, all her other relationships, even down to military camaraderie take the same back seat. Then, there's the way that sexual relationships are bound up mostly in the duty of reproduction. It sort of seemed like no one in that society had any kind of healthy relationship to sex. I never really thought to ascribe Kyr's feelings as much of anything beyond the fact that her whole society was messed up. Probably, I should have been a little more open to an alternate interpretation.

Among the reviews I read, I saw others express similar thoughts. The problem I have with that perspective is that her relationships never took a back seat for Kyr. They drove her relentlessly throughout the story even though she often lacked language to describe how intensely important they were to her and struggled constantly to capture and interpret what others were trying to communicate.

In fact, I would say her actions at each step indicate that really, despite the lifelong indoctrination and all her struggles with it, the relationships that mattered to her (either at the outset with her brother and her mess or developed during the story) ended up being pretty much the only things that truly mattered to her. But those relationships drove pretty much all her major decisions in one way or another.

And it seems to me that if a reader is missing the ace piece of her identity, then a scene like that with her brother in chapter 11 is likely to lose some of its impact. That's also one of the moments where she felt *very* autistic to me, but that might just be the particular way the scene landed for me. That scene in particular feels like it loses a lot of its impact without the reader understanding that Kyr is ace. Her answer to a lot of the questions her brother is asking is no or just pure confusion. At one point she's even wondering internally if he really doesn't think a relationship counts if it doesn't involve "sex stuff".

I wouldn't have thought of Kyr as asexual. It just isn't a high priority to her "at that time". She is still young and growing up.

Val, because of her more normal upbringing (Outside the spartan Gaea military life), is definitely aware that she is attracted to women and Kyr does start to notice Lisabel once she is aware of her Val life.

Tassie Dave wrote: "I wouldn't have thought of Kyr as asexual. It just isn't a high priority to her "at that time". She is still young and growing up."

I deeply appreciated the very specific explanation of the sort of queer representation Emily Tesh intended with Kyr. It shifts the conversation to whether or not the author succeeded at writing the character they intended to write.

And Val actually reinforces that aspect of Kyr's identity. First, Val is six years older than Kyr. She's graduated college and completed officer training. In the opening conversation with Cleo after discussing Cleo's plans, Cleo asks, "What about you? Anyone caught your eye? Oh sorry, I forgot. Not your thing, right?" and then a bit later, "So who are they? Do I know them? Boy? Girl? Enby?" As the text establishes, Cleo is Val's roommate, and she has pretty clearly never known Val to even go on a date.

Then during the date with Lisa, Val has this reflection about herself. "She wasn't normally all that interested in romantic relationships. She didn't believe in destiny. Maybe this feeling was what all the fuss was about."

Those are just some of the specific examples. While the circumstances, personality, and experiences varied immensely, that part of their identity is one of the few things that felt pretty consistent to me between Kyr and Val.

When I found the Emily Tesh interview and heard her describe the queer rep intended with Kyr it was pretty much exactly what I had understood from the story. It's not an especially common representation even in explicitly queer stories and I thought hers was very well done. I guess I'm trying to understand why others didn't see it.

I'll add that I thought Tesh really pushed some of the metaphysical questions of a multiversal story in a way that felt different than most of the ones I've read. (And I'll note it's one of my favorite themes in stories.) It went well beyond the more usual nature vs. nurture into how much can our genetic/epigenetic makeup in the circumstances of our conception and birth change but we can still in some sense be similar enough to be recognizably more or less the "same" (for some definition of same) person in a story narrative.

Thanks,

Scott

This was interesting. In the scene where Kyr discusses sexuality with her brother, it’s clear that she doesn’t really “get it”. Her fledgling relationship with Lisabel doesn’t really get the chance to go anywhere in any of the timelines so we don’t have a fully developed sense of Kyr’s sexual/romantic identity - and neither does she. The interview where Tesh talks about this stuff is very interesting and her choice of the word “queer” (both inside and outside the book itself) was well-considered.

Interesting. I didn’t get asexual/non-sexual from the text, rather more of a feeling of “just haven’t met The One yet”. But then I read this quite a while ago.

I’ve also never thought of people who have that orientation as queer. “Queer” suggests to me that someone is playing for one team or another, while “ace” is someone who isn’t in the game at all.

A friend of ours who has recently suffered a surprise divorce by her husband has unexpectedly found herself attracted to a woman, and as she put it, “It’s the person not the package.” Which underscores how fluid this gender thing is.

Trike wrote: "Interesting. I didn’t get asexual/non-sexual from the text, rather more of a feeling of “just haven’t met The One yet”. But then I read this quite a while ago.

I’ve also never thought of people wh..."

I tried to think of what to share since I'm not really interested in getting into a discussion about what identities are or are not valid or queer. Then I remembered the #GiveItBack campaign from 2016 and wondered if there were still any news articles online about it. I found this one which provides enough context, I think.

https://www.splinter.com/this-is-why-...

Obviously there are deep dives available in multiple places on the topic of asexuality and aromanticism available online for those who care to educate themselves.

And gender identity is about who a person is, obviously within the context of their culture and socially communicated norms. That's a separate part of queerness from who a person is attracted to.

I wasn’t trying to assign validity, just sharing that I hadn’t previously considered ace as queer. I’m not judging, just saying.

I guess I was misled by your use of present perfect (I've also never thought). I read it as a statement about a past action (thinking) continuing into the present.

More broadly I'm not surprised that the general straight SFF audience missed most of the nuance in Kyr's queer identity and interactions throughout the novel. My youngest has a phrase she uses when she discusses "controversy" about queer elements in media she enjoys and has shared with me seeming "forced" or introduced "suddenly out of nowhere". (A certain relationship in RWBY comes to mind.) When I express surprise about that reaction, her reaction is often, "It's just the straights" accompanied with a "what can you do?" head shake and shrug.

Rather, my confusion stems more from the fact that this is a novel that is specifically described and marketed as a "queer space opera". I can tell from the reviews I read that it has a lot of readers who are queer and more who enjoy literature with queer themes even if they aren't queer themselves.

I thought the rep Emily Tesh intended was very well executed. I found Kyr a rich character in a very harsh and brutal environment with limitations down to the language for things she had been given but the author was still able to make the queer elements of her identity complex and pretty clear while staying utterly true to Kyr's available language and ability to form and express concepts. I loved the way her romantic (or near enough that no other word really fits) attachment to Yiso developed. I found her asexuality very clearly expressed again and again both as Kyr and Val. I enjoyed the unexpected romantic connection Val felt for Lisa, though that felt like it was more intended as an instance of bleed-through between the timelines. (Val and Lisa both commented how they felt they knew each other.) And I don't know if it was ever clear to Kyr if those romantic feelings extended to Lisobel. It's something I felt Kyr struggled to understand through the rest of the book. Similarly, her issues with her gender were repeatedly front and center.

I feel confused because it doesn't appear that many queer readers caught the depth and specific focus of the queer representation in Kyr's character. I had to use search features to find a tiny handful of reviews that even mentioned ace or asexual out of thousands written on platforms like Amazon and Goodreads. This was a novel that was more character driven than anything else and her specific queerness was such an important part of Kyr's development and the way she drove the plot forward. And I thought the representation was one of the best I had encountered (not that there are many ace characters in literature or other media today).

If I hadn't heard Emily Tesh describe exactly the nuanced queer representation I had seen in Kyr's character arc, I would have written it off as yet another place where I had my own uncommon reading of a text. But it turns out I saw the character Tesh wanted to write in Kyr.

And that alters what I'm trying to understand. If that's the case, why didn't more people see it?

I was thinking more about how most people seemed to focus on the romantic attraction that sparked for Val with Lisa and the way Kyr kept trying to make sense of it in the context of Lisabel as if that was the only queer part in the story about Kyr.

And it's not even that it's not the only one. In the scheme of the narrative, it's a relatively minor piece of the puzzle. It's important. It helps Kyr realize she's queer like her brother and that's a very critical part of her growth. But it's not the central part of her queerness in the story. And it's not even her most important romantic relationship. Emily Tesh mentions that one, but I was looking through the text of some of the key scenes again and the one at the start of the third arc when she's starting to tell her brother everything stands out to me.

She's told him she knows he's queer. She tells him she thinks she's queer. She recognizes she's getting the conversation all wrong again (*very* autistic moment to me) and as she's trying to organize her thoughts, there's this.

"I mean -- it's complicated," said Kyr, and thought about kissing Lisabel -- Lisa -- in that other life, and then for a weird moment about Yiso, somehow, just the way they'd looked at her and said unstoppable, like they really meant it.

When Kyr is trying to define her queerness in her own head, It's Yiso who intrudes into her thoughts.

Tesh even foreshadows it when she has second arc Cleo add a mock surprise "Alien!" after asking if Val's date is male, female, or enby (since she's never known Val to date anyone).

And Yiso is critical at every stage to Kyr's development. In the first arc, it's the fact that Yiso is a person that helps Kyr see all the majo as people. And again, she's deliberately been given a stunted language (T-Standard) on Gaea as her only tool for forming those thoughts, so the complex leaps and associations she's making come through in simple, forced language. But it's her feelings for Yiso that help her make that leap. And she doesn't really acknowledge them until the end, but as in the scene above, the thoughts intrude.

But more than Lisa/Lisabel, that's Kyr's main "romantic" relationship. (Not that it easily fits into such terms both because of who Kyr is and because of who Yiso is. Perhaps queer platonic is a better descriptor.) Her sibling relationship with Mags/Max and to a lesser extent Ursa and sibling-like relationship with the Sparrows and whatever her love/hate relationship with Avi can be called are also critical both to the story and to her development.

Anyway, since I've been thinking about this, that paragraph stood out as a really good example of the way Tesh kept weaving that piece into the story.

Scott wrote: "I guess I was misled by your use of present perfect (I've also never thought). I read it as a statement about a past action (thinking) continuing into the present.

More broadly I'm not surprised t..."

I'm going to say I'm not surprised that people missed it. We're so often ignored in queer literature and television that when we are represented or our relationships are because it is so outside what even most queer people are looking for or expecting.

Hell, I convinced myself that I was reading into it about Kyr once she went on that date because most media, the little there is, show aro aces like me and doesn't even acknowledge grey aces which she very much could be.

Dazerla wrote: "I'm going to say I'm not surprised that people missed it. We're so often ignored in queer literature and television that when we are represented or our relationships are because it is so outside what even most queer people are looking for or expecting."

Emily Tesh's intended representation for Kyr (which is as close as you can get to a fictional character asserting their own identity) was fully quoted from the Listen In episode in my initial post.

I wholly get the challenging relationship with labels she expressed in the quote. I find them incredibly helpful for self-understanding since it's extremely difficult to construct complex thoughts and communicate effectively internally and with others absent sufficient language something Tesh made clear in Kyr's struggles throughout her arc. (It was really interesting to have Val's much more complex language and associated thoughts inserted into an internal dialogue or sometimes commentary in Kyr's head in the last section.) And at the same time they can make me want to throw them out the nearest window. It doesn't help that I can't find language for myself that seems quite ... right.

But with that long aside, I though Kyr came across as full on ace and grey aro. And even the romantic feelings with Lisa were more the result of the shifts, I think. I know on the third shift, there was a comment that others had always thought Kyr had romantic feelings for Lisabel, but Kyr never really resolved that during the story arc. She was struggling with the idea though. I didn't naturally fit. No, I thought the strongest romantic bond she had was with Yiso. (And from the interviews, that was apparently Tesh's intent, though deliberately never reduced to anything that's clearly stated.)

But it's a complex line and every individual draws it differently. So grey ace and shifting her attraction to Lisa to sexual attraction seems fine. Heck, in the context of the novel, *Kyr* doesn't really know how she feels or what it means exactly. And that's pretty spot on representation IMO.

I catalog books for a library and some of the distinctions drawn here have piqued the interest of that part of my mind. I'm taking a look at WorldCat and not really seeing any records for this title that include asexual or aromantic in subject headings. Even where catalogers have gone through and added headings from subject vocabularies that are more inclusive than the Library of Congress, I'm seeing really broad suggestions like LGBTQ+ Fiction or Gay Fiction. This seems to signal to me that the publisher information provided and marketing that was done was pretty non-specific too - probably just "queer science fiction," as you said above.

I have been enjoying this conversation, and it makes me appreciate Tesh's work even more.

Seth wrote: "I catalog books for a library and some of the distinctions drawn here have piqued the interest of that part of my mind. I'm taking a look at WorldCat and not really seeing any records for this titl..."

Yeah, my impression from the interview was that the particular line she chose to set was specifically to keep "lesbian" out of any and all of the material from the publisher. And I understand picking your battles.

But that's a great thing about the present day. It's a lot easier for authors to give insight into aspects of what they intended to do in their work if they choose to share that information than it used to be.

Trying again. There's a question from the Reading Group Guide at the end of the Kindle ebook specifically related to this topic. I tried to post it and include my lengthy response, but since that failed, I at least wanted to post the question. I may try to reproduce my response later. The nature of the question, though, leads me to believe the vagueness of the marketing may have been deliberate. Tesh has described the specific sort of queer representation she intended to write with Kyr, but she may have wanted readers to approach the character with few preconceptions.

8. Is Kyr queer? Whether she is or not, what do you think queerness means for her as a product of a Gaean upbringing? Does a queer character need a romance -- and do you think Kyr gets one?

Okay. Looks like I have a bit of free time, so I'll try to recreate some of the thoughts I wrote earlier. This time I'll remember to copy them first so gremlins can't eat them. ;-)

I found Kyr to be a thoroughly queer character. As I mentioned, I was getting specific sorts of queer vibes from the first couple of chapters. Since that sort of representation is uncommon, I kept wondering if I was reading too much into the character, especially when it seemed like almost nobody else saw the same things I did. When I heard Tesh describe the way she wrote Kyr, it was extremely affirming.

Whether or not Tesh intended to write Kyr that way, I also found her experience of the world around her and the people in it very autistic. I've decided that's going to be part of my reading of the character even if nobody else sees it. I also see how it could have slipped into the character unintentionally. There's a lot more autistic (and other neurodivergent) people percentage-wise in the queer community than in the general population. (There are even academic studies on that point at this juncture.) So if you're writing a specific sort of queer character, especially one in an extreme social and cultural environment, I can see how autistic traits could find their way into the character development even without explicit author intent.

I had actually been reflecting for some time on the specific context of sex and gender in the highly toxic Gaean culture. I would describe it as holding and enforcing very sex negative cultural beliefs along with a rigid and unyielding strict gender binary with narrowly defined gender roles. I found it noteworthy that from the outset that's one area where Kyr appeared to at least partially reject the indoctrination. I wouldn't say she had any sort of sex positive perspective, but she pushed a lot more toward a neutral attitude. She hadn't reported and helped shield the queer couple in her mess long before the novel began. Avi's queerness was the least interesting about him to Kyr. In the conversation with Mags where he tells her he's queer, she dismisses it as important. "It's just sex stuff." For someone who at the outset had accepted almost everything the cult of Gaea had tried to instill in her, that bit of separation stood out to me.

I'll note that's her attitude toward sex in general by others not her personal attitude toward engaging in sex. For ace people, that typically is described using a spectrum from sex favorable (can enjoy sex and sometimes might seek it for other reasons even absent sexual attraction) to sex averse/sex repulsed (even the idea of engaging in sex personally produces strong aversive reactions). I don't know that we have a lot of insight about Kyr's personal attitudes toward engaging in sex. It's pretty clear from the text that as both Kyr and the older Val, sex has never been her thing. My guess would be somewhere in the sex averse to sex neutral range.

I would say that no character, queer or otherwise, ever *needs* a romance. And I say that as a panromantic who loves a good queer romance. Or even a sometimes over the top, ridiculous queer romance. (Check out the Heart of Heroes series by Molly J. Bragg if you're in the mood for queer superhero stories.) I also love straight romances in my stories if done well.

But queer is who you are, not who you aren't or aren't involved with at a specific moment in time. And a queer character does not "need" a romance to be a complete and complex character any more than a straight character does.

When it comes to Kyr, I think Val's unexpected romantic attraction to Lisa was important in helping Kyr develop her self-understanding. I don't feel that she ever really worked out what it could mean when it came to Lisabel. It's phrased in terms of romantic attraction and even has Val wondering if this is what all the fuss was about. (That's the part that made me think 'grey aro' since it's apparently the first time even the older Val had felt that way.) However, the way it was framed as feeling drawn to each, as if they already knew each other, felt a lot like influence from the universe shift.

I did think the relationship that slowly developed between Yiso and Kyr had a lot of romantic vibes to it. Obviously they are very different species but as much as she tried to deny that she cared about Yiso at various points, it was her recognition that they were a person that helped her shift to the point where she saw all the Majo as people. And it felt very much reciprocated from Yiso's side as well. By the end of the novel, their relationship had grown quite intimate. That's one aspect that left me curious about what might happen after the end of the novel. That's the closest I really felt to anything like romance with Kyr. I loved their last exchange in the text.

"Well," said Kyr. "Lucky us."

"Lucky you," said Yiso. "I'm suddenly faced with a future with staff practice in it."

Kyr laughed. "I'll be gentle."

"You're worse than the Wisdom," Yiso said. "The Wisdom wasn't having fun." But their silver eyes were shining.

It had an intimate and comfortable romantic feel for me.