Biblioflyer

Towards a more chill fandom commentary. OC blog for analysis and critique from a place of love.

[biblioflyer]

Strange New Worlds 4x01

The grognards are gonna grognard no matter what. If SNW had acknowledged the elephant in the room, it would have been called insincere Memory Alpha mining by the haters. But by not doing it, SNW has once again demonstrated its "total lack of respect for or awareness of canon" - in the eyes of the trolls.

Spoilers

So you may as well have just done the thing and found a way to squeeze the Voth in with enough plausible deniability that the crew doesn't have confirmation of a third technological civilization in Sol 65 million years ago. That would have been my preference. We're already in very, very silly territory with not one but two lost Sol species in this episode, may as well go for three.

This episode also solidifies what I've been conscious of for a while: my own personal slide into virtue ethics. I do think we are meant to come away feeling queasy and uncertain about this outcome. At the same time - and I'm not saying this to be edgy or anything - I don't feel good about the idea of passively allowing an entire civilization to be destroyed to preserve our timeline. Sure, said civilization was belligerent and had seemingly resisted any prior attempt at communication but I don't particularly enjoy the implications of depicting alien species who are unreasonably violent and cannot be reasoned with, feels a little too close to the rhetoric used in present day geopolitical argle bargle.

Perhaps with Enterprise's influence, the Federation starts 25 million years earlier with Martians, Sol V-ers, and Voth as its founders. The price is maybe Humanity doesn't evolve.

The problem I have is the default assumption in time travel that the lives and the present the protagonists have come from take priority. The reason virtue ethics have become more attractive to me is that, properly oriented towards humanism and hard reduction, making the moral choice in the moment ends up being the right thing to do precisely because the future is unwritten and there are too many variables to account for. Allowing an entire civilization to be annihilated because of a vague sense that its what is necessary to allow the future to unfold as its "supposed to"? Its a bad brain feel.

This is not one of the episodes that I'm going to throw rocks at because it has "bad ethics" though. I appreciate that Pike at the end does not seem to know if he really made the right choice or not. He made the choice that fulfilled the predestination paradox and ensured his present happens, but he doesn't necessarily seem fully convinced he did the right thing, and I appreciate that.

[biblioflyer]

The Odyssey and Superhero media

Spoilers for Supergirl, mild spoilers for Nolan's The Odyssey (yes I know the joke 'you had 3,000 years to read the book' but Nolan does make artistic choices in his interpretation that may or may not create expectations you may or may not want in your head if you're wanting to go in without preconceptions.

This may seem like a reach, but I think Nolan's interpretation of The Odyssey is in conversation with the finale of "The Boys" in that both very strongly emphasize that if decency is the price of victory, you haven't actually achieved a final victory, you've merely won a battle and what you can potentially have unleashed is something you may not overcome and if you do, it will only be at a heinous price.

It also aligns nicely with my gripes about Supergirl which spends most of its runtime very loudly shouting that it believes the same things about honor and the consequences of indecency as The Odyssey but then changes its mind.

[biblioflyer]

On Subjective Humor and Space Barbarians

or: Am I out of touch? Or is it the children James Gunn who is wrong?

The biggest problem I have with Supergirl is that I don't understand what kind of superhero movie I am supposed to view it as. Were the expectations set by Superman fair and the humor just didn't work on me? Is it actually something that really is intended to be more introspective and moody like the Snyderverse films?

It does bug me a bit when I can't figure out what the right lens is to view a film through because I genuinely want to be generous. I don't want to be the person who just completely doesn't understand the intentions and themes of a film that isn't trying to be opaque and subjective - and I don't think Supergirl was trying to be on the same level as Ridley Scott's Prometheus when it comes to finding signal amidst the noise, Supergirl is fairly loud about its themes....it just seems to do nothing whatsoever to actually validate those themes. Which may be a problem that I overlooked in the much glossier, and jokey Superman.

Spoilers ahead

Was this meant to read as an action comedy or am I just a snob?

I did not find Supergirl to be a silly or frivolous film. Subjectively, it felt like there were far, far fewer jokes overall compared to Superman and I only remember one or two that really landed with me. Maybe there was more there there and its just not my brand of humor, but it was infinitely less slapstick than Superman, aside from Kara's drunken brawl. I sort of get the impression that Lobo was meant to provide more comic relief, but if so he didn't exactly have me in stitches. If this was an intentional choice instead of me just not getting it, then that is itself an interesting contrast with Superman that does in some ways add more contrast to Kara and Clark and their outlooks.

So I do understand the framing here that Kara is a mess and while aspects of her messiness may be funny, this is ultimately a person who is dealing with a lot of very serious baggage. Same with her newly orphaned sidekick on a revenge quest. In a lot of ways, a lot of goofy antics would undermine the gravitas of this being a space fantasy redemption and vengeance story: that is, after all, among the common complaints of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace or Taika Waititi's Thor films. Yet all of this somberness is undermined by the most aggravating trope this film deploys:

Space Barbarians

This is incredibly, incredibly subjective but I'm so over this trope. Brutish body modification enthusiasts who are barely more eloquent than the Reavers of Firefly and sometimes, maybe, sort of follow some kind of internally consistent code of honor but only when it suits them. Krem and his gang are offhandedly referred to as having a "male only society" and, fine, whatever, they're hardly the first group like this in sci-fi, fantasy, comics, or mythology - hell the Romans celebrated the mass kidnapping of women from neighboring areas after their (semi-mythological) founding by runaway slaves, exiles, and other people of predominantly "lower" social status led to a major gender imbalance.

There's at least a way to tell this story where the Romans are scrappy underdogs who turn to wretched villainy to ensure the long term survival of their society. Krem's Ravagers...wait that was Guardians of the Galaxy....Krem's Reavers...nope that was Firefly...Krem's Venari Ral...nope that's Starfleet Academy...hang on I'll get this right....Krem's Beltalodas nope, that's the Expanse.....okay its...wait for it....The Brigands!

The Brigands.

A completely legally distinct group from Marvel's Ravagers or any of the aforementioned groups.

Disney in The Mandalorian and Skeleton Crew at least played cutesy with it and had its Space Pirates be evocative of cheesy pirates. The Expanse tries to make its pirates sophisticated and allegorical by having the Outer Planets Alliance be an exploited underclass cobbling together their forces with salvage and use savage tactics because they themselves are the victims of generations of dehumanization by Earth and Mars.

The Brigands fly spaceships but pee in buckets.

I know that this film seems to be trying to lean into the idea that this is a film capturing a much darker and more gritty side of DC...in a bio humor sense, even demonstrating that Kryptonians do in fact pee, but there's establishing our heroine has gone kind of feral and antisocial and then there's a space pirate on a space ship peeing into a bucket. A film that can't decide if its Guardians of the Galaxy or John Wick feels like an alarmingly unserious platform to vaguely gesture towards Boko Haram.

The Brigands are designed to be offputting and entirely unsympathetic so that its completely fine when a few of them die as collateral damage when they fail to kill Kara and co. and Lobo gleefully kills them by the truckload. In this I'm reminded of a discussion on the lives of henchmen in media that I thought went something along the lines of "Whose deaths matter?" but I cannot now relocate the essay, book or YouTube video I lifted this concept from (I believe it name checked John Scalzi's "Red Shirts.)

Krem is likewise created in such a way as to duplicate the Problem of Evil in superhero media. IE the infamous thought experiment used to dunk on deontological morality by demonstrating that every time Batman has an opportunity to kill the Joker and refuses to, he is passively refusing to prevent the Joker from killing more people - which he almost certainly will do. Therefore in a consequentialist paradigm, the responsibility for the Joker's future murders are shared, at least in part, by Batman as his enabler.

Intriguingly, Kara's arguments against Ruthye killing Krem are very similar to that of Batman: vengeance won't offer peace, murder will change who you are for the worse. Kara demonstrating that she does believe in a version of Clark's morality but then acting as a kind of sin eater for Ruthye could have been an interesting twist ending if not for Kara executing Krem seeming to be entirely inconsequential. If you grasp enough straws, you could perhaps argue that this is the moment where Kara decides she does in fact need connection and more specifically Clark's idealism specifically because she just killed a man and is seemingly totally fine with it.

But I think that is straw grasping.

I think two things are true with no real relationship between the two: Kara executed Krem and didn't express any real shame or regret in doing it AND THEN decided it was time to stop self medicating and get on with things, with the adventure she just undertook probably having had more to do with getting her off the fence than any issues with having killed someone.

I'm not saying that in empirical reality, she should feel bad - I leave that to you and your conscience, but in the reality of this film we are led to believe that Kara at least thinks she should say that killing Krem would be bad for Ruthye. The implication being that she either knows this from prior experience or believes this to be true for other reasons, and then kills Krem anyway - not even bothering to rationalize it: whether through there being no viable way to contain Krem and/or little hope for his rehabilitation.

Unlike the Joker, Krem definitely won't be killing for fun in the future and that should be enough for this audience member. Yet again the lack of any real introspection on this choice to reconcile it with Kara's preaching at Ruthye feels like a giant oversight if its not a deliberate choice to throw a twist in at the end as a sort of "surprise! Kara was wrong, killing for the right reasons is fine, she should have killed Krem much earlier and if she had that Space African family would still be alive. Lobo was the hero we actually needed and wanted."

Maybe I'm going to fully into the Dweeb Side as the world seems to shed any pretense of continuing to revere Enlightenment values, but it felt weird and bad even though this was fully constructed in such a way, plot wise, that Kara has no other choice from a consequentialist lens but to kill a disarmed man at her mercy in order to prevent him from future mass murder.

But then that's probably because I never sat and really thought about the implications of Superman all that closely because it was so successful at covering up anything that might make me uncomfortable with a well timed, well executed joke: something I'll be reconsidering in a post coming to a wall near you in the near future.

[biblioflyer]

Implications of "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" for racial hatred & activism

Tawny Newsome's "new" podcast Starter Treks encouraged me to revisit a classic Trek episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield." Its the one with the half black / half white alien and the half white / half black alien.

This is a really interesting episode for a number of reasons. The first is obvious: the aliens themselves. This is perhaps remembered as Trek being rather hamfisted and its not entirely wrong, at least superficially, but the dialogue is actually quite phenomenal. They go through just about every permutation of the arguments deployed for and against resistance movements: the original complaints were "a long time ago", the victims should be more than satisfied with the efforts at restitution, the methods of resistance are inappropriate, the fugitive is accused of being a master of playing on emotions and sympathies of others in order to enlist them in his cause as useless idiots he'll betray and expose to harm in his stead.*

*This last bit I've been hearing more and more of as the term "red-green-brown alliance" comes up in discussions wherein critics of anti-war and pluralist thought seem baffled that anyone would think that societies in which a typical Westerner would not want to live (especially if they are queer, female, or on a list of disfavored religions) nevertheless are composed of people who are fully human and have an intrinsic right to not have suffering imposed on them from outside their society or that a reasonable person would see excessive, pre-emptive policing of certain types of ethnic and religious minorities as vulgar and even dangerous: representing a voluntary slickening of a slippery slope.

Further at various points the science behind these aliens is interrogated. Heavy handed allegory that it is, McCoy and Spock swiftly clock that these beings almost certainly did not arise from nature alone. Spock later prods the "cop" alien about their natural history, theorizing they must have come from a monochromatic ancestor. The unspoken implication being that that monochromatic ancestor was a shared ancestor between the two peoples and, when combined with the earlier incredulity that nature could have produced such aliens, that at some point at a time lost to their history, this dimorphism was something the civilization imposed upon itself.

Presumably as a way to more easily distinguish at a glance between who was of the favored class and who was the disfavored class. Which, if this is the intended subtext, aligns nicely with one of the rationalizations for using Subsaharan Africans as slaves: assuming that racial purity can be maintained reasonably well, Europeans could tell at a glance who was a slave and who was a free person: neatly solving the problem of indentured servants getting fed up with their conditions and relocating to somewhere they could start over in anonymity.

Star Trek: TOS, once again you're both quite loud in what you have to say but then also allude to much more in the subtext for the thinking viewer.

[biblioflyer]

Supergirl: When does "Live Action" become a cartoon?

A relatively spoiler free rumination on my own idiosyncratic issues with taking superheroes out of the modern Earth setting, as in Supergirl, but then also can probably be extrapolated to why a few other settings bug me.

Something I have come to realize about how I engage with fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero media is that the more detached from normal, everyday Planet Earth it is the harder it becomes to grasp "the rules." I have realized this about myself that I am the type of fan who tends to gravitate more towards setting and scenario than characters and their personal journeys. I am not indifferent to characters, whether they have personality traits I find endearing, annoying, or annoying but understandable under the circumstances etc, is part of how I feel about setting and the nuts and bolts of how a story is told.

However, I still tend to think about characters more in terms of what their emotions and reactions tell me about the universe, the situation at hand, and the stakes. This is where I think there is the potential for at least some of the griping about the unseriousness of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or some of streaming era Star Trek to be in good faith, presuming its coming from people who are even less likely than me to become parasocially invested in specific characters. Essentially if you are reliant on the characters to set expectations for how to feel about a given situation and the tone of how the characters conduct themselves conflicts with other information you're given, that creates confusing stakes.

22nd - 24th century Star Trek deals in fairly abstract problems in a semi-distant future setting, but it features Humans and Aliens who can be assumed to be near 21st century human baseline in their physical and mental attributes, if perhaps a bit more "evolved" in terms of their inner discipline and social - emotional intelligence. When someone is exceptional, its generally called out: Vulcans possess intense mental discipline and exceptional logical thinking but are bad at social cues because they've eschewed emotion. They are also physically stronger than Humans. But not ludicrously so. So how they interact with their environments tells you a lot about their universe, its rules, the constraints the characters are under, and how to understand peril.

I like superhero stories but not in a space opera context: never really have. I think this absence of context is why putting superheroes in space opera settings has always rubbed me the wrong way. I have a deficit of whatever it is that lets me detach from reality and just appreciate the spectacle or be entirely satisfied with character arcs alone. Modern Earth works as a setting for superhero stories because when the superhero shrugs off bullets, that's a clear, unambiguous statement of how tough they are. When a supe lasers a car in half, that's a clear, unambiguous statement of how powerful that ability is.

Putting a superhero into a sci-fi or fantasy setting means that you have a being who defies nature interacting with people and objects that defy easy categorization too. Although sprinkling in a bunch of people who appear to be stock sapiens wearing conventional leather brandishing axes and gunpowder firearms does help a bit with providing the audience (me) with handholds while at the same time aggravating me due to how unimaginative it is. Antman Quantumania was at least a visually imaginative film even though it had the problem of everything being rather abstract and lacking in handholds to grasp the rules of the setting.

Maybe I can't pleased when it comes to Supes in Space, although I did like the Guardians of the Galaxy films even though by my own schema, it should pose suspension of disbelief issues. GOTG is extremely unserious and plays fast and loose with its own internal physics, you have a mishmash of different kinds of aliens and technologies so there's no real consistency to anything. It has another thing I absolutely despise which I'll go off on in a bit and at length, but in the end no single gripe or even the assemblage of gripes is a deal breaker. Perhaps its because even though it is technically a superhero film, there's an upper limit on how implausible the characters are with Gamora and Drax peaking at vaguely "super soldier" levels rather than "demigod."

I have a similar preference for the way Force users are presented in the Star Wars original trilogy for similar reasons but I won't deny that there could be some "old man shouts at clouds" there too since I'm pretentious enough to write 3k words explaining my frustrations with Supergirl but not pretentious enough to act like I'm immune to nostalgia. I also liked Masters of the Universe (2026) but there again I didn't have expectations that the setting would make sense, I understood that I was there to experience a celebration of action figure oriented imaginative play.

It could also just be that I didn't like how the space opera tropes were utilized. I wrote a lot about the utilization of Space Barbarians (TM) and the contradictory way the film moralized about the deaths of evildoers. That's coming shortly. Needs maybe one more editing pass and a shot of courage to release it into the world: it feels real weird to be a really big fan of Captain Marvel and to really, really not like Supergirl for reasons other than Marvel / DC partisanship. Although the longer I sit on it, the more I realize that my own thoughts aren't particularly original: the non-cavemen also really didn't like it either.

[biblioflyer]

Discovering the Trekrooms

Its fascinating, in a way that feels bad, to read r/Startrek rants about Discovery after a fresh viewing of The Backrooms.

For like a decade now, its just iterations of the same three or four hyperbolic gripes, often decaying to the point where they're unrecognizable as actually having a relationship to the source material:

Crying on the bridge in the middle of tense situations (a thing I think happened exactly once and it didn't actually get in the way of Michael basically telling Book he was dead to her)

Burnham as a "Mary Sue" (actually that one seems much more valid in the later seasons that most of these people don't seem to have watched bizarrely enough but then almost no one who uses that epithet every really uses it correctly),

"Its too depressing" (the first season is literally about flirting with and then pulling back from "ends justify the means" nihilism and reaffirming classic Star Trek virtues as objectively correct - but it does get cartoonishly bad with the Mirror Universe interlude.)

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I subject myself to this discourse because I actually did give Discovery a good faith effort and I have a lot of complaints, I think I mostly don't care for it, but virtually none of these lazy copies of copies of copies of hyperbolic posturing rants resonate with me, nor a lot of the time can I even discern what it is they are talking about which makes me suspect that Backrooms style distorted "still life" images of opinions have actually overwritten any original sentiments they had, assuming they had them.

[mister-dancer]

As a Discovery fiend (I really love this show!) I've had to by-and-large tune out even credible criticisms, like this.

The scars on my 1st Fandom from the hellscape of these "hyperbolic gripes" are still raw, still fresh. Like Whoopi and a lot of other Black people, Trek is an early memory of a world very different than what we had around us.

But the truth is harsher. The Discovery discourse told me that too many Trek fans really don't give a fuck about having Black people, or Women, or Gay people, centered in the show. And I say this because I remember the DS9 discourse, too, and that was harsh and brutal, too. I remember the discourse when A Woman was announced to lead Voyager.

And I see how those conversations have been shoved under the carpet, those 90s era bigotries that now have re-manifested in their own wicked Next Generation of fannish hate.

Fool me once, fool me twice.

[biblioflyer]

Good catch on Voyager. The amount of gaslighting that goes on about how toxic many online spaces were is astounding but I was there too. I used to frequent Spacebattles and Stardestroyer.net and it was vicious as vicious gets. Nowadays it seems like either people have abandoned what were performative opinions or have embraced Voyager to bolster their case that “Old Trek” was consistently “better.”

I don’t get to encounter too many passionate Discovery fans. They’ve pretty much gone underground on the bigger, more public platforms - presumably because of extreme trolling.

If you have the interest, then I’d ask you a couple questions to help me see what other people see in the show. Because I genuinely wrestle with whether there is something I’m missing that were it to slot into place, it would recontextualize the show or if I am seeing it as it is and as it is it just doesn’t work for me for reasons that I accept are purely subjective and no one else is bound by.

What do you love most about the show?

What is your biggest gripe?

I’m not here to fact check or argue about whether one set of motifs or era is more legitimate, or any of the usual argle bargle, I enjoy collecting perspectives.

Edit: In fairness, Dancer did indicate they were reticent about this topic, so I'll open this up to anyone else who stumbles across it in my limited reach.

What's your (positive) "hear me out" take on Discovery? For transparency, I've been noodling about various schemas about the ways people engage in the Trek fandom and how that might influence which series they gravitate towards: not in a judgmental way, just in the sense that I understand that are different ways of being a fan and I'm interested in trying to map that.

[biblioflyer]

Discovering the Trekrooms

Its fascinating, in a way that feels bad, to read r/Startrek rants about Discovery after a fresh viewing of The Backrooms.

For like a decade now, its just iterations of the same three or four hyperbolic gripes, often decaying to the point where they're unrecognizable as actually having a relationship to the source material:

Crying on the bridge in the middle of tense situations (a thing I think happened exactly once and it didn't actually get in the way of Michael basically telling Book he was dead to her)

Burnham as a "Mary Sue" (actually that one seems much more valid in the later seasons that most of these people don't seem to have watched bizarrely enough but then almost no one who uses that epithet every really uses it correctly),

"Its too depressing" (the first season is literally about flirting with and then pulling back from "ends justify the means" nihilism and reaffirming classic Star Trek virtues as objectively correct - but it does get cartoonishly bad with the Mirror Universe interlude.)

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I subject myself to this discourse because I actually did give Discovery a good faith effort and I have a lot of complaints, I think I mostly don't care for it, but virtually none of these lazy copies of copies of copies of hyperbolic posturing rants resonate with me, nor a lot of the time can I even discern what it is they are talking about which makes me suspect that Backrooms style distorted "still life" images of opinions have actually overwritten any original sentiments they had, assuming they had them.

[quasi-normalcy]

Paramount's decision to stop making Star Trek series for streaming anf focus more on the film end of the franchise is just really silly when you look at how legacy franchises have been having their asses kicked at the box office lately.

[biblioflyer]

The Mandalorian and Grogu wasn't even bad. I'd even put it in the top of the second quartile of Star Wars shows and firmly in the middle of the pack of Star Wars cinema. (Disclaimer: I've watched very, very little of Clone Wars). I also liked Masters of the Universe and I don't even have a strong preexisting relationship with that film, I was going to skip it until a younger coworker endorsed it.

But people are just over it all. I think what made Trek 2009 lightning in a bottle is the long fallow period. There was no built in antipathy from the reflexively skeptical, the authentically disappointed by previous media, and of course the professional rage baiter class.

It stripped away everything that wasn't a meme and went heavy on the slapstick and irony.

I suspect Paramount / Skydance will try to do that again and audiences know that trick already.

I'll defend some of this legacy stuff with my chest from the most scathing and unsophisticated criticism, but its also probably a sign of the times even for an anti-curmudgeon like myself that the most thought provoking things I've seen over the last couple years are original concepts or, like Obsession, what are fundamentally classic motifs done really, really well. I can feel the shift taking hold too, having been in a long term relationship with someone who loves horror so I've seen a lot of films at this point that I wouldn't normally have gone to that really impressed me.

[biblioflyer]

The Backrooms and the Chronicles of Darkness TTRPG (and also Deadpool)

Spoilers ahoy

This isn't fully fleshed out, more of a ramble, but I was captivated by the overlap between the spoken attempts to rationalize the Backrooms by Clark and the later explorer and the conception of both the Underworld and God Machine "infrastructure" in the Chronicles of Darkness setting.

The Underworld is described in various game lines, especially Mage and Geist, as having a loose relationship with physical geography on the surface level but only insofar as its a kind of archeological layering of the ephemeral remnants of things that no longer exist in the living world. People, objects, and even knowledge all pass into the Underworld, adding "deposits" as they are lost in the mortal world. Which is an important distinction from the Astral where presumably, once an idea no longer is known by anyone in living reality, it is lost from the collective unconsciousness as well (which is how CofD presents the Astral.)

This actually does lean more towards The Backrooms being a kind of Astral Plane in the sense that its presented as a place that collects and attempts to reconstruct memory. Memory being a thing that anyone who has spent more than five minutes dwelling on it realizes is hardly an immutable and perfect recording. Aside from things we've made a concerted effort to remember with precision, a lot of our memories are just clutter that is compressed down to lower resolution impressions our minds decompress on command with plausible inventions where needed.

Why I lean more towards the Underworld though is both the subterranean, labyrinthine feel to it and the mix of insensate and "hungry" entities dwelling within the Backrooms. In CofD, ghosts are hungry. The Underworld acts on them to cause them to surrender their identity which in the Underworld is their "physical" existence. They are being dragged downwards to a point of no return, in the bleak cosmology of CofD, this is a cthonic ocean that absorbs Memory and Identity - essentially forcing the dead to become one with everything whether they like it or not. This being a personal horror setting, its worth pondering there is a sort of bias towards terror and dread, so if there is anything after that final plunge, any experience past that its fundamentally unknowable to the characters the player is intended to play: Wizards, Sin Eaters and other beings who have an interest in exploring the depths of the Underworld for fun, profit, or, rarely - this is a personal horror game after all, for nobler intentions like carefully managing and trying to minimize the suffering in this "ecosystem."

My own personal interpretation of the interactions between Clark and Pirate Clark is that on the surface level, Pirate Clark is a distillation of all of Clark's memories that have been distorted by his perpetual stewing, the cycle of remembering, of getting angry, of blaming someone else, feeling embittered etc. has created this putrid creature that is simultaneously pitifully moaning, perhaps even sobbing but whose actions are relentlessly violent.

At the same time, I like reading Pirate Clark as having a more primal, instinctual core that is perhaps related to the nature of The Backrooms as a container for warped memories: that is to say that Pirate Clark on an instinctive level yearns to be more alive. He is perhaps fighting against the same sort of decay and corrosion that the more docile, less sensate entities seem to have been afflicted by. On some level I do wonder if Pirate Clark is trying to add more substance to himself, to make himself more resilient, in the way that CofD ghosts use Memory as currency in more civilized areas of the Underworld or will hunt one another and try to devour one another to stave off their decay.

Again, this is all existing on a symbolic level, not a level of conscious thought. Pirate Clark is not a reliable actor, he's a crude Egregore so his actions are only rational according to how he perceives the world, which definitely seems to be through a blinding haze of anger and fear. Like I said, I mostly just got caught up on the idea of a being of Memory ultimately consuming its progenitor, and in a fundamental way: itself.

As for the God Machine, the short version if you're not familiar with the setting is that there is a kind of arcane "machine" that is woven throughout reality acting according to long term and inscrutable plans. There are many, many suggestions that aspects of it may be breaking down and working at cross purposes or no longer fulfilling their original functions. Its a kind of inscrutable cosmic horror take on the concept of the demiurge where the archetypal being is using nonsensical "technology" to shape reality. The setting hems and haws about whether or not its actually technology in the way we would understand it, but tends to lean more towards its magic that is using technology as a set of symbols of intent rather than actual, honest to god Clarketech: but then of course, if it were Clarketech that appeared to be magic then we puny mortals wouldn't know the difference.....

The relationship to The Backrooms is less metaphorical here than with the Underworld, its mostly that many story seeds using the God Machine involve accidentally stumbling upon impossible spaces, literal warehouses, staging areas, machine rooms, and other aesthetically industrial but probably occult in nature places.

These are described as infrastructure. Places and systems that have been set up to serve the God Machine's Lovecraftian agenda. Places that suggest that our world is actually more of a showroom floor or stage and there is an invisible realm that exists all around where we play out our mortal dramas where work vital to existence as we understand it takes place but we are not meant to experience or tinker with and are poorly equipped to comprehend or survive it. The metaphysical equivalent of not understanding any of the hazard symbols on the access hatches to the uranium fuel rods of a nuclear reactor and wandering in like Mr. Magoo.

Which is just another way of saying that the God Machine Chronicle leaned heavily on the idea of liminal spaces with a "techgnostic" aesthetic layered onto it. Probably mining some of the same inspirations as The Backrooms draws from or at least an earlier form of the subculture and set of ideas, circa 2013.

On a more whimsical note, we can perhaps also interpret The Backrooms as serving a similar function to The Void at the End of Time in Marvel. A garbage dump of sorts for abandoned timelines, ideas, objects etc. Mary and Clark exist in a kind of "Sacred Timeline" although perhaps in the universe of the Backrooms, what it actually is is a bit like the cosmological equivalent of our planet Earth. Our universe is the one where everything is "just right" to have given rise to beings that could label a universe "just right" whereas the Backrooms contains the realities that are "close enough" to be marginally habitable but are still quite "wrong."

Of course as I write this, I realize I'm laundering more Chronicles of Darkness into The Backrooms because what I've just described is essentially the Abyss of Mage the Awakening, the irrational antimony realm that cuts Humanity off from Source thanks to the hubris of ancient and overly ambitious Mages and makes drawing down "true magic" from the Source rather perilous even for people connected to it.

One final idea that also comes to mind and this has nothing to do with Chronicles of Darkness, the Backrooms may have a relationship with fairy stories. Perhaps it’s even Arcadia itself or what’s left of it. A realm of creative potential abandoned by its inhabitants who have either died out or left, masterless the creative energy has gone feral.

[biblioflyer]

Follow up after watching The “Everything Must Go” special extended edition. Spoilers to follow for both the special edition film and the YouTube series.

Okay so the extended footage adds a few interesting world building elements. Not a lot of new information pertaining to the nature of the Backrooms itself other than stronger implications that the objects that are found there are frequently all distorted facsimiles of the same original object.

Which further leans into the idea that the Backrooms is either itself “remembering things”, going through iterations of trying to recreate things in our world, or - one suggestion by Clark who may be an unreliable narrator or has some sort of subliminal insight, the Backrooms itself is memory made physical as people and objects remember themselves.

On a less metaphysical note, if you consult the timeline for the rest of the Kane Pixels specific storyline, then it becomes undeniable there is some Weyland - Yutani style shenanigans afoot. Specifically when it comes to compartmentalization of information and using people as lab rats or bait. The film starts a month after ASync had become aware of the presence of aggressive fauna and had even gone so far as to arm a team revisiting an area where there was a near miss with a hostile entity.

Why this is important is the apparent casual disdain for personal safety the Everything Must Go team displays upon discovering a new area. Two out of three members are extremely gung ho to look around, none of them are carrying weapons, and none of them explicitly mention the potential for encountering a hostile entity. Not even the team member who keeps trying to talk the others out of this course of action raises the possibility that there could be a predator, which would be a stronger argument than “this is stupid” which implies more that they could get lost, injured, experience a “natural” hazard such as a pitfall, or some abstract unknown.

Could this just be hubris?

Sure! It’s in keeping with the genre but at the same time the way ASync handles its first brush with a threat was anything but reckless: they were extremely thorough in trying to manage risks. Which suggests that their default posture wasn’t to cavalierly feed researchers to the Backrooms in the hopes that something scientifically interesting would happen.

Thus the implication is that Captain Clark’s first known victims went in blind, completely kept in the dark about the recordings of the entity caught on the motion triggered cameras or that pursued the researcher who fell into the pit into the floor below in room 14d.

It shouldn’t be surprising that ASync is becoming more atomized and the people at the top deliberately hiding things, but it’s a bit of a fast evolution given that even a month prior it was secretive to be sure but only to the outside world, it would be quite a thing to expect the field researchers not to talk or to isolate the teams from each other.

[biblioflyer]

If not Possession, why Possession shaped?

A metaphysical and armchair psychological attempt to reconcile knee jerk reactions to Obsession with director's commentary.

Spoilers for the film Obsession (2026)

Right from the start, I do want to clarify that I am not going to be snooty about why people experience Obsession as a demonic possession story.

"Wish Nikki" behaves in such a way that one could quickly make assumptions that this is demonic. The rapid escalation from love bombing to feeding Bear his cat, to creating a shrine with the rest of the cat's remains, to the creepy walking, and the rest of her bizarre behavior creates confusion because this doesn't seem like how someone would behave if they love someone more than anyone else in the world. This just seems unnecessary, willfully cruel even.

Then when you throw in the phone call with customer support where Nikki is screaming as if in agony, it sure seems like she might be experiencing some sort of supernatural torture.

I get it! The idea that Nikki's body has been infested with a demon feels apt for the genre.

However, we have it directly from the director in multiple statements that this is not possession.

So then what is it?

If not possession, why possession shaped?

A more helpful reference point might be Dissociative Identity Disorder. Now contrary to the way its normally presented in pop culture, as its understood clinically* different personalities aren't always completely isolated, they can experience varying degrees of awareness of what is happening even if they aren't operating the meat mech right now.

What I propose is that at the moment Bear makes his wish, what happens is that a new personality emerges that is largely unaware of the original personality and is mostly in control of Nikki's body. Like DID, this is something that looks and acts a lot like possession but this isn't something you can fix with an old priest and a young priest.

Critically, this new personality seems to have Nikki's memories but doesn't seem to act as if it has experienced those memories first hand. It has an intellectual understanding of how to be a person but no real context for any of it to steer its behavior going forward. In some sense, this is a being who was "born" in the moment of Bear's wish, has some vague notes on being a person, an overriding compulsion to love Bear more than anyone in the world, and crucially: no real sense of self except in reference to Bear.

The increasingly "demonic" behavior I attribute to Wish Nikki's mental integrity rapidly breaking under the strain of violently needing to please Bear while not not having a clear understanding of what actually pleases him. Wish Nikki loves Bear more than anyone else in the universe, including herself, and also clearly needs for him to show love back. When he is put off by the duct taped door and enraged by the cat sandwich, these are devastating experiences for Wish Nikki because she's only days old with an extremely unsophisticated understanding of love and the only thing that matters to her is Bear being happy. If he's not happy, she's not fulfilling her purpose: to love Bear more than anyone else in the universe.

When Bear yells at her to be normal, Wish Nikki experiences a momentary break where she begins sobbing because she's failed again and Bear has asked her to do something she clearly does not understand how to do: be normal. Even when you have the average degree of socialization you ought to have as a person in your 20s, "be normal" is an ambiguous command. When you're days old and your only reference point for anything is whether it makes Bear happy, its practically cruel.

Which brings me to my grand theory of why Wish Nikki presents as demonic: she is ALSO suffering.

Her suffering is different from Nikki Prime** who is watching helplessly as her body is used to violate her will in increasingly disturbing ways, but Wish Nikki IS suffering. She is suffering because she is existing and trying to make do with a life that has one overriding purpose: love Bear. And it starts becoming more and more obvious that she is failing, the more she tries to fix things the worse it gets, and if she doesn't have Bear she quite literally has nothing. No purpose, no reason to live. Nothing matters except loving Bear.

And on some level, the firewall between Nikki Prime and Wish Nikki is not absolute. When she is watching Bear sleep, Wish Nikki comments that her dreams make her uncomfortable. Its implicit then that when she's asleep, Wish Nikki is confronted with thoughts and feelings she cannot reconcile with who she is as a person who is defined only by loving Bear: what if part of her, a VERY angry part of her does not love Bear? I think we pretty much get confirmation of this later on when Nikki Prime is able to speak when Wish Nikki is asleep.

I could be mistaken, but I think its also strongly implied that Wish Nikki is conscious when Nikki Prime is able to take control for brief moments and is terrified, if not by the sudden and inexplicable loss of control, then by the idea that something is causing her to take drastic actions that displease Bear - not even mistakes like cooking the cat, but full blown incidents that Wish Nikki is not responsible for.

For her part, I think Nikki Prime's primal scream when on the phone with Bear is perfectly explainable by means other than having been consigned to some sort of Hell where she is actively being tortured. Her present existence of having no control over her body and being witness to her body being used to do things she vehemently does not consent to IS the torture.

So I read this scene as Prime Nikki not having the bandwidth to speak to Bear. This experience is still fairly new and she is likely still very confused and very angry. By the time she is talking to Bear while Wish Nikki is asleep, Prime Nikki seems to understand what has happened in supernatural terms and that it can't be undone except through her death, but as of the phone call, it seems like Prime Nikki hasn't had anyone explain what has happened. Customer Service can have her "speak" to Bear, but hasn't really bothered to try talking to her it seems, or if they did, she wasn't in a receptive mood.

Later, Prime Nikki seems to have been quietly building her strength and working to understand what is happening and thus figures out she can speak to Bear when Wish Nikki is sleeping and is able to marshal some potency to break through and self harm at a moment when there are the most witnesses and thus the most consequences. I understand this as Prime Nikki having acclimated to her new reality up to a point, perhaps you could say she's moved through the stages of grief from anger to bargaining to a kind of acceptance that is actually more like a cold fury capable of some calculation rather than an uncontrolled rage.

And that's basically it. Not a capital P Possession, but a split personality where both are actually experiencing suffering, and the one you probably assume is being driven insane is actually slowly pulling herself back together to wage war for her body and the one you think is "stable" but evil is being driven insane by the impossibility of ever truly fulfilling her only and most important command: to love Bear more than anyone in the universe - and in every sense of the word.

In the end, Wish Nikki can't allow others to compete for his affection, and she must also love him more than anyone else as a verb, but also seems to have a deficit of reference points for what is "normal" and the more her behavior frightens and disgusts Bear, the more her sense of self crumbles. Its not active, conscious cruelty, its violent jealousy born of a profoundly insecure attachment style and an implicit interpretation that Bear can have no others before her.

*And even the clinical understanding of DID is a giant kettle of fish with a lot of consternation and accusations of misleading data and professional malpractice flying both ways across the proverbial battle line. However, this is not the essay for adjudicating between the different sides when it comes to the science and the pros and cons of encouraging or scolding self diagnosis. I do think its important that people know these conflicts exist though and engage with them thoughtfully and without unnecessary venom for whichever side you think is "wrong."

**Based on how I'm thinking about them, while I've used the terminology "Real Nikki" I'm coming to feel as if this minimizes the ways in which Wish Nikki, while clearly dangerous and with a severely warped moral compass, is no less a human being than someone who suffers from a non-magical extreme mental illness. Such a person may have severely limited or compromised agency with reference to objective reality or the median of society, but they still experience pain, fear, and the rest of the human experience and that matters.

[biblioflyer]

The Federation and "Bad" Peace

A defense of Federation non-interventionism and peace with morally icky entities.

The Cardassians circa the armistice with the Federation were known imperialists: enslaving the Bajorans, using brutal tactics to try to maintain their control in the face of an insurgency, and looting the planet of its natural resources leaving it ecologically damaged and sabotaging as much infrastructure as possible once they finally decided to withdraw.

The Cardassians perpetuated multiple atrocities against the Federation, killing noncombatants in events like the infamous Setlik III massacre.

The Cardassian Union is openly and directly governed by an unelected military command and a spy agency that use all of the classic tactics associated with descriptions like Stalinist to ensure their rule is unchallenged.

The Federation and the Cardassians fought a war over an indeterminate period in which millions were stated to have been killed. Its a bit hard to imagine this happening without a fairly hefty number of attacks on civilians or large scale ground force operations or both. Millions equates to thousands of Galaxy-class starships at a time when the "meta" of the series was that there were fewer than six Galaxy-class starships and the loss of 40 ships at Wolf 359 was a military disaster that was staggering. The point is that this number is hard to explain with just Dominion War style starship walls crashing into each other.

Given all of this heinousness, why doesn't the Federation just "do something" about the Cardassians?

I don't know what real world reference points the writers had in mind for the Cardassians. Prior to the Global War on Terror, a lot of fans seemed to be thinking of Iraq but in a shallow way: emphasizing the seeming vast chasm of capability between the two parties, but not stopping to think through why the original Gulf War coalition stopped short of trying to occupy Iraq and replace its government or why they would even permit Iraq to retain at least some military power.

For the fans for whom the virtue ethics argument that abstaining from war in the face of abjection outside of their borders isn't a selling point for the Federation, lets think through why the Federation would swallow a bitter pill:

One of the things we don't truly know is what the limits are of Federation power if it was fully and completely mobilized. The complete destruction of the Cardassian military down to the last security trooper who won't throw down his phaser doesn't seem impossible to fans who wonder why the Federation doesn't do just this, but it isn't ever established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Federation actually can muster the resources to do this.

Assuming it truly could, there is still a matter of material costs and moral risk.

Rip it out, root and stem

The most extreme scenario is the one I just described: the Federation extirpates the military, Obsidian Order, and anyone else who wants to point a phaser in the general direction of a gold shirt. The Federation takes over responsibility for the territorial defense of Cardassia against outside predation and for interior defense against looting, terrorism, and other crimes great and small until such time as indigenous security force and government can be established that the Federation feels like is 1. competent and 2. can be trusted. If the problem with the Cardassians is assumed to be innate to the Cardassians themselves, then this is the only solution available to the Federation: it will simply need to raise a generation or two of Cardassians who have never internalized the norms of the Union under the military and Obsidian Order and are fully assimilated to Federation values.

While the Federation is waiting for the Cardassians to assimilate to Federation habits of thought and behavior, every single day Federation security forces will be in situations where they will be making snap judgments about whether they need to protect themselves, who to believe in a petty dispute, and increasingly who to trust with responsibility and authority over their fellow citizens. And the Federation will morally and practically own the consequences of every decision. Make enough good decisions on balance and you end up with post World War 2 Japan and Germany in the end. Make enough bad decisions and you end up with Afghanistan and Iraq at the end of their respective occupations as part of the Global War on Terror.

Of course we want to believe that the morally enlightened and scientifically dominant Federation would make the best and most well informed choices. But what if this information dominance isn't enough? What if all that raw data when fed through Federation heuristics doesn't reliably spit out conclusions that fit neatly with Federation moral thinking? Or do it fast enough that a gold shirt manning a checkpoint knows whether that Cardassian approaching and ignoring orders to bring their hover craft to a complete stop is planning to ram the checkpoint or just drank too much kanar with a faulty universal translator?

Find a useful idiot to rule

Short of that extreme scenario above, there is the more common regime change option frequently exercised by great powers throughout history: kill everyone who doesn't agree that you are their suzerain and then find someone to personify a pretext of local rule. Then make that person responsible for implementing whatever reforms you desire. This is liable to fall well short of the moral preference of your average Trek fan. It doesn't feel good to replace one tyrant with another that's more amenable to your preferences while leaving literally everything else about the regime intact, at least for now.

I also don't see Federation citizens feeling like this was worth some portion of Starfleet waking up in a cold sweat reliving the moment they vaporized their first Cardassian trooper. A rather foundational experience that left deep scars on Miles O'Brien..who might also be, if I'm not mistaken, the first Starfleet character to profess to having been traumatized by killing in self defense.

Whether its ultimately selfish or not, I have begun to consider the possibility that at least one component of the Federation's preference for abstaining from wars of choice and trying to find an early off ramp when war comes to the Federation anyways, is that on some level, maybe even a very explicit level, it is understood that a familiarity with and comfort with the use of violence can erode utopia. Traumatized victims of violence from the predatory actions of neighbors and Starfleet officers who become conditioned to reflexively consider violence as a necessary tool before other options both represent a kind of social contagion that needs to be managed in a society that requires high levels of trust.

Prosperity in the context of Star Trek (as I think it does in our world) relies on a disinclination towards violence in order to ensure that more people can be trusted with Swiss army knife technologies that could easily be perverted into tools of destruction. Feeling safe and that peoples from wildly different cultural contexts reflexively prefer cooperation to "stranger danger" or zero sum competition. The end result is that the Federation quite obviously must protect its citizens and infrastructure from harm, but if it does so with unnecessary aggression it risks creating a culture where threat prevention and response get more and more loosely defined.

And as we've seen in the real world, sometimes you exchange one set of problems for a new set of much more disturbing and much more difficult to manage problems: such as exchanging a belligerent nation state ruled over by a brutal but fairly predictable tyrant for a hodgepodge of stateless militias willing to use suicide tactics and undertake ethnic cleansing.

With the Cardassians for instance, its not hard to imagine a situation where Obsidian Order and military remnants, finding no role for themselves in a post war society and with a long list of people that have deadly grievances with them, may wind up opting not to surrender and continue to wage an increasingly desperate and increasingly amoral insurgency and especially focusing on civilian casualties to demonstrate Federation and Cardassian successor state inability or unwillingness to provide for the safety of noncombatants.

Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should

One of the friction points I've experienced in the Star Trek fandom over the years is over the foreign policy of the Federation, especially between The Undiscovered Country and the Dominion War. The Federation gets dinged heavily by some fans for its many and problematic peace deals with known bad actors.

The Cardassians in particular are a recurring theme in large part because the Klingons and Romulans are understood to be polities of such power that while the Federation might prevail in direct conflict, that victory would taste like ashes. With the Cardassians, this has never really been explicitly communicated. They exist in an awkward position where they are clearly powerful enough that the Federation takes them seriously but on almost every occasion we see them confronted with a first rate starship like the Enterprise or the Nebula-class USS Phoenix, the Cardassians get clobbered and it doesn't even seem particularly close. Later, we'll see the Defiant rip through what we are led to presume are the best of the best of the Cardassian navy.

In the mind of a Trek fan who isn't really thinking things through all the way, this intrinsic weakness of the Cardassians when taken with their moral odiousness: their imperialism, their willingness to kill civilians, and commit other atrocities, their military dictatorship with a vicious police state, it turns a Trek fan into the Romulans of the Balance of Terror: arguing that the very weakness of another party is itself a moral reason to subjugate them. After all, it would be quick, easy, clean, and for the Cardassians' own good right? Right?

[biblioflyer]

The Sequel Trilogy didn't invalidate every achievement from Endor onward.

Reflections on the discourse around whether the deeds of Star Wars heroes actually matter and how people are the not their governments.

It is popular to dismiss everything that is done to mop up the Empire and strengthen the New Republic after Endor as irrelevant and a failure because the First Order will wipe it all away.

There are aspects of this I agree with: resetting the Jedi back to one lone survivor with only perfunctory training and maybe destiny on their side is ghastly in its lack of imagination and total lack of respect for the character of Luke Skywalker. And this is coming from someone who actually does not consider the broken man of Episode 8 to be a complete character assassination nor has any particular literary issues with Rey's very rocket punk ability to pick up new skills.

But at the same time, while Luke's attempt to re-establish the Jedi ends in disaster and Leia is sidelined as a radical provocateur who can't accept the war is really over, the broader meta: that nothing matters because the First Order is going to sweep the table, that deserves unpacking.

First off, while the New Republic failing to anticipate the First Order threat is presented as an example of New Republic fecklessness, tie in media such as the Mandalorian itself has gone to great lengths to show that the First Order was careful not to tip its hand too early and highly valued secrecy, using the warlords as cat's paws and distractions.

I would also invite people to really and truly try to put themselves in the headspace of the people who, after World War 1 with its vast amount of suffering, saw the moves being made by Mussolini, Hitler etc. and tried very studiously to convince themselves this was all something very unexceptional that would burn itself out without the need for another vast and bloody conflict where armies of millions clashed abroad while millions starved at home.

The failure of any relief force to come to Leia's aid in Episode 8 is held up as an example that anti-Imperial sentiment was only ever skin deep. When push came to shove, the galaxy would not rise up. This cynical viewpoint is undermined in large part by the bizarre choice to emphasize the theme of isolation and defeat while setting the beginning of Episode 8 mere hours, at most days after the destruction of Starkiller Base. A handful of days after the lion's share of the New Republic's military was destroyed at anchor along with a lot of the civil and military administration.

A common complaint about the apparent collapse of the New Republic is that in the real world, most major governments have contingency plans wherein the chain of succession is mapped out to several dozen places.

And yet, up until a few months ago, this had never really been tested in the real world until the United States and Israel started assassinating Iranian military and governmental officials as part of an attempt to (depending on which narrative you believe) start a revolution by lobotomizing the state or cause a radical shift in domestic and foreign policy by killing everyone who wouldn't immediately acquiesce to the demands of the US and Israel.

The extensive preparations by Iran to fight a war without the benefit of a consistent, centralized command have gone about as well (for Iran) as can be expected: the situation Iran has found itself in is not ideal with a vast amount of experienced command staff and infrastructure lost, but the structure of its government is largely intact even if the specific personnel occupying particular posts has gone through some grisly turnover. The state that has come through this trial is still sufficiently menacing that the cost (in blood, weapons, and treasure) to actually achieve a more complete victory over it is now well understood and unpalatable to the only party who could conceivable attempt it: namely the United States.

However, and again this is perhaps a valid complaint about the New Republic's lack of vision, this sort of deep level preparation was done in the anticipation that there is a specific, known threat with fairly well understood capabilities that stakeholders are very certain is going to act. What the New Republic should have known and when it should have known it remains a contentious question with regards to the First Order.

In the wake of the Starkiller Base disaster, we might for instance imagine that the New Republic was struggling to sort out who was still alive and coordinate a response, creating the appearance that the galaxy was cowed.

The failure of regional and local governments to mount a counter offensive between Episode 8 and Episode 9 and throw off the yoke of the First Order certainly does not inspire an idealistic assessment of how deep anti-authoritarian sentiments had penetrated post-Endor, seemingly not deep enough to cause a larger, more capable Resistance to form. On the other hand, we know from their own statements that the First Order was increasingly worried about just that. The one adult in the room bemoaned the over reliance on Starkiller Base as the primary threat to keep order in the galaxy and the way it left the First Order with much less in the way of resources to actually consolidate their rule.

When given the opportunity to decisively roll back the First and Final Orders in one climatic battle and commit regicide along the way, the galaxy rose up and did just that. The New Republic may have been very fragile as a governmental system, but the fragility of formal institutions does not directly translate to a yearning for brutality. The Rebellion and later Din Djarin may ultimately have failed to establish a government that could anticipate a threat that could lobotomize it or reconstitute itself after said lobotomizing, but they succeeded in the sense that they helped nurture a general disdain for the Empire and its system.

The spirit of anti-authoritarianism was alive the whole time, it just lacked a theory of victory and an opportunity.

In communicating this, I will give The Rise of Skywalker its due. I don't have a lot of praise for the film otherwise, but I think its fair to say one thing it did do right is recognize that there is a difference between people and their government. Governments can fail and fall. This may be interpreted as being symptomatic of a broken people, or may just be that too many people who had specific knowledge and skills were killed off along with critical pieces of infrastructure and its going to take more than a few days for an occupier to realize how shallow their pacification actually is.

So no, I don't think that the stories set between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens are pointless. That the achievements of the good guys are irrelevant. It just requires understanding that this is a story about combating the Dark Side, both the metaphysical Dark Side and the small d dark side of banal evil. It turns out Star Wars is simply mirroring what I think may audience members are personally struggling with: the establishment of governments that can implement deep, meaningful change and defend that change is harder than hogtying warlords and rocketing away to turn them over to the space cops.

[biblioflyer]

The Backrooms and the Chronicles of Darkness TTRPG (and also Deadpool)

Spoilers ahoy

This isn't fully fleshed out, more of a ramble, but I was captivated by the overlap between the spoken attempts to rationalize the Backrooms by Clark and the later explorer and the conception of both the Underworld and God Machine "infrastructure" in the Chronicles of Darkness setting.

The Underworld is described in various game lines, especially Mage and Geist, as having a loose relationship with physical geography on the surface level but only insofar as its a kind of archeological layering of the ephemeral remnants of things that no longer exist in the living world. People, objects, and even knowledge all pass into the Underworld, adding "deposits" as they are lost in the mortal world. Which is an important distinction from the Astral where presumably, once an idea no longer is known by anyone in living reality, it is lost from the collective unconsciousness as well (which is how CofD presents the Astral.)

This actually does lean more towards The Backrooms being a kind of Astral Plane in the sense that its presented as a place that collects and attempts to reconstruct memory. Memory being a thing that anyone who has spent more than five minutes dwelling on it realizes is hardly an immutable and perfect recording. Aside from things we've made a concerted effort to remember with precision, a lot of our memories are just clutter that is compressed down to lower resolution impressions our minds decompress on command with plausible inventions where needed.

Why I lean more towards the Underworld though is both the subterranean, labyrinthine feel to it and the mix of insensate and "hungry" entities dwelling within the Backrooms. In CofD, ghosts are hungry. The Underworld acts on them to cause them to surrender their identity which in the Underworld is their "physical" existence. They are being dragged downwards to a point of no return, in the bleak cosmology of CofD, this is a cthonic ocean that absorbs Memory and Identity - essentially forcing the dead to become one with everything whether they like it or not. This being a personal horror setting, its worth pondering there is a sort of bias towards terror and dread, so if there is anything after that final plunge, any experience past that its fundamentally unknowable to the characters the player is intended to play: Wizards, Sin Eaters and other beings who have an interest in exploring the depths of the Underworld for fun, profit, or, rarely - this is a personal horror game after all, for nobler intentions like carefully managing and trying to minimize the suffering in this "ecosystem."

My own personal interpretation of the interactions between Clark and Pirate Clark is that on the surface level, Pirate Clark is a distillation of all of Clark's memories that have been distorted by his perpetual stewing, the cycle of remembering, of getting angry, of blaming someone else, feeling embittered etc. has created this putrid creature that is simultaneously pitifully moaning, perhaps even sobbing but whose actions are relentlessly violent.

At the same time, I like reading Pirate Clark as having a more primal, instinctual core that is perhaps related to the nature of The Backrooms as a container for warped memories: that is to say that Pirate Clark on an instinctive level yearns to be more alive. He is perhaps fighting against the same sort of decay and corrosion that the more docile, less sensate entities seem to have been afflicted by. On some level I do wonder if Pirate Clark is trying to add more substance to himself, to make himself more resilient, in the way that CofD ghosts use Memory as currency in more civilized areas of the Underworld or will hunt one another and try to devour one another to stave off their decay.

Again, this is all existing on a symbolic level, not a level of conscious thought. Pirate Clark is not a reliable actor, he's a crude Egregore so his actions are only rational according to how he perceives the world, which definitely seems to be through a blinding haze of anger and fear. Like I said, I mostly just got caught up on the idea of a being of Memory ultimately consuming its progenitor, and in a fundamental way: itself.

As for the God Machine, the short version if you're not familiar with the setting is that there is a kind of arcane "machine" that is woven throughout reality acting according to long term and inscrutable plans. There are many, many suggestions that aspects of it may be breaking down and working at cross purposes or no longer fulfilling their original functions. Its a kind of inscrutable cosmic horror take on the concept of the demiurge where the archetypal being is using nonsensical "technology" to shape reality. The setting hems and haws about whether or not its actually technology in the way we would understand it, but tends to lean more towards its magic that is using technology as a set of symbols of intent rather than actual, honest to god Clarketech: but then of course, if it were Clarketech that appeared to be magic then we puny mortals wouldn't know the difference.....

The relationship to The Backrooms is less metaphorical here than with the Underworld, its mostly that many story seeds using the God Machine involve accidentally stumbling upon impossible spaces, literal warehouses, staging areas, machine rooms, and other aesthetically industrial but probably occult in nature places.

These are described as infrastructure. Places and systems that have been set up to serve the God Machine's Lovecraftian agenda. Places that suggest that our world is actually more of a showroom floor or stage and there is an invisible realm that exists all around where we play out our mortal dramas where work vital to existence as we understand it takes place but we are not meant to experience or tinker with and are poorly equipped to comprehend or survive it. The metaphysical equivalent of not understanding any of the hazard symbols on the access hatches to the uranium fuel rods of a nuclear reactor and wandering in like Mr. Magoo.

Which is just another way of saying that the God Machine Chronicle leaned heavily on the idea of liminal spaces with a "techgnostic" aesthetic layered onto it. Probably mining some of the same inspirations as The Backrooms draws from or at least an earlier form of the subculture and set of ideas, circa 2013.

On a more whimsical note, we can perhaps also interpret The Backrooms as serving a similar function to The Void at the End of Time in Marvel. A garbage dump of sorts for abandoned timelines, ideas, objects etc. Mary and Clark exist in a kind of "Sacred Timeline" although perhaps in the universe of the Backrooms, what it actually is is a bit like the cosmological equivalent of our planet Earth. Our universe is the one where everything is "just right" to have given rise to beings that could label a universe "just right" whereas the Backrooms contains the realities that are "close enough" to be marginally habitable but are still quite "wrong."

Of course as I write this, I realize I'm laundering more Chronicles of Darkness into The Backrooms because what I've just described is essentially the Abyss of Mage the Awakening, the irrational antimony realm that cuts Humanity off from Source thanks to the hubris of ancient and overly ambitious Mages and makes drawing down "true magic" from the Source rather perilous even for people connected to it.

One final idea that also comes to mind and this has nothing to do with Chronicles of Darkness, the Backrooms may have a relationship with fairy stories. Perhaps it’s even Arcadia itself or what’s left of it. A realm of creative potential abandoned by its inhabitants who have either died out or left, masterless the creative energy has gone feral.

[quasi-normalcy]

The other thing that I find with the Maquis is that I think the writers were leaning very hard on the historical oppression of Native Americans to make them seem sympathetic at all. Like the first time we learn anything about the situation in the Demilitarized Zone, it's in the context of a planet settled by Indigenous Americans whom Picard has been ordered to relocate, thus automatically articulating their struggle to the Trail of Tears and other real-life episodes of genocidal colonialism.

But like...the thing about the settlers on Dorvan V is that they're settlers (i.e., textually not indigenous). They're indigenous in an ethnic American sense only. And, what's more, the text of the episode is that they settled only recently, like 20 years ago (within the lifetimes of most people living on Dorvan), and against the advice of the Federation government, who told them that it was disputed territory with the Cardassians. Moreover, they're not really living under an expropriative capitalist and racist regime like the USA or the British Empire, but under what is, textually, a generally egalitarian post-scarcity society that is entirely willing to let them settle on another perfectly good planet somewhere else. So while the subtext of the episode may be that they're indigenous peoples being relocated by a remote and indifferent government, the literal text of the episode is that they're settler colonialists who are upset that their central government is unwilling to press a war against a rival power so that they're not temporarily inconvenienced. And okay; this is one of the few times that Star Trek acknowledges that how humans react to situations will continue to be informed by history even in the future, and i can definitely see how a people who have centuries of experience being lied to and exploited by various governments would be inclined to tell the Federation to go to hell when they say they have to move again, but this is (a) an extremely contrived situation (and don't even get me started on the Jamake Highwater "we must live here because this planet is sacred to us" bullshit) and (b) doesn't textually apply to any of the other planets in the DMZ.

Anyway, to me, the Maquis seem more like American settlers whining about being denied the right settle beyond the Appalachian Mountains by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 than they do like indigenous land protectors. I find them unsympathetic.

[biblioflyer]

While Journey’s End leans heavily on themes of forced relocation, I think there’s a strong context that for the rest of the Maquis and a fair amount of Starfleet the main moral outrage is ceding territory to the Cardassians. I fully and completely understand and support the Federation on this but I also understand the bitterness of buying peace with territorial concessions to a polity that got caught cheating on the cease fire, uses torture, and has at least one conflict dubbed “the (planet name) massacre” to their name.

The Federation is exercising strategic patience. On its own a war with the Cardassians is far less than existential but it’s an extra problem it doesn’t need when added to the general pile of the Romulans, instability inside the Klingon Empire, the Borg, all sorts of lesser powers that enjoy raiding, and of course escalation risk: the Cardassians when backed into a corner have all sorts of deadly options available to warp capable civilizations and if you do pound the stuffing out of them, then what? What happens to all the loose military hardware you fail to account for? Does a humiliating peace radicalize the Cardassians?

But for the Maquis the Cardassians don’t have any greater moral claim to those planets and even less of one if you aren’t of a mind do a moral relativism and tend to assume it’s bad for pillagers and torturers to win territory from the Federation. On the other hand I fully agree they have no right to expect the many to buy trouble at wholesale volumes to defend strategically worthless territory and go against the Federation ethos that peace is always worth trying even if you have to tell the families of victims that you will not be perpetuating the cycle of vengeance on behalf of the slain.

TNG and DS9 sort of had a hazy memory of the US experience in Vietnam that a war against an opponent perceived to be materially weaker by far might nevertheless bog down and turn into abject misery and horror for no satisfying conclusion.

And that might be what they were hinting at with the frequently memory holed quote of “millions of lives lost” in the Cardassian War, but when it comes to setting up the moral dilemma of the Maquis, at the very least the Maquis themselves, if not the writers, can’t quite get outside of a very 1990s mindset where war against “backwards psychos” is now awesome and easy with no real consequences. A concept that wound up causing ego to vastly exceed means….

The writers were interested in the idea of “what if a super power had to swallow an offensive peace deal for the greater good?” but didn’t have enough perspective to understand it well enough to make the Federation’s case very well.

[literary-potato]

Stanislav Petrov, 'The Man Who Saved The World,' Dies At 77

Petrov was on overnight duty in 1983 when computers indicated the U.S. had launched a nuclear strike against his country. He had only a few

RIP to a quiet hero.

A good reminder in these times that even when powerful men act with impunity to do evil, tossing out callous orders left and right, that at the end of the day those powerful men often depend on ordinary, low-level workers to push a button somewhere, to flip a switch, to pull a trigger… and that those ordinary individuals have the power to say “no.” You can refuse to push the button, and you might save countless lives in the process.

[biblioflyer]

This is a guy I've referenced quite a bit over the years in my discussion about Trek. Because Trek is a place where people like Stanislav Petrov are the heroes. The people who are willing to take a chance on being wrong rather than start a cataclysm.

Every time Picard opts not to fire first, a thing that a segment of the fandom has always decried, this is the tradition that Picard is living inside of. This is the tradition that Trek honors. You can think twice. You should think twice.

[biblioflyer]

I'm not sure I ever hated the first 20 minutes of an episode of Star Trek and loved the last 20.

But there's a first time for everything.

Note from the future, I found this in my Drafts and evidently decided not to put this into the universe at the time "Four and a Half Vulcans" aired. But it seems timely in the wake of SFA's cancellation, the announcement that SNW will end after a truncated fifth season, the all but official confirmation that the TOS reboot sequel to SNW is not happening, and also the manosphere was back in the forefront of everyone's minds for a hot minute thanks to the antics of some weirdo who apparently thinks working on yourself means violently altering your bone structure? I don't know man, please don't make me be more informed about this stuff than I already have to be as an elder millennial who works in education.

I really had to shut my technobabble brain off for "Four and a Half Vulcans" and just go with it, and that was hard.

I've always found the idea that Vulcans are extremely racist uncomfortable. And I suppose its a logical (no pun intended) extension of Spock's condescending behavior towards the other humans on the crew in TOS, although a more sophisticated analysis might have unpacked whether or not this was a response to the casual bullying of the rest of the crew, and as these things tend to work out, Spock's willingness to give it back actually resulted in him bonding with the crew and causing them to sometimes do a bit of self reflection.

But DS9 and onward saddled us with "Spock was constantly chirping on the humans in the crew, therefore all Vulcans are aggressively culturally chauvinistic and actually since Spock is only half Vulcan, he's actually the most culturally sensitive Vulcan alive and not massively overcompensating."

I don't love it, but I'm at peace with it in the same way I'm at peace with my low level tinnitus. Often I forget its there, but sometimes I can't not be aware of it and it infuriates me.

As the episode moved on though, I found more and more sophisticated commentary on lack of empathy as a major liability in interpersonal relationships and a fair amount of whimsy that I genuinely enjoyed.

There's a lot of complicated meta dynamics to Una Chin Riley and Doug the Vulcan. AKA Rebecca Romijin makes puppy eyes at Patton Oswalt. Superficially, its a classic mismatch gag played for laughs but I do think there's something sophisticated there if people want to see it.

Patton Oswalt is not exactly a guy who reflects the Greek ideal of "the golden median." Rebecca Romijin was a cover girl in her youth and has, if I may be so bold, aged rather gracefully. This isn't the type of blog to speculate about nips, tucks, fillers, and skin care routines, so when I say aged gracefully, lets assume I'm talking about how she chooses to present herself.

In another era, I'd call this male nerd wish fulfillment. And maybe there's still a layer of that.

On the other hand, Oswalt out of character is generally speaking a classy guy. In an era where there are men constructing elaborate hierarchies of male desirability, Oswalt is a person who isn't "classically handsome" but presents as educated, affable, and with a well developed sense of humor. His character, Peter, is kind, respectful, and authentically interested in Riley as a complete person, not on aesthetics alone.

I'm not saying working on your personality and your manners such that it comes naturally, not as an affected lure, is a foolproof strategy for happiness. But what's the harm in trying? Also, this is not a strategy that makes you entitled to date a supermodel: find happiness in a relationship itself, in the dynamic you have with another person, and the experience of being with them.

Back to the "racist" Vulcans!

Peter and the Vulcan Commodore's willingness to reconsider Batel's character despite his seeming innate dislike for humans nicely complicated the otherwise rather concerning presentation of Vulcans in this episode.

I know that through a lot of oscillating hands the crew were actually distorted reflections of Spock's own broken relationship with being Vulcan, but it was also something I had to keep reminding myself of every time I caught myself grinding my teeth at one of the newly Vulcan crew members being over the top obnoxious.

I'm also aware that I was grousing about character arcs being the new shadow metaplot that replaces the galaxy ending crisis of the season, but I also was struck again by how Pelia doesn't really seem to be on any sort of journey this season. She's almost exclusively a comic relief character and it seems weird that the show would tap a veteran actress with quite a legacy to only be a half mad immortal hoarder with a lot of "archaic" habits and slang that just happen to almost perfectly align with that of the target audience.

[biblioflyer]

I want to briefly revisit the topic of Vulcan chauvinism as its been depicted from DS9 onward.

I just rewatched TMP over the weekend. I'm on a bit of a TOS kick because I'm in the right head space to look at TOS and appreciate it for what it was trying to be and be very curious about it as a time capsule rather than being overly judgy and presentist - while still acknowledging that there are things that rightfully and properly give me the ick as a 2026 human in a WEIRD nation.

To that end, Spock's arc in TMP is incredibly relevant and interesting both as a companion piece to his characterization in Strange New Worlds and also as a reflection on Vulcans.

I've said this a lot but the Spock of SNW is actually quite consistent with how I read Spock in TOS and the TMP-era. The Spock who is violently ping ponging between cultures and whether to embrace his emotions and to what extent can very plausibly evolve into the steadier, aloof but not severely detached Spock of TOS and the Spock of the TMP era who is reserved and stoic but not uncaring or even all that chilly. He's exactly the kind of guy you want on a starship and in a crisis: he's cool as a cucumber but he's not so ultra rationalist that he can only find his morality in statistical calculations of the greatest good.

And its in TMP where Spock fails the kolinahr. I've actually mischaracterized this discussing it previously because I thought Spock consciously rejected it but actually he's about to be certified emotion free and he just sort of catches a vibe for V'Ger from interstellar distances. The Vulcan elders clock this right away and declare that kolinahr is not his path and he needs to find his answers elsewhere. That's it. That's how they frame it. He's not not a Vulcan, in their eyes he's not necessarily a failure although I use that word for simplicity, they pronounce that the path of purging all emotion is not the path for him.

And this nuance is one I think has been lost on all successive Trek writers who have handled Vulcan characters who aren't series regulars like Tuvok who intrinsically cannot be depicted as incredibly obnoxious about their culture and how they think everyone else is inferior, least the audience rightfully despise these characters. But every non-series regular Vulcan except Doug and T'Pol's dad? Including the members of the Enterprise who get Vulcanized via Spock? Insufferable cultural chauvinists. Downright racist even.

Heck, their entire story arc in Enterprise having to go from rather xenophobic to more open to other species seems based on this original sin of not realizing that Vulcans by and large were depicted as fairly non-judgmental in their original conception. I mean, wow, for all that the TNG - DS9 era really worked hard to flesh out the setting and add complexity, the Klingons became kind of dumb and the Vulcans got very racist.

To boldly bunny hop where no man has gone before I suppose....

[biblioflyer]

I'm not sure I ever hated the first 20 minutes of an episode of Star Trek and loved the last 20.

But there's a first time for everything.

Note from the future, I found this in my Drafts and evidently decided not to put this into the universe at the time "Four and a Half Vulcans" aired. But it seems timely in the wake of SFA's cancellation, the announcement that SNW will end after a truncated fifth season, the all but official confirmation that the TOS reboot sequel to SNW is not happening, and also the manosphere was back in the forefront of everyone's minds for a hot minute thanks to the antics of some weirdo who apparently thinks working on yourself means violently altering your bone structure? I don't know man, please don't make me be more informed about this stuff than I already have to be as an elder millennial who works in education.

I really had to shut my technobabble brain off for "Four and a Half Vulcans" and just go with it, and that was hard.

I've always found the idea that Vulcans are extremely racist uncomfortable. And I suppose its a logical (no pun intended) extension of Spock's condescending behavior towards the other humans on the crew in TOS, although a more sophisticated analysis might have unpacked whether or not this was a response to the casual bullying of the rest of the crew, and as these things tend to work out, Spock's willingness to give it back actually resulted in him bonding with the crew and causing them to sometimes do a bit of self reflection.

But DS9 and onward saddled us with "Spock was constantly chirping on the humans in the crew, therefore all Vulcans are aggressively culturally chauvinistic and actually since Spock is only half Vulcan, he's actually the most culturally sensitive Vulcan alive and not massively overcompensating."

I don't love it, but I'm at peace with it in the same way I'm at peace with my low level tinnitus. Often I forget its there, but sometimes I can't not be aware of it and it infuriates me.

As the episode moved on though, I found more and more sophisticated commentary on lack of empathy as a major liability in interpersonal relationships and a fair amount of whimsy that I genuinely enjoyed.

There's a lot of complicated meta dynamics to Una Chin Riley and Doug the Vulcan. AKA Rebecca Romijin makes puppy eyes at Patton Oswalt. Superficially, its a classic mismatch gag played for laughs but I do think there's something sophisticated there if people want to see it.

Patton Oswalt is not exactly a guy who reflects the Greek ideal of "the golden median." Rebecca Romijin was a cover girl in her youth and has, if I may be so bold, aged rather gracefully. This isn't the type of blog to speculate about nips, tucks, fillers, and skin care routines, so when I say aged gracefully, lets assume I'm talking about how she chooses to present herself.

In another era, I'd call this male nerd wish fulfillment. And maybe there's still a layer of that.

On the other hand, Oswalt out of character is generally speaking a classy guy. In an era where there are men constructing elaborate hierarchies of male desirability, Oswalt is a person who isn't "classically handsome" but presents as educated, affable, and with a well developed sense of humor. His character, Peter, is kind, respectful, and authentically interested in Riley as a complete person, not on aesthetics alone.

I'm not saying working on your personality and your manners such that it comes naturally, not as an affected lure, is a foolproof strategy for happiness. But what's the harm in trying? Also, this is not a strategy that makes you entitled to date a supermodel: find happiness in a relationship itself, in the dynamic you have with another person, and the experience of being with them.

Back to the "racist" Vulcans!

Peter and the Vulcan Commodore's willingness to reconsider Batel's character despite his seeming innate dislike for humans nicely complicated the otherwise rather concerning presentation of Vulcans in this episode.

I know that through a lot of oscillating hands the crew were actually distorted reflections of Spock's own broken relationship with being Vulcan, but it was also something I had to keep reminding myself of every time I caught myself grinding my teeth at one of the newly Vulcan crew members being over the top obnoxious.

I'm also aware that I was grousing about character arcs being the new shadow metaplot that replaces the galaxy ending crisis of the season, but I also was struck again by how Pelia doesn't really seem to be on any sort of journey this season. She's almost exclusively a comic relief character and it seems weird that the show would tap a veteran actress with quite a legacy to only be a half mad immortal hoarder with a lot of "archaic" habits and slang that just happen to almost perfectly align with that of the target audience.