I’m sensing a theme overarching in strange new worlds that pretty much applies to all the episodes we’ve gotten so far.
Definitely going to drop a big fat meta on how that was 100% a COVID metaphor, and how what happened (and everything that’s happened in SNW really) is going to profoundly affect Pike’s character arc and that this is the first time there’s been like, a BIG breakthrough that I think is gonna rock Chris’s world a little.
That was so goddamn dark but so GOOD
I feel full like I had a good meal but for my brain
PSA if child death is a trigger for you, this is a heads up.
Y’know, you’d think that with how tough Klingons talk and act, and their being equivocated to space Orcs or Vikings, that Qo’nos would be some sort of naturally hostile hell planet. Really it’s just a hyper-urbanized polluted mess with an outdated (absurdly violent) gentry system, and Klingons are just hyperurbanized street rats that REALLY want to be LOTR characters. You want to talk about being from a terrifyingly hostile world? Turns out that VULCAN is the REAL hell planet!
Like seriously, T’Khasi (Vulcan) is a freaking NIGHTMARE of a planet. Vulcans are the REAL Space Orcs, they are just very good at hiding it! I’ve been doing tons of research for a blog post I wanna make about what their planet is like based on what we know and how it correlates to their biology. Just for the fact that it doesn’t have a moon and that salt HAS TO be a rare mineral in order for their oceans to be freshwater, the implications are INSANE. The storms! The heat! Holy crap!
Like living on Vulcan for an extended period of time with no technological help would KILL a human being. While Vulcans on Earth are like “well it’s a little chilly, but there’s more air here and no literally constant dangerous geothermal activity and catastrophic storms, and I’m stronger than everyone else. So that’s pretty rad.”
MAN I have some Spock/Bones OPINIONS that I’m gonna share in a long post soon! Cuz I’ll tell you what I’m tired of people infantilizing Spock and/or demonizing Bones (and vice versa, but it’s more commonly the former!) and I’m just- that’s not how their relationship works! They’re equals! They don’t hate each other! Neither of them is stupid! They have a complex adult relationship! They work well together for a reason! Asdffghjjkl!
Ever since we learned that Victor had been trying to decide between On Love: Agape and On Love: Eros as his short program music for his next season, I’ve been wondering about the matching free program. Victor sets up agape and eros as opposing themes -- so what kind of story did he want to tell for the season? What possibilities did he have in mind?
But this is a series where music is an integral part of storytelling, so maybe it should have been obvious: it’s a fucking metaphor.
Victor describes agape as unconditional love, self-sacrificing, uncalculating. In contrast, eros -- sexual love, the conduit of pleasure -- requires an acute awareness of self. So first, it’s important to consider: what does Victor consider sacrifice? and what does he consider pleasure?
These things are, I think, related: because Victor is attracted to men, and Victor is a top Russian figure skater, and those two things do not coexist easily.
At the beginning of the series, Victor is not out -- there are multiple references to his female fans, but none that imply he might be just as attractive to males. His preferences might be well known among the skating circle (those at the Cup of China certainly weren’t afraid to draw their conclusions), but they are decidedly not public. And we don’t ever get to see Victor with any kind of companion, of any gender, save Makkachin. That is, Victor has had to sacrifice eros -- the pleasure that is self-centered -- for his sport and country.
For Victor, performing agape means choosing the course of Russia; the course of skating; the course of loneliness. The show makes this explicitly obvious by linking the agape performance to Yuri Plisetsky -- the very first program that Yurio sees when he finally finds Victor, and the performance that is intended to bring Victor home.
And Victor refuses this! Even as he declares Yurio’s Onsen on Ice performance as the best Victor’s seen from him, despite this last heroic attempt from agape to sway Victor back to Russia and his former life, the path that Victor chooses is eros.
Eros; pleasure; the freedom, for Victor, to be selfish. To own his body, to express his sexuality -- to love, for only himself, and have that love be returned.
So how does this metaphor wrap up? Victor chooses eros; he chooses love; he chooses Yuuri.
Victor’s free skate for this season -- the best, most heartfelt story he wanted to tell -- is Yuuri.
okay here’s a voltron theory/headcanon dump so i can have them all in one place
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keith, shiro, and family:
nearly every main character mentions family/a family member at some point (lance, “my mom’s hugs”, 1x04; hunk, “yeah, i have a family. they live on earth”, 1x04; coran, grandfather, multiple; allura, father (alfor), multiple; pidge, listen her family is an entire plot thread)
keith is described as an orphan in the promo material; in-canon, here’s an oblique mention from 1x04 that i will come back to in a minute: “You're not the only one with a family. All these Arusians have families. Everyone in the universe has families.”
an interesting point: shiro’s family is never mentioned at any point.
so, headcanon #1: one of shiro’s parents is dead. the other one was injured in the same accident, but made it out alive.
headcanon #2: keith reacts incredibly strongly to the idea of pidge leaving the team, and more specifically the idea of pidge prioritizing her family members over more altruistic motives, because of how his parents died: trying to save people in the same incident that shiro’s parents were involved in. he used to feel resentful about it, that they’d sacrifice themselves without thinking of him; then he felt guilty about it, and eventually convinced himself that it was the right thing to do. that he’s proud of them, that it’s the same decision he would’ve made.
if pidge can make a different choice, maybe his parents could have, too.
headcanon #3: building on 1 & 2, keith knew shiro from before the garrison because shiro’s family took him in. it was a kindness, he thinks in the end, but he spent a lot of time right after the accident trying to pretend none of it had happened at all.
alteans, galrans, general space politics nonsense:
the galran kingdom and the altean civilization used to have a friendly diplomatic relationship (1x10)
zarkon refers to alteans as “that foul race” (1x01)
the original paladins of voltron were “like a pack of yalmors, linked at the ears" (1x02)
zarkon is the original black paladin (1x11)
allura is able to operate a galran handprint door while in disguise (1x10)
voltron is still acknowledged, after ten thousand (altean?) years, as the most powerful weapon in the universe (multiple)
the important question is: why are galrans evil? why did they ever decide to go down a path of total galactic conquest?
we know altean technology is vastly superior to galran, because even after a ten thousand year head start zarkon’s still looking for the original voltron instead of building his own. we also know that alteans are fond of helping other people and civilizations (see: the arusians, 1x06).
so, theory #1: the galra were originally a much less advanced civilization than they are now, and the alteans wanted to help. they gave the galrans new technology and integrated galrans into their society, to the point that one of the pilots of the most advanced weapon they had could be a galran.
this resulted in a generation of galra who were a) equipped with powerful technology and b) harboring a lot of resentment for the alteans under the surface! because no matter the benefits, being surrounded by alteans and constantly reminded of the fact that you owe everything you are to an entirely different group of people has got to breed one hell of an inferiority complex.
theory #2: allura never told the voltron crew about zarkon’s connection to voltron and altea because the alteans collectively harbor massive guilt about this.
STEVE: Is this the first time you lost a soldier?
TONY: We are not soldiers.
-- The Avengers (2012)
fast forward four years later, and here’s the thing: steve rogers is.
captain america: civil war begins by giving both steve and tony what is essentially the same problem. in lagos, steve’s actions unwittingly lead to the death of civilian bystanders; in sokovia, tony’s actions did the same. that’s the set-up. but here’s where the similarity ends.
tony stark was never a soldier. he is a wealthy american in his mid-forties; war was an abstract concept to him, right up to the moment where it blew up in his face. the violence he witnessed (had done to him) shocked him so profoundly that it prompted him to change the entire course of his life.
in contrast, steve grew up in the shadow of war. his father was a casualty of the first world war. he himself is first shown on screen trying to join the second. for him, the draft has been active since 1940. this war is a part of his reality -- of his way of thinking.
and here’s the thing: compared to other wars throughout u.s. history, wwii is a brutal one. the only one with a higher total body count is the civil war; in percentage of population killed, wwii ranks third.
because of these differences -- not just ideological, but cultural -- steve and tony approach being an avenger in very different ways. for tony, the world is full of civilians, and he is a superhero: he helps them, never the other way around. he can save lives, and he can be the one to carry a nuke into a hole in the sky; but he can’t ask for help for his ptsd. he can’t tell his friends the arc reactor’s killing him.
this is why being confronted with charles spencer hits tony so hard: it means he’s failed in his duty as superhero. it means violence has reached somewhere he is supposed to protect.
in contrast, steve has no problems drafting bystanders to fight with him. he recruits the police force in new york against the chitauri; he urges shield employees to help take down hydra. for steve, there is no civilian population; the whole world is under draft, waiting for their number to come up.
and this is why steve finds some level of civilian casualty acceptable: because he is a soldier. because sometimes soldiers make sacrifices, and the way to honor that sacrifice is not to break down in grief, but to win the war.
this is what steve learned from bucky. this is the principle steve’s still clinging to, even now: “we try to save as many people as we can; sometimes that doesn’t mean everybody.” to win the war, even if some battles are lost along the way.
tony stark, the modern superhero, might be a tragedy in the original sense; his downfall is his hubris, the certainty that he can fix the world if only he tries hard enough. but steve’s tragedy is this: he was never really a superhero. he’s just a soldier who never came home from the war.
i’ve seen a lot of variations on this argument pass my dash ever since that cacw empire article came out, so i’m just gonna say it: it is not harder and better and somehow purer to portray a platonic male friendship on screen than it is to make the relationship romantic. it’s not. the body of popular media is full of guys who love each other and would do anything for each other and then go home to their wives, because well obviously they’re not gay.
“romance is just an easy shorthand for intimacy and trust.” please. please send these easy shorthand gay relationships my way. what universe do you live in that gay people can hook up easily on-screen and the audience reaction is “what a cop-out, they’re just doing it to avoid developing their friendship.”
listen. heterosexual romance is often an easy shorthand for intimacy and trust. this works because there’s an expectation -- both on part of the filmmaker and the presumed audience -- that heterosexual romance is normal and part of the background radiation of everyday life. and any time someone makes a movie where the male and female leads hook up, without much build-up or development of their relationship, they then strengthen that expectation in a self-perpetuating feedback loop.
gay romance does not have the same cultural history. the default assumption is that same-sex leads will not hook up unless they live in the gay/lesbian genre. platonic male friendship is, in fact, the easy way out.
it’s absolutely homophobic to say a gay romantic relationship would somehow lessen a bond of friendship. and i mean this in the kindest of ways, because it may not be the same degree of homophobia that leads to gay people being physically attacked, or laws being written to actively restrict people’s rights for the fact of being gay. it’s a low-grade, pervasive homophobia that results when the speaker doesn’t conceptualize gay people as a part of a normal, everyday milieu. that a character being gay has to be narratively justified in some way (as if gay people around the world don’t have to justify their right to exist every single day!); that a gay relationship is somehow “pandering” and “inorganic”, because the normal, natural -- straight -- audience could never really relate to a gay relationship.
look. we are all shaped by cultural expectations. it doesn’t make someone a bad person if their mental conception of “an intense relationship between two guys” defaults to “friendship” instead of “romance”. but responding to any challenges to that paradigm by extolling the virtues of same-sex friendship and ignoring the long history of gay relationships in media being censored and sanitized and othered? yeah. that’s homophobic.
so i’ve seen quite a bit of doylist discussion about the steve-tony relationship and how marvel is trying to use a long comics history as shorthand in the mcu, but i keep thinking about it from a watsonian point of view. and here’s the thing: tony stark is not very good at friends.
tony is self-centered, antagonistic, and sarcastically belligerent on the best of days (and i say this with great affection); he is not an easy person to be friends with. tony knows this. and tony has, i think, decided very early on that he doesn’t care to sand down his rough edges for the sake of friends. it’s very possible that his first friend in the world was edwin jarvis -- and that says a lot, that the people tony grows close to are, by and large, in some ways obligated not to leave him.
because that’s what tony does to people: he is intensely tony at them until they leave. and if they don’t, then maybe -- maybe that means they love him. this is the tony stark model of friendship. it’s not a very healthy model, granted, but no one’s ever accused tony stark of being well-adjusted.
and then there’s steve.
i think it’s important to remember that tony stark grew up immersed in the lore of captain america. “that’s the guy my dad never shut up about?” he says in the avengers. young tony grows up with a father whose emotional and intellectual energies are intensely focused on captain america. steve is essentially, for better or worse, a member of the stark household. an absent older brother -- or maybe, a friend.
tony stark brings preexisting feelings to the steve-tony relationship because he can’t help it. captain america is a part of tony’s emotional landscape. he might love him or hate him, but he could never be indifferent toward him.
and now that steve rogers has been resurrected, i think it may never occur to tony that steve doesn’t carry that same history. tony makes the mistake of believing that other people feel about him the way he feels about them. and why not? that’s always worked for him before. the people who hated him went away. the people who loved him stayed.
steve’s known tony for only a few short years. steve tells tony that bucky’s his friend, and maybe what steve means is that bucky’s been a part of his life for as long as he can remember.
and therein lies the problem: because for tony, that person is steve.
