#(The found family as I see it is a subsection of the crew)

[hephaestuscrew]

Thinking about what it means to be part of a crew in Wolf 359... 

Ep15 What’s Up Doc?

Ep18 Let’s Kill Hilbert

Ep25 Lame-o Superhero Origin Story

Ep31 Sécurité

Ep36 Fire and Brimstone

Ep52 Constructive Criticism

[recentanimenews]

The 6 Things We Need From A Live Action One Piece Series

  In July 2017, it was announced that Tomorrow Studios was planning to produce a live action One Piece series. Then, in March 2019, a synopsis for an American adaptation of One Piece was found on Netflix (though it was later removed.) This led to a reaction of equal parts excitement and anxiety: "Yay, more One Piece!" and "Ehhhh, maybe not like this." Live action American adaptations of anime have gotten, to put it extremely gently, a mixed response. We haven't really nailed down the formula for making them consistently good yet, so by leaping ahead to adapt One Piece, it's kind of like we made a sandwich out of rotten ham and some old tires and now we think that we're ready to open our own restaurant. 

  But I have hope. I really want One Piece to be good, and it usually is! So I'm not gonna stick my fingers in my ears and "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" to the sounds of Hollywood trying desperately to figure out what a Luffy is. Instead, I'm gonna offer advice of sorts. In translating the manga/anime to a live action format, there are a few major things that need to be worked out, and one of the most important ones is....

  1) Luffy's Stretching Powers Have To Look The Best In History

  We can create such true-to-life looking video games that you'd swear the latest Call of Duty was a documentary. We can create borderline photorealistic special effects that, for a few hours, turn our superhero epics into living, breathing worlds. But for some reason, we can't create a man's stretching powers in a way that doesn't look A) Awful, or B) Absolutely horrifying. And if you haven't noticed, stretching is like 90% of what the main character of One Piece does when he's not eating. 

  I mean, we've nailed it down in horror movies. Films like The Thing prove that we're totally able to stretch a dude out as long as we're gonna eventually turn him into a hideous monster. But look at any Fantastic Four film, whether it's the two from the mid 2000s or the 2015 reboot, and get ready for a buffet of awkward transitions between an actor and his CGI rubber-ness.  If One Piece is able to smooth this process out, it will frankly be a special effects miracle. Even if the show is terrible, it will be lauded for finally being able to make a man extending his limbs look adequate.

  2) It Needs A Diverse Cast

    There's no reason that a show about a strong, goofy dude that sails around the world making friends and has no second job shouldn't have the most diverse cast, like, ever. It would honestly feel weird if it didn't. But while most people would probably be pretty cool with this, there's always a subsection of people that say things like "NO. THAT WOULDN'T BE ACCURATE TO THE MANGA AND IT WOULD RUIN EVERYTHING!" But even Eiichiro Oda, the creator of the whole thing, has listed out what countries the Straw Hat Crew most represent. So them being a diverse crew is pretty canon. 

  3) It Doesn't Need To Be 100% Devoted To The Source Material

    There's a certain rush that comes out of seeing something that you've loved in one medium displayed in another. When we saw all of the Avengers in a group shot in The Avengers, we went nuts because for decades, that image had only existed in comic books and cartoons. So I do expect the live action One Piece to try and replicate some of the story's bigger moments - the walk to Arlong Park, the raising of the hands to signify the relationship with Vivi, Caesar Clown's laugh. Ya know, the important stuff.

  But do we need it all? No. The best adaptations in history have rarely been 1:1 with the source material. Look at Jurassic Park. Decent novel that would make for a terrible movie if adapted directly from the page to the screen. Steven Spielberg and David Koepp knew what to cut, and what to add, and the same needs to go for One Piece. As long as it holds true to the spirit of the story and doesn't stray too far from the backbone of the plot by doing crazy things like removing all the boats or making Sanji likable, I'm not sure I care if it does its own thing. Honestly, I'd be more interested in seeing it if it DID decide to go off the trail every once in a while. 

  4) It Needs A Heart

    I just mentioned that it needs to embody the spirit of One Piece and by that, I mean it needs to have One Piece's heart. And One Piece's heart is more than just keeping all of the names the same and all of the islands in order. Beneath the gags and the punches, One Piece tells a story about adventure and about finding a family when the idea of that formerly seemed impossible. It does have dark moments, but it's not a cynical show. It's about good people helping good people, and as long as the Netflix adaptation adheres to that, it will be doing something very right.

  5) Train The Actors And Actresses In Combat Classes

  I don't mean that every performer needs to learn MMA (though that would be rad). I mean that every main actor needs to be able to have a convincing brawl. And this is mostly for budget reasons. The amount of powers in the One Piece world means that A LOT of money is gonna be spent on effectively showing off everyone's lasers. In the TV streaming world, where they don't have Marvel/Disney money to throw behind every episode, they're gonna need to balance this out with human moments and with the cast getting in more realistic fights.

  And I don't think that's a bad thing. First of all, I've always wanted to see Nico Robin throw down. She's an assassin. She should be breaking necks left and right, both with her powers and without. But also, guys like Zoro are practically made for well choreographed battles. Remember all of the brutal fights in The Raid and movies like it? Now imagine that with your favorite sleepy, direction-less swordsman. See, I've already sold myself on this show.

  6) The One Piece Must Remain A Mystery Until The End

  Ya ever watch Twin Peaks? It's pretty good and you should give it a chance if you haven't. Anyway, the show kind of lost its appeal when the mystery at the center of it got revealed. And that's honestly my biggest fear for a One Piece TV show: Some executive who thinks that manga is a type of hibachi sauce is gonna pressure them into giving away the secret of the One Piece too early. One Piece can't get Twin Peak'd.

  What some don't get is that the best part of the mystery isn't the reveal. It's how well the journey is concocted. We don't think M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable is a great movie because at the end, it's revealed that Mr. Glass caused all the accidents. Any screenwriter could reveal that. We think it's great because the lead-up provides such a fascinating glimpse into how people would feel to find out that superheroes actually exist in the real world.

  The best part of One Piece isn't us scrabbling over ourselves to figure out what it is. It's us falling in love with characters and enemies and locations and plot lines that are all based around the quest to find the One Piece. To quote Miley Cyrus, "It's the climb." 

  Anyway, until it comes out, you can always enjoy One Piece on Crunchyroll. Always. Until the end of time. Probably.

  Are you excited for a live action One Piece series? What storylines would you most like to see adapted? Let us know in the comments!

    ---------------------

  Daniel Dockery is a writer for Crunchyroll and a huge One Piece fan. You can find him on Twitter. 

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[abbhorase]

The Pale Horror

[DATA EXPUNGED]

Ms. Hohlstein

Creative Writing

6 November 2017

You never think about this kind of stuff. Not the hundreds of thousands of bodies lined up in the cargo hold, not the families waiting to see them, nor the morticians, greedily rubbing their hands at the sheer volume of demand soon to follow. What Abby never thought about, sleeping soundly in a cryopod with the rest of the crew of the Aramanthe, was the possibility that something was never right in space. Perhaps it was a rogue asteroid that had found its way into the hull and through a score of war casualties. Perhaps it was the ship's automatic response system, SKyLaR, waking them up barely six years after they had left drydock at Konštrukta M-14-A/112, the station in low orbit around planet F-2-A5-R.

She felt too lucid to be home. Too...sound of mind. It was yet to feel like her dreams had eaten themselves more than thrice, as was common with the Safe Stasis models onboard. With an annoyed groan, Abby sat up, swung her legs wide, and stood to see the white, sterile walls of the Stasis room.

Who was she? She wondered to herself; wakeup had a habit of clouding memory for the hour after it occurred. I am Carmin Abigail; Abby for short.

Why was she standing naked in a white room surrounded by people more than likely wondering the same thing? She again asked herself. The answers were simple: She was a technician for a cargo ship taking bodies recovered from the Camin insurgence on F-2-A5-R, and she was naked because the continued exposure to the sensation of clothing often led people in stasis to wake up thinking they were a shirt and their shirt, them.

She looked left, she looked right. Stella and Claus, respectively.

"Stella? Stella?" she asked the woman to her left. There she sat, clutching her head in her hands in an expression of pain.

"Stella… I'm… I'm Stella." she managed out in response before wrenching clear fluid onto the grated metal floor.

"Oh my god!" Abby exclaimed, running over and clutching her dear friend. Was she dear? How long had she - it didn't matter; something was wrong and Abby was the only person who seemed to care. Still with an arm around Stella, Abby took off jogging towards the nearest door. She needed to get blood flowing so she could remember where the infirmary was, and that was the fastest way. A crop of white robes, hanging from hooks nearest one exit, that was where she ran first; one for her, one for Stella, before running off down a gunmetal hall. The hiss of pressure regulators, the echo of feet slapping on the ground, noises so familiar as she ran she let her mind wander.

Stella was...26. Abby thought to herself. She was coming back to herself. To her right, still in her arm, Stella looked on the brink of tears as she slipped on her Robe. Abby followed suit shortly after. Why was she crying? Abby wondered to herself; now wasn't the time to ask, as she had in the days before their mission began and knew the answer was in some crevice of her mind. The way to the infirmary snapped itself into her thoughts; left, right, straight, right, left, first door.

"It's gonna be alright, okay?" she said, helping Stella to sit down on the examination table.

"Okay...Okaaaay…" Stella wheezed out, passing out and falling to her side on the table.

"Condition." inquired the onboard computer SKyLaR, possessing the spider-like machine that hovered over the table.

"Unknown," Abby responded, arranging Stella onto the table so that everything was on the table. "Perform exploratory testing procedures please."

"Understood." the machine responded, whirring to life above Stella's face.

A thin line and a wavering frequency of sound burst from one of its spidery legs, sweeping over Stella's body. It was looking for deformities, sicknesses, something wrong, but after a minute, stops.

"No abnormalities detected. Recommending DeepScan of Brain tissue." the A.I. reported. Abby knew the process; the same kind that would detect cancer in the brain and mental instabilities, but only with sufficient time. 6 hours, to be precise, given that this was one of the earlier models to employ such technology.

"Acknowledged," Abby responded. They were still a lifetime from Home; everyone could wait.

"Initiating scan." the machine confirmed. "You are dismissed for the process."

"Dismissed?" Abby asked.

"You are required in the briefing room; medical assistance deemed secondary directive for Crewman: Abigail."

Nodding, confused as she might be, Abby took slow, turning steps for the door before a hasty march to the room not far to her right.

There everyone was, sitting in rolling chairs while Claus, their acting leader at the time, stood in front with a dry-erase marker and a large wall-mounted whiteboard. Abby took a seat nearest the back, a seat separating her from two of her more 'immature' colleagues.

"What we have here," started Claus, "Is a ruptured bulkhead in the cargo deck. Somewhere in the region of E-7 to F-8 and the blocks they encompass. So, we are - yes, Tracy" Tracy, one of their technical workers, raised her hand almost like a schoolgirl.

"Yes, sir. Do we have any idea what triggered the alarms?" she asked, standing.

"At this moment we are fairly confident it to be an asteroid that penetrated the outer hold and dented the inner casemate, causing distortion to the inner structure of the cargo hold."

"And our plan of repair?"

"Yes, yes." Claus continued. He motioned for her to sit down whilst turning back to the whiteboard. "The plan at this moment is, given the wide area necessary to search, is for everyone present here to fan out in search of the rupture. By the way - where is Stella?"

"She's...in the infirmary," Abby spoke up, thinking of her laying half dead in that cold, white room. "She was experiencing unusual cryo-sickness and I thought it'd be a good idea to take her down there."

"Good to know. Okay!" he clicked the cap back onto the marker and looked out onto the crowd of five.

"We're down a member. That means double duty for someone-IVAN!" he called out. Ivan, sitting next to Adam and swapping dirty jokes, looked up sharply.

"What?" he looked like a lost dog.

"All who vote Ivan take Stella's route say aye."

A chorus of 'ayes' came out. With a betrayed, angry glare in his eyes, Ivan shook his head and, somehow, simultaneously glared at everyone in the room.

Claus, uncapping the marker, laid out the routes he wanted from everyone in the room, calling out again for Ivan who was, naturally, talking again with Adam. in less than 10 minutes, they were getting dressed in actual clothes, and within 20 they were out in the hold.

Caskets, quickly put together, lay stacked neatly on every shelf within sight with shelves extending almost farther than the eyes could see. most had nametags, some didn't. It was an older cargo train they took out to the cargo block, creaking and rattling with every grain-of-sand-sized piece of debris in the tracks.

Abby, sitting next to the Innocent Tracy, and Connor, couldn't help but feel self-conscious as she felt Ivan and Adam staring down the crack of her pants. She had to remember to sit in the back next time. She was almost lonely; besides her, the short-fused Connor sat with Tracy's hand in a loving grip. He barely moved, she leaned on his shoulder.

Abby could never stand it, the violent outbursts Connor was prone to in aggrivating situations. Yet their love for one another was clear; not once had he done Tracy harm as much as he had done to everything and everyone around him.

Behind her, Ivan cracked the can on what she presumed to be beer, snuck in from god knows what little hidey-hole he'd kept.

"Bus is leavin', folks," Claus stated, pulling the tram to a stop. With the clang of steel-tipped boots, the six of them piled out and onto wherever they were ordained to go.

Nothing. There was nothing. After close to half an hour circling her path, covering every piece of ground she could, all she saw were caskets, caskets, and more caskets. No dents, nothing particularly interesting, just-

"I think I found it!" came the radio on her belt. It was from Adam, the raunchy bastard who'd tried putting cameras in the vessel's showers an embarrassing number of times. "E-8, subsection F-130. 'Looks like the entire column exploded from the bottom up. There are bodies everywhere and I mean EVERYWHERE."

"You heard the man. Connor, Tracy, E-8 F-130 with your tools." came Claus' voice from the radio.

"Over and out." in unison, Tracy and Connor responded, accompanied by the echoing sound of metal boots.

"Does that mean I get t- WHAT THE F-" Adam, far to her right, was screaming for help, sounding almost like he'd been set on fire.

Within a minute, everyone present had converged on Adam's location. Abby had out a pocket flashlight and was crouching to Adam, laying on the ground and gasping.

"Adam, Adam!" she shouted. His eyes darted about like he didn't know his own name. With her flashlight, Abby checked his eyes. They dilated, they followed, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

"This doesn't change what need be done," Claus stated. "Abby, take him to the infirmary. Connor, Tracy, you still gotta fix… this." he motioned for the twisted, creaking cargo tower. "And Ivan-" he was standing there, a string of three beer cans hung by their pop tabs around his waist and another already in his hands. "Just….go back to the lobby. We'll talk later." With Adam in arms, Abby, Claus, and Ivan found themselves heading back to the tram, not yet out of earshot of Connor's rage.

"Oh yeah. Everything's fine. It's not like we're already DOWN TWO PEOPLE with a giant dent in this tin can!"

"Please, Conny. Calm down." Tracy, in a soothing voice, said.

"No! This is bullshit! Fuckin' Jackass fakes a fall and he gets to run off with half the team and WHERE ARE WE? ALONE, SURROUNDED BY DEAD PEOPLE." The group of four boarded the tram and got away as fast as possible. Behind them, the sound of rivet guns going off resounded.

"Stella!" Abby called in glee. There she sat, still wrapped in a wake-up robe and weakly waving to her. "What happened?"

"There was a bit of SNAFU with last preparations I guess," Stella answered. "The cromaStasis fluid they put in me was apparently contaminated with….Mercury, was it?"

"Affirmative," SKyLaR affirmed. "2.1 parts-per-million mercury contamination within intravenous Cryostasis preparation induced a form of seizure in the cerebellum, decreasing the already slowed rate at which oxygenated blood flowed through the body among other deformities."

"I'm lucky I woke up when I did." Stella continued. "Another 16 years of that and I….Probably wouldn't have woken up. Hey, what's up with Adam?"

"Oh, dipshit two faked a fall in cargo and Claus had me take him here," Abby Answered, shaking Adam playfully in her arms. He was still gasping, a listless look in his eyes."

"Listen." Stella started, standing up from the examination table and walking towards the pair, standing by the door as they were. "I've caused you a lot of trouble today and it's the least I can do."

"Are you sure?" Abby asked.

"Yeah, yeah. I'm feeling a lot better. Just go on to the lounge. You deserve it."

With a smooth motion, the two girls swapped Ivan off, Stella quickly carrying him to the examination table while Abby smiled back.

"Hey, Stella?" Abby called out.

"Yeah?"

"I'm glad you're okay."

And with that, Abby was out the door and walking into the lounge.

Crew compartments weren't necessarily that small, but weren't designed for extended use; as in, it was believed that the crew would be in cryo for the majority of the time aboard. For all intents and purposes, there were two hallways for the main deck and a veritable maze for engine functions far back in the ship. The lounge the farthest from the Lobby where Abby heard Claus and Ivan mid-argument. Abby was quick in the door and onto the nearest pinball machine.

It was an hour later. She was onto a random shooting game. The lights were dimming, ever so slowly, to indicate as the relative time at, "home," to be about 10:30 PM.

A Scream. Stella's.

From the Infirmary.

A wet, ripping sound, not dissimilar to the sound of a knife through a booklet of wet paper.

Abby lept from the console and out the door, running down the hall and around a corner to come face to face with

An open door, clawed open, bent metal and streaks of blood abound. She raced inside, praying that Stella - SOMEONE was alive.

She wasn't. She was in the room, though; all over the walls and floor, a strange covering of hair and blood over the report screen on the examination table. Were it not for the bright red, flashing anomaly sign, she never would have moved it all away.

Adam's outline, displayed against the blue screen, something coiled, something wrong.

It was thin, but noticeable against the X-ray before flashing to what she presumed to be an MRI scan.

Abby nearly vomited, the sight of his chest melting on the screen to show not organs, but a long, tendril-covered form, a long and bony tail trailing from it's spurred body and terminating in a set of claws and long, jagged beak. Throughout Adam's body lay tendrils, spread like nerves through his arms, his legs, his mind,

His heart.

"SKYLAR!" she called out, adrenaline pulsing through her body with every heaving breath. "SKYLAAR!"

"Abby. Please remain calm." it started, the spider-like scanner peaked on the examination table to reveal it's single blue 'eye.' "Stella is gone and there is very little to be done."

"SKyLaR, please. What happened? What was inside Adam?"

"Scanner report: Unknown Parasite present within Crewman Adam. Kingdom: animal. Phylum: unknown. Class: unknown. Order: unknown. Family: unknown. Genus: unknown. Species: unknown. Diagnoses: Due to present procedures, it was judged that no action was necessary due to evidence that no physiological changes in the negative spectrum were detected. Conclusion: observe closely for as long as possible, gather biological data, perform an autopsy upon status: Deceased."

"So you left it in him!?" Abby screamed. "Are you kidding-"

The sound of screaming from the Lobby, but without the wet, tearing sound. Abby found herself bolting away, down the hall and around the corner in the hope against hope that Stella was alive, somewhere.

"IVAN!" She screamed, stumbling into the lounge to see Ivan huddled in the corner, a fire ax clutched in hand, beer spilled on the floor and still dripping from an unfinished can.

"What the hell was that?" Ivan asked. In a moment, Abby realized what was wrong with the picture.

"Ivan, Where's Clause?"

"Whatever that thing was, it got Claus," he replied, standing up, hefting the ax onto one shoulder mid step towards Abby.

"Well then where the hell did it go?"

"Crew quarters. Must be looking for more people."

"And why'd it leave you alone?"

"This thing," he replied pompously, hefting the ax back into two hands. "I did a nasty number on that thing. It's weak now; I bet if we can catch it, we can kill it."

With a shaky nod, Abby turned and walked for the hall to Crew Quarters, Ivan in hot pursuit.

"You got a key, right?" Ivan asked, padding the area around his thigh with a sheepish grin. Abby unclipped the magnetic card from her belt and, squatting in front of the door, slid it in. it was a process that took roughly 7 seconds for full affirmation, almost 7 seconds too late.

From behind Abby came the sound of bones breaking, of pain and of torment in it's purest form. She turned around to see Ivan, split across the stomach with his head and arms hanging limp behind. From within his popped chest cavity came a white form, pale like a corpse and bony like a starving child. Its jagged beak had ripped through the remainder of Ivan's chest, tearing tendrils from his chest with a grotesque sccchpop sound. In hunger, it stretched claws and tendrils to its next host, Abby, huddled against the door and unable to make a sound. It was silent but for the wet, organic sounds of it tearing itself away, the almost clinical silence of a hospital full of those with incurable diseases. Abby shuddered, closing her eyes to the nightmare in front of her; maybe it would dull the pain, not to know when it would strike

The door opened to a spray of rivets, her salvation, puncturing and staying within the thing before it broke itself into Ivan's broken body and leaped through the ceiling's grating, scurrying off to god knows where.

She turned around, the glow of fluorescent lights casting an angelic glow onto Claus' vindictive form, heavy rivet gun braced in both hands.

"Oh god, CLAUS!" Abby cried in glee, leaping up and pulling him into a thankful embrace.

"Oh god, Abby," Claus responded, returning the embrace. "What was that thing?"

"Hell if I know," she responded, pulling away and looking into his teary eyes with her own tearful eyes. "It killed Stella, it's killed Adam, and it took Ivan. that's three crew we're down."

"We need to regroup." was Claus' answer. "If we're all in one place, it'll have a hard time singling the rest of us out." he relayed the order through the ship's speakers for everyone to regroup in the lobby due to an uncontained biological hazard.

Tracy and Connor came running into the lobby, Tracy noticeably lagging behind, roughly ten minutes of tense waiting later.

"Where were you guys?" Abby asked harshly.

"I was in the bathroom. Sorry." Tracy answered, a slight blush on her face.

"And what, you didn't go in with her?" Abby screamed at Connor.

"Why the hell would I want to?!" Connor shouted back, matching Abby's anger.

"Because we're dealing with an unknown parasitic hazard and it's already killed three of this crew!" Claus shot in. "we need to stick together."

"What we NEED to do is find this thing and Burn it Alive!" Connor said. He was growing red in the face, neck pounding with produced veins.

During the chaos of the boys' continuing argument, Abby moved her way to Tracy, hiding behind her hair near the door.

"Hey." was Abby's opener.

"Hey," Tracy responded. "What happened? Have you been crying?"

"It….it got Stella," Abby responded at the thought of her dead friend. "She's just…. Gone."

"It's gonna be alright, okay?" Tracy offered, pulling Abby into an embrace. "We're gonna kill this thing and that'll be the end of it. Okay?"

"….Okay." Abby agreed, sniffling.

That was when Tracy started hacking.

A deep, wet cough mixed with the sound of choking, the sound of her inability to breathe and need to vomit at the same time.

Claus and Connor stopped their argument and turned around, Tracy doubled over and clutching her stomach as a slurry of impacted rivets, hair, and fabric strips came gushing out of her mouth.

There was a moment of silence as what just happened slowly set in.

Connor looked at Claus, then back to Tracy, then repeated the cycle as he said "Rivets, Huh? Bunch'a rivets in its chest?"

"Y-yeah." Claus answered backing away. Abby followed suit, skirting the edge of the room to hide behind Claus. There sat Tracy at the far end of the room, shaking, weeping

"Is that you, Tracy?" Claus asked, crouching and picking up a rivet from the pile.

"IS THAT YOU?!" he shoved the rivet in her face

"DON'T LIE TO ME YOU FUCKING-" he said, slapping her across the face. Claus, in unison with Abby, gasped, not just from the display of uncharacteristic violence, but the sight of Tracy's face splitting apart to reveal a slew of tendrils headed by a jagged beak. It wrapped itself around Connor's hand, the beak biting in and leaving a large chunk missing from his hand. That was when Connor started screaming, that was when Claus and Abby started running. Their directions were separate, but both went the way to the engine's maze. Trying to escape the echo of the screaming, trying to escape the sight of Tracy devouring her lover.

The screaming stopped.

Abby was alone, surrounded by brass pipes and industrial lighting.

"Claus?" she called out after a minute. She had no idea where he was, nor where she really was in this mess of access tunnels. "CLAUS?!"

"Abby!" came his echoing voice, ever so quietly.

"CLAUS!" She called back, walking towards the voice. In a matter of minutes, they had met in the maze of brass pipes.

But something was wrong.

That thing was still out there.

Claus had been alone.

Abby had trusted Tracy, just as she had trusted Ivan. she wasn't going to be fooled again.

"You….YOU MONSTER!"

"Abby! ABBY!" Claus called back. He was backing up at the sight of Abby taking a brass pipe from the wall, the scalding hot steam mattering not to her as she tore it from the wall.

"YOU KILLED STELLA!" Abby scream, swinging and missing Claus. He was backing up, all to aware of the dead end behind him

"YOU KILLED TRACY!" she swung again, this time hitting the side of his face. Claus was on the ground, clutching the side of his face where the pipe had struck and broken the majority of his left molars.

"YOU KILLED CLAUS!" Abby shouted in fury, savagely swinging down on Claus' stolen body. Every swing reduces his movement until, finally, he was not but a sobbing heap on the ground.

"JUST DIE DIE DIE!" she said in final, stabbing the hollow brass tube through the center of his chest in hopes of killing the parasite within.

But there was no scream.

There was no monster.

Claus was human, but Abby was the monster.

There sat Abby, sobbing, over her dear friend's corpse.

There collapsed Abby, passing out on top of his corpse.

"Preparatory serum injection successful." SKyLaR reported. Abby had awakened 10 minutes earlier to the sight of her greatest sin. Whatever it was, it didn't want her. It wanted to torture her. To tear her apart.

"SKyLaR, please prepare the examination table as a cryostasis chamber. I'm….I'm not gonna be able to sleep next to empty pods.

"Affirmative." Abby stood up and backed away from the table, watching metal casings slide out from the floor and meet with the table in a satisfying click. A triad of glass, asymmetrically aligned on the metal, would show her face to anyone who found her, and she hoped someone found her. She dropped her robe and lay in the cryopod, letting the great metal jaws close over her.

She was losing consciousness slowly. Above her, the old A.I. ran one last scan through the glass. She could see the screen from her position, oh so clearly.

The flashing red unknown entity detected warning flashed just as she fell to her deepest slumber.

Just a little thing I wrote for my Creative writing class.

it’s actually about 3 times longer than it should have been as per the rubric.

but whatever.

Sincerely,

Abborase

[thesapphicagenda]

preface: during this thing I use queer as an umbrella term for the broader LGBT community and wlw (woman loving woman) when specifying a subsection of woman aligned people who are attracted to other women which can encompass lesbian, bisexual, pansexual identities as well as woman aligned people on the aromantic spectrum and asexual spectrum who experience same gender attraction of some measure.

On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden is a sci-fi webcomic (2016-2017) set an unknown but far way into the future where the galaxy has been colonized by people. Mia, a young woman, starts on a new job with a crew of four construction workers who travel into the long forgotten reaches of space and restore old buildings. Through this the reader learns about the crew and follows the present day actions. Simultaneously Mia’s story of growing up is told, as she goes to boarding school and meets Grace, a girl whose family controls part of the most dangerous places in space, the Staircase. Through these two parallel stories you see Mia and Grace’s relationship develop in the past, while in the present Mia struggles to find Grace on Staircase again.

On a Sunbeam is told in two parts. These two threads are interwoven and eventually come together with Mia going to Staircase and finding Grace. The parallels in these two opposing story lines speak to greater critical ideas that exist within queer theory. Although Walden has created a universe where every single person (with the exception of Elliot) identifies as a woman and every known romantic relationship is with another woman, the before and after aspect of queer identity is still present. This way of presenting narrative and the narrative arc itself strays from traditional storytelling, two stories existing, two separate identities the reader gets to know, both existing in tandem. The entire comic ends with Mia’s reconciliation of identities, with finding Grace and looking for some resolution to that chapter of her life. This is a common theme among coded queer fiction, the split identity or the journey from one world to another. When one examines sci-fi fantasy through a queer theory lens this is one of the ways queer themes can exist. 

In science fiction the idea of Other is key. In cases involving alien races or new customs, or even futuristic technologies, when creating a fictional Other, that will be rooted in our cultures concept of Other. In this case unlike a lot of science fiction there is no masquerading an unknown entity as an Other, but this concept is now given to us, the reader to process what is like, and unlike our culture now, which is what defines science fiction essentially.

One interesting feature of On a Sunbeam is the fact that it is specifically not diverse. Every character in this webcomic (again barring Elliot who is gender neutral) is assumed to be a woman, and every discussed romantic relationship is gay. This brings in the idea of the reader creating the science fiction, and creating the Other, reconciling differences between our world and the fictional world. 

On A Sunbeam is pointedly not inclusive in respects to sexuality and for a reason. Walden’s comic speaks of separatism and the specific catering to a wlw (woman loving woman) audience, a lesbian only piece of media leads to the lesbian Separatist movement that emerged in the 70s, where the idea was to be self-sufficient and independent from a patriarchal society. Lesbian only spaces are a form of resistance against the heterosexual institution.

Through this Walden points out the heteronormativity of media where queerness has to conform to an idea of reality. When consuming media it’s not a surprise to have an all straight cast of characters, it’s not questioned at all. Opposed to when the majority (or even a portion) of the characters are queer it is immediately noticed and the rules of “reality” are applied, whether having that many queer characters is realistic, especially in a narrative that is not a typical gay narrative. It is rare to find media where every character is queer opposed to finding a mass amount of media where every single character is straight. Side note if I have to hear that the diversity of a piece of media is just trying to reflect the world's demographic then clearly I’m missing the statistic that said that most of the world is white, everyone is gorgeous, and vampires and werewolves are better represented than trans people. GLAAD’s 2016 report of LGBTQ representation sits at 4.8% of characters on primetime television which is 43 characters out of 897. So my point here is that we can have this enormous mass of straight characters and not question it which is a direct result of heteronormativity. Only having wlw characters is a direct challenge of the heteronormative structure of the media we consume, and by doing this Walden asks readers to acknowledge this, the immediate discomfort with the unexplained fact that every single known character in her comic is a wlw and consider it rationally. 

Why are queer identities a feature of science fiction? Why is one of the things that is striking not the fact that there are space ships that are giant robotic fish, or that there is a place called The goddamn Staircase which has glowing giant fox beasts in it.  Where does the true other lay? Not in the world we live in entirely, but where we see ourselves fit in. Ain’t that poignant enough for y’all. 

Last point my man. The theme of family and community is prevalent in queer media too because so much of queer identity (or at least what media leads us to believe) is about acceptance. Acceptance into the community around (be it the general community or the LGBT one), acceptance into ones family, or acceptance into the greater world. Found family comes into play in many queer stories in opposition to biological family, “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” maybe?

The dynamic between Mia and the team on the ship and Grace and her family demonstrates this concept pretty accurately. This plays into the idea of building a community which can be more supportive and healthy than the community one is born into. This is really part of the queer identity because unlike some other intersecting identities as a queer individual you aren’t typically born into a queer community, you go and seek out one, or build one yourself. Part of being queer is trying to find other people who are queer and building a network of individuals who aren’t necessarily blood related but feel like family. This also can be coupled with the rejection of the patriarchal structure of the nuclear family, which plays directly into queer identity, which is inherently aberrant and maladjusted to fit into the heteronormative idea of it. The whole story, of two wlw girls who meet when they are separated from their families, in an institution which they both don’t fit into and get into trouble because they can’t conform and find companionship because of their isolation and dissatisfaction speaks to the reality of living as a queer woman.

Anyways that’s my analysis! On a Sunbeam is written by Tillie Walden who is is super bomb and very great for letting me use these images