#i think if you WRITE fanfic without having seen/read the original you should experience a promethean/sisyphean punishment | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mitziholder · 1 year ago

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apologies for being weird and hogging your inbox like this but i LOVE your thoughts on fandom and i think very few people talk about it in a critical way without completely condemning the entire occupation. in my experience people (not just on this website but in general) tend to take a very black and white view of fandom/fic, probably because it can feel like a very personal thing for many; either they're 'normies' who think all fanworks are 'cringe' or they're the anything goes kind of person. radfems seem to me to be the only ppl who aren't overly defensive of the enterprise but can still enjoy fanworks critically. its nice to see women who aren't like. Fandom Moms talking about these things at length. i think you're one of the few people i've agreed with regarding this subject so far :/ your analyses are very much appreciated and i'd love to read more of what you think (especially regarding the point about navigating trauma). have a good day!

oh and also regarding the whole 'i want women to read better thing' ive always felt this idea that fandom culture is above criticism (or criticising it is inherently misogynistic) is in some ways an extension or at least related to the societal notion that women should be confined to the fluffy feeling aspects of writing and art and aren't as capable of intellectually engaging with things (and of course some 'criticisms' of fan culture ARE misogynistic but i'm not referring to those atm). and obviously there isn't anything inherently WRONG with silly fluff novels or romance (especially romance of course as one can certainly explore that subject in depth and i actually think there's a lack of well written romance out there) but it still feels like a limitation on female growth to normalise women ONLY reading fanfiction or even only certain brands of genre fiction i guess? and i find it sad that so many women seem to almost buy into that idea nowadays or shoot down any sort of criticism with the 'stop shaming female desire' catchphrase. and considering that there is still a dearth of well made original female work for women in pop culture (that act as cultural touchstones in the same way a lot of male works do) it's even more depressing that a lot of fanwork centers men. sorry if this comes off as insufferably pretentious lmao! i'm not even against fanwork i mean this is tumblr i still enjoy things but hopefully you know what i mean lol

like i mean. there's a reason why fanfiction is seen as primarily a female affair (even though a lot of the highly regarded published fanfics are by men. u know the neil gaiman stuff or whatever). its sort of a reassurance that women are 'limited' to writing fanworks. idk. i guess i want women to do better idk if im making any sense

ok, mandatory disclaimer that what I’m describing here is a series of trends, trends I’ve observed within fandom at large including both fanfiction readers/writers and fujos more broadly. obviously, not everyone who reads fanfic or yaoi is a woman (though the vast majority are). obviously, not every woman who reads fanfic or yaoi is a stunted teenager who refuses to engage with any other media. I will also admit that not every fanfic is jimin ABO. I don’t think that fanfic is inherently cringe or low-quality, and there are certainly a lot of respectable published works that have been created with other people’s characters or settings. but, as I’ve said, the vast majority of fanworks in the modern day are essentially pornographic mad libs. I find that disappointing. and there’s no reason it has to be this way… except for all the reasons I’ve outlined in my other posts.

things that are lazy and thoughtless and easy, that provide instant gratification, are generally more popular than things that are difficult or uncomfortable. clearly. but people who denounce all fanfic/fanfic writers and pigeonhole it as low-effort slop are not actually interested in helping the women who write it achieve their fullest potential, because they do not believe those women have any potential. it’s true that some criticisms of fan culture and fanworks are purely misogynistic… but I care about women’s voices, and I do want women to be able to express themselves. I’m not on a quest to stop women from writing or reading fanfic. I’ve been slightly flip about the subject, but truthfully, not everything that is “derivative” is bad, and there’s no reason that fanworks couldn’t be good. it’s just that the culture around them is so intensely sensitive - anti-“shaming” - that women are terrified of saying anything about the level of quality or the potentially harmful nature of most fanfiction because they don’t want to devalue media created by and for other women.

I think that’s a disservice to women as a whole. not everything we write is valuable. I’ve written plenty of crap in the pursuit of getting better - plenty of crap I currently disagree with. and if our work can’t withstand criticism - if we shut down immediately at any hint of a deeper, more unflattering analysis of what’s really going on… then what’s the point? what are we communicating? that female fantasies exist in a compartmentalized bubble far and away from our politics and intellectual pursuits? that we should be able to j/o to rape fantasies without question because it’s not that serious? that the personal is political, except for when it isn’t… and we should all be quiet and let women write whatever they want free of criticism lest we shame them so hard they go into hiding? my standards might be a tad high, but that is setting the bar… dangerously low. it’s also patronizing. since when has “just let women enjoy things!!” ever gotten us anywhere? since when has that been a cornerstone of feminist thought? is that really the best we can do? are we really so fragile?

I’ve seen a glut of posts about how useless and harmful constructive criticism supposedly is. the reasoning is always basically the same:

criticism is mean/toxic/discouraging

maybe I’m too hardened by countless death wishes I got on my old blog, but, in my experience, whenever I have something I want to say or a point I want to make, very little can keep me from doing so. I can’t imagine being so bothered by what random Internet people think. it’s important to remember that being able to determine what criticism is valuable is a skill in itself. disavowing criticism as a whole because some of it is “toxic”/discouraging is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

criticism is pointless; perfection is unattainable

of course nothing is ever going to be perfect. but if that’s your attitude, why bother editing? (rhetorical question. some fanfic authors do post unedited works… just because they can.) hell, why write? why get up in the morning? why make your bed? why try anything new at all? it’s a completely absurd, defeatist attitude. like the first point, it also reeks of intellectual laziness and self-satisfaction.

you could just be nice and say what you liked instead because that’s helpful too

please don’t blow smoke up my ass. in editing, I want to fix things that don’t work and to trim the fat. is it “kind” or “helpful” to let me do something completely stupid because you’re too afraid of embarrassing or offending me to say as much? also, knowing what people like is useful in producing more of what people like - it doesn’t help me do anything new or different. there is nothing less helpful to me than saying “good job!” when I ask you to read my work. it’s certainly nice (as long as you actually read it), but it’s not helpful.

it’s published, the author is through with it, and they don’t want to touch it anymore

I plan to do everything I can to edit and improve my writing before the thing is drawn and published, but I’m sure some flaws will inevitably slip through the cracks. currently, I’m rewriting entire chapters from the beginning because they became incompatible with what I wanted out of the series as it progressed. considering that a lot of people write fanfic on a chapter-by-chapter basis with only a very vague trope-strung outline, I have to wonder why they’re so averse to major overhauls. sure, it’s not pleasant, but don’t you want your writing to be the best that it can be? what is the purpose of uploading it if you don’t want the thing to be responded to as it is, warts and all?

also, not all criticism is limited to the specific work it’s derived from; many things can be extrapolated to future works as well. how are we supposed to correct trends that could lead to a decrease in the quality of future works if we can’t even point them out?

fanfiction is a hobby, and hobbies should be fun

I’m not under the impression that I’ll ever be able to make a living from my writing. I do it as a “hobby” in my spare time simply for the fact that I need an outlet for my thoughts - I need to organize them in some way. writing is an art form that we use to communicate meaning and to make sense of the world around us. your goal as a writer may be to have fun, but it isn’t mine. overgeneralizing and building an entire subculture around the pursuit of mindless fun limits what fanfiction and amateur writing have the potential to be.

you could just go read something else that you like more

actually, no. I don’t like any of it. I’m sorry if saying that is offensive to the 38-year-old she/they whose blog post I grabbed this from. most fanfic is bad. I yearn for the exploration of topics that are categorically not explored in fanfic - because the scope of what fanfic is interested in is constantly narrowing, feeding on itself, like an ouroboros. this problem is only going to get worse over time. why wouldn’t I be bothered? why can’t I say it’s a shame?

mass media and tiktok are worse!

maybe, but so what? at least the majority of people who spend their time watching tiktok videos and bad TV don’t act like it’s a suitable replacement for real literature. and at least there aren’t tiktok compilations being listed on goodreads(?)

anyway, more to the point, fandom is full of technically competent writers. but if they continue to insulate themselves within fandom or fandom-adjacent offshoots, they will never be great writers, because great writing requires tight editing (the elimination of things that are pointless and redundant), syntactic fluency, organizational skills, and, most importantly, an individual voice - an artistic vision - interpreting individual ideas… things that are born of criticism and a diversity of influences that are not present or valued within fandom in its current state. great writing cannot be made in a vacuum. great writers don’t allow themselves to be broken or stifled by criticism they disagree with.

sure, no one has a responsibility to be a great writer, and mediocre writing isn’t a moral failure… but I’m certainly not going to be happy about it, especially when the prevailing attitude is “fanfic is art… but I make what I want for myself and sharing it with you is a privilege and therefore you can’t criticize it!” how boring! how utterly conceited! my god. throwing a temper tantrum because you’re not 100% in control of how others perceive or respond to your creation. put it in a diary and not on a public forum if that bothers you so much… (but then, of course, you couldn’t count kudos.)

I do have a plan to touch on some of my other gripes since you asked so nicely. but this response is, once again, getting too long, and those things have little to do with what I was complaining about here. I’ve got an outline for a post I’ll develop and publish later as a final note on this convo, since at that point I really will have said all that I have to say… thanks again for writing in :-)

#ask #i'm being flip again. there are a few fanfictions that i've enjoyed #but they were gen + about female characters (EXTREME RARITY LOOOL)

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triflesandparsnips · 1 year ago

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Is there a database, or maybe a wiki, of written descriptions of physical actions? Because-- because gosh, if only as a resource for writers, there should be.

To clarify: Every time I come across a novel way to describe a physical action I'm always fucking delighted, because describing common actions in such a way as to be immediately obvious and not interrupt the flow of the text/reading is my (and, I imagine, other writers') bête noire. I therefore collect really good ones as I come across them, and I bet I'm not the only one-- case in point?

She toed off her shoes.

That's a very (very) popular -- and fanfic-originated, I think, based purely on usage history -- description for an action that regular shoe-wearers are absolutely familiar with: Using the toe portion of one foot to hold down the heel of the other, allowing the wearer to pull their foot out of the held-down shoe without needing to sit or use their hands.

A huge, annoying, and still kinda unclear paragraph reduced to a beautifully economic five words -- two words, even, if you just count "toed off".

One of my favorite descriptions-- that I saw for the first time in a Marvel fic (Good Boy, by triedunture) and have kept on my mental mantlepiece for the day I get to finally use it-- is:

his hands laced on top of his head

This one requires a little more context, but not by much-- the full quote is:

"Get it together, Rogers," he whispers to himself, pacing the floor with his hands laced on top of his head.

And look at that, right? In my mind, the most obvious visual accompanying that action would actually be Steve's arms raised, elbows winging out. The fingers laced together on his crown are incidental to the intended visual of those arms/elbows-- but the economical description of the single action ("hands laced on top of his head") implies all the rest of it, letting the reader's kinesthetic imagination do the actual heavy lifting. Amazing.

Anyway, I've seen body-language cheat sheets for writers, but I think what I'm asking for falls into a sliiightly different category-- those cheat sheets are more about, like, "emotion as motion" objective correlatives.

No, what I want is just a database, or a wiki, or even just a list outside my own, of damn good descriptions of actions-- highlighting the craft of writing economically (to give me more space for Other Nonsense) and collaboratively (to provide the audience all they need to fill in the blank with their own experiences and not get distracted by my authorial presence).

#send me your own favs if you've got them #send me links to any useful database you have #drown me in verbs my dudes #writing #linguistics

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blnk338 · 2 years ago

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I read Ghost's backstory just now. I knew it was f-ed up but damn... He should really have a lot more problems than just being emotionally unavailable. I'm kind of surprised he's opening up to Reaper or anyone at all (it's great he is though). What's your view on his mentality in general, based on his past trauma? What are his habits caused by it? And is his original backstory even a part of your fanfic? Sorry if you already answered this previously.

anon i am so glad you brought this up bc i could talk about this for eons <33333 mwah mwah -- yes, simon's backstory is canon is RWYS!

i am so sorry i wrote this much on this LMAO

cw for heavy trauma, sa mentions, abuse mentions, eating disorders, discussion of mental illness

I think more people need to put more effort into their fics or stories when writing trauma because I often see characters be one of two things:

They're tiny, sweet, pitiful babies who don't know anything and they're so little and small and they're not even adults or people anymore

They end up being their abuser.

Both are terrible options and unfortunately, as I said, they're shown way too often and really do not illustrate a lot of trauma reactions (of course there are examples of them, but I have not seen them as commonly). I take the writing of traumatized characters from my own experiences and from my own research (and literal human empathy, which appears to be void in half of the Ghost fics I read).

I think the idea of making Ghost quieter, closed off, a wall of a man is an accurate reaction to the shit that he has been through. He has a mountain of baggage and I think it's nearly impossible to write him without considering that. There's a clear idea that he limits who he trusts, and allows even fewer people to look under the layers that he's built up; but it makes complete sense that he has a conscious amount that he "lets people see" (even those he holds dear), until he breaks down.

A few of the responses that I think he has are avoidance and isolation, and the development of depression and anxiety disorders.

Simon blocks out a lot of the memories that he has and largely tries to avoid any conversations or thoughts on the subject of his sexual assault. Obviously, as an SAS soldier, it's hard to avoid certain topics, but I feel like he separates Ghost and Simon as two different people. It's common to find that people will put up different "faces" when it comes to responses to certain traumatic experiences, and I think it makes sense that Ghost would be willing to handle anything; he could be beaten, screamed at, watch and do terrifying things, handle himself well in the battlefield, but Simon can't.

Simon is scared. Simon is nervous, anxious, he overthinks things. He bites his nails and paces around his house, he has three locks on his door, he triple-checks the windows before he leaves for the day-- Simon isn't the stone-cold person that Ghost is, Simon is trying to relearn how to be a person who doesn't hide knives under every chair in his home. (Please also keep in mind that Simon's psychiatrist was also killed, I believe, in the midst of the murder of his family, so he would also limit the mental help he gets because of a fear that it might happen again)

Isolation makes complete sense because, as I mentioned before, he might see him and Ghost as different people. Simon doesn't go out of his way to ask for help, there's an incapability to do so. With that comes helplessness because he might not see the change he wants to see in himself. He's gotten back up from getting shot, he's taken hours of beating and torture, why can't he just get past this? All of these different sides of him build into depression and mass depressive episodes, paranoia and anxiety disorders, insomnia, etc.

Eating disorders may come with that; forgetting to eat or not going out enough to get groceries often. Restless, sleepless nights. Panic attacks that rise out of nowhere, he manages to push them down into staring off into space and clenching his fist, masking it on the job or in public. Hearing people's words but not listening, spending hours in his room on base, letting his anger out in the gym, sobbing into his pillow into the wee hours of the morning.

On top of that, he also refuses to let his anger out in any way that would hurt people like his father hurt them. Simon is careful about touching people, but is especially considerate of his anger. All he does is think, think, think, about how not to turn out like his dad. That's another thing I see people headcanon, that he would be physically abusive, and I don't see that at all. Ghost and Simon don't touch people because the last thing they want to do is end up like his father.

Tl;dr: Simon is very, very fucked up from his past and is still working through it.

#rwys asks #asks #simon ghost riley #cod:mw2 #rwys ghost

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courtney-deserved-better · 2 years ago

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Hello, TD fanfic anon here! I just wanted some general competiton and ship fic advice

hi td fic anon i am so sorry it took me this long to respond 😭 but anyways here's my advice (under the cut bc it got long)

competition advice:

it really helps to plan out your elimination order before you jump into writing. you don't have to have every elimination planned but ones that are plot significant/necessary should have timing/a solid reason for elimination to make sense within the story. but don't be afraid to deviate from your plan or improvise! i was originally gonna eliminate courtney in the china chapter of slippery slopes and decided as i was writing it to finally deviate from the canon elimination order and boot duncan instead. and that totally changed the story for the better! i think the biggest thing to watch out for is having a character get eliminated with very flimsy reasoning. the reasons don't have to be dramatic, they can literally be "yeah everyone thought this one team member was annoying so bye", but as long as they're believable it helps strengthen the logic/structure of your story.

speaking of logic/structure, it's a good idea to have a concept of the tone you want to take when it comes to the competition. this is especially important for total drama fics, because there's a lot of frankly fucked up shit happening in canon that's played off for laughs or not fully delved into. and maybe you want the sharks and deadly challenges to be silly or brushed off while you explore the character dynamics/relationships as serious. or maybe you want the challenges to be scary and dark and threatening to the characters. or maybe everything, including the character relationships, is slapstick! the key is consistency. consistency doesn't mean there can't be tone shifts—maybe you start off the fic with the challenges being seen as goofy, but then as they keep going, the characters experience more and more danger and become traumatized by these challenges now seen as horrific. or maybe it's the opposite, the challenges start off as scary but over time the contestants get used to them and they fade into the background. the one thing that puts me off in fics is where the challenges are regarded as commonplace until one event needs to be emotionally heavy for the sake of plot and then that challenge is portrayed as Extremely Dangerous And Traumatizing when it hasn’t been any different than the rest of the challenges. not sure if that makes sense so i’ll just reiterate that consistency and confidence of tone is important.

when it comes to the content of the challenges: if you’re doing a rewrite and anyone who’s reading your fic has most likely seen the challenge and episode it’s based upon, err on the side of less detail. if you’re writing about the obstacle course from all stars, we don’t need an explanation on how every obstacle works if it’s not relevant to what your main character(s) is experiencing in the moment. on the flip side, if you’re making up a new challenge, be specific in how it works since it will be new to people and they will be imagining it without a reference point in canon. also, don’t be afraid to not explain things if it’s not super relevant to the main character. if a minor character beats your main character to the finish line, but your character was too focused on a conversation with another main character to care about competing, you don’t necessarily have to talk about the minor character running ahead of your character throughout the whole conversation/challenge. you can just write something like “when [main character] finally crossed the finish line, there was [minor character] panting and looking rather smug with themself” and leave it at that. if it’s not super relative to the main character’s pov, and isn’t necessarily a funny bit or enriching detail, you don’t have to write more than a single sentence about it, especially if it distracts from the main pov. it’s something that can get tricky with total drama’s ensemble cast, so you have to find the right balance for yourself.

ship advice:

when it comes to the (main) couples you’re writing about, it’s good to keep the arc you want their relationship to take throughout the fic in mind while writing, possibly tying it to specific plot points in your planning if you’re the type of person who likes to get meticulous (like myself lol). if you’re writing friends to lovers, explore their friendship and platonic dynamic before one character realizes they’re in love with the other, it gives the readers a sense of how these characters care for one another and work well together, and gives more stakes to the classic “if i tell them how i feel it’ll ruin our friendship” dilemma. if it’s enemies to lovers, explore why they dislike one another and how they push one another’s buttons and the transition from hating someone to having feelings for them. while the names for these tropes are simple, the content within the trope doesn’t have to be boiled down. using slippery slopes as an example again, alenoah in that fits into the “enemies/rivals to lovers” box. but what makes their dynamic compelling is how within their rivalry they had moments of friendship and attraction. heck, they were getting along really well in chapter 6 which made the inevitable blowup that deepens their rivalry that more impactful. so in a nutshell: have a clear idea of the arc but don’t be afraid to delve into or subvert/complicate the dynamic. the line from point a to point b doesn’t have to be a straight line.

i already talked about consistency when it comes to challenges but it’s important when it comes to ships too. if character a is mad at character b in chapter 3, but is suddenly fine with them with zero explanation in chapter 4, that’s jarring for the readers and diminishes the emotional impact of whatever happened to make character a mad in chapter 3. therefore diminishing emotional impact in future chapters if the readers know [important thing] that happened in chapter 8 could totally be glossed over when they get to chapter 9. don’t be afraid to take your time with the characters’ emotions and feelings toward one another, it doesn’t really read as natural for someone’s opinions toward another person to turn on a dime without something significant happening to cause that.

lastly, think about why these two characters work as a couple (or don’t work, if that’s the direction you want to take). what does character a admire about character b and vice versa? in what ways are they similar and in what ways are they different and how do those affect their relationship? what makes them a good couple? why are they attracted to one another? it’s harder to get invested in a fic that goes “character a and character b like each other” without elaborating on that than a fic that goes “character a likes character b because b brings stability and a soothing presence to a’s anxiety-inducing chaotic life and character b likes character a because a’s impulsivity pushes them out of their comfort zone and challenges them to be their best self when b is finding themself bored with their own life’s stasis”. this is obviously A Lot to work with if you’re writing a fluffy oneshot or something but if you’re working on a roughly season-long multichapter fic it’s good to really dive into what makes your main couple(s) click & tick.

not really related to ship or competition but: do NOT be afraid to write extremely niche stuff that you think only you have an interest in. it’s probably not gonna get written if you don’t write it, and if you do write it and put it out there, you might find other people who like that same niche stuff or didn’t like it before but like it after reading your fic. write what you wanna see!! don’t worry about who might read it, write for yourself. if you’re putting all the effort/work in to create a fic you deserve to be that fic’s number 1 fan.

i hope this was helpful, please keep in mind that i’m not trying to be a definitive authority on how to write well, i’m just “verbalizing” what helps me write fics i can be proud of and enjoy. again, im so sorry it took this long to respond! if you have any more questions feel free to send them in and i promise it won’t take me another month and half to get to them lol

#ask #anon

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salvatorelizzie · 1 year ago

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idk why this fandom in particular, i’ve never noticed this before, but i think it is cause it’s a lot of peoples first ever experience in fandom culture? or it’s because the whole fandom is built on fanfics with loose strings attached to the source material? but people here treat fandom content like it’s something they have a right to. that they can treat like any other media, and they can demand. because normally fanfics and fanart and such are complementary to whatever media the source material is, but here it is the whole fandom you know. i have never seen or experienced such disrespect towards writers, artists, editors etc. it’s wild. being upset that a fanfic isn’t regularly updated or the author takes time with their writing, the way an artist depicts a character in their art, feeling as if you have a fundamental right to anything that’s created (for free, without any additional benefits other then that the person enjoys making it) in a fandom. i am very sad that that is what it’s become. so many wonderful people have been affected by it when fandom isn’t anything other then people with a shared interest who want to talk about and expand the original common interest together. no one owes you anything. no author owes you a fic, and no author has to in any way make their fic palatable to you. there’s nearly endless fics out there. you don’t like the content in a specific one? don’t fucking read it then. close the tab. go use ao3s amazing search filter to find one you like. don’t leave hate to the author. don’t leave hate to the artists. find what you like, leave the rest. entitlement and rudeness are not traits that should exist when willingly entering a space where nobody is forcing you to be. nobody is forcing you like agree with their hc, nobody is forcing you to read their fic. you choose what you engage with. leave the rest alone.

#vent kinda #marauders fandom #just some thoughts cause this is never something i’ve experienced so intensely befor #there’s always bad apples #but never a majority of a fandom #marauders #mwpp #fanfiction #fanart

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aelaer · 2 years ago

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Hey, there! For the ask game: 😎, 🎬, 📗, 🌻, 🎁?

PS, I've been a fan of your works since forever <3

Ugh I was mid-writing this and tumblr ate it :( I want to say "thank you so much!" and also ask how long forever is, because I'm definitely in the fandom-old category these days with my 20 year fanfic anniversary coming next year :B But seriously, whether it's 10 days or 10 years, it is super appreciated <3

Now let's try this again. From this post:

🌻 How often do you read your own fics? Pretty often! If I'm in the middle of fanfic-reading nights (which come on-and-off throughout the year) and I don't see anything new interesting, or don't feel like reading an old favorite, I'll go to one of mine that scratches the itch I want itched. I definitely write what I want to read, for the most part. There's only a couple fics that are exceptions for exchanges as experiments and pushing my own boundaries.

📗 Do you want to write something outside of fanfiction? If so, what about? I may be in the minority of writers that have been writing for several years (at least I think I am), but the answer is actually no. Lord knows my dad has asked me several times over the years why I don't, and the answer simply is that I enjoy playing in other worlds that happen to be currently under copyright. I enjoy expanding on worlds that already exist rather than creating one fully from scratch.

I mean if I really enjoyed Wizard of Oz or the original Sherlock Holmes it might be different, but dealing with the publishing world is also a serious pain in the ass and I'd rather just keep writing as a fun hobby as opposed to something I depend on income for. My creative side definitely burns out, so I find having my creative stuff such as art and writing as hobbies rather than job-dependent good for my artistic health in the long run. Any aspiring writers/artists here should keep that in consideration as they go into school and then the job world; it's not always a bad thing to keep your passion as a hobby. Depends on your personality!

(I definitely prefer the stability of my current job!)

🎬 If a movie or show were based on your fic, which fic would you choose and who would you fancast? Oh this is a cool question. Uhhhh. Yeah, the Earth-197320 series, which is basically one long fic split into sections as I find time in my life to write it (the final part has like over 40k written or something like that, so it's coming along!) Everyone in the MCU is still cast as they were. I don't have too many OCs in the fic and I'm terrible at fancasting - for OCs in the past I usually start Googling lists of actors and actresses of the right heritage and/or age range and go from there.

There are a couple though, most of which are seen the most in the still-unpublished last part, but they all make at least one appearance earlier in the series. So I'd need an eastern Asian woman around 40-60, a Hispanic or Hispanic-passing man from 35-50 (Latinx appearances vary quite a bit!), and a black woman probably 30-50. But I don't know actors/actresses well enough without really doing deep dives into these profiles, which I've only done for one fic that basically co-starred the OCs xD

😎 What fics do you prefer on a scale of canon compliant to wildly original? Varies for each fandom. For the ones I read most in:

LOTR: Canon compliant/canon gap-fillers. There's a lot of years to fill in. The occasional canon divergence works for the really, really, really good authors. Minor canon divergences like "dead Gilraen early on" for Aragorn is fine. The one exception to this rule is modern AUs where the characters slowly relearn their past selves or have to act like, the heroes their past selves are. I wonder if those fics are still around... it popped up here and there in the mid-late 2000s. If they are, I should download them from ff.net before the site is wiped off the face of the earth.

BBC Sherlock: Really went with "anything goes" in this fandom. I found myself enjoying wild AUs the most than any other fandom here. That said, the top of the top list still tend to be canon gap-fillers or canon divergences, even though the AUs were quite a lot of fun.

MCU: Canon-compliant or canon divergence (especially after Endgame haha). I do not tend to prefer huge world AUs (like no superpowers) or fusions (like they're students at Hogwarts). I find that a fic can still be wildly original while still being canon compliant/canon divergence. A great example of this is Signature Move, my favorite MCU fic. It's canon until after Endgame then goes into a fully original story that turns canon divergent, but still feels more original than most "high school" or "high fantasy" fics. If I cannot recognize the character anymore from his core personality, I grow less interested in the character. I can go on this topic for *ages* though, aha.

🎁 Have a piece of a WIP you want to share? Here's another one. I literally wrote this snippet in the wee hours to scratch an itch that like, there's no other fics that exist out there to scratch it. It's another one of those "this probably won't ever get completed/published properly" fics.

Also, the snippet's called "yet another kidnapping" because I've written this trope a stupid amount of times. It's not my fault it's such a fun way to make characters meet.

----

When Tony woke up again, there was another man in his cell.

Under the single dismal light bulb he couldn't make out much of his features. He sat in the corner, slouched, a head of dark, tangled hair shot with strands of grey obscuring his facial features. His clothing was dirty and, in a word, weird. It looked like he was wearing some sort of long Ye Olde Tunic that went to his thighs. All blue, too. One leg lay out in front of him while his head and arm rested on the knee of the other. Interestingly, there were metal bands on his wrist, slightly lit by a small green light on each of them. He wondered what those were for.

The man didn't acknowledge him as he pulled himself into a sitting position. Maybe he didn't hear him and realize he was awake. "Hey."

The man didn't lift his head. "Don't talk to me."

What the hell. Of all things he was expecting his cell buddy to say. "Well, that's rude."

The man didn't reply and, fine, if he wanted to play that game Tony was happy to oblige. He didn't need this asshole to figure a way out of there.

…..scene break cuz i didn't write the filler...

When he looked back at the man, disbelief was written all over his features. "You're real?" he whispered.

Tony snorted in disbelief. "Seriously? Of course I'm real."

The man pulled himself to his feet, slow and unsteadily, and walked closer. As he came into the light, Tony could see that his pupils were blown wide.

"Jesus, what're they giving you?" he asked.

"I don't know," he said. He swayed, then lowered himself to the ground again, now just a few feet from him. "I keep seeing things. I thought—I thought you were just another hallucination."

"Nope. Tony Stark in the flesh," he said. In the light, he could see the cuffs even better—and the man's hands, which were heavily scarred and slightly shaking. They were older wounds, though, that was clear. "What's your name?"

"Stephen. Stephen Strange."

What a name. But he wasn't a completely heartless bastard and he wasn't going to mock his drugged out cellmate, who was looking at the wall as if there was something worth looking at there. "What're you in for?"

Stephen blinked and tore his gaze from the wall. "What?"

Drugged out of his mind, right. "What do they want with you?"

"Ah. My ah, my powers."

An enhanced human; he figured it was something along those lines with those cuffs. "And what are those?"

Stephen muttered, "Go away," swatting at something only he could see, then said, "Magic."

Tony waited for his answer for another three seconds before realizing that *was* the answer. "Magic? Like 'You're a wizard, Harry' magic?"

"Sorcerer," he said as he swatted the air again.

Was there a difference? He didn't think he'd get a clear answer currently. "Right," he said instead. "And what exactly does that entail?"

"Uh, lots of things."

He waited. Nothing. "...like?"

-----

And that is all that may ever exist of that. For whatever reason, I really, really enjoy Stephen Strange meeting various Avengers AUs. Especially if it's mid fight or in less-than-perfect circumstances for one side. I tend to make that side Stephen because I'm biased and I find the idea of this super powerful guy appearing harmless at first until a Big Reveal absolutely hilarious. I will read seemingly-harmless-until-provoked Stephen + anyone until the end of time. Sadly it's not a genre heavily explored.

#ask #answered #anonymous #my writing #ask game #stephen strange #long post #about me

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chaotic---calm · 1 year ago

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A very interesting and enlightening read. It's concerning to know that those programs are moving away from simple grammar/spelling rule coding and into shit like user suggestions. I've also seen them advertising the "let us write your sentences for you" option, which gives me a whole lot of pause. Every day if feels like people are getting too reliant on AI and not taking the time to learn to do things themselves, like craft a sentence.

I always use the spelling and grammar check in my writing software (Scrivener), which honestly is not very good. So I also copy everything into Word and run spelling and grammar check there too because theirs is better, though still fairly lousy with the grammar side of things. But it certainly catches small things that I miss (like incorrect comma usage, misplaced apostrophes, homonyms, etc.).

I have never used other editing software like Grammarly purely because I didn't think it would be worth my money or even my time if there's a free version. (I also hated their marketing because it felt so trite and disingenuous.) That isn't to say that I think they're not helpful for anyone or should never be used; I just have the background of an English degree and a lot of writing and editing experience to help me feel comfortable proceeding without additional checks. My stuff isn't error-free, but given that most of what I currently write is fanfic shared online for free, I can't invest in money to pay a proofreader or editor to check my work and so have to rely on myself (and self-editing is always much harder than editing someone else). If I start tackling my original content again, I might try to hire a proofreader to help me if I can afford it.

Also, my second job at the first company I worked for years ago was in the copyediting department of a publisher of scientific and medical journals. They were trying to develop a software that could edit the articles before we passed them on to our copyeditors, with the goal of eventually using it only and getting rid of our team of contractors. Except it was garbage. I saw first-hand how very unreliable AI is at doing work only a human can really do well. (No matter how much you teach them, machines can't use reason and nuance the way a human can.) Most of the time, it introduced more errors than it corrected, just making our copyeditors' work all the more difficult, and the company finally scrapped the project before I left for a different career opportunity. Witness that has made me very wary of any kind of editing/writing automation in general, and only fueled my disapproval of the wave of "let's use AI to take work away from people" that seems to only be getting stronger.

My advice for writers would be to use whatever level/amount of grammar and spell check software you feel you need to help you be successful with your writing projects, but always always fall back on yourself as the solid foundation. If something doesn't make sense, run an online search to double-check the usage rules. Or ask a fellow writer or a mentor. Or just listen to your gut. If you have the money to, hire a real live person to either proofread or copyedit (two different types of work) your content (and pay them what they're worth; those jobs are grueling). And like OP said, watch out for software that "grades" your writing. Even if you're the greenest writer out there, the most neophyte you could possibly be, I assure you that you're still smarter than that AI and know more about writing than it does. They are tools and absolutely can be helpful, but they can just as easily kick you in the kneecap if you aren't paying attention.

So, anyway, I say as though we are mid-conversation, and you're not just being invited into this conversation mid-thought. One of my editors phoned me today to check in with a file I'd sent over. (<3)

The conversation can be surmised as, "This feels like something you would write, but it's juuuust off enough I'm phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm."

They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird... And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the "he would not fucking say that" meme?

Yeah. That's what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.

Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the "suggestions" are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my "decline" every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don't know.)

It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I'm over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:

ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, "Look how they massacred my boy."

Fearing that it wasn't just this one manuscript, I've spent the whole night going through everything I've worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I've not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It's fine; it's all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter's wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.

This is a sentence from a Batman fic I've been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:

"It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas."

This is what the AI changed it to:

"It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug."

Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words "Batman Muppet threesome?"

Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit's side piece too much???? What have I wrought?

Anyway. Double-check your work. The grammar software is getting sillier every day.

#writing #grammar software #spell check #issues with ai

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avayarising · 3 years ago

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So I’ve seen quite a few mentions of Embers by Vathara on my dash recently. I don’t know quite why this is blowing up now, but some of the takes going around are awfully obtuse, so I’d just like to say a few things of my own.

If it’s a surprise to you that Vathara is politically conservative, then you weren’t paying attention to the story of Embers, and certainly not to its footnotes. It’s very clear from the values and ideas espoused in that story where Vathara stands, or, at least, stood at the time of writing.

That doesn’t mean it’s not a good story. Just because you disagree with someone politically or they do bad things doesn’t mean they can’t write well. You may choose to boycott or protest someone’s work because of what they have said or done, but that’s independent of whether or not the work itself is bad.

Embers truly is a good story. It’s very well written, with strong visualisable descriptions, an intriguing plot, interesting OCs, and some very imaginative and internally self-consistent worldbuilding – the whole theme of the story is about finding out what happened in the past so you can heal the problems it left behind. And there are some wonderfully exciting action scenes and moments of badassery: Zuko’s experiments in waterbending, the train escape, the retreat from Chameleon Bay, Aang’s final confrontation with Koh, and pretty much every spirit battle.

Which is not to say that it’s the Best Story Ever. Structurally it really sags in the middle, and I think it would have been better split into two books. Langxue is an important character who is introduced far too late and insufficiently developed, so never really feels real. There's a notable lack of gender and sexuality diversity. And there’s something more than a little dehumanising in the way a lot of the characters' motivations and personalities are stripped down to which element they belong to, and the idea that the elements somehow bind people to certain behaviours (angst comas for everyone).

But you have to read it with this in mind: this is not the canon ATLA world and these are not the canon ATLA characters. (There’s a reason I said ‘internally self-consistent’ above.) They’re folks with the same names and some superficial similarities who happen to have done and experienced the same things as the canon folks in the period immediately before the start of the story (i.e. up to mid-Book 2). But they have different histories, different motivations, and different personalities. This Aang thinks and behaves like he's nearer 8 than 12. This Katara is a lot more aggressive and antipathic to anyone outside what she defines as her group. This Zuko is far wiser (not to mention draconic). But it's not like there's not a pile of other fanfic that recharacterises canon characters – in fact, most of it does, in one way or another. If you can't cope with these particular characterisations, find another fic. Embers is not, and does not claim to be, a canon fic or a ‘what I think should have happened’ story. It’s not a fix-it fic. It’s using the scenarios of the show as a springboard to tell a new, different story. (Vathara could fairly easily have changed the names of characters, places, and concepts, and published this as an original work with only minimal other changes.)

If you try to limit your consumption of art to only that created by people you agree with – especially if you do that according to demands from other people without checking for yourself – then you are going to limit your own capacity for critical thinking. Read Embers, spot where Vathara’s own stance comes through in it, and decide whether or not you agree with that for yourself.

#atla #embers #embers by vathara #my opinion #embers discourse

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vanishedangels · 2 years ago

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My take after all that we said these past days regarding the way we -as a fandom- portrait Din and Luke in our creations is that if we start telling ppl that canon Luke would never be this or that, we're forgetting that we're pairing him with another character from the SW universe. In canon Luke is a single man, he had never been in a relationship as far as the story shows (I'm only taking the movies), he could easily be an aro ace character, which is so good, since representation matters.

Since I do interpret canon Luke as an ace man, that doesn't stop me from shipping dinluke where Luke experiments sexual attraction, I know my headcanons are not canon, the minute we assigned him a partner we're far from canon.

Ppl should write and draw whatever they want, still, and this is personal, I find really upsetting when Luke is forced to be a helpless little bird turned into a piece of meat who's only there to satisfy brutal men's appetite, and it hurts more when that man is Anakin or Din. In my case, it's not about purity culture, I do read dark content and I write Dark Luke, my problem is that for a year I've seen posts about these machos abusing Luke while I was scrolling the tag, this is not about fanfics, but about posts tagged as dinluke without any bloody TW at all. So, I don't read fics that explore Din as an aggressor, or Boba Fett, because I don't enjoy that at all, the poc being treated as predators is really hurtful. Tagging is important, I know how to use tags to avoid triggering content, still, Tumblr dinluke tag was full of that said content (out in the open) and we witnessed how those tropes grew until it became unbearable for some of us.

The good, refreshing, appealing thing about the original Star Wars trilogy is that Luke is not the typical toxic male hero from westerns, imagine being a girl or a boy back in 1977, you go to the theater and see this boy next door, watching the binary sunset, feeling that it could be you, it's not John Wayne, it's Mark Hamill, an average boy who craves for adventure, he's not in love, he's not there to save the day but in the end he saves it, he's not the man that turns every head when he walks into a room, he's awkward, hot-headed, stubborn, inexpert, he's starting his hero's journey and he could be YOU.

Star Wars subverted those toxic stereotypes, Leia is a princess, but in the story she's the one blasting their way out the imperial cruiser, she's not a damsel in distress, she's the rebellion leader, she's the one comforting Luke when they were mourning their people not the other way around.

What we do with these characters it's up to us, but I think we have a very good, wholesome ground to start creating positive content.

Expressions like "Fandom designated top", "Pedro Pascal is Latino but he's not a poc because he's white", "Din cut a man in half in that episode so he's aggressive enough to be an aggressor", "Dark dinluke is vanilla compared to jangobi or bobaluke" are only reinforcing the sexism, xenophobia, misogyny and heteronormativity in this fandom. So please, listen to each other, I'm evaluating my bias all the time when I read other people's concerns and I'm learning a lot, so thank you guys for expressing yourselves, it's been very helpful.

#dinluke #fandom

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wordsandrobots · 4 months ago

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Thank you! I'm far better at rhetoric than academic rigor, which is why I'm writing amateur essays on an anime rather than driving myself round the bend as a historian of science, but I'm glad it's still given you much to chew on!

With respect to Agnika, I've just belatedly gotten down my copy of 1/100 Bael's manual and it states

"After the War, he divided the world into four economic blocs and founded Gjallarhorn as the supervisory organization. Leaving the management of the organization to the Seven Stars, Agnika passed away as Bael went to sleep. Therefore, the spirit of Agnika Kaieru is said to live in Bael lying in Vingolf, and thus Bael was deified among the people of Gjallarhorn."

So there you have it. Why didn't I think to check that before posting the essay? I will say the kit manuals fall into fuzzy-canon status sometimes, especially in translation ('founded' I think should read 'established', since we know for sure Gjallarhorn was formed in the middle of the War), but this is probably the most definitive statement I've seen on the matter. Without a timeframe,the exact degree of responsibility and how quickly the Seven Stars took over is still up in the air, of course, though this does kind of lend a bit more credence to the idea of the current order coming out of Agnika trying to implement his ideals, rather than being entirely contrary to them.

Now, as for Rustal . . .

OK. This is probably worth a whole separate essay (or conveniently illustrative fanfic), but in brief, it's not that I view him as altruistic but rather that I believe there is reason to think his *intentions* include a wish to improve things from where we start.

The main bases for thinking this are his relationships with Julieta, Iok and the Bearded Gentleman we know as Galan Mossa. In reverse order, the BG is devoted to him in a way that speaks of true commitment to Rustal's cause. In their own words they are friends and I don't think you'd get that if Rustal was a purely selfish arsehole manipulating everyone like Iznario. With Iok, Rustal's guardianship is a power-play but also I think it represents an attempt to shape Iok into being a better officer. The way Rustal talks about Iok's dad suggests he is mindful of how important that kind of inspirational nature can be, and he keeps putting Iok in positions that should, by rights, be learning experiences. It doesn't work because Iok is a pampered brat without a single thought in his head, but I can see a decent idea behind the attempt.

Then there's Julieta. Who is a uniquely talented weirdo with no social standing and a serious lack of self-preservation, and, importantly, not somebody you would ever keep around for the sake of your image. She is blunt and stubborn and canonically out of place in the middle of Gjallarhorn's elite fleet. And Rustal not only keeps her close but relies on her in a way that you'd imagine would have a lot of other pilots gnashing their teeth in frustration, given what we know of the internal class politics.

Yes, he's using her. She is a useful tool. But he also makes her his successor (if we trust that Gaelio heard an accurate rumour). At the very least, her uniform in the epilogue suggests she's made Commander (like Carta), most probably taking Rustal's place leading the Arianrhod Fleet. Which would have caused a riot among the aristocrats if it had even been suggested prior to the reforms inside Gjallarhorn. She's *nobody*. Not quite as low as Ein, given she appears to be from Earth, but a commoner with no manners and no willingness to learn them. That's who Rustal relies on, all the way to the end of the show.

In the side-story focused on Julieta's origins, the BG has a line about telling Julieta his real name if the day comes when everyone is valued equally and treated right. Based on Julieta and Rustal's relationship (in which is his very open and honest with her about both his expectations and what he does to achieve his goals), I think that kind of world is one Rustal sincerely believes himself to be working towards. I think that's the cause for which 'Galan' follows him, and I think it's why he took a chance on making Julieta his right hand in battle. The 'democratising' of Gjallarhorn (however that works) is intended as part of that, as is elevating Julieta through the ranks (however that worked). For whatever reason, Rustal concluded the aristocratic system wasn't fit for purpose and decided it would be better if people were promoted based on merit rather than background.

(The reason, to my mind, is seeing bruises on McGillis' neck and however many other pieces of dirty Seven Stars' laundry. I don't think a reasonably intelligent person, suffering the company of the rest of the Council on a daily basis, would come away thinking highly of hereditary greatness as a concept. He's got bloody Iok as a ward, for heaven's sake.)

The big honking caveat is that Rustal's efforts towards furthering this goal are filtered through the mindset of a colonial officer and a master of realpolitik. He's not an idealist. He meets the world as it is and works with the systems available to him. Making any changes within Gjallarhorn under the Seven Stars requires that he gather as much power as possible, because those levers aren't going to turn on their own. But more than this, I think Rustal believes in Gjallarhorn's purpose as an instrument of 'law and order'. Foundationally so. Everything he does is in the name of preventing wide-scale disruption to the systems on which the world runs. What he ultimately wants, in my view, is to see those systems run in a more equal fashion, shorn of the kind of bigotry that would have skilled people like Julieta dismissed out of hand.

And because he's raised in the environment he is, he doesn't see the contradiction. He's a reformist, not a revolutionary, because he still thinks in terms of the world being divided into 'the good parts that must be maintained' and 'the bad parts that must be kept under control'. That's why he can be so callously dismissive of Tekkadan. They're a disruption. They're making a lot of noise in the wrong place, getting in the way of the people who see the bigger picture and thus make the correct choices to improve things.

The way he talks about McGillis is very patronising, in the sense of looking down on someone with obvious ability who is just not using it right. He thinks McGillis is small. Small and childish, throwing a tantrum and making things worse as a result. Endangering Gjallarhorn's reputation. Threatening to destabilise the whole shebang. Chaos. Confusion. The little people messing everything up.

Rustal, to me, is emblematic of why a focus on 'meritocracy' shorn of a commitment to deconstructing systems of oppression is a dead-end. I think he is a man just as obsessed with power as McGillis, but he thinks that's OK because he's doing it for the right reasons. I think it's telling that he seems devoted to his fleet before the Seven Stars (wearing his green coat over his uniform) and that we never see any Elion Family (my head-canon is, he never married and has no children specifically as a fuck-that about the whole inherited position thing). I think, ultimately, he is a great example of why a 'well-intentioned noble' is a self-fulfilling contradiction if it's taken anywhere near realistically.

I've never thought the show means us to believe he's the good guy at the end. I think it positions him as the guy who won, taking logical steps towards recovering from the havoc McGillis wreaked, and who is revealed to have good intentions filtered through a totally poisonous view of the world. He is broadly speaking a better option than the Seven Stars were. He's also the man who bombed a bunch of teenagers for the sake of looking good on the news. Because that's what you have to do, when you're in his position, and want to keep being able to turn the levers from the inside.

Above all, it seems to me there is a damn good reason why he and Kudelia are facing each other at the end of the show. They're reflections. The woman who got down among the dirt and the blood to learn what she didn't know, and the man who looked out from on high and assumed he knew everything already.

Phew. That ended up longer than I intended (slightly longer than the fic, too, which at least proves narrative to be the more succinct form of communication!) but I hope it clears up my position a bit. I'd never argue Rustal Elion is a particularly deep character, but I don't think it's fair to say he's a one-note bad guy either.

(I shall have to prod that tag about Almiria another time, because it has gotten very late while I've been writing this, but suffice to say, I agree McGillis cares for her, even with all the complexity that comes with it being *McGillis*.)

IBO reference notes on . . . the lie of Agnika Kaieru

This is a post about McGillis Fareed.

Originally presented as an antagonist ala the Gundam franchise's 'Char clone' archetype (named after Char Aznable, an expy of the Red Baron by way of the Last of the Romanovs), McGillis turns out to be one of Iron-Blooded Orphans' key protagonists, his initial appearances reframed by an eventual alliance with Martian mercenary group Tekkadan, home to the more obvious lead characters. In large part, it is his story we watch unfold, as he attempts to secure control over Gjallarhorn, the repressive extra-national military in which he serves.

And it's hard to discuss that story without reference to Agnika Kaieru, the man credited with founding Gjallarhorn to counter AI-controlled 'mobile armours' three hundred years earlier. The apocalyptic conflict between humanity and the armours known as the Calamity War is the source of the current social order, not to mention the titular Gundam mecha. Agnika is responsible for leading Gjallarhorn to victory, an achievement for which McGillis idolises him. He is also a non-character, haunting events solely through McGillis' commentary, at once vitally important and entirely absent.

I thought it would be interesting to examine how that works. I ended up writing 7000 words about it. Spoilers for everything and content warnings for mentions of child sexual abuse.

The character who wasn't there

If we take McGillis at his word, his personal philosophy was defined by reading a biography of Gjallarhorn's founder at a young age. More specifically, at a young age, while being sexually abused by his adoptive father, Iznario Fareed, who had extricated him from working at a brothel, a situation he was previously forced into after being abducted while homeless on the streets. The Life of Agnika Kaieru was a light in this darkness, offering a path out of a situation that, though seemingly improved from his original impoverishment, continued to be highly coercive and harmful. McGillis was made heir to a powerful family, yet had to sneak out of his patron's bed in the middle of the night, naked, with visible bruises across his body. He was desperately in need of hope.

The abuse appears to have been baked into this plot-beat from the start, with hints to it provided at multiple points during Season 1. Iznario being accompanied by a blonde boy and blonde young man (echoing the excesses of Carta Issue, a character who surrounds herself with McGillis lookalikes owing to an unrequited crush), McGillis' reluctance to spend the night at the Fareed estate, and the questions of legitimacy surrounding his inheritance all take on darker significance when the truth is revealed in Season 2. We may safely assume he was always planned to be reacting to this form of exploitation.

I suspect Agnika was a later creation. Comparing the outline of the Calamity War provided at the very start of the show to the ways it later becomes relevant suggests a considerable amount of fleshing-out in the interim. There are few outright contradictions, or at least, few we cannot explained by assuming in-fiction ignorance. Nevertheless, the importance of Agnika as a historical figure, the myths surrounding his mobile suit, and the very existence of the mobile armours each enter without previous set-up. This is inelegant, in the manner of much of IBO's exposition: workmanlike additions to propel the plot along, extending exactly as far as required and no more. But we cannot discount their importance to the final result and since McGillis aspires, in a very real sense, to become his hero, it is instructive to consider what the show tells us about Agnika.

Immediately we run into the fact we know nothing at all about him as a person. The only 'canonical' description of his personality was provided by the series' director, who compared him to 'the hero in a shonen manga': a charismatic character who always saves his friends. Apart from reinforcing my belief any spin-off set during the Calamity War would be more typical fare than Iron-Blooded Orphans turned out to be, this tells us little. Within the story as it plays out, Agnika is blank space. Being three hundred years dead, it does not actually matter what he was like – itself a statement about how people can be forgotten even when their names reverberate through history. Indeed, the thematic parallel to the fates of a large chunk of the cast is a potent one. Time has rendered Agnika a cipher, subject to the judgement of distant strangers, his exact morals and intentions long-since stripped away.

What remains are his legacy and beliefs. That we must speak of these separately is telling. The Seven Stars, descendants of Agnika's fellow Gundam pilots and Gjallarhorn's present-day leadership, show little deference to the man who commanded their ancestors. There are no statues memorialising him and though Gundam Bael has its attendant ghost stories, of Agnika's spirit living on inside and how it will only awake for his true inheritor, it is shuttered away, a monument nobody ever goes to see. One gets the strong impression McGillis is the only person to pay him more than lips service in centuries.

Consequently, McGillis' personal interpretation of Agnika's philosophy is the only window we get on his beliefs, and the most thorough explanation of that interpretation is given to his eleven-year-old child-bride, Almiria Bauduin.

Fairy tales told by a pied piper

From what we see on screen, McGillis is never overtly abusive towards Almiria, to whom he becomes engaged as part of a political scheme. He is pushed into the arrangement by Iznario and in the side-story covering its commencement, he goes out of his way to provide Almiria with the choice he lacks – something that spurs Almiria to form a genuine attachment to him. However, the engagement also serves his personal ambitions extremely well and he unquestionably manipulates her over the course of it (hard to think of another term to describe comforting her on the loss of her brother Gaelio, for which McGillis is himself responsible). We could and probably should label his apparent concern for her emotional wellbeing and indulgence of her desire to be seen as a grown-up as an attempt at grooming her, not in the sexual sense, but to make her a more amenable chess-piece. On the other hand, McGillis prevents Almiria from killing herself when the truth comes out, at the cost of an injury that severely disadvantages him in battle shortly thereafter – a notable action when her political utility has just evaporated. On the other other hand, this incident prompts him to describe her, quite disdainfully, as 'troublesome'.

What I'm saying is, the question of whether McGillis sees Almiria as a tool or somebody he truly cares for is thorny, as it is for virtually every single character with whom he has a meaningful relationship. Nevertheless, I think we are meant to believe he is being honest when he talks to Almiria about The Life of Agnika Kaieru. What he says fits his actions elsewhere and there are no on-screen indications he isn't being truthful – at least from his perspective – when he credits Agnika's principles with 'saving him'.

McGillis states Agnika wanted a world where “humans could live as humans”; that is, where humans of all backgrounds could compete fairly to achieve their dreams. To a child of low-birth, abused behind closed doors, this is an enticing prospect. McGillis goes on to entice Almiria in turn with the promise of 'loving whomever you wish' and of neither of them being mocked for the age imbalance between them. He concludes the scene by saying it is time to “pry open the door to that world with my own two hands.”

A few episodes later, in an internal monologue, he refers to Agnika as the “greatest symbol of power the world had ever seen. Authority, vigour, might, capability, vitality, influence, as well as brute force.” Inspired by this man's life story, he is determined to usurp rule over Gjallarhorn and finally address the want of power that had defined his own life since birth.

Like everything to do with Agnika, what this tells us about his principles is somewhat vague. Quite literally the child-friendly version (sort of; McGillis openly tells Almiria he contemplated suicide prior to reading the book and is likely a poor judge of age-appropriateness). Still, the philosophy described combines individualism with egalitarianism. The stated goal is a level playing field, free of artificial advantages like wealth or social status, where everyone can pursue their dreams as far as they are each able. This is implied to be a natural state for humanity, such that achieving it would be a form of reclamation. Further, the kinds of power McGillis lists are personal – physical strength, intelligence, charisma – and he works obsessively to cultivate them. We don't get confirmation that self-improvement is another of Agnika's ideals, but it would fit from what is presented.

If you are anything like me, your brain will have turned to all sorts of weird capitalism fans and their buzzwords for justifying frantic competition between people at every level of society. Phrases like 'personal responsibility', 'rugged individualism', and 'rational self-interest', possibly with a side-helping of – gods help us – libertarianism. You may also be asking, if this is what Gjallarhorn's founder espoused, how did it end up enforcing disparities between different populations, oppressing workers and maintaining social hierarchies, at large and within its own walls?

To which I might reply, have you looked at what all those weird capitalism fans get up to, recently? This is an unsatisfying answer, though, and to properly examine how Agnika's legacy intersects with the dreaded c-word, we need to take a couple of side-steps, starting with why it should be a natural connection to make within the context of this show.

A digression into narratives about capitalism

Iron-Blooded Orphans is one of the few entries in the franchise to directly engage with capitalism as a major source of global problems. That probably sounds a little strange if you're aware of the the reputation Gundam has as a whole, so let me explain.

[Also, let me remind everyone the definition of capitalism is “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.” (Wikipedia; emphasis mine). It's worth being exact.]

When the concept of space colonies is introduced in 1979's Mobile Suit Gundam, they are framed as a response to global overpopulation and the consequent ecological decline of the Earth (pause to appreciate the massive fuck-off dog-whistle; we'll come back to that in a second). The war the show depicts is presented as a matter of sovereignty, whereby those offloaded into orbit rise up against rule by an indifferent terrestrial government. The colonies themselves are cities built within artificially landscaped environments inside O'Neil cylinders. They do not appear to serve any commercial purpose in and of themselves; when we see labour happening in space, it is in service to the colonies, rather than something they are for (the Zeon miners in sequel series ZZ; there is also the fuel-collecting Jupiter Fleet but they are a very odd entity and not fleshed out).

Contrast this to IBO where Mars' utility as a source of 'half-metal' is of paramount importance to its political and economic position, and the space colonies are explicitly shown to be factory complexes, company towns, resorts, and prisons. The middle arc of Season 1 is focused on a workers' revolt against the corporation running a particular group of colonies, the Dorts, while the impetus behind spin-off game Urdr Hunt is the lead character's desire to transform his home's fortunes by making it a popular tourist destination. There are also mentions of 'resource satellites' and glimpses of what appear to be colonies built to mine asteroids. And true, it isn't stated whether all the colonies originate as extractive operations and production centres. But those purposes are depicted the reason they are maintained to the present day, removing such dirty businesses far above the 'precious', 'unsullied' Earth (cue 'The Lightship', played with maximum irony).

[Side-note: the Dort Company runs its colonies as a 'public enterprise on behalf of the African Union', implying state ownership. However there are multiple references to 'rich factory owners from Earth', suggesting private control. Best I can figure, the colonies are state-owned while the production facilities inside them belong to private companies? Since everyone appears to work for Dort (every worker we see wears the same green jacket), I'm not certain how that functions. Perhaps the workforce is leased to private factories via the Company? That would be fittingly grim.]

Now to be clear, I am not claiming Gundam as a whole doesn't tackle problems caused or exacerbated by capitalism. The introduction of Anaheim Electronics into the original Gundam timeline marks clear interest in exploring the influence of corporate entities on warfare. We may also – from the outside – interrogate overpopulation concerns as deflecting blame from capital's destructive activities, going hand-in-hand with racism over migration, and obfuscating who exactly gets sent to 'colonise the unknown' (spoilers: it's the poor and vulnerable). I'm unconvinced the original run from Mobile Suit Gundam to Char's Counterattack is intended as commentary in this manner; equally, I don't think it's hard to get there (as Gundam Unicorn somewhat demonstrates).

What I'm trying to articulate is a distinction between 'being about a problem' and 'naming capitalism as the cause'. Most Gundam series tend to depict capital as part of an amorphous blob of 'Earth-sphere corruption' or 'greedy elites'. Even Anaheim acts as a third party in the Earth/space conflict, taking advantage of the war rather than shaping the fault-lines along which it occurs. Additionally, actual money very rarely tends to be a factor in the plot. Groups like Celestial Being from Gundam 00 appear to possess near-infinite budget; Gundam Wing's itinerant teenage terrorists have only erratic and arbitrary issues obtaining supplies (where are you getting the damn ammo, Trowa?!); and even in The Witch From Mercury, where you'd really expect expenditure to matter, it… doesn't. G-Witch toys with access to funds and the requirement to be profitable early on, but overall is more a courtly drama in business drag, unconcerned with why corporations work the way they do. Issues such as the exploitation of vulnerable populations for the sake of driving down costs are gestured to without becoming strictly plot-relevant.

Meanwhile over in IBO, the poverty of the Martian characters is an ever-present threat and come the denouement, whether they have any money left is of paramount importance. The show tells us bullets have a price-tag, using this to drive actions inside a world run for the sake of profit. It is mentioned that productivity in the African Union's colonies is expected to drop following the Dort labourers wining better working conditions, a boon to the competing economic blocs that leads to one of them sheltering Tekkadan in gratitude for helping bring this change about. The reason co-main character Orga Itsuka does not survive episode 48 is because arms-dealer Nobliss Gordon thinks it will be financially advantageous to have him killed. That fellow businessman McMurdo Barriston extends limited aid to Tekkadan after publicly cutting them loose for the sake of the Teiwaz conglomerate's reputation and revenue is highly relevant to his characterisation. And Teiwaz itself is run like a mafia, a riff on yakuza practices that erases the line between big business and organised crime – a hell of claim to make in a story where another of the leads' entire goal is uplifting Mars by playing the economic system.

Now, in my reading the major theme running through Iron-Blooded Orphans is exploitation. An acute depiction of how capitalist societies operate – the amorality of the profit motive, the colonial underpinnings, the sheer, monstrous cost – is a subset of this. I don't feel it's any surprise that an attempt to realistically depict child soldiers and other exploited groups should lead to a detailed rendering of the gears in which the world is currently caught. Equally, I don't think it fair to reduce IBO to being about capitalism, full-stop. Patriarchy, slavery and repressive class structures all have older roots and there is an argument to be made that where it touches those things, the show cares less about them as artefacts of modern economic arrangements than as evils in their own right.

It still manages to say stuff about the functioning of capitalism with more bluntness than most pieces of fiction I've encountered and, speaking as an Englishman, the thing that strikes me most is the decision to make the lynchpin of its world an aristocratically-led military force.

A further digression into aristocratic fables

Aristocracy means 'government by a hereditary elite'. It is sustained via wealth passed down through generations of a small group of families and was one of the key mechanisms by which the feudal system operated, prior to the slow capitalist revolution of the 16th to 18th Centuries. It is often treated as obsolete, having been superseded by more modern forms of 'being rich'. Certainly it seems quaint in these days of tech billionaires and oligarchs to talk of descendents of feudal lords who prize family trees traced back to William the Conqueror.

What you have to understand about the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (official name used with illustrative intent) is that this country never properly rid itself of its aristocracy. We are a monarchy. Our parliament includes a House of Lords. And while these are both vestiges of earlier systems, they are neither of them ceremonial. The Lords and the Crown possess actual power that can affect decisions made by the House of Commons, our democratically-elected governing body. The Lords (who are not elected and include those appointed for life alongside ninety-two hereditary positions [this was a compromise]) can review and send back certain types of bills passed in the Commons, delaying their introduction into law. Meanwhile the Crown technically still holds an absolute veto at the end of the legislative process, which only by convention do they not use (royal assent is required for any bill to become law; apparently the last time it was withheld was 1708, but the threat remains and the Crown continues to interfere in proposals affecting their interests).

As you might expect, there have been murmurings for years about replacing the Lords with elected officials and we all like to pretend the King just exists for show. Regardless, these institutions – hundreds of years old and holdovers from a completely different social and economic order – persist because the aristocracy remains a useful tool of the modern British state. The Royal Family can be said to be its advertising wing, not in the sense of attracting tourism but of going around shoring up foreign relations, to help keep Britain the fifth richest country in the world. These diplomatic efforts are a key reason why they are worth the maintenance costs (and the noxious scandals). However it goes deeper than that.

Kings and queens don't make sense without the idea of hereditary superiority, and even with its overt political power reduced by changing times, the British aristocracy continues to shape our upper classes. We have an entire parallel school system preparing the children of the wealthy for life running the country. Our public schools (fee-paying schools open to all who can afford them; we call the free ones 'state schools') have been educating the sons of the 'best families' for centuries. They were the source of the officers and administrators who maintained the British Empire and they continue to be where a massive proportion of our diplomats, politicians, journalists, civil servants, and military leadership receive their education.

This system, funnelling kids through schools like Eaton and Harrow to Oxford and Cambridge Universities, is a factory for class solidarity. It allows students to network and, just as importantly, instils in them the signifiers of being 'the proper kind of person'. Ways of speaking. Ways of dressing. An awareness of who they should defer to and who they can look down on, so that they can be recognised by other alumni as 'correct'. Trustworthy. Reliable.

Above all, it reinforces the notion they have both a right and a responsibility to lead.

Because that's the heart of the lie nobility tells: 'there is something about us that means we must rule over them.' If Britain no longer entirely subscribes to this quality being inborn, it can at least be taught to those of the right stock, bringing them a little closer to the true aristocracy. They can elevate themselves above the plebs, as diligent servants of the Crown, who remains the untouchable pinnacle of quality. [Translation note: 'the Crown' refers to both the reigning monarch and the state. They are functionally the same thing. That's what being a monarchy means.]

Thus, the Empire was able to send its younger, weirder sons out to plunder far-off lands, and produced many an honourable sort to lead thousands against machine guns in Europe, and, in a post-imperial age, Britain can still present an impeccably polite face to the world, to negotiate better deals. Diminished as it is, the aristocracy's shambling husk continues on, manufacturing not the capitalists per se (although the successors to the original land-lords are hardly above enriching themselves and plenty of our lifetime peers are people who've run successful businesses), but the supporting apparatus for capitalist operations. The grease on the wheels and a permanent roadblock along the road to meaningful social change.

You literally cannot have equality if there's a guy at the top who gets a stupid hat and ungodly amounts of influence just for who his parents were.

The wrong story, at the right time

It isn't hard to imagine about how it happened.

Gjallarhorn is the only significant military force left standing after a quarter of a solar-system-spanning human race has been exterminated. Faced with the task of reconstructing civilisation, it splits the world into four blocs for easier administration, abolishing the old national borders. At those blocs' request, it then applies the same reorganisation to Mars and Jupiter, the better to funnel resources towards restoring the Earth. Throughout, it maintains the position of a neutral arbiter; Gjallarhorn was formed to stop the War; now it must ensure there will never be another.

To this end, the tools that allowed it to triumph – the Alaya-Vijnana augmentation technology and the Gundam frames that meant flesh and blood could out-compete tireless machinery – are buried. Victory is instead attributed to the resilience of pure, unadulterated humanity. The pilots slew the monsters not thanks to their equipment but their innate ability. The greatest among them are heralded as champions and natural leaders.

It is a small step to decreeing that their children will inherit their positions. Innate qualities can be passed down and heirs, raised in the image of their parents. Maybe this is an extension of those traditions from which sprang duellists bearing red flags. Maybe it is merely a result of the new-born legends. What matters is, Gjallarhorn endures, guided by its seven stars.

Over the following centuries, the system embeds. The ethos of human purity takes hold, measured by distance from the homeworld. Unfortunates born to space or on distant, dusty worlds posses utility for digging up half-metal or labouring in orbital factories but have no place inside Earth's atmosphere. They would make the place untidy, now the scars of the War are scrubbed away. Those who seek to upset this situation are dissuaded. Those subjected to augmentation, dismissed as subhuman. The peace is kept.

Sadly, new generations of the ennobled families lack the moral fibre of their forebears, accepting bribes, pushing the boundaries of Gjallarhorn's neutrality. There are rules and those tasked with enforcing the rules and yet still the rot spreads. These younger generations lack the moral fibre of their vaunted forebears. A sad decline.

Or perhaps that is bullshit and they are exactly the same: people come into power, who will justify anything for the sake of never giving it up and ensuring that all things flow towards the centre.

Gjallarhorn is the armed wing of the Earth super-state, operating for the benefit of the whole despite competition between the individual blocs. That is to say, it is the army of a capitalist state writ large, in the usual manner of sci-fi magnifying things across time and space. Broadly, a state's purpose under capitalism is to facilitate the smooth running of private enterprise by maintaining infrastructure, providing a workforce, and destroying anything that gets in the way of expansion. Tradition, upper-class solidarity and ideological frameworks all help hold the arrangement together. It is useful, after all, to train people to believe they're supporting a grand cause when they are in fact facilitating exploitation and theft for the benefit of someone else.

And it is here we must turn our attention back to The Life of Agnika Kaieru. Above, I glibly compared the things McGillis says Agnika stood for to capitalistic propaganda. What I mean is that it reads as the ideology surrounding free-market capitalism, where companies are released from all restraint and allowed to compete irrespective of consequence. This is often said to fuel innovation and create a healthy market that will – somehow – benefit everyone, despite observably driving owners to increase profits at the expense of large numbers of people, including their customers.

In that context, claiming you want to ensure everyone competes 'fairly' is disingenuous, since it entails the removal of both limitations and safety nets. No artificial advantages and reliance solely on personal strengths means those who are old, disabled, or otherwise lacking Agnika's stated virtues will automatically be left behind. This is not hypothetical; I see it around me everyday, as a result of policies predicated on exactly this basis, just as we see it represented in IBO by a wide-scale absence of social support and characters too vulnerable to survive a free-for-all (Atra, Builth, the Turbines, in flashback). But the ideological statement elides such problems.

Given the title of the biography, I assume it dates from after Agnika died. Any impression derived from it must therefore be suspected of being what Gjallarhorn required him to have believed. Historically, both aristocracy and capitalism alike have benefited from this kind of distortion, so it would be no great surprise if the book turned out to be more PR than honest report. While Agnika's principles are incompatible with the hereditary advantages enjoyed by the Seven Stars, there are ways to read them as being aligned with the wider social and economic arrangements. As such, it is entirely plausible the way he is remembered was designed to support those arrangements.

The right story, at the wrong time

The rhetoric of McGillis' attempted coup centres Gjallarhorn's failure to adhere to its original values, citing unwarranted attacks against civilians and inference in Earth politics. The Seven Stars must be replaced with sincere believers to correct a drift away from what Agnika intended. McGillis outright proclaims his 'revolutionaries' have the truth of Gjallarhorn on their side.

Even if this is a calculated stance designed to rile younger officers into being the army he requires, McGillis' internal monologues reveal a commitment to the ideal of the individual seizing their dreams through sheer personal strength. He seeks not only to prove this is possible, but also to inspire those who cower because “they don't know how to use their fangs” into following his example. From what we see, he has taken Agnika's words – as they were relayed to him – as gospel.

Is his interpretation correct? And if it is, was it what Agnika believed, or simply what it was useful for him to say? McGillis is manipulative, spinning tales to make others do what he wants. Was his idol the same, pre-empting biographical distortions by espousing a finely-tuned message that would reassure the masses while he built a system geared toward curtailing the power of all but a few?

Trick question. There's no answer in the text. As I said, Agnika isn't a character; what he really intended is irrelevant and therefore not present. Yet a distinction must be drawn between what is said publicly and what is said behind the scenes. This is a layering IBO captures via Rustal Elion, McGillis' rival for control of Gjallarhorn, who out-manoeuvres and defeats him. Rustal is a pragmatist unencumbered by quasi-mystic belief in Agnika or some 'true purpose' to Gjallarhorn. He does whatever it takes to best McGillis, casually breaking centuries-old weaponry restrictions and even provoking a fresh war to undermine his opponent's plans – all while presenting as a bastion of lawful rule. Privately, he admits to being 'shady', willing to deal with whomsoever furthers his goals (e.g. Nobliss Gordon, who starts violent uprisings to spur sales of his merchandise). It is this capacity for realpolitik that means Rustal comes out on top.

The narrative does gesture at motivations beyond self-interest. When Rustal reforms Gjallarhorn in the wake of the Seven Stars decimation at McGillis' hand, he abolishes the aristocratic council (of which he is also a member) and replaces it with a more democratic form of governance. That he is immediately elected to the role of supreme commander gives us some reason to doubt his sincerity. Offsetting this, he is also shown to be working towards the abolishment of slavery in his society.

Regardless of his exact degree of progressiveness, however, Rustal appears entirely uninterested in changing what Gjallarhorn is for. See, institutions and social structures have specific purposes, which need not be the ones they claim, via statements or appearances. A capitalist business may claim to exist to provide a product or service, but its actual purpose is the generation of profit. The police may claim to be an institution of citizen protection, but their purpose is the enforcement of the law, which can be detrimental to some or all of those selfsame citizens.

Gjallarhorn's purpose is to control the colonial holdings of the Earth and maintain the current division of the world. They administrate the extraction of resources, quash attempts at social change, and crush resistance to exploitative business practices. Moreover, Rustal is certainly well-aware this is what his job entails. It is his fleet that carries out a calculated massacre of the Dort workers' unions when they push for better conditions and he personally orders an orbital strike on defeated child-soldiers as an exercise in image management. His reforms thus smack more than a little of an army or a weapons manufacturer improving its hiring policies: sure, they now employ women and members of minority groups; they still exist to kill people.

For these kinds of entities, purpose is all-important. You can dress them up however you want, so long as their function continues to be carried out. I bet, when I described my country's persisting aristocratic elements, you immediately went, “that sounds like [mechanics of regional upper class and attendant justifications for social division].” Yes. Precisely. We don't have feudal system holdovers at the centre of our society because they're the most efficient or only means of fulfilling those roles. They're simply the ones that make the most sense at this point in our history. A different environment would necessitate a different form, but the function would remain.

[I am glossing over the mutability of function here – the power of the king has reduced greatly via political and economic shifts, so he's no longer performing quite the same role as his ancestors – but hopefully you get what I mean.]

Rustal's reforms are an illustration of purpose superseding form. At the end of the show, the narration informs us trust in Gjallarhorn has been restored, indicating an end to meaningful opposition to what we have seen it do. Similarly, when Rustal states that the organisation's history matters more than its mythology, he is saying it has largely been operating correctly and should continue to do so in the future. The public claims can be altered, the set-dressing reworked. The function remains.

Poor delusions

Like the British state and its equivalents, Gjallarhorn is draped in heroic, mythological imagery. From uniforms to equipment naming conventions, it presents as grand and noble, even possessing heraldry, as if originating in a gathering of brave knights. We, the audience, know that this is a veneer plastered atop the material reality. Scenes of its foundation are comparatively mundane: sober men wearing drab suits, shaping the future with the stroke of a pen. The dress-up played since is pure embellishment.

McGillis, however, takes the imagery seriously.

His plan hinges on 'awakening' Gundam Bael and being 'accepted' as its new pilot, fulfilling an old rule/tradition whereby whoever possesses this particular mobile suit is the undisputed leader of Gjallarhorn. By taking a disgraced Iznario's place among the Seven Stars, augmenting himself with an Alaya-Vijnana system, and capturing the facility containing Bael, McGillis intends to anoint himself the new Agnika. At a stroke, he believes he will gain the loyalty of all Gjallarhorn forces on Earth and thus the military strength necessary to defeat Rustal's Moon-based Arianrhod Fleet.

For reasons I'll detail another time, I don't think his strategy is necessarily ridiculous. But it doesn't work. The other Seven Stars do not automatically bow down to Bael's new pilot, instead adopting a neutral position awaiting the outcome of the impending battle, and there is no mass uprising among the ranks below them. Since Rustal otherwise commands an overwhelming number of troops, this turns the conclusion into a foregone one. The few who do join McGillis' cause are annihilated and he is forced to retreat, eventually dying in a one-man attack on the Arianrhod flagship.

It must be stressed that McGillis isn't stupid. He is a canny political operator who correctly identifies the biggest obstacles to success, and while his analysis of Gjallarhorn's corruption is deployed principally as a rhetorical tool, he's not wrong. The leadership are complicit in a lot of extremely shady activity, including experimentation with Alaya-Vijnana technology, contravening the taboo against augmentation their ancestors propagated. They do act against their publicly-stated values, to the detriment of ordinary people and in the interests of those who benefit from a hideously exploitative system.

His mistake is to treat this as a bug, rather than the feature we might more correctly diagnose it to be. Within The Life of Agnika Kaieru, McGillis believes he has discovered the hidden truth about Gjallarhorn. He imagines by setting Agnika aside, the Seven Stars obfuscated mechanisms to curtail their authority and an ethos more welcoming to people like him. (There is a lot we could discuss about the ways McGillis is immunised against some forms of bigotry by his station, despite his illegitimate status, and how he exploits more disadvantaged soldiers like Ein Dalton and Isurugi Camice for his own ends. It's just, that'd be another two thousand words and I really need to wrap this up.)

Yet if we follow Rustal's advice and heed history, the timeline shown in Season 1 has Gjallarhorn dolling out sections of Mars to the blocs a mere three years after the Calamity War ended. Among the many things we don't know about Agnika is if he survived the War, but whether he did or not, his organisation pretty instantly became a tool of social division and exploitation. The most we may allow is that its original purpose was truly noble. Its actions once the apocalypse had been averted speak for themselves.

This has been long walk, I suppose, for the fairly succinct summary of McGillis as a character who rejects private truth in favour of embracing a public, propagandising lie. I am compelled by the idea even so. Capitalism is far from the only system to have claimed universal virtue while benefitting merely a select few, but it has gone uniquely hard on the idea 'you can make it too'. Given IBO's uncluttered depictions of a world run for profit (with the complicity of ostensibly non-capitalistic institutions), taking a cynical read on Agnika's supposed ideology is trivial. Human triumphalism and Gjallarhorn conceptualised as the arbiter of fair competition dovetail into the show's unjust present in a manner too neat to discount. More than anything else, the choice McGillis makes is a common one in real life.

Sometimes, that's a positive thing, pushing people to insist on making promises come true to the detriment of the swindler proffering them. Others, it is a source of profound disorientation, leading in very dark directions as blame for the dissonance is attributed to anything but the root cause.

[This seems is as good a juncture as any to remark that McGillis is not a proponent of anything we can easily label fascistic. He focuses on individual freedom irrespective of national identity; he is attacking people genuinely perpetuating his world's ills; and he definitely doesn't bother courting a disaffected public by playing to middle-class anxieties. He doesn't need to. His plan is to enact a coup from high up inside a military hierarchy, while promising to lessen the force exerted against society. Though there are links to be traced between his ideology and fascist rhetoric, it isn't the avenue his circumstances compel him to go down.]

[I am 100% certain he would've gone in that direction if they had, but that's a counterfactual, not what the show actually presents.]

How McGillis got to where he did is another of IBO's many examples of adaptations to extremis that look utterly bonkers when seen at a remove. An outsider, thrust into the realm of a vicious upper class, he accurately declared the whole thing a nest of lies and hypocrisy. He could never buy the pretences it sold, to others and to itself. His very existence was damning disproof. Then, at his lowest ebb, he found a story about what it should be and that – that he bought, hook, line and sinker.

Already primed to consider power the be-all and end-all of life, he took Agnika's story as a guide to gaining the upper-hand, going so far as to tell Rustal (then a young adult) that the only thing he now desired was Bael. Though it seems he lapsed into a wait-and-see approach between prepubescence and his mid-twenties, witnessing children from Mars fighting using Gundams makes him believe destiny is taking a hand in events and the time has come to act. He betrays Carta and Gaelio, his two closest friends, both heirs to other Seven Star families, for the sake of clearing his path forwards. These were the first people to treat him like a normal child and he admits with his dying breath that he reciprocated their affection. This was part of why he killed/attempted to kill them: in their company, he started losing the will to pursue his dream, put off guard by finally having something positive in his life. So he chose to violently reject them, unable to give up on what he'd started.

That could easily be McGillis' epitaph. He is characterised by an overwhelming commitment to seeing through his power-grab, even if it means fighting an entire fleet to go personally kill Rustal. This is very far from a sane response and we might say likewise about everything he does prior. From his gleeful divinations at the sight of ancient relics, to his rapturous exultation on activating a machine he knows just required the appropriate brain/computer interface, the personality lurking beneath his habitually polite mask is little short of unhinged.

Which is of a piece with a group of teenage orphans clinging tight to the idea a good life lies just beyond the next battle, having internalised that proving their strength is the only way to survive. McGillis has to think taking on Agnika's mantle will bring him what he wishes, because otherwise his actions have been for nought, nothing can be changed, and the misery he endured is inescapable. It's the same self-reinforcing spiral, turned up to eleven.

(Re)imagining the world

In the final outcome, Iron-Blooded Orphans refutes McGillis' individualism, albeit not without caveat. Destabilising the Seven Stars creates space for incremental change and self-interestedly assisting independence activists lays the groundwork for Mars' eventual freedom from Earth. McGillis does create a “storm in this stagnant world,” with lasting consequences regardless of how swiftly it subsides. Nonetheless, his death is a futile one compared to the other causalities during the finale, who all manage to make their last acts count for something. Where Tekkadan share a mutually-supporting community – they are a 'pack of wolves' – he stands alone and saves nothing of what mattered to him.

As I said above, I don't want to treat IBO as a story solely and absolutely about capitalism. In a similar vein, I'm not trying to position an interpretation of Agnika as a vector for capitalist propaganda as the intended one. There are multiple moving parts here, spinning out from that serious consideration of child-soldiers as more than just a trope in fiction aimed at teenagers. My read on those parts is contextualised by my cultural background (I do now want to look into how Japan's own aristocracy mutated with their forced induction into global capitalism).

At the same time, McGillis indisputably misapprehends how a structure within a capitalist environment works because he wants to believe a version of what says about itself. And The Life of Agnika Kaieru is an artefact of that environment. Even without knowing more about its authorship, publication or veracity, and setting aside what McGillis brings to the table (his desire for power was set years before he'd heard of Agnika), the fact he finds it in Iznario's library speaks volumes. Biographies are not neutral objects. As alluded to above, the act of public remembrance shapes culture and hence society. I think it both reasonable and interesting to look at McGillis' arc with the assumption the book is ultimately commensurate with everything he was reacting against.

What would have happened had McGillis won is another moot question when the narrative hinges specifically on his failure. But a land of competition, overseen by the supreme authority of Gjallarhorn, where the only moral law derives from the dreams of the strong?

Perhaps the most damning thing to be said of McGillis' principles – of Agnika's principles – is that they would produce a world functionally identical to the one we started with.

———

Postscript:

For the sake of absolute clarity, I do not believe whether a story is about capitalism or not has any bearing on its quality. My discussion of the other Gundam shows is intended purely to highlight what I see as a fundamental difference between what they are doing and what IBO is. I don't think it is a problem that G-Witch is a personal/courtly drama, or that Wing is focused on fighting in a more philosophical than material sense, or that the franchise has overall tended towards addressing conflict per se, without any serious interrogation from an economic angle.

Stories can only fail at what they attempt, not at what they don't.

I nevertheless stand by what I said. A piece of fiction concerned merely with some generalised notion of 'human greed' is not about capitalism in any meaningful sense, and I fear that's where most Gundam shows land, one way or another, when they touch on corporate interests.

[Index of other writing]

#more rambling #rustal elion #gundam ibo

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sergeantsporks · 2 years ago

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how do u write fanfic? Every time I try I just get thoughts about how people may find it and link it back to me. It's a nightmare because I want to go into the professional art world (Become a animator/writer) and Im so nervous about someone judging me for it. So, how do you do it?

(This is kinda personal, so if u dont wanna answer this thats fine :D)

In my experience, worst case scenario already happened when my "friend" leaned over my shoulder and read some of my fanfiction out loud in the middle of our high school classroom, so I'm immune to that kind of embarrassment.

Honestly, it helps to remember that more people who write also have read/written fanfiction than you think. In my creative writing circle alone, most of us have stated that we read or wrote fanfiction at some point. Heck, one of the pieces we were workshopping? An original work inspired by a MCYT fanfiction. Even in my creative writing class, it's been mentioned and ppl around me have been like "oh, yeah, fanfiction, sure, there's a lot of good stuff out there, I've read some really good fics, it's not all weird and bad" Like, there's a bit of caginess around the whole thing, most ppl say it in past tense and laugh a little embarrassedly, but on the whole, they're a lot more chill with it than you think.

Another thing that helps is that you're writing with a pseudonym with the anonymity of the internet, and while that doesn't necessarily guarantee that no one will find it, it's a pretty good help to know that it's unlikely that ppl will trace it back to you. If they do, then that's mildly stalkerish of them, and is going to be hard to confront/attack you with without admitting that they're being a little weird and/or have read your fanfiction

Finally: "I am cringe and free" mentality. Own that side. Yeah, you write fanfiction, what of it? It's fun. It builds a little community. Why SHOULD you be embarrassed? I've seen Dr. Who and Star Wars fanfiction published IN my local library. Some of my favorite books in elementary school were published Star Wars fanfiction! Any "movie adaptation" of a book that doesn't have the original author on set is just fanfiction! Fr, just embracing that you write fanfiction and being open about it makes the whole thing less embarrassing. Every time someone in CWC goes "Yeah... I used to write... fanfiction... oof" I say "Hey, I STILL do, you be PROUD of your fanfic writing roots." Nothing to get "gotcha"d with if you're open and don't hide it (that's a huge step, tho, obviously you don't have to go around being like "YEAH I write FANFICTION and I am PROUD of it" the point is just the "I am cringe and free" mentality really helps here)

#asks #writing #fanfiction #fandom

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iwishicanbeagoodpianist · 3 years ago

Text

the Wifilcon and the Winter Router

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x OC/Reader Summary: When Bucky learns that his neighbor has been stealing his wifi for months. Warnings: None A/N: I'm not a fanfic writer at all, this, like all my stories, are adaptations to fanfics. My original stories are not written in english, so this is also a translation. please do not repost my work

For an instant, Bucky thought that the knocking he was hearing was coming directly from his head, I mean, it wouldn't be the first time his mind played tricks on him, but he realized that the sound was actually coming, unluckily for him, from his apartment door. Oh no no no no no no no, I just got back from putting up with Sam for almost 6 full weeks, I don't need interaction with more people for now.

Bucky thought for a minute to ignore the sound, to wait for the person to give up and leave, anyway he didn't spend many days on this apartment, almost no one had seen him leave or enter the building and he had no contact with the neighbors, only with the lady on the 7th floor who once lost one of her cats, which ended up in Bucky's apartment, accidentally. Not that I found the cat in the alley and actually brought him to my apartment, it doesn't mean that I stole the cat, he was in the street by himself, I rescued him.

When the banging on the door stopped and Bucky thought he could breathe calmly again, a voice between altered and annoyed was heard all the way to the living room where he was sitting trying to overcome his third panic attack and fourth existential crisis of the day .

-"I know you're in there! I saw you coming in a few hours ago! I've been waiting for days for you to come back!"-

More out of instinct than anything else, Bucky pulled out the knife hidden in his right boot as he slowly backed away from the door. Do I really have a spy as a neighbor? Should I call Sam? Is he in danger too? Never mind now, you need an escape route Bucky, concentrate, third floor, window to the alley, 2 minutes max, the bike is parked far away, I'll have to run, but to where, rendezvous point, safe place, think....

- "for God's sake, open the door, I need you to pay for your fucking internet plan, I'm in the last season of my series and I need to know if Carolina died or not!"-

- "The internet?"- Between the andrenaline from escaping and the shock of not understanding what was happening Bucky spoke louder than an assassin, with over 60 years of experience, should have spoken. Oh, shoot.

-"Yes! Your wifi, I need it to finish watching my series"-

Whispering "wifi" to himself, Bucky tries to remember where he has heard that word before, this is what I get for never listening to Sam when he talks to me. But before he can continue his mental analysis of all the conversations with Sam about such stupid things as his favorite American Football team, the New Orleans Saints, that I remember, to how Antonio could possibly leave María on the last episode of the 6 o'clock telenovela of which Sam is a fan, his apparent "neighbor" spoke up again:

-"Jesus Christ, can you open the door? So we can resolve this like adults"-

Bucky resigned to the fact that he has given his position to the "enemy", walks to the door and opens it waiting for his death. Well at least if I die I won't have to listen to Sam again talking about Antonio and María. But on the other side of the door, there was a woman, who in her pajamas, very unthreatening but cute, was watching him as if he were a ghost but still with defiance in her eyes, in one breath she introduced herself and continued her speech about her complaint to Bucky:

-"As I was saying, I need you to pay for your internet"-

-"I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean"- mumbled Bucky.

- "Good Lord"- To Bucky's surprise his neighbor, pushes him and enters his home, well not so much a home home, more like the headquarters of his secret club, of which he is the president, vice president and only member, the point is that it is his place, where he can (and wants to be alone), as she lives here. This must be a dream, maybe I hit my head too hard in the last mission and I am unconscious in the hospital.

Crossing the room, Bucky's unwanted visitor looks around searching for something while whispering the words "I see you are quite minimalist, but maybe this is too much, someone urgently needs to look for some inspiration on Pinterest". She stops abruptly in front of the shelf where, in theory, a TV should go, while shouting: "EUREKA", she bends down and picks up a white device which has two antennas and like a million little blinking lights, damn, that looks like something out of a spaceship, I'm being watched by aliens? I'm being spied on by Kree?

-"This is your router, this is where the internet signal comes from, which I need you to pay for so I can finish watching my series"-.

Bucky, still in shock for the third time in less than 15 minutes, as he processes the idea that perhaps Thanos' unknowing twin is spying on him for a second invasion of earth and revenge for his brother's death. He can only nod to his now more relaxed and happy neighbor.

-"Perfect, thanks! I need to check the food I left in the oven, I'll talk to you later"- and as quickly as she came she left through the same door, leaving Bucky with more doubts than answers, peeking down the hallway, he realizes that she is the neighbor who lives next door, to his right. When Bucky comes out of his initial stupor, still not fully understanding what is going on, he decides to take his cell phone out of his pocket and call his own personal Google to solve his doubts about this century: Sam Wilson.

-"Hey Buck! What's up?"-how does he always manage to sound so happy? focus Buck.

-"What the hell is a router and why do I have one in my house?"- somehow Bucky manages to formulate, although maybe his voice cracked a little on the last words.

-"That thing's been there for at least two months and you didn't even notice it? Have you even paid the bill?"-

-"You put this in here? Without telling me????"- maybe Sam is also a Kree? Who can I trust now? It's all a trap?

Listening to Bucky's accelerated breathing, Sam tries to explain to him slowly, that in this century life without internet is not life, but obviously as Bucky does not even know how to set the alarm on his own cell phone, he was in charge of buying the router and creating the contract with the company so that, the 106 year old man could have his personal network at home. He had given it the name but he had not given it a password so that Bucky himself could set it up later. "I am an excellent friend, I mean co-worker, if I may say so"

-"Sorry man, after all that happened, we got called for a mission and I forgot to tell you, do you have your laptop over there? I'll help you set up a password, so your neighbors won't steal your internet anymore"- and with that comment everything started to make sense in Bucky's slightly screwed up but functional mind about the events with his seemingly non-spy and harmless neighbor.

Meanwhile Bucky was trying to remember his own password to unlock the laptop in front of him, also courtesy of Sam. "Bucky, when you learn about online banking and that you can pay your rent, electricity, phone and everything with a click of your computer, you will thank me". It should be noted that Bucky hasn't used that laptop once, like a good 100 year old grandpa he goes to the bank to make his deposits and pay his debts, which obviously consisted only of electricity, water, gas and phone because the man had no idea that there was a device in his house that spit out internet, apparently only his next door neighbor knew this. Buck tells Sam how he thought his router was an alien device and how he thought his neighbor was a KGB agent coming to kill him. "Relax Buck we all have undesirable neighbors that steal our internet signal sometimes", well undesirable is not the word I would use to describe her but ok.

When Sam finally explains to him how to connect his computer to the internet, Bucky can finally see the name that his wonderful co-worker, not friend, because he could never be friends with someone so stupid as to think that the name "THE WIFILCON AND THE WINTER ROUTER" was a good name.

- "my god Sam, you're such an asshole!"-

-"HEY! That's a great name!"- Sam responds with as much indignation as possible, he's the best at naming everything from dogs to wifis.

- "I can't believe you're Captain America, I can't believe we're even friends"- Bucky really can't understand his luck to have friends, well, co-workers whatever.

- "Well excuse me but we're co-workers..."-

- "Well, take this call as my formal resignation, bye"-

-"Wait a minute Buck..."- Bucky ended the call, to finish -his self-imposed- punishment of listening to Sam Wilson talk for over an hour. At least I asked him how to use the bank's website to pay for the internet. Suddenly, without warning and without explanation, the memory of his neighbor is lodged in his head, her hair in a ponytail, her reading glasses, pink shorts, her sweater from some university of which he can't even remember the name because he was watching out for other things... that she wouldn't kill me obviously, he was watching out that she wouldn't pull a knife out of her back and kill me right there. The message on his laptop indicating that he can now set a new name and password to his wifi distracts him enough to stop thinking about his sweet and cute non-spy neighbor and how she would look with her hair down and her glasses off.

Still with the sweet feeling in his chest and the desire to see her again he writes as the new name of the wifi, while laughing:

"If you want free internet, you owe me at least one free dinner"

After paying the internet debt and closing the laptop, Bucky gets up hoping to find something edible in the kitchen, while leaning over to look inside his fridge and analyzing how bad it would be to eat a fried egg with pasta and sriracha, he hears again a knock on the door, but this time it does not cause Bucky the anguish and anxiety that caused him the first time, but quite the opposite.

-"Open the door Winter Router! I prepared chicken pot pie for dinner"-.

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