Okay, it may be obvious by now that I'm ALREADY doing a re-read of your Askazer-Shivadlakia books (I really want it to be Ashkazer because it's how my brain first read it, but alas....)
On to Infinite Jes--when I read it the first time, I saw Noah calling Jes "Boss" because they work together. Now I realize it is, or could be, a gender-neutral word for parent.
If they didn't work together, would this still be what Noah called Jes?
As a parent myself, I think "boss" is a pretty reductive word, so I'm curious about what it means to Noah and Jes.
LOL, hey, I've re-read them a handful of times, no reason anyone else shouldn't. :D
Essentially I think of Boss as a term of endearment -- you might say "she's my boss" or "he's the boss" but you don't generally call someone just "boss" to their face, unless you have some other kind of relationship to them as well. It's a very casual thing to do, at least to my mind.
I have the process of all this written out somewhere but I think it's in bits and pieces scattered across last March or April. To summarize, I did a survey where I asked, essentially, if you're a nonbinary parent or the child of one, what parental term do you use? and I got a lot of specific terms, but also general discussion -- for example, some kids use the term of the parent's assigned-gender-at-birth, and others use a term that most fits the parent's "role" (ie, a nonbinary person who leans more masculine might be "dad" regardless of their gender identity/AGAB). Above a certain age it seems like most kids use the parent's name, but it's by no means universal.
None of the specific terms resonated for me with Jes and Noah's relationship. Some I didn't like the sound of, others just didn't feel quite accurate, especially for use by a child on the cusp of adulthood. Noah's old enough not to use a gendered term, but "parent" in direct address felt too formal, and something like "rent" or "renny" felt disrespectful in this context (to be clear I think these are fine objectively, and I'm not here to say what you should or shouldn't call a parent, but for this specific relationship it felt wrong). I felt weird making up a gender-neutral Shivadh term for parent, since then I'd have to do at least a brief exposition dump about what the term was and what it meant.
The only thing that did resonate was the idea of Jes and Noah figuring out a term together. Jes has always given Noah a lot of well-supported autonomy, so it made sense that once he was old enough, he'd have a full vote in what he was going to call them. Boss was convenient as it was evident Noah was eventually going to be working with them on the podcast, and it was catchier to my ear (and thus Noah's) than some other terms.
Within their relationship, it acknowledges that Jes has the ultimate authority as parent, but also that they aren't actually in an employer-employee situation, that there's a deeper bond between them and a more comprehensive expectation of care from Jes. It says "I know the buck stops with you, but you have a duty to look out for me and treat me like a person."
For another kind of parent-child relationship I would probably choose something different, but Boss feels to me like it suits them in the way they have of like -- obviously being a loving family, but also being very Shivadh in their trolling of each other. I think even if they didn't work together, they'd probably both find "boss" pretty apt.
But also, you know, I really think it does depend on the parent and child, so I could see how you wouldn't want your kid to call you that, which is perfectly legit. Boss is definitely not some platonic ideal, it's just what Noah and Jes cobbled together without much in the way of a handbook for this kind of thing.
Anyway if you use any term for anything long enough it starts to sound natural to your ear, and that idea is doing quite a bit of heavy lifting for "boss" -- by the time I was done with the book it sounded as natural to me as "mom" or "dad". So it could be I'm just more acclimated to it. :D
