new product for angels who want to lose their wings
fixed it
cherry valley forever
Keni
Show & Tell
Monterey Bay Aquarium
occasionally subtle
Acquired Stardust
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

Andulka
Peter Solarz

No title available
Stranger Things
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Claire Keane
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
AnasAbdin
taylor price
trying on a metaphor

Janaina Medeiros

shark vs the universe
hello vonnie
seen from United States

seen from South Africa

seen from Lithuania

seen from Malaysia

seen from Malaysia
seen from Dominican Republic

seen from Netherlands

seen from United States
seen from Saudi Arabia

seen from Indonesia

seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom

seen from South Korea
seen from United States

seen from T1
seen from Mexico
seen from United States
seen from Argentina

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
@lizardanya
new product for angels who want to lose their wings
fixed it
It would have been cool to see a flashback scene from Lister's childhood, because we got one for Rimmer (the school one from The Beginning ep.) and seeing a slightly futuristic version of liverpool would have been cool. Or even just a flashback scene of him and his nan.
We were absolutely robbed of Lister flashbacks. Literally nothing between the baby scene in "Ouroboros" and 17 year old Lister in "Timeslides".
I have complained about this a lot in the past, but we get SO LITTLE INFO about Lister’s life before the show compared to Rimmer’s. 😡😡😡
Ok, I’m triggered now, I need to rant.
We get a lot of info in the show about Rimmer’s family and even his extended family. We know what kind of people they were, he talks a lot about them, they get seen in multiple flashbacks etc.
Lister - mother, mentioned once, no detailed info. Father, mentioned twice, no detailed info. Stepfather, mentioned once, no detailed info. Grandmother, one photo, mentioned a few times, some info about what she was like but never named. None of them ever seen in flashback.
Rimmer talks constantly about his experiences at school, multiple flashbacks shown, yet it’s S7 before we get any real info from Lister about his time in the orphanage (some of which regarding the neglect they suffered was also cut out of the episode).
The lack of background info we get given on (arguably) the main character of the show is frankly bizarre. And I get that part of that is characterisation- Lister is simply not as vocal about his problems as Rimmer, he doesn’t like to dwell on the bad stuff - but sometimes it’s SO FRUSTRATING.
Yep, it is frustrating. Especially since Lister also lost his virginity under very dubious circumstances. Having sex when you're twelve years old isn't normal. And since we don't know if Michelle Fisher is the same age as Lister. There's a good chance she was probably a creepy pedophile.
I hesitate to be that guy when I’m new to this fandom, but it’s (unintentional) racism. The lack of background info on Lister is part of a wider issue within the show: neither of the Black characters are treated as if they have as much interiority as those played by white actors, nor are they treated as if the audience will be able to see their interiority. Even when Lister is surface-level relatable, who both Black characters are is external to the intended viewer; their funny habits are always observed, gawked at, but never fully fleshed out.
This isn’t a post about the Cat so I don’t want to derail too much, but it’s worth noting that his backstory is nigh-nonexistent. He may as well have popped up fully formed with no experiences to shape him. Kryten has his time on the Nova 5 plus the inherent depth of concept that being a service robot comes with in sci-fi, Kochanski has a vacillating but relatively cohesive positionality and even Holly has some degree of background, but any opportunity to focus on the Cat’s upbringing or mindset has been swept aside or actively scrapped by the writers in favour of other characters. He’s also the one who things happen to either first or last, depending on which gets him out of the way quickest (ie last in Camille so his relationship preferences aren’t dwelt on; first after Lister, the other Black character, to be fed on by the Polymorph). The way he dresses, talks and performs physically is pure spectacle for the white viewer to be amazed by, and is never interrogated from his perspective. That someone could relate to him is seemingly considered inconceivable.
But more to the point — Lister. He certainly has more interiority than the Cat, but the amount of time the show spends being interested in what he’s like beyond his external habits and expression still pales in comparison with how much time is dedicated to penetrating the depths of Rimmer’s mind. He’s just kind of… alive. In fact, I would argue, the majority of incidents during which some information about Lister’s life (outwith what white characters see of it) is revealed are in fact in service to the depths of Rimmer’s mind.
To use the example here of Lister losing his virginity, the anecdote is relayed in response to Rimmer’s potentially emasculating answer to the same question, and for Rimmer to respond to. Despite the seriousness of the implications, and despite dalliances with older women taken as evidence of manhood being an issue that affects Black boys disproportionately due to adultification, the joke as told exists to make Rimmer feel inadequate and then recover by putting Lister down. The primary thing it’s designed to convey about Lister is that — look at him! — he obviously wouldn’t be given a golf club membership, so it says something about Rimmer’s expectations that Rimmer can’t conceive of a person unable to play golf regularly. It also communicates that Lister, who had sex at twelve, is so inherently virile by comparison it causes Rimmer some introspection (also racial stereotyping when it recurs, as it does). Both of these notions place the focus on Rimmer’s feelings as opposed to Lister’s when it comes to telling his own story.
Looking over the show as a whole, Lister’s backstory typically becomes relevant when:
1. It’s compared and contrasted with Rimmer’s — a white character’s — backstory, for the purpose of making Rimmer feel better or worse about himself
2. It’s being reacted to by Rimmer, for the purpose of noting how Rimmer interacts with those of a different class to himself
3. It’s explicitly brought up by Lister for the purpose of providing Rimmer with the opportunity to learn something about himself, or feel better about himself
4. Once or twice, to show class solidarity with Kryten’s marginalised experiences as a mechanoid — again, a character played by a white actor
From an in-universe perspective, Lister simply doesn’t offer much information about himself unless it’s funny or kind to do so, which is valid. But in terms of white writers choosing when to make their Black character’s backstory relevant, it’s almost exclusively done in service of a white character’s emotions, or in service of a joke focused on the white character’s reaction (an exception might be Duct Soup, where he tells his sex anecdote to the Cat, but it’s still in response to a demonstration of Kochanski’s priorities). This is frustrating to watch as a racialised viewer. A lot of the classist or personal insults Rimmer flings at Lister have disturbing racial overtones when viewed in the context of a white person saying them to his biracial Black colleague, but the onus is consistently on Lister to show genuine depth as a person through the act of coddling Rimmer by deploying personal stories for his benefit.
This doesn’t happen to the characters with white actors, who we learn about for the purpose of learning about them.
It’s in line with the myriad of other ways in which Rimmer feels like the writers writing what they know (everyone’s met a white git) and Lister feels like them riffing on something they don’t quite know how to riff on. Perhaps they don’t know how to riff on it respectfully, and so have opted to simply opt out, or perhaps they just don’t expect the white audience to care. The Cat has it worse, of course, being largely comprised of a list of stereotypes and parodies of Black celebrities they don’t seem to know anything about, but Lister’s a victim of it too. For example, the fictional musicians he likes are of nebulous genre, whereas Rimmer’s favourites are real highly specific genres on which the writers are aware of how to dunk. Lister likes a fictional sports team who’re barely detailed, whereas Rimmer’s icons and heroes are real historical figures people of his demographic today might idolise. Episodes will often pivot from focusing on Lister at the start to being about Rimmer’s psyche by the end. One could explain this away as Rimmer being a person we’ve all met while Lister is the person we are, but if that’s purely the case, where are Lister’s relatable life experiences?
This all becomes incredibly frustrating to me personally when the character they’ve built is a biracial person with experience of the British care system who was adopted into a possibly all-white working-class family. Non-white children are disproportionately overrepresented in Britain’s care system, and children of mixed race number most highly among these. Black children in particular are 8% more likely to be in care than their white counterparts, and less likely to be adopted than children in care of other races. Adoptees may also find their relationship to class differs from their non-adopted counterparts, which has an intrinsic racial component. As a racialised person living in Britain, these things aren’t distant statistics. I’ve been “looked-after” as it’s called and subsequently worked within care myself, and have witnessed firsthand how big a deal transracial adoption is, how much it affects one’s sense of self — especially when coupled with class, which the show is about. No matter how much the Red Dwarf production team pat themselves on the back for not bringing race up even once, it’s impossible to decouple race from class, even for comedy. Being Black in the care system affects you! Being biracial in working-class spaces affects you! How do orphanages work in the future; how does adoption work in the future? Have the disproportionate racial statistics changed over time? Why did Lister’s adoptive family choose him? What was it like finding out he was adopted if he didn’t know, and how did his race affect him if he was visibly not related to his family? These are questions the show would be interested in at least vaguely gesturing at an answer to if it had any interest in who Lister is beyond his contrast to Rimmer. Sure, the show is set in the future in space where race doesn’t matter, but the writers aren’t in space and the audience sure as hell aren’t in space. It clearly affects the actors’ performances as well, even though they’re onboard for not mentioning race onscreen. And y’know what, it’s possible the show wouldn’t even have known how to cast a biracial child for believable flashbacks! They’d have completely failed at casting the baby in Ouroboros if it weren’t for the one other Black guy present happening to notice.
It’s been bugging me especially since I read the novels. In print, Lister goes oddly… under-described… and even stretches of writing ostensibly from his perspective in the first two omit key details that leave it feeling like it’s the white characters whose mindsets are simply easier to write from. The urge to distance the reader from Lister’s mind leads to things like us learning about Frankenstein when she’s found out, even though the book’s been following Lister for months during which the presence of a new cat ought to have been felt, for example. Or learning about what he looks like from a recruitment agent who’s referring to him as “the object”… Maybe I’m simply spoiled by my immediate previous experience with a television novelisation being DS9’s Far Beyond the Stars novel (ie one of the finest depictions of Blackness in sci-fi ever), but like, do better.
I’m incredibly sorry for the no-holds-barred wall of text on what’s otherwise a short and pleasant exchange, I’ve just been holding this in for a while.
i have to agree because i’m actually reading through the first novel right now it has been bugging me how weirdly flat lister is. like, way flatter than the show.
firstly, his entire motivation is getting back to earth after accidentally being stranded on mimas – which is not a bad motivation, but it’s weird how simultaneously underwritten and all-encompassing it is. in the show, his relationship with frankenstein is a moment of characterisation about his sentimentality. he’s the kind of guy who wants to settle down on a farm with some animals and a girl he likes. he’s the kind of guy to adopt a cat by sneaking it on a ship where it’s not allowed, and secretly take care of it until he has enough money to settle down. he’s the kind of guy to take a selfie of him and his cat and develop it asap. sure, these things make him a bit stupid and irresponsible, but also very sincerely loving and caring. him going into stasis is an act of self-sacrifice because he doesn’t want his cat to be harmed.
in the book, he gets the cat explicitly to go into stasis. he takes the picture explicitly to get caught. the only real characterisation to come out of this entire scheme is that he looks up the least severe offence he could pull off, as well as getting the healthiest possible cat and hiding it well enough for it to not get found, which all amounts to “he doesn’t actually want to seriously harm anyone”. which makes him a bit more smart and responsible, sure, but it also takes away the emotional depth his decisions otherwise carried.
which brings up the second part – his motivation to return to earth goes as far as “well, it’s home, and i wasn’t supposed to be here anyway”. he doesn’t even have the life plan like he did in the show. his longing to be home isn’t explored at all, as far as it goes it’s just him being bored and disliking red dwarf. he has friends back home – the ones he mentioned going on a pub crawl with, but they are not really talked about, he doesn’t reminisce about them, doesn’t wonder what they’re up to or if they can’t find him. his life pre getting stranded on mimas is not really mentioned, his motivation to get back to it doesn’t get expanded upon.
even his life on red dwarf isn’t touched on in a lot of details. the most we get is some mentions of him drinking and his brief relationship with kochanski – which is generic and encompasses like two chapters. his only friend seems to be peterson and their only shared activity seems to be drinking, which is weird, because lister has always been described as sociable and well liked! this strangely even extends to his relationship with rimmer: again, the show would make you believe there were constant antagonisms and hijinks between them ever since they became bunk mates, and yet a novel that expands on said time period leaves their interactions to be, at most, those between coworkers. there isn’t even really a mention of either of them doing something that annoys the other, until post-accident suddenly rimmer has very strong opinions on lister’s presence. it’s just weird that once the opportunity comes to expand on lister’s backstory and motivations for getting onto red dwarf’s crew, suddenly all of his liveliness and personally is sapped in order to just make him bored and depressed.
and all this only becomes worse when contrasted to rimmer. rimmer so often has little anecdotes about him sprinkled in. his feelings, his past experiences as they relate to his present ones, his real time thoughts are all constantly mentioned. the changes the book makes to rimmer are additive, to the point of describing his exact feelings and thought processes.
and yet, with lister, in explaining his motivations they rid him of so much personality and agency. at a point he just becomes a character that’s waiting for the preamble to be over. which sucks, doesn’t it? they wrote a story about what lister’s life was like before the accident, and most of it is lister desperately trying to skip the story of what his life was like before the accident.
MY SANYA PLUSH GOT HERE
kyoko + sayaka shadow/light practice
Ragebaiting my fat dog? More like master baiting my fat hog!!!!!!!!
❗️Great Hog is displeased by this.
The kingly pig looks taken aback by this statement. "You claim to be 'baiting' our kind?.. A master of it, no less - after all the trust we hsve placed in you?"
- Your relationship with the Hog Society 🐖 is now Unfavourable.
🗡 Your left leg took 99 Pig Damage!
🗡 Your right leg took 99 Pig Damage!
❤️ Your health is in critical condition...eat a 🍎 Healing Apple to restore it!
🗡 Your left arm took 99 Pig Damage!
🗡 Your right arm took 99 Pig Damage!
🗡 Your torso took 99 Pig Damage!
❤️ Your health is fucked. There's no hope for you!
🗡 Your head took 99 Pig Damage!
❗️You have died! Cause of death - 🐗 Hog Swarm
"yea u prolly should make fun of big pig's speech impediment. where he says s insteas of A sometine. seems unwise idk" - Sun Tzu
AGENDA
AGENDA
guys i’m gonna do a psyop of pafl agenda posting so we get genuine powerscaling debates. ferry if you see this im sorry i have to
This was all I could think of while watching Duct Soup
have a hog wild weekend
the timeline of tboy lister necessitates that he transitioned prior to joining the crew of red dwarf for one simple reason:
he'd absolutely without a doubt be a freebleeder, and rimmer would absolutely without a doubt kill him about it, which would mean the show wouldn't happen.
hence he at the very least went on t way before red dwarf and never had his period while on board. thank you all
i think about that one exposed shoulder lister scene a normal amount
tboy lister is real as fuck to me partially because there’s no way to really argue against it. transitioning is canonically so advanced that any reference to his sex or anatomy can be argued to be just him being post-op.
that being said my personal favorite game to play is imagining he never had bottom surgery and trying to weasel in alternative explanations whenever his anatomy does get brought up. like that one scene in body swap where rimmer is in lister’s body and is shocked when he looks down can be easily interpreted as rimmer getting mind blown by the concept of t-dick.
as to why i like to imagine he never had bottom surgery um. personal reasons (i want him carnally)
i completely understand the fact that delfi as a name has cultural ties and “dagger” is white guy roleplay and he will probably grapple with his racial identity as a part of his gender identity arc but i really don’t think “he’ll just go by his birth name” is a satisfying or interesting conclusion to this conflict. after all, these characters arcs aren’t going to be about navigating the cultures they exist in currently. they’re going to be about navigating the notions of said cultures after they suddenly end. nymph culture is going to die the same way satyr culture is going to die the same way alternian culture died the same way earth culture died.
the bulk of the story is still about playing a game that ends the world, playing a game with the goal of creating a universe. in that way it is also about re-imagining culture and not necessarily rebuilding it, in the way that troll culture on earth c is distinct but also not a recreation of alternian culture. the prospective arc of dagger’s self exploration is not just navigating the divide of female nymph vs male satyr it’s navigating the preconceived notion of female nymph vs male satyr while participating in the project of culture creation. ultimately he’s going to find himself in a world in which a male nymph is possible if he can conceive of such a thing. that’s not an arc of acceptance, it’s an arc of ground up identity building.
neither delfi nor dagger are “real” names in the sense that they both erase a part of his fundamental being so to him, as a character, accepting either one or the other is a concession to a cultural landscape that fundamentally does not consider him in a situation in which he gets to decide what the cultural landscape ought to be
ngl “delphi is confirmed to not be a deadname” thing seems to me more like an egbert situation. like we all know june is coming but john is not really her deadname at the moment because she hasn’t come out yet. john is the name the character uses at this point in the active story so it’d be silly to shut down all use of that name in fan discussions.
that being said deadname still accurately communicates “they’re transgender and have a different preferred name to their given name” so idgaf idgaf