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beach day!! ☀️ (by @quibbs)

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sweetheart, baby, darlin', and so on. 💞 (by @jamisonrivv)

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minkowski and hera (indirectly; to herself) are the only ones who call eiffel "doug", eiffel is the only one who calls minkowski "renée", hilbert is the only one who calls lovelace "isabel", and no one calls hilbert by (any of) his first names. kepler calls jacobi "daniel" and maxwell "alana", and maxwell and jacobi use each other's first names too, but neither of them ever calls him "warren" - the only person who does is rachel, while he calls her "miss young." pryce and cutter are the only people who use each other's first names (though cutter's habit of almost always only using first names is a whole other thing.)

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since wolf 359 is a show that puts so much emphasis on names / what people are called when / "first name moments", it puts hera in an interesting position that she only has a first name. you could maybe say the closest thing to a first name moment that she gets is in idle hands, when eiffel regains his mind, but the connotations are still a little different - it is an indicator of closeness / a significant relationship, but it isn't a shift in that relationship. i think part of the significance of first names - for anyone, when used sincerely - is the subtext of speaking to the person rather than the job they perform, but hera's name has additional stakes and significance for her when being called by her name is the baseline level of respect indicating who sees her as a person at all.

so, with that context, the other moment that interests me is the only time someone ever addresses her by rank: when minkowski calls her "officer" in let's kill hilbert. from minkowski in particular, that's also an acknowledgement of her personhood - evoking "she was a member of my crew." and i don't think this is just an honorary title bestowed by minkowski, either; in the most technical sense, i think hera probably does have a rank on the station. hera's programming restricts how she can address station officers. commonly, she addresses minkowski and lovelace as "commander" and "captain" when talking to them, and "commander minkowski" and "captain lovelace" when talking about them, while most other people she tends to refer to by both name and rank. she drops kepler and jacobi's titles after the mutiny.

but eiffel she calls (both when talking to him and about him) "eiffel" and "officer eiffel" interchangeably. (she never calls him just "officer.") in a practical sense, this helps communicate that her relationship with him is more casual - and in am i alone now? when she's talking 'to' him but not really to him, she calls him "doug", which has a whole other set of implications for how she thinks about him, when in that same monologue she still says "commander minkowski" and "doctor hilbert." - but… i think it's also pretty reasonable to assume that her rank is functionally the same as his, and that part of why she's more comfortable with him even early on is that he quite literally does not have the same authority over her that everyone else does.

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'Beyond This Power of My Nature': Hera’s self-perception and relationship to humanity

Okay, this is something I’ve wanted to make a proper post about for a long time now: what evidence we have for how Hera sees herself in canon, why I think it’s important to acknowledge she is written with an element of physicality, and how I think, keeping the themes of Wolf 359 in mind, Hera as an AI Character comes across very differently from a lot of other AI Characters. The idea that she is fundamentally human has different implications in the context of a show that is so focused on humanity, and specifically on the way that its characters (at various points) navigate, reject, desperately try to hold onto, and are repeatedly denied recognition of their humanity. There’s so much more I could say on the topic, but. This post is already over six thousand words, so it will have to do.

tl;dr: Hera’s identity is not representative of AI Identity in any broader sense, even just within Wolf 359. Hera has a defined internal self image that is singular, and distinct from the Hephaestus or any systems she runs. There is an aspect of physicality to the way she is written, performed, and treated by the text, and she canonically experiences physical loneliness. Her feelings of isolation and the ways she is othered, even by herself at times, are reflective of very real human experiences - in particular, I have to touch on how I feel Hera can be read as a trans character. Hera struggles with the feeling that she is inherently different from everyone around her, and therefore intrinsically doomed, and it is only by letting go of those fatalistic notions, realizing she and her friends are more alike than different, that she can start to move forward and imagine a life for herself.

Keep reading

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pov you accidentally engaged warren kepler in conversation during the si-5 beach episode

saw this trend and immediately thought of kepler. i simply could not resist

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“look at it this way: you’ve chosen to be incompetent at stuff you could’ve given a crap about. you made a lot of stupid calls. and that’s… fine. because it means that today? today you’re due. you have more care and attention stored up inside of you than the rest of us put together. so even if you’re competent at nothing else, you can be competent at this. do you know why?” / “… because i have to?”

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They deserve a lil' smooch 💙 Commission for the lovely @commsroom!

kofi

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A super fun commission of Doug Eiffel for the ever so lovely @commsroom! ✨

Commissions (OPEN) I Patreon I Ko-Fi I VGen

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kepler, jacobi and maxwell better known as nightmare trio

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A great love is a lot like a good memory

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the year is 2024 btw

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whoa wait a minute, i know abt ep 5 post end credit scene (the decima introduction) but what were the two other ones?

oh! ep 37 (overture) is a call between cutter and kepler discussing mission progress that hints at what's going on with lovelace: "we need her, warren. she's the key to everything we've been working for." ep 43 (persuasion) is about lovelace and hilbert's plan to get everyone else on board with the mutiny: "command staged their deaths?" / "as was to be expected, but she needed to find out for herself. she is ready to do what must be done. and eiffel will follow her." / "hm. guess you were right. they just needed some persuasion."

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when eiffel dreams about hera, his brain conjures her as a tangible person, but in that sort of abstract way where you can recognize someone in a dream even if they look different than they do in reality. and i don't think that image is consistent - if you asked him directly, i don't know if he'd even be able to say what he thinks she looks like. not with any certainty, at least. but, post-canon, he retains the memory of her face - subconsciously, the same way he knows what words mean or how the comms equipment works, even if he doesn't know how he knows those things - and his dream image of her is always the same, and always vivid. without his memories, he has no way to realize the significance of this, and hera has no reason to suspect or to ask him about it, but it's always there.

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Okay! Obviously, I love Wolf 359. The available scripts for Wolf 359 are recording scripts, meaning they're inaccurate in a ton of places when it comes to finalized or improvised dialogue, and don't function well as transcripts (especially since the scripts for the live show and some of the mini episodes were never made available.) That said, I think everyone should read the scripts; the sheer amount of physical description that you can feel in the show, even if you can't see it... I guarantee it will enhance your listening experience. Most visual show to ever be an audio drama. So, in pursuit of both of these goals at once, I went over every word in the scripts, and wrote up new scripts for the unavailable ones. Some of the sound effects described - especially in early episodes - might not line up exactly, because I didn't want to mess with the non-dialogue portion of the show, but I hope this strikes a good balance and can be a useful resource.

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what gets me about minkowski and eiffel's relationship is that they are the polar opposite of "i would find you in every life" like i don't think they'd find each other in ANY other life!! they don't share interests; their values conflict; their personal habits and hygiene standards drive each other crazy. the fact that they end up desperately important to each other isn't based on any kind of personal compatibility, but just the bare minimum of "you are a person and you want to go home and we are in hell together" and that's ENOUGH because that's more than the prevailing powers want to allow them. minkowski is determined to get them home and eiffel is determined to make sure they do it without sacrificing what makes them people and it's moving to me that this scraped-bedrock common ground is enough for love to grow from

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I had the pleasure of drawing once more for the lovely @commsroom

It was fun drawing Doug again after all this time!~