#[warning: long]
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
random-thought-depository · 11 months ago
Text
One of the thoughts I had while writing that post on Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites, anti-predator defense, and the origins of the male gender role is if that model is correct it implies Larry Niven got the relationship between a sapient species's diet and culture/values pegged wrong, at least as far as the Kzin are concerned. Courage is the virtue of a prey species that engages in collective defense; a smart predator attacks the weak, avoids fights against strong opponents, and is quick to retreat from any fight in which it loses the advantage; a sapient species with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore apex predators would probably value/honor courage less than we do, so Kzin biology and implied evolutionary history is actually kind of an awkward fit with the kind of assholes the Kzin are. Asshole aliens with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore apex predators might be sneaky raiders with an unapologetic "if they outgun us, trade, avoid, or appease, if we outgun them, raid and pillage!" mindset, or something like that; they probably wouldn't have the prideful machismo, hotheaded aggression, and disdain for restraint of the Kzin (you could argue calling it machismo is an anthropomorphism because Kzintosh aren't men but lbr human machismo is very obviously what the Kzin attitude is modeled on).
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unrealistic for the Kzin to be the way they are, cause Kzin values could plausibly arise from intra-species competition and my rationalization for why the Kzin are as they are is a mix of that and "the Kzin are like that because their right-wing authoritarians won their history and got to shape their culture." But, as I said, I think the kind of assholes the Kzin are wouldn't logically flow directly from their ancestral subsistence strategy/ecological niche.
Which makes me wonder: if as a spec-bio exercise I tried to make a species which's biology would predispose them toward becoming approximately the kind of asshole Proud Warrior Race the Kzin are, what traits would they have?
Here's what I came up with:
First obvious thing is to give them a "harem" social system like gorillas, elephant seals, certain ungulates, etc.. This lends itself well to a species with a highly competitive male hierarchy in which male social and reproductive success is contingent on being able to make credible costly signals of being strong and badass.
One major obstacle to a species like that becoming a threat on the interstellar scale is control by a single dominant male is a pretty hard cap on group size. I propose that this species has overcome that by developing a social system with dominant bull coalitions, so instead of being limited to groups of one to three dozen individuals controlled by a single dominant male, they can have e.g. groups of a few thousand individuals controlled by a few hundred dominant bulls and so on; this eventually scaled up to an interstellar empire with billions of subjects and probably at least a few hundred million dominant bulls in loose coalition (that big dominant bull coalition is the empire's warrior-aristocrat class).
Unlike the Kzin, in this species the females will definitely be sapient and have lots of soft power; all the internal male social competition and external war and imperialism is largely about impressing them.
Another major point of difference from the Kzin: this species definitely should not have much evolutionary history of cooperative big game hunting. Pack hunting strongly incentivizes and rewards cooperation and solidarity (I suspect this plus the smaller group sizes of carnivores is why you see "harem" social organization more in herbivores), whereas I think to get aliens that are assholes in approximately the way the Kzin are we want a social system that's highly internally competitive. This probably implies a mostly herbivorous diet, though there might be some supplementation with small game; the important thing is this species has had basically no selection pressure for being effective predators of animals strong enough to require cooperation to take down.
Related and important point: the evolution of sapience in this species was more-or-less entirely driven by social competition and sexual selection, and they got too big to be tempting targets for the predators of their ancestral environment long before they developed sapience. So this is a species with no recent evolutionary history of being a prey species.
I guess we're maybe looking at something like a mix of gorillas and elephants here; maybe ancestrally browsers of the savanna and open woodland (though they'd gradually switch toward eating more richer food such as fruit, tubers, young shoots, meat, etc. as they developed more efficient food production). If we're doing the Mass Effect "more alien-looking than Star Trek forehead aliens but still implausibly humanoid" thing some kind of big beefy horned minotaur-looking humanoids would be a pretty appropriate look for the dominant bulls (with the subordinate males being more slender and the females being more slender and substantially smaller - this would be a species with way more sexual dimorphism than humans), not sure what I'd make them look like if I went the route of making them more realistically alien-looking.
Organized violence (i.e. war) developed in this species partly as a mating ritual. Large-scale battles gave males the same kind of opportunities to demonstrate strength and courage that fitness signalling duels did, but the much more complex tactical environment of a large-scale battle also offered opportunities for males to conspicuously demonstrate intelligence and cooperation. The switch from duels to battles as the primary arena of fitness signalling was a major selection pressure driving the evolution of sapience in this species. Originally the ultimate aim of war in this species was group fusion in which the dominant bull coalition of one group would defeat the dominant bull coalition of another group and the two groups would merge with the victorious dominant bull coalition being the dominant bull coalition of the combined group and the males in the defeated dominant bull coalition being either killed or demoted to subordinate status with their new lower rank being rubbed in by bullying and humiliation rituals. As the species developed bigger and more sedentary social groups this developed into territorial conquest with conquered communities remaining in their old homes under the rule of viceroys. But the thing where wars were partly giant mating rituals meant often neither side was particularly in a hurry to finish off their enemies as no more enemies to fight would mean diminished opportunities for social mobility and impressing females; there tended to be a "we have always been at war with Eurasia/Eastasia" dynamic where the conflict itself was effectively treated as having social value and actively maintained and subject to various forms of ritualization that limited its destructiveness so it could be kept going longer.
So, this is a species that's gotten lots of selection pressure from intra-species competition and violence, but has no recent evolutionary history as cooperative predators of animals with comparable size and strength to themselves and has no recent evolutionary history as a prey species. This species will have instincts and intuitions about violence totally optimized for intra-species violence that's mostly a mix of coalition politics propaganda of the deed and male fitness signalling rituals (and, of course, their culture will build on those instincts and intuitions and the dynamics that selected for them). I think this would lead plausibly to people who share one of the defining traits of the Kzin: being aggressive imperialist warmongering swaggering bullies who endlessly congratulate themselves on their ferocious warrior spirit and supposed mighty warrior prowess and supposed right to rule derived from that but are not actually all that good at war compared to a species like us that has been shaped by hunting and being hunted.
The thing about intra-species violence that's mostly a mix of coalition politics propaganda of the deed and male fitness signalling is it simultaneously incentivizes restraint more than inter-species predator/prey violence and incentivizes aggression more consistently than inter-species predator/prey violence.
On the restraint side, intra-species violence means potentially violence against relatives or potential mates, and in a social species violence against potential helpers. This obviously creates an incentive for restraint. Violent intra-species competition is where you get natural weapons and combat set up to probably not do too much damage (bighorn sheep knocking each other on their hard blunt horns instead of stabbing each other in the fleshy flank or face with sharp horns), notions of fair and honorable fights, "why don't you pick on someone your own size?," chivalry, rules of war, boxing gloves and rules against hitting below the belt, etc.. This post touches on some of the dynamics I'm talking about here.
I think plausible cultural development of this species might enhance this. A highly competitive "harem" social system means at least the males of this species are likely to be less cooperative than humans, and a less cooperative species will have a harder time forming effective equalizing coalitions. This species never got our probable evolutionarily significant period of living in mostly relatively egalitarian societies; compared to us their males at least are likely to be less wired for cooperative coalition-building and more wired for trying to individualistically climb their way up viciously competitive hierarchies; again, it seems likely this would make the formation of effective equalizing coalitions harder. The females are a bit of a wild card here, not sure what'd be going on with them, but considering they find aggressive, violent, domineering males sexy, I can see them not having instincts terribly promising for forming effective society-wide equalizing coalitions either. A species that's not very good at forming effective equalizing coalitions is likely to be not very good at coming up with ideologies of equality; equivalents of liberalism, democracy, socialism, anarchism, etc. may not exist at all in their philosophical tradition, or if they exist are likely to be obscure and marginal. The implication may be the political landscape of this species was a pretty dismal picture of oppressive oligarchies everywhere for pretty much the entire existence of their species. Like I said, I expect this species would develop a lot of practices to limit the destructiveness of war and focus its destructiveness on direct combatants. Defeat of a community in war would likely mean little change in the social or material conditions of most of the community's members; one oligarchic dominant bull coalition would replace another, and the only real change for most people would be a change in the names and faces (or scents or whatever they primarily recognize each other by) of their masters. Plausibly, the females of a conquered community would even approve of the change, seeing their community's new ruling dominant bull coalition as having proven themselves more desirable breeding material by winning. All of this would tend to encourage a sensibility that wars are basically social games between males and the only thing important at stake in them is the personal social and reproductive success of the direct combatants.
On the aggression side... Violent coalition politics involves lots of costly signalling, bluff, and martyrdom. The kind of violence a species like the one I'm describing here engages in is probably going to include a lot of violence that's basically an implicit statement of "I am exceptionally strong and brave and badass and would be an exceptionally good subordinate or ally, please give me a promotion!" And when it comes to male violence done as male fitness signalling to females, well, sperm is cheap and ova and wombs are expensive; in a "harem" social system demonstrating your mere viability will probably not be enough to impress females into mating with you, they are likely to require a costly signal of exceptional excellence before perceiving you as a desirable breeding partner, and if you die trying to make that costly signal, well, rolling the dice on a 65% chance of getting killed while young and a 35% chance of getting to breed might easily be selected for over contenting oneself with dying childless at a ripe old age.
Basically, I think you might plausibly end up with a species with bone-deep intuitions that:
- Violence is a performance, it is primarily communicative, using it to send a message to your opponent and/or to witnesses is at least an important secondary consideration and may even be more important than the actual concrete outcome of the fight. It is not enough to simply defeat your enemy, you must do so in a way that effectively communicates what you want to communicate.
- The most consistent purposes of violence are to show off your own strength, bravery, and fighting prowess and to terrorize and humiliate your opponent into submission.
- War is basically a game played among males. It's not a trivial game, it's literally deadly serious for the males involved in it and your society is largely organized around it, but it's fundamentally a game; the only people who have really big stakes in it are the direct combatants, and having fun and displaying good sportsmanship and putting on a cool performance are important secondary considerations and may even be more important than the actual concrete outcome. If you've ever read Ian Banks's Player Of Games, Azad (the game and the institutions and culture around it) in that book is the best analogy I can think of for what war would be to these people.
- Your enemies will be basically following the same rule book you have.
When these people develop interstellar travel and meet other sapient species, they'll apply the instincts and cultural institutions they developed for intra-species competition to those other sapients. I.e. they'll turn into nasty imperialists. Conquered aliens would get incorporated into their society in about the same social position as weak males. In their society weak males with little hope of rising to dominant bull status are kept around for labor and to assist with the care and education of the offspring of their female relatives and have a social status roughly equivalent to serfs; this would be the obvious niche to put conquered aliens in, with some modifications, e.g. conquered aliens would be expected to keep reproducing with each other.
Combine what I said in the previous paragraph with how much these people's social instincts would revolve around volatile male hierarchies reinforced by bullying and humiliation rituals, and I expect being a conquered subject of them would tend to be unpleasant to horrific. Being a primarily herbivorous species, these people wouldn't occasionally eat their slaves like the Kzin, but I could totally see the dominant bulls occasionally casually caving some poor slave's skull in out of a combination of some petty irritation and wanting to remind everyone who's boss.
Let's say we want these people to get approximately the same nasty surprise when they attack humans that the Kzin did. Model favorable to that:
In this setting, the most common pathway to sapience is through social and sexual selection. Sapient species usually evolve in environments without big predators, e.g. isolated islands, because serious predation pressure tends to prevent the very strong commitment to a long-lived slow-breeding very K-selected life strategy that leads to sapience. Sapient species usually do not have recent evolutionary history as big game hunters (the typical sapient is a physically not very strong omnivore, often primarily an eater of fruit, tubers, seeds, insects, and small animals, though also a lot of sapient species started with an ecological niche roughly equivalent of fish-eating birds that nest in large rookeries). Species that evolve sapience through this pathway usually have strong social and artistic intelligence, but lack instincts and institutions of organized violence (they aren't always peaceful, but if they do have significant intra-species violence it's murder, done by individuals or very small groups, not war).
When the warmonger aliens I've spent most of this post describing meet species like this it usually goes similarly to what happened when the Maori met the Moriori, or at least like that event as described in a book I read once. The warmonger aliens will roll up and be like "Yo, what's up, losers! You are now our slaves! We're awfully fond of presents called 'tribute' which you'll be giving us regularly from now on, and you'll be obeying our orders from now on! You can start by performing these humiliating submission rituals to acknowledge our superiority!" and this will be kind of an OCP to their victims, who will usually either basically surrender immediately or try to resist but fold pretty quickly cause they aren't well-equipped for war psychologically, culturally, institutionally, or materially. The warmonger dominant bulls honestly find it kind of boring, to the point that they fight a lot of highly ritualized flower war style conflicts among themselves as a mix of oligarch class dispute resolution, bloody enrichment, and live fire training to keep their warrior skills sharp.
Basically, the galaxy is full of weedy theater kid nerds, and these warmonger aliens are the meathead jock bullies of the galaxy going around shoving those nerds into lockers and stealing their lunch money.
The exceptions to this pattern the warmonger aliens met before us were a mix of 1) other species like themselves, 2) sapient species with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore more-or-less apex predators (who are basically sneaky raiders). The warmonger alien dominant bulls tend to hate the latter and bitch endlessly about how they "have no honor," but savor tangling with the former in a "finally, worthy opponents!" way.
Then they met humans.
Humans have a long enough evolutionary history of big game hunting that this may have subjected us to significant selection pressure for increased cooperativeness that the warmonger aliens didn't get. But that isn't special in this context, the warmonger aliens have tangled with sapients descended from big game hunting carnivores before.
The thing that makes humans relevantly special is our relatively recent evolutionary history of being a prey species that engaged in collective defense, and the instincts we have that formed in that context but can be activated in other kinds of conflict.
Going back to that "real fights" thing earlier:
"but how often are you ever going to be in a fight where you’re willing to rip the other guy’s cheek out, gouge out his eyes and so forth?"
A fight against a predator that wants to eat your child looks like that.
If you're fighting a member of your own species, the entity you're fighting might be a relative, potential mate, or potential helper, so there's an incentive for restraint.
If you're a predator hunting, well, a carnivore species needs their prey species, that's their food source; smart lions wouldn't want to wipe out their prey species, they need their prey species, they would prefer their prey species thrive and be abundant and healthy; again there is an incentive for restraint; very plausibly one of the first lessons a sapient carnivore species would have to collectively learn after becoming sapient is restraint, learning that it would be all too easy to use their new, better weapons to kill too many of their prey and that they need to consciously avoid doing that.
Prey defending themselves from predators are the ones who'd have more-or-less zero incentive for restraint. If you can hurt or kill the lioness that's trying to eat your child, there is basically no reason to not go for it except self-preservation. Predators need their prey, but that's not symmetrical; prey don't need their predators, and sapient prey smart enough to do birth control and cull any dumber competitor species would probably be unambiguously much better off if all their predators dropped dead (Pleistocene humans could have done semi-reliable birth control by abstinence, outercourse, and lactational amenorrhea).
Humans are a slow-breeding species. A pride of lions could easily gradually eat a small early human band into extinction, and would have little incentive to avoid doing so cause humans aren't even their primary prey so when they ran out of humans they could just eat more of the antelope and so on that are already most of what they're eating anyway. The warmonger aliens have no evolutionary history of conflicts so existential.
The warmonger aliens have an idea of self-sacrificial heroism, but their version is entirely oriented (in an "adaptation executor, not fitness maximizer" way) toward burnishing the reputation of surviving close male relatives by association and thus increasing their reproductive success. They would have nothing in their recent evolutionary history like the experience of standing between a child and a hungry lioness. They would not grok "get away from her you bitch!" (that essay talks about the role of males in anti-predator defense but, yeah, women would have this too, who do you think would be the last line of defense for the children if a predator got past the male defensive ring?).
(The warmonger aliens definitely think it's a bit weird that we have mixed gender armies, not so much in a conventionally sexist way - they're inclined to see the size and strength differences between human men and women as obviously trivial compared to the much bigger sexual dimorphism of their species - but in that the idea of females caring enough about the outcome of a war to fight in it is alien to them. It's not that weird to them though, the big game hunter ancestry carnivore sapients they've encountered have mixed-sex armies and unwarlike sapients that try to resist conquest usually form them when they scramble to put a military together so it's got precedent in their experience.)
Like, yeah, the warmonger aliens are exactly the kind of people where some human commander would draw some of them into a clever trap they wouldn't anticipate cause prioritizing actually winning over looking heroic is alien behavior to them and then the comrades of the ones who died getting punked would bitch about how "dishonorable" it was of us to fight to win instead of obediently lining up to get slaughtered like cattle in some set-piece battle because that'd be the "honorable" thing by their definitions.
But also, something a lot like Londo Mollari's little speech about how brave the humans were in the Earth-Minbari war but it's some warmonger alien dominant bull describing the resistance we're putting up against his people and instead of admiration it's spoken with a tone of queasy puzzlement tinged with fear, irritation with our "irrational" resistance mixed with fear of the possible implications for what might happen if we start winning, it's alien behavior to him and he's admitting that it scares him.
Also, turns out species that have been strongly selected for solidarity (that's us!) are good at building equalizing coalitions and creating memes to coordinate them around, so not only are human ideologies of equality such as liberalism and communism effective at supercharging our resistance against imperialist conquest in a way that's an OCP to the warmonger aliens, they also turn out to be really disruptive to the warmonger aliens' shitty empire when some human chaos agents have fun spreading them around in it.
69 notes · View notes
a-deed-without-a-name · 6 days ago
Note
I know I had *considered* sending something like this in but I’m not sure I ever actually did. If I did just ignore this I guess. If you are still open to prompts would you do some kind of mpreg with Elias?
As his hand smoothed the lotion across the wide, pale expanse of Elias’s belly, Jon asked, “Shouldn’t the sire be doing this?”
“Unfortunately, he’s currently out of the country,” Elias replied.
“And he’ll be back…when, exactly?”  Jon looked up from where he was kneeling between his legs, laying irritation plainly across his face.  Given the angle, he could barely even see Elias’s face over the gravid swell of him; it wasn’t helped by the fact Elias wasn’t even looking at him, attention bent to the expense reports he was currently looking over.
“I’m afraid even I don’t know that,” he said, marking something with a pen.  “The nature of his work is…unpredictable.”
Jon warmed another palmful of lotion between his hands.  It was heavy, rich, smelled of coconut, giving Elias’s office a faint tropical air that was very much at odds with the overabundance of dark wood and antique books.
“Does he know?” Jon asked, and that got a look thrown his way, albeit a sharp one.
“Of course he knows, Jon, I saw to that.  Honestly, what do you take me for?”
Jon chose to answer that only with a soft snort, and saw Elias’s eyes roll behind his glasses before he went back to work.  He reached out, starting at the peak of the stomach that so noticeably strained the buttons of Elias’s suits and sat heavily between his spread thighs now, working his way down to a navel in serious danger of everting.  He rubbed a thumb over the red mark that a seam had left in the surprisingly-soft flesh.  Elias really ought to invest in some maternity wear.  Jon suspected he’d already had his tailor let what he did out as much as he could.
“Just so long as he gets back before your water breaks in the library,” he muttered, then paused, glancing up again.  “How far along are you?”
He didn’t need to use his so-called powers to be sure of Elias’s answer even before it came.  “This would be an excellent opportunity for you to try and Know, Jon.”
It probably was.  Low-stakes information seemed to come so much more easily than things that were actually useful.  Sure enough, after only a moment or two of concentrated effort, Jon burst out with an incredulous, “Ten weeks?!”
Elias drew in a long, slow, measured breath, and let it back out again.
“Good lord, Elias.”  Jon hadn’t exactly been around many pregnant people.  He’d assumed that Elias was approaching full-term, based on size alone.  Perhaps it might have caught him as odd that he’d gotten so big so fast, but he assumed he’d “popped,” then there was the fact anything would look enormous on his small frame…
“Infants in the sire’s family tend to run large,” Elias said somewhat stiffly, as Jon ran a hand back to moisturize what was unmistakably a love handle.  “And of course there’s the potential for multiples.”
“Even still!”
“I am eating for two.”  Elias shifted in his chair.  It creaked beneath an ass that had grown nearly proportionally with his middle.  Jon knew, having hefted it in both hands quite recently, assuming it a simple perk of pregnancy and the hormones that were making Elias - ordinarily a buttoned-down, slicked-back collection of angles sharp and delicate as blown glass - so soft and round.  “And it certainly doesn’t help that since I started showing, everyone in this Institute seems to have taken it upon themselves to shower us with care.  Usually of the edible variety.”
“Like bees tending to their queen,” Jon said scornfully.  Elias’s smile was small, smug, and very pointed as the pale eyes Jon could barely see flicked to the lotion sitting on the edge of the desk, then down to Jon’s hands, still working it into every inch of him with a diligence he applied usually to research alone.  “Oh, shut up.”
“Incidentally, Martin is a wonderful baker.”  Elias nodded down at himself.  “A good few of those pounds are his doing.  I think it especially enjoys his scones.”
“I’ll have a talk with him,” Jon muttered, and did not ask whether “it” referred to the fetus (or fetuses, as the case may be) or Elias’s gut.  Although he was very tempted.
“You don’t like it, Jon?”  Elias put a hand on top of his own belly, caressing, fingers digging into it.  His skin was like satin, the smooth expanse of it almost shimmering, unbroken except for the faint line of sparse hair that began below his navel and disappeared into his unbuttoned trousers.  Not a stretch mark to be seen, courtesy of Jon’s exhaustive efforts.  “Worshiping at the altar of my gravid belly?  Witnessing my ample growth?  Tending to every need of both myself and the evidence of my fertility?”
“As if more than ten percent of that’s a baby right now,” Jon muttered, and it was a coincidence, how close his mouth currently was to the curve of Elias’s stomach.  “And no, I don’t.”
“No?” Elias raised an eyebrow.
“No.  Believe it or not, Elias, I have better things to do with my time at work than take stock of how - increasingly pampered you are during what is barely a pregnancy yet.”
“I suppose you come in here a dozen times a day for your health, then.”
The noise Jon made was not a growl, and he was not nuzzled into the hot, bloated weight of Elias’s full belly when he made it.  Elias’s chuckle thrummed through him, and his long fingers carded through Jon’s hair.
“Rosie’s on her way back.  You’d better get down to the archives.”  There was a smile in his voice.  “Wouldn’t want anyone to catch you in here doing this, would you?”
Jon pulled back, stood up, wiped his hands and his mouth on the paper towels that Elias provided.  He grabbed one arm, rubbing it aggressively, forcing blood into the skin and muscle there and away from…other areas.
“Wouldn’t want to stick around and watch you gorge yourself,” he muttered, Knowing Elias had sent Rosie out for lunch.  “Is the sire even going to recognize you when he gets back, Elias?”
He did not like the smile that prompted from Elias.
“Everyone thinks it’s yours, you know,” he murmured, and Jon straightened, affronted.
“You’re joking.”
“I know.  I’ll admit I was offended at first, too.”  Jon glared.  “But can you blame them?”
Thinking about it - thinking about it honestly - Jon supposed that no, well, he couldn’t.  All the trips to Elias’s office, ostensibly so he wouldn’t have to come down the stairs or even get up off his swiftly-growing ass.  The hands pressed to the small of his back to steady him as his center of balance rapidly shifted.  The time Tim had caught them leaving together.  The time Sasha had caught a glimpse of the search for pregnancy pillows he’d left up on his laptop.  The time Martin had asked him to bring a cup of tea to Elias and Jon had dressed him down upon realizing it wasn’t decaf.
He’d apologized for the last one at the time and explained he was simply under a lot of stress, to which Martin had given an understanding nod and said he could imagine.  Jon regretted telling him he was sorry now.
It went far against his policy regarding how much of his personal life seeped into work, but maybe Jon ought to rethink letting his preferences slip.  He had obviously been far too rigid if the entire goddamned Institute thought he was capable of and willing to make a baby with anyone, least of all Elias…
Elias read his thoughts, as was his obnoxious wont.  “I know, I know.  As if the thought’s ever even crossed your mind outside of awkward first-date explanations.  But…you’re certainly not without your avenues for pleasure, are you, Jon?”  He smiled up at him, and there was a definite seductive quality to the way that he pulled his reluctant buttons together over his bump.  Jon sucked in an involuntary breath.  “You can go now; I’ll see you tonight.  And do bring dinner.  We’re craving Indian and…Greek, I think.”
“Which one?” Jon asked at the doorway, and Elias looked at him, head cocked, hand resting possessively on his stomach.
“Both.  Obviously.”
4 notes · View notes
turtlemagnum · 1 year ago
Text
here's some of the lore adjustments i'm going to make when i buy the star wars franchise:
recanonize hutts being able to biologically trans their gender for purposes of having kids. jabba can be trans if she wants to, ok
i think it's fucking stupid that twi'lek women are god damn gorgeous and the twi'lek men look like fucking freaks. therefore, i'm gonna be making the men look as pretty as the women. it's only fair
give the devaronian women horns. you make a species of devil lookin guys and you TAKE AWAY their HORN's??"? shame!! shame upon your houses. also i'd make the facial variation a bit more diverse so we still get the freaky lookin guys but also we should be able to make hot guys too with them i think.
in general i'd get away from that weird sexual dimorphism thing common to a lot of fantasy stuff where the males of a species are all monstrous but the women are all sexy and curvy and such. as such, either all of the people of a species are gonna be sexy and curvy like the women, or they're all gonna be monstrous like the men. them's the rules
revan would be made canonically transmasculine, though i'd wanna do it in a very low key way. it just makes sense!!!
droids can use the force, and everyone has a little bit of force in them so if you train hard enough anyone can become proficient. also, since the cool thing about the force is that it's a very soft kind of magic and is generally just whatever the story needs, i'd go Ever So Slightly Anime about it. like not full on but i'd definitely wanna stretch the physical elements of it slightly more than the movies tended to
yoda's lightsaber should be longer than average, actually. dude's little, he's gonna need the extra reach
the society of star wars is like, fairly straightforwardly a human supremacist one, right? how would that impact the beauty standards and gender identities of the other sapient guys? like what if a rodian got surgery to have a body more appealing to the human gaze? what if one of those secretary droids intentionally designed to look like a shapely woman turned out to be transmasc and got robo-top surgery? conversely, what if a transfem B1 battle droid got robo-breast implants to feel more like a woman?
anyways, speaking of rodians. i want you to imagine the face of a rodian (for those unaware, the guy we see han solo shoot at the beginning of a new hope (greedo) is a rodian). imagine what that mouth do. like, vacuum type shit. literally inhuman degrees of head game. think about it
slugthrowers!!! i'd wanna completely overhaul them, there's this one bit of lore That I Hate that is like "heh... slugthrowers are so much more reliable than blasters, which are actually unreliable as hell if you really think about it..." and it's like. No. That's Not How That Works. if blasters were less reliable than more conventional weaponry, they'd never be widely adopted. that's how weapons work. if it ain't reliable, nobody's gonna fucking use it!!! you need (and i mean NEED) the thing to go bang (or pew, in this case) every time you pull the trigger!! if it doesn't, then no military is gonna adopt it, and since civilians will very frequently go for stuff that has some degree of military pedigree, that's kind of fucking important. so, here's how i'd make blasters better than slugthrowers: more accurate, more reliable, easier to mass produce cheaply and effectively, higher ammunition capacity, and not impacted by varying gravity (at least not as much as Real Bullets, y'know). i'd also make the advantages of slugthrowers that they hard counter jedi (can't reflect metal with a lazer sword, you'd just melt it and now you have molten lead hitting your body at somewhere between mach 1 and 4!!!), and have more potentiality for stealth since you can suppress em silent if you know what you're doing. it is canon that jedi are often killed by assassins with explosives, and since slugthrowers are essentially a form of explosive, this is just an extension of that. so, that's why blasters would be more popular, because How Often Is A Normal Person Gonna Fight A Guy With A Lightsaber, so blasters are just Better in almost all situations but slugthrowers have Just Enough Of A Situational Benefit to still be around for like, at the very least people who are like, bounty hunters that specifically go after jedi or sith, y'know. And No, Jedi Cannot Just Catch The Bullets With The Force, That's Stupid.
anyways, i'd either make padme as young as anakin was when they meet (about 9) or i'd make anakin about the same age as padme when they meet (about 14). that way it's Not Quite As Weird, y'know. i'd probably spring for the latter since that'd be easier to cast good actors for
i'd decanonize the sequels since i have my own ideas for them, but i'd keep certain elements (like bb8 droids and porgs and the live slug reaction guy)
luke is ace but has romantic attraction. again, relatively low key but yeah. also mara jade is canon
i'd make jar jar hot. i'm not gonna elaborate because i wanna keep some things a suprise
3 notes · View notes
gongyussy · 10 months ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
"i would know her by reformed body alone... i would know her in death"
also... there's official art
Tumblr media Tumblr media
26K notes · View notes
tomb-of-madeline · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
The Bird Daughters. A comic about a bird woman and her dreams. made in the spring of 2023.
24K notes · View notes
comicaurora · 2 years ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
how do you infinite scroller webcomic people DO IT
40K notes · View notes
cookinguptales · 2 years ago
Text
So I’ve been enjoying the Disney vs. DeSantis memes as much as anyone, but like. I do feel like a lot of people who had normal childhoods are missing some context to all this.
I was raised in the Bible Belt in a fairly fundie environment. My parents were reasonably cool about some things, compared to the rest of my family, but they certainly had their issues. But they did let me watch Disney movies, which turned out to be a point of major contention between them and my other relatives.
See, I think some people think this weird fight between Disney and fundies is new. It is very not new. I know that Disney’s attempts at inclusion in their media have been the source of a lot of mockery, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that as far as actual company policy goes, Disney has actually been an industry leader for queer rights. They’ve had policies assuring equal healthcare and partner benefits for queer employees since the early 90s.
I’m not sure how many people reading this right now remember the early 90s, but that was very much not industry standard. It was a big deal when Disney announced that non-married queer partners would be getting the same benefits as the married heterosexual ones.
Like — it went further than just saying that any unmarried partners would be eligible for spousal benefits. It straight-up said that non-same-sex partners would still need to be married to receive spousal benefits, but because same-sex partners couldn’t do that, proof that they lived together as an established couple would be enough.
In other words, it put long-term same-sex partners on a higher level than opposite-sex partners who just weren’t married yet. It put them on the exact same level as heterosexual married partners.
They weren’t the first company ever to do this, but they were super early. And they were certainly the first mainstream “family-friendly” company to do it.
Conservatives lost their damn minds.
Protests, boycotts, sermons, the whole nine yards. I can’t tell you how many books about the evils of Disney my grandmother tried to get my parents to read when I was a kid.
When we later moved to Florida, I realized just how many queer people work at Disney — because historically speaking, it’s been a company that has guaranteed them safety, non-discrimination, and equal rights. That’s when I became aware of their unofficial “Gay Days” and how Christians would show up from all over the country to protest them every year. Apparently my grandmother had been upset about these days for years, but my parents had just kind of ignored her.
Out of curiosity, I ended up reading one of the books my grandmother kept leaving at our house. And friends — it’s amazing how similar that (terrible, poorly written) rhetoric was to what people are saying these days. Disney hires gay pedophiles who want to abuse your children. Disney is trying to normalize Satanism in our beautiful, Christian America. 
Just tons of conspiracy theories in there that ranged from “a few bad things happened that weren’t actually Disney’s fault, but they did happen” to “Pocahontas is an evil movie, not because it distorts history and misrepresents indigenous life, but because it might teach children respect for nature. Which, as we all know, would cause them all to become Wiccans who believe in climate change.”
Like — please, take it from someone who knows. This weird fight between fundies and Disney is not new. This is not Disney’s first (gay) rodeo. These people have always believed that Disney is full of evil gays who are trying to groom and sexually abuse children.
The main difference now is that these beliefs are becoming mainstream. It’s not just conservative pastors who are talking about this. It’s not just church groups showing up to boycott Gay Day. Disney is starting to (reluctantly) say the quiet part out loud, and so are the Republicans. Disney is publicly supporting queer rights and announcing company-supported queer events and the Republican Party is publicly calling them pedophiles and enacting politically driven revenge.
This is important, because while this fight has always been important in the history of queer rights, it is now being magnified. The precedent that a fight like this could set is staggering. For better or for worse, we live in a corporation-driven country. I don’t like it any more than you do, and I’m not about to defend most of Disney’s business practices. But we do live in a nation where rights are largely tied to corporate approval, and the fact that we might be entering an age where even the most powerful corporations in the country are being banned from speaking out in favor of rights for marginalized people… that’s genuinely scary.
Like… I’ll just ask you this. Where do you think we’d be now, in 2023, if Disney had been prevented from promising its employees equal benefits in 1994? That was almost thirty years ago, and look how far things have come. When I looked up news articles for this post from that era, even then journalists, activists, and fundie church leaders were all talking about how a company of Disney’s prominence throwing their weight behind this movement could lead to the normalization of equal protections in this country.
The idea of it scared and thrilled people in equal parts even then. It still scares and thrills them now.
I keep seeing people say “I need them both to lose!” and I get it, I do. Disney has for sure done a lot of shit over the years. But I am begging you as a queer exvangelical to understand that no. You need Disney to win. You need Disney to wipe the fucking floor with these people.
Right now, this isn’t just a fight between a giant corporation and Ron DeSantis. This is a fight about the right of corporations to support marginalized groups. It’s a fight that ensures that companies like Disney still can offer benefits that a discriminatory government does not provide. It ensures that businesses much smaller than Disney can support activism.
Hell, it ensures that you can support activism.
The fight between weird Christian conspiracy theorists and Disney is not new, because the fight to prevent any tiny victory for marginalized groups is not new. The fight against the normalization of othered groups is not new.
That’s what they’re most afraid of. That each incremental victory will start to make marginalized groups feel safer, that each incremental victory will start to turn the tide of public opinion, that each incremental victory will eventually lead to sweeping law reform.
They’re afraid that they won’t be able to legally discriminate against us anymore.
So guys! Please. This fight, while hilarious, is also so fucking important. I am begging you to understand how old this fight is. These people always play the long game. They did it with Roe and they’re doing it with Disney.
We have! To keep! Pushing back!
52K notes · View notes
kyra45 · 11 months ago
Text
Scammer pretending to be in Palestine v2
This post has been remade with better info! Please go to this one:
Got an ask from someone claiming to be in Palestine needing mutual aid? Unfortunately there is a scammer going around and it’s likely the ask you got sent is the same one being sent by multiple accounts who target users interacting with Palestine posts. These blogs use the text/images off a real fundraiser and then post it here pretending to be the person it’s made for. Their accounts are usually only a few days old and they don’t interact beyond the ask/follow. Lately they might make the link to their PayPal account in different colors or claim their GoFundMe is pending so you will assume the real one is theirs. They don’t have any GoFundMe’s set up. They steal from them. If you need proof of something being stolen, searching the text of their post in a search engine should pull up the source. If you know how to report PayPal accounts, please report those used by the scammers.
(Moved to new list)
Below is a growing list of fake/stolen names used across the accounts:
Nour Samar | maryline lucy | Fred Odhiambo | Jeff Owino | Valentine Nakuti | Conslata Obwanga | JACINTA SITATI | David Okoth | Martín Mutugi | Daudi Likuyani | William Ngonyo | Fred Agy | George Ochieng | BONFACE ODHIAMBO | Sila Keli | John Chacha | benson komen | Alvin Omondi | Jacinta Sitati | Daudi Likuyani | Noah Keter | Faith Joram | Rawan AbuMahady (any PayPal’s using this name are scammers who have stolen it off a real GoFundMe. The real person does not have a PayPal account that they post on tumblr.) | Asnet Wangila | Remmy Cheptau
Keep in mind this post isn’t saying all accounts asking for mutual aid in Palestine are scams. Rather, this post is meant to bring awareness of a scammer stealing money from those who really need it by pretending to be a person in Palestine. To report scams, use this:
Report -> Something else -> Illegal uses or Content -> Phishing
12K notes · View notes
parisoonic · 5 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
Demo has had many careers - tattoo artist isn't one of them.
4K notes · View notes
tardxsblues · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Because you and Mr. Fell don't ever talk to each other. We talk all the time. We've been talking for millions of years. Bla-bla-bla-bla-bla-bla-bla-bla-bla. I say something brilliant, and he says something unintentionally funny back. It's great. You never say what you're really thinking.
22K notes · View notes
changelingchilde9 · 1 year ago
Text
I’ve seen a few people here doing animal versions of their ocs, and while I haven’t got much skill at drawing I do know my animals.
So. The animals I’ve considered most when designing Gillian are gannets and viperfish.
Gannets are diving birds, with bodies built to survive slamming head-first into the ocean. They have yellow-spotted heads with light blue beaks, black-tipped wings and white bodies.
Viperfish, meanwhile, are jet black and silver deep-sea nightmares with one of the largest fang-to-head ratios out there. It’s a miracle they can close their mouths.
So, what do you get when you combine the two? Well, you pretty much get what Gillian already looks like when not in her London-friendly aspect. Amber colored feathery hair, gills, long well-braced neck, a sharp ‘beak’ made out of interlocking needle teeth, oil-slick scales.
1 note · View note
Text
"The imperative of protecting the vulnerable young in a predator-rich environment no doubt played a major role in shaping human sex differences and sexuality. La difference - the sexual dimorphism characteristic of humans and many other animals - is now believed to reflect, in large part, the greater role of males in actual combat with predators. Hunting, too, if it were a male-only activity, would have favored bigger, stronger males. But long before the male hunting band, males were probably deployed as baboon males are: to guard the periphery of the group." - Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites.
Some years back I read a post about how war is basically an exercise in sending barely adult young men to kill each other, but this is made more palatable by honoring the young men used so. Blood Rites seems like basically an attempt to offer a theoretical model of the origins of that behavior; not so much the origins of the war part as the origins of the honoring part.
I've only read the parts I could find for free on the internet cause my local library doesn't seem to have the book and my financial situation is not great so I'm reluctant to buy it, I'm wondering if she talks more about how her theory relates to gender, especially masculinity, cause, like...
... Yeah, let's talk about those hypothetical proto-humans making their camp in the Pleistocene savanna, deploying in that gendered defensive formation, the fighting age adult males deployed in a ring at the periphery of the camp, clutching their sharpened sticks and stone hand axes (the mightiest human weapons of this era), deployed out there to watch for and defend against and absorb the violence of the savanna's predators, while the more vulnerable immature young and more demographically valuable females and the few elders who've managed to live long enough to become enfeebled get the relative safety of the camp's center.
If the masculine gender role originally emerged from that situation, I think that would explain a lot about what it looks like! In the context of that defensive formation might emerge association of maleness with combat and an idea that able-bodied adult males should participate in group violence, masculine protectiveness toward women and children and division of humanity into fighting men and protected ones (women, children, the old and disabled), valuing and honoring of courage in combat especially in males, shaming and ostracism and punishment of young males who very understandably show noticeable reluctance to leave the relative safety of the group's core and take a place in the peripheral defensive ring when they reach maturity, females using gifts, affection, and sex as ways to reward males who show willingness to put themselves at risk for the sake of the group, honoring of heroes (the male who drove a sharpened stick into the lioness's side), honoring of the memory of martyrs (the male who threw little stones at the dinofelis and drew its hunger and rage down upon him so it would kill him instead of a woman or a child).
There's a paragraph, like, right after that quote that speculates that human playful/social non-reproductive sexuality may have evolved in that context, which, yeah, if we're going to talk about the gendered aspect of this we should talk about some of the stuff I talked about here. When I first conceptualized the first sentence of my response to that quote the phrasing that bubbled into my mind was "barely legal adult," which, lol, "barely legal" is a porn category, usually meaning an 18 year old young actress IIRC, but actually I think there might be something in noticing that parallel, pulling on that thread! Also, I see a possible intersection with the Sex At Dawn kind of monogamy as a relatively recent innovation hypothesis in this. In this gendered anti-predator defense formation males would work together to defend the females and immature young of the group as a collectivity. If you're going to use male-female sexual bonding to strengthen that relationship, it would probably work better if it was polyamorous so most or all of the group's fighting males would feel that attraction-affection-gratitude-protectiveness tangle of emotions toward many of the group's females.
Re: hunting hypothesis vs. defense hypothesis for the origins of human organized violence, which is something Ms. Ehrenreich talks about (she's strongly on the side of the defense hypothesis) - as I pointed out here, I think the human tendency to honor courage is suggestive; courage is the virtue of a prey species that engages in collective defense; a smart predator attacks the weak, avoids fights with the strong, and quickly retreats if it loses the advantage. Then again, bravery is also useful in intra-species competition, so that's not conclusive (notably, I think the "a smart predator isn't brave" thing isn't so obvious to a lot of humans because present and recent historical human hunting is often partly an intra-species social activity oriented toward gaining prestige by killing big, strong, dangerous animals and taking impressive trophies). I also think that stuff like that visceral dislike of deserters David Graeber talked about fits better with this model. Like, yeah, I guess big game hunting might have been vital to survival sometimes, but it's hard to see "all men must be hunters!" as a strong imperative unless it's really about something else (like enforcing gender conformity). But an able-bodied adult male who runs away instead of defending the women and children when the hungry lions come? Yeah, I could see emotions that incline toward very strongly disincentivizing that behavior getting strongly selected for. Then again, the threat that encouraged strong negative attitudes toward deserters might have been organized violence by other human groups, we've had at least multiple millennia when the animal most likely to kill a human was another human, so again, not conclusive.
IDK though I'm probably biased toward this model cause it's extremely congruent with my kinks and damage lol. Like, one of my "maybe I'm an outlier and shouldn't be counted, but..." issues with 2010s flavor feminism was "if you're going to talk about masculinity, I'm a cis-in-the-expansive-sense male and I don't really see myself at all in this figure of the entitled misogynistic 'bro' you seem to think is the default state of men in our society, but I once ignored a severe and painful toe infection cause I just kind of didn't want to be a bother about it and didn't want to inflict a doctor's bill on my family, and something in my brain shivers in dark rapture at the 'I will stay and be thy husband / though it be the death of me' line in The Maiden and the Selkie."
Another thing I'm wondering about is if the book touches on the situation I talked about here and here, where early humans got smart enough to imagine pre-emptive self-defense with a long planning horizon and revenge and started to turn the tables and actively hunt human-eaters. Because if we're suggesting that the "put them in white robes and give them gold bands" aspect of war is originally derived from our responses to predation, that seems like it might have been a very important stage in the emergence of that!
There's a bit in the book speculating that the primordial situation religious sacrifice reconstructs is a group of proto-humans being attacked by a predator and one of them being killed and carried away, possibly with one of the proto-humans either voluntarily offering themselves to the predator so it doesn't hurt the others or being chosen as a designated victim (note: this was Barbara Ehrenreich relating somebody else's idea). And, yeah, I guess that might be a harrowing formative collective trauma of our species, but it doesn't leave much time for ceremony and it's an inherently unpredictable fast messy process. It really wouldn't be a promising nucleus for rituals to grow around. It might get associated grief rituals that happen afterward, but the kind of ceremonialization of war Barbara Ehrenreich is talking about is more about the preparation for organized violence, the build-up. Also, I think a big part of the emotional appeal of that ceremonialization of war is that it generates a feeling of power, whereas watching one of your friends get dragged away by a lion would have exactly the opposite effect, it would make you feel weak and afraid.
You know what would offer time for ceremony and a prolonged period of fearful-angry-mournful-but-also-hopeful emotional build-up? When some clever proto-humans get a bright idea. They already hunt small weak animals like monkeys (chimps do), they are already used to fighting their predators with simple weapons, they have already learned to track predators to some extent to better avoid them, now combine these skill sets! Instead of waiting for the predator to come to them again and have the fight on its terms and hope to just drive it off so everyone gets to live one more day, they can seek its trail, find its lair, fight it in circumstances of their choosing, kill it and the end the threat of it forever, invert the ancient relationship between its species and theirs, hunt the dinofelis or megantereon or whatever that predator is! Now give it maybe a few generations or centuries or millennia for that practice to become an institution...
Here is the opportunity for vows of revenge choked out through tears as what's left of the predator's latest victim is buried in honor. Here is the opportunity for the selection of champions. Here is the opportunity for rituals to prepare the chosen for their terrible and glorious task (dream image: an old woman opening a shallow cut on her left arm with an obsidian butchery flake and using a thumb to smear a little of her blood on the foreheads of five 16-26 year old boys). Here is the opportunity for the chosen to dance around the fire and sing confident war songs ("you big dumb cat, you don't know what's coming! You think we'll wait for you to come again and eat another of us like the dumb antelope! You'll be so surprised when we hunt you instead, when we trap you in your hole and kill you! I'll cut your stomach open to get my niece's bones back! I'll cut off your head and cut out the teeth you tore up my niece with and give them to my mother and my aunt to wear in their hair!"). Here is the opportunity for the community to luxuriate in the promise of power and deliverance their cleverness offers them (the big dumb cat indeed is oblivious to the danger it's in, no other prey species has the cognitive capacity for the kind of strategic thought these early humans are doing, this kind of prey behavior is an outside context problem its instincts do not prepare it for) and dream of a better future when the enemy is defeated. Here is the opportunity for the chosen to be indulgently pampered with food, affection, and sex as a reward for their selflessness, with the promise that they will be given more of the same treatment if they come back from their great task victorious and their memory will be honored if they die during their mission.
Imagine the high that might be for a prey species, especially if they still remember the long age of fear and grief and impotent anger before they realized they could turn the tables, hunt the hunter. Something something that Frantz Fanon-ish therapeutic value of inflicting violence on your tormentor idea.
“One of the most dangerous things in the universe is an ignorant people with real grievances. That is nowhere near as dangerous, however, as an informed and intelligent society with grievances. The damage that vengeful intelligence can wreak, you cannot even imagine.” - Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune.
Aside: I know some nonhuman animals do sometimes attack their predators pro-actively, e.g. I've heard about cape buffalo doing that, but I don't think they do anything like try to systematically exterminate every individual predator that attacks a member of their group including tracking them and hunting them down with days-to-weeks planning horizons; you'd need some pretty serious cognitive capacity for that kind of strategic thought which I don't think cape buffalo and the like have.
In a different corner of Tumblr somebody made a post arguing that it's absurd to think that men experience gender oppression qua being men because there's no uniquely male experience of oppression. It's not an argument I particularly want to get into, but I think what I've just written is kind of a counter-argument against that idea, though admittedly a very weak one; highly speculative, and Anglophone internet feminists are usually talking centrally about relatively peaceful societies where being a man isn't particularly dangerous, and societies where being a man is dangerous are often really dangerous for women too.
47 notes · View notes
starry-bi-sky · 2 months ago
Text
on a completely separate note; shizun luo binghe with a disciple shen yuan who fell into the abyss??? *thinks about LBH canonically stealing SQQ's corpse for 5 years* he'd hallucinate i think. like, like visual and audial hallucinations.
Keeps thinking he's seeing SQQ in the corner of his eyes, or wandering between the trees, amongst a group of disciples. Thinks he hears him calling for him, but its just the wind or another disciple.
Gets Xiu Ya reforged but patently fucking refuses to make a sword mound. Because his disciple Is Not Dead :))) There was No Body. He's Not Dead. And If You keep Insisting That He Is, He's Gonna Skewer You :). He's holding onto Xiu Ya so he can return his most favored disciple's sword when he returns. It's on his hip right next to Zheng Yang where it's supposed to be.
Also this motherfucker?? does not sleep btw. He has the image of SQQ, wide eyed and hysterical and standing at the mouth of the abyss burned into his fucking eyelids. Can't use the dreamscape to escape it either because he keeps trying to save him and either he does and it's an incredibly cruel trick to wake up to, or he doesn't and he gets his heart broken in several different pieces again.
There is no convincing this man that Shen Qingqiu is dead. Absolutely nothing at all. He is buried so deep in denial that moles would be jealous of how deep he is. He keeps making tea for two in the bamboo house only to remember that it's just him. SQQ's fans are hiding everywhere, little reminders of his presence. He goes to wake up SQQ on the mornings he sleeps in-- only to find the room empty.
#svsss#luo binghe#svsss au#scum villain#scum villian self saving system#shen yuan#shen qingqiu#disciple shen yuan#lbh. visibly exhausted and with twitchy eyes: im fine :) | everyone else: ho no the fuck you ARENT.#SQQ was hysterical not because he found out LBH was half-demon but bc he was having a long-awaited mental breakdown over his autonomy :)#or (limited) lack thereof. he was having a sudden onset crisis of mortality and was handling at quite literally the WORST time. oops#im thinking very hard that LBH would never push his disciple into the abyss especially with no system to force him to. so SQQ either#had to goad him into it (failing always) or throw himself in. he ended up doing it himself but not before some very impressive hysterics.#BUT ALSO. IF THIS HAD BEEN WHERE SQQ WAS THE HALF-HEAVENLY DEMON INSTEAD IT WOULD'VE BEEN SO GREAT.#and by great i mean horribly angsty bc SQQ is NOT doing too hot and has. in very SY-like fashion. convinced himself that LBH will kill him#when he finds out he's a demon. so when it comes out i have this mental image of him lunging at LBH and LBH flinches back. but SQQ wraps hi#hands around the blade of Zheng Yang and yanks it up so the tip of the blade is digging into his chest where is heart is. LBH can't yank th#sword away without risking slicing into SQQ's hands. SQQ's hair has fallen out of its tail/bun and is now messily spilling down his#back and its NO helping the kinda deranged look he has going on. he's visibly shaking and his eyes keep flittering away and back at LBH's#face. SQQ is looking at the messages from the system warning him that he has to go into the abyss or punishment will occur. he's like.#rambling though. talking about how shizun doesn't *like* unclean things and there is nothing more unclean than a demon. like he is#INSISTING. LBH can't?? get a fucking word in. actually. SY isn't listening that much either anyways. too overwhelmed with the system and#the amount of stress he's under and his crumbling mental state and the innate and primal desire to live even when he's standing in front of#his own executioner. it all ends with him sitting on the ground at the lip of the abyss with his hair falling in his face. he looks so#unkempt and fallen apart and so distinctly *non-Shen Qingqiu* that LBH feels physically ill over it. tears are streaming down SQQ's face#and despite everything he is smiling. its not a nice smile. its a very frayed falling apart at the seams about to crack smile.#he tells shizun not to worry about staining his blade with this disciple's filthy blood because this disciple will take care of it himself.#and then he falls into the abyss before luo binghe can so much as grab him. the only reason LBh doesn't literally jump in after him is bc#he was numb with shock and the abyss was already closed before he could feel his legs again :]
1K notes · View notes
mita-vittua-olivia · 4 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
was about to go to sleep, remembered this parallel. rip hammer you will always be famous
2K notes · View notes
supreme-leader-stoat · 4 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
2K notes · View notes
random-thought-depository · 3 months ago
Text
The Affini are good. They, on a fundamental, deep-seated level, want what's best for you, and if turning you into a pet isn't what's best for you, they wouldn't do it. And they're almost always right.
On a purely Wattsonian level, that "almost" qualifier is the thing I'd be worried about if I was a HDG human (well, that and without access to Doylist-level knowledge I'd have some pretty serious doubts about the truth of the rest of that statement too). Sure, Affini may have benevolent intentions, but they're going to mess up sometimes, because they're not omniscient, and because they don't seem obviously much smarter than humans (most of them would have a lot more experience than any human because of their long lifespans, but experience/knowledge is only one facet of intelligence).
Somebody else objected to my position on I think basically left-skepticism grounds in the tags, and the left-skepticism argument against it is the one I find most compelling.
On a more meta/Doylist level I guess my true objection is that I'm adjacent to the kind of person the setting is designed to cater to but not actually that kind of person, and, uh...
I remember once reading a post on this site saying that calling your lover "Daddy" has different vibes when men do it in a gay context vs. when women do it in a heterosexual context. I don't remember it super-well, but the argument was something like the straight "Daddy" is about pure power but the gay "Daddy" has more of an idea of the "Daddy" as an aspirational figure and a mentor and somebody you might become like some day. It didn't say this, but the subtext I got from it was, like, that kind of relationship has different dynamics when it's between people of the same gender because then you don't have a whole cultural complex of gender bullshit encouraging you to think of your lover as a fundamentally and innately different type of person and encouraging you to conceptualize this kind of relationship in gross bio-essentialist complimentarian "natural role" terms, in a gay context that kind of hierarchy is more easily recognized as the conditional and contingent and provisional thing it actually is.
I feel like the difference between HDG and what I'm into parallels this. Like, yeah, a lot of HDG stuff reads to me as D/s for people for whom safety is hot who'd enjoy having a kind and indulgent psuedo-parental figure who they get to have some kind of sexual intimacy with, same hat, that is also one of the few D/s-adjacent dynamics that's appealing to me and it is very appealing to me. But it would be really off-putting to me have this offered to me on the terms of "you're going to get this as part of a bio-essentialist racial hierarchy in which your dom(me) is assumed to have a right to control you derived from their innately morally superior character that is derived from their biology, your subordinate status relative to your dom(me) is permanent and unchangeable (is there such a thing as floret manumission?), and this is going to come bundled with severe violations of your consent, autonomy, and bodily integrity, extreme contempt for your intellect, and radical disregard of your stated preferences." I would like having a mentor who is wiser than me and a helper who is stronger and more competent than me, I don't want a controller, and, uh... Well, there's a point occasionally made that a lot of kink scenarios are horror scenarios to people who don't have the kink, I wouldn't go so far as to say HDG is a horror setting to me, but it's definitely something that provokes mixed feelings when I read or contemplate it.
I wonder if this has something to do with the differences between the cis autistic experience and the trans experience? A lot of trans people seem to have a feeling of "I wish somebody had ignored my stated preferences to satisfy my real preferences, and been empowered to do that over my most strenuous objections" or at least find that very relatable. If you're cis and autistic (as I suspect I am) I guess you're likely to mostly just associate people ignoring your stated preferences with stuff like being pressured to eat foods you don't like and wear clothes with textures you don't like.
Like, there's a bit in Dog Of War (just read it, well, skimmed it anyway!) where Princess chooses an internet username that's a Dune reference and Camilla decides that Dune isn't quite ideologically kosher and forces her to change it, and all I could think of reading that was how infuriated I'd be if somebody pulled that shit on me and how scared I'd be if an authority figure with the kind of power over me that Camilla had over Princess at that point demonstrated that kind of interest in intrusively micro-policing my self-expression.
Aside: the point about Affini not seemingly obviously much smarter than humans made me think an interesting scenario would be Dog of War but Princess is a Blindsight vampire (in this scenario turns out they were a thing in the HDG universe too and the Accord tried Jurassic Park'ing up a few of them for approximately the same reasons Blindsight humans did). It'd be interesting to see an Affini try to deal with a person who actually has a pretty big advantage over them in raw brainpower (though, as Kirk said about Khan in Star Trek, compared to them it would be intelligent but inexperienced), who'd likely be relatively apathetic to a lot of the attractions the Compact offers, and who would definitely be in the "potential danger to others" category but would probably not like the idea of being a floret at all (vampire social instincts would be wired for low-trust relationships, the idea of anybody having the kind of power over them an Affini has over their floret would probably be extremely viscerally terrifying to an adult Blampire). And I think you could write a Blampire that's survived in human society in a way that's actually kind of on-brand for an HDG protagonist.
I suppose this is part of the reason stories in the setting consistently load the bases by emphasizing just how horrific life under future space capitalism is, and just how miserable it makes everyone. Like, I cannot stress this enough, the Terran accord fucking sucks.
It kind of backfires for me, the Accord sucks so anviliciously it makes me very aware of how I'm being emotionally manipulated and it feels like the logical objections to/opponents of domestication are being strawmanned. Like, I would really like to see one of those captive humans raise the obvious relatively sympathetic objection to the Affini's face value self-presentation ("You're enslavers! We beat assholes like you on our own planet before we went to the stars and we'll give you the hardest fight we can before you drag us back to that old night! Destroy my mind if you want, the cause of freedom has many martyrs and I would be proud to take a place besides the likes of John Brown!") instead of just spouting strawman-y right-wing nationalist cliches. Even if it gets brushed off as them not understanding how the Compact's society and florethood works at all and being misinformed by Accord propaganda, I'd respect that more than just setting up "rargh gargle my balls I have indomitable Terran warrior spirit I am a fashoid space racist!" as an obviously deliberately unsympathetic strawman for the Affini to knock down. Not that I necessarily object to the latter existing, but it'd be nice to see more acknowledgment that people might have sympathetic and principled reasons to react to the alien invaders who are doing something that looks a lot like an imperialist war of conquest against your people and have something that sounds a lot like slavery with horror and defiance. As I said earlier in a different post, you could even play this as the Accord's rank and file soldiers and spacers being tragically misled and propagandized by their right-wing authoritarian leaders, but, like, if so how much more of a visceral stab in the heart would it be if instead of memetic Best Korea style blatant lies played for humor about how silly they are they're given an at face value plausible and consistent with the Affini's own words narrative that they're facing basically leafy Draka and they live out something pretty similar to this/this but then after the war the ones who lived through that and managed to survive it find out they were given a very deceptive impression of the stakes of the conflict, a lie that is half a truth is all the bitterest of lies etc. (and, like, I actually think that might be pretty good for making the Affini sympathetic too, I definitely get some feels imagining, like, the Accord's equivalent of the Battle of the Line and it cuts away to the Affini and they are doing their equivalent of crying their eyes out about how scared those poor humans must be and how brave they're being and how awful the whole thing is).
And the Accord sucking so bad makes it easier to read the Affini's deal as a Jacob's bargain/the equivalent of getting a dog to swallow a poison pill by wrapping it in meat.
There's no war
Except for the wars of conquest the Affini wage against any sapient aliens they meet who resist their domination! Yes, I know the Affini don't consider their domestication campaigns wars and that totally has verisimilitude as a way they'd think of it, but my reaction to reading that exchange in Dog Of War was thinking I'd have liked if Princess said something like "It sure felt like a war to me and the rest of the crew of the Valiant, and I think our experience of it counts for something."
One last thing. I reject the idea that the terran accord would have done better with the more advanced technology of the Affini. Technology is a tool, and a tool's use is downstream from the society that builds it.
I think I just disagree with you about the relationship of technology and society. I think the Marxists are more-or-less right that culture and social order is mostly downstream from material conditions and the power balances that emerge from them (I mean, I think it's also downstream from biology and that might be significant when comparing the trajectory of human civilization to those of alien civilizations, but I find a bio-essentialist pessimist reading of "humanity will never build socialism unless a species more biologically predisposed to it than us forces it on us at gunpoint, thankfully the Affini are there to be and do exactly that" pretty distasteful).
P.s. if you're looking for noblebright opposition, consider "No Gods, No Masters", which takes a long philosophical look at how human communists would handle the Affini. It's quite something.
I've thought of taking a look at it but TBH am not sure I want to do so because it sounds like lots of what makes me uncomfortable with the setting turned up to maximum.
HDG and "Horror"
So I've seen several people talk about the horrors of Human Domestication Guide and how it's really effective cosmic horror if you look past the kink part of it, but I don't really see that? At least, I don't think I've seen any points levied towards that point that don't already just exist in day-to-day life but far worse.
The main one I see a lot is the idea of this incomprehensible cosmic force that we can't fight completely subsuming our culture and freedoms, but like, is that not already just a grander version of living under capitalism? That shit invades every single aspect of our lives but unlike the affini it's perfectly content with killing us at a moment's notice, and in so many cases actively wants us dead for the crime of existing.
Like, oh they're an imperialist empire and don't give you a choice about living under them? Yeah man that would sure suck I cant imagine what that would be like
I saw a post on r/196 calling the Affini slavers which is really fucking funny to me because you can just tell whoever made that post has never actually read the fucking thing
I dunno, at the end of the day i honestly cannot fathom what makes the Affini terrifying when I'm at least *allowed* to live under them. Where basic survival isn't something I have to earn by tearing my own body apart every single day, where I'm actually loved and cared for by the people running shit. There's nothing bad about them that isn't already so much worse in the present day, and the whining I've seen in places like Reddit about "never being allowed to reach our fullest potential" is as much wish fullfilment scifi as the HDG setting as a whole is, so it's kind of a moot point
739 notes · View notes