The great part about Breq and her gun is how vitally central the gun was in her plan. When you think about how she spent 19 years on a plan that apparently started with “join a religious order and work my way up until I get an opportunity to get filthy rich risking my life in Space Political Deathball” and ended with “find gun that may or may not even exist and use it to shoot one clone of the immortal thousand bodied emperor” it really highlights how she truly was insane in a spaceship way. Like, there HAD to have been easier ways of taking out a single Anaander, if she was determined to spend the rest of her life on that. Going after the lost magic mythical gun was not the most logical approach.
I think part of the issue was that for most of its existence, Justice of Toren really only ever had to be afraid of one (1) weapon and so when it tried to think of the best weapon to kill Anaander Mianaai it naturally went for the one it had been afraid of.
I agree! but fascinating that this doesn’t come through in the narrative, part of how Breq generally elides any and all of her feelings around events at Garsedd
and also either character-defining or indicative of the “AI type of insanity” mentioned in canon that she comes up with that goal and then so single-mindedly dedicates herself to it despite the impracticality
i always felt like having an epic goal that would take as long as possible was kind of the point. drawing the thing out, you know?
All of this is true, but at the same time, I think you’re overstating things a bit.
For one thing, yes, it takes her twenty years to get the money and then the gun. But I don’t know that Breq is used to considering things on a human timescale. Twenty years is nothing to an AI, that’s an eyeblink. Ships and stations are effectively immortal, unless they are killed in a battle or something. How many thousands of years old is Justice of Toren by that point? And it may be reduced to one ancillary, but that ancillary isn’t old; it’s got time. What else is JoT/Breq going to do with the ancillary’s life? She’s not expecting to survive, after all. She might as well put in the time to make it really epic.
She’s got the time. A few years here, a few years there, it’ll add up, but she’ll still be capable of carrying things out. There’s no rush. She can be patient, implacable. It’s a very AI/ship perspective, but I wouldn’t call it crazy or insane.
The other thing is, you have to consider her goals. Breq doesn't just want to kill an Anaander, she wants to kill her while all of Anaander is watching, so the divide between the two Anaanders can’t be concealed. (And thus, what Anaander--both of them--did to her can’t be concealed.)
There are many easy ways to kill an Anaander. There are a lot of Anaanders walking around, and if you pick an older one there won’t even be any bodyguards, we saw that on Shis’urna. Walk up, snap its neck, boom, done. Probably happens all the time.
Except that won’t get the attention Breq wants. It will be absolutely useless. She’ll just be “random person snaps, gets re-educated.” It won’t get her Anaander’s attention.
If she wants to get the attention of multiple Anaanders, so that they’re both paying attention and it can’t be hushed up, it pretty much has to be on a palace station in a temple in a formal audience. And if you want to kill an Anaander there, that is much harder. The station will see everything, it will see any weapon you bring on station, so you can’t use a weapon. And there are guards at the beck and call. Even an ancillary might not be able to kill an Anaander in the middle of a Palace temple without a weapon, and you can’t get a weapon.
Unless you get a weapon that station can’t see.
Also, while Breq is affected by Garsedd, we know there is someone who is far more affected by Garsedd, and that is Anaander Mianaai. All the trouble, all the conflict, all the internal fighting that is becoming a civil war, it all starts there. Anaander became a house divided against herself because of what she did at Garsedd. If you want to absolutely rivet the attention of all Anaander segments out there, pull out the missing Garseddai gun.
And with that gun, you might even be able to kill multiple Anaanders before they take you down, even in the middle of a palace temple.
Believing she’ll be able to find the weapon that all the Radch agents couldn’t ... that was hubris. But she was right that it would be the most effective way to achieve her goals, if she could manage it. And she had the twenty years to spare. And if it didn’t work out, she could always go for a simpler way of killing an Anaander. So why not?
