klapollo fans have you seen the new drama cds from the trilogy it is so gay. first one has apollo, phoenix and ema going to klav's solo concert and apollo changing his mind on klav's music because of their experiences together in court and geeking out and then klav invites him on stage to duet love love guilty together. this is so huge this is enormous bro. look at this. polly sounds so cute
EDIT: ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE WHOLE THING IN THE REPLIES
Smthn about escapism and why someone (me) might choose to stay with Kinito even tho he was a bit mean and also didn’t like that u had freewill lol
Also a little bit of thinking abt how Kinito and the Player Who Stays (the Stayer???) share a lot of parallels (working hard to deserve nice things, crippling loneliness, selfish reasons for clinging to one another, self awareness, dissatisfaction/disappointment with their respective realities leading to them idealizing the concept of each other, etc etc)
(The song lyrics are from ‘Woof woof’ by ARTHUR. It took a few listens to rlly appreciate it, now it scratches my brain in v nice ways)
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.