#i like to think he fixed that old era reaper- not really knowing why he wanted to and later slowly remembering the time he spent with emet

[fatedroses]

Baby Zenos being curious of everything means Atticus can't skip out on tuning anymore and Solus gets extra hands for some of his tools.

[cringecompanionapologist]

Something About a Popular Doctor Who Episode That Confuses Me Slightly

The Waters of Mars. It's good and stuff.

Now, with that out of the, one of the things we're supposed to learn from 10's arc here is that the Doctor's companions keep him sane so he doesn't do shit like this.

But, "shit like this" is saving the lives of people who aren't supposed to be saved because something something Fixed Points Laws of Time etc. Most human companions can't really comprehend the importance of the Laws of Time, which with 60 years of show, are naturally really inconsistent.

So if, Donna, for example, was there with the Doctor on Mars in 2059, would she really have stopped him from saving people? She might've gotten onto him for taken like a god, but then the problem isn't that the Doctor changed history, just that he was really smug about it.

Honestly, I can't blame all the confusion on this one episode, since the Laws of Time change constantly.

In the very first season of the classic series, changing history is simply impossible. Things that are supposed to happen will happen. Barbara stops a human sacrifice, the victim is offended and offs himself anyway, everything goes on as it would've if she hadn't stopped the sacrifice.

The later Hartnell era had changing history be theoretically possible but you don't do it, because you just don't. It's against the rules. They don't go into the consequences. Anyone who tries to change history is stopped before they can change anything, so we don't what would happen if something was actually changed.

The rest of the classic series wasn't as interested in history in general as the Hartnell era. The Laws of Time and Not Changing History really only came up as a response to "Doctor, why can't we do the obvious and use our time machine to solve this problem?".

"Doctor, why can't we use our time machine to get Adric off the ship before it crashes?"

"We can't. It's against the rules. Shut up."

Then, along comes the new series and the first season decides to show the consequences of history being changed. Rose stops her dad from dying and we get the Reapers. So, if history is changed, it triggers the apocalypse and the Void Monsters will eat everything. A very good reason not to break the rules.

But then when the Doctor breaks the rules in The Waters of Mars, there are no Reapers. You might think it's because, when Adelaide figured out that she was supposed to die, she corrected the problem. But, the Doctor also saved two other people who were also meant to die and absolutely nothing happens.

A companion who has to take the Doctor's word for it that something is a fixed point and can't be changed, probably wouldn't stop him from changing his mind and changing it anyway, especially if they saw that there were no consequences.

The real reason the show can't change history is because the audience already knows how it goes. We know what happens to Pompeii. We know that the Aztecs kept doing human sacrifice after whatever time the TARDIS landed in. We know that the Great Fire of Rome will happen, so the Doctor accidentally inspiring it is no big deal.

The stories where the Doctor just shows up somewhere and overthrows the government take place on alien planets or in the audience's future. We don't know how the 22nd Century Dalek Invasion of Earth is supposed to play out. So, the Doctor and company can basically do whatever they want when they land there.

This is really funny when old episodes show their age and take place in what was then the future, but is now the past. The Enemy of the World explicitly takes place in 2018. From 2023, we know that 2018 didn't look like it did in The Enemy of the World. Doctor Who also knows that, since Ryan, Graham, and Yaz are all from 2018 and we meet them in 2018, which looks more like the real 2018, because it was written by people who knew what 2018 looked like.

But it makes you wonder: Is the 2018 the 13th Doctor fell into different from the 2018 the 2nd Doctor landed in because of the Doctor changing history? Did something happen during the UNIT era that changed the course of history so we ended up with the 2018 we got? And what would that mean for later on? Is the 22nd century Susan settled down in still the future of the 13th Doctor's 2018? If not, where did it go? Is Susan in a time or place that stopped existing?

So, simple rules: In a historical story, where the audience knows how history is supposed to go, or can learn it from a source other than a Doctor Who episode, you can't change events. But, in a sci-fi story, where everything is completely made up, we can do whatever we want.

And then The Waters of Mars happens in 2059. It's hard to say "we can't change history" to someone who is looking at the future. This wouldn't be history to Donna. It's not history to the audience. The idea that there's a specific way that this is supposed to go is something we have to take the show's word for. If the Doctor's actions change events in 2059, it has no effect on an audience watching in 2009 or 2023. By changing events and saving people, the Doctor is, from the audience's perspective, just doing his job.

So, we have to give a lot of credit for how the episode was written, acted, shot, scored, etc, that the audience can even believe that what the Doctor did was wrong. You have him use the Master's catchphrase, call himself something un-Doctorish like The Time Lord Victorious, call other people he's rescued "little people", and just generally sound power-mad and smug, and it feels like what he's doing is wrong, even if it doesn't seem quite as wrong when you give it any thought.

But still, would Donna Noble have prevented the Doctor from changing this fixed point in time? Probably not. Would she have gotten on to him for being smug about it? Definitely. So the line 10 crosses really isn't changing history. It's having a bad attitude about it.

[waywardmusings]

[Overwatch, MCU] Old Stories, New Faces Chapter 2 Writing Notes

First off, fixes for chapter 1: Apparently with Chapter 1, I uploaded the draft where I had the placeholder "the Soviets" instead of Department X (the specific group in charge of the Red Room and super soldier programs). This has been fixed. Also in chapter 1, I used HUD (Heads up display) instead of HMD (head/helmet mounted display), the difference being HUD is stationary and more like you would find in a cockpit. I need to name my drafts more clearly.

If you haven’t read Morning Coffee (the first in this series) you might not know that Gabriel and Jack look like they are in their early twenties...and so do Amelie and Sombra and...no, I suppose that is enough info right here. I’m doing a lot of hand waving with the upgraded capabilities of Reaper’s nanites.

Jack has Cortical Visual Impairment/Blindness from traumatic injury aka Zurich; Gabriel gets frustrated that he can’t heal it with nanites and sometimes thinks Jack is somehow blocking him. But since there isn’t a way to image Jack’s brain pre-Zurich blast, there is no certainty why the nano-healing doesn’t work. 

Also, CB can involve hallucinations. Let’s just say it was really hard for Jack to believe Shrike and Reaper’s identities...

If asked, both Gabriel and Jack would accuse the other of dumping messes on them. Both are right, especially in Overwatch Era; such as Gabriel would do something creative coverups in the field to get around a political landmine Jack/Overwatch is stuck in, and then Jack has to make official stories and promises to politicians to keep Overwatch in the clear from said coverups. 

I have a whole thing on Overwatch language headcanons but let’s go with the short version. First the language backgrounds: Gabriel grew up bilingual with Spanish and English, Amelie grew up with French and learned English at her rich school as well as Russian (though that was more informal among ballet friends), Sombra grew up with Spanish and is self-taught with a number of languages, and Jack grew up with English and learned a lot of Spanish from friends and high school then developing fluency in the army/with Gabriel. Working in a rural farming area I have lots of thoughts on rural area development and recent immigrant families settling in farming areas which leads me to think that Jack would grow up learning Spanish from classmates. Gabe and Jack are polyglots out of political necessity (to various degrees of fluency), and over time all four have picked up a number of languages.  This is seriously the short version somehow.

The four of them tend to slip and switch between Spanish, French, and English. They are very opinionated about each other’s accents. 

 Bucky on the other hand, grew up with English, learned a number of swears and interesting phrases in the army, then picked up (fluent) Russian and (almost fluent) German.

So...I’m a pharmacist with no ICU experience and thus did a brief review of clinical guidelines for sedation/anesthesia (based on the idea that this is somewhat like post-operative care) and frostbite treatment (for fucked up cryogenics). I don’t mention it, because idk if anyone else really wants all the the deets, but per a Hydra Winter Soldier protocol (like seriously, this has to be a thing that exists in MCU in all its terribleness), Jack gave him propofol for induction (and a few maintenance infusions to keep him at a RASS of -3 aka Moderate sedation aka movement or eye opening in response to voice (but no eye contact)).  Hydra probably actually recommends a -4 (no response to voice, but response to physical contact) or -5 Unarousable. This is brought to you by Shit I Think About that Never Makes it into the Story. Also, this is not medical advice and you shouldn’t have this stuff at home to try on your own anyways. 

Reasons why it would suck to treat Bucky: 1) Supersoldier (wtf does that mean for metabolism???? Would it matter for only kidney/liver metabolism or also plasma esterases??? What about volume of distribution???), 2) Missing an arm (aka need to consider loss of limb in calculating drug doses), 3) Hydra’s bullshit science and inhuman treatment, 4) all Hydra medical records would be affected by 3), 5) ICU delirium or brainwashed POW reasonably freaking out...you decide!, and for nuWatch specifically, 6) Does this medical equipment look outdated to you? And 7)Out of your league as a field medic, Jack? Can’t take him to a hospital and Mercy ain’t here so sucks to be you.

Poor Bucky is going to go through a lot of Yes? No? Yes????? Trying to figure out why Jack seems so familiar. And the conclusions he’s making on available data are...interesting. 

I’m choosing to place the Avengers movie in fall of 2012. There is going to be a lot of timeline bending from past that point.

I’m trying to convey that nuWatch working with informed consent medically wise with Bucky, though Bucky doesn’t really understand at this point. 

Weird writing experience: Going from a POV where there characters know are familiar with the other characters and what’s going on (mostly) to a POV that doesn’t know who the fuck these people are or what is going on. And all this because I originally wanted to impart that Bucky thinks nuWatch are Red Room rebels and it just...continued.

I made a chart to make sure I keep Who Knows What clear, with the main players being nuWatch, Bucky, Avengers, Hydra, and SHIELD proper. Misconceptions have a fun potential. 

[bwprowl]

So I’ve been seeing stuff going around recently re: GI Joe and its continued failure to catch on, and it expectedly got me thinking. As a huge Transformers fan, Joe has always been somewhat on my radar (I even dabbled in collecting it for a bit during the 25A line), and the subject of its ongoing struggles to recreate its past success have consistently interested me. Meditating on this subject again this time got me thinking about the series and what works for it, along with other ideas as far as franchises, toys, and their marketing.

So the conventional wisdom on GI Joe failing to catch on in the modern era has always gone back to its military theme rendering it unpopular in our current cultural climate. Especially as an ostensible Real American Hero, it’s easy to believe that toys glorifying US Military offensives might not go over well in today’s polarized America, and definitely not in the increasingly-valuable overseas market (it ain’t exactly easy to sell toys of American soldiers to the same international customers that love the more culturally-universal Transformers).

But while I definitely understand Joe’s limited-to-local appeal, I’ve personally never fully bought into the idea that being military-themed inherently meant it was doomed to be unpopular in today’s America. The reason for that is a big one: Call of Duty. The CoD franchise (and by extension the entire subgenre of modern military shooters) have been HUGE in the hemisphere’s video game markets, and for years dominated the charts in popularity and appeal, especially (the games’ actual age-rating apparently notwithstanding) with children. True, “twelve-year-olds on Call of Duty” is something of a jocular situation blown up past its true scope by detractors, but it still stands that these games, necessarily rooted in glorifying American military operations, are very popular with kids.

So the very existence of that situation has always brought me back to GI Joe and the question of how Hasbro could be so incompetent as to not be able to sell toys of soldiers to the audience that gobbles up CoD. The marketing would definitely play a part in it, and there is the admission that the kid audiences of CoD and GI Joe aren’t exactly the same; the kids Hasbro wants buying Joe toys are younger than the bunch that pesters their parents to buy them CoD, but the through-line I’m getting at here is that military-themed content shouldn’t be an inherent deal-breaker; if Little Timmy wouldn’t want a toy that reminds him that Daddy isn’t coming home from Iraq, why would he want a video game that did the same thing?

Granted, there are obvious tonal differences. The hyped-up modern military shooters subsist on a projection of perceived gritty realism, catering to the mature gamers who only play mature games. In this respect, of course even the actual kids, the 10-12-year-olds in the audience are going to see themselves as ‘too grown-up’ for the toyetic fantasy bent GI Joe’s action figures spin on the military.

But you know what does look pretty darn close to GI Joe’s style of squad-based superheroics?

Overwatch, as wholeheartedly as I’ve thrown myself into it since last Summer, has been an utter blast to follow simply on its own and as an excellent game, but as a marketing vehicle, it’s an absolute revelation. Being an online-multiplayer-only affair with all of its story elements only available as supplementary content, I’ve always compared Overwatch to a big digital toybox, but the comparison becomes more spot-on the more you look into it.

Just the design of Overwatch’s story perfectly mirrors the toy-advert cartoons of the 80’s on: A team of varied heroes with different distinctive special abilities, engaging in regular battle with a group of recurring obviously-villainous villains. The current Talon trio of the game especially feels straight out of the nefarious retro-bad-guy playbook; Reaper, Widowmaker, and Sombra would not feel out of place compared to Skeletor, Evil-Lyn, and Beast Man. The backstory elements of Overwatch’s fiction do lend it a lot more weight and detail than its cheesier cartoon progenitors, of course, but the base elements are all still there, making it feel like a natural evolution of those old tropes. In the end, you still have details like the almost annoyingly generic military-man leader Soldier: 76, turbo-revvin’ young punk Tracer (who probably gets into trouble and Learns a Lesson once an episode) and her brains-and-brawn best friend Winston (who incidentally, is also a loveable talking animal mascot).

Not straying too far from my original point, Overwatch basically makes the case for an updated GI Joe series as a virtual line rather than a physical one on toy shelves. Many of the characters in Overwatch mirror character archetypes that worked so well for Joe in it’s heyday, whether it’s the aforementioned Soldier: 76 as the Duke-type, Roadhog and Junkrat as new takes on the Aussie punks the Dreadnoks, or even Hanzo and Genji filling in for Joe’s famous feuding ninja bros! Overwatch didn’t invent these tropes, and neither did GI Joe, they both just figured out the best way to present and market them for their time period.

If you doubt that Overwatch is basically taking a toy-marketing approach to selling their game here, I urge you to check out the ancillary material they put out to promote it. Watch the animated shorts; hell go watch the newest one, Infiltration, right now, I’ll wait here.

That short came out at the same time new hero Sombra was launched in the game, and if you’ve ever seen one of those ol’ toy-promoting cartoons before, what it’s doing should be obvious. It’s almost hilarious how blatantly the short goes through all of Sombra’s abilities and gimmicks, showing them off to convince you to [strike]buy her toy[/strike] play her in the game. It’s the equivalent of when the Power Rangers get a new robot to add to their Megazord and spend a whole ten minutes in the episode showing all the cool shit it can do. And basically all the shorts are like this, whether it’s the otherwise-artsy Bastion one that still works in displays of his turret mode and self-repair gimmicks, or the Tracer vs. Widowmaker one that only needs two kids screaming narration over it and an ‘each sold separately’ at the end to complete the toy-commercial style.

And I’m not trying to be derogatory with this comparison, because I am of the firm belief that this approach does work gangbusters! The toys that the Overwatch media is selling are very fun toys, after all. Each character/action figure is fun to play with in their own right, using all their gimmicks and smashing them into each other on the Watchpoint Gibralter Playset ™ with your friends.

Anyway, my point with all this really is just going back to How Could This Fix G.I. Joe. I always proposed a CoD-style shooter tie-in as a marketing option for it, but as I detailed above, the style there never really jibed. But an Overwatch-style multiplayer superpower shooter? That very well could be the ticket. Look at how hard people clamor for toys of Overwatch’s cast after getting to play with their digital equivalents. Granted, Hasbro would need to pour a decent amount of resources into making a game that people actually wanted to play that could generate interest in their plastic products, but even that Paladins thing seems to be doing decently, so even the most frivolous free-to-play knockoff has a chance at success so long as it does some things right.

Or maybe in the long run we shouldn’t worry about G.I. Joe getting revived at all, since as I’ve outlined all up there, Overwatch is already a pretty dang close successor to the spirit and style of that one.

[kffandom]

i think the saddest thing about overwatch’s fall is how /lonely/ everyone must have been after it 

like it appears that no one stuck together. ana was gone before it even fell (leaving fareeha alone too, presumably, and she wasn’t even in overwatch smh), reinhardt had been forced to retire, jack and gabe effed up and separated and did their own questionable things, genji went away for good reasons but still was traveling alone, jesse went full-on vigilante, angela threw herself into her work, who knows where tracer went, winston was clearly on his own too before the recall.... 

like everyone was alone. that’s really sad to me 

some of them move on. you can tell that they do better than the others. 

can you imagine how much zenyatta meant to genji? This young omnic, wise beyond his years, cheerful but not overbearing--that companionship was likely a lifesaver, and even without zenyatta’s teachings, i imagine the friendship alone (a friendship separate from a tense organization on the verge of collapse) would’ve been helpful 

and brigitte, to reinhardt--here’s a young woman who believes in his crusade and lets an old man do what he believes in, who helps him and uses her skills to maintain his armor and help him, after an organization he devoted his life to abandoned him--that’s gotta be an intense bond. i’m unsure whether brigitte is related to reinhardt or torbjorn or if she’s just someone reinhardt came across and connected with, but regardless, that’s a friendship that must mean the world to him, and it’s a lifeline, keeping him afloat when there’s nothing else. he’s a fighter, always has been, and brigitte’s the only one after his “retirement” who understands that he won’t ever be happy sipping pina coladas on a beach 

and you have winston, who finds friendship in athena. did athena have a personality before overwatch collapsed, or was she just an advanced training bot? did winston nurture her and help her grow, in between his infrequent get-togethers with lena? or was she always like that, and she was helping him save what they could of overwatch for if they ever needed to bring it back. either way, she was there and supporting him and waiting waiting always waiting with him for the day the world would need overwatch again, never wondering if winston was futilely hoping for a future that would never happen. 

lena lena lena--she was going to be the next poster-child for overwatch. she was well on her way to being The Heroine of The New Era. part of her was probably relieved when it fell through and she could openly pursue the college student who worked at the grocery store near her apartment. (part of her was horrified, of course, but if lena had to say anything, years later, she’d admit that she’s glad overwatch fell in the first place because she never would’ve been able to have any relationship with emily if she had the “no civilian” regs to adhere to). emily, who’s smart and a double major and is going to change mathematics someday and who’s the kindest and funniest woman lena’s ever met, and she’s stupidly grateful she didn’t get sucked into Overwatch the Organization Pre-Fall and she was young enough to recover from the fall and move on 

and even gabe. you didn’t think i was going to talk about reaper, did you? reaper, who allies with talon for mysterious reasons but requests widowmaker’s assistance even more mysteriously. who demands sombra’s assistance, boldly, and snaps at her and threatens her but has never once laid a hand on her. reaper’s dead, he’s barely more than a poltergeist who can hold a gun but he has his eyes and his right hand. even if he’s watching out for them and watching his own back more than he ever would with the shimada and the cretin. 

(all of them--all of the former overwatch agents would do anything to protect these lifelines. and a lot of people say that-- “I’d die for you” and the crap like that. but even lena, arguably the most cheerful and easygoing of all of them, would press the red button for emily without a moment of doubt. she’d do it with a bright, daring smile on her face and the goggles emily picked out for her magnifying her bright, daring eyes) 

^^these are the ones who get social support, though. these are the ones that get support that helps them move past losing everyone. what about the others? what about the ones who were so deeply entrenched in overwatch, who had /nothing/ else, who had never developed the skills to find anything else? those who can’t help themselves type of schtick

you have jesse--jesse mccree, who used to be a laughingstock, who became one of blackwatch’s finest, who then was deeply feared by anyone who knew him, who went straight back to being a laughingstock. who lost overwatch and blackwatch and his commander and his partner and his /family/ for the second-third-maybe-fourth-time-who’s-counting and fell straight off the wagon down to the pit. he shoots people for money and uses that money to drink and passes out then does the same thing. and eventually it isn’t quite so bad, but it still isn’t /good/. he helps who he can and he drinks and smokes and he wanders with no goal in mind

on the other hand, you have ana, on her own crusade, who latches onto her goals. who keeps a picture of her daughter close to her heart but keeps her rifle even closer. is there anything else to say? she’s single-minded (except for those nights where she can’t bring herself to even open the hologram of her baby because her daughter would never forgive her for this and she knows it but she doesn’t know what else to do to keep her safe and she wants to go home, she wants to be back and be with everyone and stop being so damn alone please, let me see my daughter one last time, let me see my wife, please-- but she can’t, she knows she can’t, and that makes it so, so much harder to bear)

and you have mercy--no one has called her angela for years. it’s “doctor” or it’s “mercy” but never angela. she, too, has her goals, but it’s constant go-go-go with no wait in between. she works until she passes out, and then when she wakes up she gets back to it. people’s faces blur together, their injuries and deaths and rebirths blur together, and sometimes she doesn’t even know what she’s doing but she’s helping, right? she’s helping. she’s helping someone and then she’s helping someone else and that’s more important and she can fix that. she can fix that too. 

(stop crying. she can’t fix tears.) 

and then you have jack. the less said about him the better. 

(he stopped counting bodies long before overwatch fell. he stops counting days after a sketchy surgeon reconstructs as much of his body as he can, lets the rest grow back as lab experiments do, and gave him a visor with a pointed warning coming out of thick, fur-lined lips, “it’s only barely better than nothing, but you won’t see without this. treat it well.” 

what’s the point of counting the days when you can’t tell when the sun’s up or down or rising or setting or if the moon’s even there anymore) 

they’re the ones who need the recall. they’re the ones who don’t know what else to do. and when it comes--it’s a surprise, but mercy’s the first one to arrive, with a duffel bag and a bright, bloodstained smile. she passes out on the first semi-soft surface available with gore still underneath her nails. 

then jesse, after he sobers up enough to buy a plane ticket. his clothes are worn and he reeks, but he’s the first to pull everyone into a hug and ruffle their hair and ask how they’ve been. 

then ana and jack show up together. it’s a little scandalous, in that reinhardt’s hurt and everyone else thinks, “oh, that’s why switzerland happened. oh, i see now.” and neither bother to correct anyone, because what does it matter? they have jobs to do. 

recalled overwatch is half-people wanting to do the right thing and help the world, and half-I have nothing else and i will die for this cause because---because of a lot of reasons, and i’m sure you can fill in the blanks. 

the only reason it doesn’t turn into a complete “Reckless, off the rails” type of deal is because soon, once the newbies and rookies arrive, the “doing the right thing” people outnumber the “i’m here because i need to be” folk. 

it’s just really sad to me. there wasn’t really a point to this except to mull over it. maybe mercy and jesse and ana and jack and the other lost ones find community back with nouveau-overwatch, but it’s still based on borderline-unhealthy brothers-in-arms types of relationships that are desperate and based on situations rather than actual compatibility. it’s better than nothing, but by how much?