YMMV / Imperial Radch

• First Installment Wins: Ancillary Justice is viewed by many to be the best of the trilogy and is sometimes used as shorthand to refer to the entire series; while the other books are not considered bad, it's more that they're not up to the caliber of the first, being more conventional Space Navy stories.
• Funny Moments: Sphene disowning Breq over singing a Radchaai equivalent of Ten Thousand Bottles of Beer on the Wall.
  • Stoic, Cultured Badass Breq singing the Radchaai equivalent of Ten Thousand Bottles of Beer on the Wall.
  Breq: A thousand eggs all nice and warm. Crack, crack, crack, a little chick is born. Peep peep peep peep! Peep peep peep peep!
  Zeiat: Why, Fleet Captain, that's a charming song! Why haven't I heard you sing it before now?
  Breq: Nine hundred ninety-nine eggs all nice and warm...
  Sphene: We are no longer family.
  • Also, the in-universe drunken Buffalaxing of "My heart is a fish" by Mercy of Kalr's Bo Decade. "Oh, tree! Where is my ass?"
• Heartwarming Moments: Justice of Toren One Esk being trusted enough by a suddenly frightened child that the child takes its hand, and responding by reassuring the child. For this impassive-seeming AI this is an incredibly caring gesture.
  • Breq confessing and apologizing to Awn's sister, and being forgiven.
  • Mercy Of Kalr and Seivarden comforting Breq after she loses her leg, and Ship essentially telling her that both it and Breq are capable of love, and it using Seivarden (who loves Breq anyway) to express its affection since it's without a physical body itself.
  • Seivarden getting over herself and apologizing to Ekalu, and later when they fully reconcile.
  • Basically anything relating to Breq and the crew of Mercy Of Kalr once they become loyal to her.
• Moral Event Horizon: What many saw the eradication of Garseddai as, including Anaander Mianaai herself.
• The Woobie: Tiswarat. A seventeen-year old administrator trainee, fresh out of academy who's redirected to a classified military operation due to a civil war and dies when Anaander Mianaai forcibly overwrites her personality using unstable cybernetic implants. Breq forcibly removes Anaander from the body, leaving behind a 'new' Tiswarat with memories, impressions and the mental outlook of both having been a naive seventeen-year old Ensign Newbie and having been the three thousand year old lord of the Radch. This is combined in one teenaged body that has now been messed up by the implants and personality overwrite, forcing Tiswarat to spend the rest of her life on mood stabilizers just to remain sane. It's notable that when she uses a nervous breakdown as part of a Batman Gambit in book three, Breq notes that the tears and breakdown are genuine even if her reasons for having them are not.

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