II.4:

After Bloch's little humiliation kink sesh we get Maya and the gang doing the Murati thing where they've never seen the class divide before, made more funny by how Serrano is literally divided vertically by class. Nice to see her order some heads smashed by rifle butts and such, and now we get to see the liberation!

A liberation effort which has cool prison abolition beats, but quickly turns briefly goofy alongside Marceau and Nadia's awoo-nyaa antics. Newly liberated Mayor's office in an Imperial hellhole? Gay sex.

Man the liberation is like a fuckin' disaster relief effort though, for what was ostensibly a functioning society. Loads of people freed from the Empire's prisons, stock taken of inadequate housing and living conditions, fuckloads of rations handed out. It might look like this if my town was spontaneously taken over by socialists ( ) too. If near any town or city in an imperial core country were. Even in the "less bad" ones, probably, homelessness being such a problem in North America as a whole lately.

In the meantime, capitalism ground on. Prices went up, and the market shock was particularly used by landlords to raise rents. Motivations ranged variously from anticipation of market hardships due to rising prices in other goods, to simply wanting to be rid of undesirable Serrano tenants in the hopes they might house richer Rhinean residents if a deal with the Volkisch came through. Houselessness in Serrano rose steadily for the past few weeks to a whopping 20%. Then, when the masses of the poor on the streets became unsightly, Serrano engaged in beating them out of the busine districts with police violence.

Hey wait this is just like real life, right now! I can look out my window and see that, near enough! Madiha put the man-made horrors in the famous online webnovel, nice

II.5: Meow, nyaa

New Karach Station is neat because it was a literal architectural symbol of Imperial slavery and industry, and the Union turned it inside out with the help of its Shimii populace, turning cramped under-seafloor living spaces into storefronts, distribution centres and such. The above-seafloor portion got turned into the living space for its cat residents, which is neat - turns out all this bullshit the Empire ordered built by back-breaking labour can be repurposed to cool and liberating ends, I dig it.

Good to see that Ahwalia's entire faction is apparently as fuckin racist as the Bosporan Anarchists are, and getting the lowdown on Omarov's revolutionary actions and his proposal to join the Union shows the rest of those clowns how it's done right: not being a fuckin racist coloniser weirdo. Mutual respect, even. There's not actually a good reason for the Bosporans or the Ahwalian faction to be derisive and bigoted toward their Shimii neighbours, they just can't help it, I guess. It strikes me again how the anarchists just barged into Khaybar Pass and refused to really consider its people's needs and requirements, letting one of their envoys be a racist freak. Sucks to suck.

So I like seeing what a good outcome looks like instead, II.5 kinda serves as a mirror to the Khaybar Pass chapters, bears for the reader the benefits of intersectionality. I was gonna end it there but Oh man, Lehner

Tale as old as time: Fashy Daddy dealing with metalworkers on strike in the wake of his fleet getting yeeted has to call in his personal militia to break the strike, except the militia-leader is his child and trans faildaughter whom he's weird and transphobic toward. My favourite kind of guy, floods my mind with images of Natasha from The Last Girl Scout. There is always a fashy trans faildaughter in these things, I suppose. Unfunny! I wonder what her fate will be!

With that, I am onto Anthology Two, real Weltgeist hours who up? Smash that upbear button for more, hopefully shorter liveblogging about a smash-hit best-selling webnovel.