#and who was written to orbit around a male character

[boy-above]

bruh why the heck my for you tab just covered in posts where ppl are taking fandom way too seriously today

[miraluking-respectfully]

How Tall are the SWTOR Boyfriends?

This was written some months ago, but the Theron Height Poll has inspired me to actually post it.

Basing my metrics around 1) the average male height in the USA where I live (5'9" or 1.75m, according to google) 2) what would be funniest or cutest when matched to their personalities and dynamics with the player character. Bear in mind: I am not operating under the assumption that being a short man is something to be ashamed of (it isn't in the real world and it isn't in Star Wars), but some of the husbands in this video game have personalities that are...enhanced by engaging in a little playful stereotyping. You'll see what I mean.

Jorgan: 5'11-6'/~1.8m, hovering somewhere in the above average range. It makes him more intimidating to the average private who makes the mistake of getting his attention, but by the same token, more charming when he warms up to the Trooper and proves himself just a big fuzzy kitty. With a big fuzzy sniper rifle

Andronikos: 5'6ish, 5'7ish (~1.7m), hard to tell because he slouches. He only really stands up straight when he's trying to be a big tough guy

Quinn: 5'7"/1.7018m. No ambiguity because his posture is perfect. Alternate Interpretation: However tall your SW is, he is exactly 6 centimeters shorter. Come Here Elbow Rest

Doc: 5'4"/1.6m. No, not because I think his womanizing personality is him "overcompensating"; in fact Doc's height is only ever an advantage in his romantic conquests. He comes on so strong that him being particularly tall might be intimidating. But nah, he's just a little birthday boy, so the hot people in his orbit let their guard down, allowing him to get in close and hit 'em with a pickup line related to his medical expertise. Being small also means he's harder to hit when helping retrieve wounded resistance fighters from the battlefield #BalmorraForever

Felix: 5'11"/~1.8m, he gets an ABOVE AVERAGE height bc he is an ABOVE AVERAGE husband can I get an AMEN

Torian: You ever met a high school freshman and been fucking shocked that children are allowed to be so enormous? The kid's like, 14 years old and shot up like two feet over the summer, and it feels illegal? That's Torian. He's 19 and he's been 6'2"/~1.87m for the past five and a half years, but he's still a little gangly and the only reason he knows how to control his extremely long limbs is he's literally a trained fighter. Alternate Interpretation: If your BH is taller than 5'10, he's 5'10 exactly

Corso: 6'/1.82m. I know I just said negative associations around short men don't exist in The Galaxy Far Far Away, but Corso seems like the kind of guy who would somehow independently develop a complex about his height, if he was short. The fact he doesn't means he must be tall

Vector: God, I really wanted to make him on the shorter side of average to pair with his mild-mannered personality and contrast the more unusual elements of his speech and his eyes, but his sleek character design makes him feel tall when I'm looking at him. He's also the only LI I've drawn beside one of my characters, and I just sort of unconsciously made him tall because my agent is kind of short, and it looked appealing. Results inconclusive; some boyfriends can grow as tall as starships while others can be as small as mites

Arcann: 5'8"/1.72m. (Thexan was 5'9")

Theron: No taller than 5'9"/1.75m. Theron seems like a pretty normal guy when you meet him, until he reveals himself to be an insane little freak (affectionate), so giving him the most Average Height Possible feels correct.

Koth: However tall Lana is, Koth is exactly 2 cm shorter.

Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk. I encourage spirited debate in the replies. Girl LI Height Opinions still percolating

[jules-ln]

Sorry Anon, the post was too long so I decided to make it its own post instead of an answer

Let me write my Bible because I have thought about this more than I should and I'm mentally ill

First the silence of the girls

I'm going be honest and say that while I don't like this book, I can recognize that is very well written and author makes it very interesting

But!

The girls were silenced indeed 😅

Like, if you're going to market your book as a "feminist" retelling of the Iliad I'll expect your level of feminism to be more advanced than what Homer was writing

Don't get me wrong, I know that women and children are often overlooked at wars specially in a historical context, but what Pat Barker was presenting as feminism was simply "Women suffer more than men in wars 😥" and that is the same thing that Homer was saying hundreds of years ago, more than that, I'd say that Homer did it better

And you know, it's supposed to be a feminist retelling, so I was expecting sorority to be a thing, specially because the only other source of comfort, respect and friendship a woman like Briseis could have had then would've been other enslaved women

But no, we don't really see sorority in the greek camps for more than a couple of paragraphs at best, and I got the feeling that some women characters were just genderbents of the male heroes, like Odysseus's enslaved woman is clever, Nestor's enslaved woman is maternal, florals for spring? groundbreaking

More than that, in the Iliad there is a character named Iphis that is Patroclus's enslaved woman and Briseis mentioned being close friends with her. So you expect that being a close friend of the protagonist she should have a lot of dialogue, specially in conversations with Briseis, don't you think?

Bish, I don't even remember her talking at all to begin with, much less to Briseis! 🤣

The only meaningful relationship Briseis has in the book are Achilles and Patroclus, her life orbits around these men and the other women don't matter

And that leads me to my other point

Briseis doesn't do ANYTHING.

Now, I know, I know, I know. Briseis doesn't do anything in the Iliad either, but that's some of the problems I have with Iliad adaptations.

Like, none of them will EVER be as good as the Iliad, to any writer that think that they can make an adaptation of the Iliad be as good as the Iliad. Sit down, you aren't that guy

So really, they should just do what MM did. Do your own thing that can stand on its own without hanging on the Iliad. Even if it's different, that's a good thing

Now, I say all of that because, it would've been Good if Briseis did something, ANYTHING at all other than stand there and look pretty

You might say "it's accurate to the Iliad" I say "A protagonist that doesn't do anything at all and doesn't influence the world around them in any way is boring"

There was even this part where Briseis wonders about how much control Patroclus has over Achilles, And I was here like "Yesssss, Briseis is going to emotionally manipulate Patroclus to control Achilles so she can be the one who is actually in control of both"

Nope, that, didn't happen, like, at all

Even at some point the narrative kicks Briseis out of the story to focus on Achilles and Patroclus, and like, feminism where? 😅

Once again that leads to my next point. Patroclus and Achilles part was more interesting.

Unironically, the best part of the book was the relationship that both had, it was the type of relationship that was like "I love you, but ngl I kinda hate you and want to kill you too unironically" And I think that's interesting! That's new, I've never read anything like that regarding those two before!

But that's a problem, because when I bought the book I wanted to read about women, I wanted to read about Briseis, not about Achilles and Patroclus, and that the author made them SOOOO much more interesting than Briseis, is just sad

Then there's the problem of the rapes scene, which, in this day and age if you're going to add a rape scene in anything, you better have some freaking good reason. And in this book, they're there for mere shock value, it doesn't give anything to the story, it doesn't change the tone of the book, a good editor would've take them out, but I guess it was part of the "feminist" message 🙄

But really, I don't hate the book, like I said, it's well written in my opinion, but it is a disappointing book because it could've been a great book with some tweaks here and there

Now about The song of Troy

ACHILLES YOU SON OF A BITCH FUCKING LIPLESS MUPPET I HATE YOU Y SI CIEN AÑOS VIVO CIEN AÑOS CHINGAS A TU MADREEEEE

Now that we got that out of the way

See, the thing is that I've read the song of Troy some time ago, and I mostly rage read it so I don't remember it very well

Like I hated it SO MUCH it it it Flames flames FLAMES on the side of my head (yes, it's a reference) so I'm just going to say the things I remember that made me mad

🔸️Helen is the prime example that writing women that don't suck ass ISN'T an innate skill in women, like she was one of the most misogynistic characters that I've ever read and if I was Menelaus in this book, I would be happy that she was gone, bon voyage biatch!

🔸️Both the book and Achilles treat Patroclus like Trash

🔸️The story treats Achilles like an uwu boy that can do no wrong when in reality in the book he's an idiotic asshole estúpido kbron hijo de la chingada pinche mamon bastardo agarras tu espadita la haces rollito y te la metes por el culo pendejo de mierda. Yeah, I don't like Achilles in this book

🔸️Odysseus is written to allegedly be very smart, sadly in actuality he's very dumb, because you see, the whole thing about the fight between Agamemnon and Achilles was an elaborate plot by him to get the Trojans to come out if I remember correctly, now, I think any good good tactician will tell you that an overly elaborate plan that will result in like half of your men dying with no guarantee of it being successful anyway, isn't so smart

🔸️Briseis was written so badly... I'm just going to put it this way, at some point in the book Achilles hits her, and that was the best fucking thing Achilles did in that book, like yess fucking muppet slap that bitch again. Oh but don't worry, Briseis in the book was ok with being slapped and not in a kinky way

🔸️Helen hits Andromache, and so did Hector. I'm going to leave it at that

🔸️I don't remember too well because at this point the fog of rage was too thick, but I think Achilles and Hector kinda fell in love when they were fighting? Which was very weird

So make yourself a favor and don't read it

If you want a good adaptation read these

🔹️War music by christopher logue, it isn't finished because sadly the author died, but best adaptation I've read so far

Here's a quote I like:

"When Nyro’s mother heard of this

She shaved her head; she tore her frock; she went outside

Ripping her fingernails through her cheeks:

Then down her neck; her chest; her breasts;

And bleeding to her waist ran round the shops,

Sobbing:

‘God, kill Troy.

Console me with its death.

Revenge is all I have.

My boy was kind. He had his life to live.

I will not have the chance to dance in Hector’s blood,

But let me hear some have before I die.’

‘I saw her running round.

I took the photograph.

It summed the situation up.

He was her son.

They put it out in colour. Right?

My picture went around the world.’"

🔹️La cólera by Javier Olivares and Santiago García, is a comic in Spanish, but if you can get your hands on one copy, do it, it's so good and the art is beautiful, one of the best portrayals of Achilles I've seen, Pyrrha also appears

🔹️An Iliad, by Denis O'Hare and Lisa Peterson, is a play, and tbh I don't like this one as much as I do the other two, but it is SOOO GOOD too.

🔹️En mitad de tanto fuego by Alberto Conejero, this one is a play; short and sweet and the narrator is Patroclus, very new too, and as far as I know it's only in Spanish, but if you can get it, do so, because it's very good.

Let me translate a part of it to the best of my abilities to tempt you a bit

"How short was life, how short... Now bury me as soon as possible so I can cross the gate of Hades. Bury me, Achilles. And if someone in the future finds my tomb and opens it, let them see how smoke comes out of my shroud still. Because of the desire, Achilles, because of the desire"

[fandomfluffandfuck]

Are you being completely truthful with your bio? You have a somewhat juvenile writing style even down to the ✨word✨ and your writing reference for male arousal is strangely written and a little inaccurate. Your obsession with objectifying and writing porn of real life men with wives and families makes you look like either a really creepy adult, or a kid that doesn’t know any better. Do you think it’s ok for a straight man your age to objectify a female actress in this same way?

Not to mention your pinned is from 2020 so you would have been 16 when you made the account that says “minors do not interact” in all caps

The mentions of collage are interesting as well, what the hell are you majoring in anyway? Did you forget to update your age and this is your last year? Or were you actually running an 18+ account while 16? And honestly I’m assuming you were probably younger.

Your alias is S.

You go by sir and but you use very cliché and juvenile language, “I’m more friendly than I look, I promise 😅” “I’m a dyslexic fanfic writer *existencial sigh*”

it’s got the same vibe as, “he’s standing right behind me isn’t he 😬”

Just don’t lie about this shit when you’re writing porn. You’re going to be prayed on. Just be safe with it and keep it on a private account.

I believe this ask and these following asks come from the same person or from affiliated people because they all were sent in around the same time and are all orbiting the same topics, so I'm looping them together:

"Hey man, how old are you exactly?"

"What r u studying? Writing I assume? But I feel like you’d be qualified to teach the class 😏"

"Are you planning on making an account solely for your art? You’re incredibly skilled"

"Do the names cate and Lillian mean anything to you?"

"Cate?"

If they're not all the same person or a purposeful group of people talking about the same things, then I apologize to the people I've tacked on to discourse, lol.

Shorter asks first:

I'm in my twenties, and I'll explain the vagueness there in a hot second when I get to the longer, opening ask.

I'm actually studying art, not writing, lol. Writing is just a hobby for me. Thanks, regardless! I don't think I'd be very good at teaching, though 😅 My writing process is a mess, and I'm constantly breaking so, so many writing rules, lmao.

Thank you! No, I don't plan on making a separate art account for fandom or for my actual, non-sketch, finished-piece artwork. I mean, I have art accounts, but they're purposefully not attached to my Tumblr because art is a hobby right now, but I'm planning on making it into my profession.

No? Should they?

No? I'm so confused, lmao. Are you assuming you know who I am, and that's the motivation of the pointed questions? Assuming I'm Cate or Lillian? 'Cause I'm not. If they're people/characters related to the Marvel/Seb Stan/Chris Evans, then I feel like I need to warn you that I'm often fandom illiterate, lol. I don't actually watch TV/series/movies regularly, so... I'm oblivious to a lot.

Okay, on to the longer, opening ask that started this saga of asks.

First, I appreciate that you are trying to keep people out of harms way. I do. Yet, aren't there less accusatory ways to go about it? Absolutely, full stop, I do not want minors--no matter if they're 17, so close to 18 or whatever excuse they may make--in the parts of fandom that are not appropriate for them. No.

However, I, personally, don't think accusing someone of being something and talking down to them, picking apart each little thing about their online presence will do anything to anyone who is already engaging in shit that they should not be. Maybe that's just my hot take, though. I can't say I have the answer about how to eliminate minors who shouldn't be around these places on the internet, though. Unfortunately.

'Cause, yup! I'm being truthful.

Often, I am vague on purpose. I do that because, by the nature of what I get up to on the internet living in a society based so deeply in puritanical views, it's easy to have shit used against you in the professional world. But, whether I'm being vague with personal information like my age, name, location, etc. while getting hyperspecific with sexual shit, I'm still honest.

And I don't know if I need to specify this or not, but just in case I do, it says 20s with an s in my pinned post. Plural. As in 20-29, the range of being in my 20s. I'm in my 20s.

Yes, my pinned post is 4 years old at this point, so maybe I sound more juvenile in it because it's been four years since I wrote that. I have edited parts of it, but not everything. Also, yes, I was 18--closer to 19, but still 18, nevertheless--when I started my blog. So. More juvenile then, definitely. Hell, you're allowed to think I still sound juvenile, too. If you want. You're entitled to your own opinion. If you don't like the way I sound, though, just don't read my stuff. That's simple.

And it bleeds into the idea that I sound inaccurate. I am inaccurate sometimes. Definitely. Not everything I write could I replace myself with whatever character or person I'm writing about and feel like it is accurate to how I would feel or respond in that situation. But, the thing is, for me, that's the allure to porn. That's the whole thing. Porn is fantasy. The way I describe shit isn't literal all the time. It's about conveying feelings. It might not be your experience with feelings of arousal. Cool. Great! Differences are good. Feelings aren't objective. Again, if something about my writing makes you feel weird or feels too unrealistic to your experience, you don't have to read it.

As far as the ethics and nonethics of writing about real people, I've discussed that before (one, two, three), so I won't go into that now, but I would be interested to dig into your notion of how my actions may stack up comparatively to a straight man objectifying women.

I would call myself a feminist. I am always trying to learn more about how to be a better, more intersectional feminist. The swapping of me, a cis queer guy, sexualizing/objectifying other men with a cis straight man sexualizing/objectifying women does bring up very strong feelings in me. It does feel distinctly creepy to me. However, I can point directly to the reason why: it feels much more threatening for a man to talk about women like that. Obviously, not every man is terrible and means to threaten sexual violence to women, and women aren't delicate, helpless little things that must be protected at all costs. However, yeah, like you're getting at, it does feel different, and I have to sit with that to parse out why and what I want to do about it.

Interestingly, though, because of my experiences in the parts of the queer community I frequent, I feel relatively desensitized to mlm sexualization. Like, it's just part of it often, so much so that it goes unnoticed to me. Which, I can understand how people then pick up pitchforks and say no!! You can't do that! That's part of the problem! Or, why does everything have to be sexual with you!! But... that, to me, slides into the censoring, no-kink-at-pride type of discussion that I am not so interested in having at this juncture. There need to be spaces where children are welcome. Yes. There also need to be separate spaces where adults are allowed to be open and honest with all sorts of emotions, including the emotion of horny in a way that's safe and sane and consensual.

I will also note, because it feels worthy of mentioning here, that I have boundaries with sexualization. Real life and online life are different. I'm honest in both, but the rules and behavior are different, y'know? There's nuance to be had.

I don't talk outside of Tumblr the same way I do on Tumblr. Real life is very different to fandom etiquette. Which, I acknowledge that a lot of fandom--historically and presently--is women. Not totally, of course, but a good chunk. Women are objectified exhaustively in our society. So, personally, I feel that it is more than fair for them to then turn around and objective men some. Ever since getting into fandom, I've emulated that because it's the culture here. I've picked it up without really realizing it. Does that mean I feel like it's as fair for me, a man, to take up space in a traditionally women-populated area that's often described as a safe space and co-opt the slang? No. It's not really mine to adapt. Perhaps I should look into that deeper or acknowledge more than I do that I stand on borrowed ground.

Amongst that thought, though, is the realization that I don't talk the same offline because when I'm in the fandom space, I feel a little bit of my traditional socialization come undone. I'm a man. I was raised to crush down emotions and be strong and steady. Sure, I'm a 5'6" twink looking motherfucker, but I'm still a man, and still, strong emotions I might show in real life are met with confusion at best.

Strong emotions like anger or even noticeable, perky excitement when in public do not get a great response. Anger, understandably. I'm very aware of that. I'm not an angry guy, I grew up around a lot of angry people, I know it's frightening--especially when men get angry. I don't think I'm particularly threatening when I do get frustrated, but still, the few times I've been visibly upset like that around people in public, I can always feel women particularly shrinking away from me. It's just not acceptable. But, excitement. Even excitement or other positive emotions rouses discomfort from others in public.

If I express strong excitement or happiness to people who aren't my friends, people in public, I get reactions, too. Women tend to look at me strangely, as if there's something weird about me. That changes if I out myself to said women because it's more socially acceptable to be exciteable or positive if you're queer. Now, men brush me off in that situation. As a kid, that was not allowed because, what are you gay? Why? Why are you excited about anything? Pfft. That's for girls.

So, all is all to say, I don't talk the way I do on Tumblr. And perhaps that excitement/obvious horniness/whatever strong emotion that I do express on Tumblr comes across as juvenile or unmasculine to you. Maybe that's what you're picking up on with my apparently juvenile tone? I don't know.

That all sounds like I'm saying, poor me, it's so hard to be a man, feel bad for me, but what I'm doing is trying to explain where I'm coming from, why I express that way, and how it's different from my behavior in real life. You're still allowed to think I'm hypocritical and creepy, like I'm allowed to explain myself and do my own thing.

Again, I was 18 when I made my blog.

As for what I'm studying, I'm working toward an MFA right now. As it states in my pinned post, I'm dyslexic. Part of my journey in higher ed has been learning--trying to learn, at least, oof, it's not always going well--how to go easier on myself and not stress out over not being able to keep up all the time with my peers who aren't dyslexic. I'm trying not to feel dumber and feel like that's a terrible thing. So, I took a lighter class load when I got to college to go my own speed, I don't take summer classes, and then I fucked up shit with my transfer degree. Meaning, I'm a whole year, almost two, behind with the "average" track. That's why it feels like I'm stuck in college purgatory, lmao.

I use S because it relates vaguely to my real name, that's all.

I offer that people can use "sir" to refer to me because I, personally, like power dynamics in sex and my blog is about sex a lot. I don't feel like "daddy" fits me, sure, partly to do with my age, but really, daddy is a mindset, lol, and it strikes me as much more nurturing and romantic mindset/dynamic. I don't feel like that fits me. I like something stricter. I used to think I was a stone top, lol, and while I don't feel exactly like that anymore, I certainly don't feel as kinky-soft as "daddy".

Sure, that's maybe cliche to say. Cool. Personally, it doesn't strike me as juvenile, but clearly, it does to you, so... okay? I don't know what to do about that? It's just how I write.

Also, it's very amusing to me to accuse someone of lying while choosing to remain anonymous and disconnected from your own blog that, hopefully, contains your age/age range within it.

Reiterating: I think it's good that you want to keep minors out of the places they shouldn't be, I do. That's admirable. It's dangerous for the minors that do step foot in 18+ spaces as well as dangerous for well-meaning adults who unknowingly interact with minors masquerading as adults. But you're barking up the wrong tree.

You're welcome to say that writing this whole thing is defensive, clearly juvenile, and proves your point if you like. (Maybe, fine, I am a little offended to be told my smut sounds like a child wrote it because... yikes. So, I'm defending something there.) Still, I was interested in diving into some of the things you brought up 'cause I think about some of that a lot. Especially about my place in fandom as a guy. I try very hard not to be the creepy guy in the corner 😬

[jinkieswouldyoulookatthis]

regarding what people think inside their heads i totally agree with you, whatever floats your boat! but when it comes to fandom content, i don't know if other people feel this way, but the extreme majority of the top!dean fics in existence mischaracterize both brothers to force the dynamic, with dean becoming this overdone butch caricature and sam whining like a hit deer. and this is done in all scenes outside of the bedroom, with a very clearly intentional power imbalance. both of them tend to be written much more true to canon when they're in a top!sam universe (for reasons including, i believe, the fact that top!sam by nature displays autonomy and his own will as well as dean's butchness is too inherent to be able to remove entirely) and they usually end up actually resembling themselves.

I don't disagree. A Sam that is too needy, too prone to emotional outbursts or crying, too eager to just roll over for Dean just doesn't ring true. Sam is stubborn and just as emotionally repressed as Dean. Sam is often snarky and condescending and, let's be honest, sometimes downright bitchy. He wants Dean to take him seriously as an equal, and as such, he has something to prove, to Dean and to himself. He wants Dean to trust him and respect him and rely on him and lean on him when needed. Also Sam FUCKS. Like, he's a pick you up and pound you into the wall kind of guy. A barely resisting devouring you kind of guy, with hands able to wrap around both wrists at the same time or wrap all the way around someone's neck or to palm your entire head like a basketball as he kisses the fucking daylights out of you kind of guy. He's a passionate fuck in your office, or kinky sex in the backseat of his brother's car, or fantasizing about fucking evil women kind of guy. I'm not saying that Sam can't bottom, he can, but exclusively bottoming feels disingenuous because it's usually coupled with a very subby attitude, and Sam has toppy energy. Also, Dean is not an uber macho alpha male type. He's a lover with a warm, soft, squishy heart who seems quite content being pushed around by his sexual partners. He fantasizes about moments of romantic domesticity. And while I am sure he'd be happy topping, I don't find it believable that he would solely insist on it. Dean has a much more easygoing sexual vibe, like he doesn't care what y'all do as long as everyone gets off and has a good time. I think them both being versatile and switching, particularly over time and with their various circumstances, makes the most sense because it allows for a better equilibrium to be achieved between them. They need that flux and flow, the push and pull against each other. Because they both can be bossy and they both can be simps for the other and that's exactly how it should be. They both would do anything for their brother, unless it's not really important and they're in a mood, or if it's funnier to be annoying or difficult, or it's their turn goddamn it. Because when it all comes down to it, they have a mostly equal power dynamic between them and if that doesn't come through, if one of them is made to feel ultimately, persistently dominant over the other that's just not in character. And yes, yes, I know that top/bottom and Dom/sub are two different spectrums, but folks conflate and mix them so much and too often the one topping is made out to be more dominant in their relationship. And maybe that is it after all, that I don't care as much which of them is where or doing what as long as they still feel like they're locked in their orbital dance around each other, both needing as much, and sacrificing and giving and hurting and loving and wanting and filling as much as they can.

[interact-if]

Day 2 of our Pride Month Event, with Brigid!

Brigid, Author of Event Horizon

[EVENT HORIZON] is a science-fiction-horror story, set far into a future in which humans are not alone in a hostile galaxy.

The Failsafe has been activated. War lingers on the horizon. Five years ago, you were one of the last people to be selected for the Failsafe and Final Stand Programs. You were frozen in time, placed into orbit at the edge of the solar system. And now, you’re hurtling through space towards a ship you’ve never seen before. The Nomad. A secret mission beyond the edge of the solar system, to stop the Enemy before they can begin their second invasion. A suicide mission. A point of no return.

Read more about Event Horizon here. Play the Demo here or here. Brigid is also the author of Lost Birds (link) and CLOSEDLOOP (link).

[INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT UNDER THE CUT!]

Q1 - Please, introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your project(s)!

Hi! I'm Brigid, and I'm a writer, artist, and overworked college student, dabbling in writing IF. I've got quite a few projects in the works- all science-fiction, all overly ambitious.

Event Horizon is my main project; the story of crew as mysterious as they are doomed, on a one-way mission to stop the second alien invasion before it can even happen. It's a work of cosmic horror, split off into three massive "timelines", each of which showcases a different aspect of humanity (or lack thereof)- to fight, to change, to remember.

lost birds is a side project; a story told in many voices, all revolving around the end of the world and what comes after. Set nine years after the apocalypse, in the American Southwest, it concerns itself with a dead Ranger's quest for revenge- or something you can convince yourself isn't revenge- across the strange new wasteland, a world as hostile as it is beautiful.

CLOSEDLOOP is another side project; a fast-paced, cyberpunk-inspired tear through a dystopic City. Trapped in a time loop by someone or something calling itself "Control", the MC- just an average Citizen- navigates a day that repeats forever- and the consequences thereof.

In the near-ish future, I intend to publish a VN centered around the concepts of ecological succession, loneliness, persistence, and growth- a culmination of interests, and a capstone project for my art program.

Q2 - What or who are some of your biggest inspirations?

I'm unsurprisingly a huge sci-fi nerd, and it shows. Things like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar, Annihilation, Mass Effect, and many, many of the pulp sci-fi novels I read as a teen and young adult inspire my love of science-fiction.

Furthermore, my area of study (other than art) is ecology, so nature and the "nature of things" take huge precedence in my works for better or worse. Honestly, anything that captures my attention and thoughts are grounds for inspiration, things like poetry, tarot, paintings, music, obscure scientific theory, philosophical concepts. Or plants. Like 80% of my Event Horizon "research" was a Wikipedia plant rabbit-hole.

Q3- What excites you most about IF? What drew you to the medium?

I ran into IF completely at random- some artists I follow and look up to had posted art of IF characters and settings. Previously, I'd written short stories and bad notes app poetry, but this was more of chance to expand my horizons (pardon the pun). IF excites me because I get to make things- plain and simple. There's a joy to creating these characters, worlds, and stories- and in interacting with them- I hadn't even known was possible until I found IF.

Q4 - Are your characters influenced by your identity? How?

Yes, absolutely. I write what I want to see, and to me, that's greater gender diversity and WLW/NBLW representation in the realm of science fiction.

Science-fiction is male dominated, with a majority of authors and characters being male. The female characters I grew up with were token "girl on the team" characters, and nonbinary characters were often just robots or aliens, or other non-human characters. I wanted to do better for people who were like me, women and other nonbinary people. I wanted to create competent and multidimensional characters who didn't have to identify or appear as men to be treated as such.

As a lesbian, I like writing WLW and NBLW characters. I didn't really grow up with that representation, and when it was present, it felt wrong, usually because it was written off as a joke, or for men by men. By no means are the relationships I write between women (or the women themselves) perfect- but they come from a place of genuine care and nuance, and I sincerely hope the care I put into my characters and their relationships shows throughout my work.

Q5 - What are you most excited about sharing related to your project?

The move to Twine as a medium has been, by far, the most exciting thing to happen to my projects. I've got a lot more fine-tuned control over the way I get to present my work- and I'm just starting out, there's a lot more I can learn.

As far as content goes- there are a few major updates to Event Horizon and CLOSEDLOOP coming this summer, which I'm trying so hard not to spoil just yet.

Q6 - What would you like to see more of in LGBT+ fiction/IF community?

Is it selfish to say more WLW/NBLW characters and relationships written by women and nonbinary people?

Just in general, diverse authors writing diverse stories in a number of genres, anything and everything from slice-of-life to science- fiction.

Q7- Lastly, what advice would you give to your creators and readers?

Be persistent.

First drafts are first drafts for a reason; there is always room for improvement, you just have to be persistent enough to see or seek improvement. Stay curious, enjoy your work, and let the world as a whole inspire you. Make what you'd like to see, most of all. You're the only one who can truly tell your story.

[bedcorpse]

“leia dying for her uwu sweet babie boy isn’t sexist it’s feminist because blaha blahabdha” shut the FUCK up it’s sexist because literally every female character’s story in tros revolves around kylo, who’s horribly written and does NOT deserve the “redemption arc” (read: heel-face turn brought on by badly written force-assisted brain tumor removal) that he’s handed in tros. kylo ren deserved to die as a bait-and-switch in tlj and let snoke become the big bad of the trilogy. 

kylo ren is the worst character in the sequel trilogy, because his writing was so bad, it actively made other characters worse just by being in his orbit. and all because y’all were so horny for a white male protagonist. thanks.

[wispforever]

if youre still doing the character thing, how about spirit or marie?

I sure am. How about Spirit And Marie? Both wonderful characters. I’ll do Marie first, then Spirit. Thanks for the excuse to infodump, really. You people are too kind.

Marie Mjolnir

My first impression of Marie was the same impression I get of most female characters in anime. It’s either “why do their clothes have to look like that” or “oh god here comes the obligatory sexist heteronormative romance”. For Marie, it was more of the second. They mention in the same episode she’s introduced that Stein is her “first love”, which told me that if she had a large place in the plot, her assigned male counterpart around which to orbit would be him. Though I’ve never read the Soul Eater manga, I believe they do end up getting together there (I could be wrong). Whatever the case, I was relieved that Marie’s and Stein’s relationship (though heavily implied to be romantic, at least on Marie’s side) was left open to interpretation in the anime. I’m just very sick of cool badass female characters like Marie being reduced to the man they pine after. So, I guess my first impression of Marie and my impression of her now are largely the same. While I appreciate the moments we get to see her strengths and ability to operate on her own, I do think that her character really suffers because of the whole sexist “oh gosh all I want is to find a husband and retire” “oh my I have to take care of Stein” like okay, I had enough at the cat girl smothering Soul with her humungo-tits. I had enough at sexualizing underage girls and women in general. I had enough at making sexual harassment a punchline. That being said, when we push all of the shitty writing to the side, I admire Marie for her strength and how she interacts with the children, Crona in particular. Which leads me to my favorite moment(s).

The relationship Crona and Marie have interests me the most, since I’m really drawn to the parallels between Marie and Medusa. As parental figures (and as characters), they’re about as different as you can get. As Crona’s mother, Medusa is obviously abusive. Along with being negligent, she abuses Crona mentally, emotionally, and physically. In general, Medusa is a person who doesn’t appear to value interpersonal relationships, putting it nicely. She instead is more focused on her own interests, often to the detriment of those around her. Crona is Medusa’s only immediate family (besides Arachne who she is estranged from), and so they suffer the most from her refusal to show even a shred of human decency or warmth. They suffer especially because they are her child, meaning they’re stuck with her essentially, and repetivie abuse between family members like a mother and child often becomes complex because of the necessity of having a parental figure in your life to support you as you grow up. Medusa teaches Crona that their boundaries don’t matter and that they are only good as long as they are useful and do as they’re told. This is what makes Marie’s influence on Crona so cool to watch. Marie is caring by nature, loving and nurturing by nature. Her very wavelegnth is healing. She is kind and does what’s right reflexively. Marie is the exact embodiment of what Crona always needed but what, even upon being rescued by the academy, still felt so foreign to them: unconditional love. Crona struggles to understand why the other kids helped them, why Maka felt the inclination to stop their battle and save Crona instead by trying to understand them, why the kids are still so kind to them even after everything. They do not understand that love is not a bargaining chip. It isn’t leverage in an argument. It’s not a tool for emotional manipulation. Love is caring for the people close to you, just because. Love for the sake of love. The other kids and teachers at the academy are the ones who are able to pull Crona out of all Medusa’s lies, and Marie is a Huge part of that. Even though I have greivances with this being the largest part of her character and what that implies for female characters in general, it doesn’t stop being so beautiful to me that she could help Crona heal in this way. Marie = best mom for the win

Most of the story ideas I have for Marie involve her relationship with Crona or Stein. Say, this covers my unpopular opinion too. I don’t like Stein and Marie as a couple, but I really enjoy writing them as friends, because even though I don’t really jive with them being together romantically, I think their dynamic is an interesting one to explore because they Are so different.

Getting into that a little bit more, I’d like to start by saying I don’t care if other people like Stein and Marie being a couple. That’s great doods, keep doing you. The fanart’s adorable, the meta’s fantastic. Whoever you are, SteinMarie shippers, ffs keep kicking ASS. This is just my preference and opinion. Zero shade in this house. That said, because of my frustrations about Marie’s character I discussed in the first paragraph, I don’t like the idea of her and Stein being together romantically. It’s really a classic sexist trope: the troubled man and his sweet nurse. I’m also just fed up in general with the hetero-nonsense, so there. However, they are both wonderful characters that I enjoy very much seperately. Also, I think it’s worth mentioning that I’ve only seen the anime, so I can’t speak for the manga as far as their relationship or Marie’s character in general.

Oh shit I accidentally already talked about this one lmao [see the second paragraph]

One headcanon I like to think about when I’m writing Marie is that she likes women (in addition to men or not) and she struggles with comphet. Just something interesting I like to think about. It’s really fun for me to take characters who have been written as pining or had 10 million failed relationships and be like “say what if they can’t find a husband cuz really what they really need is a wife”. I’ll talk about that more with Spirit inevitably.

Spirit Albarn

My first impression of Spirit, obviously him being a cheater, really came with a lot of distaste. I come from a family that was torn apart by infidelity, among other things, so it really rubs me the wrong way. However, his saving grace for me was that he genuinely loves his daughter. It appears that, whether it’s played for laughs or not, he just can’t find fulfillment in his romantic relationships. The reason is left up to the veiwers. Spirit, ultimately, is not just a shitty person, which is how most cheaters are protrayed in media. “Well, they cheated because they don’t care if they hurt people”, “they cheated because they are shit and that’s it”. That’s a fine explanation if you plan to do nothing with whatever character you’re describing, but Spirit is relatively recurring and is shown to be neither mean-spirited or emotionally unintelligent. It bothers me that his cheating and routine sexist behaviour isn’t taken seriously enough to be a subject that Soul Eater tackles and deals with. But that’s fine. I’ll just do it myself. At any rate, I still feel that same way about Spirit’s character, but I find it intriguing that he seems to genuinely want to become a better father and is actually a pretty good dad when it comes to his interactions with Maka. If Soul Eater had been brave enough to develop him more, maybe delve into the reasoning behind his impulsive romantic affairs, I think Spirit as a character could have been done more justice. It seems to me that he could be suffering from some of that wonderful compulsory heterosexuality that I mentioned before, then becoming confused when the woman he claims to love leaves him feeling empty. Rattling my gay little cage

When I think of my favorite moments with Spirit, I think of his moments with Maka, but I’m gonna hold off on that until I get to favorite relationship(s). In reference to what I talked about in the first paragraph, one moment I find really interesting when I’m thinking about my interpretation of Spirit’s character is the scene where he and Maka are on the roof talking. Maka asks Spirit why he cheated on her mother if he did, in fact, love her. He doesn’t appear to know the answer, and he doesn’t really understand how to effectively communicate that, though he was shitty husband, what he really wants now is to try and be a better dad. We hear his inner monologue, and he says something like “I love you [Maka] and your mama. That’s the truth. That’s the truth. That’s the truth.” Every time he says “its the truth” it sounds more like he’s forcing it. This is actually something that is SO strange to me. Even if I didn’t project a queer narrative on to the characters I love, I would look at this and be like “huh that is a Weird thing to say in that specific way”. Why does he say it like that? Why does he have to say it more than once? He’s only talking to HIMSELF. It isn’t like he’s trying to convince Maka. Why does he have to convince himself?? Could it possibly be because he’s reached a conclusion about his romantic/sexual orientation that he’s been trying to swallow his Entire Life??? makes ya wonder, doesn’t it, queers?

Just like I said when I talked about Stein, most of the stories I have in mind with Spirit center around that sweet gayness. But also, I like to think of ways Spirit could come to terms with his sexuality, how it might have affected him when he was young, his relationship with all these women, with his wife. I love to think about him being a dad at 18 and trying his best, but how much responsibility that must have been. Lots of great ideas when it comes to Spirit.

Um? unpopular opinion would be all the standard like I said with Stein lmao. “Oh no!” scream the heteros, “that they/them on tumblr is making Soul Eater queer we canst not allow that in our church!!!111!” But besides that, maybe even the fact that I think he’s redeemable?? Idk most everyone I’ve met thinks Spirit is funny at least and just calls him a dumbass and a slut (affectionate). Doesn’t mean anybody thinks cheating on your wife 56 times is okay so. I like this fandom, it’s chill here. My favorite is when I see my art tagged like “aw the stupid man and his crazy bf” like YOU ARE RIGHT

My favorite relationship when it comes to Spirit (besides Stein cuz if I start talking about them again I’ll never finish this ask) is the one he has with Maka. If you can call it a relationship lol. I guess I just find Spirit’s approach to Maka as a parent really refreshing. Not that the parents in other shows don’t love their kids or whatever, it’s just that the loving parent always seems to be paired with some other trope that makes their character hard to approach. especially in anime. Like the perfect mother who dies in the first episode, and we spend the rest of the show mourning her. Or the father whose love is somehow everlasting even though he’s never home. It’s really the fact that Spirit is even THERE that I love. He knows what Maka is up to. He talks about her. He’s invested in her life, and he loves her. All he wants is to spend time with her, and though he’s sad when she turns him down, he doesn’t push her. god dammit I just like a dad who actually loves his kids without all the usual strings attached like. oh my kids are a huge pain in my ass, but I love them in spite of it. oh i’m a man so can’t relate to my children in a meaningful way but i try. Get the fuck outta here with that shit. I want all the dads to get so happy when their daughters wanna hang with them that they throw up like Spirit. Give me the guy who loves his daughter so naturally, whose daughter is such a huge part of his life, that it doesn’t even occur to him stop trying even if she literally wants to murder him. That’s Spirit. jfc

To end with a cute little headcanon, I really love to think that when Spirit gets older and starts losing the color in his hair, instead of getting white or grey, his hair turns a pale pink color cuz he’s such an aggressive redhead. Wouldn’t that just be adorable? late 30′s, early 40′s, Spirit starts getting little pink streaks in his hair and then bam. Little pink old man Spirit XD

There ya have it. Thanks for the ask, and feel free to send more.

[deiliamedlini]

WIP-ish Wednesday

Is it already Wednesday?? I’ve been very distracted by discovering Inuyasha for the first time, and by Monster Hunter Stories 2, and by Loki, and I have barely written a word this week, so I’m going to post an old WIP oneshot that I don’t want to work on ever again, and I’ll feel less guilty because it won’t be staring at me in my doc, but it’ll be here.

Once upon a time, I couldn’t stop watching Among Us on Twitch and started an LOZ AU and drew all the LoZ characters as Among Us people. Most of my ‘planning’ went into drawing everyone instead 😂. I even did Avatar because I was going insane. Like, I could not stop. It was a very in-depth moment. But I’m past that moment now and will likely never work on this WIP again, so here’s the little bit I actually had for that Among Us LoZ AU.

~~

Space is cold, Zelda realized.

When she signed on for this mission, they’d briefed her, of course, but she’d never really understood what it meant to be this cold until she was sitting in the transport ship with nine other crewmates who were being sent to a ship that was already in orbit.

The Skeld.

Zelda had never realized something could sound so daunting and so incredible all at once, but The Skeld managed that. Not only in name, but she’d read the pamphlets. She’d done her research. The Skeld was an interspace vessel equipped with hyperdrive capabilities, deep space hibernation for longer trips, and even a fully functioning weapons system for any unforeseen complications. And she was chosen to be a crewmate on the most incredible ship in the galaxy. She’d gladly left Hyrule for this.

When she’d arrived at the launch pad, they’d given her a very bright pink spacesuit. She’d nearly argued for blue, but that was already taken by someone named Mipha. When she’d actually asked for cyan, she’d been told that Mipha’s brother, Sidon, had taken it. So, she relented for pink.

On the transport ship, she watched them talk to each other. The siblings were animated with their hands, and then Zelda realized it had to do with the space helmets they were all wearing. She couldn’t see anyone else’s expression, and realized that her hands were going to be more important than anything, this trip.

The Skeld’s O2 dispersion system was broken, and they’d already been briefed that their first task was to restore it. Until it was safe, their helmets stayed on.

Zelda looked at her ID badge and was thankful that there was a nice picture of her gracing the surface.

She unstrapped the seatbelt she had been too nervous to release, and looked around. She couldn’t see nametags yet, so she went by color. Green was talking to red and brown. Yellow

and orange were together, hailing over white. Purple and black seemed to be getting along. She just had to figure out where she fit in.

Zelda tried to listen to the orange and yellow suit as they explained something to the white one. They were both from Gerudo Town, though they’d never met before, and the white one said that the company who owned The Skeld—MIRA—had deliberately chosen several people from similar areas to make their decisions easier.

So, Zelda realized, someone else would be from Central Hyrule with her.

“You seem lost,” someone said, a male voice, though she couldn’t tell who spoke right away. The green suit stopped just short of her and held out his gloved hand. “Link. Nice to meet you.”

Zelda took his hand. “Zelda,” she said as she quickly examined his ID tag. He was cute, with a mop of blonde hair tied back and bright blue eyes. “Are you in engineering?”

“From what I’ve gathered, we’re all in either engineering or mechanics. The Skeld needs some touch-ups.”

Zelda chuckled lightly. “Oxygen isn’t necessary when you have these fantastic suits.”

He laughed and tugged on his green. “I wanted blue, but those two siblings over there took them.”

Zelda’s eyes lit up, though he couldn’t see. “I wanted blue as well!

“Favorite color?”

“Yes. You?”

“Same.”

Zelda wanted to blush at his tone. Something about the way he spoke, the medium timbre and almost sultry cadence to his voice had her picturing the face behind the helmet with that as well. And all around, it was a nice picture she painted in her head.

“Where are you from?” she found herself asking.

“Hateno. It’s in East Necluda in Hyrule.”

“Oh, really?” Zelda asked with interest. “I’ve been before! I live in Castle Town.”

“City girl, then?”

“Very much. I take it you’re a tried and true country boy?”

“I am.”

She could hear the smile in his voice and was very glad he couldn’t see her.

“So,” he said. “I thought maybe you were shy and didn’t make friends easily which was why you were over here by yourself, but you’re doing just fine with me.”

Whenever Zelda got nervous, she often found herself playing with her hair. That, unfortunately, wasn’t possible with the large helmets they wore, so her hand often would simply thunk against the visor and then awkwardly fall back to her side.

“I’m a bookworm back home. I like to study and research. I don’t really talk to many people. You’re simply easy to talk to.”

Link nodded, just enough that she could see the bobbing of the helmet and suit. “Thank you. We’re all going to be stuck together for a while though, so you might want to try.”

“I just don’t know how.”

Link gave a light tug on her arm and urged her to follow him back to the red and brown suits. They were still happily chatting with each other, but black, white, and purple had joined.

“Daruk, Yunobo,” Link said, bringing Zelda beside him. “This is Zelda. Zelda, this is Yunobo,” he pointed to red, “and Daruk,” to brown. “They’re from Eldin.”

Zelda tried to cross her arms, but realized that their travel suit was just too fat for it. She was grateful they’d be given a change into a lightweight suit once they reached The Skeld so they could better preform the tasks they’d be given.

“Eldin?” Zelda asked, intrigued. “That’s so far away. Is it really as warm as they say?”

Daruk laughed, hearty and loud. It had the other group turning to see what was happening. “Hotter!” he nearly screamed in excitement.

“It’s pretty warm, yeah,” Yunobo agreed.

But the one in the black suit scoffed.

“You don’t think it’s that hot?” Zelda asked again.

Then, the one in black simply sat back down, crossing his legs as he happily had enough of that conversation.

“You all are too unattuned to your bodies. It’s actually quite easy to bear the extremes, if you simply try just a bit.”

Zelda turned to purple. He had the haughtiest voice she’d ever heard. And when she looked at his ID, she realized that his face matched the voice perfectly.

“Stop it, Revali,” the white one said. “He’s a bit of a legend back home, and it’s gone to his head. I’m Teba. The one who just sat down is Gan. He hasn’t been social, really.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” everyone said, happily introducing themselves.

The final two came over: orange and yellow. Orange was a well-respected leader of her community, Urbosa. And the other, yellow, was her protegee, Riju.

/

By the time the warning lights had come on to tell everyone to return to their seats and to secure themselves in for docking, Zelda felt like she had a decent grasp of who was who. Well, except for Gan, who adamantly refused to participate in any conversation.

Docking with The Skeld was bumpy, and Zelda felt her hands tightly grip her belt. She could see Link across from her giving her the thumb’s up. She couldn’t tell if he was reassuring her, or asking if she was okay, but either way, she returned his gesture and took a deep breath.

A robotic voice rang out through an intercom. “Pressurizing. Please remain in your seats.”

Puffs of smoke filled the small room, fogging everything up until it turned to normal air once again. And the door flung open.

Zelda jumped at the noise, but a small robot rolled in, a long neck, and functioning arms attached to a wheeled mobility unit. Then, the door shut again, and more air hissed into the room.

“Please unzip your suits below the neck. You will be provided with more efficient ones beyond this door. Please, remain in your seats.”

Zelda watched Urbosa, first in the line of seats, pull the zipper down just enough to expose the skin on her neck. The robot extended an arm and pressed a device into her before hitting a button with a loud snap.

Urbosa hissed and recoiled. “What was that?”

“That was your tracker. It will monitor your health and can be read by the internal navigation system. Please, head through the door and follow your guide to retrieve your new suits. Your color will remain the same.”

Three until the little robot reached Zelda.

She listened to Yunobo whimper and sniff as he left. Teba took it gracefully and silently, as if it didn’t hurt at all. Revali yelled at the robot, who simply repeated its instructions.

So when it was Zelda’s turn, her hand shook as she pulled down the zipper and watched the small device move closer to her. She couldn’t help but flinch away immediately, despite her constant mental reminders to stay still.

“Please, do not move or I will be required to restrain you long enough to insert your tracker.”

“Sorry,” Zelda muttered. And when she felt it against her skin and heard the loud click, it was more painful than she thought. A sharp sting and a slight burn and then it was over. Still, she wanted to get away from the creepy little pain-inducing robot, and she rubbed her neck as she left.

Only to be greeted by another robot.

“Please, follow me,” it said, rolling down the hall of the docking bay.

~~~~~~

(Yunobo was going to die first, Mipha was going to be vented but she was not an imposter and it would have hopefully been sad, and my note says it was Teba and Link, so naturally it was going to come down to Link and Zelda as the last two for dramatic reasons and then end on a “black screen” kind of moment just like the end of a round when you lose. Ta-da! That was the Among Us AU that will never be)

[per-ineptia-ad-astra]

Star Trek Episode 1.24: This Side of Paradise

AKA Yet Another Creepy Utopia Planet

Our episode begins with the Enterprise heading in to orbit around an Earthy-looking planet named Omicron Ceti 3. Omicon Ceti is a real star, by the way—also known as Mira or Mira A, it’s a red giant and part of a binary star system with its sister Mira B. It’s not a real likely place to go looking for such a nice homey sort of planet, though, because Mira is a pulsating variable star, which means its size and brightness is constantly fluctuating, and it’s hard to evolve life when your sun keeps flickering like a neon sign in a noir movie all the time.

Uhura reports to Kirk that she’s been transmitting a contact signal every five minutes just as he ordered, but she’s only getting dead air in response.  Kirk tells her to keep it up until they get into orbit, then moves on to talk to Spock. “There were one hundred fifty men, women and children in that colony,” he says. “What are the chances of survivors?”

Looks like the chances are, uh...not great. And by ‘not great’ I mean ‘nonexistent’. Spock explains that ‘Bertold rays’ are a recent enough discovery that there’s still a lot not known about them, but one thing that is for sure known is that exposure to these rays causes living animal tissue to disintegrate. Nasty. Evidently this planet is heavily exposed to these rays, because a group of colonists-- “Sandoval’s group”-- came here only three years ago and Spock says there’s no possibility they could have survived. Well why the heck would anyone build a colony in such a place? All Spock can say is “They knew there was a risk.”

Kirk questions whether they can risk sending a landing party down under such conditions, but Spock says the disintegration doesn’t start immediately, so they’ll be alright if they don’t stick around too long. The helmsman reports that they’ve successfully established orbit, and he’s found a settlement—or at least, something that was a settlement at one point. Kirk tells Spock to equip a landing party of five to accompany him down there, including a biologist and McCoy. That’s gonna be a fun mission briefing. “Yes, we're beaming down to a planet bombarded with deadly radiation, but no need to worry, crew, your tissues will probably only disintegrate a little bit."

Sometime later, the landing party—Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, a blueshirt and a goldshirt—materialize into a meadow near a dirt path and a picket fence. They’ve thoughtfully arranged themselves into a nice alternating pattern.

[ID: A shot of a sunny meadow with a dirt road, a few trees and a white picket fence in the background. Newly beamed down are six Enterprise crewmembers standing in two rows: in the front are Kirk and Spock, in the back are McCoy, a goldshirt, a blueshirt, and Sulu.]

The goldshirt, incidentally, is DeSalle, who we last saw back in The Squire of Gothos. The character was originally written for this story as Lt. Timothy Fletcher, but was changed to DeSalle after the production crew realized they’d cast an actor who had already appeared in the series. Yes, really. AGAIN. The blueshirt is Kelowitz, who showed up briefly in The Galileo Seven and Arena, and likewise started out as another character but was renamed after being cast. I don’t know how this situation managed to happen so often on TOS, but apparently it did. At least they both seem to have managed to hold onto more or less the same positions that they had the last time we saw them, a rare feat for any minor TOS crewmember.

The group walks forward towards some nearby farm buildings arranged around a dirt yard, with a horse-drawn cart sitting out in front of one of them. But there’s no horse to be seen, and no people either. They wander through the yard and over toward what looks like a paddock, but without any animals in it. Everything seems quite thoroughly deserted.

Kirk leans on the paddock fence and glumly muses, “Another dream that failed. There’s nothing sadder. It took these people a year to make the trip from Earth. They came all that way...and died.” Hold on, it took them a year? What, do they not give colony ships warp drives? Did they have to hitchhike here?

“Hardly that, sir,” someone says, and suddenly we see three men in green jumpsuits standing at the edge of the yard, looking very relaxed and also very not dead.

As the landing party all turn around to stare in shock the man in front strides forward and says, “Welcome to Omicron Ceti 3. I’m Elias Sandoval.” McCoy looks like he’s getting ready to spray the dude with holy water.

After the titles, we get a brief captain’s log to sum things up, just in case everyone forgot what happened during the commercial break:

“Captain’s Log, Stardate 3417.3. We thought our mission to Omicron Ceti 3 would be an unhappy one. We had expected to find no survivors of the agricultural colony there. Apparently, our information was incorrect.”

The colonists start happily shaking hands with the landing party—but happily as in “oh, it’s so nice to meet you” not “oh thank god you came to rescue us we’re all on the brink of death”. Sandoval says they haven’t seen anyone outside the colony since they left Earth four years ago, although they’ve been expecting someone to come by for a while. Apparently their subspace radio didn’t work right and they don’t have anyone who could “master its intricacies”. Now, I’m no expert on establishing colonies on alien planets, but ‘person who can work our only communication device’ does rather seem like a position you would want to make sure was filled before you left.

Kirk has to explain that they haven’t come to visit because of the dead radio. He does not explain why they did decide to come when they did. Spock’s comment about the colonists knowing there was a risk indicates that whether or not Bertold rays specifically were known about before the colonists left, they at least had reason to believe there was something dangerous about the planet. So why’d the Federation let them go and then wait another three years before sending anyone to check up on them? Eh, probably just another failing of twenty-third century space bureaucracy.

Sandoval’s not bothered about it, though. He tells Kirk that it doesn’t make much difference—the important thing is the party is here now and the colonists are happy to see them. Then he invites them on a tour of the settlement and casually strolls off, leaving the landing party to stand there and try to process what the hell they just witnessed.

“Pure speculation, just an educated guess...I’d say that man is alive,” McCoy says. Thanks Bones.

Spock says that his scans show that the planet is getting ray’d just as their reports indicated, so that’s not the issue. Under this intensity, the landing party could safely hang out here for a week if necessary, as per the usual Star Trek rule that you can be exposed to a deadly thing and be just fine up until the exact moment it kills you, but there’s a mighty big difference between a week and three years. Or as Kirk succinctly puts it, “These people shouldn’t be alive.”

“Is it possible they’re not?” Sulu asks. Great out of the box thinking there Sulu, love it.

Kirk takes a moment to consider that, which is fair—compared to the kind of weird shit they’ve encountered so far, the walking dead wouldn’t even stand out that much. But McCoy points out that when they shook hands with Sandoval, “His flesh was warm. He’s alive. There’s no doubt about that.” Spock fires back with a reminder that, “There’s no miracle connected with [Bertold rays], doctor, you know that. No cures, no serums, no antidotes. If a man is exposed long enough, he dies.” Okay dude, calm down, all McCoy said was “he’s alive” not “my god! Bertold rays have been fake all along! wake up sheeple!"

As Kirk points out, this whole debate is pretty pointless anyway for the moment—they’re arguing in a vacuum, and they’ll need more answers if they want to get anywhere. So they go to follow Sandoval, who leads them towards a nearby farm house, while a few colonists do various farm chores nearby. Sandoval explains that the colonists split into three groups, with forty-five people at this settlement and two more settlements elsewhere on the planet. Apparently they thought that arrangement would give each group a better chance for growth, since if some disaster struck one group the other two would probably still be alright.

“Omicron is an ideal agricultural planet,” he says. “We determined not to suffer the fate of the expeditions that went before us.” It’s rather vague what expeditions he’s referring to here, since at no other point in the episode are any previous attempts at settling Omicron Ceti 3 mentioned. But given that Sandoval specifically mentions the possibility of disease afflicting one group as a reason to split up, and Spock earlier said that Bertold rays were a recent discovery—and that the colonists knew coming to Omicron Ceti 3 was risky-- it seems possible that previous groups tried to settle the planet and, without knowing about the Bertold rays, mistook their effects for some kind of disease native to the planet. Of course that doesn’t explain why this group of colonists decided it would be a good idea to try to settle here again anyway, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few months, it’s that not everyone sees the possibility of dying to a terrible disease as a compelling reason to change their plans in any way.

As they stand in the farmhouse talking about this, a woman steps forward from another room in the house. She’s in soft focus, just in case we might forget she’s a woman, and instead of the green jumpsuit all the male colonists are wearing, she’s wearing green overalls over a lavender shirt, a combination that somehow manages to be an even worse fashion disaster than the jumpsuits themselves. She starts to say something to Sandoval, then stops in surprise as she sees the landing party. But for once the romance-o-vision isn’t for Kirk—it’s Spock that the camera zooms in on as the woman stares at him.

“Layla, come meet our guests,” Sandoval says cheerfully, oblivious to the wistfully romantic background music. He introduces her as Layla Colomi, their botanist. Layla says that she and Spock have met before, but “It’s been a long time.” Kirk gives Spock a bit of a side-eye for that, but Spock offers no details.

Well, all romantic tension aside, they do still have a mission to attend to here, as Kirk reminds Sandoval. Sandoval tells them to go ahead with any examinations or tests they want. “I think you’ll find our settlement an interesting one. Our philosophy is a simple one: that men should return to a less complicated life. We have few mechanical things here, no vehicles, no weapons. We have harmony here. Complete peace.” Oh yeah, that bodes well. Remember the last place we saw complete harmony and peace? At least that explains why everyone on this farm is using equipment straight out of Stardew Valley, which is presumably not the most advanced agricultural technology available by the twenty-third century. I’m not sure why Sandoval’s idea of a simpler lifestyle excludes vehicles, though. They’re not exactly the most recent thing on the timeline of human technological advancements.

Sandoval tells the landing party to make themselves at home, and they all head off. All except for Spock, who lingers just a few seconds more to give Layla a completely neutral look before walking away as well.

Everyone goes off to conduct their respective investigations. Sulu and Kelowitz wander through a yard over towards another farm building. Kelowitz isn’t sure what exactly they should be looking for, though. “Whatever doesn’t look right—whatever that is,” Sulu replies, climbing up to sit on a railing on the building’s porch. “When it comes to farms, I wouldn’t know what looked right or wrong if it were two feet from me.” I hope you enjoyed that line, because “didn’t grow up on a farm” is about all the backstory TOS is going to give us for Sulu until the movies.

[ID: Three screenshots showing Sulu pulling himself up to sit on the railing of an old-fashioned farmhouse as he says, "When it comes to farms, I wouldn't know what looked right or wrong if it were two feet from me." Growing up from the ground nearby are two large plants with thick brownish-purple stems and large pink flowers on top.]

Hey Sulu, what's that about two feet from you? Oh well, I'm sure it's not important.

Kelowitz opens up a nearby barn and notes that there’s no cows there—in fact, the barn isn’t even built for cows, just for storage, and indeed it only looks big enough to be useful for holding cow, singular. Having a storage barn isn’t itself that weird, although the fact that there is nothing currently stored in the storage barn is a bit strange. But also, as Sulu points out, come to think of it, they haven’t seen any animals here, native or imported. No cows, no horses, no pigs, not even a dog. Which is a bit odd for an agricultural colony. They must have had or expected to have animals at some point—otherwise what was pulling that cart?

Back in the house, Sandoval is asking Layla about Spock (once again referred to as a ‘Vulcanian’). She says that she knew Spock on Earth, six years ago. Sandoval, apparently having noticed the dreamy background music by now, asks if Layla loved Spock. She says that if she did, “it was important only to myself...Mr. Spock’s feelings were never expressed to me. It is said he has none to give.”

“Would you like him to stay with us now? To be one of us?” Sandoval asks. Layla smiles at him. “There is no choice, Elias,” she says. “He will stay.”

Elsewhere in the house, McCoy is scanning a colonist. He doesn’t look exactly happy with the tricorder result he gets, but all he says is, “That’ll be all, thank you very much,” and the colonist leaves, passing Kirk coming in. Incidentally, I can’t help but note that this room contains two paintings on the wall and what appears to be a cabinet full of china. I suppose the paintings could have been done by a colonist, but the china could surely only have been brought there. Who decided to pack fancy china on a year-long space voyage to an agricultural colony?

[ID: A shot of the interior of a farmhouse with blue walls, with a large wooden table in the middle of the room, a cabinet with china and glassware in the corner, a wooden desk with a copper tea kettle and some other kitchen items on it against the back wall, and a painting hanging on the wall showing some blurry trees. Sandoval, a middle-aged white man with short brown hair wearing a green jumpsuit, walks past the camera as he says, "Oh, captain, I've been looking for you."]

Kirk asks if McCoy’s found anything yet. McCoy replies that he’s surveyed nine men so far, ranging in age from twenty-three to fifty-nine. And they’re all in perfect condition. Not just healthy—perfect. Textbook responses across the board, from all of them. “If there are many more of them,” McCoy muses, “I can throw away my shingle.”

At that point Kirk’s communicator goes off. It’s Spock, calling in from one of the crop fields. He’s made the same observation as Sulu—there’s no life on the planet aside from the colonists and the plants. No animals, no insects. Spock doesn’t have any explanation yet, so Kirk tells him to carry on with his investigation and hangs up.

McCoy notes the absence of animals as peculiar, and Kirk says it’s especially so because the expedition records show that they did bring animals with them to raise for food. And pull their carts, presumably. But it seems none of them are still around. McCoy says he’d like to see the expedition’s medical records, a request Kirk has apparently anticipated because he’s got the floppy disc on hand with him.

Sandoval comes in and says that he’d like to take the two of them on a tour of the fields, to show off what the colony’s accomplished. McCoy says he’ll have to bow out, since he’s still working on the medical examinations. “However, if I find everyone else’s health to be as perfect as yours...”

“You’ll find no weaklings here,” Sandoval says, which uh, sure is a hell of a way to phrase that. “No weaklings! None of those miserable, pathetic sods with imperfect health! Only the strong survive! THE SLIGHTEST BLEMISH SHALL BE CAUSE FOR EXILE!”

Leaving McCoy behind, Kirk and Sandoval head out to the fields, where Sandoval gushes to Kirk about how great this place is: they’ve got moderate climate, moderate rains all year round, and the soil will grow anything they stick in it. Which is pretty miraculous, considering there’s no such thing as growing conditions that are perfect for every plant. But as we’re about to see, that’s not the only weird thing going on with their farming practices.

The conversation is interrupted by DeSalle arriving to give Kirk the biology report. Sandoval excuses himself to attend to work elsewhere, leaving Kirk and DeSalle alone to discuss the report. At first, it seems to be just as Sandoval said: they’ve got a variety of crops growing here successfully. The weird thing is that they don’t actually have very many of those crops. There’s enough to keep the colony going at the size it currently is, but barely more than that. Which tracks with what we’ve seen of the place so far: a couple of tiny fields that look more about the size for someone’s backyard garden than for a prosperous farm, tended by the occasional person idly scratching at the ground with a hoe. For a supposedly bounteous agricultural colony, that’s pretty weird. What have they been doing all this time?

“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle all one color,” Kirk muses, taking a moment to stroll a few steps away so he can say this dramatically in the distance instead of actually talking to DeSalle. “No key to where the pieces fit in. Why?”

Kirk’s communicator goes off. It’s McCoy, saying Kirk had better get back over there. “Trouble?” “No, but I’d like you to see this for yourself.” Of course. No one can ever just explain something over the phone, can they.

So Kirk heads back to the house, where the thing that Kirk just absolutely has to see for himself turns out to be McCoy just telling him what he’s found out, but he definitely couldn't do that over the communicator for, uh, reasons. What he’s found out is pretty interesting, though: McCoy checked up on Sandoval’s medical records from right before the colonists had left, which said that Sandoval had had an appendectomy, and had scar tissue on his lungs from childhood pneumonia (the weakling!). Yet when McCoy scanned Sandoval himself today, the results came back just as perfect as all the other colonists’. Kirk’s first thought is instrument failure, but McCoy says no, he thought of that and tested it by scanning himself, and it recorded him just fine, down to “those two broken ribs I had once.” Which sounds like an interesting story. But Sandoval’s scan? No scar tissue, and one healthy appendix. That’s right, Sandoval’s apparently managed to regrow an entire organ. Do you think you would notice that happening? Like, would it itch?

While Kirk and McCoy try to figure that out, Spock is hanging out in a field scanning with his own tricorder, while Layla stands nearby smiling ominously at him. Spock muses that there’s “Nothing. Not even insects. Yet your plants grow, and you’ve survived exposure to Bertold rays.” Yeah, how are those plants growing without insects? Presumably the native plants have evolved some way around that, but the ones the colonists have brought from Earth would need some help. Are the colonists just manually pollinating everything? Maybe that’s why they haven’t grown very much.

Layla says this can be explained, but when asked to do so, she just says, “Later.” Spock looks annoyed and remarks, “I have never understood the female capacity to avoid a direct answer to any question.” Hey! Cut that bullshit out. No one on this colony has directly answered a question since you got here, there’s no call to go ragging on a whole gender for it. Besides, just saying “Later,” is hardly a stunningly deft diversion, it’s not like she threw a smoke bomb down and disappeared.

“And I never understood you,” Layla says, walking over and placing a hand on his chest. “Until now. There was always a place in here where no one could come. There was only the face you allow people to see. Only one side you’d allow them to know.”

[ID: Three screenshots of Spock and Layla, a white woman with a lot of long blonde hair wearing a lilac shirt and green overalls, standing outside in a field with a large tree in the background. Layla, seen from behind, is pressing her hand to Spock's upper chest and saying, "There was always a place in here where no one could come." Spock replies "you know that's not where my heart is right".]

If Layla was hoping this little speech would prompt Spock to cry out that yes, she’s figured him out, he does love her but has never been able to show it! she’s disappointed, because he just looks uncomfortable and steps away. He tries to steer the conversation back onto the mystery of the colonists. “If I tell you how we survive,” she asks, “will you try to understand how we feel about our life here? About each other?”

That’s a pretty vague thing to make a promise about, so Spock deflects by saying that emotions are alien to him; he’s a SCIENTIST. “Someone else might believe that—your shipmates, your captain—but not me,” Layla says. Oh sure! Obviously none of the people who have lived, worked, and risked death alongside Spock can be expected to know anything about Spock. Only you are the Spock Expert, gifted with incredible insight by virtue of having a crush on him.

“Come,” she says, sauntering off through the field with her hand outstretched to him. Spock rather pointedly folds his hands behind his back instead and follows her.

Back in the house, Kirk and McCoy are struggling to have a conversation with Sandoval. Kirk tells Sandoval that he’s received orders from Starfleet Command to evacuate everyone on the colony, since, y’know, deadly rays and all that. He expects Sandoval to start making preparations. But Sandoval, calmly, casually, says, “No.” It’s not necessary, he insists—they’re in no danger.

But...but the Bertold rays. Sandoval is unmoved,  pointing out that as McCoy’s own instruments show, the colonists are in perfect health and there have been no deaths. Okay, what about all those animals? What happened to them? “We’re vegetarians,” Sandoval says blithely. Which, as Kirk points out, does absolutely nothing to answer the question. Actually it raises further questions.

Sandoval remains thoroughly unbothered and thoroughly unhelpful. “Captain, you stress very unimportant matters. We will not leave,” he says, and goes back to gazing out the window, evidently considering the conversation over.

Elsewhere, Spock and Layla are still walking, and Spock is getting annoyed that Layla still hasn’t explained just what it is they’re going to see. “Its basic properties and elements are not important,” Layla says helpfully. “What is important is that it gives life, peace, love.” Oh boy.

Spock is dubious, but Layla pulls him forward, over towards another one of those large pink flowers. “I was one of the first to find them,” Layla says. “The spores.”

[ID: A gif of Spock approaching a large pinkish-purple flower and saying, "Spores?" The flower then sprays a cloud of white spores all over his face and torso while Spock recoils.]

For a moment Spock just looks startled, but then he starts clutching his head and falling onto his knees in the grass, dropping his tricorder and gasping, “No--” For the first time all episode, Layla’s absolute serenity starts to fracture slightly. Over Spock’s agonized protests, she insists that it shouldn’t hurt—it didn’t hurt any of them. But, as Spock gasps out, he’s not like them. Whoops, did the biologist forget to account for biological differences before handing out a facefull of spores? I bet you didn’t even check if he had any allergies first, did you?

Just as it’s looking like this might put actually put a crack in Layla’s blissed-out impassivity, Spock stops thrashing about and starts seeming less anguished and more confused. Layla’s concern vanishes once again, and she goes back to smiling happily while stroking his face. “Now...now you belong to all of us...and we to you. There’s no need to hide your inner face any longer. We understand.”

Spock still seems unsure, but then he takes Layla’s hand in his and smiles. Not the slight hint of a smile or sardonic quirk of the lips you’d expect to see from Spock, but a huge, broad grin from ear to ear. “I love you...I can love you,” he says, and then he kisses her.

Hoo boy.

After the break, we get a quick Captain’s Log to recap:

“Captain’s Log, supplemental. We have been ordered by Starfleet Command to evacuate the colony on Omicron 3. However, the colony leader, Elias Sandoval, has refused all cooperation and will not listen to any arguments.”

Sure enough, we see Sandoval exiting the farmhouse, followed by McCoy and an extremely frustrated Kirk. “Captain, your arguments are very valid, but do they not apply to us,” Sandoval says, as calm as ever. He tries to walk off, but Kirk grabs his arm and pulls him back.

“My orders are to remove all the colonists,” he says, “and that’s exactly what I intend to do with or without your help.”

“Without, I should think,” Sandoval says, and strolls off, leaving Kirk standing there fuming.

Sulu and Kelowitz come walking up to report that they’ve checked out everything and it all seems normal, except for the missing animals. Of course, they also both said they had no idea what to look for in the first place, so maybe take that with a grain of salt. Kirk tells them about the evacuation orders, and says he wants landing parties to start gathering the colonists and preparing them to leave. And by the way, where did Spock and DeSalle go? Sulu says they haven’t seen either one in some time, but McCoy says DeSalle was going to examine some native plants he found. Native plants, huh? I think we can guess what happened to DeSalle.

Since Spock still hasn’t reported in, Kirk gives him a call. Or tries to, at least—Spock doesn’t pick up. On the other end of the line, we see why that is: Spock's communicator is laying abandoned on the ground, while Spock himself, now dressed in the same horrible green jumpsuit as the colonists, is stretched out on the grass with Layla, watching clouds. The communicator beeps away while Spock happily describes how one of the clouds looks like a dragon. "I've never seen a dragon," Layla says. BEEP BEEP. "I have." BEEP BEEP. "On Barengarius 7." BEEP BEEP. "But I've never stopped to look at clouds before." BEEP BEEP. "Or rainbows." BEEP BEEP. "You know, I can tell you exactly why one appears in the sky, but considering its beauty has always been out of the question." BEEP BEEP.

"Not here," Layla says (beep beep), and they smile dreamily at each other before going into another makeout session. Meanwhile, Kirk is still on the line, and not getting any happier about it. Layla finally picks up the communicator and holds it up for Spock, who takes a break from kissin' to say, "Yes, what did you want?"

Naturally, this throws both Kirk and McCoy for a loop. While McCoy stands there with a "what the fuck" look on his face, Kirk takes a moment to recover and then demands, "Spock, is that you?"

"Yes, captain, what did you want?"

"Where are you?"

"...I don't believe I want to tell you."

[ID: Three shots of Kirk and McCoy standing in front of the farmhouse, Kirk holding his communicator while McCoy looks on. Kirk has a stunned expression on his face and looks around with his mouth open, trying to figure out what to say.]

Kirk plows on ahead, telling Spock that, whatever the hell he thinks he's doing, he's got orders: they're getting the colonists out, and Spock is to meet back at the settlement in ten minutes.

"No, I don't think so," Spock says casually. "You don't think so, what?" "I don't think so, sir."

Kirk has to take a moment after that one. It's rather amazing that McCoy's made it this far into the conversation without saying anything himself. Presumably he's just in shock. Eventually Kirk tells Spock to report in immediately, but by now Spock and Layla have gone back to kissing, leaving the communicator open but abandoned in the grass once more.

"That didn't sound at all like Spock, Jim," McCoy says, putting in his bid for the Enterprise’s bi-weekly Massive Understatement contest.

"No, it--I thought you said you might like him if he mellowed a little."

"I didn't say that!"

"You said that."

"Not exactly,” McCoy protests, and then somewhat grudgingly adds, “He might be in trouble.”

I'm sure McCoy did say that, or something like it, but "I hope Spock has his brain taken over by alien spores" was presumably not where he was going with it. He obviously sees this sudden change of behavior as something to be concerned about--even moreso than Kirk, who seems more irritated than anything. But then, it's only been a couple episodes since McCoy had his own run-in with an alien influence making people act a lot more mellow than usual, and he didn't enjoy that experience at all, so it's not surprising that "trouble" is his first thought here.

Kirk tells McCoy to take over the landing party detail and start getting the colonists up to the ship, and to make sure the party works in teams of two, with nobody being left alone. Meanwhile, Kirk himself takes Sulu and Kelowitz and heads off to find Spock, using the open frequency from Spock's communicator as a homing signal. They follow a dirt path out of the main settlement and soon find said communicator, laying open and abandoned in the grass just off the path. As Kirk picks it up, they hear laughter nearby, and Sulu points in astonishment further down the path, where Layla is watching Spock dangle upside-down from a tree branch like a kid on a jungle gym.

[ID: A shot of Spock and Layla among some trees at the end of a dirt path. Layla is standing on the ground and holding hands with Spock, who is hanging upside-down by his knees from a large tree branch, laughing.]

For a moment all Kirk can do is stare weakly at this weird spectacle. Then he collects himself with a stern AHEM and marches over like a principal about to deliver some very serious detention.

Meanwhile, back at the main hub of the colony, the landing party seems to have gotten well underway with preparations for departure, with several colonists and crewmen piling up luggage and equipment in the middle of a field while McCoy stands nearby overseeing everything, a job I’m sure he’s enjoying since we all know administrative work is McCoy’s favorite thing. Then DeSalle arrives, carrying a couple of the spore flowers and tells McCoy to take “a good, close look” at them, because they’re very interesting. McCoy steps forward to check them out right before the scene cuts away again, leaving us with little doubt as to what’s about to happen next.

During that little interim, Kirk and his crew have made it over to where Spock and Layla are cavorting. Spock just grins happily at Kirk, clearly not bothered one bit, even as Kirk asks if Spock’s out of his mind. He didn’t report to Kirk, he says, because...he didn’t want to.

Kirk glances back and forth between Spock and Layla, who’s standing there smiling rather smugly, and tells Layla that she’ll need to come get ready to evacuate with the rest of the colonists. Spock cheerfully says that there’s not going to be any evacuation. “But perhaps,” he adds, “we should go and get you straightened out.”

That really doesn’t bode well, but rather than ask just what Spock means by that, Kirk tells Sulu that Spock is under arrest in Sulu’s custody until they get back to the ship. Which will certainly work out well because it’s not like Spock is strong enough to chuck Sulu all the way across the field barehanded or anything. Not that Spock seems especially perturbed about being under arrest; instead he just shrugs, drops down from the tree, and says, “Very well. Come with me,” before heading off across the field, leaving else to follow in confusion. That’s how you arrest someone, right?

Of course, Spock leads them right to another group of spore flowers, which the group stops and stares at obligingly for a moment. Then the flowers explode a bunch of spores at them. Somehow, even though he’s standing right next to Sulu and Kelowitz, Kirk manages to totally avoid getting any spores up his sinuses, while the other two are immediately affected. “Yes...I see now,” Sulu says blissfully, with that trademark Very High grin that George Takei does so well. “Of course we can’t remove the colony. It’d be wrong.”

Kirk grabs him by the shoulders—Kirk’s go-to method for snapping people out of it--but when this somehow fails to bring Sulu back to his right mind, all Kirk can do is say that he doesn’t know what these plants are or how they work, but “you’re all going back to the settlement with me, and those colonists are going aboard the ship.” This stern proclamation has absolutely no effect on anyone. The whole group just stands there happily watching Kirk stomp back toward the colony. “I can see the captain is going to be difficult,” Spock remarks.

Kirk’s day isn’t about to get any better, because upon making it back to the colony he’s greeted by McCoy, who we can immediately tell is under the influence as well because his accent is absolutely out of control. It’s so thick even the subtitles pick up on it.

[ID: A screenshot of McCoy walking through a meadow with his communicator out, saying, "Sho’nuf."]

“Hiya, Jimmy boy!” McCoy very happily says to a very unhappy Kirk. “Hey, I’ve taken care of everything. Now all y’all gotta do is just relax. Doctor’s orders!” With a very resigned look, Kirk asks how many plants McCoy’s beamed up to the ship, and McCoy says it must be going on a hundred by now.

So Kirk beams up to the ship and heads right to the bridge, where he tells Uhura to put him through to Admiral Komak at Starfleet, though what he expects Komak to do about all this I don't know. But it’s too late. Uhura turns around to show that she’s smiling as happily as everyone else, and says, “Oh, I’m sorry Dave, I mean, captain. I can’t do that.” She’s short-circuited all the ship’s communications, except for ship-to-surface, since they’ll need that for a little while yet. Then she leaves, pausing in the door of the lift to tell Kirk that it’s really all for the best.

Kirk stands there seething for a moment, then stomps over to grab a plant that’s been left in Spock’s chair. He throws it across the bridge, and the camera lingers ominously on it as Kirk heads back into the lift.

Things aren’t any better on the rest of the ship. Kirk soon finds a long line of crewmembers of all different shirt colors, patiently waiting to transport down to join the colony. Out of what I can only assume is some desperate futile hope that someone will follow his orders if he just keeps trying, Kirk orders them all to go back to their stations at once. Unsurprisingly, they all ignore him. Kirk points out to one of the redshirts that this is MUTINY! but it doesn't get him very far.

[ID: A gif showing a young white man with brown hair wearing a redshirt as he says, "Yes, sir, it is." The camera then zooms in very dramatically on Kirk's stunned face.]

So...they’re all going down to join the colony? All four hundred thirty of them? Or four hundred twenty-nine, I guess, if Kirk refuses to join the fun. That’s almost ten times the amount of people the colony currently has in it. That seems like it could present a bit of a problem, because if you’ll recall DeSalle told Kirk earlier that right now the colony’s growing enough food to feed their current population, with little left over. How are they going to handle such a large and sudden influx into their population? Do they have housing for all these people? Or are they just all going to eat dirt and sleep on the ground because they’re all too high to notice anyway?

After we’ve had a commercial break to contemplate this shocking turn of events, Kirk takes some time out to give vent to his feelings in a captain’s log:

"Captain's Log, Stardate 3417.5. The pod plants have spread spores throughout the ship, carried by the ventilation system. Under their influence, my crew is deserting to join the Omicron colony, and I can't stop them. I don't know why I have not been infected, nor can I get Doctor McCoy to explain the physical, psychological aspects of the infection."

And indeed, just in case we had any doubt, we then see McCoy strolling through the field and happily telling Kirk, “I’m not interested in any physical, psychological aspects, Jim-boy. We all perfectly healthy down here.” Kirk grumbles about how much he’s been hearing about things being perfect lately. “I bet you’ve even grown your tonsils back.” “Sho’nuf!”

Kirk tries desperately to get McCoy to do something to figure these spores out—run a blood test, take a scan, type the symptoms into WebMD, something, anything—but McCoy is more interested in rambling on about mint juleps.  Meanwhile, back in the farmhouse, Sandoval’s having tea with Spock while they talk about how nearly everyone’s beamed down from the ship and things are “proceeding quite well.” Kirk storms in and demands to know where McCoy’s gotten to, and Spock says he went off to make that mint julep. Which could prove quite difficult unless this tiny half-assed farm colony has somehow managed to set up a working distillery around here somewhere, but Kirk’s got bigger concerns right now than where McCoy’s going to get his bourbon.

Sandoval wants to know why Kirk won’t join them in their private, spore-sponsored paradise. Kirk asks where these spores came from, anyway, and Spock exposits that there’s no way to know—they just drifted through space until they arrived at this planet, which is perfect for them because it turns out they actually thrive on Bertold rays. The plants act as a repository for the spores until they can find a human—or half-Vulcan—body to inhabit. No explanation is forthcoming as to how Spock knows any of this.

Spock and Sandoval insist that the planet is “a true Eden” with belonging and love and no needs or wants for anyone, but Kirk is skeptical. “No wants, no needs. We weren’t meant for that. None of us. Man stagnates if he has no ambition, no desire to be more than he is.” Of all the things wrong with this situation I’m not sure “BEING TOO HAPPY IS BAD FOR YOU” is the take I would go with, but okay. Spock says that Kirk doesn’t understand, but he’ll come around...sooner or later.

Kirk, disgusted with this whole conversation, goes back to the ship. The bridge is dark, silent, and utterly empty. We get a slow pan of the blinking lights and displays of the consoles, with no one left to man them. Kirk walks over to his chair, hits the intercom, and starts calling one part of the ship after another, with no response from any of them. With nothing else left to do, he sits down in his chair and starts glumly recording a captain’s log so angsty it could be a LiveJournal entry:

"Captain's Log, Stardate 3417.7. Except for myself, all crew personnel have transported to the surface of the planet. Mutinied. Lieutenant Uhura has effectively sabotaged the communications station. I can only contact the surface of the planet. The ship...can be maintained in orbit for several months, but even with automatic controls, I cannot pilot her alone. In effect, I am marooned here. I'm beginning to realize...just how big this ship really is, how quiet. I don't know how to get my crew back, how to counteract the effect of the spores. I don't know what I can offer against...paradise."

Hold on hold on HOLD ON what do you MEAN the ship can be maintained in orbit for several months? Every time someone takes their hands off the controls for five seconds we get told that the orbit is decaying and they’re gonna plummet into some hapless planet within a few hours at most but now all of a sudden it’s fine to hang out up there for several months? MAKE UP YOUR MIND.

Kirk gets up to go sit at the helm, just to get a change of scenery mid-mope, and as he finishes his log/rant the camera slowly pans down to reveal the spore flower that he chucked across the bridge earlier. Which is weird because we just got a wide shot of the bridge and that flower definitely wasn’t there then.

[ID: Two shots. The first is a wide shot showing Kirk alone on the empty, darkened bridge, preparing to sit down at the helm. There is nothing in on the floor in front of the helm. The second shot is a closer shot of Kirk sitting at the helm with his chin in one hand, now with a large spore flower poking up in the front of shot.]

The flower promptly shoots Kirk in the face, and for a moment he just continues to sit there with spores in his hair and a “yeah, this might as well happen” expression. But then he slowly starts to smile, suddenly as happy as everyone else. Exactly why Kirk’s been unaffected by the spores up until now, even after hanging out for quite a while on a ship that’s supposedly been thoroughly contaminated by them, is never really explained. Maybe he's just on a lot of Zyrtec. But it seems even Kirk’s determination to not be happy can’t hold out against a point-blank spray in the face. He calls Spock to say that he finally understands now, which Spock is happy to hear. Kirk says he’ll be down just as soon as he packs up a few things, so Spock says he and Layla will wait for him at the beamdown point.

So Kirk goes off to his quarters to pack up a suitcase, the contents of which seem to mostly consist of uniform shirts. Apparently paradise for Kirk does not include one of those green jumpsuits, which, really, who can blame him. He opens a small vault by his bed and pulls out a couple of black cases, one of which he opens to reveal a medal. This seems to stir some sense of conflict because he sits down and stares at it for a long moment, but then puts it aside and heads to the transporter room, where he puts the suitcase on the platform and then prepares to set the controls.

But then Kirk hesitates, and stands there for a moment looking conflicted. Possibly he’s still having feelings about those medals, or maybe he’s having second thoughts about whether he packed enough shirts. In any case, he eventually exclaims, “No...No! I...can’t...LEAVE!” Then he punches the console for good measure.

Apparently this little emotional outburst is all it takes to cure the spores, because Kirk gasps a little, looks momentarily confused, and then seems to be back to his old self. “Emotions...violent emotions. Needs...anger,” he tells the empty room. “Captain’s log, supplemental. I think I’ve discovered the answer...but to carry out my plan entails considerable risk. Mr. Spock is much stronger than the ordinary human being.” Then he treats us to this remarkable line:

[ID: A shot of Kirk in profile at the transporter controls as he says, "Aroused, his great physical strength could kill."]

um

Down on the planet, Spock and Layla are still waiting at the beamdown point when Kirk calls Spock up and says he’s realized there’s some equipment on the ship that they’ll need for the colony, and he needs Spock’s help to get it all beamed down. Really, you’d think there’d be quite a lot of equipment on the Enterprise that a farming colony could make good use of, but I guess they’re really determined to stick to the whole no-technology approach. Despite this, Spock cheerfully accepts the explanation, gives Layla a quick smooch, and beams up.

But upon materializing, Spock is greeted not with a smiling Kirk ready to go move some equipment with his bro, but Kirk standing there holding some nonspecific heavy metal rod thing that he’s smacking threatening against his hand. “All right, you mutinous, disloyal, computerized half-breed,” he says, “we’ll see about you deserting my ship.”

Spock reacts to this bar-brawl-starter with nothing more than a nonplussed expression and polite correcting Kirk on his syntax. Kirk, determination unshaken, continues laying into him with a stream of insults that would have made that fucker from Balance of Terror go, “Whoa, hold on there a minute.” Undeterred by not being able to use any actual expletives, he compares Spock both to a machine and to various fairy-tale creatures, makes fun of his ears, and rounds it all off by having a go at the entire Vulcan race. He even insults Spock’s parents.

[ID: 1. A shot of Spock standing in the transporter room looking perplexed as Kirk, off-camera, says, "Whose father was a computer and his mother an encyclopedia?" 2. A gif from Monty Python and the Holy Grail of John Cleese as the French knight on the battlements yelling, "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"]

Spock stands there taking it all stoically for quite a while, even as the background music gets increasingly tense. He finally starts to crack when Kirk goes after Spock’s relationship with Layla, and when Kirk keeps going despite Spock angrily telling him, “That’s enough,” Spock finally flips out big time. You know what that means, it’s time for a STAR TREK FIGHT SCENE! This one’s got it all: close-up shots of the actors intercut with long shots of very obvious stunt doubles; cardboard props getting punched; even people picking up random unidentifiable bits of starship equipment that may or may not have ever been there before to use as weapons. The only thing we’re missing is Kirk doing some kind of weird wrestling move.

[ID: Three gifs showing a fight scene between Kirk and Spock. First we see a long shot where Kirk and Spock are clearly being played by stunt doubles, as Spock punches a metal rod Kirk is holding, bending it in half. He then punches Kirk in the jaw, sending him careening into the wall. Then a close-up of Nimoy and Shatner as Spock advances on Kirk and throws a punch but misses, denting the control panel in the wall behind Kirk. Kirk dodges out of the way towards the console, and Spock throws another punch that hits the side of the console. Then back to a long view with the stunt doubles as Spock throws Kirk into the opposite wall, which Kirk careens off of, falling on his back on the floor, while Spock picks up something resembling a square metal stool or stepladder and raises it over his head. Finally, we see Nimoy and Shatner again as Kirk lays on the floor looking up at Spock, raising the thing he's carrying over his head.]

We dramatically cut to black as Spock stands poised above Kirk, raising whatever-the-hell-that-thing-is over his head threateningly. Apparently the ad break gives him enough time to cool down, though, because instead of bringing the thing down on Kirk’s skull, he hesitates.

“Had enough?” Kirk asks. “I didn’t realize what it took to get under that thick hide of yours.”

Spock slowly lowers the thing, looking a bit regretful about having to do so. Kirk says he doesn’t know what Spock’s so mad about, anyway. “It isn’t every first officer who gets to belt his captain...several times.” Dude, you just stood there and unleashed a screed of personal and racial insults at your best friend here. A “sorry” probably wouldn’t go amiss here.

“You did that to me deliberately,” Spock realizes, and then realizes that the spores are gone. “I don’t belong anymore.” Kirk explains that since the spores are “benevolent and peaceful,” violent emotions overwhelm and destroy them—that’s the answer. Which...definitely makes sense, chemically speaking. Sure.

Spock, still looking pretty glum about all this, points out that Kirk’s method might have worked out alright for curing one person, but they’ve got over five hundred infected people down there, and trying to pick a fight with all of them probably isn’t going to go so well. But no worries, Kirk’s got another plan. He wants Spock to rig up a subsonic transmitter that they can hook up to the ship’s communications system and then broadcast to all the communicators. Spock says he can do that, but hesitates as Kirk turns to leave. “Captain. Striking a fellow officer is a court martial offense,” he points out.

Kirk mulls over that one for a moment. “We-ll...if we’re both in the brig, who’s gonna build the subsonic transmitter?” he says, and Spock concedes the point. Besides, it’s a bit late to be worrying about striking fellow officers now.

[ID: A gif from The Naked Time of Kirk and Spock standing in an Enterprise conference room. Kirk slaps Spock across the face, and Spock retaliates by backhanding Kirk so hard he is thrown across the table in the center of the room and falls onto the floor on the other side.]

But what with the insults and the punching and de-sporing and everything, it seems that something has clean slipped Spock’s mind: Layla’s still down there waiting for him to come back. As she stands around the field, McCoy wanders over and asks what’s up. When she tells him that she’s been out here for some time now waiting for Spock and Kirk to come back, he gentlemanly offers to fix that for her and calls the ship. Spock picks up, and Layla asks if everything’s okay up there.

With obvious discomfort, Spock tells her that yes, he’s...quite well. Layla, oblivious to anything being wrong, asks if she can come up there, because she wants to talk to him, and besides, “I’ve never seen a starship before.” Wait a minute, never seen a starship before? You’re on a planetary colony! What, did you drive here?

Spock asks if she’s still at the beamdown point, and if McCoy’s there. Layla says yes to both, so Spock tells her to give the communicator back to McCoy, since she won’t need it to transport, and he’ll have her beamed up in a few minutes. One might think that at this point they might take this easy opportunity to also beam up McCoy and get him cured (it shouldn’t be hard, McCoy is already 85% comprised of negative emotions to begin with), so he can start investigating these spores, just in case Operation Go For the Eardrums doesn’t work. But they don’t. Kirk awkwardly asks Spock if he’s sure about talking to Layla while she’s still spore’d, but Spock just nods and heads to the transporter room.

He beams Layla up, and she happily runs over to give him a hug—they’ve been parted ever so long, after all—but when he just stands there stiffly, not reacting at all, she slowly pulls back and says, “You’re no longer with us, are you?”

Spock says it was necessary. Layla begs him to come back to the planet and belong again, but he says he can’t. She starts crying and saying she loves him. "I said that six years ago, and I can't seem to stop repeating myself. On Earth, you couldn't give anything of yourself. You couldn't even put your arms around me. We couldn't have anything together there. We couldn't have anything together anyplace else. But we're happy here. I can't lose you now, Mr. Spock, I can't." Look, if the only time the relationship you want can possibly work out is when the other person is being mind-controlled by alien spores, I think it may be time to consider whether this is really a relationship you should be pursuing in the first place.

“I have a responsibility to this ship...to that man on the bridge,” Spock gently tells her. “I am what I am, Layla. And if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them. Mine can be no worse than someone else’s.”

Layla soon realizes that all this anguish has resulted in her getting de-spore’d as well, and she’s not happy about it. “And this is for my own good?” she demands angrily. Well...yes, I mean, it is, but Spock doesn’t say that. Nor does he respond when she asks, “Do you mind if I say I still love you?” but she hugs him again anyway.

[ID: Layla tearfully embraces Spock and says, "You never told me if you had another name, Mr. Spock." Spock replies, "You couldn't pronounce it."]

ROMANCE

We’re obviously supposed to read this little story arc as the tragic tale of true love destined never to be, because Spock is only able to express his feelings for Layla under the influence of the spores. He has experienced paradise, but alas, he cannot linger there, and so on. It’s never set all that well with me, though. The problem is we never really get Spock’s side of the story and so it leaves open the question of how much he actually did want this relationship in the first place. Layla said earlier that “Mr. Spock’s feelings were never expressed to me” so evidently he never outright said “I love you but I can’t be with you” or anything of that sort to her. When they’re alone in the field before Spock gets spore’d he seems stiff, standoffish, awkward, and deflects all of her overtures with what appears to be discomfort, even annoyance. He clearly has no interest in talking about whatever history they had together, even when they’re all alone. For all that Layla goes on about how she can see a side of Spock that his crewmates don’t, we see interactions with those crewmates multiple times throughout the show that prove that Spock is perfectly capable of showing people that he cares about them, even if the ways he does it are usually a bit atypical. We don’t see any of that in his initial interactions with Layla.

If we accept the premise that the spores only make people act as they would if they had no inhibitions or fears holding them back, then yes, Spock saying he loves Layla after he’s been spore’d would indicate that he did secretly love her all along. The problem is that we know the spores make people do things that they would not ordinarily want to do. You think all of those four hundred thirty people on the Enterprise secretly longed for a quiet life among the soil but all chose to instead join the space navy for some reason? Should we believe Scotty is actually deep down perfectly okay with abandoning his beloved ship to a slowly decaying orbit? I doubt that Kirk has always harbored a subconscious desire to give up exploring the final frontier to pursue a peaceful agrarian lifestyle, but he very nearly does do just that. So the question of how much a relationship with Layla is what Spock “really” wanted seems to be a bit hazy.

Mind, I’m not saying this makes Layla an evil person who deliberately drugged Spock so she could have a relationship with him or anything like that. It’s clear throughout the episode that the spores induce those who are infected by them to spread them around to anyone nearby who’s not in the spore fandom yet, so there’s no reason to believe Layla would act as she did if she wasn’t under the influence herself. I just personally find it hard to buy into the tragic romance of a star-crossed relationship when the thing crossing the stars is that one of the participants is only enthusiastic about the whole thing when they’re not fully sober. It makes me question how much of their previous relationship really was Spock having feelings for Layla but being unable to express them, versus Layla projecting a lot of feelings onto him and writing off his disinterest or discomfort as denial.

Kirk and Spock go back to working on the signal, while Layla deals with her heartbreak by disappearing into thin air for the rest of the episode. Spock says that the sound they’re going to send out is on a frequency that won’t be heard so much as felt, but apparently it will be felt quite emphatically. Kirk compares it to putting itching powder on someone. Which may seem like another silly technobabble deus ex machina, but speaking from personal experience, driving someone into a frantic frustrated fit by playing an obnoxious noise just on the edge of hearing sounds totally legit. All they need to complete the sensory overload meltdown experience is find a way to simulate some flickering florescent lights and put tags on the backs of the uniform shirts.

And indeed, as the device starts to work, we see Sulu and DeSalle working in one of the fields—for a certain value of ‘working,’ anyway, they’re kind of just digging around aimlessly—when Sulu accidentally elbows DeSalle in the back. He apologizes, but DeSalle shoves him back, and before long they’re having a full-on brawl right there in the field, which can't be good for the crops. As the device on the ship hums away, two more crewmembers start their own fight over by the farmhouse, and when a third tries to break them up he promptly gets dragged into it as well.

The effects haven’t quite reached everyone just yet, though, as we see McCoy chillaxing under a tree with some unspecified concoction. Sandoval strolls up and says that he’s been thinking about what sort of work he could assign McCoy to. When McCoy protests that he does one kind of work and that’s doctorin’, Sandoval says that he’s not a doctor anymore—they don’t need any doctors here.

This does not go over well.

[ID: A gif showing McCoy reclining against a tree in a grassy meadow, a stalk of grass in one hand and a grass of something brown with several leafy stalks in it. Sandoval is standing over him. McCoy says, "Oh, no?" and then slowly stands up, tosses his grass stalk aside, looks Sandoval in the eye and says, "Would you like to see just how fast I can put you in a hospital?"]

Undeterred, Sandoval says that he’s the leader and he’ll be assigning McCoy whatever work he wants to, but when he tries to walk away McCoy pulls him back and snarls, “You’d better make me a mechanic. Then I can treat little tin gods like you.” Sandoval throws a punch at him, but McCoy dodges and whacks Sandoval in the stomach, putting him out flat on the ground. See, I told you it wouldn’t be hard to cure McCoy. Everyone else on the Enterprise was perfectly happy to give up their careers to go do a bit of light farming, but tell McCoy he can’t be a doctor anymore and no amount of spores are going to save you.

While Sandoval is busy rolling around on the ground, McCoy stands there looking confused for a moment, then—presumably having only just now noticed that instead of a mint julep he’s actually been drinking a coke with a bunch of cilantro in it—throws his drink aside and admits that he’s not sure why he just clobbered Sandoval. But Sandoval has other concerns for the moment. With a look of dawning horror familiar to all us chronic procrastinators, he abruptly realizes that they haven’t actually been doing anything all this time. “No accomplishments, no progress. Three years wasted. We wanted to make this planet a garden...”

McCoy points out that the colonists really will have to leave—they can’t survive here without the spores handling all that radiation for them. But the dream’s not over; the colonists could be relocated to start again somewhere a bit less deadly, if that’s what they want.

“I think I’d...I think we’d like to get some work done,” Sandoval muses. “The work we set out to do.”

McCoy calls Spock and says that Sandoval wants to talk to Kirk. Spock notes to Kirk that the crew are all starting to rather sheepishly call in by now. Sandoval tells Kirk that the colonists will fully cooperate with the evacuation now, and Kirk tells him to start making the preparations. Real ones, this time.

Sometime later, everyone’s back on the bridge getting ready to head out. McCoy reports that he’s examined all the colonists and they all remain in perfect health. “A fringe benefit left over by the spores.”

One would think that this would have been quite the eventful afternoon for the medical sciences, given that they just discovered spores with such incredible healing powers that they can make people regrow organs, and McCoy just confirmed that anything healed by the spores stays healed after the spores are gone. Sure, they’ve got some side effects, but Kirk’s already discovered a simple way to get rid of the things once they’re no longer needed. Strap someone to a bed, give em a facemask full of spores, let them lay there for a while having a nice buzz while they heal their cancer or whatever, then play an irritating noise at them until they sneeze the spores back out again. Boom. Done. You’ve solved medicine. Or, y’know, we could vacate the planet and never speak of it ever again, that works too.

Notably unmentioned by anybody during this little denouement is the fate of the other two settlements on the planet that Sandoval mentioned back near the beginning of the episode. The length of the timeskip isn’t specified, so it’s possible that the crew went and collected them as well in the interim, but we never get any details as to how that little adventure went, assuming that it did happen and that the Enterprise isn’t about to get halfway to the next starbase before Kirk realizes he forgot something.

As they watch the planet diminish behind them on the viewscreen, McCoy muses that this was “the second time man’s been thrown out of paradise.” Kirk disagrees. "No, no, Bones, this time we walked out on our own. Maybe we weren't meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through--struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums."

Spock remains unimpressed by this bit of philosophizing. “Poetry, Captain. Nonregulation.” Kirk notes that they haven’t heard anything from Spock about this whole ordeal, since, y’know, that definitely seems like something Spock would want to talk about. He says he’s got little to say about Omicron Ceti 3.

[ID: A close-up of Spock on the bridge as he says, "Except that for the first time in my life...I was happy."]

oh my god someone needs therapy

On that INCREDIBLY CHEERFUL note, the Enterprise flies away and the episode ends.

It’s somewhat baffling to me that of all the quite reasonable objections available to the whole situation with the spores, the main problem that Kirk—and by extension, the episode—seems to have is that “the spores make things too EASY and mankind was meant to STRUGGLE!!!” I mean, effectively what we had going on here was people being drugged without their consent into a state that overwrote their own desires, ambitions, emotions and much of their individual personalities and replaced them with bland, happy conformity to a goal and lifestyle none of them actually chose. That seems a bit worse to me than “people weren’t working hard enough.” Kirk goes on and on about how the spores made things too easy, but what they really did was make people apathetic to whether they succeeded at anything or not. Sandoval’s horrified when he’s cured of the spores because the colonists had much different plans for their colony; far from making those plans easier, the spores made them impossible. The dreams and desires of the Enterprise crew for a life of exploration among the stars would have been forever unmet if they had permanently joined the colony, they just wouldn’t have been able to care. Kirk seems to believe that the ultimate evil of the spores is that they deprive people of ambition; to me it seems that the worse evil is that they deprive people of their individuality and their autonomy.

Then there’s the fact that while the spores make people happy and friendly, they also make them remarkably blasé about the well-being of anyone who isn’t part of their collective. They have to be—caring about whether someone else is upset or hurt would make them unhappy, after all. Spock and McCoy are completely unconcerned with the mounting distress of their best friend, and beyond peer pressuring him to get with the program and take the spores like everyone else, they don’t seem to much care if he remains the only unhappy person on the planet. The colonists seem completely unbothered by the fact that all the animals they brought with them died a rather grueling death by radiation poisoning. Everyone on the Enterprise is happy to abandon the ship and join the colony with no message left behind for Starfleet, with apparently not a thought to spare for any friends and family back home, who would only ever know that their loved ones disappeared into space never to be seen again.

Or at least, they would if things actually went according to plan, which they probably wouldn’t, because the spores also made everyone cheerfully oblivious to the idea that anything could potentially cause a problem or pose a threat to them. After all, if Kirk hadn’t had a recovery at the last minute, the Enterprise would have been left unmanned in orbit around the planet, with no way for anyone in the colony to get back onboard. Uhura also goes out of her way to make sure that they no longer have any off-planet communication. So it’s probably not going to be long before Starfleet notices that one of their prize starships has abruptly gone incommunicado, and I’m willing to bet they’d be a bit quicker on that investigation than they were about checking on a tiny backwater colony (although it is Starfleet, so who knows, really). And since they know exactly where the ship was headed on its last recorded mission, it probably won’t take them long to find it. If Starfleet sends another ship along to investigate quickly enough, they’ll find the abandoned Enterprise hanging out in orbit around the planet, and Kirk’s log clearly lays out what happened, so all the other ship has to do is figure out how to neutralize the spores and everyone’s going to get rescued from Omicron Ceti 3 pretty quickly whether they want to be or not.

If Starfleet doesn’t show up in time...Kirk says the ship can be “maintained in orbit” for several months, but then what? It can’t stay up there forever. Sooner or later, the orbit will decay and the ship’s going to crash into the planet, and if it crashes anywhere near one of the colonies, their magic healing powers are going to be put to the test. Also their magic agriculture powers--rich soil and mild weather is all well and good, but is that going to be enough to carry all those crops through the ensuing environmental effects of an impact that big? Especially since, as already mentioned, the colony has enough to feed them and that’s about it—so they really can’t afford to lose any crops for very long.

Sure, maybe the Enterprise wouldn’t crash close enough to any of the colonies to ruin them, but why take the risk? All they had to do was have a helmsman set it on a course out of orbit, then take a shuttlecraft back to the planet. Doesn’t occur to anyone, evidently. Nor do we see anyone bothering to bring any supplies or equipment from the ship to the colony, even though there’s gotta be lots of stuff up there that would be useful. All in all, it seems quite likely that Paradise would have eventually collapsed in on itself simply because the spores make people unable to pay attention to any potential threats or obstacles long enough to do anything about them.

So what’s the moral here? ‘Society can’t survive if everyone is stoned all of the time’? I mean, okay? Sure? Cool? Glad we sorted all that out.

That said, despite having ranted for the past nine hundred words about the weird moral, I’m not saying this episode is bad. As a serious point about human nature I don’t find it especially compelling—YMMV, but I just personally tend to side-eye stories that center around the idea of “wouldn’t it be awful if we all had it too easy??”--but as fifty minutes of extremely Star Trek-y silliness it’s glorious. We’ve got Spock hanging from a tree and talking about dragons while making out in the grass, McCoy going full Georgia and wandering about with something he thinks is a mint julep, Kirk stomping around in increasing agitation as he tries to get some sense out of somebody and then making emo log entries while he sits on the bridge alone...it’s great.

The original draft of this episode apparently had the romantic subplot be for Sulu, who would have been motivated to stay with Layla after having been diagnosed with a serious medical condition that was cured by the spores, kind of like the eventual plot with McCoy in For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky. D.C. Fontana rewrote the story to focus on Spock, since if you have an episode about something that causes a strong emotional reaction, throwing Spock and his ever-present internal conflict into the mix is kind of the most immediately obvious way to generate some pathos and drama. The spores originally granted those affected with them telepathic abilities, enabling them to link with everyone else who’d been spore’d and form a hivemind. There are some traces of this in the final episode with spore’d people talking about “joining us” and “being one of us” and so on, but without the telepathy part it just kind of makes it sound like they’re in a cult. Also, the cure for the spores would have been consuming alcohol, so presumably in that draft McCoy never got infected.

For the purposes of the Trek Tally I’m going to count the spores as a Space Disease, which might be broadening the umbrella of that term a bit but hey, close enough. Next time we’ll be looking for life, Jim, but not as we know it, in The Devil in the Dark.

[goose-books]

& while i am posting things today. some more maxwriting, specifically two mini-fanfictions for yves. @yvesdot​ ’s WIP the one and only universe of kay rainier (would recommend! arguments to lovers! he/him wlw! interdimensional (?) shenanigans!) one of which also features an OC i've mentioned a few times on this blog but done historically very little with.

it’s occurred to me in my moment of posting that neither of these pieces have titles. oh well.

THE FIRST ONE

you ought to send yves. some bingo prompts. anyway, i sent them kay + daemons, and then immediately realized i had ideas and thoughts about that, too. so i wrote my own version. unlike theirs, this is vaguely set in the HDM universe, which is funny because i haven’t read HDM and learned everything i know from waya vivji, a single war and peace fanfiction, and also wikipedia just before i wrote it. the notable context here is that daemons are usually the “opposite sex” of their humans, and if i got that wrong do not tell me because i am embarrassed.

Kay is a precocious child; she is twelve years old when her daemon settles. Chesire is a sleek dark mahogany, a ferruginous hawk with a wickedly curved beak and eyes that glitter like beads. He is also male. This, for the Rainiers, is not done; even the absent Ariel, despite his eccentricities, had a properly gendered daemon. It unsettles Kay in a way she will not place for many years; still, as soon as she registers her disappointment (for it must be disappointment, surely; nothing more), she’s awash in guilt.

“How lovely,” she tells him, stroking his glossy new feathers, keeping her voice low less to keep out her father and more because it is only polite. Cheshire bobs his head and flutters his wings and seems, very slightly, to preen. He must be able to sense her uncertainty, the subdued flatness to her voice, but he is a Rainier as well; the polite thing is to ignore it, and he does.

“How curious,” Father says, stroking Fauntleroy’s velvet ears.

“Not unheard of,” the dormouse says from her seat in his breast pocket. Constantine inclines his head slightly; he does not deign to offer more.

/

When the Neighborly enters the house the jackal stalks at his heel, ears pricked at attention, wet black nose gleaming, mouth crooked open in a canine grin. With it comes a distinct smell — not unpleasant so much as it is unbalancing, an earthy scent, filling the foyer as its claws click on the floor. Like his clothes, it is black, head to toe. They aren’t usually. Kay wonders if it’s coincidence, if perhaps he dyes its fur so it will match.

She thinks of it as such — it — because to be frank she is not sure what to make of Atlas, and what to assume about his daemon. During the customary introductions, Cheshire perches atop Kay’s shoulder, and Fauntleroy emerges from her pocket to whisk up to Father’s collar and cling to the fabric to study the Neighborly. He can’t stay quite still. His hands twitch at his sides. He shifts his weight. The jackal paces maddening circles around the room, eyeing the dark walls and the fine wooden furniture, too dignified to lower its head and sniff but not too good to cast judgment without speaking. Every time it passes Kay in its slow inexorable orbit, Cheshire’s claws tighten on her coat.

“It’s a pleasure, Atlas,” Constantine says stiffly, extending a hand to shake with an expression that suggests he’d rather have it removed.

Atlas shakes, grinning easily, a looseness to his motions, and then he tilts his head and says, “Anubis.” In a moment the jackal’s at his side, curling around the backs of his legs to turn its wet smile on Kay’s father. It’s too large; that’s what she decides. How does he take it anywhere? Why hasn’t it learned to behave? Unless this is his goal: to part rooms, to announce his presence as soon as he steps through the threshold.

“Anubis,” she says, the first time she and Atlas are alone. “Like the god?” Atlas and Anubis; it is the sort of half-joke she can appreciate.

Anubis looks up at its name. Atlas looks at it. “I don’t know,” he says. “It was my sister’s idea.” He looks to Cheshire, who has settled near Kay’s inkwell to reorganize her pens. “And this is…”

“Cheshire.”

“Cheshire,” Atlas repeats, piercing glinting as his eyebrow quirks.

“When I was younger, I thought he would be a cat.”

“I thought she’d be a crow. Probably better this way. Crows are poser birds.” Anubis snorts at that, a sound both doggish and human.

“She is… she, then,” Kay says carefully.

“Oh, yeah. Apparently that’s weird.” Atlas leans back in Kay’s chair until the front legs leave the ground.

“Is it,” Kay says.

Atlas’s eyes flit around her face, like he knows what she’s asking; his smirk doesn’t lessen. “Well, women have male daemons, right? Ask Cheshire.”

Kay and Cheshire look at each other. Cheshire fluffs his feathers and says, “This is dull.”

Kay is less certain. She does not smile at Atlas, but some of the edge has smoothed from her voice. “I should like to watch you explain it to my father.”

“If he could take it,” Atlas says. “What’s the mouse’s fucking name again?”

Cheshire steps back and forth, feathers ruffling, until Kay sets a hand out to still him, gentle, comforting. “Fauntleroy.”

“Christ,” Atlas says. “Bless you.” When he catches Kay stiffening, he relents a little, letting the chair clatter back to the floor. “Fits the vibe, I guess.”

“As yours fits you,” says Kay, making it as uncomplimentary as she can.

“Guess my soul’s black,” Atlas says cheerily. He balls up a piece of paper and tosses it to Anubis, who, flopped across the floor, doesn’t move. “Not the weirdest thing about us.”

“Well,” Kay says, “I think it would be rather unfair for me to talk about oddities,” and she takes a small victory in the look they share: not friendship, not fondness, but something like an understanding, reached in the quiet moment before Cheshire hands her another pen and she resumes her work.

THE SECOND ONE

this one’s a bit older but i never posted it until now, at yves.’s urging! i think i was doing... camp nano last year? or something. and couldn’t think of what to write. or maybe i couldn’t focus on my project because i was thinking about my other project, the butch4butch hamlet retelling i still haven’t written. to which yves. said, “write kay x your lesbian hamlet character,” to which i said, “you don’t think i will, but i will,” and i did. so really this is yvesmax crossover fic.

It is annoying, Holden’s habit of dropping by whenever she likes. This can probably be attributed to the fact that Holden, herself, is annoying. Kay can only adjust the items on her desk (pens, mainly) so many times; she is caught up in an aggravating state of waiting but also not waiting, and she does not care for that.

Just as she thinks so, there’s a knock at the front door.

Holden doesn’t ring the doorbell anymore. She did that the first time and Kay came down the stairs a few seconds too late to find Father staring at the creature in his front hall, looking like he didn’t know whether he should be put out or concerned. “I think the earrings got him,” Holden said later, on Kay’s bed, tapping the crosses hanging inverted from her ears. Kay’s opinion was that it was all of her, from the messy post-buzz hair to the propensity for suits to the Doc Martens to the way Holden leans on any available surface.

She opens the door and Holden is leaning against the doorframe. Which looks a little more awkward coupled with whatever she’s carrying under her arm.

“Hi,” she says.

Kay blinks slowly.

“It is late,” she says, spinning on her heel and heading for the stairs. Behind her, she hears the quiet click of Holden closing the door. The grandfather clock in the front hall is ticking toward eleven.

“I never get over how weird this place is.” When she glances back, Holden is peering into the nearest glass cabinet. “Like a little dollhouse.”

“Thank you,” Kay says stiffly. She cannot decide whether she is irritable.

“And this is coming from someone whose parents were devoted to taxidermy.” Holden follows her up the stairs, hands shoved into the pockets of her suit jacket, looking entirely too comfortable here, and Kay decides that she is irritable after all.

“I do not know what you suppose your business is here,” she says. “Especially as it is almost an hour past ten.”

Holden shrugs.

“Do not shrug at me.”

Holden opens her mouth as if to speak, then casts a glance behind her. There’s no one in the darkened hallway; Father is in his office. Still, Holden waits for Kay to shut her bedroom door.

“I know I’m late,” she says, slouching back against it. “Sorry. I lost track of time in the bookstore.”

Kay blinks. “You are late to see me because you went to the bookstore,” she intones.

She says nothing as Holden withdraws the books from under her arm and extends them. “I really wanted to find Carmilla for you,” she says. “Like, the oldest print version I could find.”

It certainly looks old. Kay purses her lips. “I own Carmilla.”

“I know. But, like… it’s vintage.” Holden attempts one-handed jazz hands. “I have a sentence in my notes app from six months ago that just says carmilla but like the old edition.” She shuffles the stack of books. “And then I sat down for — look, I swear I was trying to be timely about it. Trying to be punctual.” She pops the P. “But time isn’t real and I read two chapters of Pride and Prejudice and I don’t know if you own that but it feels like the kind of thing you’d find sexy.” Her smile glitters. “And then — I know The Catcher in the Rye isn’t your thing. But I wrote in this one, so.”

Kay reaches out, very carefully, to take the books. She does own Pride and Prejudice, actually, but she still feels a pang. She flips through The Catcher in the Rye and is met with scrawls of black-ink handwriting, filling up the margins and underlining passages.

“Thank you,” she says, very softly, and moves to set the books on her desk. “You didn’t have to… get me anything.”

“I like knowing that my parents’ money is fueling homosexual agendas,” Holden says pleasantly. When Kay turns around, Holden catches her hand and steps in closer, showing her teeth in a smile. “But I’ll try to be on time from now on.”

“As you should,” Kay says, pulling Holden a few inches closer.

Holden raises a hand to caress Kay’s cheek. “That said,” she says in a low voice, “now that I’ve — what did you say. Now that I’ve fulfilled my business here, I can think of a few things we could do. Unless it’s too late.”

Against her will, Kay smiles.

“I suppose we can extend your stay a little longer,” she says, and their lips meet.

[violethowler]

Death and Separation: Emerging Trends in Pop Culture Franchises

Warning: The following essay contains ending and character death  spoilers for Voltron: Legendary Defender,  How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Game of Thrones, and everything released under the Disney umbrella since January 2017. That includes Marvel, Star Wars, and vanilla Disney movies, both animated and live action. 

I’ve noticed a pattern in the last couple of years of media consumption. 

Since 2017, there has been a string of major releases by major companies or networks that featured story decisions that proved controversial with audiences. Now, such things on their own aren’t really a big deal because for the most part there’s always going to be some fans who aren’t satisfied with how a story turned out, regardless of their reasons. 

But what I’m noticing is that there is a pattern to which elements fans are criticizing and why. 

As I became aware of this trend I started looking back at media released in the last few years and noticing that many of these stories were featuring the same plot elements, whether they worked for the story or not: 

One common point I noticed is how many of these franchises have taken morally complicated characters that were popular with audiences, and permanently killed them off in ways which a lot of people have found narratively unsatisfying: 

In Star Wars: Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, Ben Solo manages to achieve his redemption and turn back to the light after all prior supplementary material showed how Snoke preyed on his feelings of abandonment to groom him into joining the dark side. After being redeemed, his contribution to the story’s climax is being thrown into a pit, where he stays until after Palpatineis defeated, and upon climbing out finds the girl he loves dead. Ben then uses the force to heal Rey and restore her to life, only to immediately kick the bucket himself, after which point the narrative ceases to acknowledge him in any way. 

Loki and his brother Thor reconcile at the end of 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, only for the film’s post credits scene to herald their encounter with Loki’s former “employer” Thanos. The next time audiences see Loki in the opening minutes of Avengers: Infinity War, he’s strangled to death on-screen by Thanos following a failed assassination attempt before the film’s title card has even appeared. Despite theories that he had faked his death and would return in Avengers: Endgame, the only versions of Loki to appear in the finale of the Infinity Saga are past versions from alternate timelines, with only the characters dusted during Infinity War being brought back to life. 

Gamora escapes from her abusive father figure Thanos in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie and spends subsequent films building a life for herself outside of Thanos’ toxic influence, with the sequel focusing on her repairing her relationship with her sister Nebula. After being captured by Thanos and forced to bring him to the Soul Stone, Thanos flings her off a cliff to her death when he learns that obtaining the Soul Stone will require him to sacrifice someone he loves, and awakens in a pool of water with the stone in his hand. Despite theories she would be brought back to life in Avengers: Endgame, but like Loki, the only versions of Gamora to appear were from alternate timelines that lacked the dead version’s character development.

Black Widow’s defining character trait across the Infinity Saga has been her desire to eliminate “the red in her ledger” to atone for the things she did when the Red Room had raised her to be an assassin. In Avengers: Endgame, Black Widow sacrifices herself to obtain the Soul Stone in the past to give her close friend Clint Barton a second chance to come back from the brutal path of vengeance the death of his family had set him on, in the same way that he had given her a second chance to build a better life for herself when they first met. 

In Voltron: Legendary Defender’s third season, Prince Lotor is introduced as a morally ambiguous figure with unclear motives. When forced on the run by his tyrannical father, he forms an alliance with the Paladins of Voltron and eventually develops a romance with Princess Allura. In the sixth season, Lotor is accused of mass murder of the survivors of Allura’s destroyed planet and their alliance falls apart. Lotor insists that his intentions for peace are genuine, but his efforts to explain himself fall on deaf ears, and after a battle, is left for dead in the Quintessence Field. The second episode of the final seasons fills in the details of his abusive childhood while showing that despite what he’d suffered, he was genuine in his desire for peace. Seasons 6 through 8 are sprinkled with hints that Lotor was innocent of the crimes he was accused of, but despite Season 8 Episode 6 Genesis depicting him being still alive after four years in the Quintessence Field, the audience is treated to an image of his melted corpse four episodes later, while his abusive mother searches alternate realities for a better version of him.

The first seven seasons of Game of Thrones depict Daenerys Targaryen as someone from an abusive family who was nevertheless determined to rise above her turbulent upbringing and make the world a better place. Over the course of the eighth and final season, her new allies disrespect her, her lover repeatedly betrays her trust, and her advisers not only question her mental stability but immediately attempt to undermine her campaign as soon as a male heir to the throne from her bloodline is presented to them. When her trusted confidant is murdered in the penultimate episode, she snaps and burns large swaths of the capitol to the ground with dragon fire. In the series finale, her remaining advisers convince her lover to kill her for the good of the realm, and her destructive rage is presented as who she always was.  

In the narrative of these characters’ stories, some of these fit with the themes of that character’s story arc. Black Widow sacrificing herself makes sense because of the symmetry with what we know of her backstory. Clint Barton gave her a second chance and guided her back from the dark path she was on when they first met, and in Avengers: Endgame, she returns the favor. Her death, while upsetting to many fans for different reasons, fits within the context of her personal narrative arc from across the last decade of Marvel movies. 

While Daenerys turning into a Mad Queen like her father would still be disappointing to fans hoping to see her disprove the “madness is in the blood” ideas about her family, it wouldn’t have come entirely out of nowhere. The hints that she had the potential to go down that path were there, even if many hoped it would only remain potential. One of the biggest issues is how Season 8 portrayed her descent into madness. Her cruelty towards King’s Landing is treated not as the rage of someone who has been pushed too far, but that this is who she always was. 

Meanwhile Ben Solo’s death came suddenly and abruptly after repeated narrative fakeouts that he came back from. The previous films, novels, and comics had built him up as a victim of abuse and set up audiences to anticipate him breaking free of the Dark Side and finding a happy ending, likely while working to atone for his actions as Kylo Ren. But despite his actor having been promised that Ben Solo’s story would not end the same way that Darth Vader’s did, that was exactly what happened: with the redeemed villain dying to save a person they loved. 

The context may differ, but there is a visible pattern of major genre franchises in the last year taking this type of complicated character and either killing them off when they’re finally in a good place mentally and emotionally, or in the case of Lotor and Daenerys, striping away their happiness to force them into the role of a one-dimensional tyrant and then killing them off. Lotor’s case is even more egregious because there were unanswered questions and inconsistencies surrounding his alleged crimes that after his death were never explained.  

While I doubt the creators of any of these titles set out to intentionally hurt people who identified with these characters, their narrative choices still send very damaging messages. 

These character’s backstories involve them either intentionally or unintentionally set up to fail by the people around them. Where most characters begin with a blank slate, theirs was already written in with expectations, pressure, violence, condemnation, control, manipulation, and/or outright subjugation. Fans young and old find them relatable because of similar rough pasts or trauma, often because or in spite of their grey moral compasses. This type of character resonates with audiences because they represent what it means to be human -  to struggle, to make mistakes, and to have the ability to atone for them in the end. 

Except in recent stories they don’t ever get that chance. Seeing Ben Solo and Lotor and Daenerys and Loki denied a chance at a happy ending tells people who identify with them that they will never find happiness. That their struggle toward the light is doomed to fail and will only end in death. 

And that isn’t the only divisive trend that’s been observed in recent years. Since 2018, there have been sequels and series finales where the characters whose bond was the core of the story go their separate ways either after the conflict has been resolved or as the means to resolve the conflict: 

In the series finale of Star Wars: Rebels, audience viewpoint character Ezra Bridger forces Grand Admiral Thrawn’s Star Destroyer fleet into hyperspace to protect the capital city of his planet Lothal from orbital bombardment. This separates him from his Found Family, and due to their commitments to the rebellion it isn’t until several years later that they set out to find him and bring him home. 

During the course of Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-it Ralph 2, Vanellope von Schweetz becomes enamored with the virtual world of the internet, having grown tired of the routine of her life in the arcade in the five years since the original movie. Ralph’s desire for life to stay the same and his insecurities over losing his best friend drive the plot of the movie, and the conflict is resolved when Ralph learns to let go of his insecurities and respect Vanellope’s wishes. Ralph returns to the arcade while Vanellope remains on the internet, though they stay in touch via video chat.

The series finale of Voltron: Legendary Defender depicts the surviving paladins going their separate ways after the war ends, only meeting up once a year for a memorial dinner to honor Allura’s sacrifice. Lance is depicted with the markings of Allura’s people branded on his face, grieving her as he spends his days working on his family’s farm. Keith returns to the stars to restructure the Blade of Marmora into a peacetime organization. Hunk becomes a galactic chef, while Pidge returns to Earth to build robots at the Garrison. A year after the series, Shiro retires from the job he loves and marries one of the men on the bridge crew for the Atlas. 

In order to protect the dragons of Berk from Grimmel the dragon hunter, Hiccup must send Toothless away so that the Night Fury can lead the Berkian dragons to the safety of the Hidden World. Year later Hiccan and Astrid take their children to the entrance of the Hidden World where they reunite with their dragon friends and their children. 

In order to defeat Thanos and his army, Iron Man uses the Infinity Stones to snap Thanos’ legions out of existence at the cost of his own life. Following Tony’s funeral, Captain America returns the Stones to their original timeline before settling down in an alternate timeline to live a peaceful life with Peggy Carter in the 1940s. After reaching old age, Steve returns to his original timeline and passes the mantle of Captain America on to Sam Wilson along with the repaired shield. Thor abdicates the throne of New Asgard to Valkyrie before setting off to the stars with the Guardians of the Galaxy. Hawkeye returns to the quiet farm life with his wife and children, and the remaining heroes all go their separate ways. 

After the death of Daenerys in the series finale of Game of Thrones, the Westerosi nobility decided to form an elected monarchy, choosing Bran Stark as the next king of the Seven Kingdoms. Sansa returns to Winterfell, where she becomes Queen of the North, while Jon Snow is “exiled” beyond the wall, and Arya sets sail to explore lands west of Westeros. 

In Toy Story 4, Woody is feeling pushed to the side as Bonny plays with him less than she does the other toys. After getting lost on a road trip, Woody is reunited with his lost love, Bo Peep, who has been living alone scavenging from humans rather than being played with by a single child. After rescuing Bonnie’s new toy Forky, Woody and Bo race to get everyone back to the RV before Bonny’s family leaves. Before boarding the RV, Woody ultimately decides to stay with Bo, and he parts ways with the rest of Andy’s toys as the film ends. 

After the previous film was about Maleficent becoming a surrogate mother figure to Aurora, the sequel, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, is about Maleficent learning to let her daughter grow up and leave the nest. After Queen Ingrid’s crusade against the fairies is thwarted, Maleficent gives her blessing for Aurora’s marriage to Phillip and lets her adopted daughter go. Maleficent returns to the Moors with the promise that she will return when Aurora and Phillip have a child of their own. 

In the course of uncovering and making amends for their bigoted grandfather’s actions against the Northuldra people, Elsa and Anna learn that the rumored fifth spirit that bridges the mortal and the supernatural is actually them and their bond. After breaking the curse on the Enchanted Forest, Elsa abdicated her throne and remains in the forest to continue exploring the full extent of her powers while Anna takes the throne. Thanks to the magic of the other elemental spirits, the sisters remain in constant contact, with Elsa returning to Arendelle for regular visits. 

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker establishes that Ben Solo and Rey are a dyad in the Force - literal soulmates. At the end of the movie, Rey sacrifices her life to destroy Palpatine, and after climbing up from the pit he was tossed into, Ben uses the Force to heal Rey’s wounds and bring her back to life, at which point he immediately dies. After a victory celebration with the Resistance, Rey travels to Tatooine and is last seen burying Luke and Leia’s lightsabers in the sands outside the farm where Luke grew up. 

As with the trend of killing off morally complicated characters, some of these examples work within the context of the film. 

Motherhood was an important element of Maleficent’s arc across the two live action films, and learning to let her daughter leave the nest is a classic lesson in a parental figure’s character arc. 

Hiccup and Toothless parting ways fits with the How To Train Your Dragon series’ focus on protecting the dragons and the animal conservation message that comes with that. 

Ezra being separated from his found family at the end of Rebels was a way to maintain Luke Skywalker’s status as the only Jedi working for the rebellion in the original movies without permanently killing Ezra off, and the show’s writers left the door open for a potential sequel focused on Sabine following his trail to bring him home. 

Other examples, however, do not align with the themes of their respective franchises. 

Game of Thrones spent several seasons focusing on the surviving Stark children as they find their way back to each other. Sending them all in different directions at the end feels disappointing and pointless after they had finally been reunited in the previous season. 

The Paladins of Voltron finding their own careers after the war that take them to different parts of the galaxy but still making the effort to consistently stay in contact makes sense in theory, but with the death of Allura it comes across as if her passing broke the team apart. 

While the original Avengers going their separate ways to let a new generation of heroes step into the limelight seems like an organic conclusion to the Infinity Saga, Captain America’s ending in particular feels like a regression. His character arc across his previous solo films has been about moving forward, and Endgame concludes with him literally going backward. 

It’s been common for fan complaints over these story elements to be directed mainly at the people directly responsible for making each project - the showrunners, the movie directors, the script writers…… But I couldn’t help but notice just how many of these examples for both trends fell under the Disney umbrella.

And then I remembered that Infinity War, Endgame, and The Rise of Skywalker all had reshoots done at some point in the production process. 

It really makes me wonder how much of these disliked story decisions were really the individual directors’ and showrunners’ decisions and how much were mandated by someone higher up the ladder. And I can’t help but notice the demographics of the people in charge of these companies and the people affected by them. 

The demographics of fans that enjoy morally complicated characters and want them to have a happy ending, that enjoy stories where the the characters who bonded over the course of the story stay together after their mutual goal is achieved, are from what I’ve observed predominantly made up of women, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, nonwhite people, and people with mental illnesses. 

And most of the people in charge of these story decisions are cis, straight, neurotypipcal, able-bodied white men. The CEO of Disney... The showrunners of Game of Thrones….. Voltron’s a little more complicated because while Dreamworks made the show they didn’t own the franchise, but the Voltron IP owner is a straight white male.  

These stories are controlled by straight white men, and the audiences that have the biggest negative reactions to these story decisions are women, LGBTQ+ people, and POC. 

Companies may talk about having more diversity on camera and behind the camera, but the people at the top of the corporate hierarchy - the ones with the money and therefore the ultimate control over what gets released to the public - are for the most part the same demographic as they've always been.

And all of these show finales and movies have been released within the last four years, as fandom spaces and American public discourse in general have become increasingly polarized into a black and white mentality with no room for nuance. Where someone can only be either a perfect ally or an offensive oppressor. This trend in killing off morally complicated characters in ways that don’t always work for their character arc has also coincided with the rise of fandom’s pearl clutching over moral purity and whether a villain or anti villain “deserves” a redemption arc. 

Your first instinct will probably be to dismiss what I’m suggesting, insisting that these are just shows and movies and that they don’t matter. That it’s Not That DeepTM. But more often than not the media we consume is a reflection of the world around us. And we are seeing a pattern that as fandom becomes increasingly obsessed with purity and enforces a “one strike and you’re a monster” mentality, the major franchises of pop culture are producing stories where people who aren’t clear-cut Pure Good Heroes or Pure Evil Villains die. 

Also, dismissing people’s thoughts about the social messages of a movie or show, insisting that we’re wrong for saying that something doesn’t fit with the story so far, is part of the problem. Having critics and other fans praising the stories we feel hurt by and dismissing our criticisms as, for example, whiny shippers mad that our favorite pairings didn’t happen, has a very stifling, damaging effect. It tells us over and over again that this is the way that stories are supposed to be, and that there is something weird, broken, wrong with us for not being satisfied with stories that break up the Found Family or kill off your morally messed up fave regardless of whether it actually makes sense for the story. 

It leaves us isolated and alienated from wider fandom discussions because we’re told it again and again until we internalize it that we’re in the wrong. That people just don’t want to make the kinds of stories we want to see. That we’re paranoid for suspecting that there is a pattern when we see this happen over and over. But it’s clear from the way that some creators have acted - going from excitedly promoting their work to complete silence after the initial disappointment over the finale - that there are creators who want to tell those kinds of stories, but they are being silenced. They are being forced to change the stories they wanted to tell because someone in charge didn’t like that kind of story, and because of their NDAs are forced to either keep silent, or lie and take credit for decisions that weren’t theirs. 

It’s easy to dismiss these story decisions as a coincidence. To believe that all of these creators made similar decisions on their own. That they just fucked up a beautiful story on their own with no intervention from someone higher up the corporate ladder. It’s a comforting option. It makes us feel like our criticisms have an impact. Because the alternative? That creators can and have been forced to change their stories because the person at the top doesn’t think that it’ll sell well if it doesn’t cater to the demographic they consider most important? That’s terrifying. 

[aawesomepenguin]

[SONIC ARTICLE] The 2010 Sonic Bible: EXPLAINED

Okay, I’ve seen some people curious asking about the Sonic Bible, and what it is, so let me give you a basic run-down: There exists FOUR Sonic Bibles. 

This isn’t some sort of religious text featuring Sonic, instead, it has the bible name becuase it was written by a lot of different authors. 

 These Sonic Bibles were created to explain the Sonic Series lore at the time they were created, and try to keep Sonic Media consistent at the time. 

 The first one was made in the U.S., and in it, it gives us details like how Sonic was originally brown, and how he was friends with an scientist named Dr. Ovi Kintobor, and how an accident featuring a rotten egg and the Chaos Emeralds created Dr. Ivo Robotnik. 

 The second one was made for the Sonic SatAM series, it was used for the cartoon and Archie Sonic as well. It gives lore details such as Mobotropolis, how Robotnik took over and it became Robotropolis, Sally, Antoine, Bunnie, etc. 

 The third one was made in Japan, it featured some really unique backstory for Sonic, it talked about how an American woman created a story about a Blue Hedgehog named Sonic, inspired after her husband, who was a pilot who fought in World War 2. It was implied that Sonic was fiction within fiction, but at the same time, it seemed that he was also real for that world. 

 “The story of a man who tirelessly sought to fly his plane at yet-unknown speeds. 

 His hair, always standing up, led to him being called the “Hedgehog.” 

 The nose art on the plane he flew depicted Sonic. 

 He got married to an author of children’s literature, and she wrote a children’s story about a hedgehog that was based on him. His flight jacket still exists today.” 

 The fourth one is the 2010 Sonic Bible, it was created around that time to make sure all Sonic Media would follow suit, the Sonic Movie follows it to a degree, IDW Sonic follows it, and the games follow it. And I’m going to give you LOTS of details about the 2010 Sonic Bible. 

 The 2010 Sonic Bible was created to give multiple details about the Sonic Series, the character’s age, height, weight, etc. There’s also reference sheets for each character. 

 The bible also features rules for the Sonic Series, saying what is and what isn’t considered canon in the Games’ universe. Keep in mind that these seem more focused on the Modern side of the series, but the Classic Series could also follow some of these rules: 

 Hyper Forms and Super Emeralds: 

Hyper Sonic won’t return, Takashi Iizuka himself said so in SXSW. Super Emeralds and Hyper Sonic, Hyper Knuckles and Hyper Tails aren’t canon. These kind of details will only be referenced in material dedicated to tell the history of the Sonic series, such as ‘History of Sonic Books’. 

(Material like this)

Super Tails and Super Knuckles: 

 Even though Tails and Knuckles have went super in the past in the Mega Drive trilogy, they can’t tap into their super forms anymore. At most, it’ll be something like Sonic Heroes. Only male hedgehogs can achieve Super Forms. 

Burning Blaze:

 Even though Burning Blaze could be considered a “Super” form, the Bible doesn’t believe so to be the case, since Blaze is the guardian of the Sol Emeralds. The form she obtains with them, Burning Blaze, is different from a Super Form. 

There exists Two Worlds in the Sonic-verse: 

 This one Takashi Iizuka has made clear in a couple of interviews, and he has given this information to the fandom since 2010, around the release of Sonic Colors.

Basically, in the games’ universe, there exists Two Worlds or Planets:

 There is Planet Earth, this one is home to humans, and is where games like Sonic Unleashed, Shadow the Hedgehog and the Sonic Adventures happened.

And also there’s Sonic’s World,  places on it look totally alien to our world, inhabited by Anthros, crazy colours, concepts, rules etc. This planet is where games like Sonic Colours, Sonic Lost World and Sonic Forces happened.

Those two planets are 'connected' by a ‘gate’ of sorts, but while the two planets’ societies clearly interact with each other, they don’t always do. Some events may happen in one world, but they won’t have repercussions on the other. It seems that this gate is more of something exclusive or difficult to access.

[I am personally adopting as a headcanon the way the Sonic Movie explain this, they use Warp Rings]

Earth’s Moon:

The moon is still destoyed after the events of Sonic Adventure 2, but its’ orbit changed, we are looking at it from the other side.

Dr. Eggman Nega:

Eggman Nega is Dr. Eggman’s descendant from the far future. He comes from Silver’s time, and is Silver’s rival.

[Yes, it seems that Dr. Eggman eventually had kids in some point in the future]

Sonic’s World and Earth exists within the same universe:

Ok, Sonic’s World and Earth are separated, but how? By dimensions? It doesn’t seem so. The bible says that they are two distinct planets that are in the same universe.

“Also, when making a game, you have to choose to either set it in Sonic's world (without people) or on "Earth" (with people.) Mobius is an official thing in Sonic's universe, but it is not the name of the world itself. It's actually the Sonic universe's equivalent to Mars.”

It seems that Sonic’s World and Earth inhabit the same solar system.

And okay, that’s all we know that the bible has to share right now. It certainly contains LOTS more details, but it’s an internal archive that people working for the Sonic Games consult to know about the lore.

This bible was probably in use for the Sonic Series as early as 2010, but some fans also think that it could have been used for Unleashed as well, since in that game, Sonic travels through the world, and doesn’t meet much anthros in his travels except for Tails and Amy.

Source for all of this info.

[secretlymagneto]

Hi, I love all the cherick on your blog and I was just wondering if you have a top 5 fic rec? Or if you have any ideas of any cherick fics where Erick talks about the camps?

Aw thank you ! 

Here are some of my faves :D (content warnings are written where appropriate of course!) 

Fics with mentions of the H**ocaust are ITALICIZED and BOLD (also please make sure to check the rating/tags on these of course!)

Long Faves that deserve more attention:

This Harbour that We Call Home by nekosmuse and verilyvexed 

CW: Graphic depictions of violence 

It's hard not to get swept away by Charles' enthusiasm. The idea of finding others like him--of belonging--is seductive, but it is the thought of spending his life at this man's side that decides it. Crane or man, Erik cannot help but fall into Charles' orbit. An alternate meeting loosely based on the Japanese folktale, The Crane Wife.

Contingency by populuxe

Erik kills Klaus Schmidt on New Year’s Day, 1961. In New York City two years later, he attends a lecture on the future of genetic mutation.

The Waste Land by nekosmuse 

CW: graphic depictions of violence, war,  heavy topics and PTSD

The White Queen and her Shadow King sit on their throne, safe behind the psionic shields of the Walled City. The armies of Genosha batter uselessly at the gates, a war locked in stalemate. Magneto, camped in the frozen mud, receives word the Citadel intends to send a telepath to the front lines. The same telepath he met two years ago, who sat across a carved wooden chess set and offered Magneto the first friendly smile in a lifetime. The same telepath who still haunts his dreams.

The Strange and the Wonderful by ximeria

Erik is still trying to find his way around his crazy, new job as a Warehouse agent. Every time he thinks he's got it all figured out, the universe throws him a curve ball - and he has to deal with artifacts, cranky partners, his growing attractions to the Warehouse's caretaker, and not to mention, the Warehouse itself - and its moods. 

The Neglected Garden by MissGillette

Neighborhood legends, especially those imagined by children, are often more farce than truth. Charles moves to a rural village where the legend of a boogyman who lurks in the woods is far from fiction. Coming face-to-face with him, Charles ushers the tall tale into the light. But the boogyman isn't the only one who could use a helping hand. 

Short(er) Faves that deserve more attention:

Empty by hllfire

CW: Dark Charles, cynicism, dark themes

It wasn't supposed to end like this, Erik thought, his breathing hitching slightly as he looked around himself, grey eyes wide open as the bodies kept falling down one by one. Lifeless.

Home is in Your Arms by lavenderlotion

“You know, there would be space for you, in Genosha,” Erik told him carefully, walls of steel erected around his thoughts.“Would there?” Charles asked, and then, Because I have to wonder if there has space for each other in our lives for many, many years.

At First Glance by g33kyclassic

Erik-- the CEO of a multinational company-- is always dressed to the nines fine suits. The people who surround him are no less. They're all well groomed, fit, and some better looking than top end models (men and women). But one day Erik meets a frumpy Professor in a fluffy cardigan, thick glasses, full cheeks and a slight pudge. Charles Xavier. His life will never be the same.

Shattered Mirror, twisted reflection by vinndetta

CW: implied child abuse, trans male character (could trigger dysphoria)

On second thought, Charles probably should have realized that spending a couple weeks on a road trip with a unbelievably handsome basically-stranger would have consequences. Especially if said stranger is incredibly analytical, nosy, and distrusting.

Finding Atlantis by Pangea

“There’s nothing down here,” Erik says, the words vibrating up from within the depths of his chest beneath Charles’ ear and cheek, “nothing but death.”

[initiumseries]

That scene in season 7 when Buffy says “Why does everybody in this house think I’m still in love with this Spike” forever pisses me off. The narrative and dialogue both state that Buffy never loved Spike in s6 (or s7) and yet they included that line? & that scene in Potential where Buffy ends up straddling spike and lifts up his shirt because of his wounds and the 15 y/o potentials say “that’s hot” “So were supposed to make out with them or something?” God I hate s7 so much for protecting Spike.

Honestly, season 7 is my absolute least favourite season for a LOT of reasons, but a BIG part of it, is the way, in my opinion, it's written in a way that wants the audience to forget that just last season, which is presumably only a couple of month in the show's timeline, Spike tried to rape Buffy, because she had the audacity to exercise her agency and end things with him, and he didn't want to accept it. Male writers don't seem to grasp that assault/attempted rape aren't things characters just 'overcome' and 'move past'. Nothing Spike did in s7 HAD to be done by HIM. He should have died trying to get his soul (truthfully, he should have died back in season 2, season 4 HARD max but plot armour for no reason), and I say this knowing full well how the show ends, and that whole scenario with the pendant or whatever was created to redeem Spike in the end of it all. Buffy being thrown out of her house, was written to redeem Spike, because he's the only one who believes her, and comforts her. Buffy goes from being the centre of her own story, to orbiting around Spike narratively and I HATE it, because her behaviour in S7 is INCREDIBLY OOC, and all just to serve the Spuffy the writers murdered the second he tried to rape her? Please. 

Like you said, Buffy was *never* in love with Spike. Ever. EVERYONE knew that. When they find the Buffybot and Spike having sex, the assumption isn't that Buffy somehow fell in love with Spike, it's that she must be working out some issues on him and everyone feels disgusted and sad, they even understand why she'd hide it. Buffy is *clear* when she says Angel is the only one she could ever love that way. Even when dying, Buffy says she loves Spike to placate him, and he tells her he knows she doesn't. So why is that line even there? 

Even Buffy straddling Spike. She shouldn't even want to be in the same room as him, much less climb on top of him, just to serve the Spike narrative? Buffy never even gets the chance to recover from her own trauma bc she has to take care of Spike who went insane of his own volition. Everything abt Buffy and Spike this season is awful and insulting. It's really a massive discredit to Buffy as a character. 

[phinnsyreads]

Item #: SCP-1417-J

Object Class: Euclid

Special Containment Procedures: As it cannot be moved, a titanium containment chamber 10m x 10m x 10m has been erected around SCP-1417-J, with SCP-1417-J itself in the center. SCP-1417-J's containment chamber is to be painted solid white and decorated with prop scientific and medical equipment. At no point should any equipment installed within the containment chamber be used for actual examination of SCP-1417-J. Current authorized decorations include:

Two high voltage traveling arcs ("Jacob's ladders"), to be kept online at all times.

A late 1950s transistor computer covering one wall, with visible reel-to-reel tape drives and three large panels of flashing diagnostic lights ("blinkenlights").

One telescope of at least 100 cm circumference, with a retracting roof section.

Six conical glass flasks ("Erlenmeyer flasks") filled with brightly colored liquids and illuminated from behind the perspective of SCP-1417-J. At least three of the flasks are to be kept boiling above Bunsen burner flames at all times.

One centrifuge holding test tubes filled with brightly colored liquids.

Two oscilloscopes, one of which has been modified to play the game "Tennis for Two".

Three large wall-mounted switches with signage in English and German reading "DO NOT PULL".

One Van de Graaff generator and one plasma globe standing side by side.

Three lava lamps.

Three microscopes.

One paper stock ticker providing the current readout of the New York Stock Exchange.

One electric heart monitor connected to SCP-1417-J at all times and producing falsified readouts representative of a healthy adult human male.

One falsified SCP containment file for SCP-1417-J, identifying it as a Keter-class artifact capable of producing an XK-class event if not neutralized as soon as possible.

SCP-1417-J's containment chamber is to be staffed at all times by no less than three Level 1 personnel with prior experience in live theatre or public performance, and who have attended and passed Foundation Training Seminar 43021.102 ("Improvisational Acting and SCP Containment"), 52033.206 ("Advanced Technobabble"), and 83902.101 ("SCIENCE!"). Containment personnel are to be dressed in white laboratory coats and wear eyeglasses at all times, and are to carry a notepad, six pens or pencils and two test tubes in a breast pocket, a slide rule, and a pair of opaque goggles. Containment personnel are not to make any actual attempts at experimentation on or scientific observation of SCP-1417-J, and are to engage in "experimentation" involving the provided prop equipment while pretending to take notes and speaking to each other in "technobabble" with no intended actual meaning. Actual observation and monitoring of SCP-1417-J is to be conducted indirectly by hidden camera and microphone; in the event that physical interaction with SCP-1417-J is required for testing purposes, personnel conducting the examination are to be dressed and behave in a similar manner to containment personnel.

In the event that SCP-1417-J ceases to respond to standard containment, Emergency Procedure 1634-Broadway is to be conducted as soon as possible until such time as SCP-1417-J becomes inactive. Emergency Procedure 1634-Broadway is to be rewritten after each such implementation and containment personnel are to rehearse the current procedure for at least two hours each day while not engaged in containment. Class-B or Class-E amnestics are to be distributed to the civilian population of █████ as necessary in the event of high-visibility containment breaches.

Description: SCP-1417-J is an irregularly shaped meteorite approximately 1.2 kg in mass, composed primarily of silicates and igneous stone, which entered the Earth's atmosphere on ██/██/20██ and impacted the Earth's surface in a desert area approximately 6.3 km east of █████, Iraq. SCP-1417-J's surface has been no less than ███ degrees Centigrade in temperature at all times since its discovery; all attempts at relocating SCP-1417-J from its impact site have resulted in its temperature increasing rapidly and producing physical pain or destruction of equipment being used to attempt to move it. Physical analysis suggests that SCP-1417-J came into being during the initial formation of the Solar system approximately 4.3 billion years ago, and that it had been in an irregular orbit of the Earth for an unknown period of time prior to its impact.

SCP-1417-J is believed to be sentient and to possess telekinetic abilities. No means of direct communication with SCP-1417-J has been established; observation suggests that SCP-1417-J is able to see and hear events occurring within its immediate vicinity, that it is sensitive to radio waves, and that it is able to induce telekinetic effects within a 20 km radius of itself (an area including all of central █████ and several outlying suburbs and agricultural areas).

SCP-1417-J's telekinetic abilities become active whenever it is not undergoing what it considers to be active "scientific observation", which it appears to define as being directly observed by a group of human beings who are experimenting on it with electrical or chemical apparati and taking written notes regarding it. Early attempts at containing SCP-1417-J with legitimate scientific research became ineffective after approximately two weeks, whereafter increasingly dramatized and pseudoscientific "Hollywood science" setpieces were performed by containment personnel with success, leading eventually to the establishment of current containment protocols. Current speculation by Foundation xenopsychological specialists suggests that SCP-1417-J finds actual scientific research "uninteresting" or "unrealistic", and that stylized performances with no actual scientific merit are more "entertaining" to it or appealing to its ego.

In the event that direct observation as described above ceases or the quality of performance fails to "impress" SCP-1417-J, it will begin to employ its telekinetic abilities against site personnel and/or civilians in the neighboring areas. Manifestations of SCP-1417-J's telekinetic ability have been noted to extend solely to mischievous deeds of a light-hearted nature ("pranks" or "practical jokes" in common use), beginning at a rate of approximately one per minute and increasing in frequency and severity until containment performance resumes, with a high of 700 instances per hour noted during Containment Breach 1417-J-36. "Pranks" performed by SCP-1417-J rarely result in direct lasting harm to the target; in advanced containment breaches, however, pranks have become increasingly malicious in nature and have been noted to result indirectly in serious injury or fatality. Pranks performed by SCP-1417-J have been documented as including;

Tying together of personnel's shoelaces

Manifestation of partially inflated balloons under seat cushions, intended to gradually deflate with a loud report when sat upon

Unscrewing of shaker lids on condiment jars

Manifestation of burning paper bags containing animal excrement at the front door of a domicile

Replacement of freshly ground coffee beans with instant coffee crystals

Placement of phone calls to police agencies reporting false crime tips, including reports of "streakers" outside the ██-███████ mosque, that Prime Minister █████ ██-██████ had become stuck in a public toilet, or that author Salman Rushdie [DATA EXPUNGED]

Replacement of the active ingredient in non-prescription painkiller tablets with prescription painkillers, laxatives, or nitroglycerine

Manifestation of dead houseflies (Musca domestica) within ice cubes contained in a person's beverage

Replacement of live rounds in a US serviceman's rifle with blank cartridges, tracer rounds, or bullet-shaped pieces of caramel candy

Spontaneous appearance of large amounts of pornography, of a legal or illegal nature, upon staff computers

Manifestation of paper notes upon persons' backs reading "Kick me", "Pinch me", or "Death to ████████ and all the ████ that ██████ him" in English and Arabic

---

Containment Breach 1417-J-36: Emergency Procedure 1634-Broadway

Foreword: On ██/██/20██, a Level 1 employee engaged in routine containment procedures broke character after tripping and injuring himself. As a result of the lapse in containment, SCP-1417-J began instigating telekinetic pranks throughout the █████ area and failed to respond to attempts at re-containing it. Dr. James Anderson, current SCP-1417-J containment manager and six-time star of the annual Site-19 Christmas Pageant, entered the containment chamber to assist in conducting Emergency Procedure 1634-Broadway. Personnel on hand: Dr. Anderson, Dr. Sarah Becker, Dr. Ibrahim Kemal, Dr. Andrew Sullivan.

<Begin Log>

Anderson: (whispering) Earpieces are in. Alright, Control, are we clear to proceed?

Control: Affirmative, Jim, we are monitoring the anomaly remotely. Ready when you are.

Anderson: (whispering) Are we ready, people?

Becker: (whispering) Ready, sir.

Anderson: (whispering) Great. Scene.

(Becker and Kemal begin running around the room frantically. Sullivan rushes up to Anderson, panting.)

Sullivan: Thank God you're here, sir!

Anderson: What the Devil is going on here? This is a laboratory, not a circus!

Sullivan: It's SCP-1417-J, sir! It's… the readouts… seventeen minutes… if we don't… all those people…

(Anderson slaps Sullivan across the face.)

Anderson: For God's sake, man, calm yourself down!

Sullivan: Sorry, sir. It's just… we've got a runaway positronic acceleration on our hands here!

Anderson: Have you tried realigning the multimodal flux relay?

Kemal: It's no good, sir. We're getting a gluonic resistance readout of 38!

(Anderson whips off his glasses.)

Anderson: Mother of God.

Becker: If we don't stop the antipolar magnetic attractors from aligning in the next three minutes, Doctor, this entire continent is going to be kaput! We're going to have to reboot the central lenticular magnetron and…

Anderson: Dammit, there's no time! Ibrahim, you took Advanced Phlogistonics back in college, right?

Kemal: Yes, sir, but I don't see how that's…

Anderson: Andy, get the subatomic electro-vulcanizer ready. Ibrahim, I'm going to need you to manually rejigger the anti-nucleonic force matrix!

Becker: Are you mad, sir? That'll kill him!

Anderson: If we don't stop those nega-quarks from sorting the strange matter from the osmium-freon colloid, we're all dead! Ibrahim: can you do it?

Kemal: I… I can't do it, sir.

(Anderson slaps Kemal across the face)

Anderson: Dammit, Ibrahim! When I rescued you from the orphanage in that Turkish prison, it was because I knew someday you'd save the entire world. Are you going to let me down now?

(Kemal sighs and mumbles under his breath in Arabic.)

Kemal: I… I can do it, sir. Stand back and watch how a pro does it.

(Kemal puts one hand on the plasma lamp and one on the Van de Graaff generator and begins to mime being electrocuted.)

Kemal: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

Becker: Photonic resonance rating at 63, sir! 68! 74! 85!

Sullivan: Oh my God…

Becker: 87… 93… 99.8, sir…

Kemal: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Control: Telekinetic activity is slowing, folks.

Becker: 99.9… 92. 73. 48. It's going down, sir!

Sullivan: Raritanium levels dropping… negative Aetherius levels nominal… we're in the clear, sir!

Anderson: We did it! Ibrahim, are you OK?

(Kemal falls flat on his back.)

Anderson: Dammit!

(Anderson rushes to Kemal's side and begins miming CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.)

Anderson: Don't you die on me, you son of a bitch! You've never given up on anything before! Don't you give up on me now!

(Kemal coughs, lurches up, and rises slowly to his feet.)

Kemal: Did we do it?

Sullivan: We sure did… son.

Kemal: I knew we would… dad.

(Anderson sweeps Becker off her feet and kisses her.)

Anderson: I love you.

Becker: I'm pregnant.

Anderson: But how…?

Becker: SCIENCE!

(Kemal and Sullivan cheer as Anderson lifts Becker off her feet and carries her out of the containment chamber. Relief staff enter and standard containment resumes.)

<End Log>

===

[The voice of Dr. James Anderson was provided by @iridethedirt.] [The voice of Dr. Sarah Becker was provided by @mezzoprime.] [The voice of Dr. Ibrahim Kemal was provided by @navox-the-weary.] [The voice of Dr. Andrew Sullivan was provided by @phinnsy.] [The voice of Control was provided by Christian Jasper.]

===

This episode is from our Patreon-exclusive series of monthly joke episodes. To gain access to more of this series, including a second joke episode for April (to release 3-Apr-2020), please visit patreon.com/thescpfoundationdatabase.