#idk man it's epic and I needed Cas to give me the backstory so I could properly start it

[abrthephantomq]

'Encoder' Zim AU Idea Thingy

ie, Cas is Trying to World Build this Invader Zim AU he wants Alicia and Steven to Write and the whole process has got him like this:

Putting the idea behind a cut but also tagging @paynomindtotheinsanity because this was heavily inspired by a conversation we had a few days about competent!Zim but also because her characterization of Zim is *chef's kiss* in Your Eyes Are Red.

So the real concept is that instead of “Invading” planets, Irkens are sent to various alien planets throughout the universe in order to study them. And then they “assimilate” them into the Irken Empire’s vast galactic Empire. 

The Irken Race are being guided by the “Control Brains” still – the Control Brains can do all the things that they can totally do in like – The Trial episode. But also note that Red (Savin) and Purple (Jazz) (like 00 version J&S where they are very, very sexually compatible but not necessarily compatible-compatible, especially as leaders, not that it matters because –) are basically puppet dictators – they know their role is just to be the public face for the Control Brains. 

The thing is – the Control Brains aren’t actually Irken. They’re humans who achieved immortality. I want to say two of them but honestly? I think they’re supposed to be the 8 richest human beings from this earth. They had so much wealth and power that they basically other humans into something unrecognizable…

Well, they turned them into Irkens.

Irkens are basically the like, Worker Bees of the giant Hive Mind the Control Brains worked really hard to create, and have been creating, for the past millennia. Irkens are used to MAINTAIN the hive. They go to planets and figure out what sorts of things its societies are doing “wrong” and how fractured each world is etc and learn the history / record the issues down and then pass the information to The Tallests. The Tallests then report this information to the Control Brains, who then decide the fate of those planets. 

(Read: The Control Brains then tell the Tallests that yes, these planets should be assimilated and that they need sooooo much help and guidance to learn how to have the besttttt livessssss ever and like…. the Encoders are supposed to facilitate that whole process, as well. Irkens live for many many years, they effectively don’t age because they’re genetically perfect, thanks to the cloning process, and the Paks make sure that everyone stays in LINE)

So rly – Paks keep Irkens Alive, they keep them In Line, and they essentially act as fucking thought police. 

Now – here’s where it’s gonna get a bit loopy. 

Irkens are Humans, right? The first race that the Control Brains assimilated into the Hive Mind? The same Hive Mind that essentially continues to feed the Control Brains desire to control EVERYTHING across the galaxy and continue to pile more and more money etc??? 

What happens if an Irken Encoder is sent, purposely, to Earth? 

Humans shouldn’t still exist, right? 

Yeah, tell that to planet Earth, circa year 2001. Humans are still there. Still “thriving.” 

Professor Membrane is studying Human Genetic Manipulation. He’s made two clones of himself – a boy, and a girl. They’re both him, they’re his kids, they’re fucked up. As all families are. 

Professor Membrane is also splicing Human Genetic Material with Other Species’ Genetic Material. 

Except he can’t test this shit on HUMAN subjects, because that shit’s unethical. 

Well… 

Except he can, though. 

He proved that he could clone himself, after all. Who’s to say he can’t just…. try to clone humans and manipulate their DNA that way? No one. He’s given free fucking rein because Dib and Gaz were the only “successful” human clones he’d produced, according to his research and the grants etc he was given to conduct this research, etc. 

Dib and Gaz may get to live long, happy lives (as they are human beings born with Privillege – Professor Membrane’s rich as fucking hell, obvs) – but they have an untold number of “siblings” they know nothing about. 

I can’t remember if it was Enter the Florpus that had Membrane working on a perpetual motion / energy machine? I think it was Enter the Florpus. 

Anyway, EtF more or less proves that the Earth IZ takes place on is part of a series of different AUs. Remember, there are other dimensions, too – A Room With A Moose, for example. So this isn’t all that weird of a thing. 

Thing is, these AUs exist together and overlap one another and Zim is sent to Encode Earth. Zim is a competent Irken Encoder; he has yet to fail at properly folding various planets in. He’s good at it. It essentially requires him to just conduct experiments on different races all day long and see how they work etc. 

He’s so good at it, he starts to notice weird shit about the Human Race, and about the planet in general. Features of it look familiar; bits of history sound familiar, etc. 

btw, he and Dib more or less have the SAME weird rival situationship happening – because Dib recognizes Zim as not a human being (“Does…. nobody see the alien sitting in class?”), and since Zim is competent at blending in and shit (and honestly? Yeah, he kinda IS in the show – at least with middle schoolers? he was REAL GOOD at getting the other kids to be on his side and not Dib’s). 

So Dib grew up the same fucking pariah in his class, with Zim like – falling into the “preps” – Drumline Captain for the marching band, etc. Like, Zim is popular. The girls want to date him. The boys want to be him, etc. Prom King material, right there.

They graduate. 

They go their separate ways. Dib becomes a paranormal investigator with the CIA (Swollen Eyeballs - Agent Mothman) and… 

Well, he’s given a mission to assassinate a certain scientist / researcher. Someone who’s putting too many puzzle pieces together and therefore threatens to completely collapse the human race and, quite honestly, the planet – especially if he ever gets his research published. Because this scientist / researcher has been working independently for at least a decade, and every single time he releases findings, Things Happen. 

The researcher / scientist / historian (lol) is Zim. 

Chaos ensues. 

[elizabethrobertajones]

You know, I desperately want Destiel to be end game as much as anybody, but somedays I think I would just be content if the show just textually acknowledged that Dean's bi. Something as simple as a dude at a bar asking Dean to come home w/ him while they're on a case and Dean saying something like "any other day I'd take you up on that but I can't tonight." IDK the subtext that Dean is bi is strong enough that I can't say the GA would be shocked by it and it would just be a nice textual nugget.

Hey, sorry it took so long to answer this, I’ve not been at my best for ages… Been thinking about this all week though :P 

I think it feels to me like the general audience can discard or mentally discredit an AWFUL lot of implication and direct hints - there have been comments and moments in many bits of media which imply directly or with heavy innuendo that a character may be interested in a non-hetero way to someone - especially things like teasy moments… 

Thinking of things like in HIMYM there’s an ongoing joke about Lily having a crush on Robin, but since she’s with Marshall the entire show, it doesn’t really go anywhere, and when they do kiss the dynamic swaps and Robin is left with kind of a crush on her and Lily’s over it and it’s all a joke, and even though they kissed it was a lol girls kissing is hot joke for the whole show, and it never turned into a discussion of sexuality, even if they would both happily stay married in their heterosexual marriages. (And… Uh. Robin stays married okay, I’m pretty sure that was the alternate ending in the DVD unless I hallucinated it out of sheer frustration >.>) Anyway to me it seems pretty natural to read both of them a little queer to full on bi, and if it had gone even a little bit differently Lily especially could be good representation for a bi woman in a relationship with a man who just happens to have ended up falling in love with him and that’s normal and doesn’t invalidate her sexuality? But yeah. No such nuance, so this whole thing barely registers for people and in general people would think it’s all a joke. 

I mean, even Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which is where that Getting Bi song comes from, has an episode where the main character has a huge rival-crush on the girlfriend of the guy she’s into, and gets so into her she even kisses her, but there’s no exploration of what that means to her and when her boss comes out as bi with that number, no exploration of if she might be as well, even if all these characters eventually might feel more comfortable defining themselves as straight it’s just weird to me there’s all these jokes about it which can go as far as kisses, use overly romantic language or a long-running joke of Lily heavily coming onto Robin or something, and yet unless you’re like a magpie collecting all this stuff it’s all still just noise. 

I bet a ton of people would not even have considered the characters were not-straight, even when directly pointing their eyes at this moment, consider it all as a joke or that it’s just something straight people do sometimes because of the cultural massive repression of bisexuality and the indications in more liberal times and places that when polled people will be majority queer to straight with at least some bi leanings… There’s all these headlines about gen Z being the gayest generation yet, but it’s not something in the water, it’s that previous generations have never dared be as open or consider that they’re non-straight, especially if they are easily attracted to people heterosexually… 

I think the Aaron scene was 90% of the way to what you are describing, minus Dean giving him a raincheck overtly, and Aaron admits it was a ruse before any further tension can follow. I think, having snooped a lot of blog archives in my time, that really was a turning point that got a lot of people convinced of the textual possibilities, especially with the director/writer commentary basically confirming it. And obviously it didn’t work to make EVERYONE see it, although fandom swelled that season and it was a very dramatic moment in the history of bi!Dean and Destiel within fandom. 

To give another example from outside the show, I’ve been watching Black Sails with my friend, who is very straight in mindset, and - major spoilers for that show ahead - the main character is confirmed to be overtly queer in the  middle of the second season. I think I know exactly the point I would have picked up this was a queer narrative in the first season, and what would have made me suspicious about the mysteriously un-revealed backstory. The build up to the reveal was amazing in the second season and I think if you didn’t get it you really need to do a rewatch, because my friend was utterly blindsided by the revelation, only catching on a scene before it happened (she does like guessing and is smart at TV if she knows all the cues to start with). But she’s - sorry - at sea with the character’s motivations and reasons, and understands his earlier actions almost completely backwards to me as she took him on face value for far too long without suspecting there was more than treasure and restoring his name on order, and not understanding his motives to be so political or to want to burn the entire system down or his utter alienation from the system; even after the reveal she didn’t understand the degree to which things were on the line or the forces pressuring him one way or the other. 

(I find it really interesting and I’m not really disagreeing with her, I’m curious how the surface layer all reads tbh :P) 

In any case, I don’t really have much confidence in a wider general audience taking throwaway moments to be full canon, and generally would need declarations and inescapable discussion or plot arcs for it. I think in some ways the trail is being blazed now - when Rosa came out as bi in b99 it had a sort of special episode educating you on it as much as being very sympathetic for bi people to watch and see literally a bulletpoint list of their issues and weird things people say about it acted out on screen. The subplot is basically the masterclass in addressing it. 

(So is the Getting Bi song :P although it covers less of the issues overall, it does make it fun and normalises the idea into a dance routine and deals with someone discovering the label for themselves and being thrilled it makes their life make sense.) 

I don’t think spn should do anything quite so specific or hilarious, but I love @bluestar86‘s concept of an episode which uses flashbacks to reveal Dean’s bisexuality - basically like with Robin in 9x07, but I think even just showing it was a childhood crush and he never figured it all out at the time but meeting the guy later in life makes things make a lot of sense or something… And we already have a template for that without going all the way into it with his reaction to meeting Gunnar Lawless, a childhood celebrity crush. So there’s paths to take which could do it.

But ultimately I think the issue is so messed up and tangled into the main arc that it would be next to impossible to confirm Dean is bi without having an utter drama about why not Destiel, as the two concepts are not, at this point, really separate or that you could have one without the other, though it would be easier to not address Dean’s sexuality in any way of assigning labels or having more than the immediately necessary self-reflection to deal with feelings for Cas without exploring deeper… (Not that I like that idea, it’s just, they could, you know? Not even in a “i don’t like labels” way but just something like Dean going “huh” and then getting together with Cas and literally no one ever makes a fuss or starts up a dialogue about why they’re now holding hands :P) 

But it’s been such a ridiculous, epic, drawn out relationship on screen that making Dean bi independent of Cas would seem bizarre and off-balance without addressing his relationship to Cas. Just because they have such an intense relationship, and within the text of the show are many many references to their relationship on many different levels, from snide comments to enormous declarations. None of this happens in isolation to other storylines or character depth. With the momentum and depth it has in the story, making Dean bi would be seen as a precursor to Destiel, and at this point cruel and strange not to address it and would beg the question of why they ever confirmed him bi in the first place, if not to leave the ship unresolved to the end but to be open for us to imagine it might happen one day when the story is over - or not, if we don’t ship it, and it’s the way to thread a needle to try and keep everyone happy. Which I’m not sure would work except for the people who very specifically would advocate for bi Dean but don’t think a ship is necessary. I mean, I know that’s a chunk of the Dean fandom, and it’s a valid way to read the text, and of course a lot of Destiel shippers are fully aware Dean is bi without any special interference from Cas about that :P 

And, I mean, in the same way, Cas’s story isn’t ALL about Dean and he has a lot of personal growth that doesn’t have to do with him or happens in spite of him in some cases. But it’s still inextricable from Cas’s character how much he loves Dean and how much Dean has meant to him, and they crossed the line of Cas loving Dean, unrequited or not, a long time ago, and Cas has been existing in a subtextual agony of being in love with Dean but seemingly unrequited for a very long time now, as that line was crossed before several season renewals made it  a painful wait for him. This doesn’t exist in a void to Dean’s sexuality either. 

So, I mean, I don’t know. I disagree with you about the general audience thing entirely, and I think this exchange you imagine could easily be absorbed by the GA to not really credit it as a full part of Dean’s character, laugh it off as a joke from him no matter how seriously he delivers it, and generally not remember him as a bisexual character. Because to straight viewers, they aren’t seeking out sexuality hints and confirmations, and such things don’t really affect their view of a character unless it becomes a textual romance. It has all the meaning sucked from it by their lack of interest and inability to sympathetically mould the character’s inner life based on their own experiences that match. If they’re not making a study of the character, these things can be dismissed as white noise, and in a few years time, a Buzzfeed article of “10 Pop Culture Characters You Never Knew Were Gay!” or something.

And it’s like, yes. We knew. We knew all along. We knew before it happened. But that doesn’t affect how people think of it.

So it feels to me like the only way if they wanted to make a real point of Dean being bi is to have the frank discussion, and devote a proper subplot amount of time to Dean’s sexuality, enough that it is clear and inescapably affecting him, or to confirm it via a relationship which would in this case conveniently by answered by the angel he’s been subtextually pining for for years, and who has his own arc of being pretty overtly in love with Dean to answer… should the show decide to go with addressing Dean’s sexuality, they have put a LOT of work into having this relationship ready and waiting, I’m just saying :P And if they only had an Aaron but x10 scene, it would STILL not really affect anything except layers below GA  - there’ll be more queer viewers who see it for the first time, and within these four walls it will obviously never be forgotten and will be a huge part of how Dean is celebrated by fandom, but I just can’t see it making an impact unless it’s more than a passing moment, because those get swallowed by a heteronormative void…