(((I Will Outlive)))

Doctor Who is a great fandom to be in on tumblr because you'll see spoilers everywhere but not a single one of them is coherent unless you've seen the episode anyway. like oh the glorbon is secretly trying to ensnare humanity in a giant crab trap? the new companion Jiminy Pubble turned out to be the latest regeneration of the Doctor's old enemy The Fuckwizard? thanks I know less than I did before

legitimately so scary that i just made a doctors appointment for 2025. you mean the far distant sci fi future 2025? you mean the pacific rim 2025? you mean i have to go to the doctor while giant robots are fighting the fucking kaiju? fuck all the way offfffffff

i wish there was as much redemption in cartoons as cartoon fans think there are. i can count on one finger the amount of shows where the main villains actually dont die / get imprisoned at the end. 

i want more. i’d give anything for everything cartoon bros hate to be true. i want welfare universalism where we redeem everyone as well as we can, heal them, help them, understand that punishment isn’t the same as change, and forgiveness isn’t the same as compliance. everyone is a product of society and therefore changing society is what matters. healing over hurting. i don’t care if every other cartoon does the opposite, i just want one where that’s allowed.

i just… they’re such spoiled brats. in almost every single major cartoon, the villain is treated as an irredeemable villain, and half the time there’s snide comments about how you can’t help everyone.

why can’t i have one show where you can actually help everyone? why is it so bad for that to exist once, in a sea of punishment, cynicism and believing in your own moral superiority over others?

i’m so tired. i just want to believe in people.

For a while now I’ve been extremely confused by how common complaints against redemption arcs have become, because even outside of the realm of children’s cartoons, I can count on my two hands the number of western stories I’ve seen where villains are *actually* redeemed. Like, where is this over saturation of redemption arcs you all are talking about?? I’d love to see them!

I think it’s a combination of:

1) confusing villains being humanized and treated like well rounded people for a “redemption arc”, as if having the barest hint of understanding and sympathy for a villain = redemption, and

2) general audiences being so used to and comfortable with irredeemable villains who always recieve their inevitable retribution, that the few pieces of popular which break that mold are just too fucking much for them.

Americans are just obsessed with retributive justice and revenge and death and are very unwilling to accept anything else, even in fiction.

I’d like to add some other possible factors:

3) they treat slice of life media on the same level as sci-fi/fantasy/action media - despite the fact the former type treats characters in a different way than the latter (aka in slice of life media characters are simply characters, while in fantasy etc. you need to have distinguishable positive characters and villains, even if you write about)- so for them when a slice of life movie features a bad or just not nice parent/partner/friend/teacher/employer, who learns how to be a better person, they treat it on the same level as a redemption arc in a fantasy series (I saw someone saying that Ebenezer Scrooge had a redemption arc; I also remember that in the time when the Sequel Trilogy was being released, some anti reylos were claiming that canon Reylo would be very unoriginal, because there already are a plenty of media, in which a “good girl” ends up with a “bad boy”);

4) anti redemptionists spend so little time outside fandom sphere that they confuse the prevalence of concepts about redemption arcs in fandoms with the actual amount of redemption arc in media;

5) they treat redemption through death trope (which mostly is executed not as an actual redemption arc but as the last minute heroic sacrifice) and the reverse heel turn trope on the same level as actual redemption arcs that end with the villain’s survival;

It’s always nice to see the scientific literature proactively dealing with problems we don’t quite have yet… 😏

“You should describe how big a character is in terms of height” “You should describe how big a character is in terms of weight” I am going to describe how big a character is in terms of what fluid volume they would occupy if rendered down into goo.

@ranfanblog​​ replied:

That’d actually be a pretty fun quirk for an alien species with an amorphous body plan. “How big are Terrans” oh, several gallons each.

They’re perfectly capable of conceptualising a human’s size in terms of linear dimensions, but they typically avoid doing so, because in their cultures, linear measurements have a specific connotation of “non-sapient animal” or “inanimate object”. This is sufficiently ingrained that if one does describe a human in terms of height, they’re either making a conscious effort to do things the human way or being rude on purpose; sometimes it’s hard to tell which.

Some people are like "The classic sci-fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus is Problematic because it features the Torment Nexus"

#Woe betide if it's just called 'The Torment Nexus' and you're supposed to infer 'Don't Creat the Torment Nexus' for yourself

imagine you start watching this new show and it’s a silly little show about space set in the future then they announce the next season so you wait excitedly for five months and finally it’s here… you all sit round the tv and suddenly one of the main characters who is known for being unemotional starts going mad because of “biology…” and you slowly realise that he needs to have sex or he’s going to die so the other main character risks his entire career to help him out then they start ‘wrestling’ on the sand and the one going through the mating fever ends up killing the other guy which ends the fever but now he’s depressed because he just killed his best friend but wait he’s not actually dead the unemotional one is overjoyed everything’s fine and then they go back to work like nothing happened… you look at everyone else sitting in stunned silence thinking “did any one else think that was a little… yknow” then you accidentally start modern fandom and shipping culture

very much enjoying the tags thank you everybody

Wait till they all actually watch it and see the unnecessary titty window situation.

[ID: A collection of tags that read:

Based on some of the first-hand accounts I’ve read, fans already had thoughts in that direction but were very cautious about expressing them, because, you know, it was 1967 and they were nice suburban ladies. They referred to the idea of Spock and Kirk being in love as The Premise. One little housewives’ fan club in California wrote to Leonard Nimoy in the hiatus between seasons one and two, and he was very pleasant and agreed to come and meet their group and tell them about being in the show. They didn’t say anything about The Premise directly, in case it offended him, but of course they expressed their enthusiasm for the rapport between Kirk and Spock and how curious they were about Spock’s background and inner life. And Nimoy, who was working on season two by that time, said that he couldn’t give away any specifics but there was an episode coming up that would focus more on Spock’s personal life and the planet Vulcan, and they were naturally delighted and intrigued.

So when they sat down to watch season two, episode one, “Amok Time,” they were primed for an important Spock episode, and then that played out before their widening eyes and I think it’s safe to say it blew their beehives clean off their heads.

#lmao#star trek#lest we forget the literal binders of loose leaf paper with HAND WRITTEN FANFICTION being handed around#thank trekkers for fan fiction you literal babies

…And this is exactly how some of us got onto the path toward getting into SO MUCH [GOOD] TROUBLE later in our lives. Handwritten fanfic… pages and pages and PAGES of it. Tens and hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic. In looseleaf binders.

Just remember: “The first million words are for practice.” :) After that… all bets are off.

And it’s also worth bearing in mind that Amok Time was written by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon was a bisexual writer (according to his friend, gay author and academic Samuel R Delany) who wrote “The World Well Lost” (1953) which may have been the first SF story about homosexuality to be published in a mainstream SF magazine, not to mention gay-coded stories like “The Saucer of Loneliness”. Ted Sturgeon was a brilliant writer about love, and he knew exactly what he was doing in Amok Time. Although he might not have known what it would spawn.

And if you are curious to read some of his fiction there’s a Selected Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon out there, and the novels The Dreaming Jewels and More Than Human appear to be in print.

holy shit neil gaiman is here everyone stay cool

“But I can’t just use the same OCs in multiple unrelated stories with completely different settings” buddy, some of literary science fiction’s most celebrated authors invented entire subgenres of sci fi in order to justify doing exactly that. If you really can’t live with yourself unless you explain it, go with multiverse theory. Go with serial reincarnation. Heck, make the fact that their cumulative backstories cannot possibly add up an explicit plot point and go with some sort of metaphysical “eternal champion” deal. These are old and well-established plot devices created for that precise purpose – the heavy lifting has been done for you.

I’ve seen so many negative reviews of sci-fi movies and superhero movies and SFX-heavy action movies of all sorts that boil down to “all of the action scenes and all of the special effects are superfluous and the only portions of the film that have any merit are the parts where the characters are sitting around in dimly lit restaurants talking about their feelings”, and it’s only now occurred to me that these critics are literally just giving the movie a bad review for not being a coffee shop AU of itself.