#anyway. to fire-hydrant information: imagine pulling the outlet cap off of a fire hydrant. but with information

[hiddeninthe-veil]

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In the fanfiction series pray for disaster (when the world is razed we’ll still be burning) by the Archive Of Our Own user Omegalomania, also known as Zero or @graffitibible on Tumblr, there are a variety of words used by characters to indicate a person’s gender identity. These do not match up with our world’s concepts of gender. These words (starshine, earthshine, luneshine, and ringshine) are based on the word “sunshine.” As the society this series is based in is a very informal, unregulated one, “sunshine” takes the place of the formal “person” and informal “guy,” “bro,” or “dude,” albeit in a much more gender-neutral way than either of the latter. This is, at least, the case for the second generation of Killjoys, whose worldview and times we are the most sunk into. Four books are solely about this second generation, more page-time than any of the other three generations we see are given.

Starshine is the Zones’ word for “person who uses he/him.” Luneshine means “person who uses they/them.” Earthshine means “she/her,” and ringshine means “person who uses something different from the above (i.e. it/its or e/em, etc.).” “Woman” and “man” seem to have lost their meanings sometime during the first generation of Killjoys— during the Analog Wars. “Woman” appears only ten times in Peacemaker’s story; seven of those times, Peacemaker is referring to herself. “Man,” (as its own word, not part of “many” or various other words, as far as I can discern quickly) appears only a few more times than that, but no more than thirty times. The books told from the perspectives of the Fabulous Four have as few or fewer mentions; likewise, the Girl’s book only has one mention of the word “woman,” which is in reference to Battery City’s Director. “Woman” and “man”, as labels for a gender identity, became obsolete in the first generation of Killjoys, during the Analog Wars, and were replaced at some point by the various “-shine”s.

I tried to find a closer look at when they may have appeared. Peacemaker, who had not heard of these words, was dracked (brainwashed) in 2012; yet, when Party Poison and the Kobra Kid escape Battery City, all of the words are in widespread use. This means the words must have popped up between those dates. Fun Ghoul’s perspective, we put the faith back in mayhem (it's important to enjoy what you do), reenforces this; all four pop up when he's around thirteen or fourteen. In a comment made on January 10, 2024 on don't tell me to rest in peace while you're still picking the bones of my memory, the author notes that he was eighteen or nineteen when they died in 2019, meaning he was born in 2000 or 2001. Through other context, I was able to figure out that the words were spreading over the radio waves in late 2013 or early 2014. Ghoul escaped Battery City in mid- or late-2012, in the confusion of the Fires of 2012 when the Analog Wars were ended. Shortly before NewsAGoGo, who Ghoul is staying with, mentions any of the ‘shines (Faith, ¼ of the way through chapter 3), Ghoul mentions that he escaped the city “maybe a year, maybe longer” ago (Faith, 1/6 through the way through chapter 3). From this, we can determine that use of the ‘shines was definitely widespread by mid-2014.

This can be narrowed down, however. Kobra mentions the Analog Wars ending (They Made, two-thirds of the way through chapter 1) just before a quick montage of how his training changes as a result of the Wars ending; after this montage, he mentions that he is “thirteen years old, on the leaderboard for a year and counting” (They Made, three quarters of the way through chapter 1). 9 months later, “less than three months from final exams” (They Made, three-quarters of the way through chapter 2), he escapes the City with his brother. "Final exams" were to be taken when he turned fourteen. Therefore, my hypothesis is that the Analog Wars ended at least two, and at most six, months before he turned thirteen. This leaves a gap between the Analog Wars ending and his escape of at least eleven and at most fifteen months for the generation and propagation of the terms. At the very earliest, the ‘shines would have been in widespread use in mid-2013. At the very latest, they would have popped up in early 2014.

How, though, might the words have spread, and what (in-universe) could have possibly inspired them? The first question is easy to answer: the DJs, the voices of the desert, spread a truly ludicrous amount of slang around the desert. They are the reason that Killjoys have any sort of cohesive culture and vocabulary. I assume that most widespread slang, such as “shiny” (meaning good) and “red-line” (to vacate a place quickly) would have originated in a crew with a good relationship with a DJ, who would have then used said slang as a way to further encode messages over the radio.

My personal theory is that Show Pony had a key role to play in the inspiring and spreading of the ‘shines. They were close to a DJ during the timeline under scrutiny. As a nonbinary person, they would have a personal interest in generating and propagating some sort of words to easily communicate pronouns. They might have been far from the ‘original’ nonbinary person we hear of in the Zones (that title might go to El Antagonista or Zero Percent, both members of the First Killjoys), but they are shown to have enough creativity to come up with the terms, and enough sass and charisma to force them into general use.

What could have inspired the terms in-universe is a harder nut to crack. Out-of-universe, the author made a tumblr post talking about how they were inspired by the canon use of “sunshine” and used various astronomy terms to expand on the concept. However, in our world today, connecting the earth to femininity, the stars to masculinity, and the moon or astronomical rings to androgyny is a bit of a stretch. I assume, at least, that (as in our world) pronouns would originally be connected to whatever concepts of gender theory were still floating around after the apocalypse which took place in the late 1990s, even if they concepts became divorced later. Having brainstormed with multiple people on the idea, my best guess is some sort of advertisement campaign connected astronomical terms with gender in the minds of the general populace of Battery City. I am able to extrapolate further, but I will head way too far into the weeds with this, so I’m not going to go there.

So the ‘shines were a contribution to the common slang by the second generation- what did the other generations contribute to ~gender~? The third generation contributed both the combining of various ‘shines to show the use of multiple pronoun sets, alongside the broadening of the term “sunshine.” Whereas before “sunshine” had simply meant “person,” it was shifted to be also used as an identity in the same way the rest of the ‘shines were- “sunshine” became “person who does not have a preference in pronouns used for them” (Messiah, halfway through chapter 3). Before this, the only option for a person without a preference in pronouns, such as Fun Ghoul, was to say “no preference” in response to the unspoken question of someone calling them “sunshine” (Faith, halfway through chapter 4). There was also a de-gendering of “no preference / sunshine;” Fun Ghoul, despite never expressing a preference, is only ever referred to using he/they pronouns. Young Menace of the Defenders crew, on the other hand, is liberally referred to using all three pronoun sets.

I theorize that if the fourth generation of Killjoys had continued in this way, four more terms would have appeared, using “sun” as either a prefix or suffix, meaning “all pronouns, but with a preference on the other half of the word.” For example, sunstar could mean “any pronouns, but with more he and him than anything else.” This is, however, pure speculation on my part, and not to be taken as anything more.