hey boy don't kill yourself. green's dictionary of slang is available online and allows you to explore 500 years of english vulgarity. you can search by part of speech, source, time period, etymology, and usage. there's a whole category for gay slang. they even have specific citations listed so you can see the exact context for yourself. boy did you know that in 1927 "to kneel at the altar" was slang for "to sodomize"
Princess: an effeminate and relatively youthful male homosexual or lesbian (1931-4)
Daffodil: effeminate young man (1925)
To throw a fuck into: to have sex with (1919)
Top sergeant: a masculine lesbian (1939) [‘she takes command of the girls’ privates’]
Lily: penis (1919)
Wolf: sexually aggressive man (1847); a homosexual top (1918)
Soul kiss: a deep kiss, involving putting one’s tongue into one’s partner’s mouth (1907)
Tom: a lesbian (1909); [in 'old tom'] prostitute catering to lesbians (1966)
Church mouse: a male homosexual who frequents crowded churches in order to fondle any potential sex partners. (1941)
Discover one's gender: to accept or acknowledge one’s homosexuality (1941) / Lose one's gender: To return to living as a heterosexual
Minty: a masculine lesbian (1941)
Also a lot of early 20th century vulgarity is recorded in Letter from My Father, which is a collection of letters published by a man who's dad was, in short, a major slut and human disaster who wrote about his sex life for his son. It's insane. You can find copies of it online & it's a wild fucking read (literally!) and I think a really interesting look at the life of a person who goes against our stereotypes of what people in the past were "supposed" to be like.
Anyways feel free to add y'all's favs to this post. & if you use this for gay historical fanfic please share with the class
#OH THIS IS EXTREMELY EXTREMELY HELPFUL#writing#resources#saving for later#maybe i should move my 1920s story from '25 to '27 because..... bro..........
note for writers: these are dated to the first time they were recorded, not necessarily to their first use. I imagine for many of these, they came about naturally through spoken language before they were written down anywhere. This is especially true of more underground slang because it's probably being recorded (in ways we still have) the least. So if you wanna use a term but it's a little off date-wise, give yourself some wiggle room.
also gonna take this moment to highlight two more i found recently:
Best boy: a sweetheart, a boyfriend, a husband. (1893) [w the obvious equivalent term 'best girl']
Honeydripper or honeydrips: a sexual partner (1917)
Like. Honeydripper?????? That's so horny I can't stop thinking about it. We need to bring THAT back
Hey, I just came to your blog from that massive argument you had in the comments of a post. As many people can see that literacy crisis is in full swing. From where I stand you are 100% in the right and what op was talking about was censorship. If there are things in this world that make us uncomfortable, thats a good thing. It keeps us from regressing, being uncomfortable is the only thing that drives us forward as a society. We don't live in a George Orwell novel where thought crimes are punishable! I noticed a lot of this "how DARE you write this disgusting evil smut" came during covid. A lot of people who weren't initially invested into fanfiction came to this space and tried to set their own rules. This was especially true after season 4 of Stranger Things came out. The other issue that we're having from Covid is that people don't know how to conduct themselves in public spaces online. You getting degraded as hard as you did, being called a literal pedophile because you disagreed with someone else's opinion! I unfortunately don't see this stopping any time in the near future. I just wanted you to know there's at least one person who was in your corner reading all of that.
Thank you. I knew it was probably coming the minute I opened my big mouth. I’ve watched the same playbook happen over and over. The threats, virtual yelling, accusations. I wasn’t joking I did keep a list of the insults.
I agree with you about the root causes. I’ve been involved in one fandom or another for a long time. This problem always existed but was kind of low burning. Covid and the influx of new people started it into what’s becoming an aggressive forest fire.
I definitely agree with you about how people do not know how to interact in public online spaces. To quote Mike Tyson “Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it."
He’s not wrong it’s a lot easier to be a raging asshat if you don’t have to see the victim and their feelings.
I think something has gotten lost between the beginning and the movie maybe drowned out in the arguments. But truly the show is essentially this ,beautifully drawn by this artist. A scared child reaching out and a protector, a father reaching back.
because I don't have to like it, I don't have to consume or even see it, to understand that censorship of anything at all is bad and harmful.
respectfully, if you think I like "every single thing", you are wrong. there are dozens of things in fiction and fanfic tropes that I dislike, hate or find disgusting. but no matter how much I hate them, I will always defend their rights to exist without being censored, and I will always condemn harassing real people over fiction.
if one thing can be censored, everything else, that isn't of conservative value, can and will be censored too.
Periodic reminder that you are not immune to reactionary radicalization through fandom.
We all know the “jokes” about how old bronies either came out as queer or became fascists - except they’re not really jokes, and a lot of the queer ones admit to having been in the pipeline before they came out (some in a way that implies they never totally got out of said pipeline and don’t understand the gravity of it),
GamerGate was an entire right-wing reactionary movement that was - and this is not hyperbole - partially responsible for turning fascism into a “legitimate” position by the American Overton window, composed entirely of people who feared losing their fan spaces,
We’ve had terfs right here on tumblr dot com BRAGGING about how useful fandom is as a recruiting space,
TJLC was a big pipeline for acephobia on this hellsite in particular, when people argued that headcanoning Sherlock as ace was inherently homophobic because it was denying a TOTALLY GONNA BE CANON (while the creators were promising that it wasn’t going to be canon) gay pairing, and puritanical, and just HAVING that headcanon was saying that people COULDN’T ship Johnlock, all in the interest of a “fake” sexuality and “pretending to be oppressed” and oh whoops there you went,
We see people who all but center their fandom activity and identities around figuring out which people in predominantly queer fandom spaces are SECRETLY PEDOPHILES AND GROOMERS, acting consciously or otherwise under the assumption that predominantly queer fandom spaces are just massively infested with them in a way that other spaces are not for SOME reason, who twist the definition of “pedophilia” in these spaces until it covers shipping a 17-year old fictional character with an 18-year old fictional character, or a 30-year old with a 45-year old, or including an autistic character in a ship, and drawing two 17-year old characters kissing constitutes “child porn”, and who unironically say we should bring back the Hays Code and Censorship Is Good Actually And Our Problem Is We Don’t Do It Enough and this often becomes a pipeline to “sex ed is child abuse; people shouldn’t even know what sex is until they turn 18; you need my consent to wear certain outfits in public if I see them as sexually charged, and Pride SHOULD be an assimilationist sideshow for our corporate overlords family-friendly party with no sadness or anger or ESPECIALLY acknowledgement of sex allowed”,
We’ve seen otherwise progressive people defend literal hate symbols in fanart when pushback against the above brand of reactionaries gets corrupted into zero-nuance “it’s us vs. them so anything they don’t like is Good”,
Even outside of those examples some of the most vicious, unapologetic, blatant queerphobic abuse I’ve seen in recent years hasn’t come from right-wingers but from LGBT+ people, dressing their deep, violent, seething hatred for queer people who aren’t exactly like them in a thin veneer of progressive language, who have become so convinced that they’re the main character of the fucking universe that they think writing or enjoying a queer story that doesn’t resonate with them is more queerphobic than sending a queer person who writes or enjoys such a story countless rape and death threats and denying their identity,
We’ve seen these examples again and again and again, and we keep seeing it again and again and again, so I am once again on my knees BEGGING people to recognize that this is not Something That Happens To Other, BAD People, or Something That Happens To People In BAD Fandoms, or Something That Happens To People On The OTHER Side Of Perennial Drama; this is something that CAN happen to you.
These things are the result of the fact that fandom is, by nature, a place of heightened emotion and if you don’t know what to look out for that is very exploitable; you need to know the methods people use to do this, simply Being In The Right Fandoms or Liking The Right Ships is not enough.
So, if you see someone trying to convince you that you have the ONLY valid approach to any specific character, or ship, or show, or whatever, that your ship is activism and your fanfics are praxis, and liking something else or liking the same thing differently is Only For Bad People, that is the single biggest red flag that YOU NEED TO RUN, THEY’RE TRYING TO SELL YOU SOMETHING THAT YOU DO NOT WANT
Seeing people reblog this with mile-long DNI pages that talk about about “irredeemable media” and “you’re a pedophile if you like XYZ mainstream piece of media and I hate you” and “if you like these things that are bad irl happening in fiction in any context that’s apologism for them in reality and you should be ashamed” and “if you’re okay with consenting adults having weird sex and talking about weird sex with other consenting adults and putting weird sex in appropriately tagged fanfics that means you support rape and pedophilia and bestiality and incest and you’re evil” and “terfs and exclusionists and gatekeepers gtfo BUT combination labels aren’t valid and trans men aren’t really oppressed beyond collateral damage and fuck off if you think they are lol” and doing the biggest facepalm of my life like
👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏
👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏
👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏
👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏
👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏
👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏
👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏
So I sincerely hope, if you’re one of those people reblogging this, you’re taking it as a call to seriously reflect on those beliefs and how you came to hold them, and not just sitting there smugly thinking that when I said “YOU are not immune to this” I meant “YOUR FOLLOWERS may not be immune to this, but YOU are, oh great and glorious Knower of Pure from Irredeemable, holder of the True Correct Media Opinions”
Let’s simplify it a bit: No one is immune to doing evil, period. Always reflect on what you are doing and saying and why. Becoming complacent, thinking that you’re a “good person” and thus can only do “good things” is the fast-lane to the worst kind of evil: that which tries to justify itself as good.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, indeed.
Rocky: we built our spaceship by unifying every mind on the planet to create a super hive mind, pooling out collective knowledge and problem solving skills to come up with a plan.
Grace: we gave the scariest woman I've ever met two coffees every morning, an unlimited budget, and enough legal immunity to cuss out any world leaders she wanted to and boy did she want to.
Everyone brings a dish to share. A table full of endless choices stands before you. Some dishes are labeled correctly, others arnt. Some are extra spicy so read notes and tags about the dishes.
But as you go down the table, you have the choice for what you put on your plate. Don't pick up the pasta if you're gluten-free. Avoid the stew if you don't like onions.
You have a choice again when you sit down and take a bite. Was the tater tot casserole not really what you wanted anymore? Cool, stop eating it.
Fandom is a potluck and you have a choice to not consume the things you don't like. You don't get a choice over what others bring to the potluck. You don't get to police others for what they want to eat either.
Don't be mad that we brought egg salad when you hate it. You're the one that is forcing yourself to eat it when we told you exactly what it is.
Don't like something? Don't put it on your plate and eat it. You do not get to be a bully and be mad that someone brought it and someone else likes it.
The fandom isn't all about you and your likes. We don't have to cater to you.
Find the dishes you like and just eat them. If you don't find anything you like, maybe it's time to contribute to the potluck yourself.
Another visual demonstration that historical clothing wasn’t dingy and monochrome.
All of these colours can be obtained from vegetable dyes, producing different shades depending on what mordant (colour fixative - alum, different metal filings, different vinegars) was used. See here and here for examples.
Not clothes, but this was a palette developed by the National Museum of Denmark based on paint residue from archaeological finds for the purpose of painting a reconstructed hall.
Apparently, they can tell from the chemical composition that the colours wouldn’t be mixed with black or white to mute them, but be used in their brightest form. Bright yellow and red was achieved with expensive dyes (orpiment and cinnabar) and was thus fashionable. (Source in Danish)
So. I want to talk about Dune, and how its subject matter overlaps with my professional training as a geneticist, and how Dune: Awakening got me thinking about ways to mess with it. But to get there, I want to go on so many tangents that it's spawned an entire series of posts, because I looked at the thousands of words I'd written and realized "maybe this has become a bit much."
Dune's got overarching themes of future human evolution, and how humans might one day deliberately modify themselves both genetically, chemically, and behaviorally to direct the course of the species. And along the way, your great-great grandma might start talking to you through your genes.
Let's discuss that. Because Frank Herbert was big into genetic memory as a plot device, and biology is big into that not being a thing. Let me explain why, and tell you about some other cool stuff along the way!
I'll be discussing material from both the books and movies, with most of it pitched toward an audience that has seen one to none of these. I will also be discussing a lot of concepts in genetics and biology in general, which I've attempted to pitch toward a general audience. Feel free to use reblogs or comments to leave questions or comments! Dune is up to interpretation in a lot of ways, and the sciences discussed here have a bajillion nuances and sub-specialties, of which I've only personally worked in a few, so I'm always happy to learn more.
Content warning for Lady Jessica's horror movie face. If you want bonus rambles on all sorts of topics, check out the image descriptions!
Since there's some people who've expressed interest but haven't ever seen or read Dune, let me give a quick summary of the relevant plotline: Dune follows Paul Atreides, as he continues the ongoing blood feud with the Harkonnen family and also finds out he's a result of a program by the Bene Gesserit sisterhood to create a manufactured messiah, using the same tactics as contestants in the Westminster Dog Show: breeding together the weirdest people you've ever seen, until they check off all the boxes for the space-witch kennel club.
The Bene Gesserit, via years of intensive training and drinking a specific kind of poison, are able to unlock a portion of their genetic memories, granting them the wisdom of the ages. Paul's mother undergoes this process, and Paul eventually does too, unlocking his entire bloodline. This gives him so much knowledge that he's able to predict the future by seeing how the past played out. It goes great for everybody. Don't worry about the holy war, I'm sure that'll be fine.
Right, so, first off, let's just make this a clear no: The genome does not contain memories. There are two things we have that could be termed genetic memories, and neither of them are what Frank Herbert describes.
First, we have instincts. These are hard to positively identify in humans because we're such social animals and love learning things by imitating each other, but we do have some that we can point to: babies crying, the instinct to nurse, how to swallow food without choking, that kind of thing. These are things that just help you not die.
And not dying is good! That's just not what we're looking for here.
What the genome itself does have are little chemical doodads that can be broadly classed as epigenetic modifications: "epigenetic" literally meaning "above the genetic", so this is an added layer of coding, separate from the DNA itself, that alters how genes are used, rather than changing the genes themselves. Unlike the genome, epigenetic modifications are dynamic, and they aren't all the same across the body. They're different in every cell, they can change throughout the day, and respond to different conditions. Some last fractions of a second, some can last for basically a whole lifetime. A subset of them can even be inherited from your parents!
This means that events within the life of a single individual can in fact alter the way an offspring's genes are used, moving faster than the pace of genetic mutation. That's often very slow, changing the makeup of an entire population on the scale of multiple generations. But if you have a famine? You need something quicker.
And indeed, that's one of the first places we saw evidence for this kind of epigenetic inheritance. The Hongerwinter of 1944-1945 that starved the Netherlands during WWII has resulted in greater rates of several chronic health conditions in granddaughters of mothers who were pregnant during the famine. This is called transgenerational stress inheritance, where extreme physical or psychological hardship can have long-lasting effects in a family, even if parent and child never meet.
These studies controlled for all the factors that might complicate these findings, leaving only the intergenerational effects of starvation as a clear culprit. So, if we know that parents can pass down their stress responses to famine, or other epigenetic factors, what else might be carried? Could you inherit memories?
Well, no. While we don't have a great understanding of how experiential memories are formed (as opposed to instincts and reflexes), remember back to something. I said earlier: epigenetic marks are not shared across the body. Even if epigenetics probably plays a component in memory formation, your brain and ovaries are in a long-distance relationship, with shitty cell service. This is why we can have vague, intergenerational stress responses encoded in epigenetics, but nothing more concrete than that.
Also, the majority of epigenetic marks get stripped off during early embryonic development, leaving only a few that get carried over. There's a lot we're still learning about it and it's an active area of research, but hopefully you can see why you're not humming your great-great-great-great grandmother's favorite songs unless she left the family some sheet music.
But what if we want to bullshit a reason for how genetic memory could work, in a universe that isn't ours, with genetics and epigenetics that work completely different from our own?
jpegs.
I have to emphasize, what I'm about to propose is not the way anything works in real life. This is pure science fantasy.
Compressing data is a very useful process that we use all the time in computing and in communication. Like, a workout routine will tell you "do two thousand steps today" not "step. step. step. step. step. step. step. step. step. step." for three pages. And if you were wondering, yes. I actually checked how many pages it would be. Compression acts like that: a series of instructions that tell you how to build a digital file, do a task, or make something. Some methods are lossless, which means that the compressed instructions will always result in the same end product. Others are lossy, which means that certain data we find less important is thrown out entirely, preserving a decent facsimile of the original template. PNGs are lossless, and often bigger. JPGs are lossy, but are smaller file sizes.
And we need a lot of storage space to pack in twenty bajillion generations into one brain.
A hypothetical system of genetic memory would require compressing vast amounts of information about how to structure a brain, on a level of detail that our actual genetics doesn't do. We all end up with brains shaped approximately the same way, but not exactly the same. Everybody has an amygdala, and it grows into a predictable structure, but this ain't exactly precise. Brain cells show up, they go where they're needed, and nobody's taking role call.
I mean, not unless you're somewhere like the Allan Brain Institute, but even they don't pretend like they're gonna do a one-and-done here. There is also the deceptively named paper "Neuronal wiring diagram of an adult brain", which is an amazing achievement that takes a couple sentences before you find out they're talking about an adult fruit fly.
Anyway! Connections between neurons start out quite wild and woolly, then get pruned back as we learn: this process basically makes highly complex biological circuits that encode skills, memories, habits, addictions, and everything else you can think of. Like, literally. Everything you can think of is determined by these connections. And some you don't think about, like unconscious movements, subconscious processes that run in the background, etc. etc. As mentioned, some instincts are pretty hard-wired in there, indicating that those structures are constructed to a high degree of similarity in everybody.
What we would basically need would be to extend that a lot. We'd need to add in systems that encode bloodline-specific patterns of neural circuit formation, which are generally not consciously accessible, but can be consciously activated if a person is exposed to the right psychoactive compounds, temporarily or permanently unlocking some other neural mechanism that makes the switch.
If we wanted to make this only mostly entirely impossible, we could say that this is an epigenetic mechanism, one that isn't wiped out during the purge of epigenetic marks within the first few days of development. I want to emphasize, this would require a lot more of these marks to be maintained, but hey, some preservation is possible, so we can say more could stick around. Once the brain develops, it starts a process of preferentially pruning connections between neurons, to make the circuits that encode these ancestral memories. The epigenetic encoding of ancestral memory would be basically compressed into a series of complex but lossy biochemical algorithms, which would allow memories to be retained up to a point. Each generation would lose some data, freeing up more for the next generations. The brain can hold a lot, but even when bullshitting, I'm not willing to say we've got anything like infinite capacity in there.
We still have the logistical problem of getting this encoded information from the brain of a parent to their freakin' gonads, but I'll take a swing at that as well.
Make an entirely new regulatory system in the body. When a memory is formed, nerve impulses that reflect the new structure of the memory are sent to a purely hypothetical organ that can transmit the information. I have two options I can think of:
The organ creates cells, which act as messengers. These cells produce RNA that signal where in the genome needs new epigenetic marks. These circulate through the bloodstream, eventually finding the gonads, where they interact with tissue there. The signal is then propagated through to developing eggs or sperm via… something. Gap junctions, I guess, I don't study intercellular signalling.
The organ creates RNA that is packaged into endogenous retrovirus-like particles and sent into the bloodstream. What the hell does that mean? Well, your DNA has ancient virus genomes accidentally stuck in it, some of which have been coopted for regulating cell behavior. But sometimes, at specific stages or development or in specific biological fuckups, some viral genes get properly reactivated and actually make virus-like particles! Usually it is not ideal when these regain the ability to be infectious, but we can make that a thing for Dune! Give them surface proteins that latch onto reproductive cells and infect them with RNA, acting as both a messenger for the modifications we need, and to make more viral particles. Preferably without exploding the cell in the process, because that would be bad.
I cannot stress enough how much bullshit I'm having to put out here while ignoring the many gopher holes of various biological impossibilities, trying not to fall into one lest I break a leg.
If we want to make this even more impossible, we could say the DNA itself is being altered. That would get around the issue of epigenetic marks getting removed during reproduction and also give a plausible reason why these memories wouldn't be accessible without a chemical signal that activates the brain to form new connections, plus also creating a handy way to cause the dreaded status of Abomination. What's that, movie-watchers and others ask? Good question! Let's ask Horror Movie Face Lady Jessica what that's all about.
Abomination is what happens when genetic memories are unlocked in someone who is not sufficiently trained to control the weight of countless generations bearing down on their consciousness. Strong personalities within the memories can go progress from speaking to the original personality, influencing their behavior, or even go as far as to suppress the original personality entirely, producing an effect that basically manifests as possession by a ghost in their genes.
While Dune itself doesn't include any Abominations per the story as written, the line may be fuzzy, and Dennis Villeneuve seems to have leaned into that. Jessica's personality radically shifts after she unlocks her genetic memory. We've arguably witnessed manipulative behavior from Paul's visions as well, which pushed him into doing things he hadn't wanted to do, and ending with a personality shift similar to what happened to Jessica. Some of the things he says in the movie are not found in the books: his realization that both he and his mother are Harkonnens by lineage has more weight in the movies, with his comment being "We're Harkonnens. So this is how we'll survive: by being Harkonnens."
So, Villeneuve may have been making the suggestion that Paul, trained in the Bene Gesserit ways but not sufficiently trained to safely unlock his genetic memory, may have been partially taken over. It's the best explanation I have for why the Reverend Mother Mohiam calls him "Abomination" in Dune: Part Two, rather than the I-won't-totally-spoil-who she directed that toward in the book. Jessica probably had something similar happen, as she wasn't actually on a path to be a Reverend Mother.
Oh hey and you know who really didn't have training?
I'm sure that won't be a problem later.
We already have regulatory regions coded into the genome, so adding in more isn't a stretch. They would probably be subject to more rapid degradation than genes themselves though, because they're not critical to, y'know, living. So expect mutations to up in these regions, leading to imperfect recall, or even false genetic memories.
But how would you actually make changes to the genome within the lifetime of a person? In humans, outside of a couple of really special contexts that aren't relevant here, that's something that doesn't happen.
Well, it's simple! We just need humans to be like bacteria.
no, that's not it.
CRISPR/Cas gene editing is a technique we scientists have stolen from distant cousins of strep throat, and we're using it for genome editing. Basically, bacteria can get infected by a virus too, and they don't like to be infected by a virus. So, because they're a single cell, they need in-house solutions to find viral DNA in their own genomes and snip them out. Geneticists have used that for gene editing in laboratory settings: add in a DNA template sequence for the cell to use as instructions for what to put in the gap, and bam, you can insert a new DNA sequence. There are a load of caveats, but that's the basic idea. Load a CRISPR/Cas system into one of the fictional delivery mechanisms I mentioned above, and you've got a genetic memory.
I have to stress that humans are not, in fact, bacteria, having a programmable CRISPR/Cas system in your body would probably be a great way to shred your genome due to some side effects it can cause when it gets a bit too exuberant, and I am not proposing this as any sort of real thing. How would you encode the guide and repair templates? Not my problem! I've already thought about this way more than Frank Herbert did.
Now, this could in fact lead to terrible psychological effects, beyond the Abomination thing. Like, beyond destabilizing your genome, obviously. Like, there's a lot of sensory information that we filter out 99% of the time. What's your tongue feel like right now? You probably weren't conscious of that until I mentioned it, and now you're thinking about it. Imagine that, but it's twenty-five thousand years of your ancestors. People who have exceptionally strong autobiographical memory often report all sorts of distressing events sticking with them, because they don't get as much relief from forgetting details over time, and, unlike in Dune, it can make it harder to plan for the future, because there's an often exhausting parade of memories running "in splitscreen" all the time.
The fact that we only see one character in the books go absolutely bat-guano because of ancestral memory seems like it's lowballing the danger here.
In summary!
Dune has a major plot point about genetic memory, which is unlockable with special training, partially accessible with special genetics, and by overdosing on worm juice.
This is not a thing in real life, with intergenerational memory limited to very basic instinctual behavior, and less literal memory that tweaks the likelihood of certain health outcomes depending on extreme stress exposure in recent previous generations.
If we wanted to bullshit our way to making genetic memory a thing, we would need to compress a lot of information, and transfer that information from the brain to the gonads via a Rube Goldberg machine of biology.
This machinery would probably involve memories being encoded via epigenetic information (more malleable, but more likely to get erased, harder to do the plot points around unlocking them via special training), or genetic information (more permanent, matches the story more closely, but more likely to go absolutely bananas and break you)
The transfer itself would either be done by some sort of fictional class of transport cells, or a fictional class of endogenous retroviruses, the little viral pals that hang out in your genome.
Adding the modifications that encode memory would either be done by altering some pre-existing class of epigenetic targeting system, or by giving us a CRISPR-Cas9 system, something only found in bacteria IRL.
I'm not done yet, though. Because this only talked about the concept of genetic memory, not some of the major plot points around accessing it, and who can access it.
Next time, we have to talk about chromosomes, and why a female bird could be the messiah.
God this is so cool. At the start I was like will they mention epigenetics? The coolest horrifying concept I barely grasp but am so interested in. And they did ! And that one sentence under the baby picture “I’m sure that won’t be a problem later “ made me ugly laugh.
Sometimes my brain reminds me that, out of all the mandos who tried to put to words what it means to be a mando, you have the original resol’nare aka the 6 actions, which inspired the canons of honor, which in turn was inspiration for Tor Vizla’s Kyr’tsad (Death Watch) Manifesto, and Jaster Mereel’s Ori’ramikade (Supercommando) Codex.
And I think about the LENGTH differences between a single phrase of six core values, a group of canons, a manifesto and a codex. Like, I can’t stress enough that the reason we don’t have a canon Supercommando codex is because a codex is an entire book, a compilation of rules, lists, values, and priorities grouped together, organized, and put into book form.
And I think of the man who, upon seeing corruption right in front of him in the system he was apart of, his first response is to kill the superior officer who was apart of that corruption. Then when he’s been kicked out for killing a superior, and he sees that the corruption and injustice and dishonesty spread far beyond the Journeyman Protectors of Concord Dawn, that its everywhere in the galaxy, his response then is to write a fucking book.
