The individual stakes in the Lunar Chronicles are hilarious to me.
Cinder is the missing Lunar princess, and Iko’s her best friend. Kai is an Emperor and being perused by Levena as a political pawn. Wolf is one of Levena’s mind controlled soldiers who was sent after Scarlet, whose grandmother was part of Selene’s rescue team. Winter is Levana’s stepdaughter, and Jacin was raised alongside her and they basically the only family they each have left. Cress is Levena’s secret weapon who has been trying desperately to warn Earth about Levana’s plans, and is the daughter of a rouge Lunar scientist defying Levena.
And then there’s Thorne, who is only nvolved in saving the universe because Cinder took a wrong turn into his cell while trying to escape from prison 😂
Thinking about Iko and the way she's introduced as this small, quirky robot who wants to be a girl. The cute endearing slightly comic-relief esque character, who has "a crush"on the prince and interest in fashion despite not being able to wear it. Silly, cute and charming.
Thinking about how her chip moves to the spaceship and suddenly she's so big. Her quirky traits become a bother to everyone around. Your ship is blaring an alarm because she wants to squeel. She's cooking you alive to stimulate blushing. She keeps complaining about her body, she's messy.
And than she gets a human body and you realize, oh. This is who she was meant to be. This is who she is, has been from the start, her mennarism never changed and her talk never changed but suddenly we see her as a HUMAN. Suddenly we're on her side. And she's the most stereotypical of girls, and the most fashionable out of the group, and a damage tank and so so so ALIVE
And i'm thinking of Iko saying. I am like other girls. I'm exactly like other girls. And Iko deliberatingly causing herself to blush and swoon and faint and do all the most weak and bothersome things a girl can do, and it's a win, it's a statement.
Also thinking about how androids in TLC only have gender in the most arbirtary of ways. They have pronouns and "male" and "female" body but for all it's worth, they're all the same blank slate, blinking exactly ten times a minute and standing single file until given a command to run. Darla has the same amount of personality as the med droids- and she's easily compatible with the ship's computer. Even Nainsi, who we're told must have a very developed personality chip after running for years, is punctual and quiet.
Thinking about the inherent transness and neurodivergence in Iko, the most normal girl in the cast.
So last month I re-read The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer, and one of the things I thought was absolutely hilarious was the different compositions of the Rampion Crew, because it is NEVER stable and it's always funny. I took a break from making Dragon Games redesigns to doodle most of them.
I wanted to do them all, but things get pretty chaotic in the last third of Winter and I was getting burnt out, so I ended up cutting Team: Not Again when Cinder and Wolf get kidnapped and Maha gets shot, Team: DIY Brain Surgery when Jacin, Thorne, Iko, and Cress pull Cinder out of the lake and patch her cybernetics, Team: AWOOOOOOOO when Scarlet and Winter convince the wolf troops to revolution, and Team: REVOLUTION!! for the final battle when everything kinda just goes bonkers.
Also! Fun fact! Even if you include Wires and Nerve and Something Old, Something New, the only time Cress and Scarlet exchange on-page dialogue is like 2 lines during the first time Cress video-calls the Rampion.
The first time they even have an off-page conversation is AFTER Levana dies and they're both recovering from battle wounds while they wait for Cinder to wake up.
Meyer is also a master of dramatic irony. The funniest parts of this book series are as follows (not in any particular order):
-Jacin not finding out Cinder is Princess Selene until AFTER he backstabs them all and genuinely thinking she and the crew are maniacs for the entirety of Cress
-Kai losing his mind for all of Scarlet AND Cress because in addition to the whole "get married to a tyrannical dictator so you can get her plague antidote and delay a war even if it means you get assasinated while also having to be the emperor at 16 because your parents just prematurely died to said plague," he cannot figure out what Cinder's deal is and trying to be objective about it and accept that she's a criminal is actually making it so much worse. Culminating in the beautiful scene where she shoots him with a tranq dart and kidnaps him because they don't have time for a moral crisis.
-The crew's partial reunion in Farafra when Cress assumes everybody here wants to kill her because let's be real, they are BEYOND sketchy and she showed up at THE WORST time.
„Lunars were a society that had evolved from an Earthen moon colony centuries ago, but they weren’t human anymore. People said Lunars could alter a person’s brain—make you see things you shouldn’t see, feel things you shouldn’t feel, do things you didn’t want to do”.
