#a theme that will be further explored in final edits etc etc

[compacflt]

i hate their last names now lol

[the-bad-batch-baroness]

Infectious

TBB & Fem!Reader

Chapter 3: Rumors on Scorro

Summary: You're completing your final practicum on Kamino as part of the experimental non-clone Combat Medic program. After graduating top of your class, and being inducted into the prestigious 407th Medic Unit, you get assigned to Clone Force 99. Neither of you are excited to be working together and tensions run high. However, those tensions dissipate when the Bad Batch unexpectedly falls ill while on a covert mission. Running against an unknown clock, it’s up to you to figure out what’s causing the illness before it ultimately kills you all.

Pairing: TBB & Fem!Reader

Characters: Hunter, Echo, Crosshair, Wrecker, Tech

Tags & Warnings: BAMF fem!reader, enemies to friends, humor, action, angst, hurt/comfort, canon typical violence, mild suggestive themes, explicit medical descriptions, whump

Word Count: 5.7k

Author's Note: WE'RE BACK BABY!!! Yeah, that's right. Finally. After all of this time, the next chapter has arrived 🥳 I told y'all I would be updating my other series fics in the new year, and I meant it. This chapter has some Echo angst in it, because why not. FYI, since it's been 9 months, I went back and edited the first two chapters to match my current writing style. No plot elements changed, just style, grammar, word choice, etc. As always, please enjoy 💚

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3

As the ship leaves the stormy atmosphere of Kamino, you turn your head to look out the transparisteel viewport and are greeted by the sight of endless stars twinkling brightly across the ebony horizon. You smile wide knowing this view will never get old. The galaxy is vast and beautiful, and getting to see it up close and personal, while also doing something you love, is priceless. This really is a turning point in your life. A new chapter to be written and explored.

When the ship levels out, you unstrap from the jump seat and start exploring the Marauder. You have a feeling you’ll be spending a lot of time aboard this ship, so you want to familiarize yourself with it as much as possible. You walk back towards the stern, where Wrecker is, and look around, but there's not much to see. Then make your way back up toward the bow and step aboard the bridge. You weave between Hunter and Crosshair, and stand behind Tech.

“So, where are we going?” you ask while looking over Tech’s shoulder at the controls.

Without turning around, Tech answers. “Agamar. It’s a rather barren planet found in the outer rim. The terrain is inhospitable to most, but we will manage.”

“What’s the mission?” you ask further, excited by the prospect and intrigue.

“There’s a separatist base they want us to route,” Hunter says. “A simple in-and-out mission.”

You nod your head at the explanation, but he makes it sound like routing a heavily guarded separatist base is a walk in the park. You have to remind yourself that they are an elite force of clones and are genetically modified for the toughest conditions. It amazes you that such clones can even exist and your fascination with them grows. You wonder how they look in action and if they live up to all the rumors the regular clones whisper about on Kamino. Only time will tell.

Hunter rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck. “Get some sleep, all of you. We’ll be there in a couple hours.”

You want to say something funny, like 'aye aye captain', but decide not. Instead, you simply nod and make your way back to the bunks. Laying down on the flat rack, you stare up at the ceiling. There are too many pre-mission jitters vibrating through your body to fall asleep. Even after shutting your eyes and calming yourself, it's just not enough. So, you toss and turn, getting more aggravated that your body won’t drift off, since being tired for your first mission is not an option.

You sigh and sit up, then peer around at the others who are soundly asleep in their bunks and chairs. You’re not sure how they can fall asleep so fast. It’s either a genetic thing or a military training tactic, but whatever it is, you don’t have it. You decide to get up and pace around to try and wear yourself out, and when you do, you hear something. The ship is quiet and your ears perk up immediately at the sound. Wanting to investigate it, you quietly slip around your squad.

One by one, you pass by them, waiting and listening to hear who made the weird sound. Not Wrecker. You move on. Not Crosshair either. You check the next one. He’s making noise for sure, but not the sound you heard. It’s not Tech either. You move towards Hunter, a little nervous that he might wake up and catch you staring at him, but you pause and listen. Nope, not him. You purse your lips. That only leaves Echo. Carefully, you tip toe over to him, wait, and listen.

He's not making a sound, and with a shrug, you turn to leave, thinking you’re a level of crazy for hearing things on a quiet ship. Then it happens again. You turn back around and look at Echo. He’s sleeping rather soundly, with soft rhythmic breaths and gentle rises and falls of his chest. No breath obstructions, you note to yourself. You wait and watch for a moment, then he says it again. It’s faint, breathy, and almost unrecognizable as a word, but you hear it regardless.

Fives.

You knit your eyebrows at the odd utterance, and wait a little longer, listening to see if what he mumbles changes or if he’s repeating the same word. After a couple standard seconds, Echo says the same breathy word again. Fives. You wonder what it means. Maybe it’s a special numerical sequence from his time back on Skako Minor? You shrug at the mystery, but are happy that it’s not a breathing issue. You turn to leave him be, but he mumbles something else.

Fives come back.

Oh. Your heart drops. It’s a person. He’s dreaming about someone he knows, or maybe someone he once knew. You sigh and let your eyes turn soft, knowing exactly what it’s like to dream about loved ones. It’s been several years, but you still dream about your parents. Sometimes you can’t fill in all the gaps of your dreams as you slowly forget things, but it still pulls at your heartstrings every time they show up to give you a hug in the realm of sleep.

As your thoughts wander a yawn escapes past your lips. Finally, feeling tired and ready for sleep, you return to your bunk and crawl onto the hard surface. Laying on your back, you close your eyes and take a few deep breaths to settle yourself. You still wonder who Fives is and what they mean to Echo. Your psychology books tell you that dreams can be a subconscious escape or a subconscious desire. Knowing next to nothing about Echo’s past, it could be either one.

You take another deep breath and exhale slowly. Closing your eyes, you let yourself drift off to sleep, but in a split moment, a rough hand shakes you back awake. You shoot up and hit your head on the bunk above you. Ouch. Nursing your newly formed bump, you use your other hand to rub the sleep out of your eyes. When you come out of your groggy haze, you can hear snickering coming from the rest of the squad. Ha ha, yes, very funny. You think to yourself.

“Rise and shine,” Hunter mocks as he walks away from your bunk. “We’re here.”

Gathering your composure, you swing out of the bunk and head over to the cockpit for the landing. You look out the viewport as you enter the atmosphere of Agamar and your face lights up with excitement. This is it. Your first mission. You want to squeal, but something tells you that no one else is going to appreciate it, so you keep it internal. The ship lands on the rocky surface of the planet with only a slight wobble. Tech wasn’t kidding when he said it was inhospitable.

Your excitement grows as the squad gears up with their packs, and you follow suit the same way. You double check your pack to make sure you have all the medical necessities and do a mental headcount of your supplies. Once satisfied with your inventory, you sling it across your back and toss your bucket snug on your head. You’re all set to go on your first mission. The ship door opens, light beaming in, and your heart begins to race. This is it. This is your moment.

You take your first steps forward to leave the ship when Hunter stretches an arm out to stop you. “Not you,” Hunter says. “You’re staying here.”

“What?” you question. “But what about the mission?”

“Your mission is here,” Hunter says. “You’re staying on the ship with Echo.”

“But, sir!” you argue. Your feelings of excitement crumble. “I belong in the field!”

“You belong where I tell you you belong, medic,” Hunter snaps back. “Or are you ignoring an order from your commanding officer on your first mission?”

You huff and clench your fist. “No, sir."

“I didn’t think so,” Hunter says, then turns to face Echo. “We may need a quick extraction, so keep your ears on.”

“Understood,” Echo acknowledges with a nod.

Hunter nods back and heads out of the Marauder with the rest of the squad, well, the rest of the squad except you. You remove your bucket, plop down on your bunk with an angry grunt, and lean your head back against the wall. This entire assignment has been one big pissing match, and every time you think you’re making progress, you get sidelined. How are you supposed to make Kix proud if you don’t see any action? You release another angry grunt and cross your arms.

“Careful,” Echo says. “You’ll lose your voice if you keep grunting like that.”

You roll your eyes. “Aren’t you upset being stuck here?”

“No,” Echo answers. “It’s not unusual for someone to be left back with the ship. Keeps people from stealing it.”

With such a small squad of men to work with, you guess that makes sense, and since Echo is your unofficial chaperone, it makes sense that you were left on the ship with him. However, even though you try to explain it to yourself in those practical terms, you still think it's to spite you. You sigh. At this rate, you’ll never get to prove your worth as a Combat Medic to any of them. To these special clones, you’re just useless dead weight and not worth their time.

As the planetary rotation moves forward, you find odd things around the ship to busy yourself with, but you’re still bored. Echo is not much of a conversationalist and he hasn’t moved from his spot in the cockpit. You end up sprawling yourself across the seat in the gunner’s nest and looking out the window at whatever draws your attention. There’s some trees, a little snow on the ground, and a few stray wildlife that come into view. Nothing too spectacular, that’s for sure.

Finally, after hours of sitting by yourself, you decide to go back to the cockpit and sit with Echo. You're still curious about this Fives person he mentioned in his sleep, and you think maybe now might be a good time to ask him about it. You walk into the cockpit and sit down in the chair across from him, bending one leg up onto the chair and resting your chin atop your knee. Echo silently acknowledges your presence and returns to looking at the setting sun over the horizon.

You fidget with your fingers as you mull over whether to ask him about what you overheard last night. It might be private, and he may not want to tell you, but your curiosity is getting the better of you. “Echo,” you ask. “Who's Fives?”

Echo shifts uncomfortably in his seat and stays silent for a couple of minutes. “How do you know that name?” he asks. His words hang heavy in the air.

“You…” you begin, then pause, unsure of how to tell him. You don't want to sound creepy, but honesty is the best policy. “You said it in your sleep.”

Echo sighs, but doesn't turn his gaze from the orange sunset. “Shouldn’t you have been sleeping too?”

“I’m not used to sleeping on ships,” you answer. You can tell by the tone of his voice that this is a sore subject and you're starting to regret bringing it up.

Echo swivels his chair to face you and worries his lip. His eyes are full of sadness and his countenance is engrossed in pain as he searches for the words he's looking for. A small smile flashes across his lips. You wonder if he's thinking about a memory.

“He was my brother,” Echo says, his voice quiet at the strain of saying his thoughts out loud.

You can tell by his choice of words and his tone of voice that this brother isn’t around anymore and you feel a twinge of sadness settle in your gut. You understand a thing or two about the loss of a loved one. “What happened to him?” you ask.

“He was murdered,” Echo says, his fist tightening as he looks back out the viewport. “By one of our own.”

Your expression turns from sadness to shock and then confusion. A clone killing a clone? Does that even happen? Why would a clone do that? Your mind rushes a mile a minute trying to wrap your head around the idea, but you cannot seem to reconcile it. It’s too bizarre of a concept to comprehend. Every clone you've ever met was a brother to the one next to him. So, for a clone to kill another clone, it’s like a family member killing another family member. It’s unheard of.

“I’m sorry, Echo,” you offer as a consolation. “You must miss him.”

“Yeah,” Echo says, his voice distant. “I do.”

“I miss my parents all the time,” you say, trying to bridge the gap and build a connection.

“I remember you mentioning they’re dead,” Echo says as he turns to face you.

“About ten years ago,” you add. Now it's your turn to look out at the sunset.

“I’m sorry,” Echo says.

“It’s fine,” you shrug. “It hurts, but it doesn’t hurt like it used to. I know they’re out there watching over me, somewhere.”

Echo snorts. “You believe in that Jedi force stuff do ya?”

“Not really,” you answer with a small laugh. “But everyone needs to believe in something.”

“That’s fair,” Echo says.

“When I look up at the stars,” you begin with a smile while staring fondly out at the horizon, “it’s almost like I can feel them with me, you know? Watching over me as I make my way in the galaxy.”

“Sounds nice,” Echo says.

“I bet Fives is watching you too,” you say, then look at Echo with soft eyes. “He hasn’t left you alone, just like my parents haven’t left me.”

“Maybe,” Echo shrugs, then chuckles. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he came back to haunt me.” His brief small smile fades as his countenance reverts back to a frown.

“We’ll see them again some day," you say, trying to stay hopeful. “I just know it.”

“That would be something, wouldn’t it?” Echo half-jokes, but you can hear the part of his heart that wants what you're saying to be true.

He wants to see his brother again, desperately. So much so that he calls out to him while he sleeps. He must agonize over Fives’ death. You understand because you’ve been there. You’ve stared death in the face, the kind of death that leaves you thoroughly alone. You don't need to understand psychology to know what his subconscious thinks about on a daily basis, and your heart hurts for him, but you know there's nothing in your medpack to mend a shattered heart.

You and Echo stare out of the cockpit in silence and watch the sun fall beyond the horizon, sharing in this solemn moment and appreciating the company. The veil of night arrives and the stars begin to shine in the dark sky. The billions of bright burning lights feel comforting. The stars aren't very visible on Kamino, but here, on this planet, they are bright and beautiful. You relax your shoulders and lean back, thinking that maybe this assignment isn’t so bad after all.

However, your sweet moment is interrupted by Hunter’s voice over the comms. He’s calling in that quick extraction now and by the amount of yelling and blaster fire in the background, this is going to be a hot one. Echo relays the affirmation, sets the coordinates, and lets Hunter know that both of you are on the way to pick them up. You're slightly surprised that Echo included you in the transmission, but now is not the time to be celebrating your first taste of inclusivity.

“Civvy, strap in,” Echo orders as he starts pressing buttons and flipping switches to get the ship going. “This is going to be a bumpy ride and I don’t need you falling out of the ship.”

Ah, there it is. You sigh and head back towards the jump seats and strap yourself in for the wild ride ahead. Echo expertly maneuvers the ship to the squad's location and brings it in low so they can climb on board. You can hear the blaster fire outside and as the door opens to the ship, you watch them file in while firing off blaster bolts to cover each other. It’s the first time you’ve seen any of them in action and you're a little awestruck. They don’t move like other clones.

Tech next to Echo and Hunter yells for them to get them out of here. The ship moves again, this time more aggressively, as the enemy continues to fire at the Marauder. Wrecker moves to the gunner’s nest and shoots down the vulture droids that are following behind. You tightly grip the bars on the jump seat as the ship rocks from the blasts. Thankfully, the shields are up. The ship flips upside down, sideways, and every other way you can think of to out maneuver the droids.

At long last, the ship breaches the atmosphere and moves into space. Tech initiates the hyperdrive and pulls the handle down to enter into hyperspace. Once safe in a hyperspace lane, you let out the breath you were holding in, then flick the safety release on the jump seat and push them over your head. You get up from the seat and wobble forward, not realizing your legs turned to jelly from all of the excitement, and let your feet stabilize before trying to walk.

“Woah, that was fun!” Wrecker hollers as he brushes by you and moves towards the cockpit. “Echo, you should have seen this place. It was crazy.”

“Not as crazy as being sling-shot across a ravine,” Crosshair grumbles and pushes past you. He sits down in one of the swivel chairs and starts cleaning his rifle in silence.

“I said I was sorry,” Wrecker apologizes. “But we won!”

“Correction,” Tech says as he lifts a pointed finger in the air. “I won.”

Crosshair rolls his eyes and pulls a few credits from his pocket and hands them to Tech.

“Much obliged,” Tech says as he stuffs the credits in one of his many satchels.

The exchange has you lost in bewilderment. Clearly, something happened during the mission and you’re curious to know the details. You look at Echo, hoping he'll ask for more information about it, but he doesn’t, leaving you more curious. You do find it odd, however, that they had some form of amusement out on the battlefield. From your time on Kamino, most clones don't find blaster fire fun. Clone Force 99 really is different compared to the rest of the clone forces.

“I assume your mission was a success?” Hunter asks while walking by you, breaking you from your thoughts.

“Yes… sir,” you answer with a twinge of hesitancy, a little unsure of what your mission was other than staying on the ship with Echo.

“Good,” Hunter says. He reclines in one of the empty swivel seats and clasps his hands behind his head. “Glad to hear it.”

You can’t tell if he’s being serious or if he's trying to make fun of you. Either way, you brush it off and focus on more pressing matters, like what's next on the mission agenda. Will you go back to Kamino? Or will you wait for more orders? That’s what good soldiers do, isn’t it? Follow orders? You’re still unfamiliar with all of this, so you’re not sure what to ask or what to do with yourself. Rather than make new issues by asking more questions, you retreat back to your bunk to relax.

But the boredom of waiting creeps in and you start to doze off. Your eyelids are heavy even though you barely spent any energy this rotation. It doesn't take you long to remember that you didn’t get much sleep the night before and now that the adrenaline is wearing off, your body is telling you it needs rest. You don't fight it and let your body go to sleep, hoping you won’t be woken up. As a medic, you must get rest whenever you can so you can be at your best at all times.

This time you wake up on your own terms, when your body feels rested. You’re not sure how long you were out, but no one bothered you so you assume everyone is still waiting for new orders to come across. You sit up in your bunk, without hitting your head this time, and stretch out your arms. You roll your shoulders and crack your neck. The bunks aren’t exactly soft, but they do their job. Swinging your legs over the side of the bunk, you get up to use the refresher.

As you head towards the refresher, the rest of the squad is huddled around and speaking amongst each other. Hunter looks serious and has his arms crossed, which can’t mean anything good, and Echo is arguing with him, again. You forget the refresher for a moment and walk over to add your presence to the mix. Hunter notices and glances at you before turning back to Echo. Not realizing where you are standing, Crosshair gives you a small jab on your behind with his rifle.

The sudden touch startles you. “What was that for?”

“You’re blocking my view,” Crosshair hisses. “Move.”

You roll your eyes. “You could've just asked me to move, you know. That's borderline harassment.”

“If you looked more like a window than a door, I wouldn’t have to borderline harass you,” Crosshair snarks and flicks his toothpick in your face.

Your nose scrunches and eyes close when the little wooden projectile hits your face. As your frustration builds, you take a deep breath to calm yourself. You want nothing more than to tell that sniper where he can shove his rifle, but you won't. It's not worth it because it will only fuel his bullying further. Instead, you choose to let it go. This time. There are points where you will cross the line, and he keeps dancing around that line. If he ever crosses it, you'll let him know.

“Can we get back to more important things?” Hunter asks, shifting his gaze between you and Crosshair.

Echo huffs and shakes his head. "I don't like it."

"We don't have to like it," Hunter says. "Orders are orders."

"What orders?" you ask.

Hunter swivels to face you. "There's rumors of an imperial base operating out of Scorro." Tech pulls up a holo of the planet and Hunter continues his explanation. "According to our intel, the GAR sent a squad of clones to scout the base, but their comms suddenly went silent. Another squad of clones were sent after them with the same result. Now they want us to investigate."

"Do they know what happened to the clones?" you ask, curious as to what's causing Echo's skepticism.

"No," Hunter crosses his arms. "They were never recovered."

"No one went back to get them?" you ask.

"It would be a waste of resources," Tech adds. "Besides, based on the trend, sending another clone squadron would yield the same results."

"But aren't we another clone squadron?" you ask, this time your nerves bleed through.

"Stop worrying!" Wrecker exclaims. "We can take on whatever they throw at us!"

His words don't make you feel better about the situation. While Echo is the only one openly objecting to the new mission, Hunter's facial expressions tell a different story than what he's leading everyone to believe. Your first inkling was the fact that he hasn't shoved you aside for this conversation. In fact, he's answered your questions without issue. He's serious about this in a way he hasn't been since you've met him. The fact that Hunter is worrying, has you worrying.

"I still don't like it," Echo frowns. "How'd they lose two clone squadrons without so much as one distress signal?"

"Maybe a new type of droid?" you offer. "Or their signals were jammed?"

"Groundbreaking ideas," Crosshair says.

"Everything is a valid option," Echo adds.

Crosshair rolls his eyes.

"Enough," Hunter says. "We're going to Scorro to investigate the rumors and to find the missing clones. Double-check our supplies and prepare for anything."

With the sergeant's final words, everyone scatters to prepare for the mission, except for Tech who punches in the new coordinates and sets the course for Scorro. You linger in the cockpit, silently observing Hunter as he pulls out his knife and twirls it around his fingers. The mission makes you nervous even though it shouldn't. You'll probably end up staying on the ship again, but maybe that's not a bad thing. You shake your head at the thought. That's not why you're here.

"Sergeant–"

"You too," Hunter says before you get a chance to ask. "You're coming with us."

You smile and nod. "Thank you, sir."

"Don't get the wrong idea," Hunter adds. "I need Echo for this mission, and I'm not leaving you alone on the ship."

"Yes, sir," you frown then turn back towards the bunks to get yourself situated.

Of course it would be too good to be true. For a second, you thought he actually wanted you on this mission, but he just wants to keep an eye on you. As a medic, you can help the missing troopers if they need medical attention, which you're confident they will. Your presence on the mission should be vital, not just an afterthought. Although, you shouldn't be upset that you're going on a mission, but you wish it was because of merit and not for the sake of babysitting.

Regardless, you will do your best on this mission and prove to Clone Force 99 that you are a good medic. That they need you. You're not sure how, but you will. When you get back to your bunk, you triple-check the supplies in your pack and stock as many bacta patches and stim shots as you can fit, plus some essential fluid and mineral packets, ration bars, and a few medical odds and ends that make sense to bring along. You want to be prepared for anything.

With your preparations made, it's another waiting game until you reach Scorro. You don't remember reading about that planet in your studies, but apparently it's rather primitive in nature, which is why no one has settled on it. It's an abandoned planet, making it a great outpost for mercenaries, pirates, and separatists. Pulling out your data-pad, you do a little more research to see what you can find out, but come up with the same dismal results that your holo-texts had.

It's not much longer before the Marauder drops out of hyperspace and the olive-green planet comes into view. When the holo-text said that Scorro was primitive, it wasn't kidding. It looks new and unabused by modern progress, and its vegetal hue is highly alluring. Your curiosity has now surpassed your trepidation about the rumors and missing clones. You're excited. This is a great opportunity, even if it's dangerous. The closer you get to the planet, the faster your heart beats.

“According to the scanners, there are no active fauna on this planet,” Tech states. "But the air is breathable."

“Just because the air is breathable doesn’t mean it’s good for you,” you point out. “Carbon monoxide is breathable but you’ll die before you figure out it’s bad for you.”

“Correction,” Tech adds. "The air is non-toxic towards human life-forms."

"Glad we could sort that one out," Crosshair says. "Any more words of wisdom?"

You narrow your eyes at him. "No."

"Take us in," Hunter says. "Land just outside the coordinates of the last clone squadron."

"Affirmative," Tech says, then flips a few switches before piloting the ship into the planet's atmosphere.

Once the ship has landed, Hunter addresses the group. "Our mission is to locate the two missing clone squadrons and investigate the rumors about an separatist base of operations. We'll use teams of two and spread out in an 800 meter radius from the last known coordinates. Keep the comm lines open and have your blasters at the ready."

Everyone nods and gears up, including you. Before you put your bucket on, you glance at the medic mark on your shoulder pauldron. No matter what happens, you have a job to do. You're a medic first. These men, your squad, are in your care and it's your responsibility to make sure they all survive. Steeling yourself for what's to come, you bite back every lick of fear that tries to take hold in your mind. You've trained hard for this, and you're not going to get cold feet now.

The side loading ramp opens and the bright sunlight of the planet blasts into the dimly lit ship. No turning back now. You follow the rest of the squad out of the ship and step onto the fresh earth of Scorro. For someone who grew up on Coruscant and spent the last cycle on Kamino, this much vegetation is mesmerizing. The sun is so warm, and the earth beneath your feet is so soft. This virgin planet is breathtaking. You take a few more steps forward, then Hunter stops.

"Tech, Crosshair, go east," Hunter says while pointing in that direction. "Wrecker and I will go north. Echo and Civvy, you'll go west.

The group nods and heads out in their respective directions.

"Stay frosty men," Hunter says over the comms. "There's no telling what we'll be up against out here."

You and Echo silently walk towards the western end of the perimeter, keeping your eyes peeled for any signs of the clone troopers or separatists. After a couple minutes, the silence grates on your nerves, but Echo seems focused right now. A little too focused. You know this mission bothered him from the beginning, but there seems to be something else about the way he carries himself that indicates it's not just about the mission being odd. There's something deeper.

As you continue forward, your foot kicks something hard. Looking down, you catch a glimpse of the familiar white plastoid clone trooper helmet, which is attached to a body shrouded by tall weeds. Your stomach flips. You weren't expecting to find one of them so quickly.

"Sarge," you say in the comms. "I found a trooper." Crouching down, you check for a pulse, but as you expected, there is none. "He's dead."

"We're making our way to your position now," Hunter says. "How'd he die?"

While your medic training didn't have an autopsy course, you inspect the body for the usual suspects. The armor is still intact and there's no signs of a struggle, which you find odd. There's no blaster marks, claw marks, bites, or scratches on the armor either. The black bodysuit isn't even ripped. He must have died from something. You pull back some of the black bodysuit and notice the tissue is necrotizing, but you don't see anything suspicious. Then you scan the body.

"Civvy, status," Hunter interjects over comms.

"I'm not sure how he died," you admit while reviewing the results of the scan. Echo looks over the body too, but doesn't come up with anything substantial. Not that you needed a second opinion.

"What do you mean you're not sure?" Hunter asks. "You're a medic, you should know how people die."

"There's no wounds," you explain. "He looks normal. Fine, even. Besides being dead." You don't mention it, but the fact that there are no organisms feasting on the clone's flesh also baffles you. You'd figure there would be more decay markers, but there's not even a single worm.

Hunter and Wrecker make it to your position and Hunter looks over the body, confirming what you said. "Then how the kriff did he die?"

You look up at Hunter from your crouched position next to the body and shrug. "We'd need a full autopsy to determine that, but the scans indicate no internal injuries either."

"So, he died from nothing?" Echo asks.

You shrug again. "Maybe he had a heart attack. That doesn't show up on portable scanners."

"Eighteen clone troopers died of a heart attack?" Hunter asks, his voice sounding distant.

"No," you rebut. "But maybe this one did."

Hunter points past you and you stand up to see what he wants you to look at. You tilt your head from side to side, scanning the area he's pointing at, when a glint of white pops up on your HUD. Then another. And another. Your eyes widen and your mouth gapes. The ground is littered with seventeen more troopers half-covered in tall weeds. The first squad and the second squad, dead mere meters from each other. You've never seen so many dead bodies before.

You feel your stomach grow queasy, and you rip off your helmet to vomit. As a medical student, you've seen cadavers, held organs in your hands, been bathed in blood, but nothing prepared you for the sight of a mass death. There's something menacing and sickly about it. You know most clones are never retrieved from battlegrounds and you know most clones will never see a proper burial, but knowing and witnessing are two different things. It's heartbreaking.

"You all right?" Echo asks.

You pant from the spasmic exertion, but find your voice. "I'm fine."

Tech and Crosshair arrive at your position soon after, and take note of the bodies. Everyone feels it now, the pressure looming thickly in the air. Something happened on this planet. Something killed these eighteen troopers and it killed them silently. There's an anxiety that creeps in as you wonder what it possibly could be. What is the silent hunter? How does it find its victims? And how can you and your squad escape from it? Perhaps, it may even be too late.

"I've got a bad feeling about this," Echo says to Hunter.

Hunter sighs. "Me too."

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3

Masterlist

A03

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[variousqueerthings]

I am an idiot with a box and a screwdriver, passing through, helping out, learning. I don’t need an army

Dark Water/Death In Heaven -- we're doing it as a double episode single-review, because it's one continuous story. It also wraps up a lot of the thematic threads of season eight and finally reveals that *gasp* it was the Master all along! (I genuinely do not remember if people were taken by surprise back in the day, I never watched this far at that time, and obviously I knew when I finally did)

sexism rank objectification (female character is ogled/harassed/turned into a sex joke by the doctor and/or a lead we’re supposed to root for and/or the camera): 6/10

sexism rank plot-point (lead female character is only there to serve plot, not to have her emotional interiority explored, or given agency to her emotional interiority): 6/10

interesting complex or pointlessly complex (does the complexity serve the narrative or does it just serve to be confusing as a stand-in for smart, this includes visually): 3/10

furthers character and/or lore and/or plot development (broader question that ties into the previous ones, at least two of these, ideally three should be fulfilled): 5/10

companion matters (the companion doesn’t always have to be there, but if the companion is there, can they function without the doctor– and overall per season how often is the companion the focus or POV of the story): 5/10

the doctor is more than just “godlike” (examines the doctor’s flaws and limitations, doesn’t solve a plot by having it revolve entirely around the doctor’s existence): 5/10

doesn’t look down on previous doctor who (by erasing or mocking its importance, by redoing and “bettering” previous beloved plotpoints or characters, etc.): 6/10

isn’t trying to insert hamfisted sexiness (m*ffat famously talked a lot about how dw should be sexier multiple times, he sucks at writing it): 4/10

internal world has consistency (characters have backgrounds, feel rooted in a place with other people, generally feel like they have Lives): 4/10

Politics (how conservative is the story): 2/10

FULL RATING: 46/100 (if I can count….)

the real issue with the plot of the finale, as I see it is actually solidly in the field of "pacing." there's some other stuff (I'll get into what I think about fulfilling character arcs and concepts about soldiers below), but pacing is the throughline as we take a look at various themes and arcs and whether they were sufficiently wrapped up

EDIT: this one is quite long because it also partially covers the whole season + I rant about the military

OBJECTIFICATION: oooof the four women in this finale, Clara, Kate, Osgood, and Gomez!Master, we technically don't get this much, however I do think it's interesting that M*ffat's Master is... called... Missy....

which I will not be doing, because I hate it. you see she's "Mistress" because she's a woman now, but no nonono, she needs a cutesy version of it, so it's "Missy," she's like the sexy dom you always dreamed of (just like Irene and River and several single-episode characters...)

at least he didn't dress her in leather

it's also hard to designate whether the way he writes her is so off from the way Simm!Master was written, because he for sure had a bunch of "I'm just Cu-raaazyy" moments. also he used bigotry as a casual hammer, which I'd be curious to talk with RTD about. I don't think he'd do that the same way if he were writing those episodes today, anyway, wrong era

Gomez!Master, in these episodes, has some really really stellar moments. she also has moments that make me go, "ah yes, this is a woman written by M*ffat," most noticeably in some of her one-sided "flirting" with the Doctor. again, it's hard to pinpoint, because a lot of it is just "yeah they're unhinged about each other and have been forever," but some of the "ooh Doctor I'm doing all of this for you," stuff is... it just feels like they can do that because of het Nonsense now (which I will get into in the "sexiness" point)

like she can be softer now (in a Master way) because she's portrayed by a woman opposite Capaldi's Doctor, which I think the "short for Mistress" moment is the most prime example of

I do also think though, this is (you guessed it) partially a pacing issue, because they didn't insert Gomez!Master into the main narrative until the second-to-last episode. if we could have seen her in some material way doing something prior to that -- but wait, Simm!Master also only appeared properly in the second-to-last episode, yes, correct, but Simm!Master was materially affecting the narrative from very early on, and not in a somewhat random "I gave you a number to call for a helpline that turned out to be the Tardis and also I'm sort of sitting around waiting for the plot to catch up with me" setup, but in a "I'm monitoring your family, I'm fucking with the government" kind of way -- there was even a musical cue that included the four beats that recurred so that we could connect that to the overarching story of mind-control

I'm going to get back to this in complexity, because we're getting off-point. Point is the jump from where we left off to where we find Gomez!Master being a bit lovey-dovey (again, in a Master way) just wasn't there and I feel like M*ffat thought he could do it this way because of course now they're played by a man and a woman... hypothesis. theory, if you will. Charlie Day Corkboard meme perhaps. but M*ffat would never have done this if the Master were played by a guy, looking at his track record. he might have done it if the Doctor were played by a woman, but I think the real issue there would have been how incredibly porn-opening-adjacent his Doctor/Master interactions would have become, so that's a different sort of lesbophobic bullet dodged

like, I'll take more explicit Master/Doctor stuff. but I'm fucking watching you M*ffat, youknow.

PLOT-POINT: Clara is not a plot-point in this episode, however I do think the pacing of Stuff hits her quite hard. we had a slowish build-up of her and Danny over the episodes, although fascinatingly he never really got to have proper feelings about the acres of lies she'd told him -- she was working up to telling him about it properly, but he got hit by a car before she could

this brings up a Thing about Clara, which is that she makes a loooot of bad decisions that prioritise her own current wants over what's good for her and/or people around her, and I doooo think that's intentional -- she has a line in this episode where she says to Danny, "I wasn’t very good at it, but I did love you"

now season 9 might deal with the guilt of the above, so there may be things to come, but there was certainly a lot of confusion on my side about what her journey was going to be about, and so far it seems to be a very unhealthy "I am owed things" rather than about running away from something tangible or feeling overwhelmed from life

there is the original idea that it was her mother's death that prompted her to want to travel, but something always got in the way, and that this (for example taking care of two kids whose mother died recently) indicates that she's a "good" person who cares for others -- and she doesn't not care, but it's certainly not her driving character trait in the way that it seemed to look like when Eleven met her properly and gauged her as a person who could be a companion

this is all very waffly, because I'm still not sure where Clara lands in all of this, or if I think it works in the grand scheme of things, especially in tandem with the other characterisations and themes of this season. it's got a very depressing, hopeless sort of framing to it that in other contexts I might be really into, but I may not enjoy for Doctor Who

that being said... it's consistent throughout the season. Clara sees the Doctor's red flags (and we'll get to those) and provided the ending is okay and she can control the Doctor and her own role in the situation, she's okay with the idea that people get used along the way -- as long as the Doctor doesn't try that on her

in this episode of course Clara threatens to (and makes good on that promise, even if it doesn't work) destroy the Tardis keys, stranding them both on a volcano, rails against the ordinariness of grief and feels that she is owed something more, shuts down Danny's attempts to say that he loves her, because it's not on her terms (granted, these terms are "please just accept that I'm dead," but that is kind of the point with Clara and her sense of controlling things, even death), then decides to be the one to kill Danny properly as a Cyberman, despite the Doctor explaining that Cyber-Danny will kill others, and then is fully intending to just straight up kill the Master!!!!

this is wild to me -- back in s3, when Francine and the entire Jones family are prepared to see the Master dead, it's because he destroyed the earth and made them watch and kept them as slaves for a year

in this episode, Clara wants to kill the Master because she did bad things that, yes, prolonged the sadness of Danny's death, but crucially did not actually cause Danny's death. Danny just... died. yeah, there's probably theories out there that the Master might have caused it (we'll get to this too), but this is never textual in the episode, and Clara never gives an indication that that's her belief

she's just angry that the Master is a bad person who did bad things, as concept. and mostly she's angry because her boyfriend is dead, and as far as I can see, the Doctor is now off the hook (whereas at the beginning the Doctor was very much on the hook) and the Master is the closest person around to take that anger out on

bonkers for a companion to be this way. again, Martha, my beloved Martha, Osterhagen key back in the day, she's not doing this out of anger, she's having a straight-up bad time and the whole tragedy is about the Doctor accidentally turning companions into soldiers. they've got guns and everything. Clara just bypasses this and is simply down for murder because she's upset

at the end of course she elects to not tell the Doctor about Danny's sacrifice/still being dead, because she thinks the Doctor would stay rather than return to Gallifrey (which may not be found after all, because the Doctor lies to her about that too), which is quite self-sacrificial of her. we'll see where this sentiment goes, especially as it's another lie, which is kind of their whole... thing with one another. terrible terrible for one another, which I know is the appeal for their fans, so I'm not necessarily writing this as critique

I am reminded of the Doctor and Martha again, who also had a whole unhealthy thing going on, but it was very based in the narrative and had a specific trajectory and then an ending that acknowledged this as a reason for Martha no longer wishing to travel with them (and then some things I have questions about, RTD bring Martha back I'm not satisfied!)

in this story, it feels like this is simply who Clara is. and while it does contradict some of her earlier narrative in s7, I can accept that it's consistent now. but yeah... as said, there's some plotting and pacing inconsistencies. where are the kids from before (I know she stopped taking care of them, but one feels like they had no tangible impact on the story), why was Danny's death written in the way it was (we'll get to that), where did some of her s7 characterisation go (I really missed a Clara who wasn't just smart and quippy, but was also scared and out of her depth), is this because she "knows" a lot of the Doctor lore now, so she feels like she belongs more in this world than other people? why was she in love with Danny, to the point of wanting to go to a possible afterlife to get him back (actually this is a big one, because while they did have scenes together, I don't know what drew her to him, and I have some feelings about Danny down in the politics section of this, which somewhat can be boiled down to "he gives me the vibes of a man who is kind and sensitive and easily used and Clara likes to use people so...")

like I said- it's not that Clara doesn't make sense for who she is now, but that the pacing and structure don't support her arc very well. I don't think this is the worst thing to happen to a female character during M*ffat's run, but it does make this finale less emotionally fulfilling than it clearly wants to be

am I sad that Danny is dead? yeah, but not because of Clara. I'm sad because of his unrealised potential as a character. am I shocked that Clara wanted to shoot the Master? yes, but because it was a Bonkers Yonkers bit of characterisation on top of some already wild things she did which any past Doctor I think would have said "ok, you are not suitable for this kind of life, because you are way too down with murder and have no emotional stability." When Clara left the Doctor, I was kinda like. yeah, ok, she could end this here I guess (I say that, and acknowledge that actually the Christmas Special right after gives her a bit more depth on the whole "Danny Dying Sitch" of things, although again, it does not make me think she should be continuing to travel with the Doctor, never mind be working with UNIT in s9????)

ok. but. pacing. let's get to it

COMPLEXITY: ok the problem with this episode is not technically complexity, although it does fall for a couple of M*ffat standards in that it didn't need to be doing some of the things it is doing (the cremation stuff I think is particularly unsettling in a needless way that I think crosses a line, but that is possibly subjective)

the problem is the questions I was asking in the previous sections and a whole bunch more, that shows that all of the themes and questions that were set up throughout the season weren't paced well or satisfactorily concluded

take one that I like: The Master. big fan of Gomez' portrayal of The Master barring a few things that are very M*ffat female character, with a dash of his Moriarty (so youknow the drill if you've ever spent too long engaging with a M*ffat narrative), but that's not her, that's just her having to make a "hey Missy you're so fine" dialogue work

I mentioned it was odd that she was so sidelined and just... hanging around... until the second-to-last episode. I am unclear why she "chose" Clara to travel with the Doctor, first of all. I cannot remember if this is answered in the episode, beyond like "the Universe and fate and shit" which I'm not a fan of if so. second of all... why didn't she kill Danny? (EDIT: did read there's a short story that confirmed she did kill Danny, but we're going purely by episodes here)

if we want to go big, say, why wasn't there a big, slow reveal that she'd been poking around in Clara's life, maybe also Danny's life who knows, and that she was giving all of these things to the Doctor as a gift by using humans as puppets culminating in Danny's death and this is what sets Clara off? the idea that she once again is just playing to the tune of a larger narrative that she has no control over and worse, isn't even about her, but about this fucked up dynamic between these two incredibly old aliens

I'm sure some people like the randomness of Danny's death. I personally do not. I think it's contrived angst that comes out of nowhere in the same way so much of M*ffat's narrative tends to do. why is this happening now? because we need the story to go there and we forgot to place 90% of the establishing building blocks that make it feel organic -- the worst offender for this in my opinion is still the "Amy grew up with River as her best friend the whole time, you just didn't know," but this is a pretty bad example in my opinion too, because on the surface it is very very sad, and the randomness of death is a great idea... but hey, remember when they did that story in 2005 with Rose's dad and it was really good and established and played into the overarching themes of her story? this is not that. this is using sadness as a cheap device

there's like. a story in here that is really really good, and it gets buried underneath a bunch of contrived over-the-top stuff (although, while I initially thought the "president of the earth" stuff was bad, and still kind of do, I did think it was funny that the Doctor mocked the Master about all those times they tried to rule the world and the Doctor managed it by accident)

I also -- and I'm sure many people have noticed this too -- cannot help but go, "oh isn't this just the Library plot but evil? and with a worse/less believable set of scifi nonsense explanations?" and that's such a M*ffat classic too. use three or four good (and sometimes not good) ideas over and over again, but bigger and more unwieldy

Ohhhh boy the idea of the Brigadier becoming a Cyberman, because all of earth - no wait, more than earth, some of the people who end up there aren't on earth - for the last x amount of years has just been sucked into the evil Library database. (seriously, tell me how this works, because it works across Time and Space apparently??) -- anyway billions? trillions? of people becoming Cybermen. I don't think this is explained either. I am not a fan of the Brigadier becoming a Cyberman, let's say that

none of the core scifi stuff is explained beyond a handwave, and none of the emotional arcs are given a satisfying conclusion but!

listen Michelle Gomez is so cool, I relish the future when I know she's getting better dialogue

also in theory I like the callback to the "I win" in s3. we know the Doctor doesn't kill her, but yeah, him going "you win." they're such weirdos about each other, truly. again, with all of the rest of the "stuff" this season, the poor pacing, the scrape-the-surface-and-it's-cheap-sentimentality I don't think it entirely works, but hey, Gomez will return so!

CHARACTERS/LORE/PLOT: Danny is dead. the Master is Michelle Gomez (and not dead). the Doctor is slightly? more chill in themself (maybe, idk, going by the following episode, maybe not). Gallifrey is still lost. I think that covers it?

also the Doctor just straight-up wasn't looking for Gallifrey this whole time it seems

COMPANIONS MATTER: Clara does some things in this one. notably, not a single thing she does works, but for the ways they work because the Doctor and/or Danny care about her so so much, which I think is at the heart of all of this -- if you (the audience) believe that the Doctor and Danny have so much affection and/or love for Clara that despite her behaviour they would go to the afterlife for her, they would break cyber-coding for her, then this works

if you don't believe this, then we're in trouble.

things Clara does: aforementioned attempted destruction of Tardis key, attempting to save Danny from death, passing herself off as the Doctor, killing Danny, killing the Master

I thiiiink... that covers it. within this she does convince the Doctor to take her to the afterlife, and Danny saves her life a few times

I want to note the "Clara pretends to be the Doctor" moment, because I think it's a good example of some of the flattening of her character. in her earlier entries in s7 she was afraid at times. now, obviously, like the other companions she's seen more, she's more confident, but she is still in very real danger -- contrasting with Rose in Doomsday and how she taunts the Daleks, she's still very very afraid, she's sure they're all going to die

and I think Rose in Army of Ghosts/Doomsday is the closest to Clara out of previous companions I've seen (not counting Classic Who which I haven't finished). by that point she's seen so much that her mother comments that she doesn't seem like herself anymore (I wish Clara's grandmother had made a similar observation -- or at least some kind of observation). she knows a bunch of DW lore, she loves the travel for the sake of it, she feels, yeah, special (although with the caveat that she's met previous companions, the Doom hangs over them all season, we know this is about to end one way or another)

I just sat there the whole time thinking, "why is the director not asking JLC to put more emotion into her voice, more doubt, more desperation, just... more. why is this scene so flat?"

“GODLIKE” DOCTOR: the Doctor is a headless chicken in this one, except for the fact that he's like "yeah we'll go to the afterlife" and then promptly goes "there is no afterlife, this is stupid."

it's a small thing on the whole, but hey, Doctor, you're the one who decided to go there

as for the Doctor as a seasons-arc roundup. I... don't hate it... but I still don't like how this Doctor is characterised. he's still incredibly unlikeable just on a personal level, and yeah yeah good doesn't mean nice, but he's also just not kind. and I think I struggle to enjoy an iteration of the Doctor who isn't kind, at least sometimes

I think a lot of that -- the unkindness -- falls to the wayside as a concept in this episode, because idk, it's not important I guess? whereas I think it's central to the Doctor's question of "am I good"? are you good because you try to make people not-die, sure, but you're also good because you don't mock kids. you don't casually state that you've forgotten peoples faces because they're so forgettable/unimportant to you. you don't treat people poorly that know they're about to die

if that stuff -- that domestic stuff, as Nine might have called it -- isn't important to the question, then I don't think the question is being satisfactorily answered by this episode

yes, Twelve turns down the chance to have a literal army that could just kill all bad guys, but I never doubted that. does Twelve treat others with kindness? Mmmm still not really, going by the episode right after. it's a fun little exploration of something absolutely wild the Master might try, but I don't think it tells me anything new about the Twelfth Doctor

PREVIOUS DOCTOR WHO: ok, I'm sure some people loved some of these callbacks. The Brigadier. the Cybermen outside St Pauls.

did like Osgood saying that Simm!Master prime-minister wasn't even the worst one we've had. that ages ever more hilariously

I just don't think the plot is good enough for a lot of them. and as an ending to the Brigadier well... ok, I liked it better than way back (s6) the Doctor receives a random phonecall that the Brigadier is dead and it's apropos nothing and Kate Stewart hadn't been introduced yet, so it was just some random guy that the old fans knew, but the nu fans would have been ??? about, because why does this guy dying drive the plot like that? I liked that the Brigadier has context

of course that context is, your brain was uploaded to a computer database for years and now you're fully a cyberman -- and it's not framed as super tragic? it's another one of the ways the emotional Stuff falls flat in this episode, and I just choose to pretend it's not something that happens

“SEXINESS”: M I S S Y... short for Mistress... because we need to gender this now. Anyway, the first time this character meets the Doctor in this form, she forcibly grabs him and kisses him without his consent (afterwards Clara smirks and asks if she used tongue)

so that is... that is a thing that happens. that is a thing that has happened a lot on this show, both to Ten and Eleven, but not to Twelve until now, because I guess women only humorously throw themselves at twinks

when will our suffering end?? why is this considered funny???? Stop!!!

she also at one point says "you know I should shoot you in a jealous rage, now wouldn’t that be sexy," which was one thing I was alluding to with the "where does writing the Master as kind of fucked up end and writing the Master as a Crazy Evil Sexy Lady begin" because this is definitely in the latter category

INTERNAL WORLD: is this just the Silence of the Library but evil and less believable? yes. does it make sense that they could magically put all those minds back into reconstructed Cyberbodies on top of corpses, including people who must have been dead for centuries, or died in the future not even on earth? don't think about it

POLITICS: So, you know how this season is all about the Doctor and soldiers and "am I a good man" and Danny was a soldier and calls the Doctor an officer, and on the plus-side we have the Doctor's speech about not being a good man or an officer or anything like that, but just "some fuckn guy" (paraphrased, he actually calls himself an idiot)

on the flipside of that we have... Danny. oh Danny. I. so I really want to like Danny, and I actually do like Danny, I think he's the most underserved character of the season, in the sense that everyone else being written to be an asshole just makes it shine through that he is... not. and his whole thing is that he feels guilty about having shot a kid in Afghanistan and that's what made him leave the military, because... it felt bad, I guess

I write that, because Danny didn't leave the army because he didn't agree with their politics anymore. despite having a bunch of lines derogatorily calling the Doctor "sir," and flipping shit like "watch the blood-soaked general in action" there's never actually a story of Danny realising a superior officer was using his power to hurt anyone, and he never questions that having been there in the first place, in a position to shoot a child, might have been the bad thing

he's not railing against superiors, he's just railing, which is frustrating when it's so close to getting it right. it seemed like they might be going there for awhile, there was a hot second where I thought they might, but at the end he firmly re-identifies himself as a soldier and shoots himself and the other Cybermen into the sky to save the planet. it's so... oooh it's so [flames on the side of my head]

he does send the kid back, rather than himself, which circles back to my thinking about Danny the character (kind, compassionate, sensitive) and Danny as keeper of certain themes (that it's not the system of soldiering that's bad, in fact we need to defend ourselves, see Doctor, your black and white narrative about soldiers as related to any guilt you might feel about having once killed people, or making situations happen where people die or or, is false, because it's more complicated than that, and soldiers are a good thing actually -- no, we haven't actually made a narrative about systems of soldiering, we've conflated freedom-fighting against a fictional fascist-coded alien with the British army, it's the same thing in the end)

it makes me want to -- in that oh-so-silly fandom way -- take Danny away from the writers and look back at his core traits: he's an orphan who by the sounds of things was never adopted, so in a place of being easily groomed by a structure like the army, he believes in the inherent goodness of people (I think), like I said, kind, compassionate, sensitive, lovely to kids, clearly suffers from PTSD (of course), and... in my opinion eaaasily misused by others, because he judges things to be solely on his shoulders

because Clara is a very forceful personality, I can sooo easily see how he'd be taken with her and want to forgive her over and over again and sacrifice himself for her

I wish that Danny's storyline had been about realising his worth. not his worth as a fucking soldier, but just "oh, I've been scared my whole life, I've had to do what others told me my whole life, and now this is my choice." I mean, the sacrificing is still... sigh (I do remember seeing people pointing out that great, we introduce a Black recurring character and then yeet him into the sky once his use is up, vs, say Rory who is there from beginning to end)

(I actually like Danny better than Rory on the whole, but I also think Danny and Rory have a lot of similar traits, and they both fall in love with women who have treated them abysmally, but at least Clara understands this as a part of her arc, both in the final episode of this and the subsequent Christmas episode)

but at least it wouldn't have been a sacrifice in which he reinserts himself as a cog in a machine. fucking soldier. please Danny, you deserve more from this thematic journey. if we'd had a narrative about an abusive or simply bad or incompetent or idealistically incompatible officer, this would have made more sense, but instead we just get vague references that go nowhere

ok I'm writing in circles now, so let's drop this and talk about the kid he shoots, whom he meets in the "afterlife" (argh this whole concept is so stupid) and I guess just... sits with? until he scares him away. and then sends him back to life again

there's something poignant in that to an extent, it's just of course that this random unnamed kid from Afghanistan who says not a line is a prop to absolve Danny of his personal guilt at shooting a child, and, again, not really about the nature of British colonialism and military violence

now oof, those are some heavy themes to bring up, can we expect all this from a silly show like Doctor Who? well, M*ffat did, he just wasn't able to follow through. heavy themes aren't shock value, you'd better be a good enough writer to do something with them, or idk, not want to suck the British army's dick

ooh, that was a bit aggressive on my part. I think because season eight actually has so much interesting stuff it's playing with, so this time I could finally see Stuff, but then the payoff was just a disappointing slap. RIP Danny, in my heart you had character development this season that went into all of the interesting narrative threads that were introduced, and you became a passionate speaker for not grooming kids into joining the army

the TL;DR of this point is "soldiers good sometimes. check mate Pacifist" -- but similar to Kill The Moon, it's so messy I'm not sure it actually knows what it wants to say

FULL RATING: 46/100 (if I can count….)

I feel like not everyone would agree with me, but I like the Master's overall plan. it fits with the wildly swinging way they try to win the Doctor over, just to lash out when the Doctor (understandably) turns them down, while also pinpointing the little hypocrisies of the Doctor's morals, because the Master keeps offering the ability to Change Things and the Doctor prefers little shifts of the status quo that often mean people get left behind or get hurt or it's much messier than a clean sweep of "if you just ruled the Universe with me, we'd do good things"

(the Doctor is of course right to go "yeahno, this is not a good idea, for starters we both have so many issues, for seconds anyone who sets out to be a good ruler of anything has already failed because of the premise"). it's the strongest part of the episodes for me, I just wish it had had a more satisfying build-up and been able to tie in better to the themes of the season (or rather that the themes of the season had been written better in previous episodes so as to tie in better with this wrapping-up)

and obviously the whole "soldier" stuff is just badly written

and Clara...? I'll wait and see in her final season. it's very much a "depends on how they round it off" for me

also, oh boy am I done with quips. the Wh*donesque quipping is doing my head in, please make it stooop

"One last chance. I don’t care about the rules, I don’t give a damn about paradoxes, I swear you will never step inside your Tardis again" <- this is Villain Behaviour Clara!!!!

[utilitycaster]

So I wanted to cover that bit about the "not everyone gets the same amount of Christmas presents" that I mentioned here. The original quote from the EXU Calamity Wrap-up is:

"I didn't want it to be like Christmas where it's like, 'Everyone gets the same amount of presents.' (...) There's some people in this Brass Ring that are up to an asymmetrical amount of shady shit and that's realistic and that's going to create fun dynamics."

I think with actual play, there can be this artificial expectation that every does get the exact same amount of presents - focus, plot, items, etc - that we don't have as much for scripted works. Some of that is that in D&D, a few of these things are objectively quantifiable and some aren't and people struggle to evaluate equivalence (my endless struggle to get people to understand that the fact that some sorcerers get more spells is not game-breaking or unfair is indicative of this). Some is also that I think people take their own experience of playing D&D, in which you are deeply attached to your character and often see them as the main character of their story, and struggle with their favorite PC not being obviously the main character of the story on screen.

Critical Role gets this more than other shows, and I think some of it is that most other shows either have significantly smaller (3-4 people) parties or in the case of D20 are often more heavily plot-driven. Critical Role is also alone among the more popular shows in its lack of editing, so if one player is in focus, there's no way to condense all the little hems and haws and backtracking that is typical in D&D and so the plot focus seems longer. Its particularly long runtime means that a ten-episode arc focused on a character you're less invested in will take 3-4 months in real-time and 40-ish hours to watch. And finally, I think Critical Role's fandom has groups of people with pronounced preferences for certain actors that at least to me have little to do with acting/d&d skill or recurrent themes explored, and I have not seen this phenomenon elsewhere.

Getting to the actual topic though: the fact is, different characters require different stories! I think a prime example is Fjord having a particularly cool sword; he is a hexblade, and having a sword is a fundamental part of that class and serves as a symbol of the source of his powers, and on top of that he grew up having very little and so the possession of a special material item is meaningful to him in a way it wouldn't be to (for example) Beau, whose story is much more about overcoming the self-hatred she learned from her father's abuse; finding a position in the world she loves and in which she can excel; and in finding family in the Mighty Nein, in the Cobalt Soul, and with Yasha. Percy's story is deeply tied to a particular location and enemy such that it belongs in a self-contained arc with largely background development afterwards; Vex's story is a highly internalized one of constant slow progress with notable and consistent beats but no specific clearly defined arc throughout the entire campaign; and Keyleth's arc is a mix of concrete trials and ongoing personal growth. Or, going back to Brennan's original statement, Patia, Nydas, and Laerryn have background information that isn't present for the rest of the party because that's the story being told! It doesn't mean that Zerxus, Loquatius, and Cerrit don't have compelling backstories; it means that they are differently positioned within the city and the story and have their own specialized knowledge. In fact, giving these characters the knowledge that Patia, Nydas, and Laerryn had would significantly change the intent of those characters from what the players had planned.

Which is in fact another part of this issue: overall, I think most characters get a decent number of "christmas presents", but sometimes the fandom response goes further not just to quantity but also a belief that everyone should get the exact same things, too. I still recall people asking me about TLOVM and whether Vex and Keyleth had comparable screentime with each other, or if they had comparable screentime with the men in the story. These remain among the more baffling questions I've gotten - and I've gotten some weird ones - because it's such a profound lack of understanding how stories work. One would hope that all D&D characters get the same amount of development overall, but that does not necessarily mean the same amount of screen time.

Anyway: the questions to ask are not "who gets the most presents" because most people aren't great at defining what a "present" is or which presents are equivalent in the first place; it's "is this character getting developed in the story in a way that makes sense, and is the plot compelling to other characters around them even if it is for the moment centered on them."

[create-with-afp]

Bleach Fanfiction Master Post

Figured I would make a fun little catalog of my years of Bleach fanfiction. (Jeez, I am so old.) All of it is ByaHisa because that is my special kind of brain rot. My favorite romantic set-up involves a firm stoic falling hard, and we know like… five things … maybe? … about the other half of this canon pairing, which leaves a lot open to interpretation/artistic license. Also, contextualizing or reframing the woman character whose sole function in a narrative is to serve as characterization for a male character is a Fine Undertaking* in my opinion, and Bleach has so many interesting dead wives to choose from….

So, without further ado, here we go (in-progress or completed stories only):

Mortal Devices: Part III of the Maid!Heist/Dark Academia series with The Darkest Black as Part I and An Education as Part II. This WIP departs from both Maid!Heist and Dark Academia, as it's more of a political slow burn with espionage and clan politics taking up most of the breathing room. It's still firmly ByaHisa (as the politics of their marriage is explored in depth), but the main plot revolves around locating stolen documents and research from the Twelfth before they can be used to devastating effect in the WOTL. [a03 exclusive]

An Education: Part II of the Maid!Heist/Dark Academia series with The Darkest Black (described below) as Part I. This is finally complete and is the “Dark Academia” portion of the tale. The chapters are broken up into seasons for each year (Year One: Autumn, Year One: Winter, etc.). Accordingly, the chapters are largely episodic with a few themes woven into each “Year.” I’m not quite convinced I’ve nailed Dark Academia with this one; it seems more “Slice of Life” than anything else, which I think is partially owing to the dual POVs with Byakuya (the other POV character) not attending the Academy. (He’s actually banned so… yikes….) [ff.net (discontinued on ffn, but there are a few chapters there so I'll link it) │ a03]

A Thin Red Line: This is my longest work to date, as it’s basically the length of four traditionally published fantasy novels (400k+ words). To be fair to me, this is a retelling of Bleach where Hisana does not die so it covers the Byakuya and Hisana origin story, the major arcs, plus that whole 40-year period where canon Rukia was basically living in a gothic novel. Mind the tags. Still in progress after like 10 years…. Edit 6/19/23: And she’s DONE! Bonus content on AO3 for registered users. [ff.net │ a03]

The Darkest Black: While stuck with writer’s block on ATRL, I wrote an entirely different “how did Byakuya meet Hisana” story that is… bleak? Bleak for me, at least. Probably not bleak objectively. Hisana is a thief who agrees to steal a priceless piece of art from the Kuchiki family posing as a maid. Hijinks ensue. Byakuya is particularly unlikeable as a character in this one, but that’s probably more of a side-effect of Hisana being the main POV character. This was my way to make a “Hisana as a maid” meet-cute between these two characters make sense in my head. Complete. [ff.net │ a03]

Smoke and Mirrors: A dark ByaHisa origin story with Hisana as an oiran. It isn’t particularly graphic in terms of sex or violence since that isn’t really my style, but the text and subtext are definitely there that terrible things happen to Hisana, and her mental state is understandably not great. [ff.net │ a03]

Without Frontiers: Like the Peter Gabriel song! (Yes, that song was the inspo. I write to music just like probably 95% of anyone who writes.) This is a pretty fluffy one-shot where Byakuya and Hisana are childhood friends. There is like 0 romance. They are legit kids just making up stories and being goofy. There are some hints that Hisana may be exposed to Bad Things that she is trying to process through story-telling because, really, who doesn’t want a little Adult Fear injected into an otherwise light-hearted story? [ff.net │ a03]

Charcoal Hearts: This is my very tame attempt at a reincarnation fic. The story is about Byakuya taking Rukia to a ballet during their off-time. He is there basically to ogle the reincarnation of his dead wife as a ballerina performing Serenade. It has a flirty ending, but, since I don’t particularly love Hisana reincarnation fics, it ends ambiguously. [ff.net │ a03]

So Far Away: A pretty depressive one-shot where an injured Byakuya recovers in Hisana’s hovel in the deep Rukon. Here, Hisana is a barmaid who scavenges and does side jobs to support herself, and Byakuya is… well… sort of an asshole? Like I think writing this one-shot was where I had an epiphany about Byakuya’s character (or at least my attempt to write his character): That “epiphany” being that because he lives in a rich people bubble, he (1) is extremely entitled and (2) struggles to understand and connect with others. These two traits create a feedback loop that makes him come off as simultaneously arrogant and stiff/awkward. I don’t think Byakuya is canonically on the spectrum, but I could entertain that theory, especially in light of the CFYOW books. Instead, I think there is a point when someone has so much privilege that they never learn how to read the damn room because all rooms, at that point, are basically designed to cater to them. Everyone is artificial with them so genuine concern or emotion seems inconvenient, at best, to alien, at worst. All that said, in this story he very much trips all over himself, but he improves. Slowly. Over the course of like years. [ff.net │ a03]

Stages: A short ByaHisa origin story that incorporates the five stages of love challenge that was popular on LiveJournal back when LJ was a thing. (Is it still a thing?) Hisana is a courtesan. It isn’t the best, and I sort of hate it, but it is part of the plot bunny that prompted me to make a version of Hisana as a courtesan that would be interesting, or more interesting, and better researched in keeping with the Edo Period sensibilities of Soul Society, which led to Smoke and Mirrors and A Thin Red Line. [ff.net │ a03]

White Flowers and Red Hearts Trilogy: These stories are the earliest of my ByaHisa brain rot, and they probably read exactly like that. I have not done a re-write (or, hell, even a re-read) of any of these in like a decade or more so… yikes… But, from what I recall, the first story, Dissidence is the meet-cute, where Byakuya meets Hisana while on a mission. Hisana is a Rukon local working as a host performing tea ceremonies, and Byakuya sort of winds up in a “you broke the thing, now you must buy the thing” situation with Hisana, explaining his decision to marry her. Dimuendo is the middle child, and it chronicles their first year of marriage. Both Dissidence and Dimuendo are pretty fluffy with some light angst. Dolente is like super depressive because… well… death is pretty sad, and it is the final year of their marriage. Would not recommend any of these, and, like Stages, I would probably delete them if not for the sentimental value. [a03]

The Rites of the Dead: It’s a weird story. Technically, it’s a one-shot, but it has a few “movements” that break the story into parts. It has no romance. The subject matter is dark: Hisana is a member of the Fourth and is tasked with preparing the funerary arrangements upon Ginrei’s death. And, I like it? Still. For some strange reason. Sure, there are things that I would go back and fix on a technical level if I were to re-edit it (which I have no plans to do), but the idea of Hisana and Byakuya’s first meeting being on a tragic occasion seems poetic? Also, the idea of a bunch of “dead” people having to mourn and “bury” their dead is so on the nose, that it seems right. I found the wordplay in some parts of this story to be pretty clever. (No one else did.) [ff.net │ a03]

A Suggestion of Marriage: A light fluffy one-shot where Byakuya asks Hisana to marry him. She says, “yes.” Shocker. I know. I do kind of like the backstory for Hisana in this one, which is that of an Academy flunkie who goes on to work at a tea house. I think this is the story where I got the idea to finally take the plunge and make her an oiran; although, she isn’t technically one here. [ff.net │ a03]

Fan Dance: A one-shot where Byakuya and Hisana meet during a sparring match. She is the Lieutenant of the Fourth, Byakuya is the Lieutenant of the Sixth, and they get matched to spar during an event where all the fancy pants Shinigami are supposed to release their zanpakuto for public spectacle. Byakuya gets more than he bargains for when Hisana winds up not being a total powder puff. No hugging or kissing, which seems to be a theme among like half of the one-shots…. [ff.net │ a03]

*On a tangentially-related aside for anyone who comes across this random post and who wants recommendations from an internet rando on actual literature where real, serious authors reframe women who got the short end of the narrative stick, see Wide Sargasso Sea, The Penelopiad, or The Problem with Susan (Jane Eyre, The Odyssey, and the Narnia series, respectively).

[findroleplay]

woah, hello, friends !

’m looking to take on a couple long-term partners + threads, and this time i’ve got a couple of broad ideas for oc x oc plots that i’m absolutely chomping at the bit to write ! note : they may sound a bit . . . cheesy ? cliche ? but i’m not searching for kitschy sorts of characters. ideally, i’d like to craft realistic, flawed, and fleshed out characters to make these somewhat cheesy plots a bit more authentic !

before i get to my ideas, a bit about myself : i’m a 22 y/o ( they / them ) adv.lit / novella length writer with 10-ish years of experience, give or take. i am absolutely capable of writing shorter, more concise replies when the scene calls for it, or if we establish a desire for rapid fire responses, however as a general rule of thumb, i tend to get carried away when writing . . . so i like my partners to have a similar enthusiasm for response length ! i’m a discord based roleplayer — i prefer to have entire servers dedicated to our roleplay. i'm big on making mood boards, playlists, edits, etc. so i like to have lots of organization. plus, i like to make friends with the people i write with, so having somewhere we can chat, like an ooc channel, is important to me! at this time, and for my own comfort, i am exclusively interested in writing with writers aged 21 or older. this is a non-negotiable. and, finally, NSFW content is always welcome but never necessary. we can touch on this further one-on-one.

now that all of that hullabaloo is out of the way ! here are a few broad ideas i’m enthusiastic about developing — BUT ! please proceed with caution. the following synopses include brief mention of age gap relationships, infidelity, and power imbalances. nothing explicit, but it is mentioned, or implied. if any of that upsets you, please, move along and take care of yourself !

I CONFUSE INSTINCT FOR DESIRE — ISN'T BITE ALSO TOUCH ?

five long years later, and i'm finally watching succession ! while i don't have the confidence to write any of the canon characters, watching the behind-the-scenes shit-show of conglomerate business has inspired an array of dynamics i'd like to write. specifically, i'm heavily inspired by kendall + roman's characters ( note : i'm literally on like, episode five of season one. this is not a direct, one-to-one interpretation, but rather, inspired by ! ). i'd like to write a character reaching middle age with corporate ambitions, a need to impress their father, a fear of failure, and unhealthy means of coping with the pressure. when i originally began conceptualizing this dynamic, it was the very typical future ceo x assistant dynamic, and while i'm not opposed to that, if you have any strong ideas for the character you'd like to pair against a strong-willed, but insecure business person, i'd love to hear it ! i initially imagined it as an MxF ship, with myself writing the male, as the ambitious businessman, however i could absolutely see it as MxM or MxF should we have any desire to explore themes of compulsive heterosexuality, homo-eroticism, and expectations of oneself along with the inherent themes of age gap and power imbalance that come with this sort of dynamic. anyways, i'd love to know what kind of character you'd like to write against a kendall / roman coded character, and see where we can go from there !

MY REPUTATION'S NEVER BEEN WORSE, SO YOU MUST LIKE ME FOR ME

so — i've never seen nor read daisy jones and the six, however i'm kind of obsessed with the idea of it ! i think it could be entirely entertaining to write a slow, slow burn dynamic between two members of a band who refuse to act on these feelings for one reason or another. are they afraid that admitting their feelings could lead to tensions in the band ? maybe one of them is already in a relationship, maybe both are ? there's so many reasons this could be a sticky situation. while i have more of an idea in my previous synopsis of the character i'd like to play, i don't totally have that for this idea, and would love to develop it together ! open to MxF, MxM, FxF, etc. for this dynamic. ideally, this verse would be a vintage one, taking place anywhere from the 70s to the 90s ? also not opposed to the rockstar x groupie dynamic, but i would want to put enough care and consideration into it to not make it too terribly predictable !

so yeah, after that novel, we've made it to the end ! thanks for sticking with me ! please like this post, and i'll reach out and see if we can figure out a dynamic that works for us :)

( as always, if neither of my ideas caught your eye, but you think we would make good writing partners regardless, feel free to still hit the like button ! i'll hear out just about anything. )

_

[digiwareit]

Mastering CMS Development: A Comprehensive Guide

Introduction

Brief overview of Content Management Systems (CMS)

Importance of CMS in modern web development

Purpose of the guide: to provide a comprehensive understanding of CMS development and best practices

 Understanding Content Management Systems

Definition and key characteristics of CMS

Types of CMS: Traditional vs. Headless CMS

Popular CMS platforms: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.

Advantages and disadvantages of using CMS

Planning Your CMS Development Project

Defining project goals and requirements

User personas and their roles in content management

Content architecture and organisation

Choosing the right CMS platform for your project

Setting Up Your Development Environment

Installing and configuring the chosen CMS

Exploring development tools and plugins

Version control with Git/GitHub

IDE recommendations and setup

Customising Your CMS

Theming and templating: creating custom themes

Extending functionality with plugins and modules

Implementing custom post types and taxonomies

Leveraging APIs for integrations

Developing Content Management Features

User authentication and authorization

Role-based access control (RBAC)

Content creation, editing, and publishing workflows

Managing multimedia content: images, videos, etc.

 Optimising Performance and Security

Caching strategies for improved performance

Database optimization techniques

Implementing HTTPS and SSL/TLS certificates

Protecting against common security threats: XSS, CSRF, SQL injection, etc.

Testing and Quality Assurance

Writing unit tests for custom functionalities

Performing integration testing

Accessibility testing for compliance

Cross-browser and cross-device compatibility testing

Deploying Your CMS

Choosing a hosting provider and server configuration

Automated deployment pipelines with CI/CD

Monitoring and scaling strategies

Disaster recovery and backups

Maintenance and Support

Regular updates and patch management

Monitoring performance and security

Providing user support and documentation

Continuous improvement and iteration

Conclusion

Recap of key learnings and takeaways

Encouragement for further exploration and learning in CMS development

Final thoughts on the importance of CMS in modern web development

[taylastudio2022]

REFINING & SUBMITTING EXPOSURE BLUE FORM (STATEMENT + PHOTOS etc):

After having a conversation with Shannon, and working through the drafts I had for my 70 word statement, we both re-wrote and edited the statement - and I think that it’s the best it could be. 

From my latest draft - to Shannon’s re-written draft, which I then had another go at and ended up with :

70 word statement:

“ My practice explores textile processes that have been historically marginalised, due to their “feminine” attributes. Knitting, knotting, and plaiting combine raw and found materials, to assemble my sculptures and installation. The eventual works suggest a body; existing within the convergence of tension and agency, simultaneously challenging and expressing a sense of “feminine energy”. “ 

The suggestion to not talk in binaries, (masculine feminine etc) was a good decision, it doesn’t restrict the nuanced themes in the work. It was also helpful to think about what you want to sit alongside the work, and prime the experience of the work -  I’m really happy with what we landed on. 

^ We also talked about what the work is doing - how it is critiquing, breaking free, nuanced, and existing within tension and agency etc...something to further unpack....

Title: 

Empress

I ended up titling the work ‘Empress’. I think that out of the working titles I had this was the most successful, and I think works best for the work. I feel as though this isn’t too on the nose, but still tells people what is important/ promotes a sense of what the work is about.  ‘Femininity’ in its “highest regard” - speaks to ideas of “grace” and “decorum” - (and a challenge to such ideas), but also speaks to feminine control. A presence. Holds more air. It also kind of addresses (challenges) these hierarchal , old , roles... Theres something that works about calling my sculpture works Empress. 

List of Materials: 

Found materials including ribbon, stockings, jewellery, lingerie, thread, tea bags, clay, PVA Glue, and makeup.

I also ended up taking some more detailed photographs of my work to include in my final 4 pieces of media. Elana kindly helped me format and edit this final selection for the exposure form on photoshop. I’m happy with the final selection, I think that it shows off what I consider to be some of the best parts of my work, and the install that is the closest to my intention for this work: 

4 pieces of media: 

Captions:  Empress, varying in size, 2022.

For my contact details I put my email, and also my art instagram account as I know it will stay the same and be up kept :) 

[felassan]

Mass Effect development insights and highlights from Bioware: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development

This is the Mass Effect version of this post.

[In case you can’t read it the subtitle in the bottom left logo above is “Guardians of the Citadel”]

Note: Drug use is mentioned.

Cut for length.

Mass Effect 1

ME began its life in a vision document in fall 2003

Codenamed “SFX”

Conceived of by Casey Hudson and a core team from KotOR. Its genesis was the intention to create an epic sci-fi RPG in an original setting that BioWare owned (so they could have full creative control), and in a setting that was conceived of first and foremost as a video game

Initially players could control any squadmate, but they wanted it to be about Shep and for players to be focused on Shep being a battlefield commander, rather than on switching bodies

By the start of 2004 its story was shaping up. Initially humans landed on Mars in 2250 and discovered evidence of an ancient alien race and a powerful substance, Black Sand, which rapidly advanced tech to the point that FTL travel was possible. (My note: obviously now the Prothean artifacts on Mars & associated mass effect force tech enabled this in the final canon, but I wonder if aspects of the ‘Black Sand’ naming-type & powerful substance stuff was rolled into red sand from final canon) Humans were suddenly capable of travel to multiple star systems and made contact with a multitude of other species. At the start of the first game, these species together with humans had a fragile peace, with focus placed on the political center of the galaxy, a hub known as Star City, later renamed the Citadel

Multiplayer was a vision for the series as far back as 2003. The plan was for ME1, an Xbox exclusive at launch, to take advantage of the platform’s online components. Early designs saw players meeting in one of the central hubs to interact and trade items in their otherwise SP adventures

By 2006 it had the name ME and the story was more specific, with the theme of conflict between organic and synthetic lifeforms. The story’s scope now stretched across 3 games and included scope for full co-op MP

They tried to do MP in every game, discussing it from the get-go, but it always just fell by the wayside. “When you’re trying to build something that is a new IP, on a new platform, with a new engine, you’ve got to really focus on the core elements of the game.” 

The conversation system prototype was made in Jade Empire, and some of ME’s earliest writing was done in an old JE build. At first there was no conversation wheel. Paragon was “Friendly” and Renegade “Hostile”. In the prototype Shep was a silent unnamed Spectre. Many conversations in the prototype about the player’s choice in smuggling a weapon through Noveria made it into the game

In said prototype a merchant referred to themselves as “this one”, though the word hanar never appeared. The PC in it also had the option to end a conversation with “I should go”. In the prototype also, Harkin was voiced by Mark Meer

An early version of the Mako got used as the krogan truck in ME2

Early concepts of the Citadel were drawn in pencil by CH. A piece of concept art of its final design was painted based on a photo of a sculpture near Aswan, Egypt

As with any new IP naming it was a struggle. They put out a call to all staff for ideas, did polls, made a name generator that combined words that they liked in random ways and made pretend logos of ones they liked in Photoshop to see if they could make themselves love the name or find visual potential in it. (Some of these names are in the pic at the top of this post.) CH liked “Unearthed” as it was a reference to Prothean ruins dug up on Mars and humanity’s ascendance going away from Earth. They knew the game would have a central space station featuring prominently so some of the ideas were based on that - “The Citadel”, “The Optigon”, “The Oculon”. “Element” was another one they had in mind due to the rare substance in the game 

CH: “I was a big fan of John Harris’ book Mass, which had epic-scaled sci-fi ideas, so that was a word that came up often. Many of the names came from the idea that the IP featured a fifth fundamental physical force (in addition to the known four of gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear) so the word ‘effect’ came up pretty often.” Ultimately none of the ideas really felt right. One Monday morning they were going over the names and Greg Zeschuk said he had an idea on the weekend: “Mass Effect!” CH: “I said, ‘I don’t hate it’, which in the naming process is a high compliment. And it stuck!”

CH on Shep’s Prothean vision from the beacon: “It was hard to imagine how we would do this. CG was - and is - really expensive. Instead I wanted to try doing it through photography and video editing. So I went to a local grocery store and bought a few packages of the weirdest looking meat that I could find. Then I set up a little photoshoot in my basement, complete with some electronics parts and some red wine for juicyness.” He used these props to create a video sequence where the photos were rapidly cycled and blurred, along with production paintings, to create the scary vision an organic/machine experiment on the Protheans. These mashups were also used as inspiration for concept artists and level designers who were working on these themes

Tali used to be called Talsi

On the licensing side they often joke that they’re licensing N7 not “Mass Effect” due to N7′s popularity

There was a confidential internal guide to the IP in 2007 to help devs along and summarize/synthesize the vision etc. Some excerpts from it are shown in the book and this is the first time the public have ever seen them

Early versions of Asari had hair

Asari were designed as a nod to classic TV sci-fi (with human actors wearing obvious makeup and prosthetics to play aliens)

The turian design guideline was “we want them to be birds of prey”. They also wanted a range of alien types, some close to human like Asari, while others were to be a lot further away, like turians

BioWare patented the conversation wheel, which was a first for them. CH had been frustrated with reviews of Jade Empire that said that the actioncentric game was too wordy [with its list dialogue]. “I’m like, story is words. [...] What is it about our games that is making people feel like they’re wordy?” Then he thought “In a game you kind of need to feel like you’re continuing to play it. Maybe you should continue feeling like you’re playing it actively into the dialogue.” “[The wheel] kind of gave a new experience with dialogue when you did start to react based on emotion, and that’s ultimately what we’re trying to bring out in our games”

The original krogan concept was based on a bat “with a really wide squidgy face. We just used its face on top of this weird body and it kinda worked”

Geth musculature was based on fiber-optic cables, with flexible plates of armor attached

The vision for the IP was 80s sci-fi inspired space opera

The concept art of Saren lifting Shep by the throat inspired a similar scene in-game. The staging wasn’t planned til designers saw that art

A squadmate with Shepard on the way to meet Ash in an old storyboard was called Carter. Early name of Kaidan or Jenkins?

Bono from U2 was kinda instrumental in bringing us ME lol

Finding the right cover art for ME1 was notably tricky

Matt Rhodes got his start drawing helmets for ME1, including one which would become Shep’s “second face”. He estimates he drew between 250-270 different ones

Some of the sounds in-game were people smashing watermelons with sledgehammers and sticking fists into various goos

The audio team had fun trying to slip the iconic main theme into unexpected places throughout the MET. “We were very aware of how powerful that track was for the fans and it was tempting to overuse it for any moment we wanted to make really emotional”.

The theme was creatively repurposed in ME3: slowed down and reworked as the ambient sound for the SR-2. “If you listen to it for a really long time, just stand in the Normandy and listen, you’ll actually hear the notes change slowly. It doesn’t sound like music, it sounds like a background ambiance, but it’s there.” (My note: Well no wonder the Normandy feels so much like home?? 😭 sneaky..)

Bug report: “Mako Tornado”. There wasn’t enough friction between the tires and the ground, causing testers to lose control of the vehicle and send it spinning into the air like a tornado. “As it turns, the front end comes up, and then it starts spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning faster and faster and faster until it just flies up in the sky” (My note: Sounds like a regular day in the Mako to me)

Cerberus originally had a bigger role in this game. It was cut but they had a whole explorable outpost. “I called it Misery,” says Mac Walters, “It was this planet with a little outpost that said ‘Welcome to Misery’”. Everything on the outpost was shit - dirty worn stuff, no windows, no kitchen, the vehicle bay was open to the elements etc

The Reaper sound is literal garbage. Some audio designers went on a recording trip to a national park. One of them got fixated on a garbage can, “a metal bear-proof receptacle with a heavy lid that creaked horribly when opened”. “It was like, ominous, spooky, tonal and almost musical. I decided to throw a mic into the garbage and record it moving. I didn’t know what it was going to be until later”

They were making lots of noises to record like throwing logs and rocks around. An old couple peered at them through the window of their camper van in the woods and must have called the cops because then the cops showed up, pulled them over and told them to stop. The cops towed their car (the driver’s plates were Cali plates and expired), drove them to Edmonton outskirts and then the audio producer Shauna got a call and had to go pick them up “like three little boys”. “We got a stern talking to”. Once back they were playing around with the garbage sound, editing it etc. Casey heard it and proclaimed “That’s the sound of the Reapers”

Preston Watamaniuk: “There are things I could have done to Mass 1 to make it an infinitely better game with better UIs” and some simple cuts and changes. “But when you’re living with it, it’s very hard to see those things”

BioWare Labs

As social media and smartphone games exploded, BioWare dedicated a small team dedicated to exploring opportunities here - BioWare Labs

Mass Effect: Galaxy used a unique graphic art style and static visual presentation common in visual novels. It has the distinction of being the only iOS game BW have made during their first 25 years

Scrapped ideas were a 3rd person space shooter called Mass Effect: Corsair and 2 DA titles - a strategy game and a top-down dungeon crawler starring young Wynne. (My note: Maybe the corsairs stuff was rolled into Jacob’s backstory in 2, the Alliance Corsairs)

Corsair was a very short-lived project that never got its feet under it. It was a spin-off on Nintendo DS featuring a behind-the-ship perspective and branching dialogue. At one point it had MP. The idea behind it was basically “ME: Freelancer” - fly your ship around, do missions, get credits. It had a limited branching story but was a gameplay-centered experience intended to fill the gap between ME1 and 2. That gap ended up being filled by Galaxy

Galaxy and Corsair’s smaller screen allowed concept artists to use bold colors and a simplistic character design style to help those games stand out from Shep’s story

Nick Thornborrow did some art for Corsair but was worried his art style didn’t fit ME. He moved to DA where he feels his art style fits better

Lots of BioWare VAs and even a lead writer and the VO director are drawn from Edmonton’s local community theater scene, which is vibrant. Think this is how Mark Meer got involved

Mass Effect 2

Player choices carrying over was a first for BW

Dirty Dozen-inspired plot

Its plot is a web of conditionals (see Suicide Mission)

Was more of a shooter than anything BW had made since Shattered Steel

There was 2 camps on the team, those who wanted to push combat and systems forward and redefine the ME experience and those who wanted to make a true sequel, with the same gameplay and systems but a new story. Karin Weekes: “I think it ended up being a good push-pull. It felt like a pretty healthy creative conflict”

“ME2 was a game you could hold up to someone who argues that games aren’t a serious medium and go ‘Oh yeah, then why is Martin Sheen in this?’” Sheen was their first pick for TIM

The idea for TIM came from a mash-up of concepts CH had collected over the years. The name “Illusive” originally came from his pitch for naming DAO’s Eclipse engine, a word inspired by Obi-Wan’s line “It’s not about the mission, Master. It’s something... elsewhere. Elusive”. “I thought, what if we called our next engine 'Elusive', but used an ‘I’, and then it’s like ‘Illusion’. [...] I still really like the word with an ‘I’ and what it conjures”

When ME1 DLC was in production, CH had been watching a lot of CNN, specifically Anderson Cooper. “How is one guy travelling to all these places and never looking tired and always being able to speak with clarity?” CH says it seemed almost superhuman. “What if there was someone who is the absolute maximum of the things you would aspire to be, but also the worst of humanity?” Cooper, though not evil, became an inspiration for TIM down to the gray hair and piercing blue eyes

Inspiration for TIM’s behind-the-scenes role pulling political strings came from Jack Bauer’s brother Graem in 24. Graem “can call up the president and tell him what to do and hang up, because he’s so connected and so influential”. Sheen had played a president and his performance brought gravitas and wisdom to the role. He had quit smoking, but the character smokes. He didn’t want to fake it, but he also didn’t want to smoke, “so he actually asked for a cigarette” to hold so he could stop his words to take drags with natural cadence

Writing was still pushing to write and revise lines hours before VO started. A series of problems like injury and some writers leaving for other opportunities left it so that Karin, Lukas Kristjanson and editor Cookie Everman hand to land the story safely, with PW helping where they could. Lukas: “We took over the writing bug and task list, and I can’t stress enough how much [Karin and Cookie] did to get ME2 out the door. There’s no part of that thing we didn’t touch”. Karin: “That was the most dramatic 2 weeks of my life”

Initial fan reaction when they started promo-ing ME2 was very negative because people didn’t want to know about new chars like Jack and Mordin. “[fans were like] ‘Get them out of here. We want our characters from the first game’. But then when they played them, those became some of the most popular chars [of the series]”

Concept art of Thane has an idea annotation saying “Face can shapeshift?”

At one point when designing Thane concept artists sent multiple variations of him to the team asking them to vote on which was the most attractive

Most of the Normandy crew was written by lead level designer Dusty Everman. Lukas gave him advice in the evenings between bugs

BioWare Montreal made ME2 and 3 cinematics

CC for Shep was based on tools used by char designers to create in-game chars. Under the hood similar tools existed to create aliens

Aliens were much easier to animate than humans. When something is human it’s very difficult to make it look realistic and you can see all the mistakes and everything

Over the holiday period in 2007 CH worked out a diagram on a single piece of paper that would define the entire scope and structure of the game. The diagram is included in the book

Bug report: “I shot a krogan so hard that his textures fell off”. At one point shotgun blast damage was applied to each of the pellets fired, and shot enemies ended up with just the default checkerboard Unreal texture on them after their textures got blown off

Blasto was meant to be 1 step above an Easter egg but his fan popularity prompted them to bring him back in ME3

They rewrote chunks of Jack 2 days before she went to VO. She was the only one they could change because all the other NPCs were recorded. They redesigned her mission by juggling locked NPC lines and changing Shep’s reactions by rewriting text paraphrases to change the context of the already-recorded VO

Lukas snuck obscure nods ito ME2′s distress calls. In the general distress call for the Hugo Gernsback, there’s BW’s initial’s and Edmonton’s phone number backwards. In a fault in a beacon protocol there’s the initials and backward phone number from Tommy Tutone’s “Jenny”. In 2 other general distress calls there’s initials and numbers from Glenn Miller Orchestra’s “Pennsylvania 6-5000″ and initials and numbers from Geddy Lee and Rush’s “2112″ respectively 

Mass Effect 3

“The end of an era marks the beginning of another”

ME3 “marked the end of Shep’s story”

Saying bye to Shep was as difficult for devs as it was for players

JHale’s final VO session included Anderson’s death and romanced Garrus’ goodbye. “We were in the session and we both just started crying”, Caroline says. “I couldn’t come on the line to give her notes because I was crying, and she was crying. And so there was just this minute-long pause of like, nothing, nothing, nothing - just silence through the airwaves. And then I came on and just told her that I was crying and she said ‘I’m crying!’” They talked about these anecdotes also here on the N7 Day reunion panel

The Microsoft Kinect voice support required devs to teach Kinect hundreds of commands in a variety of accents across multiple languages. The result was useful but made for some awkward moments. Numerous players accidentally said “geth” or “quarian” while making a particular decision and accidentally killed Tali

MP chars were voiced by cops and military people

The helmet on one of the MP chars was originally designed for cancelled project Revolver

The payload device at the end needed to attach to the Citadel while essentially serving as a giant trigger. “It ended up becoming quite the engineering feet just to visualize how this thing would move and connect to the Citadel”

Concept artists explored creating an anti-team, where Kai Leng was almost an anti-Shepard essentially, with an elite squad to counteract your team. This idea never went beyond concept phase

ME3 Special Edition was released on Nintendo Wii U exclusively. This exclusive version of the game includes Genesis 2 (a sequel to the original Genesis comic) and unique gameplay features that took advantage of the touchscreen GamePad. For years Sonic Chronicles: Dark Brotherhood had had the honor of being BW’s only game made for a Nintendo console

FemShep regrettably didn’t feature in major ME marketing til ME3. Later releases like DAI, MEA and Anthem have taken increasing care not to gender their protagonists in cover art

To capture combat sounds they took a trip to CFB Wainwright, a military base southeast of Edmonton. They got a big tour of it and were allowed to record anything they could find. The tour ended with them getting to drive and shoot tanks (real shells). The force of doing that sent waves through Joel Green, he felt his whole chest compress when it went off; the perfect sound for the Black Widow! After the trip the soldiers let him keep the shell he fired and it’s been passed on like a torch to various devs since

Kakliosaurs began life as a joke in the writers’ room after John Dombrow placed a Grunt figure on a t-rex toy he had on his desk. Lore was brainstormed to justify the mash-up before someone asked, “Why don’t we put this in the game?” They loved it so much Karin had custom coffee mugs made

Bug report: For a while Tali’s final romance scene would fire when she was supposed to be dead

“Balancing combat: how designers in ME3 entered an ‘arms race’” - the solution to players feeling OP vs players feeling frustrated by really strong enemies is to find a good middle ground, but for designers Corey Gaspur and Brenon Holmes, it was war. Brenon designed enemies, Corey designed guns. Corey “was obsessed with bigger, heavier guns. We had this sort of informal competition where he’d make this crazy overturned gun that would just murder all the enemies, and then I tuned some stuff up to compensate”

Brenon had to invent new ways to “stop Corey” and this led to the Phantoms. Corey had in turn designed consumable rockets that could wipe out entire waves of enemies. He must’ve figured this would make short work of Brenon’s space ninjas, but Brenon had other plans: “I had just added the ability for her to cut rockets [when Corey was playing MP and he was watching]. She cut the rocket in half... Corey just turns and looks at me and is like: ‘Really dude? I just shot a rocket at this Phantom and she’s fine? Not even damaged? Zero damage?’” 

This friendly rivalry helped elevate ME3′s gameplay. Corey had a knack for making a gun feel so good to fire it had his fellow designers scrambling to keep up. It was his version of balancing. Before Corey sadly passed away he mentored Boldwin Li in all things weapon design and the arms race continued

Corey designed the Arc Pistol. It was causing problems for enemies because it was too powerful. It seemed hell bent on staying that way, Boldwin would tune down all its stats and it was still doing 3x the damage it should have been doing. “I was like ‘What the hell?’, and then I looked closer. It secretly fired 3 bullets for every pull of the trigger! Corey, you sneaky jerk”

The day it launched there were midnight launch parties across North America including one near the BW building. Numerous devs sat at long tables greeting fans and signing autographs as the fans picked up preorders. When midnight struck the line was long enough that it took several hours for some fans to get their game. One particular fan is remembered: “It was 3am. Some guy drove up from Calgary with his friends. He was like one of the last people in line. I think he was sort of tired-drunk. He threw himself across the tables, pulled up his shirt and shouted ‘Guys, sign my abs!’ And like I did, because he waited so long. It felt impolite not to. So I hope he enjoyed his copy of ME3″

For designing Protheans concept artists had free reign to design something that read as ancient

Before the concept art team had the story of the game to work toward, they explored wild ideas of their own including an image of the crew stealing back the Normandy to go after the Reapers

Jen Cheverie was testing scenes and was initially excited to be testing Mordin scenes, til she saw she was testing the Renegade version of his death. “This is even before like all of the audio and everything was in, so you didn’t even have the sad music. I remember sitting at my desk and my hands just went to my face when I saw that the gun Shep pulls on Mordin is the gun he gives Shep in ME2. I burst into tears and was crying for the rest of the day. People are waving to me as they walk by and I’m like, ‘It’s ok, I’m just killing my best friend’” 

There’s a segment called “Shepard’s story ends”. Casey on the ending: “There’s a whole bunch of things that come together to make it incredibly tense and emotional for players. I think the biggest one was the sense of finality, that whatever it was that happened in that very last moment... was it.” 

Wrapping up the story was a massive feat. In a way all of ME3 is an ending. Its final moments were the players’ last with a char they’d been with all the way from Eden Prime

“And while the critical reception of the game was extremely positive, many fans were unsatisfied with the ending, which became one of the most controversial in the history of games.” CH: “We were, on one hand, at the end of a marathon trying to finish the game and the series. But as devs we also knew that there would be more. We knew that we would continue to tell the story. In retrospect, we didn’t fully appreciate the tremendous sense of finality that it would have for people”. He envisioned an ending that posed new questions, something in the tradition of high sci-fi that left players dreaming about what that particular galaxy’s future could hold. “Frankly, there’s a lot more that we could have and should have done to honor the work players put in, to give them a stronger sense of reward and closure”

AAA games are massive undertakings with a million moving parts. Somehow they come together but even the best-planned projects don’t turn out quite like devs hope. From start to end video game production is a series of compromises. It’s rare if not impossible for devs to ship a game they’re entirely happy with. “I think that people imagine that when you finish a game, it’s exactly the way you wanted it to be. But whether people end up loving or hating the final result, we work hard to finish it the best we can, knowing that there’s a lot we would have wanted to do better. I think that’s true of any creative work”

As the dust settled after the initial reaction to the ending and later its epilogue, meant to show the wide-reaching ripple effects of Shep’s final choice, “players emerged mostly asking for one thing”. CH: “Now, most of what we hear, after both ME3 and MEA, is ‘Hey, just go make more Mass Effect’. And that to me is the most important thing. Knowing that players want to return to the ME universe is what inspires us to press on and imagine what comes next”

Mass Effect: Andromeda

By creating a new ME in a new galaxy the team was challenged to put their own visual stamp on the game while keeping it true to the franchise

Being the first ME game on a new gen of consoles meant for more detail

“Massive transport ships called arks populated with salarians, turians, humans, asari and quarians” made the risky jump to the Cluster

MEA was the first time BW had truly codeveloped across 3 studios: Edmonton, Montreal and Austin. The bulk of the work especially early on was done in Montreal, which was composed of a handful of Edmonton expats and heaps of experienced devs who joined from elsewhere specifically to bring a new ME experience to life. Series vets in Edmonton then came on to contribute writing, cinematics, design and QA, along with leadership from creative director Mac Walters and the core Production team. Austin writers and level designers also joined the fray

“It took a new team to take ME beyond the Milky Way”

Mac: “A lot of people in Montreal joined BW as fans of the franchise, so they just had this passion, and it felt like it was more like the days of Jade Empire, where a smaller younger team gets to do something for the first time. Even though it wasn’t necessarily a new IP for me, it felt fresh and new because of that. The team was just super excited to be working on it”

Early plans had the player exploring hundreds of worlds, procedurally generated, allowing for a nearly infinite variety of experiences. But as development wore on, it became clear that the game narrative required more specific, hand-touched level design on each world to keep the story focused and the experience engaging. “The plan was to give players numerous uncharted worlds to explore. Designers worked hard to come up with procedural elements that would make such planets special. Eventually the team made the difficult decision to abandon procedural planets in favor of more memorable hand-touched alien worlds, each with a specific story to tell”

One challenge was defining what ME meant without Shep. Care was given to include many of the MET’s key species. “Ryder recruited turian, asari, krogan and salarian followers”. Like Shep Ryder represents humanity’s hope for a peaceful coexistence among aliens who had long operated without human contact

Beginning with MEA the team decided that with few exceptions vehicles in ME have 6 wheels. Early Nomad concepts were bulkier. Later ones focused on its ability to move over its ability to protect itself from hostile fire, underlining the themes of exploration

German concept designer and auto-motive futurist Daniel Simon was contracted to create the Nomad and Tempest. The Tempest’s final design took inspo from the Concorde 

Concepts for angaran fighter ships have the following notes: “Two doors swing open, wings rotate down to function as landing struts, the landing struts split open. It has a spinning turbine engine 

Despite being set a galaxy away and some 600 years after Mordin’s death, there was a time when he had a cameo. It wasn’t cut due to running out of time however, it was cut due to drug references. John Dombrow explains: “One day I had to write a small quest for Kadara. I thought it’d be amusing if these 2 guys living way out on the fringes in a shack were growing plants for uh, medicinal purposes, and needed Ryder’s help with it. It occurred to me, wouldn’t it be amusing if Ryder had the option of actually trying ‘the medicine’ to see what would happen? And I thought, what if it turned into some hallucination that somehow involved SAM - like maybe SAM would sing? But why? How could I motivate that? Then it hit me. Who else in the ME game sings unexpectedly? MORDIN. As a nod to him I wrote SAM singing Modern Major-General. It got even better when our cine designer John Ebenger wanted to take it even further. Bless him, he came in on a Saturday to do a special hallucination showing Mordin himself. It was great. Til the fateful day we were told MEA had already been submitted to the ratings board. That’s when you declare things like drug references in your game. Mordin fell under that category which meant it was a no-go. We were too late”

Ryder’s white AI armor contrasts Shep’s iconic dark armor (intentional design)

Concept art for Ryder involved experiments with cloth (cloaks, ponchos, capes - “Pull here to release cloak”) and asymmetrical design elements

For alien design, there’s a few exceptions but humanoid figures are the ME standard and this persisted into MEA

Kett and angara concepts explored striking lines and textures 

– From Bioware: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development

[microbiologynerdd]

Notion - BASIC and EASY Note taking system FOR STUDENTS

Hello everyone!

I hope you are well!

For this weeks #Microbiologynerddweeklytips post, I shall be sharing my university note taking and organisation system using Notion.

I have been using Notion for roughly 1 year, and have used it to organise my second year university studies, in addition to my voluntary position as the VP of my society.

So below is a very BASIC and EASY to use format you could adapt for yourselves! Enjoy😊

Contents

As a directory to everything I need at university, I have a contents page. Here I have each of my modules, as though they were chapters of a book. Each leading to a separate page of their own.

After this I have the required ‘modules’ for my placement year. I have arranged this slightly differently to my regular university notes - more details on this later.

Below this you can find pages for my summer microtalks hosted by SFAM. I attend these weekly and make notes in that subsection.

And finally I have a section for Taekwondo, to organise tasks I have to complete as the VP of Taekwondo.

Module pages:

So i have tested 2 different methods for module layout, each only having a slight twist.

- Please click the photos to enlarge -

In the photos above, I visualise the 2 different systems. Each of the systems involves having a new cell per lecture. However, in the first 2 photos (from left to right) I have separate pages for my lectures vs my lab notes. Whereas on the right, I have my lectures, labs, extra reading and questions all formulated into one table. Clicking the See All button at the top left of the table, above the search bar, you can choose to view classes by type i.e. just see my lectures or just see my lab notes for example.

The second system I have found works best, otherwise you are just clicking too many buttons to get to the area you need. However, in future I shall implement the ‘breadcrumb’ at the top the page, like i did with the first and second photos. (Breadcrumb = univeristy/ BMS2037:cellu../lecture below the page titles). Breadcrumbs make it easier to shift between pages instead of clicking the back button all the time. They are essientally hyperlinks to other pages.

Tip: to insert a breadcrumb simply put /breadcrumb and a breadcrumb will appear. This works for anything you are trying to insert e.g. a table

You can also choose to insert materials e.g. any lecture slides or resources you used within that lecture. Personally I dont find this helpful, as our VLE is clearly laid out with our lectures. But it might be something worth trying, as you can also insert pictures or any sort of media you require.

I also use the tick box function to keep track of whether I have written the lecture into Anki cards (flashcards)/ attended the lecture.

Side note: Please ignore my spelling/ how I label lectures, they make sense to me, they dont need to be 100% correct - right?

Internship/Placement Page:

I have recently been dabbling in the layout I would like to use for my internship year, however, I shall update you at a later date with any additional details, as due to COVID-19 the formate of the year and my assessments has changed. I also will find out more when I start my internship... which is soon - yay!

I’ve decided to have reminders at the top, which I inserted using /callout - you can change the emoji to anything you would like. This is for me to know instantly any important documents or tasks that I need to complete.

The external work to that provided by my internship is included in the table. This is essientally the coursework I have to complete on the side of the placement. Here i decided to note the deadlines and percentage of the year that it is worth. This is just to help me grasp the format of this year, since as mentioned above, it is slightly different.

Underneath this I have a selection of details to do with the company. This includes my acceptance letter and any insurance forms I need to send off. I just wanted to have them at hand so i can reference them at any time.

Summer 2020/Taekwondo pages:

These pages I format the same as the ‘Module’ Pages, so I haven’t included any pictures etc.

Miscellaneous things:

- NOTION IS FREE FOR STUDENTS - if you have an educational email, you can sign up for free! If not, packages start at $4 a month, which isn’t too bad for something you use frequently!

- This service is avaliable on tablets and computers, so anyone can take advantage of this organisational software!

- You can change the cover and icon at the top of each page. They include emojis and a standard image database, but you can also upload your own unique images if you desire.

- There are also template designs for pages, with different themes for different needs. So if you don’t want to start one from scratch you have lots of options to choose from. Use those as a base and edit them from there! For example, there are calendars, habit trackers, resume trackers and whole load of other things.

- Using a device for notes, such as notion, allows you access to any notes you have made at ease. It is organised, and you are unlikely to lose your notes. Paper is great until you scrunch up that important sheet, or it rains and the paper gets wet, or you are carrying every single note you have ever made - that can become heavy. Just something to bear in mind, especially if you can afford a laptop/ note taking device of some kind.

- You can create multiple pages for different aspects of your life (photo below). For example I have 2 additional pages, 1 for personal things and another for blog post ideas - to keep you guys entertained... haha! 😆

Conclusion :

What I have shared here is a very BASIC overview of how I use notion. If you desire a detailed in depth report of how notion works, it might be worth checking out Ali Abdaal, who can give you this information. As for me and what I require from the service, Notion has been working really well, keeping me organised with all my notes in one area. Knowing what I am doing, when, and being able to keep up with the speed of lectures - considering my writing speed is questionable. 😂

When you first download notion and look at all the templates, it can be a bit overwhelming/ exciting. Start with what you need, and then explore new ideas that you want to incorporate. There is no point setting up hundreds of pages if you aren’t going to use them, just like writing out pretty notes doesnt help you learn content - but more about that in a future post. Start small, being organised involves consistency, you can’t be consistent if you have given yourself too many things to do daily. Or at least you are unlikely to be.

One word of warning, Notion is not compatible with the Apple Pencil, so if you like writing notes on your iPad, this may not be the best software for you. As well as this, if you are a faster writer than you are typer, DO NOT USE NOTION. The whole basis of this app or at least how I use it, is to stay organised and write notes productively and efficiently. If you prefer writing, keep at it! Don’t just switch because suddenly you hear lots of tapping on keyboards in the lecture theatre.

Play to YOUR STRENGTHS , enhance what you are good at, not what everyone else is doing. As always, you’ve got this 💪

Let me know if you have any questions, or whether you’d like any further posts/details about my notion workflow. I’m happy to answer any queries you have.

Speak soon,

Lucinda x

[hellroots]

『 MOBILE FRIENDLY RULES 』

— here you will find my rules or can also find them on my gdocs as well once i’m done with it. please like this if you read it, but otherwise don’t interact with this post, thank you. rest assured that i always read my moots rules before following and that i fully expect the same courtesy. i tried not to let them get too long but feel free to ask me anything you wanna know about them if it’s not clear ok?

 『 THE MUN』

NOXTROMUN, THEY/THEM, 21+, BRAZILIAN

shy but friendly ! i don't follow for follow, if i follow you that means i've read your rules and want to write with you. i have no triggers nor squicks of my own except drama in the dash, for that reason i do not engage in callouts/witch hunts and if you do it on a constant basis i might have to hard block you for my own peace of mind. although i may come off too strong/harsh, i am always up to talking things out privately. as long as you are civil, so am i. any form of hate will be deleted and blocked -  sometimes mocked, if i’m feeling cocky…

『 THE BLOG』

HELLROOTS, INDIE ( POTENTIALLY TRIGGERING AND NOT MINOR FRIENDLY ), HIGHLY SELECTIVE & PRIVATE MULTIFANDOM MULTIMUSE

primarily run on a low activity \ effort and with a slow speed.. my muselist changes a lot, depends a lot on what i’m watching lately so bear with me please. this is a drama free zone, therefore do realise that mun ≠ muses and (obviously) writing ≠ condoning !! as a quick note, do keep in mind that my blog is my safe space, just as your blog is yours - you are responsible for your own internet experience just as i am responsible for mine. should anything in my blog annoy/trigger/squick you, i strongly encourage you to block me & not write with me - your mental health is far more important ( for me, and hopefully for you as well ) than rp. on that note, please do not softblock me - that’s annoying, just hardblock please.

『 THE TRIGGERS』

TRIGGER HEAVY, PROPERLY TAGGED AND TAKING NO CRAP

i  usually  tend to write for trigger heavy fandoms (such as asoiaf, kingdom and others) and may incorporate some of it into my writing, muses' backgrounds and overall characterization. if you're bothered \ squicked \ triggered by that, i kindly encourage you to reconsider and not follow me. no amount of rp fun is worth your mental health.  i try to tag everything accordingly and i fully expect the same courtesy for our followers' sakes. be aware that there may be mentions of death, gore, violence, consanguinamory \ endogamy (especially when it comes to the lannisters and kekkei genkai clans), rape ( kingdom, though it will only be mentioned on the character’s backstory ) and cannibalism ( hannibal and kingdom ) , as well as unhealthy relationships and dynamics alongside with powerplay, and otherwise bad behaviours.  for all that is sacred, please, do note that i, the mun, do not approve, support or condone any of these actions or behaviours !!  i simply am capable of separating fiction from reality. as long as everything is properly tagged, with mutual consent and there are no minors involved (muse and especially not muns), . i support the right of a consenting adult to explore these awful dark topics in a safe fictional environment with other like minded consenting adults, people shouldn’t have to share their traumas to strangers on the internet to explain why they write what they write, be considerate. if that notion bothers you perhaps you might not want to interact with me, for both of ours sakes. fair warning, most of my graphics and aesthetics might trigger those who have xylophobia/hylophobia (phobia of trees or wooded areas), and considering it is a main theme here i will not be tagging it, i'm sorry. but its too many. however, if you want me to create a special tag for you, there's no issue! it will be either "[your mun name] don't look!" or "[your url] don't look!", whichever you prefer. QUICK EDIT/ADDITION: i do not believe that aging up fictional characters is inherently a bad thing - from what i understand, the whole appeal of aging up a character is that while you like their personality but you do not want them to be kids (for whatever reason) but insteasd adults. if you are one of those who think that aging up a character is automatically something bad (without even knowing why it was done in the first place) don’t bother following me because i do think that opinion is quite silly.

『 THE INTERACTIONS』

OC, DUPLICATE, MULTIMUSE AND CANON DIVERGENT FRIENDLY

my tagging system is simple, i tag triggers as "tw; x" and . images that may be sensitive or triggering as "cw; x". you can further see how my tags work by taking a look at my tag dump post, just search ‘tag dump’ on my blog and you will find the most recent one i’m using.    i shitpost and talk oocly on the dash constantly but you can easily blacklist my tag if it bothers you.  here's something you should know about me:  when i'm doing drafts i usually don't feel like chatting much, so please do not spam me because i won't be able to reply, i love to talk with my moots but sometimes it overwhelms me.  on that note, please don't pester me for replies ic or ooc, i am slow and chances are that if you try to guilt trip me or just nag me about it i'll leave as the ones i'll get to in the later end on purpose, just out of spite. yes, i be like that.   please be patient - i’ll never pressure you and expect the same in return.  plotting wise: i prefer to just wing it with just a faint idea of where to take the thread but honestly i'm cool with anything. please be considerate when formatting your replies, i have a bad eyesight & if i can't read it, i won't bother with it.   my own formatting is simple and clean.   on a smaller note, please bear with me and my muses as my muses ramble a lot but you don't have to match the length, just give me something to work with. if we write together, the chances of me making edits/tagging you in stuff are really big, just lmk if you don’t like that though !

『 THE FLEET』

MOSTLY BI/PAN MUSES, MULTISHIP AND MULTIVERSE, SMUT FRIENDLY

i love shipping but i like my ships to be devices to move the plot/dynamics/muses forward, every once in a while though i partake in some much loved self indulgent shipping. just because i ship a certain pairing don't presume that my characters are approaching yours with second intentions, please.   most of the time i like to reblog those relationship memes, so if you’re interested in a ship the best way (other than  sending me a message ofc) to let me know is by sending ones. there will be some triggering ships here ( like the lannisters, both cersei x jaime and joanna x tywin are my otps, and potential inter clan ships, like with the hyugas - i mean how the hell you think they keep the byakugan in their family?? ) that may either be played with trusted friends or be mentioned/reblogged sometimes, all properly tagged so you can easily blocklist/avoid it.  most of my muses are either bi or pan, those who are not will be specified. don't be afraid to reach out to me for shipping right off the bat - i'd rather have you to be open and honest with me about the interactions you want than lying to me, just know that there will be needed some plotting and threading first to see if your muses match. as an adult, my blog is smut friendly, i partake in sexual sunday a lot because some of my muses are very lewd in nature, you can blacklist my tag if that bothers you as well.

『 THE FINAL NOTES』

GENERAL RP ETIQUETTE APPLIES, CREDITS, THANK YOU FOR READING MY RULES

lastly but not least, general rp etiquette applies on my blog: no godmodding, forced ships, etc. there’s only ONE thing that truly makes me go apeshit crazy, and it’s when people don’t read my rules. i ALWAYS find out and it’s not pretty; i block it like it’s hot, ♪ ♫ ♬ block it like it’s hot ♪ ♫ ♬.   i strongly assure you that i always read your rules before both following you and also before sending memes, just in case. on a much smaller note, i’m not so hot on single shipping and i really feel weirded out about people forcing me to pic who i’m going to interact with due to theirs DNI’s. while i get DNI’s when it comes to actual predators, when it’s something seemingly random chances are that i’ll softblock you because it weirds me out how volatile some can be when it comes to a hobby. i have some trigger heavy hcs ( for example, the one about jiraiya’s hypersexuality being rooted in trauma that he suffered at a young age ) that i share with only a few muns that are closer with me, so i’ll be mentioning them every once in a while but won’t share them, please don’t insist.  i don’t really like most of the main characters of the franchises i write for, and when it comes to certain characters  i reserve the right to decline an rp for my own comfort. for further info on what i use to make my graphics please check my “CREDITS.” tag.  most of my stuff is made by me, i’ve got a lowkey rph in case you wanna check it out it’s @brazucahelps, however if you want a custom content i can see if i get a free time to come up with something :D

 IF YOU READ THIS FAR, THANK YOU SO MUCH — JUST ONE LAST THING, COULD YOU PLS LIKE THIS SO I KNOW YOU’VE READ IT? <3 THANKS!

[phynali]

Canonization and Fandom Purity Culture

I wrote a 1k-word twitter thread (as proof that I am Not made for Twitter and it’s goddamn 240-character limit) and am pasting it here with edits and updates (it’s now 2k words). 

I have thoughts to share (which I know have been stated more eloquently before by others) about this trend of demanding/obsessing that certain ships become "canon" and how it overlaps with the rise of fandom purity culture.

Under the cut.

Here in 2021 there is a seemingly large and certainly loud and active contingent of online fandoms who desire (or even demand) "canon validation" for a given interpretation of a source material. This is more true with shipping than anywhere else.

First, it is important to note that the trend is not limited to queer ships or to any single fandom. In the past few years I've seen it for Riverdale, Voltron, Supernatural (perhaps most extreme?), The 100, etc., and less recent with the MCU, Sherlock, Teen Wolf, Hawaii 5-0, etc. It is a broad trend across ships, fandoms, and mediums.

So if it is more common for queer ships, it is hardly unique to them. Similarly, pretending that it is about queer representation is a clever misdirect to disguise the fact that it is most often about ships and shipping wars. If you ever need proof of that, consider that a character can be queer without being in a given relationship or reciprocating another character's affections. Thus a call for more/better queer rep itself is very different than a call for specific ships to be made canon.

Also note that when audiences frame it as wanting to recognize a specific *character* as queer, it is almost always in the context of a ship. Litmus test: would making that character queer but having them *explicitly reject* the other half of the ship be seen as a betrayal?

(Note: none or this is to say we shouldn't push for more queer rep and more *quality and well-written* queer rep! Just that that isn't what I'm talking about here, and not what seeking canon validation for a specific interpretation or a specific ship is almost ever about.)

Why does this matter?

the language of representation and social justice should not be co-opted to prop up ship wars

it is reciprocal with a trend toward increasing toxicity in transformative fandom spaces

Number 1 here is self-explanatory (I hope). Let's chat about 2.

Demands for canon validation correlate with a rise in fanpol / fandom purity culture. What is fandom purity culture (and fandom policing)? This toxic mentality is about justifying one's shipping preferences and aiming to be pure (non-problematic) in your fictional appetites regarding romance and sex.

Note that this purity culture is so named as it arises linearly from American Protestantism, conservative puritanical anxiety around thought crimes, and overlaps in many ways with terf ideologies and regressively anti-kink paradigms.

It goes like this: problematic content is "gross" and therefore morally reprehensible. Much like how queer sex/relationships get labelled as "gross" (Other) and thus morally sinful, or how kink gets labelled as "harmful" and thus morally wrong. The Problematic label is applied by fanpol to ships with offset age or power dynamics, complicated histories, and anything they choose to label as "harmful". As such, they would decry my comparison here to queerphobia itself as also being harmful, because their (completely fictional) targets are ~actually~ evil.

(The irony of this is completely lost on them).

This mode of interacting with creative works leaves no room to explore dark or erotic themes or dynamics which may exist in fiction but not healthily in reality. Gothic romance is verboten. Even breathe the word incest and you will be labelled a monster (nevermind Greek tragedy or GoT).

As with most puritanical bullshit, fanpol ideology only applies these beliefs to sex and never to violence/murder/etc, proving what lies at its core. It also demands its American-based values be applied to all fictional periods and places as the One True Moral Standard. It evangelizes – look no further than how these people try to recruit others to their cause, aim to elevate themselves as righteous, and try to persuade (‘save’) others from their degenerate ways of thinking. 

“See the light” they promise “here are our callouts and blog posts to convince you. Decry your past sins of problematic shipping, be baptized by our in-group adulation and welcome, and then go forth and send hate to others until they too see the light.” In many ways “get therapy” by the antis is akin to “I’ll pray for you” by the Christian-right (and ultimately ironic).

(Although it has been pointed out to me that these fans are likely not themselves specifically ex-evangelicals, but rather those who have brushed up with evangelical norms and modes of thinking without specifically being victims of it. In many ways they are more simply conservative Christian in temperament and attitude without necessarily being raised into religion by belief).

What this has to do with canon validation is that these fans look to canon for approval, for Truth. On the one hand, if it is in the canon then it must be good / pure or at least acceptable. The authority (canon) has deemed it thus. It is safe and acceptable to discuss and to enjoy watching or consuming. In this way, validation from canon means a measure of safety from being Bad and Problematic. 

For example, where a GoT fan could discuss Cersei/Jaime's (toxic, interesting) dynamic in depth as it related to the canon, fans who shipped Jon/Sansa (healthy, interesting) were Gross and Bad. The canon as Truth provided a safety net, a launch point. "It's GRRM, not me, who is problematic." It wasn’t okay to ship the problematic bad gross incest ship, but it being in the canon material meant it was open for discussion, for nuance, for “this adds an interesting layer to the story” which is denied to all non-canon ships labelled as problematic.

(Note: there are of course people who have zero interest in watching GoT for a whole slew of very valid reasons, including but not limited to the incest. That’s a different to this trend. A less charged example might be The Umbrella Academy, where a brother canonically is in love with his sister and antis still praise the show, but if you dare to ship any of the potential incest ships then you are the one who is disgusting).

On the other hand, a very interesting alternate (or additional) explanation for this phenomenon was raised to me on twitter. (These ideas aren’t mine originally, but I wholly endorse them as a big part of what is likely going on): Namely, as with authoritarian individuals in general, they see themselves as right and correct, but the canon (which has not yet validated their ship) is not correct, and is in fact problematic, and so they can save the canon from itself.

As mentioned, these fanpol types see their interpretation as Good and Pure. So if they can push (demand, bully) the canon into conforming to their worldview and validating their interpretation, then they have shown the (sinful) creators the light and led them to the righteous path. This only works if the canon allows itself to saved though, otherwise the creators remain Evil for spurning them.

How is this different from fans simply hoping for their ship to be canon?

For a second here, let’s rewind to the 90s (since Whedon has been in the news recently). This “I want it to be canon” thing isn’t 100% new, of course. We saw this trend then for the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it was different then. At the time, fans who hoped for a ship to be canon might have been cheering for a problematic one to begin with (Buffy/Spike). So shipping was still present, minus vocal fanpol.

(And Buffy fans learned that canon validation...can leave a lot to be desired. A heavy lesson was learned about the ways that fan desires can play out horrifically in canon, and how some things are best left out of the hands of canon-writers).

These days, this is still largely true. Many fans hope for their ships to go canon, as they always have. There are tropes like “will they/won’t they” that TV shows may even be designed around, which a certain narrative anticipation and a very deliberate build up to that.

But while shipping *hopes* occur for many fans, almost all ships fans that *demand* to go canon and obsess over are now the ones deemed as Unproblematic, or as Less Problematic. I’m talking here about the ships that aren’t necessarily an explicit will/won’t they dynamic but do have some canon dynamic that leads them to being shipped, but which the creators aren’t necessarily deliberately teasing and building up a romantic end-game for.

These ships often have fans who are happy to stick to fandom, but there has also been a huge uptick in the portion of fans who are approaching shipping with an explicit lens of “will they go canon?” and “don’t you want them to be canon?” and now even “they have to go canon” and “the canon is wrong if they don’t make this ship canon”, to a final end-point of “if the ship doesn’t go canon, the source material is Wrong and Bad.”

These latter opinions are the one we see more by extreme fans (‘stans’), hardcore shippers, but especially by fanpol-types, the ones who embrace fandom purity culture at least to some extent.

Why them?

In pushing for canon validation, fanpol types seek to elevate their (pure) interpretation of canon. As mentioned above, it’s validation of their authority, a safety-net, and a way to save the canon from itself if only they can bully the canon into validating their right and good interpretation. 

There’s also another reason, which is that canon validation is a tool to bludgeon those seen as problematic. They can use it to denounce other (problematic) ships as Not Being Canon and therefore highlight their own as Right and Good, because it is represented in the True Meaning of the Work.

Canon validation then is a cudgel sought by virtuous crusaders to wield against their unclean enemies. It is an ideological pursuit. It is organised around identity and in groups sometimes as insular as cults.

How does this happen?

Fanpol tend to be younger or more vulnerable fans, susceptible to authoritarian manipulators. As many have highlighted before, authoritarian groups and exclusionary ideologies like terfs are very good at using websites like tumblr to mobilize others around their organizing beliefs. Fanpol tend to feel legitimate discomfort, but instead of taking responsibility for their media engagement, ringleaders stoke and help them direct their discomfort as anger onto others; “I feel ashamed and uncomfortable, and therefore you should be held accountable for my emotions.” Authoritarian communities endorse social dominance orientations, deference to ringleaders, and obedient faith to the principles those ringleaders endorse.

As these fans attach more and more of their identity to a given media (or ship), and derive more and more validation and more of their belongingness needs from this fanpol community, they also become more and more anxious about being excluding from this group. This is because such communities have rigid rules and very conditional bases for social acceptance. Question or "betray" the organizing ideology and be punished or excommunicated. If that is all you have, you are left with nothing. Being labelled problematic then is a social death.

What this means is that these fans cannot accept all interpretations of a media as equally valid: to do so Betrays the ideology. It promises exclusion. And, in line with a perspective around ‘saving’ canon and leading others into the light – forcing and bending the canon to their will is what will make it Good (and therefore acceptable to enjoy, and therefore proof of them as righteous by having saved others). As was also pointed out to me on twitter, endorsement from canon or its creators also satiates that deep need they have for authority figures to approve of them.

Due to all of this, these fans come to obsess over canon validation of their own interpretation. In a way, they have no other option but to do so. They need this validation -- as their weapon, as their authority, as their safety net, as their approval, as their evangelical mission of saviorship.

Canon validation is proof: I am Good. I am Right(eous). I am Safe.

(In many ways, I do ache for some of these people, so wrapped up in toxic communities and mindsets and so afraid to step out of line for fear of swift retribution, policing their own thoughts and art against the encroaching possibility that anything be less than pure. It’s not healthy, it’s never going to be healthy.)

In the end, people are going to write their own stories. You are well within your rights to critique those stories, to hate them, to interpret them how you will, but you can never control their story (it's theirs).

Some final notes:

This trend may be partially to do with queer ships now being *able* to go canon where before so no such expectation would exist. Similarly, social media has made this easier to vocalize. Still, who makes these demands and the underlying reasons are telling. There are also many legitimate critiques of censorship, queerbaiting (nebulous discussions to be had here), and homophobia in media to be had, and which may front specific ships in their critique. But critique is distinct from asking that canon validate one's own interpretation.

[whetstonefires]

Do you think the DC fandom maybe, Infantilizes Tim a little too much? Like for a rich kid character who's main trauma for a long time was a getting left home alone too much there's an oddly amount of meta abt how much how much his parents hurt him~ compared to, y'know the two poor characters who grew up with physically abusive dad's+druggie mom's, or the two that were raised assassin cult's, etc

…well, yeah, I do kind of think that? His whole schtick for so long was being too old for his age in ways that didn’t sacrifice his jokey, relatable teenager energies. It’s weird how little of that we see anymore, sometimes.

And then DC broke him and discarded him and he’s sort of awkwardly hanging around getting reimagined as more woobie with every fan generation. It is weird!

But tbh I do get it. And I think the reason his parents’ failure of him and his vulnerability get played up so much, and Jason and Steph’s sufferings (while used a lot for things like motivation and context) not dwelt on quite so much in the same lugubrious style, are kind of the same reason.

Which is that canon didn’t commit to it. Jason and Steph’s experiences with bad parenting were foregrounded and retconned more dramatically awful several times. (There’s some definite classism in how that was approached imo, and I’m never budging on being mad about DC retconning out Catherine being sick and then ignoring her forever in all Jason characterization because a drug death invalidates a person ig, great message during the opioid crisis guys.)

They engaged and coped with it–Steph (and Cass, our #1 canon batfam parental abuse victim) pretty directly, Jason a little less so because of the dubious and fluctuating canon status of most of the content more specific than ‘poverty, homelessness, theft, parental drugs and crime in there somewhere,’ so most of his parent issues have been focused on Bruce. He sure has dug into them tho. 😂 Rarely well or productively, thanks DC, but it’s explicitly part of his character, is my point.

Whereas upper-middle-class Tim was always treated by the narrative as fortunate and unharmed by his experiences with his parents. Even though they were clearly behaving badly in several ways, and Tim showed signs of being harmed by it.

Tim outside of immediate moments of frustration always was of the opinion he was Fine, and Very Fortunate Actually.

Therefore a huge chunk of the numerous everyone who’s got parent-related mental and emotional harm, but has struggled to have that validated and hasn’t responded with a lot of anger toward the parent, identifies with Tim. The only one who’s never really lashed out at his parents for fucking up with him. The one who still needs it explored, because canon ultimately didn’t.

[editing post to put in a readmore because lol it’s long, post otherwise unchanged]

(Dick obviously didn’t ever have any Issues with the Graysons, but he Angry Teenagered at Bruce so hard it changed Bruce’s characterization permanently, rip.)

The things Jason, Steph, and Cass have been through are dramatic, obvious, and fit stereotypes because that’s what they’re based on.

That’s important content to have, but because it’s right out there in your face even people who identify with it quite a lot are less likely to feel the need to work all the way through it again in fanworks. That part’s there. It’s text.

(Well actually Jason having been physically abused kind of wasn’t? I think? It was mostly assumed on the basis of stereotyping and Jason’s not caring about the man much even as he felt possessive of information about his death, which is valid. I don’t actually know what’s up with Willis now, Lobdell did some weird shit that lacked emotional resonance or staying power because he’s Lobdell and has no soul.

Cass’ wandering years are also ludicrously underdeveloped. But very very few comics fans or writers can personally relate to being amazing child warriors with no grasp of language living feral under bridges. That part of her life is consistently represented in terms of absences, in terms of its deviation from the norm and the deficits of normality it left her with, which is typical but unfortunate.) 

-

The interesting things to do with these characters are often informed by the bad stuff in their childhoods, but there’s relatively rarely that much more to say about the fact that those things were bad. They know they’re bad. They’ve had a lot of on-panel rage about it, as discussed above. Steph and Cass both beat the shit out of their dads.

Jason is, in fandom especially, a sort of Platonic ideal of a kid who’s mad about his bad childhood and really bad at figuring out where to point that rage.

(Damian is a whole other kettle of fish, because he’s been lumbered by so many detailed retcons coming so fast no two people can seem to construct compatible models of what his early childhood was like, and even more because he’s still ‘a child’ enough that he’s necessarily in a different stage of processing than someone who’s officially only a few years older than him at this point, but still functionally 8 and also 20 years older, and whose parents are no longer in the picture to continue screwing up.

Also there’s no question that if he brings up an abusive thing the League did, he will be validated by his current environment about his realization that it was in fact bad. There’s a lot of fic on that theme! But it doesn’t have the same tone precisely because it is usually understood that that support will be there if he wants it. Realizing that his previous context contained things that were wrong keeps being made the focus of his arc.)

The badness of Tim’s childhood, on the other hand, was mainly in subtext. Even when we were clearly meant to understand Jack was fucking up, like when he canceled plans with Tim at the last minute to go on a date with Tim’s stepmother, or that infamous time he came to apologize for not being a great parent and got mad Tim was distracted by a crisis on TV so he flew into a rage and took the TV and smashed it and was like ‘that’ll teach you,’ it wasn’t leaned into.

The story didn’t treat Jack as a minor villain to be overcome but like a sort of environmental hazard of childhood, like homework, to be endured and coped with. Tim said things like ‘it’s fine’ and ‘at least he left the computer.’

(And like. It’s not about having a TV and computer in his room. It’s about not letting a child have boundaries, pointedly not respecting a child’s possessions, creating an emotionally insecure environment, punishing minor infractions in proportion to their momentary impact on your own ego, physically lashing out at a proxy for the child…)

Rather like Tom King later didn’t understand about the punching from Bruce, whoever did that story (probably Dixon? I don’t care enough to check) did not understand how serious a case of bad parenting that scene was. That is most definitely textbook abusive behavior. (It’s a hell of a lot more common abusive behavior than being a lame supervillain or shooting you when you screw up, and a lot more specific than ‘was a thug, might have hit me, dead now.’)

And Tim was never allowed to be mad at his parents about it. It was fine. He needed to be ignored so he had the freedom to be Robin. He deserved his dad being mad at him because he was keeping secrets. He complained too much, although objectively he did not.

The universe punished him for ‘complaining,’ more than once. We cut straight from him shunting aside his disappointment that his postcard from his parents was just to say they weren’t coming home yet after all with ‘if it will stop all the fights they’ve been having lately it’s more than fine’ to them getting kidnapped.

He agreed not to come on the rescue mission. His mom never made it home, and his dad was in a coma for a while. And then ultimately Jack died as a result of Tim’s decision to be Robin, immediately after finally deciding to accept it.

So Tim walks around feeling a huge burden of responsibility for his parents’ deaths, and completely unable to process any hurt they did him as real or valid, especially in comparison with the far more blatant awfulness other people have been through, and canon is clearly never going to address it. Or even acknowledge it properly.

Let me repeat that because it’s kind of my main point:

People are fixated on getting Tim’s emotional abuse validated because that’s an incredibly important step in recovering from emotional abuse, and it’s one canon consistently denied him.

How ‘bad’ things are ‘in comparison to’ problems other people have is a bad and unhealthy way to engage with trauma. Okay? That’s just a really harmful framework to apply to pain.

It’s also a way that both Tim and people with experiences similar to Tim’s are encouraged to engage with their own experiences, compounding the existing problems.

So. Not a form of relatable DC was ever actually aiming for when they tried so hard (and pretty effectively) to make him a relatable character as Robin, but an enduring one for a lot of fans.

-

So Tim’s childhood is a natural target for fanworks in a different way than the traumas that have been made explicit and taken seriously by the text. And then a lot of that got compounded by the way the introduction of Damian as Robin was handled, and the lack of resolution that got. And his current status as not quite having a place in the family anymore.

So between the level of projection encouraged by that context and how relatively difficult to access Tim’s Robin run has become ten years after the fact, this has led to a lot of fanworks on these themes that are based mostly on other fanworks, and stray further and further from the original content.

So at this point there’s an entire wing of Tim’s fandom wherein this side of him has expanded enormously, and he primarily exists to suffer, frequently in ways that 1) escalate to a point that is inarguably ‘valid’ and hard to dismiss and 2) set him up to rebound from it in whatever way the writer finds emotionally satisfying or useful–being ultimately cared for and reassured by people who value him (the most infantilizing option but like, popular for obvious reasons), or unveiling his brilliant scheme that was causing him to pretend to be passive in the face of mistreatment, or turning around and using his genius ninja skills to wrest power back from his abusers, or just laying down some sick burns about being treated fairly.

But not that many of the last one, because that’s mostly done with other batfam members.

Tim’s become a vehicle for a lot of vicarious coping that Steph and Jason just aren’t appropriate for, because they get angry and they get even. And those are stories that exist already, so there’s less scope for telling your own.

And because Jason’s reaction pattern is ultimately so masculine (i’ll make them all sorry! with my guns! blam blam!) while Tim’s is pretty gender-neutral, the demographics of fanfic mean that the bulk of the people using Tim vicariously in this manner are female-aligned, which has over time feminized this archetype of him a lot. Sometimes in ways I find really uncomfortable, like there’s a lot of forced pregnancy stuff which activates my panic buttons. x.x

But, ultimately, it’s fandom. People are going to do what they’re going to do, DC in their perpetual fail has hung Tim out to dry in narrative terms, and I’d rather the people who are using Tim for victimization narratives over the people who can’t dismiss or discredit him fast enough now that his position has been filled. 🤷‍♀️ What we gonna do? Fave’s in an awkward spot. DC hates us. This is the life in this comic book pit. XD

-

Also if you’re the same anon who left me a callout about op of that weird Steph post in my inbox, or if you aren’t @ that person, 1) I refuse to get involved so I’m not answering that ask 2) those aren’t even particularly dramatic fandom crimes? That’s pretty normal? That’s just…Caring Too Much About Ships And Disagreeing With Me.

Do I also feel those opinions are kinda bad? Yeah. But I disagree with everyone about something. Chill.

[meksims]

the “without fail” writing tag by @gilded-ghosts.

@koisser and @honeyviesims tagged me in this challenge, and i've been itching to do it! finally found the time to write this down. :') thank you for the tag! 

Rules: List five things that you, WITHOUT FAIL, weave into or explore in your stories, whether it be specific themes or tropes, character archetypes, allusions to other literary works, what have you! It really can be anything that you consistently include in your narratives for whatever reason. Then invite others to share theirs by tagging them! 

while i haven't shared much of my writing with the simblr community, i've actually been writing since i was in first or third grade! it was mostly fanfiction until i reached high school, and i slowly branched out and started own original stories. after all those years of writing, i'd like to think that i've got some "without fails" up my sleeve. 

i’ll be keeping the rest of the post under a ‘read more’ so as to not clog your dashboards. feel free to read if interested! it’s a long one, and i think i end up going off-tangent from time to time. 😅💛

color theory.

when coming up with a new oc, i always try to get the essentials down: name, appearance, birthday, gender identity, sexual orientation, overall purpose/role, etc. i like taking it one step further and assigning them a color.

i’ve been interested in color theory / color psychology for the longest time. for one, it helps me distinguish each character from each other. it acts as a ‘starter’ or ‘base’ for developing their personality. it’s also fun when i get to build a scene and the opportunity to use color ends up presenting itself. 

if you wanna know how serious i am about it, i’ve got a tracker. like the google sheets kind. here’s the 2020 edition, which i need to update...

when it comes to translating that into the sims, i usually try and reflect their chosen color through their clothing. you’ll notice that in my coa x main nine introduction post; i think all of them (except for jian and matteo) wore their color in their clothes.  

found family.

i love this trope. i love this trope to death and i will never not include it in my writing. it can be a group of misfits coming together, it can be a squad or team going through certain trials and tribulations with one another, it can be anything of the sort and i will absolutely eat it up. it’s heart-warming, it makes me cry, and as a queer woman it has a special place in my heart.  

an example of found family in my writing includes squad a from coalesce (aether, peters, mack, and seonghui). they met primarily through their canon occupations and ended up with a synergy that’s as strong as it can be. 

found family’s also great for exploring insecurities, vulnerabilities, and getting to play with how one member or person interacts with the others. i’m a sucker for that. and i’m also a sucker for a good group hug!

the city and its secrets.

some personal context: my hometown isn’t exactly the most metropolitan. the same sentiment applies to the town where i spent elementary and high school. it was only around college that i got to experience being somewhere that felt more alive.

i love cities. there’s something about it that just draws me in—i mean, my undergraduate thesis was related to the city, and i just ordered a book about cities from my university bookstore. i love the potential there is for it, endless possibility, the different walks of life that intersect on a daily basis, so on and so forth. 

but i’m also interested in what’s kept tightly-shut; secrets, mystery, who approaches who if there’s a problem, a noisy club with a private back room, some sort of inner darkness that’s close to overflowing. 

this should also explain why i love playing in san myshuno!

road to recovery.

so you've reached rock bottom. how do you claw your way back up?

my friend rainy knows this well, but one of the things i want to do with coalesce—especially with characters like seonghui—is to show that recovery isn’t linear, as cheesy as it sounds. it’s difficult. it gets nasty. you feel like you’re thrown further back from where you started. but do you pick yourself back up and try again, or do you let yourself be consumed by the hurt of it all?

admittedly, i’ve also been intersted in looking into charcters who fall into the latter option. i think that’s something i want to do with another fic (that i’ve nicknamed shadow); but no promises on the progress of that one! 😅

disappearing acts.

an important thing to know about me: meks loves a good, good mystery.

back in high school, a lot of my stories were centered on someone who disappeared. the plot was always focused on bringing them back, but before they even did, something i also liked exploring was absence. how does it feel when someone familiar isn’t there? how do the dynamics change? is there something off-balance?

i still use the trope in current stories, but the disappearances aren’t as awful, i promise! or at least, i hope they aren’t…

but yeah, bringing it back to the second part of this explanation, i just like fiddling with absences and gaps and exploring character dynamics.

those are the top five! i’ve got way more, but i can save those for another post. 

again, thank you to koisser and vie for tagging me! i’ve got no idea who to tag because i think everyone’s done it at this point. but if you wanna do it and need someone to tag you, just say that i did. it’s okay. 💛

[geracaoalpha]

How can art help fighting environmental issues?

Recently, a lot of people talk about “artivism”, and many important art fairs call out the art & environment theme. But what exactly can art do for environmental issues? Keep reading to understand all about it.

Artivism is the obvious combination of art, and activism. It developed as a direct result of a 1997 gathering of Chicano artists in Mexico; the term itself and its derivatives (“Artivism”, “artivist”, etc.) were disseminated through East Los Angeles artists, musicians, and organizations such as Quetzal, Mujeres de Maiz, and Self Help Graphics and Art. But on a broader scale, was catalyzed by anti-war and anti-globalization protests. Artivists, of the past and of today, attempt to push a certain political agenda, as well as raise awareness of issues such as climate change, immigration, and social issues. Artivism is also revolutionary in form: the mediums involved are creative and groundbreaking, and include street art, spoken word, subvertising, and culture jamming.

Leah Harper artwork, “Larsen B”

  Art can help environmental causes through many vehicles, one of the most obvious being spreading awareness about specific issues such as endangered sea animals, deforestation, ice caps melting, among others. However, art can also help the environment in more novel ways: for example, the artist El Anatsui recycles bottle caps to create textured, gleaming sculpture pieces that could almost be likened to textiles. 

  Finally, there are an increasing amount of artists that choose to use proceeds from their art to donate to environmental causes/organizations. For example, Valentino Vettori’s project, “Arcadia”, in which he created 10 prints, all depicting solutions to our current environmental crisis, then sold them for charity and, further, created a whole platform to engage and promote sustainable initiatives. Another example is Alpha’s project titled “Artivism Challenge: Rainforest Edition” used art to raise awareness about rainforest pollution to incite change. Artists nominated art pieces that addressed rainforest conservation, and a judging panel of environmental and art experts chose a winner, whose prints were also sold for charity. Alpha’a is a prime example of an organization that “leverages the universal appeal and emotional power of art to raise awareness on critical issues… create awareness of existing solutions to environmental problems, and connect individuals, brands, and community organizations to enable organic action”. 

Olafur Eliasson installation, Ice Watch, 2018

  Olafur Elliasson is one of the more popular examples of an artist combining his practice with activism to fight against climate change. His well-known installation Ice Watch brought 12 blocks of melting glacial ice to the Paris Climate Change conference, forcing viewers to confront the impending environmental crisis. Eliasson says it best: “to take all the data, news, and scientific papers and turn it into something you can touch is, I think, incredibly effective”.

  However, there are also more emerging artivists to familiarize yourself with, on the Alpha’a platform and otherwise! One of these is Leah Harper: originally from Florida, her work explores the environmental systems of the ocean and marine life. Her mixed media pieces imbue ocean life with a colorful sense of childlike joy, imploring the viewer to protect something precious that is slipping away. Another Alpha’a artist that engages in artivism is Augusto Amado, specifically his work No over Nothing. It’s a piece focused on the overconsumption of plastic, and shows the real horrors of the fishing industry today.

  As you can see, art–and artivism– holds an incredible place in the fight against climate change, and even activism as a whole. Artists and projects such as Leah Harper’s, or even ALPHA PROJECT, ignite action and awareness in the art world and beyond. To support these agents of change, and participate in the climb towards environmental peace, support artivists’ work on Alpha’a, and spread the word! 

[savvyblunders]

Personal Post: Imposter Syndrome, Reading Traditional Books, and thoughts about my own writing

{Just rambles regarding books, fanfiction and some of my thoughts therein.}

It’s been a terribly long time since I read any published books--aside from those written by fellow fanfiction authors. It has reached the point that I find them entirely too cringey. The plots are tame, the characters stiff, the language rote. I especially have a hard time caring if there is a supposed ‘romance’ involved. Forget about het romances, they’re so formulaic that they leave me cold. It isn’t that I have no interest in the portrayal of a relationship between a woman and man, it’s that by and large they might as well have been churned off of a factory production line. 

Part of my objection is to the tired old tropes and gender roles which authors (and readers) don’t seem to realize they’re not only falling prey to, but encouraging with their work. The world doesn’t have to be turned on its head to be interesting, but you shouldn’t know from the first few scenes between characters how it will play out--and further more, not care.

I did read a rather good psychological mystery a few days ago, however. I think perhaps it was successful in part because it was so different from the usual run of stories that people publish, but also because there wasn’t a romance shoe-horned into the storyline. The narrator wasn’t particularly sympathetic, but nor were they entirely unredeemed. I don’t want to give too much away, but it explored the themes of bullying, memory, redemption and revenge, with an enjoyable twist that I didn’t see coming--I was successfully led astray by red herrings, which isn’t always the case when I’m reading mysteries. The book, should anyone be interested, was Girl Gone Mad by Avery Bishop.

{I keep on rambling after the break ;)}

I also read another which was such a stinker I deleted it from my Kindle history and couldn’t tell you the title or author. This beauty had a somewhat interesting premise of a woman who wakes from a six month coma with full amnesia and throughout the book has to struggle with not remembering anything and depending on her husband, children and neighbors for the details of her life. Frustratingly, she finds parts of her personality and tastes have changed--at least as far as they all tell her. She begins to doubt that she is who they say--an issue further compounded when certain facets of her life pre-coma are revealed. Then when the ending arrives, there is a twist and a reveal which could have been pretty neat, only it arrived at the end of such a rote story, with such clunky storytelling and unimaginative language that I kind of didn’t care. It was clear, I might add, that the female protagonist was written by a man. Although blessedly he didn’t go into raptures over her perky breasts, long hair, or other physical attributes [insert vomiting]

My reading resulted in a two-fold feeling. One, traditionally published books are by and large crap. A few months ago I tried reading a book from a famous author whom I used to be quite a fan of. It was part of a series with which I used to be enamored. I settled in, expecting a very enjoyable read. After slogging through three chapters I gave it up. The writing was generic, the characters shallow and the ‘bad guy’ was so sketchily written as to be bewildering, not mysterious. 

That book left me frustrated and annoyed. But it also revealed something to me which I had somewhat accepted and understood prior to that, but not entirely absorbed. Just because a book is traditionally published doesn’t mean it’s any good. Just because an author is well known--or even on the best seller list--doesn’t mean they can write. There are more places to find interesting, funny, heartbreaking, sexy, fun, amazingly written, daring and wonderful stories than at a bookstore or through Kindle. 

The second part of my two-fold feeling was that while, as a writer, I may have much room to grow, I still have valuable skills to offer. My four years of writing fanfiction have honed my talent, refined my style, and influenced my voice, perspective and ability. A good beta, or editor, is invaluable. While I used to write solo and not show it to anyone, simply edit and post, I’ve come to understand the inherent value of feedback. It can be a tricky road, as you might find yourself influenced too much by a reader into trying to suit their tastes rather than your own, but a good beta (eternal thanks to @paialovespie & @hoomhum)--that is to say, a great beta, will not only see the nuts and bolts which might need tightening, but will offer insights which blow your story from ordinary to inspired. The same goes for a ‘personal cheerleader’ (the highest of praise to @mottlemoth) or someone who reminds you at your dark times that you are capable of far more than you can conceive of in that moment. Forget nasty comments online, most of us are our own worst enemies--after all, we know our weakest spots and can zero in on them mercilessly.

Even without a beta, I believe in myself as a writer enough these days (most days) to hope that one day, with hard work, skill, great editing, and some luck, I too could be published. Not a NYT best seller, perhaps, but then, I’m not entirely certain I’d like that. I don’t say this out of any sort of pretentiousness, but because, in essence, these days, I want to write the kind of things that appeal to a more niche audience. I’d like to point with pride at my small book, nestled there on a bookshelf, or available with one click of a button, as something that helps give a voice to a community which has, and still continues to be, marginalized, ignored, fetishized and pandered to, in equal measure. Perhaps it would be for the best if what I wrote wasn’t palatable to the greater reading public.

Of course, those days when I’m full of zest and confidence don’t always last. Like any creator, I fall prey to Imposter Syndrome. Lord, I can’t believe that a time used to exist when I didn’t know what that was! I knew the feeling (oh, how I did), but had no clue that a term existed to encapsulate it. The concept that I wasn’t alone in having days (weeks, months, years) of being cast into doubt that I had anything worth saying--a voice worth listening to--isn’t a new one, but to find out that I’m not alone was unutterably comforting. 

Since, like so many people, I’ve been suffering from a lack of ambition and ability to focus during this global pandemic, I haven’t written much at all, that inner voice rang loud and clear. I’m a fraud, a fake. Any ability I had was used up, clearly as shallow as a mud puddle if a little adversity was enough to dry it out. The struggle to get myself past that was, and is, one that swings from good to bad almost day by day. I had to finally give myself permission to be sad, scared, worried, tired, uninspired. Eventually I decided it was enough that I could find comfort and solace in other’s writing. And oh, how I have! Even though days and days would pass when I couldn’t even muster the interest to read, other times I would consume fanfiction fervently, feverishly. 

And there was so much out there! Adventure, sex, romance, comedy, crack, fluff, hurt/comfort. It seems funny that I can rail against the ‘formulaic’ writing of published books and then turn to ‘tags’ and ‘tropes’ for comfort. But I think the difference lies in the heart that is written into those fanfiction stories. Most of us, while being somewhat influenced by friends, mutuals and fans into writing for a hungry public, are, by and large, writing for ourselves. The old tried and true ‘write what you know’ advice seemed empty and meaningless to me for years. If we only ever write what we know, then how do sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, etc., get written? My brain went to the obvious and ignored the heart of the matter--it isn’t so much what you ‘know’ as writing what you need. What makes you passionate. Even if you’ve never been on a space ship, or been part of a polyamorous, platonic communal family group, if you write it with that yearning and spirit in your heart, it will reach out to someone else.

Fanfiction, at it’s core, is self-comfort.

In my estimation, looking at traditionally published books, it seems that what most of them lack is that heart. The writers aren’t writing because they need the story, or because they are compelled to tell it. It isn’t that they had a hell of a good time writing it, or that they made themselves laugh while doing so. They had a publishing deal to fulfil, a publisher to make happy, a reading public who had certain expectations. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but if it’s your only motivation...then the writing suffers the neglect and a percerptive reader will note the difference. 

By and large, the fandom, the ship, even the trope, aren’t what captivates me most. I’m a pretty eclectic reader. I enjoy a good story more than I do the fact that it is a particular pairing. The draw is how well it is written, any chances the author took, the indulgence into style, formatting, etc. that they allowed themselves. So why should published books be any different? I’ve heard (non-fandom) people dismiss fanfiction as niche. Perhaps it is. But it is also broad, vast, uncharted territory where we’re all having a lot of fun and enjoying the hell out of ourselves.

Maybe those published authors need to spend a little time with us.