#now i'm not saying i HATE the augment arc

[deusexlachina]

Cheeseaged Exocolonist Age 15: Use my transcendence of time to cheat at cards

In which I befriend a furry by financially ruining him, in order to reach my full potential and ascend as an autistic god.

Year 15 starts with your home in ruins. There's no special dialogues, and only two ways to pass the first three months: help rebuild or mourn. I choose to mourn, because this is Sol's first time experiencing death (in this lifetime), and because, having maxed out Organizing, rebuilding is highly suboptimal, whereas mourning lets me avoid stress and trim my deck of useless non-blue filth.

Because I chose the sportsball, I find it when sifting through the rubble of my room and get this rather sad dialogue.

Mourning gives you many opportunities to level your Empathy. However, because I have the In Mourning status, all my stat increases are reduced by 1, rendering every single one of these +1 boosts completely worthless.

This always happens, because Kom always dies. I'm not sure if this was an attempt to really underscore how hurt Sol is, an oversight, or a straight-up troll.

After three months of developing my Empathy in nonexistent amounts, the Heliopause arrives, and Sol's home is gradually taken over by fascists who enthusiastically spread disease, worship the military and hate transgender people. I enjoy visual novels because it's a fun escape from the problems of the real world.

Fortunately, there are exactly two nice Helio kids, Nomi and Rex. Nomi is an nonbinary AuDHD techie and Rex is a furry engineer. Rex often reminds you that he is part dog, in case you had missed the ears. His dog traits include a reduced lifespan. This is not, to be clear, a setting where people just have mutations. This was a deliberate genetic augmentation. Someone purposefully made their kid part-dog. Incidentally, Nomi likes anime, so here's a panel from one of my old favourites, Fullmetal Alchemist. They've never seen that one, so really this picture wasn't relevant. Sorry.

I improve my friendship level with Rex by giving him sticks, his favourite item because he is part dog. Rex is easier than most to befriend because he enjoys physical affection, because he is part dog. I love Exocolonist, so rather than saying anything bad about the game here, I will reiterate that my favourite character is Tangent, because she's a complex person with a well-integrated character arc in dialogue with the central themes. The writers really took their time to make a fleshed-out character with deep relationships with the others and multiple character traits.

Once I have high enough friendship with Rex, he wants to play cards with me. I wait to play cards with him until after Vertumnalia, where I beat both Tangent and Nomi at the trivia game. The card you get from doing Trivia is worth 8, making it as powerful as the card you get for defeating a giant in a fight to the death. Better yet, it's blue. Why do I keep picking blue cards? You're about to see.

After Vertumnalia, I am Popular because of my detailed knowledge of pop culture trivia. I would fit right in on Vertumna, except it is currently ruled by fascists. We'll take care of that, but first we need to arm ourselves. Popularity doubles the amount of kudos you get for three months. From all sources. Now's the time to take Rex up on his offer to play cards. Rex is good at cards, but he has one critical weakness: he's playing against someone who has played this particular game countless times. I use my past-life knowledge to win the game, betting 100 kudos that I have a better card.

Sorry, make that 200. Sucker.

I now have a vast wealth of kudos, most of which I gained from cheating at cards by consulting my past lives. With this ill-gotten fortune, I buy the ultimate weapon in the game, which is surprisingly not the Drone Rifle, an actual gun. It is a "vintage focus device," a fidget spinner. Because Sol is very autistic indeed, a fidget spinner allows her to reach her full potential by letting her stim. Accessibility tools being a luxury you have to buy - in fact, the most expensive luxury in the game - paints a very bleak picture of the colony's ability to handle disability.

That would be just a joke, but Nougat's learning disability, Tangent's drug abuse and burnout, Dys' (potentially literal) alienation and Tammy's phobia of nearly everything all go pretty much neglected unless you step in. It's interesting how much Vertumna recreates the same oppressive structures that it is an attempt to flee from.

Fortunately, we can get rid of ableism through autistic world domination, to which we are one step closer.

[lorenzobane]

What *was* Julian Bashir’s backstory? Wild speculation for fun and profit!* 

So as some people may know, for five and a half seasons they did not have Julian’s Augment characterization planned. In fact, Siddig found out about that arc when he got the script for Dr. Bashir, I Presume? And really smart, cool people have gone back and essentially backfilled canon to make it make sense. They have come up with some really good explanations and headcanons. 

But I want to take it in the other direction. So, for five+ seasons they were writing Julian and definitely referenced many things from his past/created characterization with an entirely different fictionalized backstory. So I want to try and think through what that backstory was. Or: The Lost Julian Bashir Plot. Who was he before they decided to re-write his history? 

*Disclaimer: if any of this information exists in beta canon or in interviews I haven’t read/seen it so I’m operating fully on the text of the show itself and nothing else. 

First, the facts: 

(I’ll put this under a cut because its getting long) 

He clearly likes flexing his knowledge, and he has a fairly wide range of interests: literature, music, comparative culture (re: his complaints about 24th century theater), geology (given that Julian doesn’t seem to actually know the exact plot in Our Man Bashir I have to assume he just had that gem knowledge), his oft mentioned engineering extension course 

He played tennis, and wanted to go professional but realized he wasn’t particularly good at it (according to him) and decided to go into medicine

His character was always not close to his parents- in Homefront (S4x11) O’Brien asks Odo and Sisko to say hi to his family while they’re on Earth, they ask Julian if he wants the same thing and he very awkwardly says no suggesting the writers were always intending a complicated family dynamic 

He was afraid of Doctors, and the implication is that he was in and out of hospitals a lot as a child 

His father was a diplomat at some point 

Especially in early characterization, he’s clearly extremely ambitious, competitive, and desperate to prove himself; if we take the fact that they didn’t plan the augment arc seriously, then he really did just screw up an exam question in medical school and never let it fucking go. Or with the Carrington Award, he clearly was trying to convince himself that he doesn’t want to win, but of course he does! He’s a competitive guy, he wants to win things. 

He was engaged to a ballerina from a prestigious family, Palis’ father was the top administrator at a medical complex in Paris  

DS9, as i often harp on, is his first job out of college

He’s somewhat ambivalent about authority figures (see: Kai Winn, publicly humiliating Gul Dukat, calling Sisko out when he disagrees with him, calling Worf out when he disagrees with him, his attitude towards the Healer in The Quickening, yelling at Admiral Ross- though that is after the Augment arc, his actions in Past Tense, that time he and Kira end up in a Mirror-verse and he can’t stop sassing Mirror!Odo), and about authority for himself (see: him asking everyone to call him Julian, even though technically at least some of them should call him sir) 

My theory: 

I think the original intended backstory for Julian was that he was the son of a wealthy and respected Diplomat who was relentlessly hard on him and impossible to please. The way, especially early on, he uses his academic and professional achievements as a shield is extremely indicative of someone who has always had to prove their worth through achievement. I think that also explains his love of James Bond- a character who is often the smartest person in the room, filled with expertise on things like fancy wines, and literature. It makes sense that Julian would be attracted to a character whose expertise and general knowledge makes them cool and sexy, not annoying. 

The fear of doctors suggests to me that he maybe was extremely sick as a child, in and out of hospitals a lot until he got better. At some point falling in love with tennis and becoming extremely competitive in it. I think his parents, who I’ve already guessed are extremely impossible to please, convinced him he wasn’t very good and wanted him to do something more respectable instead. The fact that he didn’t want anyone to go see or check on his parents, even though Homefront implies there may be an invasion of earth is TELLING. 

He probably fell out with them when he decided to join Starfleet. I mean before that, he was engaged to a high class woman and about to get a cushy, fancy job- he rejected all of that for the opportunity to take a job that basically no one else wanted on the edge of space. If you’re an impossible to please parent, your son walking away from a perfect cushy life probably makes you crazy. This also might explain his deep distrust for authority figures, or people who try to tell him what to do. 

I’ve often felt that it was a seriously good thing that Julian doesn’t have a “boss” per say. Yes, Sisko is his boss, but Julian still outranks him on medical issues AND the medical bay seems somewhat separate from general Station goings on. Sisko doesn’t seem to particularly care how Julian runs his med bay or what research he’s ever doing- Julian is more or less allowed to just do his own thing which is great. I think if he had a boss in a real sense, he would lose his mind because he clearly and obviously hates being told what to do.  

So yeah- that’s my theory! What do other people think? I’m sure @sigynpenniman has given this subject some thought so would love your opinion! 

[sineala]

i really hope you are still doing this because i'm about to ask director's commentary for my favorite fic of all time, Straight on till Morning!

I am still doing this! I just like having an excuse to talk about my fic! I am not having much luck actually writing fic at this moment so I feel like talking about my fic might help.

This fic was an idea that I'd been kicking around in my head for a while, because Star Trek is one of my oldest fandoms and has been pretty consistently on my mind for most of my life, and when I get into new fandoms I usually end up plotting Star Trek crossovers in my head, though other than this one I'd never actually written one down.

So I started out trying to give the Avengers bridge crew positions on a starship, like you do, and I thought it would be interesting if Tony had left Starfleet but returned due to some trauma paralleling Vietghanistan. (Phoenix had to remind me that Picard also has an artificial heart -- somehow I had forgotten that -- so then I figured I could just do that for Tony too.) It was a little tricky trying to come up with a background that would make Tony feel like Tony in a civilization with no money but eventually just decided he was going to be A Really Good Engineer. I couldn't decide whether Tony would be Steve's chief engineer or Steve's second in command and then eventually decided, well, why not both? Spock can be science officer and XO, after all.

Obviously Steve was going to be the captain of a starship, right? That's Steve. He's the captain.

At this point it was basically just a fun little recasting and I wasn't planning on actually writing this because I didn't have a plot in mind and I couldn't think of anything really compelling. There has to be a story that only works as a Star Trek fusion, otherwise why would I write one? I mean, sure, just to put the two universes together I could write a little ficlet but I felt like if I wanted a proper full-length story it had to be something that had to benefit from both universes. And then I was trying to come up with Steve's background, and something that's going to make Steve sound like Steve is him being from the past and getting frozen, which is even more plausible in a setting that routinely employs cryogenics compared to, say, the handwaving in 616. So Steve is a captain from, say, the Earth-Romulan War, a hero who sacrificed himself nobly and then gets frozen and woken up in the present and that feels very Steve.

And then I kept thinking about cryogenics in Trek. And then I thought some more about "Space Seed" and Khan and his supermen. And I thought, oh, geez, it's a good thing Steve isn't Captain America in this fusion because there is no one the Federation would hate more than a twentieth-century genetically-engineered superhuman and that's exactly who Captain America is. And then my brain went, oh now that is interesting.

That's a story that you can tell about Steve that is different and interesting and only really works in a Star Trek fusion. In pretty much every Marvel continuity, Captain America is a good guy. Captain America is respected. He's a hero. But not here. Here, what he is is an Augment. His existence is, in most Trek eras, illegal. This is basically the one universe where as soon as anyone finds out who Steve is, they're absolutely going to hate him. And if I set it up so that Steve has recently woken up from a hundred years ago, then you're not really going to expect him also having woken up from World War II, because why would you think Captain America exists in this universe when I've already shown you the backstory you think matches his? And then Tony gets out his Captain America poster and you see where this is going.

I guess a thing about me is that I really like writing stories where you know exactly where this is going but you are hopefully going to be excited to see how it gets there. (I was deeply into Babylon 5 as a teenager, which was arc TV before arc TV was cool, and it had a lot of foreshadowing.) I want people to see what's coming and say OH HO HO HO popcorn.gif to themselves, because as soon as you see that Captain America exists in this universe you know who it's going to be. My favorite endings are always the ones you can see coming from miles away.

(And then of course Tony would learn to love and accept him anyway because Getting Over Your Prejudices is a very Star Trek storyline although I feel like that specific prejudice is one the Federation doesn't really get over, last I checked.)

That was when I knew I was going to write this, and I ended up writing it for a Big Bang and getting amazing art from Phoenix and Ran, both of whom were awesome and also helped me check some of the little Trek canon details. I set this during the TOS movies pretty much solely so I could make the two of them draw me Steve and Tony in the movie-era uniforms because all the Trek crossover art I have seen is TOS TV era.

I ended up just smashing Skrulls and sex pollen together to make a plot because I figured why not take a very Marvel plot and a very Trek plot and that way it will feel like both canons? I was really going for that Trek sense of optimism about the future. I hope I got there.

And, yes, I am still working on the sequel. I know it's been years. I'm just waiting for there to maybe not be so much of a pandemic before I finish writing the story that is unfortunately about a fictional pandemic (I stole it from Marvel and, no, it is not the Legacy Virus) because I swear I have the worst timing. The plot is also a Trek plot and a Marvel plot smashed together, and it's Steve's POV this time, and I was just about to write the scene I had been dying to write the entire story for (it would be incredibly incredibly angsty, the scene where Everything Is At Its Worst, you know the sort of the thing I mean) and then 2020 happened and I was like "writing about a pandemic doesn't sound escapist anymore" so, you know... maybe someday. They are actually going to cure their pandemic in the story though.

So I don't know who all is going to still care about this fandom when I finish writing it, but I promised it for a charity auction, so it is going to get done. Someday. The 130,000 words of it are just waiting for me to write the last couple chapters. I don't know when. But it's gonna happen.

[itsclydebitches]

Honestly a lot of what you said about Yang applies to like, most of the cast. The main problem is that, honestly, the writers don't respect their characters, or at least don't respect their legacies and histories. They view their characters as tools, devices to augment to their will to keep a story going.

Yang just got this particularly bad in Volumes 6-8, only managing to course-correct somewhat in the later parts of Volume 8 before getting tossed off a cliff for cheap drama. I'm a major Yang fan as you can likely tell, and it's been nothing short of exasperating watching the writers blatantly ignore all the strong aspects of her character established in Volumes 1-5 for the sake of pushing the plot they want instead.

As one example, that Yang/Ren argument? It was apparently originally supposed to be an argument in Volume 7, between Ren and someone else (likely Nora). And I'll bet you anything they just copy-pasted most of it while just swapping Yang and Nora's names.

Of course there's more (like Yang going from strong arguments in Ironwood's favor to "alright let's go behind his back now" in the same scene just because Blake got sad), but that just speaks to me about how they don't really care about keeping their characters consistent.

Yeah, no one is really exempt from this treatment, with Yang perhaps standing out only because she's one of the main four and has one of the most vibrant personalities. As a comparatively prominent protagonist who - as the show itself says - shines brightly, she stands out in a way that the others often don't. Weiss, for example, has the same contradictory writing in regards to a lifelong struggle with abuse suddenly becoming something to joke about, but because it's one, humorous line and not, say, a full scene involving yelling and intense accusations, it doesn't sit with us quite as much, once the initial criticism has died down. Same with Blake, who despite being a part of the Robyn debacle is not the one to admit that to Ironwood, or later try to put blame on Ruby, or later still get mad at Ren - Yang gets all those emotional scenes. Ruby, meanwhile, is her own kind of mess, but a mess that, as we've seen lately, is expressed by sipping tea and quietly crying on staircases. Outside of giving angry speeches, Ruby's problems are quieter. And the others, despite being involved in the main conflict for years now, are still considered minor characters in comparison to Team RWBY, by both the writing and the fandom (Jaune's unique troubles aside). Yang, by virtue of being one of the show's stars with lots of screen time and bearing a deliberately bright, loud, in-your-face personality is in a unique position where the audience more easily remembers the problems with her writing. We can forget Nora quietly being contradictory in the background of one episode, less so Yang being loudly contradictory in the foreground of a whole arc.

But yeah, all of this is very interconnected. As your example attests: taking a scene meant for Volume 7, meant for another character, and then giving it to Yang in Volume 8 hurts her and Ren, and Jaune, and (presumably) Nora who goes from potentially having a legit disagreement with her boyfriend to... being mad he was upset about all this trauma and that her kiss didn't magically cure things? Honestly, I'm still not even clear on what Nora's deal was the last two volumes. The writers really don't care about consistency anymore, which by default means that they don't care to follow up on the new characteristics getting introduced. That's why Yang's growth was dropped so she could charge at Ruby again. Why Nora wants to be more than the bubbly girl who hits things, but immediately hits something to knock herself out. Why Blake must be devastated over everything with Adam, killing him, theoretically admitting feelings for Yang (to herself), and briefly losing her weapon, yet none of this is addressed. Why Penny is thrilled about being human despite never expressing an interest in changing - only being accepted - and then is killed off again before she can learn to live like this. Why Weiss is flip-flopping about her family every few episodes. She's terrified of her father. She's glibly arresting her father. She cares enough to try and evacuate her father. She adores her sister. She doesn't care anymore. She's back to caring the second Winter calls. She hates her brother. Wait, she loves him. Wait, she loves her mom too. When did that change?

Everyone's character is all over the place, with Ironwood himself being the most extreme turn imo, regardless of what some say about the setup always being there. The only characters who remain consistent lately are those who, frankly, the show isn't interested in developing, like Ozpin who seems to forever be the dubious, apologetic mentor who may or may not be merging with Oscar. But Oscar himself? He bounces from seeing first-hand how dangerous Salem's people are, to trusting them completely, from preaching about the importance of honesty, to keeping more secrets from the team, from being the weakest member to suddenly having a nuke in his cane... "development" has come to mean doing something new every few episodes, regardless of whether it makes any sense. I used to laugh at the fandom's "The only canon is the most recent volume" claims, just an exaggerated joke about RWBY's struggles, but now? It's honestly true. Whether we're talking about major plot holes, or the foundation of these characterizations, things not only change randomly from volume to volume, but episode to episode. Yang, sadly, has been hit by that particularly hard, but she's by no means alone.