concept: no astrophage au where eridians and humans still make first contact but like, properly. a whole diplomatic mission meeting in the middle of space to save travel time. stratt is humanity's greatest representation. the eridian equivalent is equally as scary and secretly soft. it's all very star trek.
but rocky and grace put the whole diplomacy thing in jeopardy by being too best buddy with it. like they're both really low level members of the mission. some engineer necessary for ship maintenance, and an obligatory molecular biologist they brought along in case they found more alien cells out in space. and these two guys like, somehow keep ending up hanging out essentially "at the back of the classroom." consistently left out of the actually important negotiations, and well, they're bored!
grace steals some laptops and starts jury-rigging his own personal translator for rocky, despite the fact that the official translation software is way quicker to learn and much more nuanced. rocky starts learning english, simplifies his eridian, and immediately starts mocking grace for needing the software. they start blabbing to each other about all the weird quirks of their respective cultures and advanced science their planets can do. the whole time they are ribbing each other about culture stuff. grace eats in front of rocky. rocky forces grace to sleep in a corridor somewhere so he can keep watch.
then stratt and the eridian leader find out and it's like
stratt: you. you've been meeting in private with a member of the eridian deligation?
grace: ... yyyes.
stratt: and you shared with them classified scientific documents?
grace: i... maybe gave him. a laptop. he's so smart! what was i supposed to do?
stratt: HIM? you've assigned male pronouns to a genderless species?
grace: he said he likes to match!
stratt: do you even know the name of this eridian?!
grace: i call him rocky :)
stratt: 😰
then on rocky's side of things it's like
eridian leader: sorry did you say you called the human after one of its digestive noises?
rocky: yeah :)
eridian leader: and. you've been telling it about how to make xenonite. one of our most vital trading resources.
rocky: yes yes, grace is very ignorant about basic chemistry 🙄
eridian leader: right. and you watch it sleep. despite the fact that all the human beings we have spoken to have described this as a cultural violation?
rocky: well he didn't like it at first but he came around!!
anyway both sides of the delegation are sweating profusely (metaphorically speaking) until they see rocky and grace in action and are like ohh! they're both freaks. we are not to blame for this. these two are just really bad at navigating cultural norms.
cut to grace curled up with rocky while he sleeps like a baby.
the thing is I am pro-rpf on principle, but I do think you should keep it away from the actual people you're shipping. but it is NOT out of concern for their comfort (insert pete wentz bank account post), it's for the same reason that like animal behaviorists and field biologists and such try to stay out of view when they're observing animals in the wild. don't tip them off it's gonna to skew the results of my study.
PSA to fan creators who don't have a lot of regular contact with children: They are almost always bigger than you think. A 1-year-old baby may already be walking. A toddler is likely already hip-high. A 10-year-old may already be taller than at least one of their parents. A 14/15 year old may already have reached their adult height.
So you're Simon, right? Simon the Butcher. Simon the Convict. Simon the Stupid Enough to Sign up For a Suicide Mission and Not Realize it Was One.
Well. Not that they told you it was one.
You weren't so clueless that you didn't figure it out before the end, of course. But you aren't sure that really works to your credit either. You did what you could, what seemed like it might help some good come from it all, and then the ocean of blood took you.
Death is not what you expected. You weren't sure what to expect. The angel kind of works, not that you completely believed one would have anything to do with you. The sunlight's nice. Believers used to preach that death lifted a man above suffering, but that doesn't seem to be the case for you. You aren't free from pain, and your body hasn't been made whole again.
There's no fighting the profound swell of anxiety that it brings up in you, to be like this. You think it'd be normal for most people who've lost both their legs and an arm and half their face, even without the ever-pressing awareness that he's fucked. A convict with no limbs? A man who can't even do manual labor now? They'd kill you outright, call it mercy and justice in equal measure, and no one would disagree.
It's probably a good thing that you're already dead.
Is this punishment? you wonder. Do others get freed from pain, but not you?
Maybe your sins weighed you down too much. Maybe this was just, all of you that could make it out of Hell? The idea fits, in a depressing sort of way. God forsook you a long time ago. But, here you are, in the light, and even though it's not perfect, it actually isn't so bad either.
The angel is called Grace. He looks like a human, like a humble man from some old story, vids from before the energy was too precious to spare on entertainment. He doesn't walk around with gleaming wings or in a white dress or anything, no, he wears a sweater and glasses and he talks kindly.
Purgatory is called Erid. The other angels don't bother taking on human forms, instead they look kind of like spiders and kind of like rocks. Incomprehensible and surrounded by full-body halos that glitter and gleam wherever the light (so much light) touches them. They sing to speak, and Grace translates for them, setting up a gleaming silver machine so that you can understand the others even when he's not around.
But he's usually around. You don't believe in guardian angels, for a lot of reasons, but it seems like Grace has taken you on. He's doing a better job advocating for you than your old legal representation ever did.
Though, tenderly dressing your wounds is probably not something you could have reasonably expected from your old counsel.
"Hey, you're okay," Grace says. His tone is conversational, easy. He doesn't talk like an avatar of divine judgment, and you are really, really glad for that. He feels normal, human, as he takes your hand and awkwardly encourages you to breathe with him. You didn't even realize you were panicking until the tight, nauseating sensation and the hammering of your heart starts to gradually recede.
You don't remember the last time someone touched you kindly. You didn't notice exactly when it stopped happening, but having it again makes you keenly aware of the long, devastating stretch of its absence.
When you've calmed down, Grace tells you a story.
It's a familiar story and an unfamiliar one, about the stars growing dim, about a desperate mission, a man sent out in a sealed metal vessel to go die on behalf of humanity. You think about God lovingly entombing one of his angels, but the more Grace talks the more you think he might also be a man. Or somewhere between the two concepts. It's hard for you to think, to keep it all clear. Sometimes you drift, and when you do you can hear the chorus of screams, the pleas and demands of the blood.
It's still there. The barrier of light keeps it separate, but the price of standing in the daylight is hearing its whispers, seeing it crash crimson against the shore.
You ask Grace if they sent him to die for them. Grace says that they did. You ask if he volunteered. You did, after all. But you didn't know you were doing that, and you wouldn't have done it if you had.
Grace says no. No, he didn't volunteer. He was dragged aboard and drugged.
The straightforwardness grips you. The rueful way he describes it, as if not being brave enough to face death for humanity is embarrassing. But as the story goes on, it's clear that he did it anyway. Not just for humanity, either, but for the other angels -- Eridians? -- instead. A Quiet Rapture, defeated in its infancy.
You put together a better picture of what's going on. Aliens, not angels? Other people, albeit strange ones, lost in the deep dark of space, losing their light?
And Grace saved it. He found the secret, a way not only to save the stars, but to feed a man lost in the depths of space. To live on a planet that saw far less light than the Earth did.
You revise your opinion. Grace isn't an angel. He's a man, but he's a man who saved his people, even though he nearly didn't. This is his near-heaven that he's pulled you to, the purgatory of a sinner too saintly to exile.
Grace thinks you're both alive. You know better, but you won't spoil it for him. One day he'll pay the last of his dues, helping mankind from afar, and then the gates of Heaven will open full for him, the last little stain on his conscience redeemed a thousand times over. He will hold paradise in his gentle hands. You want that for him, you do.
But you also want him to stay here, with you, in this place that can only glimpse the splendor of redemption from afar.
You've brought your sins along with you. Your darkness, your blood.
"I'm sorry," you say, and can't stop yourself from spilling out your innumerable crimes, the devastating missteps that have cost countless others their lives.
Grace absolves you, ever time.
"We're good, buddy. All's forgiven."
You're just. You're so tired. You just want to rest. Is that really so bad? For you to just stay here, to curl up safe in his arms, to leave the remainder behind? What do you owe to anyone else, really? You already tried, you truly did. Where did it get you? Pain, torment, a brutal end, the ocean of blood that still won't let you go.
But that's the thing. It still won't let you go. It's still here. Sometimes you dream of it, of the ocean expanding, flooding over Erid. Beating back the gleaming barriers until it fill the streets, drowns the angelic Eridians, covers their beautiful dark cities in red and the stench of iron. The little ones cry for help as they are swallowed up.
You did this, the blood screams. Give it all to me!
No!
You wake up sweating and struggling with yourself, panting as you bite back an actual cry of denial. Your body shakes, your breaths heave. You want to shove yourself off of the cot, but the only result of that would be a hard landing on the floor, and enough noise to wake Grace.
You check. The man's a light sleeper. But he's still curled up in the bed not far from yours. He'd offered you the use of his quilt, materials kind of hard to come by here, but you'd declined. Textiles are valuable, you won't rob a man of his blanket. The air in the house is always the right temperature anyway, bleeding into neither the desperate cold of a resource-conservation period, nor the perilous overheating of damaged radiation shields.
It might be nice to curl up with him. You let yourself picture it for a moment, using the fantasy to help calm down. Solid arms around you. Blanket over you both. Grace's lips against your skin.
When your breathing has evened out, you push the notion aside. You don't have anything to offer Grace except for yourself, and a lack of competition aside, that's a poor offer indeed. Especially when you've brought evil to his doorstep.
You give it a few more moments. There's an itch on your shoulder that you can't scratch. A maddening burn, like the blood eating away at you again. You have to go check. With a last glance to make sure that Grace is still asleep, you roll yourself off of the cot, moving carefully and using the bar beside it to get onto the ground. Regular meals and reasonably good sleep have helped recover some of your strength. In fact, you think this one arm you've got might be stronger than it's ever been.
Once you're on the floor, you use some of the ropes that Grace's Eridian companion, Rocky, helped set up around the house, and pull yourself a few feet to where the exo-arm is. Xenonite, the substance of angels. Grace had hurriedly tried to clarify something about it being a gas, but you're not sure you grasped the particulars there very well. It's not a normal substance, but you could already tell that.
The exo-arm is lightweight, and its mechanisms are simple. It fits over your stump, smooth and offering relatively little pressure. Even so, your flesh aches to have anything pushed up against it. You feel some of the ever-present disorientation over your lost limbs ease up at the same time, your mind accepting that you once again have two 'arms' now, even if one of them is a holy metal claw.
With the exo-arm on you're able to move yourself more easily out of the house. You don't bother with the full suit or the chair. They're noisy, and you don't really need that much right now anyway. You don't want to answer Grace's worried questions.
Outside is dark. Days pass quickly here, like a station running on some experimental cycle. But even the dark has a quality to it that's different than the one you're used to. It isn't the oppressive, all-consuming bleakness. Grace says that there are lifeforms in the upper atmosphere of Erid, a blanket of nature that blocks out the sunlight, like the almost-forgotten canopy of trees that once grew in such abundance, they could shield the world below.
But the Eridians keep a patch of sunlight clear over this place, for Grace's sake. At night, you can look up and see the stars.
You can't do it without seeing the blood as well, though. The barrier that keeps it separate does very little to quiet the way it can call to you. Come back, come back to us. You're ours. We're so lonely without you.
The worst of it isn't that it's threatening, but that it isn't. Not always. It's right, that's the worst of it. You don't really belong here, in this peace. No matter how conditional it might be. This is a better life than the one you left, a better hope of survival than you've had since Filament Station. Maybe even before that.
It's a reprieve. A period of Grace.
But the Hell of it all is still out there. This won't last, and if you try and hold onto it, you're afraid you'll destroy it. You'll destroy this, and in the meanwhile everyone you ever knew will still be lost in the dark, dying slow, agonizing deaths.
Grace thinks he can help them. That he can them food, energy, a means of fighting back and surviving, maybe even figure out a way to move the stations out of dark space. Maybe there's something to all of that. That old idea, the one nobody on places like Eden even glanced twice at, that they weren't the survivors but the condemned, and the only hope lay in finding a way out of the universe... isn't that what you once risked everything for?
Only for Filament Station to end up destroyed. The darkness inescapable after all.
Can you take a leap of faith again?
Oh, that... that stings. The thought of it. You shake, even though the air's not cold. The exo-arm grasps around sand, and you run your hand down your face, swiping tear tracks down your cheeks. The waves rustle like leaves, whispering.
You don't think Grace has the right of it, not completely. He's a scientist, and he thinks there's a scientific solution. That's why he can't find the way to where you've come from, can't understand how he brought you here. It's not physics, or at least not completely. It's God, and too many devils, and the souls of the damned and lost and deified.
You know the way back. What the universe is waiting for.
So, a moment of pity for the lost soul. You don't want to be the hero, no more than you ever wanted to be the villain. At least villainy seemed like a mask you could wear, or maybe just like one you couldn't escape, near enough to your skin to fuse with the flesh and become tolerable through proximity. Maybe heroism is the same way. That seems to be how Grace treats it, like a skin he was shoved into and made his own anyway.
Tears flow. Why you? Why does it have to be you? At least if it has to be, why do you have to choose it?
You know why. You rage against it anyway, despair clutching you, the stars benevolent but distant as you give yourself this last reprieve, to be human and flawed and frightened.
The next day, you ask Grace to take you to the blood again. You grant yourself another mercy, briefly, letting your hand move to grasp the back of his neck. You draw him in and press your forehead to his, soak in the touch and warmth and connection.
You almost beg him to find you again.
But you won't leave him with that burden, just in case he fails. You won't say anything, because it's better to leave some things unspoken, especially when they haven't really settled yet. You'll just take this one last moment of connection, and hold it close when the vast anger of a less forgiving god tries to consume you, like a candle in the storm.
Well you'll take that and the exosuit, too.
You walk back to the blood.
You don't hesitate, because you can't. If you do, you're done for. You've gotta keep it simple, avoid of the folly of Orpheus, and do not turn.
Going back to Hell is easier than getting out of it. There's probably something poetic in that. I'll come back, you think. I will. The red tide rises and swallows you, dark and deep, unspeakably heavy. The whispers mingle with your thoughts until they become a roar in your mind, nearly indistinguishable from your own rising panic, from the terrible familiarity of it all.
For a long time, you drift. The exosuit holds up, but the pressure remains immense, and the screaming, sobbing, furious commands and desperate pleading do not relent. At some point you think you hear someone knocking, hammering as if on the metal side of a sub, you hear Grace's voice calling and begging for help and oh, that's low.
"Simon, please. Just come out of there. Come out and you can be with me, I want to help you buddy but I can't quite reach..."
You scream back. You struggle, kick the suit's legs, flail and fight until all the cries and pleas merge into the same dull roar, until you grasp something with your hand. A long, black, iron trunk that seems to reach upwards and downwards in every direction. Not that you can completely which is which. Even so, you pick your best guess and start to climb.
You're not sure if it matters that much in the long run, but eventually you grab hold of something else. A metal hook of some kind. They fish you out, some group or other. The hook connects to a chain that connects to an outpost, rusted metal flooring already stained with copious amounts of blood, figures in whatever battered PPE they could salvage hanging back and watching warily as you swipe the blood off of the suit.
Dull, minimal electric lighting flickers. Haggard and unfamiliar faces stare at you. You look around. This isn't the station that launched the Iron Lung, you're pretty sure that one got destroyed. If it wasn't just an illusion, anyway.
Someone decides to aim a gun at you.
You raise your hands.
"Whoa, whoa. Easy," you say.
"What the fuck are you?" they reply, though there's already a communication channel crackling to life, someone with a stern and authoritative voice telling them to stand down.
You know how this must look.
Well... actually no, you have no idea how this must look. Weird as shit at least. You glance down at yourself. The suit is mostly holy metal. It's thick and darkly opaque over the legs, but transparent at the top, not doing much to disguise your missing arm or your scars. Sweat drips down to your chin, itches over the ruined cheek you're self-aware of.
"Uh. Hi," you say. "I've got some news."
Nobody looks terribly reassured, but nobody looks like they're keen to pick a fight either. Eventually you're escorted with varying degrees of hostility to a sealed room, with an observation window taking up much of a nearby wall. It looks like a lab. Apparently, nobody wants to sit down at a table with you.
You shrug, consider your options, and then resettle yourself inside the suit. You press the button to retract the top half. The air tastes of iron and of filters that haven't been cleaned in too long. Nostalgic, but not really missed. You take the opportunity to stretch, to itch your brow, rub at your eyes and knead some aching muscles. Somehow, for the first time, it occurs to you that you... might actually not be dead?
You don't know what to do with the thought, so you put it away.
When a light comes on in the other room, you put the top of the suit back up. Just in case.
Three people shuffle into the observation room. Once upon a time, they would have looked pretty put-together and authoritative to you. Maybe even dangerously so. Now, they mostly look like they've gone too long with too little of everything: too little light, food, water. Hope.
"Your resemblance to the convict pilot from the SM-13 has been noted," one of them states. "What are you?"
They're trying to sound like they have some idea of what's going on. They don't, of course, but it's interesting to recognize it and to wonder how many times this kind of seemingly cool, collected, knowledgeable front has worked on you in the past. Surely someone out here knows what they're doing, right?
They don't. You get it now. You know more than them, and you are also still just stumbling through the layers of this, looking for the barest slivers of salvation.
But there's only one thing you can do at this point, and that's give them what you have. So you do. You launch into it, describing everything: the mission, what happened to you, as best as you can still understand it. Then your rescue, Erid, meeting Grace, the stars that are still out there somewhere in a place that might still be reached. The people who are still out there, trying to reach them.
Stone faces meet your story. It shouldn't be frustrating, it shouldn't be distressing. It's exactly what you'd guessed would happen. But oh, you'd almost forgotten how much you hate it, the blank faces, the assessing eyes and the remote, dehumanizing distance of it all. The way they don't even tell you what they're doing when they file back out to go discuss all your claims, to decide what they're going to try and do with you now.
They come back, eventually. They want to know if you have proof. You admit you don't. You thought about trying to bring something with you, but in the end you couldn't trust that the blood wouldn't change it. Even the suit was a gamble. You anticipated skepticism, even hostility, and even though you don't like it, you hold cards that nobody else here does. And you know one thing very well:
They need this.
They need a miracle more than you need their cooperation.
So, you just leave it be. You do what you imagine an honest man would and tell them the truth, hold up this small, flickering, improbable candle for them to see. They try and demand you relinquish the suit to them, and you laugh and tell them no. There's more furious debate, someone puts a gun on your again, and you tell them that they'll just cause a ricochet. They don't know enough to try testing it. Neither do you, actually.
Okay so maybe that's one lie you've told. It could be true, so it's really more of a warning and a bluff rolled into one.
Three weeks into it, after enduring the most begrudging rations, one-sided interrogations, and getting sick to death of sweating in the exosuit, the sky above the outpost warps and distorts, and a hundred xenonite canisters raid down.
You're just a man named Simon, right? But for the first time in your life, you know what it feels like to have faith rewarded.
Please start that project you're thinking about. Post it anywhere you can. Let people see the art you can bring to the world. Please, I want to see it. Just type that first word. I believe in you!
Everybody and their mothers understood why removing Sokka's misogyny in the ATLA live action was a bad idea and made the story worse but suddenly when they remove Sanji and Zoro's misogyny in OPLA it's a good thing?? Make it make sense
Sure, I'll make it make sense. Because comparing the two starts from a place of false parallelism.
In ATLA, Sokka's misogyny was present for 3 episodes in the very beginning of the show, and then used to deliver narrative carthasis in episode 4, in the form of Sokka's 180 turn into feminism. The tension of flexing the rubber band of Sokka's misogyny was brief, and the release of that tension then felt appropriatly sized, because it came so soon in the series. The the rest of the show continued slapping instant karmic punishments to characters who expressed misogynistic beliefs. (Anyone who underestimated Toph, Yue's bethored, the guys who catcalled Katara, etc, etc). The world of ATLA is such, that it bends itself to always prove the misogynist wrong. (of course atla also has it's weak points where it falters with this aim, but the express aim is clearly there) The audience is primed, so that they can ignore the flinch of hearing a misogynist micro (or macro) agression, because they can expect the cathrasis of a karmic punishment to follow.
This works very well in the genre of escapist fantasy adventure. Shows like Succession, or Breaking Bad, or IWTV can present misogynist characters, who never learn or face any consequences, because the cathrasis of those shows comes from watching unpleasant people wallow in their self-inflicted miseries. They are shows about characters you love to hate.
Escapist fantasy adventure as a genre doesn't want to create characters you love to hate. It wants to create characters you love to love.
One Piece is an escapist fantasy adventure. It wants to create characters we love to love. So, it also has to ask the question of: How much can we pull on the rubber-band of discomfort before delivering any kind of cathrasis to the audience. The complaints that animanga One Piece faces, comes from the fact that for a lot of people, the answer is not this much.
Complaints about ATLA liveaction removing Sokka's *Suki teaches him about feminism* moment, and complaints about animanga One Piece having characters dropping misogynistic microagressions casually all over the place, come from the exact same emotion. 'I wanted to see a moment of fantasy-wish-fulfillment where a man changes how he behaves, and I was not delivered that emotional cathrasis.'
This has nothing to do with whether any of the misogyny of the characters makes sense in universe.
Different people will find different character flaws more or less bearable, and it's always a tight-rope you have to walk on. But creators do have a choice in what flaws they expect the audience to find interesting and where the line of so-insufferable-I'm-picking-a-different-show lies. I think for OPLA crew, the choices would have been
Leave it as it is, rubbing that *discomfort without any comfort* button way too roughly for a HUGE chunks of the new audience.
Create an entirely new storyline about Sanji and Zoro facing consequences and *changing their ways*. And I would be willing to bet actual money that the fans of the animanga would have been even more pissed if OPLA had started soloing with the storyline like that.
Just sand down the sexist corners, as the show did. And from these three options, I fully belive they picked the right one by pikcing this.
This turned into a pretty long rant, but it does bother me that it is often the case that misogyny is seen as *bigotry light* and the onus of accepting that media has misogyny in it, is put on the female audiences. I have a feeling that we as as society are much more accepting that making a character a racist is going to need helluva strong narrative justification, because the discomfort that choie like that causes in an audience is expected to be very high. But often it seems that the discomfort misogyny is expected to cause in an audience is.... much less. I don't like that assumption.
ohhh man. apparently when you copy+paste stuff directly from claude into ao3 it includes code. which anyone can find. people have found it in big, popular fics in multiple fandoms 😬. also heated rivalry; some of which the authors fervently denied using AI. link to thread.
link to their complete findings for those without twitter
Hola, Doomers! It's July 15th, so here's the June of Doom 2027 prompt list for all your doomsday planning! All the good stuff's below the cut!
Previous Dooms: 2023 || 2024 || 2025 || 2026
What the heck's a June of Doom?
This is a month-long prompt challenge/ list/ event/ thing that focuses on whump, angst, hurt/ comfort, and the like. Despite the air of doom it exudes, this challenge is very relaxed—your mod knows life happens but you still want to be part of your fandom(s), and sometimes you can't just sit down 30 days in a row to write/ art/ create. So, this list is out stupid early every year so you have the chance to prepare and particiapte! It's never too soon to Doom!
Rules
Tag your stuff with appropriate warnings, plzkthnx.
AI-created content is highly discouraged and frowned upon. I have no way of "checking", but I respect the time and effort people put into their crafts and encourage everyone to do the same. This isn't a contest for best written or prettiest art — it's a challenge, so challenge yourself.
Be cool. We're cool here. Don't like, don't read. Don't start none, won't be none. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it. Let people be happy. 💕 (But if someone's comin' at you within the confines of this challenge, let me know ASAP.)
FAQ
You can participate with original and fan works!
You can do so with whatever medium you want!
You can combine this challenge with other challenges!
You can start/ finish this challenge whenever the heck you want! And I'll reblog it here if you tag the blog, even if it's not June!
You can use one, some, or all of the prompts listed for a given day however you want! The point is to be creative!
You can mix and match prompts from different days!
If nothing on a certain day is inspiring you, there are 15 alternate prompts to play with!
Angst, hurt/comfort, and lighter/funnier forms of whump are welcomed and encouraged! Torture takes many forms! :)
I'll post reminders and such as we get closer!
[AO3 Collection] - Open late May 2027
[Banners] - Eventually!
**Only posts that tag the blog @juneofdoom will be reblogged. I am a one-man show and haven't time to comb through all the variants of the #juneofdoom tags anymore with the number of participants we have, so if you want to be featured here on the main blog, just @ me!**
If you have any questions, comments, shout outs, ideas, or just need some encouragement, inbox me anytime, June or not!
Have fun, Doomers! ⚡︎
2027 Prompt List ⚡︎
"Don't panic."
| Obedience | Shivering | Vertigo
"I'm trying!"
| Whip | Emergency Room | Blackmail
"Leave me alone."
| Cold Shoulder | Locked Out | Relapse
"The thing is only acting in self defense because it gets attacked first"
The very first experience it has with the base crew is that they save it from people shooting at it, give it warm hugs, and kill the people trying to deatroy it. After that it attacks and impersonates an unknown (at the time) member of the crew. After that it gets surrounded by dogs who are angry but too scared to approach, then it changes, then it attacks the huskies, and only then does anyone in the base camp treat it with hostility.
You can imagine anything you want for the unknowns (before the movie starts, whether it can tell animals apart, etc), but you are fully wrong if you characterize its reception as being preemptively attacked. You can interpret things lots of ways, but saying the humans at the camp attack it first is factually wrong.
"None of the men know each other enough to recognize an impersonation."
The entire first act of the movie is devoted to establishing that they know each other with an Intimacy so deep they can anticipate one another's actions and attitudes. They have been in an isolated arctic base for months and months where they can barely leave the same building. They are in one another's personal space throughout the movie. It's a vital plot point that the Thing can immitate people down to memories and personality traits. It's a vital metaphorical point as well. It's so deeply and fundamentally superficial and factually incorrect to call them unfamiliar with each other that it implies total inattention to what is happening on screen.
There are so, so many completely reasonable ways to read ideas of social disaffectation, queerness, and more into the text of the movie without misrepresenting the factual text. I'm screaming and crying and throwing up blood, what else would everyone like to propose about horror movies that sounds great aside from being entirely spurious? Someone told me psychological thrillers are the only good horror movies an hour and a half ago, we could start there. I want people to think in these ways about horror but also talking about it in a way that depends on the the text of the film does require a certain amount of knowing the actual text of the film.
Actually I think this is important tags that speak to a larger idea about horror conversation:
The Thing is, at heart, not a movie about any singular decision or behavior creating a bad outcome. Baked into the 1982 movie is failure, death, entropy, inevitable loss. It's not a movie that's meant to have a right solution, or a right decision - but when someone comes at this very bleak story without a good grounding in horror, there's a kind of urge to treat it like a puzzle. If only they were closer. If only they communicated.
That's not meeting it where it's at, because it rests on a situation where none of those elements really exist. People acted the best they could in the circumstances with the tools and information they had - and it simply was not enough. Nearly everyone dies. Even with the ambiguous ending, whoever is human is going to die, because it's winter in Antarctica and he is hundreds of miles from anywhere with no shelter and no food and no transportation. That's the sort of horror it is, the idea that when faced with extinction humanity's best efforts won't succeed. Creating an interpretation where if we had "just" this or that is shying away from the bleakness. But at the same time, not facing up to the idea that some things really might not be solvable, that the worst can happen in spite of it all, is a necessary skill. Not one we need to indulge in constantly, but we should have that knowledge.
And in a greater capacity, this is where I see things go very wrong when someone unfamiliar with or disdainful of horror tries to expound on the genre. It comes from a place of not wanting bad things to happen - not rose colored glasses or naivete - but not wanting the animal to die, not wanting the house to burn, not wanting the parents to lose a child. Not wanting to feel sick or hurt, a normal and human response to a genre which constantly steps over those lines, and quite often does so artlessly and with nothing but puerile shock at heart. That makes it difficult to examine in good faith, and wanting to see horror as something good for oneself leads most people to look for the places where horror doesn't stray close to the boundaries. Solving the problem of "bad horror" by presenting horror comedy or psychological thrillers as better side of horror, for example. But that's just another case of wanting to solve something that doesn't exist to have a solution. Part of getting the genre is recognizing not only that bad things happen in horror, but the ugly and awful and transgressive side is not a mistaken choice, not an error. It's part of what horror is, like a person, you can't understand it without understanding what you dislike along with what you like. Horror can't be corrected out of a set of flaws, those have to be accepted as part of seeing the genre as a whole.
Also, this isn't meant to suggest all horror is hopeless, mean, and cruel. Plent of horror is actually about having made one bad decision, having acted out of hubris, could have been solved by just talking reasonably and so forth. Those are all their own kind of horror plus loads of others. It's more that you can't fix the genre by decoding a right or wrong horror anymore than you can support an interpretation of The Thing where the base crew would have survived or mediated or so on. It's not a genre where a good version exists, because there's too much in it already which is either awful as a matter of fact like pain and death, or which is morally repugnant like racism and homophobia. It's useless to look for a way all of those things can somehow be retroactively solved. It's necessary to face all those things as a part of life. In horror, we have to acknowledge how much of it sucks (artistically) and was made by awful people and had deeply flawed examples of systemic oppression to actually like see the genre in a clear light. And similarly we also have to recognize how much of it is also necessarily transgressive in a way that cannot be anything except unpleasant, because that's part of things people find horrific. You can't have a respectable horror genre, is kinda the thing. There's too much going on, and trying to solve a flaw in like "too much gore" or "animal death" just ends up cutting off a necessary thing to the whole genre. The absolutely most bloodless zero death zero problematic element in the present day zero conflict good ending horror is still going to be uncomfortable because that's the point. Or it might suck. But lots of horror sucks, also, and sometimes that's also interesting.
people who aren't in the fandom PLEASE still check this out. you don't need to have watched the original play (though it helps somewhat) it's soo good and unsettling and such a ridiculously creative but fitting way to present the story while perfectly encapsulating the vibe of the OG play. what an EXPERIENCE
Hello! I'm very interested in making podfics but I can't seem to find anywhere that explains how to put the audio file into ao3. I'm not the most tech savvy person so I'm hoping you or your followers know. Thank you in advance, I love your account!
There are two ideas you need to understand when you're trying to post media on AO3. Those two ideas are hosting and embedding.
hosting means (basically) storing and sharing. You upload a file to a host and that host then serves your file to the people or websites that try to access it.
embedding is (basically) displaying or presenting.
The host holds the file and shares it with AO3 when you embed it in your work. It then gets displayed when you post.
Both archive.org and soundcloud.com are hosts that can embed directly into AO3. Other hosts might not work but I know that those both do.
Since you're new to podficcing, I'm also going to recommend Azdaema's Newbie's Guide to Podficcing and GodofLaundryBaskets' Keep it Simple: A Highly Biased Podfic Guide for Absolute Beginners.
Podficcers - please add in any other resources you think might be helpful!
(shoutout to @hullomoon for reccing those two guides to me when I was looking for info before)
A great guide for different hosting options is @godoflaundrybaskets ' amazing Podfic Hosting Guide! I highly recommend it.
I also want to extend an offer to anyone interested in maybe dipping their toe into podfic waters (or who is already a podficcer) to join the Podfic community on Tumblr and also the Podfichat discord server. Lots of super knowledgeable and super friendly podficcers would love to welcome you and help you out with any questions you have!
I know this movie is about cycles and loops and says so again and again but omg I’m going CRAZY at the thought of Mary in her loop. TWO VERSIONS of her are right back to where she was as a kid. Stuck inside, staring by at yellow filtered light.
1- @Bluewmist on Twitter / 2- Roly Poly is Taken on Twitter / 3- About Time (2012) by Richard Curtis, image from Mita Park on Unsplash / 4- Sherri Turner on Twitter / 5- Cold Solace by Anna Belle Kaufman / 6- The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
titsay
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