Apologies for late comment, I was at a fairly intense workshop and didn't have much spare headspace.
I really like your observation about visual reading because the inability to visualise was thing that took me longest to get used to until I figured out that all the Radch basically looked like Boy George (or possibly Boy George in a fancy uniform)* and then it all sort of fell into place visually for me. Though, now I think back, that doesn't account for the pronoun confusions outside of Radch space where you would have expected gender to be more clearly marked. I think "she" was a better default than "he", but I think you could be correct that a made up pronoun would have worked better.
*Well perhaps not Boy George exactly, because that would have been very silly, but I realised they dressed ambiguously so it probably was very difficult to tell. I guess I was visualising more some of the more fey characters in some Anime who are often military, but it can be pretty tricky in some cases to figure out gender.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2016-06-04 06:57 pm (UTC)I really like your observation about visual reading because the inability to visualise was thing that took me longest to get used to until I figured out that all the Radch basically looked like Boy George (or possibly Boy George in a fancy uniform)* and then it all sort of fell into place visually for me. Though, now I think back, that doesn't account for the pronoun confusions outside of Radch space where you would have expected gender to be more clearly marked. I think "she" was a better default than "he", but I think you could be correct that a made up pronoun would have worked better.
*Well perhaps not Boy George exactly, because that would have been very silly, but I realised they dressed ambiguously so it probably was very difficult to tell. I guess I was visualising more some of the more fey characters in some Anime who are often military, but it can be pretty tricky in some cases to figure out gender.