seen from China
seen from Panama
seen from United States
seen from Nigeria
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Vietnam
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seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Spain
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seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
eridian children in Grace’s class interested but slightly disappointed to learn that much earth life is bilaterally symmetrical with even numbers of limbs
Grace going “oh!! But!” and teaching them about starfish, to their absolute delight
new eridian schoolchild trend of starfishing aka flopping flat down with all legs out and moving by wiggling and squirming around, giggling. parents hooting at Grace in despair. why did you teach them this
eridian children in Grace’s class interested but slightly disappointed to learn that much earth life is bilaterally symmetrical with even numbers of limbs
Grace going “oh!! But!” and teaching them about starfish, to their absolute delight
new eridian schoolchild trend of starfishing aka flopping flat down with all legs out and moving by wiggling and squirming around, giggling. parents hooting at Grace in despair. why did you teach them this
expand
#project hail mary#sf writes#ryland grace#rocky the eridian#eridian biology#eridian culture#phm
I've been feeling some kinds of ways since I finished Jedi: Survivor so I'm going to ramble some thoughts that other people have probably already had, about something that blew my mind as an extraordinary example of medium-as-storytelling. big honkin spoilers for Je:Su below.
So, "turning to the Dark Side" in SW is usually going to be a plot beat in the two primary forms that SW media takes, right: visual (movies, TV) or written (all the books, but also in fanfic). In both cases, as the audience, you're largely going to have to take the author's explanation for how it feels, why a character is doing it, and what the motivations are behind it. Even in visual media you're more likely to be told than shown, since it's established as an extremely internal, feelings-based experience for the characters. Because it's not a process replicable in real life, storytelling explanations for the difference between how light and dark side Force usage feels is going to have to rely on metaphor, and on the audience's willingness to engage in pathos. Which, to be fair, audiences are famously great at! There's been mixed results in SW media, but it's perfectly possible to make turning to the dark side a very engaging story beat that feels emotionally real and justified.
Then, there's interactive media. I'm fascinated by the storytelling potential of narrative games because of the different way they demand that the audience engage with the story, right, the way that physiological input from the audience changes the connections that the brain makes to the input it's receiving. The way having to press a button to make the next action happen manipulates the lizard brain into believing itself the cause of the effect, even though the forebrain understands that the story is just as predetermined as a published novel, so the button push is really not very different from a page turn. It's a potent tool for manipulating the audience's emotions and engagement, very easy to fumble but pretty mindblowing when executed well.
There were definitely moments in Survivor when I was like "ok am I going to be allowed to actually play this game some day" when control kept being taken away from me in favor of cutscenes. But as the story went on and I got into it, I stopped minding the times when my thumbs were still, and barely noticed the transitions between "I am making this happen" and "I am watching this happen." That's good narrative game storytelling, for sure. But it still felt like a good story that happened to also be a good video game, not quite meshing the two in a meaningful way. Until Nova Garon.
A lot depends on how you play this, I'm sure, but in my case I pressed through the end of the game from the last Dagan fight to credits in one sitting. Because of how tired my hands were from the physical demand of the Darth Vader fight, and because I had been maining blaster stance for much of the game, I made a semi-conscious choice when I reached Nova Garon to use my saber as little as possible. I one-shotted a lot of unarmored officers from across rooms, having decided that Cal felt cold with rage and tightly coiled, so it would make sense for him to not even give these people the honor of being killed by a lightsaber. So I'll grant you that I was adding my own hot sauce to the delicious angst recipe the game had already made for me.
Then you get to Bode and have a really long cutscene that doubles down on the idea that Cal's anger is, at that moment, cold. He's tightly restrained. For several back and forths in the conversation he even still tries to be neutral in front of Kata.
So, for me at least, it REALLY fucking worked as a storytelling move when Cal explodes. Bode runs off, you chase, and the very first thing you're faced with is a room packed with a comical amount of enemies, the kind of melee scrum you've been trained by the mechanics for the whole game to approach with a whirlwind lightsaber freakout using either double-bladed or dual stance, ideally using Slow to buy some time. I had truly played into the game's hands like a fool here because I only had blaster and single stance as options at the time. So I'm looking around my screen in that split second, considering my stance and Force and slicing options, prepared for punishment, barely registering the notification scroll on the right side of the screen because a whole bunch of new databank entries get dumped by the Bode cutscene - the last one of which is, iirc, 'Kata Akuna.'
So Kata Akuna fades upward and is replaced by the same size white text, relatively small, suggesting a button press to you, like it's done a dozen or more times before to say stuff like 'press O to dash' or 'press R1 to tame the creature,' relatively benign things that are always very useful tools that you use over and over and over as soon as you gain them. Except it says 'press [button command you already know and have internalized as your most powerful Force tool with the longest cooldown, which you were just thinking about using] to have Cal embrace his darkness.'
And like, the phrasing is fascinating to me there. It's always fascinating to me how anyone talks about playing a video game, anyway, like "I just beat Ganon" or whatever instead of "Link just beat Ganon," because of course you feel ownership of the actions of the protagonist of a piece of interactive media in a way you rarely feel ownership of the actions of anyone in a book or movie. Previous button instructions in this same game have said 'press [blah] to do [thing]' without a given addressee, leaving the player to probably interpret that, unconsciously, as the unspoken 'you' that is typical in English grammar. 'You press O to dash.' 'You press R1 to tame the critter.' But - 'press [dah] to have Cal embrace his darkness' is so - unsettling and offputting, separating you, player, from Cal, protagonist - and it's occupying a VERY important space because the buttons its asking you to press are ones you already probably wanted to press, but instead of doing the thing you wanted it to do it's going to do some kind of new, horrible, unknown thing that is almost certainly going to be bad for Cal.
Then you press it, because you have to, and it's the best fucking shit that's ever happened to you, the player. It jumps your level by 10, instakills half the people in the room, makes you fast and powerful and nigh unbeatable. Depending on what difficulty you've been playing on, it may make a combat encounter that looked like a surefire several-deaths-in-a-row run into something as trivial as a roomful of bugs. It lasts an insanely long time. It's godmode. It's a broken mechanic. It makes your screen bleed. The unbridled glee that you, the player, probably feel while killing that room full of people is at stark odds with the circumstance you are in, storywise, because you are supposed to be feeling grief and rage and driving urgency to hunt and catch your fleeing enemy. But instead you have a moment in this room of, if you're like me, hooting and hollering while doing a big old war crime, just because it's suddenly easy and fun.
It took me a couple more 'embrace the darknesses' to realize that Cal only has one stance in that mode. Anything you've learned before is thrown away - earned skill ditched in favor of brute strength. And I didn't really care? Even though I did really enjoy how skilled I had gotten with my favored stances, because the combat in Survivor feels really good, and also I knew they'd be back after no more than 2 minutes in dark side mode. So even though I didn't get to do the moves I'd spent so long mastering, every 'embrace the darkness' was a little indulgence of having my cake and eating it too. It started to feel like an insta-win mechanic against any enemy of a low enough level, and a safety/turtling mechanic against slightly more difficult ones. I wanted to trigger it as soon as the cooldown ended even when I didn't need to, just for the fun. I felt safer having it available.
And all of that - as a mechanic - is the single most compelling depiction of the Dark Side that I've ever seen in a piece of SW media.
The way it shows up as an understated suggestion in your periphery. The way it cuts through every Gordian knot in front of you. How fun it feels, how unfair it feels, how safe it feels to have it on your side. As a game mechanic it places the audience in the position of actually feeling what before only metaphor could attempt to describe - the way turning to the dark side is all about letting go and letting loose. Being a nuclear reactor mid-meltdown. Laughing and button-mashing and going "oh no, oh shit, I shouldn't be doing this" but not stopping. And also, as the player, your mind is not clouded by any mysterious outside control - you're aware of what you're doing, you're aware you're making choices here, you could definitely stop using the mechanic after the first instance where the game has to put a finger on the scale for a moment to teach you the controls. And maybe you do make that choice, idk how you play. But you get through the massacre and at the end when Merrin asks Cal not to kill one last person, and Cal agrees, it doesn't feel cheap? It doesn't feel like Cal 'snapped out of' anything. It doesn't feel like there was anything for him to snap out of, because he, like you, has just been making these choices for room after room of enemies, and frankly no one's been around to ask him to stop before now. He still seems reasonable, and so a reasonable request by someone he cares about still reaches him.
The Dark Side isn't the grief, pain, suffering, anger, etc. It's the release from those. And this one moment of a game mechanic explains that so powerfully and succinctly, in a way that other mediums can't replicate. It's one of the the best uses of a medium in the service of the story since House of Leaves. It's still making me have to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling weeks later.
There's more to say about how the menu screen changes once Cal's embraced his darkness, altering his internal landscape in a way that doesn't change what you have access to but which can never be unseen. About how 'Slow' as a mechanic is gone forever, the most powerful Force ability Cal had just eradicated by an imposter version (a better version, the insidious inner voice wants to say). About the dramatic, overwhelming way the game chooses to command you to embrace your darkness next time, when the whole screen goes red and black. And the phrasing is different there, too, not 'have Cal embrace his darkness' but just 'embrace the darkness,' because this time you and Cal are not being treated as semantically separate entities. The first time, it's like maybe Cal wouldn't want to, so you, player, have to be the little Sithy whisper in his head that makes him do it. But the second time, Cal wants to do it so badly that his desire to embrace the darkness overpowers your, player's, agency to attempt to make any other choice. Even if you could have won that fight another way, Cal didn't want to win that fight any other way. He takes away your UI until you free him into his darkness, release him from his complex suffering into the simplicity of power.
It's just so fucking good, okay. It's such good storytelling, structurally. The way the player's choices and Cal's actions are on a surface level one-to-one correlated but actually form this intricate internal conversation. Using the most important thing a video game can be - fun - as a tool to describe a very dark place that anyone might go to internally, whether in a reality with space magic or not. But! Not by doing the thing that's been done before, the old "you [consumer] should feel bad because your act of consumption made the characters feel bad" fourth-wall-breaking meta thing that shames the reader for being entertained by others' pain (aka experiencing pathos, an extremely normal and not-shameful thing for humans to do). Survivor uses the audience's enjoyment of the medium against them narratively, in a gleeful and not-shaming way I don't think I've seen from media before, and I love it.
anyway I have no big conclusion here, I just am a writer who gets impressed when other writers do good writing. props to Respawn for making me writhe in my feels.
We're All Going the Same Way Down
Rating M, 18k words, Kallus/Zeb
A grizzled old lasat merc arrives on Lira San, full of mental health issues and struggling to find his feet after the end of the war. Zeb finds out he used to work with Saw Gerrera. Zeb neglects to tell Alex that his own personal nightmare is walking around the same city where they live.
It's a mistake.
CWs, tags: PTSD for days, angst with a happy ending, veterans, the damage war does goes on forever, what makes a monster, does the title mean they're all going to hell? maybe. Forgiveness is hard
I’ve got a Kalluzeb AU cooking right now over on AO3, in which a Kallus who left the Empire shortly after Lasan seeks out and rescues the last surviving member of the Honor Guard from gladiatorial slavery. Kallus and Zeb then form an unlikely mercenary partnership in which their primary work is dismantling slaving operations and searching for surviving lasat. Eventually they start working the odd mission alongside Spectre cell, slowly becoming infected with the spirit of rebellion and also moving from a toxic codependency into a true and deep sense of caring for each other.
I’m not writing every word of that because that could be a million-word slow burn epic and I just can’t do it, but I have been poking at assorted scenes! First, the initial rescue, and then a smut sequel of their first time. Stay tuned for the third, which will be a retake of Honorable Ones with that canon divergence twist.
Second Nature to Love You, First to Die
Rating T, gen & pre-KZ, ~7k; Zeb is a gladiator slave on Ordo Eris and a mysterious guard arrives to break him out.
The Cost of Our Desired Wrongs
Rating E, KZ, ~8k; During an op gone wrong, Zeb questions the growing mutual attraction between him and Kal. They have an ill-advised first time in the filthy depths of Coruscant that they both then try to decide if they regret or not. (They don’t.)
maybe I should post here that I’ve been writing some fic again. writing Wildflowers obliterated me on some sort of cellular level but with the help of a new disastrous blonde fictional man I’ve managed to remember how to words.
so if you’re interested, I’ve staggered drunkenly over into the Star Wars: Rebels fandom, Kalluzeb flavor, where I have done mostly tropes and banter with a tiny soupçon of smut. all G or T ish rating except where indicated.
No Looking Back, outsider perspective on Kallus post-Atollon
Reek, Kallus reacting to Ezra’s typical comments about Zeb’s smell
Heat Stroke, Kallus and Zeb sparring accidentally thirst-traps the whole rebellion
Hoth Tub Date Night, (E) exactly what it says on the tin
It’s Not Regret, with Jacen’s 18th birthday coming up, Kallus reflects on where he was at that age
Throw Your Pennies Back, a 5+1 of each Spectre having the encounter that makes them accept Kallus as just a guy, and Zeb watching the adoption happen (longer than the others, ~20k)
eridian children in Grace’s class interested but slightly disappointed to learn that much earth life is bilaterally symmetrical with even numbers of limbs
Grace going “oh!! But!” and teaching them about starfish, to their absolute delight
new eridian schoolchild trend of starfishing aka flopping flat down with all legs out and moving by wiggling and squirming around, giggling. parents hooting at Grace in despair. why did you teach them this
expand
#project hail mary#sf writes#ryland grace#rocky the eridian#eridian biology#eridian culture#phm#phm movie#phm spoilers
Heat wave sex pollen pwp alert! Handing this to the fandom like a slightly melting popsicle
Summer (AO3)
Rating E, Alexsandr Kallus/Zeb Orrelios
Summary: It's the first summer since Zeb and Kallus have retired to Lira San, and Kal is taken aback by how hot it gets. Except he seems to find it quite a bit hotter than Zeb does. Feverish, in fact. Zeb really ought to take him to the doctor...
Or: Desperately Horny Kallus Is Ungovernable
(Primary tags: sex pollen, temperature play, multiple orgasms, knotting, shower sex)
