#like hey why do some of those pieces of media eiffel references exist at all if the space development timeline is so different

[commsroom]

When Eiffel asks Hera for her top 5 stick-it-to-The-Man songs, she has a whole list of criteria she's evaluating the songs by. I was kinda under the impression they didn't have that much pop culture stuff up there. (Obviously in the real world the Kinda Evil Genius crew doesn't have the $ for copyrighted stuff.) Do you think Hera has like, sheet music but no audio recordings, or that she *does* have recordings but Eiffel doesn't actually like listening to music (which seems weird with the classical pieces, but it could be that those are novel and Eiffel loves novelty).

i think about that a lot, too!! there are a lot of things hera "shouldn't" know that, well. she does. from a character perspective, i think it works because she's written much more as a sheltered woman rather than anything that literal/speculative about AI, but in-universe i think some options/considerations are:

eiffel, being eiffel, forgot that hera wouldn't have heard these songs, and she doesn't want to have that conversation with him again, so instead she's making an excuse while she looks through all of the books available to her to find anything relevant. (which is a whole other question re: what media hera has access to. i think "all the writing" is a wild exaggeration based on hera's inability to conceptualize how much writing there might actually be in the world, personally, but evidently there are tons of books in there and she can read them... did no one ever bother to ask her, or does something prevent her from displaying them on a station terminal? are they encrypted in a way only she's allowed access to? ... why?)

eiffel, being eiffel, expects hera to remember and accurately interpret his attempts at singing these songs.

maybe there is a collection of sheet music in the hephaestus's archives? she recognizes bach somehow, after all, and i would believe it's likely at least for classical music. ... and what about minkowski's play? was she just going to put it on from memory? is hera learning her lines from the actual script, which she cannot reproduce for whatever reason, while minkowski is doing the rest from memory? what's going on at all, ever?

clearly they were allowed at least some personal media on lovelace's mission, but not on minkowski's; lovelace is listening to paradise valley diegetically. and they just left all of the stuff from lovelace's crew up there. eiffel finds hui's lovecraft book, etc.

hera does reference anarchy in the u.k. to eiffel at the end of that conversation, so clearly she picked that up somewhere.

personally, i don't think she has access to audio recordings of songs that aren't the transmissions; with the overall theme of music re: humanity, it feels like something goddard would probably deny her, and i like the idea of hera developing her music taste for the first time post-canon. and there's no way, in my opinion, if she did have access to music, that eiffel wouldn't be really annoying about finding a way to access that for himself. he is definitely a Music Guy. i'm a big fan of the idea of hera hearing some of the songs eiffel likes to sing to himself for the first time on earth, with the Eiffel Version in her head. some of them maybe she's fond of for that reason. and some of them she's probably like, wow. that wasn't even close. ... but do i think there is a satisfying answer with internal consistency here? definitely not. you've kinda gotta roll with it. it's fun to think about anyway.