#incompatible with this concept

[pollyannawog]

Thinking about an overly dramatic au/retelling where Claus doesn't get the lobotomy and is instead a smartass all game...

[twilight-deviant]

[Avengers Academy: Marvel's Voices Infinity Comic (2024) #29]

[Daredevil (1964) #270]

[unopenablebox]

periodically my brother wanders into my texts to try to explain his theory of reality to me. his theory is that human experience and love are fundamental to the universe and the most real thing, more real than physics, and in fact they create physics— until i reply to ask clarifying questions about this theory or describe my arguments against it, in which case it shifts to be only a claim about human society only for the duration of the next three texts before going back. when i eventually point out that these don't agree with each other he says that's because actually the true idea is inexpressible and this is just its nature. then i ask why he thinks it will work to communicate an inexpressible idea that requires inconsistency over the span of a conversation, and why, if he's trying to do that, he opened by trying to claim that science is wrong because it claims human emotions are an identical time-invariant experience for everyone over their lifespan and then abandoned that claim as soon as i pointed out that science absolutely doesn't say that even a little. then he says actually the idea is His Whole Self and then stops texting me back

i realize i should just stop before the first step where i respond but i want to talk to my brother! and i want to show him the respect of actually trying to engage with things he says to me! and none of this bothers me enough to not want to do those things! but also, christ

[fingertipsmp3]

God grant me the strength not to reply “there are other books you could read and other films you could watch. Hope this helps 🤞” to all the HP fans whinging about JKR’s latest tirade, specifically because of how it affects their enjoyment of the franchise

[ahamkara-apologist]

Do you believe Lightbearers are changed biologically from before they became Lightbearers?

Can't believe I forgot to answer this- I genuinely thought I did until I was scrolling through my inbox and saw it pop up again. Oops.

Anyways, my headcanon is that yes, Lightbearers are biologically different than non-Lightbearers- they become so when their ghost is rezzing them for the first time. During the first rez, their bodies are essentially restructured to better suit being a vessel of Light, with far greater phsyical resiliance, capacity, and overall durability being granted as a boon from the Traveler so that they're not torn to shreds when using even the most basal abilities. Even Lightless, they're still much stronger than a baseline human, they cannot age (their telomeres simply do not degrade and their DNA repair kit becomes more accurate, so they don't incur the gradual DNA loss/nonspecific remedies that lead to the maladies of old age), and they're still paracausally sensitive, even if their conduit for channeling the Light has been cut. Outside of the never-aging and paracasal-sensitivity thing, the effect isn't drastic, but they are still noticibly hardier than a person who'd never directly touched the light of the Traveler would be. Eris, Zavala, and Osiris could be beaten by a sufficiently strong mortal in an arm wrestling contest, for example, but they're all able to learn to use Darkness/walk off injuries with an ease that a Lightless mortal cannot.

After the first rez, additional permanant change is possible, but it requires either paracausal alteration (such as wounds created by Darkness, wounds that were earned and began healing in a no-light zone, or subconcious paracausal alteration, where the Guardian's own body rejects the touch of the Light), or deliberate ghost manipulation. I like to headcanon that by using the Light in much the same way that they would heal, Ghosts can learn to tweak parts of their guardian's bodies to be altered to their liking, which is a method by which transitioning post-rez occurs, in the instance that one was not an exo or did not medically transition before death. It's extremely delicate, but all they have to do is use their bond and the Light to go 'hey, you're missing something, you need to make more of this hormone or grow more of this tissue to fully heal', and bam, gender transed :) This fully depends on the skill of the ghost, however, so its a slow process even if it can theoretically lead to a full transition over time, and certain tissues can only atrophy so far before they need to be cut off. In the case of exos, all the ghosts need to do is block the mental disconnect between the body alterations and the perception of what those should be, and that's about it

[pilebunkers]

DEATHLOOP style Island Four Disturbance fic where an RRI offshoot sets up an experimental one day timeloop and unknowingly repeats it for hundreds if not thousands of years. Freud to play the role of loop-aware hypersoldier trying to break it for good opposed by ALLMIND agent O'Keeffe who is instructed to keep it operational at all costs. O'Keeffe gaining and losing loop awareness as a cycle of its own usually ending with ALLMIND doing something to reset his brain once he starts helping Freud.

Win condition is making ALLMIND realise the loop is unsustainable. The rogue C Wave Mutation and O'Keeffe's augmentation degrading the whole time play heavily into this.

[bannock-freak]

i will never get off my hill that 'lazer' is the only correct way to spell it

[treesurface]

kinda want to make a girlie who likes to see other people be wrong so she can point out those flaws, maybe kind of also the type of person who really likes to salt any wound she sees, so to speak

[cescalr]

Oooh, definitely glee for the fandom asks! <3

Always with the hornets' nests with these ones, I see! Though i don't think there's a fandom out there that isn't in some way a hornets' nest once it gets large enough... hm. Alright. I'm just gonna be as honest as i can be about this, and tag accordingly.

Glee:

my favourite female character: augh. argh. ouph. so difficult. so hard. Since I'm working off of half-remembered show and half recently-rewatched show... its a tossup. Mercedes, Santana, Quinn. Probably Mercedes. She did nothing wrong ever in her entire life <3 well okay maybe except that one time she smashed kurt's car windows (but it was a banger song, though). Can't say Santana because of the Biphobia TM and other things like excessive use of bigotry-based insults, and Quinn. Oh god girl. Cheating is not cool! Funnily enough! So I find them really interesting but 'favourite' is hard to say. Mercedes. Mercedes for sure <3

my favourite male character: Blaine sam blaine sam blaine sam yes. I am imitating ripping petals off of flowers and coming to a conclusion based on which is the last name i said. So I guess that means Sam! But really this is a tie.

my favourite book/season/etc: Mannnnn idk. I don't like shows for seasons as-a-whole. Also i could not tell you what happened in any given season if you held a gun to my head. I'm not good at that. The only shows i know 'seasons' of are Buffy and Teen Wolf because i've watched them like 100000000000 times (exaggeration) for various reasons (mostly fanfiction research).

my favourite episode (if its a tv show): I can tell you my LEAST favourite episode (blame it on the alcohol, thank you Kurt king of biphobia! this is a persona foible it's not the worst episode in the show. by far. by far. it's kind of an average one. I'm just angry at it.) BUT er. Favourite? Idk. Genuinely some of the earlier Kurt-centric stuff was really well done (his convo with Burt... <3) and the Quinn giving birth accompanied by bohemian rhapsody was obviously iconic, but if I'll be honest I couldn't name any episodes of this show (other than That One previously stated, anyway). And yeah most of the time they were named after song titles and No i don't remember those song titles either. I'm just so bad at this. My memory is that of a goldfish's being haphazardly bounced around on a sieve.

my favourite cast member: it would be really funny if I said Demi Lovato [she counts!] but the truth is N/A: i don't know these people !!! They are strangers!! (i don't. follow celebrities. at all. I couldn't even name most of them. They're just people doing a job and their lives are irrelevant to me beyond their ability to perform that job well. I do not need to know where they live and what coffee they drink. Stalker shit tbh. I'm kind of a very private person myself, so rpf-adjacent stuff just... creeps me out. I've never watched a single cast interview in my lifetime and I'm not about to start!)

my favourite ship: Difficult to say! Grave and obvious lie. Blam. It's blam. Quintana is a close runner up though Santana really needs to stop dating people who cheat on the regular (I'll accept Quinn has grown enough not to do this by the time a Quintana coupling would be viable - and satisfying in terms of character arcs - narratively speaking).

a character I’d die defending: Blaine Anderson did something wrong for sure but like Kurt did it first so shrugs. Cancels out. Bad for each other! Case closed!

a character I just can’t sympathize with: genuinely don't remember if I had one of those the first time around because I was like 10 and just didn't pay attention if I didn't care, but Terri and her racist self take that 'prize' this time, alongside the obvious predator in the room [original choir teacher. Sandy? I forget his name immediately after hearing it. He doesn't deserve to be remembered]. Also JBI is just.... a yikes character all around. I mean, he's a blatant stereotype for one, in a the people who wrote this person don't like jews kind of way. Unfortunately common stereotype too, for the era, so not only is he that, he's also lazy. Just a one-note pervert who's the butt of various antisemitic 'jokes' you've heard from era-peer shows a million times over, tired and awful and a sour reminder of bigotry that continues to this day. Really regrettable character who's lack of redeeming qualities was probably purposeful. (I know Rachel and tina are also jewish, but this comes up very rarely and mostly only when santana needs to say something kind of fucked up, as is her modus operandi, for 'comic relief'. Tina's jewish-ness wasn't even canon for several seasons, because she didn't have a surname or a family or anything resembling complex character depth for several seasons. The one time I really remember Rachel's religion being important was when she was pressuring Kurt into believing in some kind of god, which??? don't do that. Bad example. Trying to guilt trip a friend into faith sucks. I take back what i said earlier Mercedes did that too. Boo. Girls try again that was a bad showing all around. Though i have no idea why Kurt went the acupuncture route as his 'secular' option but i think that has to do a lot with the writers doing literally no research ever once in their lives (you can tell they don't by the way they write the football segments of the show, which make no sense according to football fans who watch Glee, of which there are numerous because real life isn't like fiction where you can only like music or sports. Most of the kids in my school year were doing the most of everything ever if they were the 'popular' ones - we do that differently; popularity isn't really based on who know know; for some bizzare reason literally everyone knew who I was? Even people I'd never spoken to?? - but more about like... how much you can do, I guess. Overachievers, but I'm not saying that negatively; these people were generally - generally - very nice, and surprisingly chill for people who had no spare time whatsoever. I'm not entirely sure when they slept; A* across the board, at least one sport, at least one instrument, several extracurriculars, parties every weekend, dozens of friends and an s.o. . Eh? Way too much going on. Scary lifestyle! Impressive burnout rate, probably. Er. Tangent! Back to the scheduled programming).) There's uhhhh there's a lot of bad characters on the show, but i'd say Sandy and Terri and her equally but more loudly racist sister are truly completely irredeemable ones. Like they're not interesting or anything, they're just there to be narrative annoyances (which, in the case of Sandy specifically, is insane. Arrest that man!!! He has actively sexually assaulted minors!!!).

a character I grew to love: difficult to say because I tend to just make an opinion and stick to it. Also i don't remember who i liked at first and who i didn't, this show came out when i was eight. I didn't watch it until I was a little older than that, of course, but I frankly have spotty memory until my late teens, so! I'm not sure!! Quinn, probably. Pink-hair-era Quinn helped me understand her more, and seeing the moments of kindness hidden behind practical cruelty, when you understand her family and situation, makes things make a lot more sense. It takes a lot to get me to sympathise with a cheater, but I can see where Quinn was getting all turned around in her head about life because of her upbringing and socialisation, not to mention the profoundly negative impact cheerios had on her mentally and that the school's culture in general was not exactly a breeding ground for empathy and optimism.

my anti otp: can you tell (klaine). I don't dislike Kurt!!! Please let him have a fun chillaxed boyfriend in new york with his vogue friends. But also please stop attempting to control other people's diets thank you!! Thank you!! I'm of mixed feelings. Blaine and Kurt both did at least one bad, relationship-ending thing, and proved over and over again that they just weren't on the same wavelength in regards to life goals and ways of living it. They can't even share the same living space, which is kind of required for a functional marriage. I don't know, it just seems like they settled for their first proper, serious boyfriend even if that's not really the best match, and I... wish they'd just got to see more of life first, you know? They got married at like 20! Or something! I'm 23, I cannot imagine getting married at 20. That's a baby. Let them live first!

(same for Santana and Brittney, imo. I also don't really like them together because Santana and Brittney have very different ideas regarding monogamy, which is just never going to go down well in the long run. If your girl cheats on you like twenty times and tells you to your face its not cheating in her view of things, but you think it is, break up with her because you'll just make each other miserable. Brittney sort of seems incapable of feeling guilt but if she were, this kind of moral pressure would be Not Good, and obviously Santana isn't comfortable with the idea and doesn't have to be!! Just move on!!! Find other people!!!! Don't marry your first girlfriend if you've broken up like ten times this is simple!!!! Please!!!! But Klaine wins out over Brittana because - in my opinion, glee fandom please do not persecute me, I am known for this specific thing - I see... interactions that verge on abusive between Klaine that I don't see in Brittana. So. Oof? Ex; use of public perception to disguise attack; deliberately hurting Blaine in a stage-combat fencing match (you are not meant to make actual contact in these) and thus using Blaine's own dislike of making his difficulties common knowledge against him in order to 'punish' him. This is no good! Don't do this!!.[Also just to err vaguepost about a comment.... that is. not. what i would call passive aggressive. Physically attacking someone with a sword - no matter the type of sword, fencing foils hurt just as much, they're just not stab-you sharp... er, these days - is just straight-up aggressive.]).

Note that negative things stick in the mind better than positive ones; on a rewatch I may well alter my opinion!

But also I'm really, really stubborn. So it's not likely. Klaine.

[clovernment]

the heart wants to yearn, and yearn and yearn. what is life lived if not a little bit pathetic

[catenary-chad]

Why “steam oppression” fundamentally fails as a social metaphor and I do not respect canon Rusty as a character (and will never portray him positively)

tl;dr it’s rage-inducing backwards and wrong, on par with making wildlife colonizers and feral cats indigenous. I don’t care how progressive the attempted messaging is. It’s a godawful metaphor that enforces widespread irl misconceptions of important issues.

Disclaimer: this is nothing against performers.  It is a very top-down criticism largely aimed at writers and higher staff and purely about train history and politics.  I’d be neutral to positive on Rusty if he was anything but a steam engine in the time period he’s in.  But as-is, he is an immensely hateable character the more you actually know about trains.  He’s the crystallized embodiment of everything wrong with Anglophone train media. He is so compellingly and deeply hateable he would actually be an amazing villain. He’s especially rage-inducing from a modern US perspective because he embodies so many things that led to the present dumpster fire

Anyways, here’s my manifesto on why I am this way.  It’s not stuff like “he’s annoying” this is actually stupidly long, detailed, thorough, and weirdly politically serious. Sources are very scattered but if you want one for a specific claim, I’m happy to provide. 

I am almost certain this concept was inspired by the Railway Series’ depiction of British Rail’s Modernization Plan, given the show’s early inspiration from it. To summarize, in the 60s steam engines and non-standard diesel engines were scrapped en masse and this is framed as a Holocaust-like event in the RWS. Which is accurate if you put faces on trains and a surprisingly dark and mature thing to have in kids’ train books. It got toned down a lot in the TV series but is a common topic for Thomas fanfiction. The steam-diesel transition in general is a notorious element of the RWS and resulting Thomas the Tank Engine TV show that was handled in relatively realistic and nuanced ways in the books, but got dumbed down into poorly-thought out fantasy racism later in the TV series after it ran out of books to adapt.

The glaring problem is that that dramatic steam-diesel transition was only really present in the UK, in the 60s. It was a lot more gradual in the US and the steam-electric transition in mainland Europe even moreso… rail electrification is expensive and gradual and usually involves phasing out vs mass removal of combustion engines (when will people stop wrongly demonizing electric trains for this).

Oh, and steam preservation was INCREDIBLY popular by the 80s, especially in the UK. They were not rounding up and scrapping or abandoning them at that point, groups were grabbing basically everything salvageable from Barry Scrapyard. Small steam engines are especially desirable in preservation even today, and a mechanically functional one? They’d be fighting over him.

Ironically, being acquainted with the Railway Series immediately made me clock Rusty as a poorly-thought out knockoff. “Ugh, it’s the overdone underdog steam engine cliche, not another one.” Fundamentally, I’m a Rusty hater because I find him lazy cliche incarnate. But the social metaphors canon attempts with him that people use to defend him wildly backfire in ways I’m dismayed nobody else calls out. Let’s go from most blatantly bad to “obscure enough I’ll let it pass, but I know too much to accept this personally”

Racism-

This is uh. Shockingly bad at even a surface level. Just look at several well-known negative traits of real steam engines:

-notoriously FILTHY, like this is the first thing rail employees bring up about them (and just look into Phoebe Snow) -technologically primitive (two for one with implications of being “less evolved” and “unintelligent”) -genuinely dangerous -low uptime of ~30%, can be interpreted as lazy, though it’s usually “diesels are hyper” instead

Yeah. That’s three to five very surface-level negative traits of steam engines that directly reflect well-known anti-Black stereotypes in both the US and Europe. This is not obscure stuff and I don’t know why nobody mentions it.

There’s also the huge issue that when steam engines were explicitly banned from places like New York City… it was for legitimate safety reasons like visibility in tunnels, air pollution, or killing people via carbon monoxide poisoning in tunnels (particularly common in alpine Europe). Oops. You made segregation VERY justified. I think this may have been a factor in why Broadway genericized the story since the NYC steam ban is relatively well known there and supposedly taught in schools at some point.

There’s a lot of well-known and influential Black history in US railroads (and roller skating) and it’s a very worthwhile direction with Stex. Basically every other Black character in the show has direct historical or political reason to be so. I was shocked that Electra was only Black due to celebrity casting because it was an almost TOO obvious choice with electric trains’ US associations.

It’s just a terrible angle to shoehorn your Thomas knockoff into if you know anything about actual steam engines like. At all.

Also come on, air pollution is a notorious class/race issue almost worldwide and this show paints fossil fuels as the real victims while going out of its way to demonize solar and nuclear, and makes a rare representation of a wildly proven and efficient form of land transport into a gadgetbahn-coded boogeyman. I’ve even seen conservative politicians try to pull the “fuel discrimination” line in defense of coal and oil in the US recently. Why does the fandom fall for this hook, line, and sinker? It’s dismaying seeing otherwise progressive people rallying behind the coal rollers as wronged by society and going all in on wrongly portraying effective and established decarbonization measures as sci fi scams. At least Hydra gets more criticism and a lot more nuance and thought than most others (see Railnatter’s episode on hydrogen for a long discussion on this).

I find Momma/Poppa more forgivable since there’s more focus on being old and they would specifically piss off Ross Rowland. People also broadly acknowledge how bad their writing is. I think making them a high-maintenance unreliable celebrity who’s just old, bumbling, and out of touch vs malicious and sings Engine of Love would solve a lot. A lot of traits Electra is given are more accurate to steam excursions but I go more into that later.

Ableism-

This almost works, if the show was set in the 50s or 60s I might be able to respect this angle.  Steam engines had terrible uptime due to how long it takes to fire them up/down and way higher physical maintenance than anything diesel or electric.  They just genuinely can’t do as much work as well as diesel or electric engines could (with the caveat that early British diesel engines were largely a dumpster fire).  The problem is in the preservation era, tourist lines got downright EXTRAVAGANT with how far they’d go to accommodate steam engines.  This was the era when they were pulling Duke of Gloucester out of a scrapyard and managing to fix its mechanical faults so it finally ran right.  This was when Disney bought decrepit narrow gauge steam engines from Mexico and replicated a lot of their parts because it was still better than acquiring a new build.  Clinchfield Railroad #1 eventually could only make enough steam to run its whistle and got scooted around with two B-unit diesel engines disguised as baggage cars.  So you have the huge issue that Rusty actually COULD “just get a job” and probably have multiple places fighting over him and offering him any physical help he needed. Especially as a small, mechanically functional switcher.  Those are VERY valuable vs larger engines on short, slow museum lines.  Even among diesel and electric engines there are far more opportunities for smaller models at them because you just don’t need or want something larger, faster, and higher maintenance.  Just look at any museum/heritage line roster.

Classism-

You could make a case that the very last non-tourist revenue steam engines were in poor, rural areas where solid fuel and labor were cheap and there wasn’t access to any better technology. We’re talking coal mines in rural China and sugar cane plantations. But then you have the problem that being “left behind” is actually the most favorable thing for steam engines. For how much Greaseball is posed as the conservative establishment (and this is an accurate depiction of diesel power in the US as long as the show has existed), steam was the previous, even more conservative establishment! There’s nothing “young” or upstart about it, it was around for ~150 years when the show came out and was thoroughly bested by electric traction as early as the turn of the century, but largely held on due to the expense of electrification, maturity and established infrastructure of steam technology, and lack of need for the advantages of electrification in many areas. Sheer inertia vs actual technological merit. Destruction and technological stalling in electric/diesel engine development during and after WWII easily gave steam another decade or two in the US and western Europe. And modernization was its infamous death knell in the UK after all.

As for why lines clung to steam engines longer in wealthier countries, it also wasn’t a rich vs poor thing. Steam engines have absolutely colossal labor costs in terms of maintenance vs diesel engines and aforementioned lower uptime (30ish percent). Broke railroads like the New York Central were often faster at totally axing it if anything. The ones that held on longer? Usually coal haulers that wanted to keep that power source relevant, like the C&O or N&W. You want a “poor” train? Try a battery-powered mining “lokie” that railfans often forget exist, or decrepit diesel switcher that’s bounced down the ladder over 70 years, or one-off “critter” built out of spare parts. One of the weird Nacionales de Mexico SLP diesels made of frankensteined scrap engines would be an AWESOME basis for Ferro since there was a lot of local pride in their ingenuity and resourcefulness. The last few freight lines with steam engines in the US were mostly side gigs for tourist operations or short lines with railfan owners willing to float them along as a novelty. On the other hand, there’s a totally non-touristy freight shortline in a sad town in Iowa with 100+ year old steeplecab electrics with trolley poles that are likely the oldest locomotives in revenue service in the US (Iowa Traction Railway).

I think one of the things that bothers me about people uncritically praising lines that used VERY late era steam engines is that they often ignore VERY ugly working/environmental conditions at play. Those places often used dirty, dangerous, inefficient processes that were awful for workers and the environment but get clouded over by “omg choo choo!”. Use of steam engines after the 80s was usually a symptom of some kind of bigger problem. This line of thought often feeds into this weird conservative fixation that steel and coal are the only industries ever which… look at how that is motivating stupid economic decisions in the US right now

 

Now, to directly challenge some lines given in songs

“This was not the dream I dreamed when they first let my fire/mainline coaches streamed behind as my steam rose higher/switching and hitching at everyone’s call hadn’t occurred in my vision at all”

Most dedicated switchers top out at maybe highway speeds at absolute max, probably closer to 30 mph or even walking pace.  Look, you could make a compelling plot about being fundamentally unsuited for your dream job.  But a switcher farting around at that slow a pace on a major rail line is like riding a horse and buggy on a major highway, during rush hour, where everyone else is getting screamed at by their bosses for being late and threatened with termination.  And you wonder why they hate him so much?  This is especially infuriating with just how ugly mainline train conditions were in the 70s-80s US, this guy could just get a comparatively cushy museum job instead of getting in the way at something he’s cartoonishly unqualified to do that’s wildly unglamorous vs his romantic conceptions anyways.  Dear god just read anything about actual mainline rail in the US from WWII-80s.  It was ROUGH.  This was the era of bankruptcies, mergers, Amtrak being created to save passenger rail from taking down the whole system because it had become such a money pit.  Just looking at photos, maintenance was in dire straights.  But you know what was on the up and up?  Steam preservation.  Amusement parks were even buying new build ones for park trains after they ran out of historical ones to rebuild.  If Rusty was actually a new-build steam engine, he’d probably be one of those, and there’s not way he WOULDN’T have been wanted, you don’t just accidentally buy a very niche piece of antiquated machinery only valued in the tourism market. 

“Didn’t have the chances didn’t have the breaks”

“Wasn’t in the right place at the right time”

Already discussed earlier but steam VERY MUCH got both of these around WWII.  

“You along have the power within you/needn’t ask the world to turn around and help you” and “with steam you’ll be under your own control” 

Are blatant references/dogwhistles for Reagan/Thatcherite politics.  That part’s even agreed to be deliberate even by the critics of the day and even actors in the show, and becomes downright sinister when you remember how much bootstrapping was weaponized against the poor to destroy social programs and blame their woes on their personal choices.  This is also a massive part of why the social metaphor part of Rusty makes him WILDLY hateable, he’s just so blatantly written by out of touch rich white guys in line with a catastrophic conservative agenda with a long and proven track record of just making things worse.  Not to mention it’s been terrible for trains in both the US and UK, lack of investment and privatization are major reasons why they suck compared to most similarly wealthy countries.  And as a bonus: steam engines physically caused more damage to infrastructure by corroding wires with smoke/steam and hammer blow to the track. Much like how those policies lead to lack of investment in infrastructure and even outright destruction of government agencies in favor of privatization (that usually is less efficient and profit rather than service-driven).  Nothing has made me MORE of a big government type than getting into trains because passenger and electric rail are near impossible for private business to sustain long term.  Hell, the Starlight Sequence is arguably “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” but for trains, under the veneer of sentiment is an ugly political message spelling all their doom and you probably fell for the propaganda. It’s the kind of song you play over stats about how little money Reagan and his successors have given Amtrak over headlines about the Northeast Corridor’s infrastructure problems. That’s what it’s calling for and it’s horrifying if you are a French/German/etc train from a country with a nationalized system. 

Anyways, my unhinged and increasingly conspiratorial rant about Rusty’s massive parallels to Reagan are at the very end of this post.  I’ve tried to keep this main section mostly based on established fact and that side of things starts falling into more bad faith interpretation.  

MY PROBLEMS WITH STEAM IN THE MEDIA 

On one hand, I will actively cheer on characters being mean to Rusty because he is just so justifiably hateable.  On the other hand, the anti-steam stuff in canon makes me bonk my head against a wall because it reminds me of God Isn’t Dead.  It’s just wildly fictionalized and completely counter to real-life sentiment, acting like the whole world hates something that is culturally dominant and wildly lionized irl that if anything, you’ll get more backlash for criticizing.

I went to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania the other day. A railroad with a prominent electrified division and several unique electric engines in the museum.  The model displays and gift shop were all steam engines and some early diesels with some token GG1s.  Which are an amazing token and fully deserving of their iconic status but this was a railroad with a rich and influencial history of electrification and the rest of it gets glossed over.  The kids’ books in the shop?  95% about little steam engines.  I think there was one diesel and one caboose.  Think about it, 

The Little Engine that Could, Casey Jr, Thomas and the army of his knockoffs- it’s harder to think of fictional talking train characters who AREN’T small steam engines, especially in the Anglosphere.  Even Pixar’s Metro seems to have slapped random steam engines into a city that literally banned them at the turn of the century.  I wish it was known if this was a plot point or steamwashing, a weirdly prevalent phenomenon where media incorrectly shows steam trains in places where they would be electric (or sometimes diesel).  

From a toy train angle?  Don’t make me laugh most companies have steam, diesel and “token GG1” in the US. The cheaper you go, the more it’s all just steam engines and maybe an F-unit or some kind of freight diesel, but you won’t see anything electric besides maybe a trolley or Acela-adjacent train.  And as another mark against the classism angle, electric engines or trolleys used to be the cheap option in the early days (pre-WWII) because it took a lot less detail to make a box with windows and even weirder shaped models like NYC S-motors and Milwaukee Road Bipolars were much simpler to make than steam engines shape/detail wise.  

Why do I feel so strongly about this?  Because rail electrification an actually relevant political topic in the Anglosphere that most people know very little about. I’d be a lot more lenient on all of this if it were Japanese, or if electrification had been a done deal worldwide and not a grinding, slow fight most people don’t even know about. Yes, I get fucking pissed at how finding historical info about electric trains usually involves major digging online or even buying physical books and much of train media is stuck in the 60s (and often ignores electric history outside the token GG1).  Meanwhile children’s media is overloaded with irrelevant choo choos perpetually painted as underdogs while their MASSIVE faults are glossed over and it just perpetuates the cycle of disconnection from current train politics in favor of fighting over boomer-era steam vs diesel arguments. 

REPRESENTATION MATTERS

It sounds absurd to apply to trains, but it really does.  I was only into boomer trains before Electra and was largely detached from their modern problems.  A lot of people into US electric trains only got into them because of old tinplate trains or models popularized by the toy market because their history is otherwise such an obscure thing for anyone under the age of 50 and/or outside urban areas.  And even on the UK side, it’s a running thread on Railnatter that a lot of people just don’t know the reasons behind the issues in modern rail, what jobs there are available, the actual benefits of electrification (freight is something that battery/hydrogen is NOT a feasible solution for for power density reasons), and that electrification and rail infrastructure is a really “unsexy”, still genuinely nerdy topic.  

It’s something that there’s not really a lot of entry level, beginner-friendly media on, you just go straight to transit youtubers yelling at you or niche books that are often a bit too technical for the layperson.  

As I mentioned before, part of why I’ve always been really critical of Rusty is that kids media is absolutely SWAMPED with steam engines.  Unless you live somewhere with them, you’re just not that likely to encounter and get emotionally attached to electric trains at an early age.  Which is most of the US, Canada, and Australia, even a good hunk of the UK.  You crank out yet another steam underdog story and you’ll probably get more people interested in preservation that lose interest after the 60s, check out from their modern politics, and see electric trains as magical boxes.  Even as an antagonist with a lot of inaccurately and unfairly negative traits, Electra was what made me dig into electrification history and uncover this huge rabbit hole and weird counternarrative that’s just been ignored.  It’s mystifying and kind of aggravating that almost nobody else seems to have gone that far into the character’s real life background vs eating the “rich, unreliable, futuristic and unattainable” thing hook line and sinker and cranking out stuff that’s just… tragically and offensively off base to the reality of electrification.  It’s so frustrating because this one of the only major electric train characters in Anglophone mass media!  Hell, the layperson probably has a better idea of lesbians are like and people are still massively critical of Girlball for falling into offensive stereotypes.  

It sounds dismissive to compare actual objects to people but… rail electrification IS an important political issue in many countries that flies under the radar and can do way more good than most people realize.  It’s basically the most efficient form of transportation there is but it’s passed off as mundane and even weak!  So many pollution-related deaths can be spared per year with them vs cars and even combustion-powered trains.  But it’s something you only really see in statistics that’s not very visible.

Roger Rabbit having a streetcar plot made a lot of people aware of their rise and fall.  People tend to dig into hydrogen as a power source to learn more about Hydra and end up actually pretty critical of it. I wish Pixar’s Metro had happened because it would have filled that huge modern, urban gap for train media and seemed to have some interesting concepts going on.  

While a lot of my opinions are sacrilegious, I think a lot of the attempts at social messaging in the show have a lot of potential if reinvented to be more relevant and accurate.  Because that’s usually more interesting!  Imagine the impact a show about the actual setbacks and problems of electrification in the US and UK would be.  A lot of them parallel the perils of defunding social programs and tie in so much better to a narrative about racism or classism than romanticizing something that was the conservative establishment of tech in the early 20th century and legitimately outclassed by technology that actually was held back development-wise by WWII.

Counterpoints:

What about coal and emissions restrictions affecting heritage rail today?

This could be a genuinely interesting topic for talking train media but the real enemy in that case would be autos not facing the same harsh restrictions or governments using the “no carrots, only sticks” approach by not funding clean alternatives and just banning inefficient combustion vehicles (even for occasional use in small numbers) 

What about legit issues of classism like electrification/rail improvement projects being centered on rich areas (see Caltrain and UK rail investment being very London-centered)? 

Also something with potential, but the answer isn’t demonizing an efficient, proven method of transport (electrified rail) in the face of a dirty, inefficient, overall harmful “everyman” solution like cars or combustion engines, it’s promoting its expansion to poorer areas too.  I will also raise the point that underinvestment has been a major historic and current threat to electric trains world over (see the history of interurbans and many de-electrified lines in the US, similar problems also exist in southern England).  And in the broader scope of things, rich countries aren’t always the most electrified (see the US, Canada, and Australia vs India), it’s more a matter of government priorities, politics, and geography.  

Fireless engines?

I’m actually totally down for a fireless steam vs battery electric vs diesel switcher faceoff…. they just don’t belong anywhere near mainlines and aren’t known for speed.  Would be fantastic in a cartoon setting since fireless engines are well suited to factories, mines, and other popular funny cartoon backdrop settings.  They’re a weird and niche piece of tech that’s well suited to specific settings and has had a bit of an uptick in recent use.  

What about the “overpowered steam shunter” thing that happens with cheap toy trains like Smokey Joe?

This would be a hilarious angle if overpowered steam switchers weren’t so painfully cliche.  It was an actual thing that some small low-end switcher models had unusually powerful motors for their size that didn’t work well at low speeds for actual switching but could make them go the scale equivalent of 300+ mph. 

“X character is too old/anachronistic too!”

Oh, I have counterarguments for basically all of those! 

Greaseball-  Early 80s is really pushing it for an E/F unit in passenger use and UP ditched their passenger services a decade earlier…. but those specific models were very popular on corporate business trains, including UPs!  They used E9s (common fanon pick tor Greaseball) as their main power until a few years ago when they started having wheel issues.  Greaseball as a corporate pawn/propagandist is actually kind of awesome tbh

40s/50s era coaches-

lol, look up the Amtrak heritage fleet.  They used stuff this old well into the 2010s.  As a general rule, early-mid 20th century American railcars by companies like Budd and Pullman are built like absolute tanks.  Several commuter agencies still use 50s-60s era gallery cars, VIA rail still runs stuff as old as 1947, and all those Amfleet coaches used on Amtrak are nearly 50.  

Dome cars-

They were used less in the Amtrak era but still existed in substantial numbers… and had a revival in the late 80s!  Look into Rader/Colorado Railcar and their crazy double-decker Ultradomes (often made from old gallery cars), which are mostly used on high end “land cruise” trains.  So there’s your first class AND dome Pearl, who would also be Vegas Showgirl tier tall… but probably shouldn’t go too fast, especially around curves. 

Caboose- Joke’s on you, these are still occaisonally used for a variety of things and weren’t too rare in the 80s.  Notoriously, the Lac Megantic disaster train had a caboose used to hold Locotrol equipment, so there’s an explanation for how a “caboose” could control brakes (though it wouldn’t work on a steam engine) 

Poppa/Momma- makes way more sense to be in the story than Rusty actually.  Mainline steam excursions were more common in the US in the 80s before insurance issues caught up with them and many railroads banned them.  

OLC Belle- Old Pullman cars are stupid common in museum and excursion settings, again, they are BUILT LIKE TANKS.  

Electra as a CC 40100- It was a pretty weird pick to begin with, not sure if it was chosen for Electra because it looked cool and “80s” despite being older or because of the Trans Europ Express relation, the Kraftwerk song of that name directly mentions David Bowie.  But these were still running and relevant in the early 80s.  There’s actually an operational one in preservation too!  They were actually some of the shortest lived Nez Cassé classes, others lasted well into the 2000s and even now and Slovenia and other countries still routinely run them.  

(Never underestimate how absurdly old rolling stock can be.  Outside of steam engines and cabooses ans heavy restrictions on 40+ year old freight cars in the US,  you actually have a crapton of downright ancient cars and engines in revenue, non-tourist service.  There is a reason why I say realism is anything but boring- it gives you a bunch of totally real possibilities way more interesting than media cliches)

——-

Bonus: unhinged political rant about specific modern-day unintended parallels.  This is where I get way more conspiratorial and vitriolic

I’ve gone on about how preservation makes anti-steam sentiment as given stupid.  But you know what did go out of favor in the late 30s and was treated as downright laughable to go back to after the 50s, just like the regular revenue use of steam locos in the US?  

The kind of small-government conservatism Reagan preached.  And the steam engines in the show promote.  Barry Goldwater was openly mocked for it in the mid-60s.  It was thought genuinely unthinkable to go back to.  

Also a funny aside: probably 90% of those new build Crown Metal steam engines were dressed up in western themes.  Literally cowboy actors, just like Reagan was.  

Anyways, steam tourist lines actually do pretty great under private business.  I’ve been surprised by how most of the ones in the US are for-profit.  They also broadly benefit from lower regulations (increased safety standards after a boiler explosion in Gettysburg in the 80s led to end of Crown Metal Products because it wasn’t as easy to run real steam engines anymore).  Rusty and Momma/Poppa focus on emotional appeals and “remember the good ol days??” and “computers bad!” sentiment with basically no concrete arguments or facts.  EXACTLY LIKE REAGAN.  Seriously, I talked to my boomer mom about how she remembered him (she hates him for taking her student aid) and she just kept naming stuff that canon specifically does to make steam engines look appealing.  I’ll spare repeating my extended rant on how Electra’s framing vs actual electric trains closely parallels slander of “liberals” and government agencies and assistance in general, I already made that post.

Now time for some really ugly modern parallels.  Rusty has some blatantly nice guy/incel-ish tendencies with expecting Pearl to be into him, insistance only on her and complaining about being alone (when he’s a legitimately unappealing partner).  There’s actually some very compelling threads to him about despair politics and how they’re weaponized, it’s a pertinant thing in rail.  Have people get fixated on a glamorous past and vaguely mad that it’s gone and impossible to bring back, while not explaining what actually happened.  Which just stalls actual development and improvement and interest in modern rail economics and politics (and conveniently ties back into my aggravation at steam oversaturation in train media).

Greaseball is depicted as a shitty establishment (and fairly and accurately so) but what are the alternatives to him?  Progress or regression?  Guess which one canon frames as deviant and malicious and which one as good.  Now how do mainstream narratives often frame progressive solutions to current problems vs regressive conservative ones that have failed repeatedly in the early 20th century but have often fallen out of direct memory over 80+ years?  Treating steam as a good thing is just like how coal-fired steam engines were briefly considered as a solution to the past oil crisis vs just electrifying more lines.  Fine, criticize the establishment, they suck!  But fixing a broken leg by just sawing it off is a stupid approach.  I get the appeal to being an edgy contrarian, I am one myself, but sometimes the alternative is WORSE.  

So we have “bad contrarian answer to actual problems”, a character who is very incel loser-adjacent, who is wildly unqualified for a race he enters and pushes fossil fuels, who represents the older, ugly conservative establishment but still cries about being an underdog and hated despite DOMINATING the media.  And then almost all the things pinned on competitors (unreliable, high maintenance, cheating on an uphill race against a steam engine, which are atrocious at that specifically) are the EPITOME of “every accusation is a confession” when you learn they’re things way more applicable to steam engines irl

Also he’s orange.  And one of his more popular actors was THE original Turnov.  Which is hilarious if definitely accidental.  

Can you see why I REALLY hate him for political reasons?  It’s so absurdly serious for a character who probably never had this level of thought put into him but it just goes so deep and becomes so accidentally compelling. Even with barely any changes besides framing he’d become a surprisingly nuanced villain.  And way more fitting to the agenda of a certain car-pushing anti-train electric oligarch  multiple people have compared Electra to (which pisses me the fuck off because that guy is a train hater and fundamentally opposed to everything non-battery electric trains require and would stand for) 

[soft-girl-musings]

and what if i gave this hero character prediabetes. what then

[karinyosa]

okay the website of my local church w the pride flags out front actually really slaps they have like 5000000 choirs and a page on their specific beliefs that is pretty slay actually, unfortunately for the part of my brain that thinks choosing to do this is insane for me

[fellhellion]

"why does miguel purport two contradictory understandings of the canon framework" <- idealogical doublebind anchored by guilt.

also, important to remember the context of the second understanding (miles is an anomaly that can therefore can only cause harm) only appearing when miguel has emotionally cracked. all his supppressed doubt abt his path surfaces in a moment of high emotional tension and so he tries to cram his understanding of miles back into that framework from the opposite direction (no longer spiderman, instead as an outlier beyond it's boundaries: an anomaly), even though it cannot work. because miles' very presence is a beacon of doubt that he's accidentally doomed people all over again, and he's terrified he's done so.

[delawaredetroit]

I miss when Izuku allowed himself to have this kind of introspection about his past. It makes sense that Izuku admired this Bakugou who was just a confident leader type. And it makes sense that because he knew this Bakugou, he’s reluctant to really call him out like he should. I mean, how do you cope when your world falls apart, your dreams are crushed, and the person you admired intentionally becomes the source of your pain?

[fade-touched-eezo]

so yes triumphant screeching at de-crapping the elf armour in this hell game may have temporarily been superseded by insane fucking shrieking that a quick and dirty test ACTUALLY WORKS? my dreams of having characters with a) not shit hair and b) modded hair that doesn't completely distract me the entire ass time I try to use it because the brain worms are too busy bitching about jesus christ girl get that hair out of your face YOU'RE GOING TO DIE

anyway I have an assignment on estuary invertabrates to write half a million .packages to raid for the good shit