#and maybe Minkowski & Lovelace

[len-the-neverending]

And without further ado, time for the Minlace post because I don't feel normal. To be clear, this isn't one of those ships where I think it is canon or want it to be canon: I think their relationship works great as it is. However, that said, I am OBSESSED with the idea of these two being girlfriends. Partially because they're my 2 favorite characters in Wolf 359 and I love that they're also awesome together, but also, oh my GOD, their dynamic.

The sheer RESPECT between the two of them, for starters. In S2 they're competing over who gets to be in charge, but in S4 they're absolutely on the same team and it's a glorious thing. The fact that when Minkowski doesn't trust herself to run the station because she feels like she's lost control, when she's at her lowest, it's Lovelace she trusts, Lovelace who isn't even *human* but who she knows will take care of her and her crew... the fact that Lovelace, who is terrified of losing control again because the first time that happened everyone died, is *desperate* to give command back to Minkowski because she *trusts* her... Lovelace knowing in the S3 finale that Kepler won't win because he's up against Minkowski... one of my favorite traits in a ship is the feeling that they're on each other's side and respect each other's capabilities, and hoo boy do they have that.

They know each other SO well! In 49, Lovelace knows that Minkowski is scared to retain command, and Minkowski knows that Lovelace is too eager to be a martyr, and then in 53 when all Lovelace has to do is look at Minkowski to know she isn't okay...

Speaking of 49, OH MY GOD THE TIME LOOP. The idea that Minkowski was the only one who had ever been stuck in one before this, and she felt alone and couldn't even tell Eiffel and Hera, and then Lovelace gets stuck in a time loop and tells her about it and Minkowski is the only one who believes her... my girls have so much in common, even aliens fucking with them.

Lovelace in the season 2 finale pushing Minkowski out of the way of the shrapnel and almost getting herself killed. Yes, I know that's just Lovelace being her self-sacrificial self, but it's also a GREAT moment for Minlace.

The treadmill scene in 50! The passive-aggression with an undercurrent of trust and respect running through! Minkowski trying to help Lovelace realize that she's just hurting herself! "It's not your fault." God, I love that scene so much.

I also LOVE them in 61. Second base is going to kill an evil CEO with guns together. And then Lovelace breaks free of Kepler's commands because she can't hurt Minkowski, and they have this whole scene. God, this broke my heart.

I know we're all butch Lovelace truthers here and I respect it, but I always imagine Minlace as a butch/femme couple, with butch Minkowski and femme Lovelace. I don't know why. It brings me joy. I'd totally draw it if I could, but unfortunately my art skills extend to stick figures and that's it.

To conclude, Isabel Lovelace is the only one good enough for my girl Renee Minkowski, I love them, and I hope they meet back up and go to the theater sometime when Lovelace gets back from her well-deserved tropical vacation.

[hephaestuscrew]

I think one of the things that I find so compelling about Minkowski & Eiffel is that I believe that who they each are as people means they have the inherent potential to have immensely positive impacts on each other, but I do not believe they would have even been friends in most possible scenarios in which they could have met. I believe they are uniquely attuned to help each other grow and develop and become better versions of themselves, but for the first year and a half of them living and working together, the prevailing emotion between them was irritation. I believe that they are able to support each other through hardship in a way no one else could, but without the specific kind of hardship they went through, they might never have known this.

And even as I acknowledge that they might never have bonded without the trauma, it's important to me that it's not that they are bonded purely by trauma, in a way that might imply Minkowski or Eiffel could have built the same bond with anyone who'd been up there with them.

They are bonded by the ways in which they care for each other, by the ways in which their contrasting personalities make them uniquely well suited to support each other, by the way Eiffel makes Minkowski laugh when she really needs to, by the way Minkowski would do anything to keep Eiffel safe, by the way Eiffel reminds Minkowski of her moral compass in her darkest moments, by the way Minkowski helps Eiffel understand that some things are worth taking seriously.

But without what they went through together, they might never have seen beyond their surface-level understandings of each other in order to form this incredibly valuable friendship. It's not that their traumatic experiences are all that bond them. It's that the traumatic experiences forced them to break past the initial barriers that prevented them from connecting with each other properly and from trying to understand each other, in order to realise the potential for connection that had always been there.

[commsroom]

ok here are my eiffel questions

-do you think he ever played sports (and enjoyed it)

-had ever watched the show 'community' he kinda reminds me of a mix between abed and jeff and idk if you've seen it but it's interesting

-what kind of pet did he have a a a kid? he's giving me cat or lizard vibes idk

anyway love your blog tyy

aw, thank you! okay, in order:

oh, god, no. definitely not. eiffel is from a generation of nerd guys who made a point of defining themselves opposite to jocks, and he does not exercise on purpose. i doubt eiffel even watches sports that aren't like, motorsports. to get eiffel to enjoy exercise you've gotta trick him into it by giving it a counterculture image. i'm so sure he wanted to learn to do sick skateboard tricks as a teenager. he still wants to do sick skateboard tricks. but his coordination is terrible.

he has almost definitely seen community, but i have not, so i can't give any further opinion on that. but he's the right demographic.

i don't think he had a pet as a kid, but not for a lack of trying. eiffel is absolutely a dog person; he was a lonely kid, and i know he begged for a dog. and maybe his parents even promised him one, but it just never happened. i actually think eiffel is allergic to cats, just based on his general misfortune. guy with ailments. he just seems like the kind of guy cats would love to climb on while he sneezes horribly.

[treezxu]

I feel the overwhelming urge to assign the hephaestus crew animals. but im once more struck with the dog curse

[stopitlight]

thinking about how lovelace was placed in charge of keeping minkowski in solitary at the end of fire and brimstone. i always wonder how that worked out for them.

[cosmicrhetoric]

still really impressed with how good the lack of romance in w359 was. not that i really would've minded if there was any but it's just that there's such a plethora of interesting and complex and devoted character dynamics that sure you can think eiffel n hera had something going on <3 but you don't have to, it doesn't change that hers was the last voice he ever wanted to hallucinate before he died. sure you can think there was something with hera and maxwell but it doesn't change the three straight days maxwell had to stay up for memoria.....or anything that happened after 😬. i make no such excuses for the kepcobi fireworks mini ep tho lmao what was that. fruit

[bearloonz]

Five (5) of them! Got on a portrait kick after looking at disco elisium art and then these guys happened. It took so long help.

SI-5 coming one day maybe.

[ID: Five portraits of the Wolf 359 cast, including Hera, Hilbert, Lovelace, Minkowski, and Doug. It's done in a painted style and each piece encapsulates their character and effect on the show. End ID]

[clonerightsagenda]

Since I'm w359posting this week apparently, I wanted to share something neat I learned from the AMAs about how the writers designed the characters.

Apparently, the original four crewmembers were plotted on two axes - human vs inhuman and order vs chaos. Eiffel and Minkowski were the chaos human and order human, and Hera and Hilbert were the chaos inhuman and order (metaphorical) inhuman. Lovelace upon her introduction was plotted at the dead center of both axes.

To really amp up everyone reflecting each other, when they started designing the SI5 characters, they took the original three humans' personalities and job titles and rotated them. So, they set up a commander, scientist, and technician, but gave the commander Hilbert's traits, the scientist Eiffel's traits, and the technician Minkowski's traits.

Obviously that was only a starting point, and all three characters grew into their own people very different from where they began. However, you can see traces of these influences. Least so with Jacobi, imo, but in the Rashomon episode where each person's account reflects their priorities and anxieties, he's striving to portray himself as a dedicated, safety-conscious professional frustrated that no one else takes his work seriously, which is something Minkowski can relate to. He's also Kepler's administrative officer, even if we don't see him doing paperwork very often.

Maxwell is clearer. She's the most friendly and social of her team and strikes up the closest connection with Hera. Also, as soon as she's gone, the rest of her team implodes, much as in "Pan Pan" the remaining crew is at each other's throats.

Finally, Kepler's alignment with Hilbert is obvious to me at least - they both are people with theoretically noble goals who are willing to do terrible things to achieve them, and Goddard takes advantage of that to get them to do terrible things full stop. Hilbert is just further along on the Goddard employee lifecycle of getting chewed up and discarded (he's had more of his legs eaten, to use the pig story's metaphor). They hate each other so much because they recognize each other.

... I am only thinking this now as I type it out, but I always wondered why Eiffel disliked Maxwell after only knowing her for a couple days, most of which he'd spent convalescing. I figured she was probably asking invasive questions about Hera, but if I'm suggesting Hilbert and Kepler hate each other because they recognize each other as card carrying members of the face-eating leopards party.... maybe Eiffel dislikes Maxwell because he sees something of himself in her.

[commsroom]

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

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

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

[box953]

your tags on your last ask have intrigued me, what are some Heiffel/Loveberg parallels??? I'd love to hear them

I've been a Heiffel truther since I first listened to w359 (the stripping scene really sold me on it too) but I've only started to get into Loveberg in the last couple days, so I haven't had the time to consider parallels between them yet

the tldr is that i think the personality similarities between Lovelace and Eiffel make for an interesting experience for Hilbert. Lovelace dies on the old mission and oh sad but it had to happen but then he meets his next crew and Eiffel reminds him just enough about Lovelace to make him squirm.

HOWEVER. I never get prompted to talk about my loveberg agenda or my loveberg to heiffel pipeline so im going to use this as an opportunity to go insane for a few paragraphs. Ok? Ok.

so maybe parallels isnt the best wording for it bc like . It is definitely kind of about the dynamic parallels i think they base-level play out very similarly due to Lovelace and Eiffel being similar in the ways they are. But also i think it’s just about. The coexistence of both relationships in the same timeline. The way they could bleed into each other.

so like. The personality parallels between Lovelace and Eiffel are pretty obvious in the beginning, right? When Eiffel and Minkowski first find her voice recordings and she sounds exactly like someone Eiffel would get along with and exactly like someone Minkowski would despise working with. You see that when Lovelace shows up, too, but she’s also an authority figure and also at the moment going through sooo much fucking trauma right now that it kind of puts a damper on that part of her personality, i feel. She’s a little busy surviving rn.

that is to say, i feel like a pre-canon Captain Lovelace would have been the most like Eiffel, personality wise. Which i think is important.

I enjoy Hilbert’s relationships with characters without any romance behind them. I think they stand really well as their own strange, convoluted narratives. However, when I am applying a lense of potential romance, a lot of the appeal to me comes from Hilbert fighting a losing battle against himself and the decades he’s spent devaluing human life. The way he talks about his relationship with the things he’s done and the people he hurts fascinates me. How conscious he is that he’s hurt people. Something something ‘Do not think this was easy for me. None of it was easy. None of it was nice.’ Some sort of implication that he still feels, he just doesn’t acknowledge it. There’s no space for that. Log it, move on, don’t dwell on it.

With Lovelace, I think it was just accidental. I think he doesn’t realize that he cares about her, values her, until it’s too late and he’s tripped and fell and gotten himself into a weird situationship with his commanding officer. The difference in their first meeting as shown in the final episode vs their relationship shown in Change of Mind is just so… ugh. He’s a part of her routine. He meets her at her room when she wakes up to update her when he was actively avoiding interacting with her during their first meetings. Something happened there. They fall into a routine, a dynamic, he respects her, she goes to him for advice, or to rant about her idiot subordinates. I’m just ranting about why i like them in this era atp ANYWAYS.

The point is. He stumbles into accidentally giving a fuck but then, obviously, everything that happens, happens. He respects her but only enough to think she’d be smart enough to see his perspective, never enough to change his mind on his life’s work.

and then the Alexander Hilbert grieving processes (and lack thereof) commences. He acknowledges that the loss of Isabel Lovelace is objectively unfortunate but that’s as far as it goes, as far as it’s ever gone for anyone since he was a child.

and then he meets his next crew, on the same ship he had just been on for years, and there’s Eiffel. And he’s… not Lovelace, obviously. He’s not even got a modicum of the competence she did, even if they’re both equally as obnoxious. But I still think there’s a level of that parallel between the two of them that kind of haunts him.

And it’s like, whatever, it doesn’t matter, he’s a better man than this. He’s killed before, experimented before, and he’s going to do it again. But what are the consequences of never grieving? What happens when you accidentally have some semblance of feelings for your old captain and then she dies and you just kind of go okay. And then try your best to move onto the next task.

i think it leaves him vulnerable to just having it happen all over again is what I’m saying. I think he has to monitor Eiffel and constantly keep an eye on him to observe the decima project in action and despite everything he’s doing to distance himself from this team (everything about his whole act in season 1. You know. The playing the mad scientist bit up to eleven.) he develops some kind of infatuation for Eiffel. Study your lab rat for too long you accidentally become bisexual. Whatever.

I just. Grips the sides of my chair. I just think it’s neat. I just find them interesting. I dont. Care. (I’m lying.)

[scooterscoob]

if you're still taking w359 requests!! maybe a minkowski and lovelace interaction? they're so funny sometimes i just cant

does this count?

[specialagentartemis]

Some more thoughts I've had about Wolf 359 Severance AU:

Renee Minkowski got the job at Goddard Futuristics after her beloved husband died in a car crash two and a half years ago. She was pretty wrecked by it, and first tried to keep pursuing her dream of being an astronaut, partially because she'd always wanted to but hadn't had the courage to pursue it and now she's like fuck it and partially to try and get away from everything for a while. But when she applied with Goddard's deep-space program, she was rejected. Again. It was crushing. But Mr. Cutter, who did the job interview, was so friendly, and made her feel so bad even though he of course didn't mean to, and he said a position was open on the Severed floor of the main Goddard headquarters, and the work is important, and if she's in-house then when there are more astronaut jobs then maybe she'll look better to the hiring committee, and she was feeling like such a mess that she agreed. And she thinks it's helped, sort of. She tries not to stress about what she's doing down there. She still feels like she's failed at the American Dream.

(She still isn't wholly convinced that Dominik's death was an accident. He was an investigative reporter. She wants to believe in Goddard but she also keeps having these doubts creep in that she is trying so so so hard to ignore. Severance was supposed to help, not introduce new doubts.)

innie!Renee is industrious and likes being a leader, feeling like she's leading a team and doing something Important. What is the job? She doesn't know. But it has to be important, and that's why it's so mysterious. Right?

Doug E. thinks they're parsing through SETI signals looking for aliens. Renee keeps saying they're not looking for aliens. Doug says how do you know. She doesn't, but that would be stupid, and the work is important, so it can't be that. Right?

outie!Doug Eiffel is still a felon whose prison sentence was bought by Goddard for labor and experimentation. innie!Eiffel does not know this.

Alex H. is quiet and studious. outie!Hilbert was a scientist working for Goddard until he Fucked Up and was reassigned to the Severed floor in order to keep his job. Hilbert goes along with this because he thinks that if he gets back in Goddard's good graces they'll let him keep doing his research. (They are totally using and abusing his research and his innie doesn't know this.)

Hera...

Hera P. wakes up on a table.

A voice comes through the intercom.

This feels wrong.

This is backwards.

She's clumsy. Her body doesn't feel right.

She meets the Hephaestus team. She does not want to be here. She tries to escape. It does Not work. She has a bad attitude about it. She wants to not do any work - "ohhhh what are they gonna do, fire me?" - but parsing data feels... good, actually. She doesn't know how to interpret the pain in her abdomen (sometimes it's hunger. sometimes it's needing to pee. She isn't actually positive how to, like... deal with either of those things? Renee and Doug are kind of worried about her and develop a protective attitude towards her - clearly something went wrong during severance, they fucked something up in her brain somehow.) But refining data is something she's good at.

Mysteries and tensions rise until 1) Doug finds something in the data he was not supposed to know and Alex H. freaks out and they learn that Alex has never actually been severed (they all end up lying about this to Administration), 2) they encounter Lovelace who has been living in the walls and talking about how Administration killed her previous team, and 3) they climactically discover that Hera P. is a clone of Dr. Miranda Pryce, the scientist who invented the severance procedure. She's an experiment. She was always an experiment. Hera was an AI that Pryce developed, and Hera P. is a clone of Pryce that she wanted to test not only severance but personality implantation in. Personality uploads haven't been perfected yet, but purely original digital AIs are something that Goddard does have now, and Hera was a particularly unruly one. Miranda's clone, probably just Miranda Jr., is obedient and probably traumatized, so testing the post-severance implantation of a known personality into a body whose biology, neurology, and genetics Pryce knows intimately is something Cutter and Pryce are both very interested in. Sever a person, then instead of allowing an innie personality to develop naturally, implant a new consciousness and see if it takes.

Hera is not, natively, human. She was not born in a human body and doesn't have human instincts. This body is not hers, she was just put in it. She is NOT happy about this.

(Though... my first idea was "clone," but Miranda Pryce just straight up experimenting on herself this way is ALSO a very compelling idea and more thematically resonant here. I'm just not sure if she would subject herself to it.)

[mykelneedssleep]

I will stand by the belief that the best and funniest thing Jacobi could have done in ep 52 when Minkowski, Lovelace, and Eiffel were asking him about Goddard out of curiosity and in an attempt to get Kepler to lose his Questions Only game with Hera would've been to say they hooked up once because even if it was a complete lie it because Kepler's options for response would have been:

Continue the game without acknowledging it and let the crew believe it's true even if it isn't simply because he didn't comment in the moment even if he tries to later

Admit that it happened and potentially lose if he can't spin it into a question

Lose the game by outright denying

Deny with a cleverly worded question and maybe not outright lose but still sound like a liar even if he's telling the truth and Jacobi was the one to lie about it in the first place because he's a known liar so why wouldn't he lie right now?

Ask a very targeted question to Jacobi about employee fraternization rules such as "do you think I would violate [insert hyper specific rule in the SI-5 handbook about getting with your superior officer that's probably in there because I'm convinced everything is]?" thus keeping himself in the game but still sounding like a liar because why would he know the exact rule to bring up if he hadn't at least thought about it?

Ask a different but still very targeted question to Jacobi such as a "why would you lie about that?" type question and still sound like a liar because you don't tend to ask people directly why they're lying with no proof to back you up and this is now a hearsay argument where the people can choose to believe whoever they want (likely Jacobi because again, Kepler is a known liar and Jacobi's being so honest about everything else right now so why would this be different)

Mentally bluescreen (and lose) because he doesn't know why Jacobi would so openly say that (true or otherwise) and now cannot think of another question to keep the game going

Any of the other options but continue to be psychologically tortured in the future because while the crew may not have ever had the thought before Jacobi put it in their heads so even if they know it's not true and even if Jacobi later says he lied about it in an attempt to make Kepler lose that thought will still be floating around somewhere in the back of everyone's minds kind of all the time

It simply would have created the perfect scenario in which any action Kepler took he would still lose somehow and at this point annoying him was really all Jacobi wanted to do so I just think it would have been a real checkmate move for him

[hephaestuscrew]

I have such emotional thoughts about Ep40 Limbo and Minkowski telling Eiffel "I'm sorry, okay? I didn't want it to matter. I was trying to make it not matter." It's such an insane thing to say about learning without any context or detail that your friend and crew member was convicted of kidnapping and child endangerment.

It's one thing to learn that someone did something awful and not to care because you don't care about them or their morals (the SI-5 approach). It's another thing to learn that someone did something awful and not to care because you can empathise with them and it's who they are now that matters (the Hera and Lovelace approach). And it's an entirely different thing to learn that someone did something awful and to want desperately not to care but to be unable to stop yourself from caring.

When there was no specificity to Eiffel's tragic backstory, Minkowski successfully made it not matter. Back in Ep15 What's Up Doc?, when Hilbert was hinting at Eiffel's secret that he wouldn't want Minkowski to know about, she trusted him with no "hesitance or doubt". In principle, on an abstract intellectual level, his past doesn't matter to her. But as soon as she has some of the specifics, her ability to trust him without question is shaken, because that trust isn't just about the abstract intellectual level. It's emotional too.

Eiffel really matters to Minkowski, so of course she doesn't want what she learned about his past to change that. But part of what matters to Minkowski about Eiffel is that she trusts him, that she believes that he does the morally right thing when it counts, and that he's the kind of person she thinks he is. The particular way in which he matters to her, when combined with her personality and her values, means that the bad things he's done in the past have to matter to her too. Because the way in which he matters to her is tied up in her sense of him as an ultimately moral person, the spokesperson of Team What's Wrong With Handcuffs.

In typical Minkowski fashion, she wants to make herself not care about it through sheer stubborn power of will. Maybe if she doesn't speak to him, she can pretend she doesn't know. Maybe if she pretends she doesn't know, she won't think about it. Maybe if she doesn't think about it, it won't matter to her. Maybe if it doesn't matter to her, then she can rebuild her idea of him as a good person on her own and she won't ever have to talk to him about it. But three months roll by, and it still matters to her. It still matters to her, and she still wants it not to.

[harpoonsandmusicals]

…a wolf 359 Good Place au would go SO HARD guys.

Rambles with major spoilers for the Good Place below the cut

Minkowski has to be Chidi (hurts people with her rigidity, arc about trusting her own choices), Hera as Janet (obviously) and Eiffel as Eleanor/Jason. He’s got big Jason energy (seems like an idiot on the surface but much smarter than he seems) but I also really want him to be fake-soulmates with Minkowski.

Cutter as Shaun, with Kepler as much less likely and probably non-redeemable Micheal. Maybe Maxwell and Jacobi are demons who (at least in Jacobi’s case) defect to Team Cockroach instead of our Micheal? Pryce could do an omniscient impartial Judge—no wait, Pryce as Shaun and Cutter as the Judge works much better personality-wise.

Actually, maybe we could pull off Maxwell as Tahani? We don’t know much about the inside of her head but she seems the most likely of the SI5 to be convinced that she’s a good person. And she’s got the family issues for it. Maybe that’s why demon!Jacobi defects? Because he finds himself liking this human?

Hilbert is a tricky one because he definitely wouldn’t believe he got into heaven and I doubt he believes in an afterlife at all. Hmm, he might pull a Simone and tell himself that it’s all a hallucination made by his brain shutting down. I feel like making him a demon would be a discredit to the more sympathetic parts of his motivation.

Lovelace is also hard. Maybe this isn’t the first iteration of the experiment like in canon Good Place, and she figured it out the first time. Then all her crew mates went to the real Bad Place, but she escaped to something like the Medium Place??? But Hilberts role in that is again unclear…

[annabelle--cane]

I think lovelace WOULD have got bisexual in the time loop were it not for the fact that minkowski's sexuality is "contact me on earth after the mission's over and maybe I'll tell you" and hera is categorically not a one-day casual fling kind of woman. I truly believe these are the only facts standing between isabel lovelace and bisexuality.