We need to talk about Tiger Squadron.
Guys, imma be honest. Almost every other project I’ve undertaken as a writer reflects some deeper meaning, message, ideology, thought experiment, thoughts about people…
Tiger squadron started with a meme and ended as a very long, rambling metaphor for a very complicated emotional situation I was navigating as I wrote it, one which I will never fully explain here. It had a lot of set dressing that fundamentally came from sci fi stuff I enjoyed as a teenager, with very little thought about the underlying ideology of that set dressing because that was never the point of the story to begin with. And...in writing it, i learned a lot. I wrote a lot that actually helped me understand myself better. But. And here's the thing? The thing is though, in the intervening years, I've grown a lot. I've worked through the issues that Tiger Squadron was, in many ways, written as reaction to. And whereas Arcadian Inquisition or Under Avandra's Eyes were things I did write as much as an expression of certain personal philosophical and emotional struggles as they were motivated by ideology...they were both written when i was a older, wiser, and far, far better equipped to do those things while actually caring about the underlying assumptions of the worldbuilding. Tiger Squadron really wasn't, which is why the gap between my beliefs and the thematic overtones of TS started off noticeable if you know me well and have only gotten bigger as the years have passed, to the point that reading it now is frequently embarassing - and not only because of the quality of the prose which is also pretty bad by my current standards. Put this way: what Tiger Squadron was *meant to do* it did well. But there's so much else in there that doesn't really align with my values as a writer or as a person, and that I probably would either excise or massively rework if I had to do it over now.
And I don't know if i want to keep it in the open. I may well take it down entirely someday, maybe rewrite it, maybe not. I don't know. Or I may leave it up forever, with the obvious note at the top of my pinned post that you can't read it as anything that has an intended meaning deeper than 'things explode in space, and the author was going through some complicated stuff with codependency and a person he had mutually trauma-bonded with.'
If you choose to read it, please bear that in mind and don't try to dig out any deep political analysis from it or its world building.
