She is a buggirl who grew up in a hive of intelligent ant people

It was EXTREMELY hierarchical

Krikree is a scout

Her job is to go to new places and learn what is there, then bring back information to the hive

She’s not stupid

But she’s used to living in a world where independent thinking is punished

And is used to mainly communicating by pheromones

So when actually speaking she uses extremely simplistic vocabulary and syntax

Anyway then one day she meets some humans who try to make friends with her because they need a guide to bug world

Plot happens, there’s a whole war

Krikree ends up leaving her hive and joining the human hive

Where she becomes a kind of goofy mascot character for a while as she struggles to make sense of human society through the lens of bug society

Trying to figure out who the queens are. Being scared of people expecting her to have her own opinions and goals

It’s very cute and a little tiring

But she’s a scout

Her job is to go to new places and understand them

And you can just really see her TRYING

Even if it means she decides farmers are a kind of beetle

When the character goes from good to great, however

Is when the rest of the cast needs to leave her behind for a while

So they take her to an Arbaian philosophy school

Arbaians are like big rock people

And they just leave her there for like a month

Finally they come back and find that this buggirl who speaks in broken barely comprehensible sentences

And discover dhe actually spent the last month learning philosophy

So now she’s still talking in broken sentences, but she knows what tautologies and semiotics are

I love the author, she's so good at worldbuilding and creating completely different perspectives.

She is scouting

Theo-sister is Theo-sister! Name is signifier, not identity!

Even when what she’s scouting is herself

Best Girl

I'm saying this from only having read a little Weirkey but the same intriguing attention to worldbuilding and details can be found in some of her porn games lol

Anyways I really should read more Weirkey.

krikree is so good

first time she meets an Arbaian

something I love about Weirkey is how you can get impressions of how some of the alien languages are constructed

like krikree clearly has specific bespoke pheromones for "not" and "what" that she's used to using

and ichili clearly uses honorific prefixes

Thr dialog is very distinctive

Even if you stripped out all the names, you can usually read a conversation and identify who is speaking just by how they talk

quinn2win: there’s actually a bit I missed before where Fiyu is the viewpoint character and she notes that she almost called Theo “Friend Theo” out loud

And that doing so would be inappropriate

ichili social etiquette is very complex

So I don’t know if the Ichili actually do that in spoken language

well it has to come from somewhere

but saying the honorific out loud in some circumstances might feel too forward

like, an anime character almost not using honorifics for someone

I do know that because Ichil is so dark, the Ichili don’t really have a written language the way we think of them

I kinda want to do a plurk talking about succubi culture in the Last Sovereign game (by the same author). Because it's surprisingly fascinating.

I was just wondering what the ichili honorific for annoying coworkers would be

Some who is ostensibly an ally that you can’t stay away from due to social obligations, but who you find intensely irritating

....

probably Associate

kajarainbow: last sovereign is by Sarah Lin?

Overbringer: Under her Sierra Lee alias yes.

Wild

I didn’t know she did porn.

The porn is... really interesting lol in how much it thinks about stuff plus all the characterization and such lol

Anyways Weirkey is what I would expect from her writing a more serious fantasy work.

Well, not more serious.

A non-porn fantasy work I mean.

Her porn work is just as serious as her non-porn work lol

Anyways, back to Weirkey!

I played a bit of Last Sovereign, but RPGs are just so much not my thing

Yeah weirkey

I love Krikree just from your talking about her and I can't wait to meet her in the books.

I think I'll make Weirkey my next reading project.

I can't remember how she got to calling Theo "theo-sister" and not theo-brother

At first her understanding of the human hive was that Kathina was the Queen and Theo was a soldier serving under her

And all soldier caste ants are female

ahh

Anyways I'm gonna just leave this plurk and actually read the books.

She just thinks about gender differently

And Theo doesn’t care about gender enough to correct her

it's just like me fr

Theo is absolutely nonbinary, even if he uses he/him

He just does not care about it enough to think about pronouns and most people look at him and assume masc

and krikree judges genders by social role, not by appearance

(She calls Theo “Ivo” for a while because Theo has a variety of false identities)

I love the Mundhim, as a race of giant stone monsters who are nature trend towards philosophical and long winded

She eventually settles on “what” for Navim’s category

Theo-sister. Kathina-queen. Navim-what

That was definitely one of them

honestly a good way to handle senka