In my twenties. She/her /Sweden If you see this on a like search, look at
other people instead, please. If you came here on purpose, then welcome to
the dumping ground of things I'm proud of, things I made that I am not proud of but want to post anyway and various other things.
Making a pinned post. Hi. Iām Joe, people use she/her for me mostly, but any pronouns are fine. I live somewhere in Sweden.Ā In my twenties.
I donāt know what to really put here so... Eh. Iāll write something.
Iām a sex-averse and somewhat sex-repulsed asexual and I often get uncomfy suggestive things, depending on context. I donāt know, just telling my boundaries.
Iām prone to spelling errors andĀ I might not catch all of them. Not a native english speaker, but mostly fluent. I love puns. I also love robots, fictional sentient AI, artifically constructed sentience and thinking about that stuff. And weird biology. And mollusc and crustaceans. And cute and funny stuff.Ā
So. Yeah. Hope you have a good day. Or if not, I hope your day is overcomable at least. Uh, bye? Or welcome to my blog? idk.
the phrase "but i didn't mean to!" in the context of causing harm is kind of redundant to me, because almost nobody means to cause harm. most of us just want to do the right thing. and i don't mean that in a wishy-washy "oh, we're all good deep down" way, i mean that even people who regularly do the most heinous shit imaginable will have a way of justifying it to themselves. the world is not populated by hollywood sadists and psychopaths.
actually i have been thinking about this some more and i want to add on to it:
abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions tend to have a idea of themselves as Good People. recognising or acknowledging their own capacity for harm contradicts that idea. so they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the 'Bad People' box (which conveniently doubles up as the 'People I Am Allowed to Hurt' box), and just like that, the world is made simple again.
i read ross greene a lot when i was working with 'difficult' or 'behaviourally challenged' children. his refrain is kids do well if they can - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.
a teacher who believes that there are two categories of people - Good People who Mean Well, and Bad People who Cause Problems on Purpose - is not going to see it that way. they're gonna put themselves in the first category, and the misbehaving kid in the second category. and once they have effectively depersoned the kid and placed themselves on a pedestal, they can treat that kid however they want while still maintaining a moral high ground. because abuse is something that only Bad People do.
I think about this so much. It is necessary to think about this when working in caregiving fields. You gotta be able to see yourself and your colleagues as something outside of "good people" because that could cloud your judgement of actions. An action can't be good just because a "good person" did it.
I think one of the gentlest things in the world is when a friend just gets your weird little brain. like you say half a sentence and they finish it. you reference something incredibly niche from seven years ago and theyāre already nodding. they understand your strange vocabulary for emotions that donāt have real words yet. itās being seen and known and still loved. maybe especially because youāre known. god. what a gift.
āMy son, those stars are already dead. Mere ghost light.ā
Okay. So. Long post so most of this will be under a cut (Iām not completely cruel), but I wanna talk about this, because itās something that I frequently see people get wrong about the Iron Lung universe, and like Iāve said before, space is the one thing that will forever put me in āUHM ACKSHULLY āļøš¤ā mode, so thatās what Iām about to do. And you all have to listen or Iām going to be very upset.
THE STARS ARE NOT āGONEā FROM THE NIGHT SKY IN IRON LUNG.
Yes, I hear what youāre all gonna say - ābut Sammy, thatās LITERALLY the main plot point! The opening line in the movie is āthe stars are goneā, what are you talking about?ā Please allow me to explain, because for this to actually make sense, yāall need to understand just how unfathomably big space is.
The closest star to Earth is, obviously, the sun. The sun is approximately 8 light-minutes from Earth, meaning that it takes the sunās light just over 8 minutes to reach us. When you look at the sun (which you shouldnāt do btw), youāre seeing it as it was 8 minutes ago, not what it looks like currently. So, if the sun were to suddenly just vanish Quiet Rapture style, we wouldnāt know it was gone for over 8 whole minutes. For 8 minutes weād have no idea anything had even happened. Life would continue on as normal.
Now letās look at the second closest star to Earth. That honour goes to the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, which lies about 4 light years away from the sun. So, it takes light from Proxima Centauri over 4 years to reach us, and vice versa. If Proxima Centauri got Quiet Raptureād right now, we wouldnāt know it was gone for 4 years.
Are you starting to get it now?
āWe can all still see them!ā
~10 year old Simon was very much right to say this! Space rambling aside, itās a very astute observation that points to the intelligence and curiosity of his character, even at such a young age (as clearly no one else is questioning why the stars are still visible while The Father is preaching about them being gone).
So letās look at the Quiet Rapture from the perspective of ~10 year old Simon, watching it happen in real time.
Letās say Edenās space station is just outside of Marsā orbit (which is fairly accurate to the movie based on the flashback scene). And then BOOM, Mars is gone.
Several minutes pass. Whatās that? Earth is gone too?
A few more minutes and itās Venus, a few more and itās Mercury. In 13 minutes, the sun is gone too. In a little under 5 hours, Pluto is gone, and youāre starting to think this is a pretty widespread thing. The whole solar system is vanishing before your eyes.
But then it seems to stop there, and youāre thinking, well thatās it then, the whole solar system disappeared and weāre all thatās left here on these space stations, but I guess the rest of the universe is fine, right?
But The Father is saying the stars and planets in the entire galaxy - possibly even the universe - are gone, and it doesnāt make sense. The stars are literally right there??? Nobody else seems to question it. You get weird looks when you try to argue about this because nobody talks back to The Father, and he just laughs coldly and gives you this vague explanation with āghost lightā.
(And the worst part is that he isnāt even wrong).
Four years pass and thereās a new surge of panic. Proxima Centauri* and itās two companion stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, have just vanished from the sky.
*Bear in mind Proxima Centauri isnāt actually visible to the naked eye (more on that later in the post), so whoever discovered it was gone was most likely using a telescope, if any of those survived the Quiet Rapture. Alpha Centauri A and B are visible in the night sky, so you would be able to see them blink out in real time in the Iron Lung universe.
It only cements The Fatherās authority over Eden because somehow he knew they would. He knew they were already gone to begin with.
Itās slowly starting to get to you too, because as the years go by, more and more stars wink out of existence, silently taking their planets with themā¦
But while I was thinking about all this (read: stewing about all this because Iām not gonna lie, itās a pet peeve of mine in this fandom. No hate to any of yāall, Iām just a huge nerd and probably undiagnosed with the ātism so I get a little uppity about these things, hence this entire fucking post), I started to wonder what the actual timeline of the stars disappearing would look like, so I did a little research, and itās gonna blow everyoneās minds;
Here Iāve compiled a list of all the stars within less than 20 light years of Earth and the solar system, complete with some color coding based on stellar type. (The metric of 20 light years specifically will make sense by the end of the list.)
By the events of Iron Lung, only 107 stars (excluding the sun) will be undetectable by any telescope.
Of those 107, only 22 stars (excluding the sun) will have visibly disappeared to the unaided eye.
So that means that by the time Simon is being sent down in the SM-13, the solar system and 22 additional star systems are visibly missing. There are many more that would no longer be visible with a telescope, and thousands more will follow in the next few years, decades, centuries.
Unless, of course, the Quiet Rapture is somehow reversed, but thatās a post for another day.
All of my incessant ranting aside, Iām really glad that Mark and David made ghost light canon in both the movie and the game, because not only is it scientifically accurate, but itās also something that makes the Quiet Rapture that much more terrifying. Itās not something that happens quickly in the blink of an eye, itās slow and itās long and itās agonizing because you already know whatās happening, and you already know itās too late, so all you can do is watch the sky as one by one, over years and years and years, the stars disappear, the sky gets darker, and the universe seems to get smallerā¦
{@ctrl-shift-alt-9 Iām tagging you bc this is in-depth worldbuilding stuff and I feel like youād be interested in it :3}
happy disability pride month and once again, FUCK lazy subtitles. fuck the [speaks foreign language] instead of actually transcribing the words, fuck shortening sentences and changing whats been said for no reason, fuck censoring swearing in captions but not in audio and fuck anyone who says youre being 'too sensitive' for being upset about a lack of accessibility
Apparently in the states it is illegal for captions not to match audio exactly. My little brother has written emails to streaming services multiple times for subtitle errors and it is always fixed expeditiously. Forever grateful to him.
Once every hundred years a kite will lay a red egg from which hatches a black and white bird. When that bird dies, a green worm-like creature emerges from its body and will grow into the fearsome Rooster of Death. Anyone who hears the call of this Rooster will die the following day unless they can find a mysterious blue herb that grows in the wilds of Asturias.
