eliminate the impossible

A Hard Evidence fanblog

[coloursofthenight-deactivated]

In the vein of questions I can't ask a property blue in real life: Why does it seem that all young property blues are incredibly vapid? I always get paired up with the children of reatives/donors at dinners and other events, and I literally have never heard them talk about anything more substantive than their new sportsball team, who is sleeping with who or yachting.

Honestly I don’t know, I agree and don’t hang out with them much. It might be that they’ve never been given any decisions that actually matter, so they haven’t had any reason or ability to develop depth. It might also be that all the non-vapid ones recognize that their cohort are mostly vapid and go off to socialize with other people (probably including older property blues). It might be that most blues who aren’t vapid pick a different track where they can more effectively pursue their interests, and it’s mostly the ones without interests who stick to property.

Most young property blues don’t have big swathes of property, either. Enough to make them feel like adults, but the real guts stick with the older relatives with experience, judgment, and reduced likelihood of blowing a bunch of their money to impress a pretty person during springtime. (Not having older relatives with experience, and being better-suited to this than my mother, I manage the majority of my family’s holdings.)

[megasilverfist]

tbf bell and stick is a pretty cool sport and blues are more likely to follow the traditional version instead of the electronic scoring crap that yellows watch.

[ominousscribbler-blog]

also kids are mean little fuckers 

what do you want to bed that half of them do have real interests but have been like trained out of talking about them because its Not Done 

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

well I was gonna say that, like I have almost no real life experience of these people but from the way blues talk online it seems like a fair bet that they’d been coached to stick to neutral, non-controversial topics - if not for their own sake, then to avoid embarrassing their relatives in politics.

They interviewed a blue at the station last week and she was a *master* at saying absolutely nothing while still emitting words

[imrainai]

Honestly, there are some great stories in the ‘purple turns out to be alien royalty’ subgenre, they are A+ wish fulfillment, but hearing people talk about them as Positive Purple Representation is…. odd.

Like, the fundamental concept is that you take an average, ordinary purple, and then they become awesome by discovering that they are…. actually not purple?

If you’re secretly alien royalty, then you’re fundamentally not purple. You’re blue. Maybe you’re an alien blue-equivalent, or maybe teeeechnically you’d be purple by the standards of your country and yet have inherited an alien throne due to alien succession weirdness, but at the end of the day you’re still being placed in a fundamentally blue role. The narrative is giving the purple character value by pointing out that actually, they were never purple at all. They may have been raised by purples due to some kind of mix-up or weird alien plan, but deep down they were always really blue.

And I mean. I think a certain amount of that is harmless? Who doesn’t imagine that they are Secretly Royalty as a kid. Or that they’re going to be an astronaut or a superhero or an impossibly gifted inventor or world-famous sports star. I met a kid once who was dead certain he was going to be a fish when he grew up. Kids are weird and have weird impossible dreams, and we should let them have those.

But ‘imagine you were blue, and therefore valuable!’ is not something that drives home the fundamental value of purples and purple jobs, or the ways purples actually contribute to society. And again, some of the stories are great. Some of them involve pretty cool characters whose purple background is an important part of their character, and sometimes it even ends up being an asset to them. And of course there are lots of other genres of story, too. There are lots of actual awesome purple protagonists in this world if you know where to look for them.

It’s just that the secret royalty plot is not actually something that tells people that purples are good or useful or valuable in and of themselves, and it’s weird watching people pretend that it does.

[getmeoffthisrock]

I’ve read a bunch of stuff in that genre and yeah, it’s definitely…it’s definitely good wish fulfillment for purples, but it’s also definitely not good purple representation.

I wonder if Due To Alien Weirdness, This Purple Fulfills The Function Of X Caste is all one genre or one per caste? I have read stuff like this about other castes

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

I have a soft spot for those cheesy old sci fi shows where it just sort of uncritically assumes aliens have the same castes as we do, but they’re arranged differently for various cultural or historical reasons.

The most plausible ones often seemed to be the whole ‘Proud Warrior Race where Greys are in Charge’ kind - in a few different varieties (these link to ebooks that are an example): they killed all the blues, they never had blues to begin with, blues are like their courtiers, they merged and intermarried until they were one caste.

Oh, also the ‘alien species that are all one caste’ trope is a good one for seeing examples of different castes as royalty/in charge - though they tend to be pretty stereotypical. Like [this one] where there’s the super peaceful aliens who are all orange and their society is lovely but ridiculously vulnerable to attack.

[candle-in-an-old-mine]

Oh, hey, my money’s back, must be summer.

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

Why do you have less money in spring?

[megasilverfist]

You put money is spring escrow so you don’t blow it on a credit.

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

#cleanproblems

[candle-in-an-old-mine]

Oh, hey, my money’s back, must be summer.

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

Why do you have less money in spring?

[trashrightsactivist]

[ooc: messaging]

I have figured out what the problem was that has been stopping people from messaging @trashrightsactivist. I will be fixing this but probably not til toward the end of the month cause I’m gonna be away IRL.

For now if you want to ICly message Ruby @trashrightsactivist, message @truth-from-ashes and be like (ICly this is to @trashrightsactivist).

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

(can be answered ooc or ic) What are some of the other characters/main characters in Hard Evidence?

[ooc] I have something in drafts for this IC but I’ll post that later, I am intruigued by this fanfic idea so I wanna send you this now and sort that out later!

In Hard Evidence the core team is made up of Detective Sergeant Hethal, homicide detectives Mepaf and Ishe (grey), lab techs Pasha and Hasam (yellow) and Dr Tep, the ‘Senior Evidence Analyst’ (green). And Keke! (purple janitor) I mean, Keke’s not part of the core team in terms of solving crimes but he’s main cast so I’m including him.

You also see grey beat cops, the orange doctor and psychologist we see every once in a while, yellows doing police paperwork and as extra lab techs, the Chief of Police, various judges, legal counsels and social workers.

(a lot of this, such as the yellows doing paperwork instead of retired/disabled cops and especially having a green running the lab, is inaccurate in depicting an actual normal police station in Tapa/Amenta.)

That’s a whole rainbow of people, though it’s missing red and there’s only one purple. 

So Hethal is like the main-ish character, but he’s a homicide detective rather than an analyst and he does the sunglasses thing the CSI Miami guy does. His personality comes off somewhere between cop and scientist - he’s more involved with the evidence side of things than like Brass is on the original show.

His main personality trait is being Incredibly Principled and always doing his best to make sure everything is done 100% right - this is kind of the impetus behind the title because his superiors always wanna fudge stuff because they are corrupt and his underlings let emotions get in the way, but while he has emotions, he makes sure only hard evidence decides who gets put away. (or executed probably, this is Amenta after all.)

Mepaf and Ishe - Ishe is the calm and good with people one and can get people to open up to him, but gets too emotionally involved in the direction of wanting to show mercy because he feels sorry for people. Mepaf is the hot-headed one who has to fight the urge to just shoot people because it would make the world a better place and what if they bribe a judge and get away. Was revealed in season 3 that she has an estranged blue dad.

Pasha and Hasam are nerdy, goofy lab techs similar to the ones on CSI. We get comic relief moments out of their finicky yellow personalities clashing with the cops’ straightforward grey personalities. Fans ship them.

Dr Tep is just Grissom with a side of Dr House. Green, knows everything, two doctorates, somehow also a concert-level pianist. Fanfics enjoy adding other random green-coded skills he is inexplicably amazing at. They also ship him with Hethal a lot and want them to be their gay dads.

Keke is a fan favourite, he was originally just a background character but slowly became part of the main cast. He’s the station’s purple janitor. Fans disagree as to whether his characterisation is complex or just wildly inconsistent, but he is a source of both ‘person is dumb or doesn’t know things’ jokes and folksy wisdom, and through lateral thinking will occasionally hit on insights that none of the other characters were able to see, solving the case. Tends to get Flanderised in bad fanfic into a ‘lol I’m so random fish monkeyhat banana’ type.

Anash is a total blank state, we don’t even know their gender and they’re only even mentioned twice on the show (in 10+seasons). Fan versions of them tend to be totally inconsistent with one another. Red fans like to ship them with their favourite character, since no other characters are red this gets those fics dropped from sites even faster than focusing on a red character to begin with would.

[wolffyluna]

Thank you so much, this will come in handy! I’m not sure I’ll quite be able to get the CSI-ness of it, mostly because I’m not super familiar with CSI, but I think I’ll be able to brush off any difference with ‘But it’s not CSI, it’s Hard Evidence!’

So far the current plan is to write one of those ‘non existent episode/an episode I wish existed’ fics, where there’s a murder that’s in a polluted area/is extra polluted/both, so that the only person who can actually physically investigate it is Anash (and their getting instructions from other characters on speaker phone in a conference room). And it looks like the murderer must have been red, but Hethal isn’t convinced, and Anash and Keke are the people who work out ‘wait, what if the murderer *wants* us to think they are red.’ And there may be some gentle ribbing of/copying the shows tendency to rip from the headlines, with the murderer who perpertrated this most DISGUSTING crime being a blue from Revenue and Customs (and this doesn’t remind anybody of anything.) I’m also tempted to make part of the fic being in character author’s notes, and the heading and tags of Archive of Amenta.

(My biggest question before I start is whether the author is red, a non red who wants to write something red focused as a challenged, or a red who’s pretending to be the second author. It’ll change how some of the scenes go.)

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

This sounds awesome <3

I figure most ppl who would wanna write abt reds are reds but I guess not everyone. And they may not be openly red.

I figure in terms of red hate levels we don’t know how the main cast feel because that would involve bringing it up. Ishe and Keke are probably the most likely sympathisers cause Ishe is just softhearted in general and half of Keke’s thing is having the opinion you don’t expect. Hethal would probably have normal levels of red-hate but the superhuman Integrity Powers to do the right thing anyway. although, since we don’t actually know, fic author could make anyone as sympathetic or as hate-filled as they wanted. ‘everybody is unrealistically fine with X’ (i.e. the Gay in historical settings) seems like a common fanfic thing.

[wolffyluna]

I’m mostly tempted to make the author-the character either red but not openly or red but pretending to be another caste so that any mistakes that I make can be written off as the in character author deliberately being inaccurate so as not to appear red. Then again, writing a red centric fic might be weird enough to be a giveaway anyway. So I might just have the just be openly red, and edit away any mistakes after publishing, or write them off as the in character author being odd.

I’m thinking of having one of the conflicts being differing levels of “Why are we letting Anash do The Thing?!” and “…because Anash is the only one who could do it?” between the different non-red characters. Possibly with some people (like maybe Mepaf or Pasha) because they feel, consciously or not, like Anash is stepping onto to their turf. (Meanwhile Anash is on the phone, politely as possible “While it is unfortunate I am on your turf, I’m currently waist deep in a slurry pit retrieving a corpse, so maybe you would prefer I be on your turf right now?”) I think if the author character is red, there might be a little wish fulfillment “these characters actually like me!” they’re not going to go full on “no character has ever had any issues with reds ever.”

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

Yeah I think this is a good conflict - and like, it doesn’t have to be 100% accurate to what people would actually let a red do, because it’s a fanfic after all. The Hard Evidence setting is not supposed to be 100% accurate as a depiction of Amentan police investigations to begin with.

Mepaf is like, the shouty one who struggles with urges toward police brutality, and while her on-screen intended targets may be entirely deserving I imagine reds are less inclined to view this sympathetically given, stuff. So she might be a good candidate for a red author’s semi-strawmannish red hater character who’d rather let a criminal get away than admit Anash is useful/a person.

Also like, in my head the show’s Mepaf refuses to let her dad do her any favours and has an entirely grey upbringing, but it seems very like the fanfic community to ignore this entirely and make her an entitled brat, especially if she gets in the way of a ship they like or they dislike her for other reasons.

In terms of whether the author’s open I think it’s been established somewhere that like the fanfiction.net equivalent takes down stories by people who are/are accused of being red? But then one has to imagine they’d do the same to a story focused on a red character so idk.

Even if the author is openly red they are likely to make deliberate mistakes or otherwise conceal stuff about how red districts function and especially their internal justice system out of a sort of general reluctance to broadcast that shit to outsiders I think. 

You’ve also gotta imagine that allowing the showing of reds and thus implicitly interaction with a corpse would allow them to get into details the show can’t about like, the details of what they find in a body and how that proves things? But they’d probably only go into that if the author was themselves an autopsy tech - which is entirely possible!

[wolffyluna]

Yeah, I think Mepaf might end up being the most notable anti-Anash character. I think a combination of “she’s established to be aggressive”+”she’s a agressive in a way that would make a red author twitchy”+”she‘s a character who would feel her turf was being stepped on.”

I was think of maybe having this fic posted in universe on an Archive of Our Own expy (though this does lead to questions of what Amenta!Strikethrough was like). I imagine an Ao3 expy would allow fic by reds, though it’d definitely be one of the mandatory warnings. If there isn’t an Ao3 expy, it’s possible there’s a small red specific archive? Red fandom may be small, but if it was multi country and multi fandom it might be big enough?

Yeah, even if the author is openly red, there’s probably some stuff that’s deliberately kept vague/incorrect. At the moment I’m leaning towards the author being red, and either being open or just not mentioning caste. Writing fic about red characters is probably odd enough that pretending to be another caste might not work.

I’m currently torn between having the author character being an actual autopsy tech, or someone who really wanted to be one but couldn’t (choked on the exam, the city only needs so many autopsy techs) and is living vicariously through fic.

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

those both sound like good ideas! I imagine there is somewhere out there an archive that will take red fic and/or a red archive

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

(can be answered ooc or ic) What are some of the other characters/main characters in Hard Evidence?

[ooc] I have something in drafts for this IC but I’ll post that later, I am intruigued by this fanfic idea so I wanna send you this now and sort that out later!

In Hard Evidence the core team is made up of Detective Sergeant Hethal, homicide detectives Mepaf and Ishe (grey), lab techs Pasha and Hasam (yellow) and Dr Tep, the ‘Senior Evidence Analyst’ (green). And Keke! (purple janitor) I mean, Keke’s not part of the core team in terms of solving crimes but he’s main cast so I’m including him.

You also see grey beat cops, the orange doctor and psychologist we see every once in a while, yellows doing police paperwork and as extra lab techs, the Chief of Police, various judges, legal counsels and social workers.

(a lot of this, such as the yellows doing paperwork instead of retired/disabled cops and especially having a green running the lab, is inaccurate in depicting an actual normal police station in Tapa/Amenta.)

That’s a whole rainbow of people, though it’s missing red and there’s only one purple. 

So Hethal is like the main-ish character, but he’s a homicide detective rather than an analyst and he does the sunglasses thing the CSI Miami guy does. His personality comes off somewhere between cop and scientist - he’s more involved with the evidence side of things than like Brass is on the original show.

His main personality trait is being Incredibly Principled and always doing his best to make sure everything is done 100% right - this is kind of the impetus behind the title because his superiors always wanna fudge stuff because they are corrupt and his underlings let emotions get in the way, but while he has emotions, he makes sure only hard evidence decides who gets put away. (or executed probably, this is Amenta after all.)

Mepaf and Ishe - Ishe is the calm and good with people one and can get people to open up to him, but gets too emotionally involved in the direction of wanting to show mercy because he feels sorry for people. Mepaf is the hot-headed one who has to fight the urge to just shoot people because it would make the world a better place and what if they bribe a judge and get away. Was revealed in season 3 that she has an estranged blue dad.

Pasha and Hasam are nerdy, goofy lab techs similar to the ones on CSI. We get comic relief moments out of their finicky yellow personalities clashing with the cops’ straightforward grey personalities. Fans ship them.

Dr Tep is just Grissom with a side of Dr House. Green, knows everything, two doctorates, somehow also a concert-level pianist. Fanfics enjoy adding other random green-coded skills he is inexplicably amazing at. They also ship him with Hethal a lot and want them to be their gay dads.

Keke is a fan favourite, he was originally just a background character but slowly became part of the main cast. He’s the station’s purple janitor. Fans disagree as to whether his characterisation is complex or just wildly inconsistent, but he is a source of both ‘person is dumb or doesn’t know things’ jokes and folksy wisdom, and through lateral thinking will occasionally hit on insights that none of the other characters were able to see, solving the case. Tends to get Flanderised in bad fanfic into a ‘lol I’m so random fish monkeyhat banana’ type.

Anash is a total blank state, we don’t even know their gender and they’re only even mentioned twice on the show (in 10+seasons). Fan versions of them tend to be totally inconsistent with one another. Red fans like to ship them with their favourite character, since no other characters are red this gets those fics dropped from sites even faster than focusing on a red character to begin with would.

[wolffyluna]

Thank you so much, this will come in handy! I’m not sure I’ll quite be able to get the CSI-ness of it, mostly because I’m not super familiar with CSI, but I think I’ll be able to brush off any difference with ‘But it’s not CSI, it’s Hard Evidence!’

So far the current plan is to write one of those ‘non existent episode/an episode I wish existed’ fics, where there’s a murder that’s in a polluted area/is extra polluted/both, so that the only person who can actually physically investigate it is Anash (and their getting instructions from other characters on speaker phone in a conference room). And it looks like the murderer must have been red, but Hethal isn’t convinced, and Anash and Keke are the people who work out ‘wait, what if the murderer *wants* us to think they are red.’ And there may be some gentle ribbing of/copying the shows tendency to rip from the headlines, with the murderer who perpertrated this most DISGUSTING crime being a blue from Revenue and Customs (and this doesn’t remind anybody of anything.) I’m also tempted to make part of the fic being in character author’s notes, and the heading and tags of Archive of Amenta.

(My biggest question before I start is whether the author is red, a non red who wants to write something red focused as a challenged, or a red who’s pretending to be the second author. It’ll change how some of the scenes go.)

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

This sounds awesome <3

I figure most ppl who would wanna write abt reds are reds but I guess not everyone. And they may not be openly red.

I figure in terms of red hate levels we don’t know how the main cast feel because that would involve bringing it up. Ishe and Keke are probably the most likely sympathisers cause Ishe is just softhearted in general and half of Keke’s thing is having the opinion you don’t expect. Hethal would probably have normal levels of red-hate but the superhuman Integrity Powers to do the right thing anyway. although, since we don’t actually know, fic author could make anyone as sympathetic or as hate-filled as they wanted. ‘everybody is unrealistically fine with X’ (i.e. the Gay in historical settings) seems like a common fanfic thing.

[wolffyluna]

I’m mostly tempted to make the author-the character either red but not openly or red but pretending to be another caste so that any mistakes that I make can be written off as the in character author deliberately being inaccurate so as not to appear red. Then again, writing a red centric fic might be weird enough to be a giveaway anyway. So I might just have the just be openly red, and edit away any mistakes after publishing, or write them off as the in character author being odd.

I’m thinking of having one of the conflicts being differing levels of “Why are we letting Anash do The Thing?!” and “…because Anash is the only one who could do it?” between the different non-red characters. Possibly with some people (like maybe Mepaf or Pasha) because they feel, consciously or not, like Anash is stepping onto to their turf. (Meanwhile Anash is on the phone, politely as possible “While it is unfortunate I am on your turf, I’m currently waist deep in a slurry pit retrieving a corpse, so maybe you would prefer I be on your turf right now?”) I think if the author character is red, there might be a little wish fulfillment “these characters actually like me!” they’re not going to go full on “no character has ever had any issues with reds ever.”

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

Yeah I think this is a good conflict - and like, it doesn’t have to be 100% accurate to what people would actually let a red do, because it’s a fanfic after all. The Hard Evidence setting is not supposed to be 100% accurate as a depiction of Amentan police investigations to begin with.

Mepaf is like, the shouty one who struggles with urges toward police brutality, and while her on-screen intended targets may be entirely deserving I imagine reds are less inclined to view this sympathetically given, stuff. So she might be a good candidate for a red author’s semi-strawmannish red hater character who’d rather let a criminal get away than admit Anash is useful/a person.

Also like, in my head the show’s Mepaf refuses to let her dad do her any favours and has an entirely grey upbringing, but it seems very like the fanfic community to ignore this entirely and make her an entitled brat, especially if she gets in the way of a ship they like or they dislike her for other reasons.

In terms of whether the author’s open I think it’s been established somewhere that like the fanfiction.net equivalent takes down stories by people who are/are accused of being red? But then one has to imagine they’d do the same to a story focused on a red character so idk.

Even if the author is openly red they are likely to make deliberate mistakes or otherwise conceal stuff about how red districts function and especially their internal justice system out of a sort of general reluctance to broadcast that shit to outsiders I think. 

You’ve also gotta imagine that allowing the showing of reds and thus implicitly interaction with a corpse would allow them to get into details the show can’t about like, the details of what they find in a body and how that proves things? But they’d probably only go into that if the author was themselves an autopsy tech - which is entirely possible!

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

(can be answered ooc or ic) What are some of the other characters/main characters in Hard Evidence?

[ooc] I have something in drafts for this IC but I’ll post that later, I am intruigued by this fanfic idea so I wanna send you this now and sort that out later!

In Hard Evidence the core team is made up of Detective Sergeant Hethal, homicide detectives Mepaf and Ishe (grey), lab techs Pasha and Hasam (yellow) and Dr Tep, the ‘Senior Evidence Analyst’ (green). And Keke! (purple janitor) I mean, Keke’s not part of the core team in terms of solving crimes but he’s main cast so I’m including him.

You also see grey beat cops, the orange doctor and psychologist we see every once in a while, yellows doing police paperwork and as extra lab techs, the Chief of Police, various judges, legal counsels and social workers.

(a lot of this, such as the yellows doing paperwork instead of retired/disabled cops and especially having a green running the lab, is inaccurate in depicting an actual normal police station in Tapa/Amenta.)

That’s a whole rainbow of people, though it’s missing red and there’s only one purple. 

So Hethal is like the main-ish character, but he’s a homicide detective rather than an analyst and he does the sunglasses thing the CSI Miami guy does. His personality comes off somewhere between cop and scientist - he’s more involved with the evidence side of things than like Brass is on the original show.

His main personality trait is being Incredibly Principled and always doing his best to make sure everything is done 100% right - this is kind of the impetus behind the title because his superiors always wanna fudge stuff because they are corrupt and his underlings let emotions get in the way, but while he has emotions, he makes sure only hard evidence decides who gets put away. (or executed probably, this is Amenta after all.)

Mepaf and Ishe - Ishe is the calm and good with people one and can get people to open up to him, but gets too emotionally involved in the direction of wanting to show mercy because he feels sorry for people. Mepaf is the hot-headed one who has to fight the urge to just shoot people because it would make the world a better place and what if they bribe a judge and get away. Was revealed in season 3 that she has an estranged blue dad.

Pasha and Hasam are nerdy, goofy lab techs similar to the ones on CSI. We get comic relief moments out of their finicky yellow personalities clashing with the cops’ straightforward grey personalities. Fans ship them.

Dr Tep is just Grissom with a side of Dr House. Green, knows everything, two doctorates, somehow also a concert-level pianist. Fanfics enjoy adding other random green-coded skills he is inexplicably amazing at. They also ship him with Hethal a lot and want them to be their gay dads.

Keke is a fan favourite, he was originally just a background character but slowly became part of the main cast. He’s the station’s purple janitor. Fans disagree as to whether his characterisation is complex or just wildly inconsistent, but he is a source of both ‘person is dumb or doesn’t know things’ jokes and folksy wisdom, and through lateral thinking will occasionally hit on insights that none of the other characters were able to see, solving the case. Tends to get Flanderised in bad fanfic into a ‘lol I’m so random fish monkeyhat banana’ type.

Anash is a total blank state, we don’t even know their gender and they’re only even mentioned twice on the show (in 10+seasons). Fan versions of them tend to be totally inconsistent with one another. Red fans like to ship them with their favourite character, since no other characters are red this gets those fics dropped from sites even faster than focusing on a red character to begin with would.

[wolffyluna]

Thank you so much, this will come in handy! I’m not sure I’ll quite be able to get the CSI-ness of it, mostly because I’m not super familiar with CSI, but I think I’ll be able to brush off any difference with ‘But it’s not CSI, it’s Hard Evidence!’

So far the current plan is to write one of those ‘non existent episode/an episode I wish existed’ fics, where there’s a murder that’s in a polluted area/is extra polluted/both, so that the only person who can actually physically investigate it is Anash (and their getting instructions from other characters on speaker phone in a conference room). And it looks like the murderer must have been red, but Hethal isn’t convinced, and Anash and Keke are the people who work out ‘wait, what if the murderer *wants* us to think they are red.’ And there may be some gentle ribbing of/copying the shows tendency to rip from the headlines, with the murderer who perpertrated this most DISGUSTING crime being a blue from Revenue and Customs (and this doesn’t remind anybody of anything.) I’m also tempted to make part of the fic being in character author’s notes, and the heading and tags of Archive of Amenta.

(My biggest question before I start is whether the author is red, a non red who wants to write something red focused as a challenged, or a red who’s pretending to be the second author. It’ll change how some of the scenes go.)

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

This sounds awesome <3

I figure most ppl who would wanna write abt reds are reds but I guess not everyone. And they may not be openly red.

I figure in terms of red hate levels we don’t know how the main cast feel because that would involve bringing it up. Ishe and Keke are probably the most likely sympathisers cause Ishe is just softhearted in general and half of Keke’s thing is having the opinion you don’t expect. Hethal would probably have normal levels of red-hate but the superhuman Integrity Powers to do the right thing anyway. although, since we don’t actually know, fic author could make anyone as sympathetic or as hate-filled as they wanted. ‘everybody is unrealistically fine with X’ (i.e. the Gay in historical settings) seems like a common fanfic thing.

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

(can be answered ooc or ic) What are some of the other characters/main characters in Hard Evidence?

[ooc] I have something in drafts for this IC but I’ll post that later, I am intruigued by this fanfic idea so I wanna send you this now and sort that out later!

In Hard Evidence the core team is made up of Detective Sergeant Hethal, homicide detectives Mepaf and Ishe (grey), lab techs Pasha and Hasam (yellow) and Dr Tep, the ‘Senior Evidence Analyst’ (green). And Keke! (purple janitor) I mean, Keke’s not part of the core team in terms of solving crimes but he’s main cast so I’m including him.

You also see grey beat cops, the orange doctor and psychologist we see every once in a while, yellows doing police paperwork and as extra lab techs, the Chief of Police, various judges, legal counsels and social workers.

(a lot of this, such as the yellows doing paperwork instead of retired/disabled cops and especially having a green running the lab, is inaccurate in depicting an actual normal police station in Tapa/Amenta.)

That’s a whole rainbow of people, though it’s missing red and there’s only one purple. 

So Hethal is like the main-ish character, but he’s a homicide detective rather than an analyst and he does the sunglasses thing the CSI Miami guy does. His personality comes off somewhere between cop and scientist - he’s more involved with the evidence side of things than like Brass is on the original show.

His main personality trait is being Incredibly Principled and always doing his best to make sure everything is done 100% right - this is kind of the impetus behind the title because his superiors always wanna fudge stuff because they are corrupt and his underlings let emotions get in the way, but while he has emotions, he makes sure only hard evidence decides who gets put away. (or executed probably, this is Amenta after all.)

Mepaf and Ishe - Ishe is the calm and good with people one and can get people to open up to him, but gets too emotionally involved in the direction of wanting to show mercy because he feels sorry for people. Mepaf is the hot-headed one who has to fight the urge to just shoot people because it would make the world a better place and what if they bribe a judge and get away. Was revealed in season 3 that she has an estranged blue dad.

Pasha and Hasam are nerdy, goofy lab techs similar to the ones on CSI. We get comic relief moments out of their finicky yellow personalities clashing with the cops’ straightforward grey personalities. Fans ship them.

Dr Tep is just Grissom with a side of Dr House. Green, knows everything, two doctorates, somehow also a concert-level pianist. Fanfics enjoy adding other random green-coded skills he is inexplicably amazing at. They also ship him with Hethal a lot and want them to be their gay dads.

Keke is a fan favourite, he was originally just a background character but slowly became part of the main cast. He’s the station’s purple janitor. Fans disagree as to whether his characterisation is complex or just wildly inconsistent, but he is a source of both 'person is dumb or doesn’t know things’ jokes and folksy wisdom, and through lateral thinking will occasionally hit on insights that none of the other characters were able to see, solving the case. Tends to get Flanderised in bad fanfic into a ‘lol I’m so random fish monkeyhat banana’ type.

Anash is a total blank state, we don’t even know their gender and they’re only even mentioned twice on the show (in 10+seasons). Fan versions of them tend to be totally inconsistent with one another. Red fans like to ship them with their favourite character, since no other characters are red this gets those fics dropped from sites even faster than focusing on a red character to begin with would.

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

caste flexibility meme

if I were blue I would do: I’d be torn here? Like I would want to do policy but there are two areas that I’d really want to change - caste-based inequality, and criminal justice/policing. I think probably the latter though because I know more about crime and policing than like economics etc.

if I were green I would do: research criminology! I would be real life Dr Tep. ;) 

if I were yellow I would do: lab tech I guess? Just the non-gross version of what I do now. Or legal advice.

if I were grey I would do: homicide detective ftw. 

if I were orange I would: be the pathologist on the other side of the glass. Or the only good red social worker. :/

if I were purple I would: actually don’t know, I would make a crappy purple I think. Physical labour, customer service and business would all be bad fits for me. I can do delicate stuff with my hands though, so maybe I would make things? Is dressmaking purple? I’d like to try working out in the countryside with animals but I have no idea if I’d be any good at it.

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

I forgot cleaning is purple! Non-polluted cleaning work. I have to very thoroughly disinfect things at work a lot, so I could make things very very clean. 

I mean also - (gross warning)

my skills might translate into butchering? ;)

-

I wouldn’t *like* to do either of these as a job though, I don’t think; I think I’d get bored mentally a lot. I need stuff to be.. like mentally challenging and difficult, I prefer it to be somewhat scientific, and it’s also a big plus for me to feel like I am improving things in the world somewhat. My job does those things and is therefore awesome, even if it is also gross.

Ultimately, sure, I would trade having an interesting and challenging job for not being red, anyone would, but it’s sad that I can’t think of many purple jobs that are like that. Just running a purple business, really. This could totally be ignorance on my part of purple jobs though, because I know it’s a very broad range and I’m probably missing something. Can you think of other purple jobs that are like this?

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

caste flexibility meme

if I were blue I would do: I’d be torn here? Like I would want to do policy but there are two areas that I’d really want to change - caste-based inequality, and criminal justice/policing. I think probably the latter though because I know more about crime and policing than like economics etc.

if I were green I would do: research criminology! I would be real life Dr Tep. ;) 

if I were yellow I would do: lab tech I guess? Just the non-gross version of what I do now. Or legal advice.

if I were grey I would do: homicide detective ftw. 

if I were orange I would: be the pathologist on the other side of the glass. Or the only good red social worker. :/

if I were purple I would: actually don’t know, I would make a crappy purple I think. Physical labour, customer service and business would all be bad fits for me. I can do delicate stuff with my hands though, so maybe I would make things? Is dressmaking purple? I’d like to try working out in the countryside with animals but I have no idea if I’d be any good at it.

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

Hard Evidence is a dumb meme show for trash. Evidence: you like it.

memes are fun

[luminousalicorn]

Can Amentans do genetic sequencing, and how genetically distinct can you expect castes to be? (Genetic differences need not result in phenotypic differences.) Because, like, irl we can get pretty good information about someone's ethnic background and degree of racial admixture from testing their genes. Is it possible for castes on Amenta? (Or castes within a particular country or region -- there wouldn't necessarily be planet-wide caste genetic markers.)

They can do that and like… a fair bit.  But they don’t have as much data for reds and for obvious reasons don’t love the idea of getting it.

[truth-from-ashes-blog]

[ooc post]

If they were to do this, which would have more genetic similarity, on average - members of the same caste from different (non-neighbouring) countries, or members of different castes from the same country?