#shuttle to phoenix

[courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme]

X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019, Simon Kinberg)

21/01/2025

[avalior]

While it was strongly claimed during Cosmic Turnabout that Clay caused Solomon's unconsciousness by overdosing him on his anxiety medication, this was not the case.

Solomon's PTSD would likely be treated with SSRIs, with the most likely prescriptions being venlafaxine, sertraline, or paroxetine. Of these three, only sertraline has an explicit side effect of potential loss of consciousness -- however, experiencing this side effect would be cause for hospitalisation and would not be conducive to space travel once Solomon was conscious. The only other alternative would be to cause serotonin syndrome by forcing Solomon's serotonin levels to spike beyond control, through either a medication overdose or combining his existing medication with other tablets to raise his serotonin.

However, serotonin syndrome would also run considerable risk of seizures and arrhythmia, which again would not be conducive to space travel and would be far too inexact as to how much of the medication to give Solomon without a) killing him b) causing him to be entirely unfit for space travel, rather than just knocked out for the launch and c) causing any of the other side effects of serotonin syndrome instead of unconsciousness in isolation.

This also does not tally with Simon explicitly stating that traces of medication were found in Solomon's system -- presuming Solomon had blood drawn shortly following Clay's attempted murder being discovered and police arriving, there is no feasible way that Solomon's unconsciousness could have been induced by his medication as the volume needed to cause the unconsciousness would show in far higher quantities in bloodwork than just "traces".

In truth, Clay assisted Yuri in 'managing' Solomon's anxiety with the launch by including generic sleeping tablets in his usual medication, passing them off as additional vitamins and assisting in this deception by taking visually similar actual vitamins himself. It was these tablets which caused Solomon's loss of consciousness for the HAT-2 launch; far safer than hamfistedly overdosing Solomon on his medication until he caused unconsciousness.

Clay worked under the assumption, with Yuri's deceitful confirmation, that the drugging was consensual and Solomon was aware of this potential plan, with Solomon being consensually unaware of the details as to avoid further anxiety. Following his recovery from the Phantom's attack, once he is medically cleared, Clay does stand trial for Solomon's spiking on charges of infliction of bodily harm.

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[robinlauren29]

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

FTC vs surveillance pricing

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

In the mystical cosmology of economics, "prices" are of transcendental significance, the means by which the living market knows and adapts itself, giving rise to "efficient" production and consumption.

At its most basic level, the metaphysics of pricing goes like this: if there is less of something for sale than people want to buy, the seller will raise the price until enough buyers drop out and demand equals supply. If the disappointed would-be buyers are sufficiently vocal about their plight, other sellers will enter the market (bankrolled by investors who sense an opportunity), causing supplies to increase and prices to fall until the system is in "equilibrium" – producing things as cheaply as possible in precisely the right quantities to meet demand. In the parlance of neoclassical economists, prices aren't "set": they are discovered.

In antitrust law, there are many sins, but they often boil down to "price setting." That is, if a company has enough "market power" that they can dictate prices to their customers, they are committing a crime and should be punished. This is such a bedrock of neoclassical economics that it's a tautology "market power" exists where companies can "set prices"; and to "set prices," you need "market power."

Prices are the blood cells of the market, shuttling nutrients (in the form of "information") around the sprawling colony organism composed of all the buyers, sellers, producers, consumers, intermediaries and other actors. Together, the components of this colony organism all act on the information contained in the "price signals" to pursue their own self-interest. Each self-interested action puts more information into the system, triggering more action. Together, price signals and the actions they evince eventually "discover" the price, an abstraction that is yanked out of the immaterial plane of pure ideas and into our grubby, physical world, causing mines to re-open, shipping containers and pipelines to spark to life, factories to retool, trucks to fan out across the nation, retailers to place ads and hoist SALE banners over their premises, and consumers to race to those displays and open their wallets.

When prices are "distorted," all of this comes to naught. During the notorious "socialist calculation debate" of 1920s Austria, right-wing archdukes of religious market fundamentalism, like Von Hayek and Von Mises, trounced their leftist opponents, arguing that the market was the only computational system capable of calculating how much of each thing should be made, where it should be sent, and how much it should be sold for.

Attempts to "plan" the economy – say, by subsidizing industries or limiting prices – may be well-intentioned, but they broke the market's computations and produced haywire swings of both over- and underproduction. Later, the USSR's planned economy did encounter these swings. These were sometimes very grave (famines that killed millions) and sometimes silly (periods when the only goods available in regional shops were forks, say, creating local bubbles in folk art made from forks).

Unplanned markets do this too. Most notoriously, capitalism has produced a vast oversupply of carbon-intensive goods and processes, and a huge undersupply of low-carbon alternatives, bringing the human civilization to the brink of collapse. Not only have capitalism's price signals failed to address this existential crisis to humans, it has also sown the seeds of its own ruin – the market computer's not going to be getting any "price signals" from people as they drown in floods or roast to death on sidewalks that deliver second-degree burns to anyone who touches them:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91151209/extreme-heat-southwest-phoenix-surface-burns-scorching-pavement-sidewalks-pets

For market true believers, these failures are just evidence that regulation is distorting markets, and that the answer is more unregulated markets to infuse the computer with more price signals. When it comes to carbon, the problem is that producers are "producing negative externalities" (that is, polluting and sticking us with the bill). If we can just get them to "internalize" those costs, they will become "economically rational" and switch to low-carbon alternatives.

That's the theory behind the creation and sale of carbon credits. Rather than ordering companies to stop risking civilizational collapse and mass extinction, we can incentivize them to do so by creating markets that reward clean tech and punish dirty practices. The buying and selling of carbon credits is supposed to create price signals reflecting the existential risk to the human race and the only habitable planet known to our species, which the market will then "bring into equilibrium."

Unfortunately, reality has a distinct and unfair leftist bias. Carbon credits are a market for lemons. The carbon credits you buy to "offset" your car or flight are apt to come from a forest that has already burned down, or that had already been put in a perpetual trust as a wildlife preserve and could never be logged:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/18/greshams-carbon-law/#papal-indulgences

Carbon credits produce the most perverse outcomes imaginable. For example, much of Tesla's profitability has been derived from the sale of carbon credits to the manufacturers of the dirtiest, most polluting SUVs on Earth; without those Tesla credits, those SUVs would have been too expensive to sell, and would not have existed:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

What's more, carbon credits aren't part of an "all of the above" strategy that incorporates direct action to prevent our species downfall. These market solutions are incompatible with muscular direct action, and if we do credits, we can't do other stuff that would actually work:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff

Even though price signals have repeatedly proven themselves to be an insufficient mechanism for producing "efficient" or even "survivable," they remain the uppermost spiritual value in the capitalist pantheon. Even through the last 40 years of unrelenting assaults on antitrust and competition law, the one form of corporate power that has remained both formally and practically prohibited is "pricing power."

That's why the DoJ was able to block tech companies and major movie studios from secretly colluding to suppress their employees' wages, and why those employees were able to get huge sums out of their employers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

It's also why the Big Six (now Big Five) publishers and Apple got into so much trouble for colluding to set a floor on the price of ebooks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_(2012)

When it comes to monopoly, even the most Bork-pilled, Manne-poisoned federal judges and agencies have taken a hard line on price-fixing, because "distortions" of prices make the market computer crash.

But despite this horror of price distortions, America's monopolists have found so many ways to manipulate prices. Last month, The American Prospect devoted an entire issue to the many ways that monopolies and cartels have rigged the prices we pay, pushing them higher and higher, even as our wages stagnated and credit became more expensive:

https://prospect.org/pricing

For example, there's the plague of junk fees (AKA "drip pricing," or, if you're competing to be first up against the wall come the revolution, "ancillary revenue"), everything from baggage fees from airlines to resort fees at hotels to the fee your landlord charges if you pay your rent by check, or by card, or in cash:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

There's the fake transparency gambit, so beloved of America's hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The "greedflation" that saw grocery prices skyrocketing, which billionaire grocery plutes blamed on covid stimulus checks, even as they boasted to their shareholders about their pricing power:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-12-war-in-the-aisles/

There's the the tens of billions the banks rake in with usurious interest rates, far in excess of the hikes to the central banks' prime rates (which are, in turn, justified in light of the supposed excesses of covid relief checks):

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-11-what-we-owe/

There are the scams that companies like Amazon pull with their user interfaces, tricking you into signing up for subscriptions or upsells, which they grandiosely term "dark patterns," but which are really just open fraud:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-10-one-click-economy/

There are "surge fees," which are supposed to tempt more producers (e.g. Uber drivers) into the market when demand is high, but which are really just an excuse to gouge you – like when Wendy's threatens to surge-price its hamburgers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-07-urge-to-surge/

And then there's surveillance pricing, the most insidious and profitable way to jack up prices. At its core, surveillance pricing uses nonconsensually harvested private information to inform an algorithm that reprices the things you buy – from lattes to rent – in real-time:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Companies like Plexure – partially owned by McDonald's – boasts that it can use surveillance data to figure out what your payday is and then hike the price of the breakfast sandwich or after-work soda you buy every day.

Like every bad pricing practice, surveillance pricing has its origins in the aviation industry, which invested early on and heavily in spying on fliers to figure out how much they could each afford for their plane tickets and jacking up prices accordingly. Architects of these systems then went on to found companies like Realpage, a data-brokerage that helps landlords illegally collude to rig rent prices.

Algorithmic middlemen like Realpage and ATPCO – which coordinates price-fixing among the airlines – are what Dan Davies calls "accountability sinks." A cartel sends all its data to a separate third party, which then compares those prices and tells everyone how much to jack them up in order to screw us all:

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

These price-fixing middlemen are everywhere, and they predate the boom in commercial surveillance. For example, Agri-Stats has been helping meatpackers rig the price of meat for 40 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

But when you add commercial surveillance to algorithmic pricing, you get a hybrid more terrifying than any cocaine-sharks (or, indeed, meth-gators):

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291

Apologists for these meth-gators insist that surveillance pricing's true purpose is to let companies offer discounts. A streaming service can't afford to offer $0.99 subscriptions to the poor because then all the rich people would stop paying $19.99. But with surveillance pricing, every customer gets a different price, titrated to their capacity to pay, and everyone wins.

But that's not how it cashes out in the real world. In the real world, rich people who get ripped off have the wherewithal to shop around, complain effectively to a state AG, or punish companies by taking their business elsewhere. Meanwhile, poor people aren't just cash-poor, they're also time-poor and political influence-poor.

When the dollar store duopoly forces all the mom-and-pop grocers in your town out of business with predatory pricing, and creating food deserts that only they serve, no one cares, because state AGs and politicians don't care about people who shop at dollar stores. Then, the dollar stores can collude with manufacturers to get shrunken "cheater sized" products that sell for a dollar, but cost double or triple the grocery store price by weight or quantity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

Yes, fliers who seem to be flying on business (last-minute purchasers who don't have a Saturday stay) get charged more than people whose purchase makes them seem to be someone flying away for a vacation. But that's only because aviation prices haven't yet fully transitioned to surveillance pricing. If an airline can correctly calculate that you are taking a trip because you're a grad student who must attend a conference in order to secure a job, and if they know precisely how much room you have left on your credit card, they can charge you everything you can afford, to the cent.

Your ability to resist pricing power isn't merely a function of a company's market power – it's also a function of your political power. Poor people may have less to steal, but no one cares when they get robbed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism

So surveillance pricing, supercharged by algorithms, represent a serious threat to "prices," which is the one thing that the econo-religious fundamentalists of the capitalist class value above all else. That makes surveillance pricing low-hanging fruit for regulatory enforcement: a bipartisan crime that has few champions on either side of the aisle.

Cannily, the FTC has just declared war on surveillance pricing, ordering eight key players in the industry (including capitalism's arch-villains, McKinsey and Jpmorgan Chase) to turn over data that can be used to prosecute them for price-fixing within 45 days:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing

As American Prospect editor-in-chief David Dayen notes in his article on the order, the FTC is doing what he and his journalistic partners couldn't: forcing these companies to cough up internal data:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-07-24-ftc-opens-surveillance-pricing-inquiry/

This is important, and not just because of the wriggly critters the FTC will reveal as they use their powers to turn over this rock. Administrative agencies can't just do whatever they want. Long before the agencies were neutered by the Supreme Court, they had strict rules requiring them to gather evidence, solicit comment and counter-comment, and so on, before enacting any rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Doubtless, the Supreme Court's Loper decision (which overturned "Chevron deference" and cut off the agencies' power to take actions that they don't have detailed, specific authorization to take) will embolden the surveillance pricing industry to take the FTC to court on this. It's hard to say whether the courts will find in the FTC's favor. Section 6(b) of the FTC Act clearly lets the FTC compel these disclosures as part of an enforcement action, but they can't start an enforcement action until they have evidence, and through the whole history of the FTC, these kinds of orders have been a common prelude to enforcement.

One thing this has going for it is that it is bipartisan: all five FTC commissioners, including both Republicans (including the Republican who votes against everything) voted in favor of it. Price gouging is the kind of easy-to-grasp corporate crime that everyone hates, irrespective of political tendency.

In the Prospect piece on Ticketmaster's pricing scam, Dayen and Groundwork's Lindsay Owens called this the "Age of Recoupment":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses

For 40 years, neoclassical economics' focus on "consumer welfare" meant that companies could cheat and squeeze their workers and suppliers as hard as they wanted, so long as prices didn't go up. But after 40 years, there's nothing more to squeeze out of workers or suppliers, so it's time for the cartels to recoup by turning on us, their customers.

They believe – perhaps correctly – that they have amassed so much market power through mergers and lobbying that they can cross the single bright line in neoliberal economics' theory of antitrust: price-gouging. No matter how sincere the economics profession's worship of prices might be, it still might not trump companies that are too big to fail and thus too big to jail.

The FTC just took an important step in defense of all of our economic wellbeing, and it's a step that even the most right-wing economist should applaud. They're calling the question: "Do you really think that price-distortion is a cardinal sin? If so, you must back our play." Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

[ottersul]

Cyclops & The Phoenix Force Pt.1

So first post gonna do something big and write without restriction like Twitter has. So this is just my mind going wild.

Let’s talk about Scott Summers’ relationship with the Phoenix Force. I’ll start with how it connects to Jean, from the very first time she became Phoenix. I’ve talked about this on Twitter before, but it deserves a proper dive.

So In the 1970s, Scott was at the height of his obsession with self-control. Being worthy, to him, meant being a good leader and protecting others, especially the people he loved. Add to that mix the abandonnment issues he has after a childhood on the orphanage, he feels for other to care or love him he has to be up to expectations.

All that explains why he’s so protective of Jean and why he spirals into guilt after she sacrifices herself and becomes Phoenix.

Now Scott has always been someone who seeks control—not just over his powers, but over his environment and relationships. Jean’s cosmic transformation threatens that. When she returns after the shuttle incident and tells her parents about what happened (Uncanny X-Men #101), we get a haunting panel of Scott watching through the window, detached. Nightcrawler remarks they’re taking it hard. Scott replies, "Wouldn’t you?"

It’s a subtle but powerful moment. That quiet distance, that calm expression he's—repressing. But more than that, it shows the shift: Jean is now something unpredictable.

This becomes even more evident in Uncanny X-Men #114, when Scott tells Ororo that Jean isn’t "the girl [he] loved anymore." Not because she changed emotionally, but because her power made her unknowable to him. That power destabilized their dynamic. He loved Jean Grey, the girl he could hold, protect, lead beside. Phoenix? That’s something else. Scott doesn’t just lose the girl he loved—he loses the illusion of safety, predictability, and emotional grounding she once gave him.

But he doesn't understand that, he can't make that process, he keeps trying to connect with her because he stills love her, but here, as he sees Jean's powers he wonders "why do I find that so disconcerting?"

And because Scott is someone who equates control with self-worth, Jean’s evolution breaks his framework. She doesn’t need his protection. She doesn’t fit in his emotional logic. So he starts losing grasp on what their relationship even is.

He blames himself—for not being able to keep up, for not knowing how to talk to her, for not being strong enough to ground her. He doesn’t fear Jean’s power because he’s intimidated by it; he fears it because it takes her away from him, and he can't do anything about it after all he's just a man.

That’s the heartbreak. Scott isn’t afraid of Jean’s power because it threatens his masculinity. He’s afraid because it changes her, and with that, threatens the emotional intimacy they shared. Her transcendence—becoming something vast and divine—makes him feel small, obsolete, unable to relate, unworthy. That emotional dissonance is what eats away at him. And he doesn’t have the tools to process it.

Of course this is later taken in Whedon's run exactly the same scene than before but adds a more explicit layer

Scott tells Jean: "I just want you to know, I understand about power that has to be controlled." He’s trying to connect, to say, "We’re the same. I get what it’s like."

Jean smiles sadly and says, "Scott, love, you’re just a man."

That response isn’t cruel. It’s quiet heartbreak. It’s her saying, gently, that the gap between them is real. Scott fights his power every day. He wins by suppressing. Jean is becoming something beyond human, and she knows that no amount of discipline or empathy can change that.

She still loves him. You can see it in her eyes. But she also knows he can’t follow her where she’s going. And Scott, deep down, knows it too.

That’s what makes his later bond with the Phoenix so fascinating—but also why it haunts him. Because for Scott, the Phoenix is tied to guilt, failure, loss of connection. It’s the moment he lost Jean, emotionally and literally.

When she dies, all of that is left unresolved. Their last arc together ends in tragedy, and Scott is left carrying the weight of unspoken fear, love, and guilt. That becomes his trauma with the Phoenix.

That trauma never left him. Not when he carried it. Not when he became its host himself. And not now in current comics Buuuut that's spoiling so that's for the first part

Next is trauma in the 80s/90s and New X-men Phoenix Jean which leads to... the affair

[aviator-at-heart]

London w/ the daggers, day 1

so you might know that I love the daggers and their ✨chaotic shenanigans ✨

heres a fic idea! though im not sure if it qualifies as a fic or a bunch of headcanons or a fic idea

~

so the daggers are on leave (yet again) because the navy cant deal with their shit, also since Maverick kept pissing off admirals he somehow (thanks to his husband Tom) became an admiral himself

-DAGGER GROUP CHAT-

Hangman: hi guys

Coyote: hey

Phoenix: im so bored

Bob: same

Hangman: we need to do something on this leave, ideas?????

Iceman: anyone up for a trip?

Everyone: yes

Bob: to where

Maverick: yesterday me and ice got drunk and we bought 14 plane tickets to London

Iceman: yea what Mav said

Rooster: this isnt gonna go well

Iceman: everyone be at the airport tomorrow at 9 pm ok

Everyone: ok

so they go to London!

everyone preps for the trip while on a facetime call (everyone keeps asking Bob, the only one thats been to London, what to bring)

also everyone asked Hangman to pick them up and bring them to the airport so he reluctantly did (bad idea because everyone was piled up inside his jeep)

he has a membership to a place where you can leave a car when you travel (The Parking Spot ig) and they all unload their baggage from Hangman's car

then they get into one of those shuttle buses and gossip mindlessly

when they get inside the airport Ice and Mav are waiting there (the daggers are 30 minutes late)

Iceman: good thing I told you guys to come an hour early

they check bags in and go through security

Iceman was stopped in security because he had "something mysterious" in his bag

all the daggers side-eye the workers who stopped him and Mav keeps trying to throw hands

Mav: stop patting him down hes mine *they go into his bags* NO THAT STUFF IS HIS-

Rooster: mav stop everyones staring at you and youll be stopped too

*they search through a compartment in Ice's bag that has photos of memories*

Rooster: HEY HE HAS NOTHING TO HIDE STOP LOOKING THERE

Hangman: both of you guys, chill *he grabs both their shoulders*

Iceman was obviously chill as ice (pun intended) during this

Iceman: *sighs and takes out his COMPACFLT navy badge* may I go now

TSA worker: sorry sir, not yet

the daggers side eye more intensely

another TSA worker: sorry sir, you may go. *gesturing to the TSA worker who told Ice he couldn't leave* he's just new

Iceman: its okay *grabs stuff and goes to the daggers who are cheering and chanting "CONNOR" <- the name of the worker who told Ice he could go *

thing is, protocol wouldnt have let Ice go but "CONNOR" wanted to make a good impression

they go and wait for the plane, all the daggers play a game of uno on the floor, Bob wins, Fanboy's the one with the entire deck as his cards, Hangman was second but everyone kept fighting with him because he made up a rule

they board the plane, everyone was fighting over what seat to be in (only three window seats, five middle, and six aisle seats, two seats are in the exit row)

 ↑ I made an entire diagram for this

anyways, Hangman and Rooster were obviously put to sit together by everyone else (sereshaw ship club iykyk)

the daggers were loud af during the flight

but then it started turning dark, the daggers started to be more quiet

Rooster was quietly chatting with someone when he felt something fall on his shoulder (thanks to me its Hangman) Roosters heart flutters, he lets Hangman sleep on him, totally forgets that his entire squadron is with him and if anyone sees them hes cooked

Bob gets up to go to the restroom and sees Jake and Bradley (Bradley fell asleep too)

↓ they fell asleep like this, Jake being marinette and Bradley being adrien (I used to watch this ok)

Bob snaps a photo to send to the sereshaw ship club (again, iykyk)

Bradley wakes up first and quickly gets out of the position he was in with Jake (he still thinks no one knows)

when they land everyone gets handed an airtag by Iceman

Hangman, when he gets the airtag: you dont trust us?

rest of the daggers:...

Rooster: no shit he doesnt trust us, Jake. We're on a trip somewhere we've never been before

Bob, being the only one who didnt get an airtag: ive been here!

Rooster: shut up you arent helping me win my argument

Iceman: *ahem* DO NOT TAKE THESE OFF OKAY?

everyone says yes

they go on another shuttle to a hotel

Maverick, as they were checking in: okay guys, we only got seven rooms

*everyone groans*

Maverick: what did you guys expect?? we were drunk

*all the people in the sereshaw group chat started whispering with each other (you know what theyre planning)*

so everyone starts rapidly picking people they wanna share rooms with - Phoenix and Bob, Payback and Fanboy, Harvard and Yale, Fritz and Halo, Iceman and Maverick, Omaha and Coyote (they dont really know each other but theyre doing it for sereshaw)

then Hangman and Rooster have to share a room

they all go up to their rooms and chill before they go out for nightly sightseeing (i cant do timelines ok)

its freezing outside

after they eat they go to shopping places

Iceman goes to buy Maverick a watch secretly

Maverick goes to buy Iceman a watch secretly

Hangman gets cold, Rooster gives him his jacket (more pictures are taken for the sereshaw gc)

Phoenix goes to a jellycat shop with Bob

idk where else everyone goes but they meet each other again

~

day two will come soon

[transitranger327]

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how the Rebel Alliance should have more former Separatists in its ranks. Like, the Separatists were 100% correct about the Republic becoming corrupt and tyrannical. Just look at what happened at the end of the war: civil liberties continued to be repressed, local governments were given even less power, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I like seeing Imperials defect. But if our current political situation is anything to go by, people don’t like following them. I get why the Rebel starfighter corps is ex-Imperial (all the academies are run by the Empire, and the Separatists used droid fighters), but ground troops? Generals? There should be a lot more Separatists and their sympathizers.

I believe several notable Alliance leaders should be retconned as former/neo-Separatists. In particular, General Jan Dodonna.

Why him?

He’s old enough to be a former separatist.

He was the first Alliance leader we ever met in Canon (besides Leia obv)

His backstory hasn’t been particularly important in canon.

He and Saw Gerrera have beef (tbf who doesn’t)

So this is my new proposed backstory:

Jan Dodonna is from the planet Raxus, future capital of the Confederacy of Independent Systems. The Dodonna family is friends with the Singh family, and thus has considerable political influence. A young Jan Dodonna joins the Raxian Home Defense fleet, and serves with enough distinction that he is promoted and transferred to the Republic Diplomatic Fleet, usually leading Senator Avi Singh’s escort or other diplomatic missions in the Tion Hegemony (where Raxus is located).

Given his family connection to and current working relationship with Sen. Singh, he has a front seat to the philosophy of what would become the Separatist movement. So when Count Dooku gives his famous Raxus Address in 24 BBY and the planet officially secedes from the republic, the then-Captain Dodonna resigns his Republic commission and becomes a military advisor to Sen. Singh.

Two years later, when full-on war breaks out, Singh recommends that Dodonna join the Separatist Navy. He accepts, and is given a small fleet of ships. Perhaps he faces off once or twice with his old friend Yularen.

By the end of the war, he has been promoted to Admiral, and is commanding a large fleet when the war ends. His droids are all shut down, and the Republic Navy begins wiping out all the ships around him. He runs with the only ship he can, the one he was commanding from. As he listens to the HoloNet, he is horrified to hear the Separatists have surrendered and been eliminated, yet vindicated when he hears the Republic has become the Empire. He parks his flagship and all of its deactivated droids on a barren planetoid in an uninhabited system, and takes his shuttle to go into hiding (maybe he grows a beard idk)

Years later, he’s found enough allies to build a rebel cell, including a programmer who can reactivate all of his battle droids. He pulls his old flagship out of mothballs, and begins running it with a mixed droid/organic crew. But during an attack on an Imperial convoy, he’s surprised by the rapid appearance of several Star Destroyers. The ISDs and TIE fighters prove to outmatch his old flagship and wing of Vulture Droids. He has to scuttle his ship and go on the run once again.

This is where the Y-Wings the Phoenix cell stole come in, replenishing the lost Vulture droids, and building a new Starfighter Corps

How does Saw Gerrera fit in? Well Dodonna and Gerrera do NOT get along, but instead of “oh Gerrera uses harsh tactics” that everyone else hates him for, Dodonna is a separatist—the very group Gerrera was rebelling against in the first place. Dodonna is still an admirer of Dooku, while Gerrera’s sister was killed on the orders of Dooku.

Anyway that’s just my personal opinion that I will eventually weave into my fanfiction.

Bonus image I stole from Bluesky about what an official meeting of the Rebel Alliance would realistically look like:

[wordrummager]

collaged trying to make the picture fit like with noses and eyeglasses too big and too close to kiss sequins and pecans with no announcer but an understood awkwardness hot pink, hot pants I might have danced in a cage in a former life the darkest stories come out at the edge of the sea but I am locked in a forest pleasant weather like a myth before space shuttles and after cave drawings after fighting traffic a phoenix waits in the basement for a breeze that feels like home

[callmearcturus]

So I watched the first 15 minutes of Dark Phoenix (2019) and was like "Punct, this movie starts and is so fucking wild, I feel like I'm having a stroke, there's a space shuttle mishap so the President of the United States calls Charles on the phone and they are on a first name basis and he asks for Charles help, the X-Men jet can go to SPACE, and then Charles uses New Cerebro to basically call into NASA and everyone is TOTALLY CHILL ABOUT THIS and then Jean DIES and its 1000% Charles' fault"

and Punct was like "why are you watching without me" so i rewound to the beginning and we watched the first 45 minutes together

and this movie must get super fucking bad because the first 45 minutes is actually the best X-Men movie ever made, I cannot BELIEVE it fucking WENT THERE and KEEPS GOING THERE, holy SHITTTTTT

anyway at the 45 minute mark, this is a 4 star movie. i will report back when we finish it.

[lonestarflight]

Space Shuttle Enterprise with her lifting body progenitor, the experimental M2-F1. Much of the groundwork for the Space Shuttle design comes from research done by the lifting body aircraft of the 1960s.

Date: September 24, 1981

source, source, source, source

Photo from the Phoenix Aviation Research Facebook page: link

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[rei-ismyname]

Jean runs another What if?

Jean Grey is still dead after the Third Hellfire Gala and she's reexamining critical decisions in her life. Her first what if blew up the universe, so that's a wash. Speedrun strat is out the window; it's time for a minmax run! What if Logan piloted the shuttle instead?

Present Jean doesn't actually get to play, instead setting the parameters for the simulation and seeing how her past self responds to a nudge. Instead of pulling rank and browbeating Logan she tells him to not be a jerk then hears his suggestion. With his healing factor he's likeliest to survive, and she can psychically guide him. She makes out with Scott then merges with Logan's consciousness as Scott desperately declares his love. This is the early polycule what if!

Obviously he dies from radiation poisoning, or he would have if a bird didn't hear his cries. No longer is he the Logan you barely knew, etc. Jean pushes until all his memories are unlocked and the overload snaps his psyche like a twig. Then the Phoenix comes, responding to his trauma and passion. Dude flies north, very quickly, to kill the fuck out of Weapon X stuff. The X-Men are like 'what the fuck just happened?'

Except Jean, of course. She doesn't have context for The Phoenix but she does have compassion.

This yassified bald bastard does not. Or maybe it's just the way he's drawn here as he orders the X-Men to leave Logan be and relax at Cassidy Keep. Jean knows what she saw and refuses to stand by. She'll stop him if need be, or ideally help him. Scott advocates for trusting Xavier blindly, but it's not good enough for Jean. She needs a good reason to abandon someone, especially someone who just saved all their lives. That's enough for Scott.

Their love is emphasised by Jean recalling how she 'wondered at the fire I sensed beneath his rigorous self-control.' Interestingly, Scott is dubious about this mission with a hint of jealousy. That doesn't stop him, of course, even as Jean describes the wild, complex inner thoughts and feelings unleashed in the man she thought repulsive.

The pair sneak into Weapon X where Logan the Hedgehog is giving a one star Yelp review. The Phoenix responds to passion and strong human feelings so together they embrace revenge. Aflame, Logan shoots adamantium spikes out of his body while slicing people up. Scott and Jean try to get through but he's so lost in red mist he doesn't even notice them. 'DEATH!' 'RETRIBUTION!' 'DESTRUCTION!'

Or so he says... Logan kills everyone in the room except for Scott and Jean but stops upon noticing the latter. Pacing, burning, he manages a monologue about the raw fire inside him before begging for death in a moment of lucidity. Jean refuses but Scott is like 'he's right.' Jealousy and possessiveness is one reading of this decision and realistically, it's likely to be a factor. After all, Scott's self control is built around not killing people with his deadly eyes. Why would he start now?

Another reading is - well, I'll just quote Anna Peppard directly. "You could also read Scott finally feeling free to fully release his rigorously controlled passion on a willing target who’s literally, sweatily begging for it in decidedly queerer ways, and I thoroughly encourage you to do so." There you go.

The red eyeballs look is wild

I think the latter reading bears fruit after The Phoenix hops over to Scott and melts his brain. His visor explodes as his passion interacts with infinity. Scott's self control holds it at bay briefly but he knows he can't keep it up, so he begs Jean to kill him.

She hesitates but Logan has healed up and he doesn't, penetrating Scott from behind with claws. It's unclear why The Phoenix ignores Jean - I guess that's just how What Ifs work. The flame passes back to Logan and he practices what he preaches, immolating himself while decrying his chances with Jean. She stands there in the blood and ashes of her two great loves and screams.

Game over! Definitely a lower body count this time around, but then again Jean wrote it off once Scott and Logan died. It was worth a shot, but neither could survive The Phoenix, not even 'her distant passionate Scott.' As she looks back on her life she considers another fork in the road. Hmmm.

Next time, a third What If! As seen in Immortal X-Men, she's burning up in the White Hot Room, but she's still got some ideas. Memories too, though she's not sure if they're Maddie's or her own. With that, Jean gives Maddie The Phoenix during Inferno! What could possibly go wrong?