Your last rb on the John Gaius post how much John is the OPPOSITE of what that reblogger implied. Because like - we rag on him for not using his magical girl powers for C--'s "Good Wizardry", but it's specifically because he *doesn't* want to rely on a new untested "technology". He tries to incorporate it into the old project, make it better, make people trust it and give him money. Slow down the people who are trying to actually do the "promising new technology" bit without proof of concept.
It's "We all came up with trials to figure out what I could do, what I couldn’t do" vs
"...they were taking one discovery and acting like it changed the whole ballgame when really we now needed ten years of funding to discover whether it was any use, i.e., academia functioning as normal."
And I think that's neat, actually.
[post for context]
Ok actually #discourse aside, I think a lot about how John WAS a scientist, and that was the approach he used in his cryo project, and that was ALSO the approach he used when he started displaying magic powers. He tried to do experiments. He tried to make up scientific terms. He tried to write papers.
And nobody would listen and then he had to cosplay a wizard on youtube.
I think about that SO MUCH. Like... I think John never had a high opinion of the "cultists." He's obviously annoyed that one of the first guys who gave them attention was a flat earther. He only started calling himself a necromancer so that people would listen. It was a last resort and personally, I think he wasn't keen on it.
Like... I think John, an educated scientist who has successfully pioneered a potentially revolutionary new technology (the cryo project, not the magic!) AND is also an indigenous man of colour, might have felt some kinda way about putting on a cape and eyeliner and recruiting a gullible cult of followers because he wasn't being taken seriously in ~intellectual circles. I know we make jokes aboout God being a twitch streamer - Taz put that in for a reason! I think it's funny, I think the cult aesthetic is fun, I think the pre-Res gang HAD fun with it, eventually. But I also think that there's a lot to unpack about John going from the lead research on a project that had serious corporate and government backing ("We cannot keep diverting three percent of the country’s electricity to your vats") to putting on a cape for the memes.
Also! You're absolutely right that the FTL fleet IS "the special technology that shows no promise." John, Mercy AND Augustine all it as hooky because it's SO new that it can scale up to what they need, if it even works as advertised. I'm very curious if / how / on which scale it was tested, and I think Augustine was right to suspect that the FTL propulsion was just an initial kick and the fleet was gonna generation-ship it and never come back.
Also speaking of people wanting an "immediate fix" - John also explicitly brings up that some of the cryo project backers nagged at him because they though an imperfect technology was good enough but the team thought the chance of damage was too high, and worked to reduce it.
Like, the whole point of the cryo project is that it worked, but it wasn't an easy fix, it required literally global cooperation, and there was no priority access for first-class passengers.
I am once again pointing a huge neon sign in John's direction that says HE ATE THE SUN!! That's plenty enough! We don't have to directly contradict canon to sue him for ethics breaches.
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thinking about how gorgug + kristen perceive both their own deaths & each other’s, and how that impacts their relationship. bc i feel like freshman year kristen was too caught up in her newfound knowledge of the nature of her own god to truly clock & process gorgug’s internal revulsion of where he went after he died, & freshman year gorgug wasn’t familiar enough with the complexities of other people to truly lock onto the sorrow buried within the chaos of kristen’s upward/downward/sideways spiral until she was seemingly on the other side of it. & i wonder if they’ve ever really talked about it (unlikely), or if they’ve just cracked very few jokes that didn’t land and decided to never quite do the work & dig through that part of their relationship. but there’s a kinship there; kristen specifically singles out gorgug to tell him she died again, and gorgug apologizes that he wasn’t there with her this time. gorgug takes one of the finger bones off kristen’s newly/long-time decayed corpse to have an anchor to something in the world. despite the fact that they were in different places after death, having been together during it means everything.
anyways what i’m trying to say is i think they should talk about it.
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not about poetry but i don't trust people who go online spewing vague declarations of "in order to write you need to understand Form And Structure!!!!" because there's prose fuckheads who do the same thing where they just vaguely say you need to understand Structure before you write a novel, but by structure they usually just mean the three act structure and the hero's journey and they've never studied or considered how structure can function beyond that, especially in non-western/non-english writing theories. the minute someone is like ohhhh but the Structure.....in a vague manner like that i'm like okay so you don't actually know structure because if you had deeply studied structure in writing theory as you claim to have done, you would know how complex and fluid and varied and malleable it is and it's not just one thing you Learn How To Do like putting a table together. and it's not something you will one day know perfectly because you will, ideally, encounter new ideas to structure a story as you expand your reading and your own writing. anyway i'm done for now i'm logging off to read more filthy animals by brandon taylor, potluck was such a good short story collection opener. i'm excited to see how he links these stories into a structured collection. i'm excited to read family meal by bryan washington when i'm done because he did a lot of fun things with really short + really long chapters in memorial and i learnt a lot about structure and pacing from there.
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I never was into Monster High and the younger-demographic reboot appeals to me even less tbh, but honestly I have half a mind to seek it out in the faint, vain hope that it might encourage Mattel to reboot Ever After High. But on the other hand Ever After High's original design was so charming because of the elements which are now becoming charmingly dated to the early 2010s, so I just know an official redesign would just always be disappointing even though fan redesigns are always super cool. And the whole fairy-tale fad is over, I guess -- I bet there are still little kids who love it like I did, but the market is saturated (and apparently Descendants is still active, and I know they're still publishing their Disney fanfiction AU books...) -- so there's little hope on that front. But I'm bringing Ever After High back into my life myself anyways. Wayback Machine saves of the old website and my books will suffice <3
Edit: wait something is GOING ON right now?? something peculiar and iffy but SOMETHING!!
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