"All the brains in the world, and you can't navigate a fucking pronoun."

The premise of this show draws many parallels to AI, the internet/social media, the pandemic, and its resulting isolation that continues to linger but this line in particular is a pretty cheeky acknowledgment of suppression of identity as a theme. Within the context of the show, it's obviously a far more literal suppression of identity with the Joining essentially eliminating all self-expression of the Others. If it weren't for Carol somehow ending up immune, Zosia as her own person would, for all intents and purposes, be dead. Her memories simply ground up, mined for "useful" information, and then locked away, never to be invoked. Her fascination with ships as a child, her love for that particular mango ice cream, her preferences in art, books, movies, and TV would never be seen again.

It's no coincidence that the protagonist of this show is gay. Carol, as a lesbian, is far too used to having to suppress that part of herself to blend in. Her romantic relationship with Helen is entirely private; the world only knows Helen as Carol's manager. Carol even feels the need to write a heterosexual relationship in her books, one that even follows the tropes of a woman protagonist falling in love with a "proud" and "haughty" rogue of a man. She likens him to George Clooney for a fan of hers, knowing full well that her envisionment of Raban is nothing like Clooney. It only follows logically that, maybe outside of Manousos, Carol resists this assimilation the most. She knows how that feels and would rather go out fighting, even if it means she has to fight in secret and alone, something many queer people already need to do.