enemyofperfect | very important Imperial Radch headcanon

In many parts of the Radch, very young children can go bare-handed without offending propriety, but there are a few places where hand coverings may be required for even the youngest citizens at certain times.

And while you can, of course, purchase adaptive gloves that will mold themselves neatly around the fingers of even the squirmiest infant -- although they're more often sold in larger sizes to adult citizens who for one reason or another prefer them to the static kind -- most parents and caretakers opt to dress their young ones in mittens, instead.

An added benefit of this headcanon is the possibility of Seivarden e.g. exclaiming of a particularly simple (yet classic!) variant of counters, "I haven't played that since I was in mittens!" Which, depending on where in the Radch her various listeners had spent their formative years, would be either entirely unexceptionable, entirely opaque (what are mittens?) or vaguely scandalous (surely it can't be proper to expose children to nonstandard gloves?)

See also