#i think im free from the coil of these goddamn characters for a SECOND and then they come back in with the steel chair

[sunnnfish]

I AM ACTIVELY SHORT CIRCUITING. HIS FLOWER MEANS RESPECT BTW

[space-city-traffic]

yet again im back on my bullshit so... (gazes with mixed feelings at the TV show Firefly) i could fix him.

my extremely long thoughts about my Own Personal Good Version of Firefly (with plenty of spoilers for the show and the movie) under the cut:

things that are getting axed first thing no question:

out with the whole “let’s add in a thin veneer of Chinese cultural aesthetics out of context for ~flavor~” deal. just no.

instead, let’s hire some actors from a bunch of different cultures and work with them to figure out how their characters would bring those cultures into space with them!! and also hopefully bring some experiences with immigration/alienation/travel into it, since the Whole Core of Firefly is about how humanity always brings our doomed and silly and stubborn and unique warmth with us even into the cold void where nothing is familiar or homey in the slightest.

let’s respect our sex worker character shall we?

i do appreciate that Inara’s work as a companion is described as legitimate and well respected in the show. however please stop having your captain and hero call her a wh*re every five seconds against her clearly expressed wishes and portraying this as just a totally acceptable thing

let’s be more respectful of our characters of color and also have some more diversity, shall we?

others have put it better than me but yeah, the way Zoe and Book are treated is very uncomfy, and the rest of the show is depressingly monochromatic. come on let’s do better.

stop the weird confederacy hat tips

again others have pointed these out with much more thoroughness than I could, but the names of some characters and locations, as well as some of the language used to describe the browncoats, has uncomfortably confederate vibes. instead i propose we very Clearly tip our hats to the Alliance equaling space capitalism instead! you can’t go wrong with space capitalism as a villain.

don’t! make! the! psychotic! character! violent!

listen i love River Tam with my whole heart. but you should absolutely not portray your only character with psychosis as violent because of that psychosis!!!!!!! and yeah, a huge part of her character is that her brain got fucked up by the alliance and so she hallucinates and is also a super ninja. but like. she doesn’t need to be a super ninja for her character to work, okay? the crew does not need to be scared of her for her character to work, okay??? more on this later bc it would take a lot of care and nuance to make her character work but i really think it can be done

things we are absolutely keeping:

found family tropes my fucking beloved

this should be self evident. this is why the show is as appealing as it is despite its flaws, at least in my eyes.

malcolm reynolds, the knight in dusty armor

there’s something so appealing to me about what Mal stands for. because at his core is this ridiculous, silly, stubborn, doomed devotion to what he thinks is important and right, a romantic idealism thinly covered by cynical cowboy platitudes that he thinks make his bleeding heart totally invisible. and he is so obvious and entirely incorrect. bless. this is a man who will do anything for his family, who charges into swordfights to defend his friend from a man who wants to turn her into an object despite having no clue how to hold a sword. at his worst, he starts brawls in bars just for the martyr’s thrill of being persecuted for supporting the right; at his best, he inspires downright religious belief from his crew because he represents a romantic and chivalrous and doomed dedication to the right thing over any practical concerns. and then he throws a “selfish” quip over it with 100% confidence that everyone fell for his clever distraction and believes him to be a dirtbag. he’s oblivious and ridiculous and god he makes me want to be a better person because he’s just so goddamned sincere. stupid, but sincere. 10/10 himbo. <3

Mal and Inara ultraslowburn friends to enemies to friends to lovers to enemies to friends to lovers to friends to...

there’s nothing i love more than a ship that’s just two people who know each other way too well, and they’re each the only one who knows the other well enough to call them out on their bullshit. the way Mal and Inara interact in the show sometimes makes me uncomfy but like. the core of their relationship has to stay.

space western aesthetic

i need the cows on a spaceship scene to stay like i need air okay

that sweet sweet religious shit

mal, who lost his faith in gd and a whole lot else during the war. who lost his faith in himself, and now feels he has to hide the part of him that still wants to be good, because he knows he can’t be anymore, and he feels like it’s embarrassing for a guy like him to want something so unattainable. who takes a preacher on board, and the preacher has lost something, too. the preacher has his own past, and his own questions. but not questions like the observant neurodivergent girl, the one who wants to interact with and understand this thing that’s so important to him, but it just doesn’t click with how her brain works and she feels like something needs to be fixed, either the Bible or herself. and Mal takes care of them all, and slowly, he begins to find gd again, not in a prayer but in humanity. humanity doesn’t need to be fixed, like the alliance thinks. the shining imperfect strawberry sweetness of it in his family’s smiles is something to be worshiped and served and devoted to. and he finds he has something to believe in again. (and his crew find that he’s given them someone to believe in, too. and maybe suddenly he’s a saint.)

and finally, my brilliant ideas as to what i would like to add:

TRANS WOMAN KAYLEE RIGHTS

listen her femininity is so important to me okay? it’s so thrilled about everything that’s pretty, from dresses to the spaceship’s electric innards, and it’s so non-traditional and grease stained until it’s not and it’s pink and ruffly and twirly, and she never sees any of it as a contradiction, because none of it contradicts, it’s all just her! her gender is warmth and love and prettiness, feeling pretty and appreciating the pretty and making her friends’ days pretty too.

i want us to find out she’s trans in that episode with the ball, and i want us to find out alongside Mal who just never asked or never realized. Kaylee gasps and squeals at the dress in the shop window and Mal makes an off handed, ill considered comment, and then... someone yanks him aside and hisses a few very significant words in his ear. and suddenly he remembers what the blue white and pink she painted all over the engine room means, and he knows he has something to make right. so he buys her that dress himself and lets her know just how pretty she looks, and when he walks into that ball with her displayed on his arm like something precious, he looks the proudest out of any man there. and she notices. for a few seconds, of course, until there’s chocolate, and ‘nara, and a chandelier—and some horrible girls, but she’s used to that, until—suddenly, she finds her people. a group of old men who light up when she jokes about compression coils and whack presumptuous boys who ask her to dance. they adopt her as a treasured granddaughter, and Mal is beaming at her like a proud dad, and she finds that one of her new elderly friends gazes a little too long at her bracelet, and so she gives it to xem and teaches xem a few new words, and... it’s a good day, huh? it’s a really good day. (of course, then the captain has to go and punch somebody in the face, but it was a real nice party up until then.)

also she and Simon are both transhet t4t im correct and you know it

time for a better River Tam

the first thing we’ve established is that this version of her is not unpredictably violent and the crew is not scared of her!!!! it makes no sense to take a kid who’s primarily brilliant, experiment on her brain, give her telepathic powers....... and tack on the fact that she also has super strength and speed and dexterity and what not, AND say that they programmed her to be super violent. no! no. not only is that extremely harmful rep, that’s also just stupid.

instead!! my version of River is in fact not terrifying to the crew, but is actually the one they feel safest around. River has always been totally blunt, she was one of those kids you could tell realllllly early was autistic, and she doesn’t like being disengenous at all. so you can always trust her to tell the truth and not play weird passive aggressive games or have any hidden agenda, which makes her just a really chill person to be around. also, one of her longtime special interests is music and dance, so whether or not she’s nonverbal on a given day, there will always be some sort of beautiful sound when she’s around. she does have the singing voice of a dying crow unfortunately but that’s ok bc Simon’s is even worse and they’re both incredibly competitive so you’ll at least get free entertainment out of the affair.

my version of River does have psychosis and hallucinations because of the trauma of the experiments, and they are really troubling to her. she and Simon work together to find ways to cope and meds that help, and it’s a process, but there are some things that help.

the only thing she gained from the academy was the ability to hear people’s thoughts and sense the future a little bit. and yeah, that led to her picking up a few spooky secrets at the beginning, which, yikes. and for a while, it was hard to figure out which voices were real and which were hallucinations. but around her friends, she always feels safe to ask “did you just think about triple cheese burritos or was that just a me thing?”, and they’ll always tell her the truth no matter how embarrassing their thoughts are, bc it’s important to all of them to respect her and help her sort accurately through what’s reality and what’s not. and bit by bit, she gets better and better at figuring out what kinds of things tend to be telepathy and what kinds of things tend to be psychosis, and that each one feels a little different. and because of the trust and respect and support of her found family she’s able to do that in a safe environment!!!

trans man Simon rights

listen i wanted to keep him as just a side note on Kaylee’s list but he is my son and he’s important to my heart so here goes

out on the outer rim where Kaylee’s from, gender ain’t much of a big deal, there’s an individualistic quality to life out there, and so if the trail you blaze is the trail of a woman or a man or neither or both, that’s respected even in the rare cases where it’s not outright encouraged. but in the inner planets, where competition and connections and public faces and family names are everything, you have to be what’s expected of you to survive. you can’t change your brand, you can’t be anything other than what your family planned for you since before you were born, it’s incredibly hard to survive in such a hyper competitive environment, and so your very identity becomes just a tool in how to market yourself for better success.

needless to say Simon (just as autistic as his little sister and also very trans) fuckin hated it there. but he was very good at it. correction: he was very good at his very specific field of STEM, good enough to where people stopped talking about how cute he looked in bows and started talking about how impressive his work was from a very young age. and his work had no gender. he could be whatever he wanted to in equations. so that was where he could express himself, and gd, he got so much praise for it, he never wanted to stop.

not until he discovered that his sister needed him, and ran away, and needed a disguise, and realized... suddenly, every stifling rule and prying eye was a million miles away. he was freefloating, freefalling, with none of the charted paths he’d been following all his life... so you know what? fuck it. he’s always enjoyed the name Simon. and since it’s not on any legal records, it’ll make him just that much more untraceable.

and on Serenity, starting over with new people who never knew him before his transition feels like an unbelievable blessing that just dropped right into his lap. he has to keep up the secrecy, he has to make sure they never find out who he used to be, because gd, it’s so nice when they look at him and say his name right, and he doesn’t know if he can handle losing that, not when it’s so new and so important to the person he’s finally becoming. but then one day, the unthinkable happens, the wanted posters for his arrest have an old name on them, they’re looking for the Tam sisters, and... nothing changes. the crew of Serenity could not give even a tenth of a percent of a fuck, and it doesn’t seem like they even know they’re supposed to. huh. that’s new. Simon could get used to that, he thinks.

i’m sure there’s more i could add, but it’s 4:30 in the morning now, so if more occurs to me, ill simply add it in a reblog tomorrow. if you’ve read down this far, i am in love with you. please let me know your Better Firefly ideas, too, bc im always down to yell about this show!!!

[ofstrikcrs]

heyo what’s poppin ! it’s me, hannah !  i’m 20 n vibin in the est. my pronouns r we/them/boys but she/her work as well djskfsmd n i’m currently #unemployed BUT i am a full time student... majoring in dumb bitch theory n loving my gf n i’m at the top of my class baby...... :’) ANYWAY. i’m back again w a ( hopefully ) more condensed version of the infamous google doc(s) STRIKER KIM? MORE LIKE STRIKE ME IN THE HEART I LOVE U BITCH so that u dont all have to read the monstrosity that is my app ( but like, if u wanna... u can find it right HERE ) 

n without further ado... let’s kick it !

this is striker, he’s 28 ( soon to b 29 #ariesculture ) n he’s very complicated.. very complicated.... 

his mom cherry kim ( nee corallo ) is the daughter of lorenzo corallo, renowned filmmaker. daphne had a stint in acting in her youth as well but ending up withdrawing from the spotlight once she married his dad.

his dad is warren kim, business man

what kind of business you ask ? well..

let us rewind a little bit, shall we? now if you know anything about the ins and outs of organized crime in new york city, the name corallo might sound *eyes emoji* familiar to you. giovanni corallo was a boss of the lucchese crime family until his arrest and… you guessed it… that means our man lorenzo corallo is a man of the mafia !

lorenzo, however, wasn’t a first-born son which also meant he wasn’t an heir in any way shape or form and was free to do his thing you know BUT when it came time to arrange marriage for his one and only daughter, cherry, it was Expected of him to keep it in the family 

enter the kim family, who had been loyal to the lucchese family for as long as they’d been in america and had built up quite a reputation for themselves in the family, so it was just a natural choice to marry off cherry to their son, warren

they had two kids! their first-born son, dagger, and their second-son…. STRIKER !

and, as in all mafia stories, there is no better prize than the benefits reaped from die-hard loyalty, so in addition to getting to marry a corallo girl… a series of unfortunate events ( i.e. some deaths and arrests ) led to the promotion from right-hand man to acting boss of none other than our very own warren kim

now being the child of an acting mob boss is stressful, but being the second-son of an acting mob boss is… slightly less stressful. see, cherry stepping Out of the spotlight was a strategic move on her own part but was entirely her own decision which meant that striker was free to choose the exact opposite

with no real mafia-related responsibilities or expectations ( other than keeping his mouth SHUT ) on his shoulders, he was more or less… free to roam however he wanted and as he’s always had a taste for the finer things in life, there’s no real surprise that he chose to follow his mother’s side of the family and became nothing short of a socialite in new york city 

which.. despite what the press says abt our #mans striker kim ( i.e. being a billionaire playboy, irresponsible, reckless, wild, etc. ) he’s smart n his main motivation for heading straight for the spotlight is bc every person who falls in love w him is part of a complex and expansive insurance policy that makes it that much harder for the mafia to make him Disappear, u know ?

this is one of the reasons why striker and dagger never Really not along, though striker’s always had this theory that dagger was built for nothing but the mafia anyway bc he’s straight up one of the meanest, cruelest,  most RUTHLESS people that striker has ever met. but, like, with a name like dagger… how could you not be?

things really start getting #Complicated for striker when he’s ABOUT to graduate from college and his dad yeets this mortal coil in a Shocking Tragic Unexpected death ! it doesn’t really affect striker all that much bc striker spent a lot of his life living with his grandfather in the city but… rather when his father dies it’s dagger that ascends into the role of acting boss and BOY OH BOY that’s nothing but trouble for striker 

dagger gets striker roped right back into the mafia that he worked his whole life to try n get out of.. just like that. sad.

and because striker is… como se dice…. a stubborn shithead with a penchant for the dramatics, he starts looking for a way to make his brothers life absolute hell because! yes! striker IS the person who fucks with the mafia! what a moron!

for a good few years it was just minor stuff, nothing really consequential, but that gets boring very quickly bc ... u know ... it is what it is 

ANYWAY. he really finds his in to what’s going to make dagger kim’s life HELL and that is getting himself involved in a little heist group. there are only so many events that striker can show his face that end with a robbery of some sort before it starts to become suspicious, and it doesn’t take a genius to connect the kim family to the corallo family to the lucchese family. it’s just enough to keep people talking but not enough to actively incriminate himself. and as long as he’s not publicly throwing the lucchese family under the bus, he’s still, by all accounts, insured by the mafia as the son of warren kim.

anyway! enough w the backstory! here’s some fun lil personality n headcanon stuff :’)

first and foremost.. he does have a face tatoo. ( and an eyebrow piercing and yes i have photos of both if u want to see them )  it’s of a crown on his left cheek and he   got it within a week of his father dying and dagger forcing him to come back into   the mafia to Assert His Dominance n show dagger he was still in charge of his own   goddamn decisions so fuck you dagger

dagger punched him in the face for getting the tattoo and he had a black eye for two weeks but you win some you lose some

on the surface? rich kid asshole!!! rich RICH kid asshole!!! you know the kind of guy you take one ( 1 ) look at him and you’re like yeAh u absolutely think that ur better than me ? that’s him 

does he rly think he’s better than u? unclear.. depends on who u are... i already have some thots abt who striker wld dislike hmu tho aha x

fluent in english ofc n also korean and italian, his primary language is lit rally a jumble of korean and italian tht nobody can understand but like.. him n dagger n his dad ( rip ) n he also knows a little spanish and japanese.

he’s afraid of horses but will never admit it

he loves to bet!!! he loves it!!! it’s probably from growing up in a family where making bets on things was a major source of income but he will 100000% place bets on anything there is to place bets on and will rope as many people into his betting pools as possible

he hasn’t had his gay awakening yet isn’t that tragic??  turns out the mafia ISN’T a very lgbt friendly place, who would have thought?? so that’s absolutely something that’s going to happen bc we know that i love to make my characters suffer esp when it’s related to their attraction to someone whew…

he’s somehow both the biggest gossip and the most secretive person that you’ll ever meet??? like he’s an instigator n will make offhanded comments abt what he’s observed other ppl doing recently that he thinks are… inch resting… and you’ll have this long ass conversation w him and not realize until like 2 hours later that he didn’t say one ( 1 ) thing abt himself the entire time

you know how finnick from the hunger games used to get paid for things w secrets??? that’s so striker to the core… like you can’t buy him or bribe him bc baby has $$$ and is so disinterested in the glitz and glamor of fast cars and expensive drinks and whatnot, so if you really want him to do something for him… you’re going to have to trade him some secrets… n that’s that on that!

he doesn’t like to take his shirt off around ppl bc #scars ( predominantly the large letter L that’s branded on his chest but there are some others that i haven’t decided on yet ) anyway he does not partake in the pool parties n as explanation has just always  told everyone that he doesn’t know how to swim… n he’ll die w that lie, thank u !

very paranoid... has 2 different phones w his contacts n codes.. folds his clothes a certain way so he can know if someone touched his stuff... has a fun in a safe under his bed that he changes the passcode to regularly.... he also has some ocd but a lot of it is #trauma

im sry there r so many points here i .. rly tried to trim them down n there are like 300% more in my app but.. whew... ok

i’m going to stop now but pls.. pls plot w me i beg ok thank u bye