#tldr: i wasn't super interested in them before but i've warmed up to them and really wish we'd seen more of them in s3!

[sflow-er]

Master post: how my thoughts on Stedrika have evolved since S3

Discussion on the minor side characters' nuances and some fans' dislike of them, in which I mostly talked about Henry but also about Stella, and after which I reassessed my views on the "mean girls" (Aug 2024)

Discussion on the Hillerska kids' futures, in which I again talked about Henry but also touched on the others, including Stedrika (Sep 2024)

Response to an anon who thought Stedrika's happy ending in S3 felt forced, in which I expressed my disappointment in their story being cut short and agreed that the backlash after S2 probably played a part (Sep 2024)

Response to another anon, in which I talked more about the backlash and listed other factors that may have discouraged shipping Stedrika after s2 + went on a tangent based on a reblog (that described Lisa's authorial intent as a critique of surface-level progressiveness)

Final response agreeing to disagree with the anon

Answer to the secondary character ask game, in which I declared again that I'd warmed up to Stella (Nov 2024)

Response to a post about how Stedrika were handled in S3, in which I discussed Lisa's authorial intent and Stedrika's abrupt happy ending based on what she said in her interview (Jan 2025)

[romilly-jay]

A "choke-up" moment - on being moved by the story of the Brown/Stigler incident (20 Dec 1943)

So, first of all, here's a link to someone else's hard work in cutting together a recap of the encounter between an American bomber and a German fighter plane during the US bombing raid on Bremen on 20th December, 1943. TLDR - the US plane was disabled, barely still flying and when Stigler arrived to shoot it down, he saw the condition of the plane and crew (visibly injured and fleeing) and chose instead to escort the crippled plane out of German-occupied territory

TLDW - by the time Stigler encountered it, the US plane was disabled, barely still flying, and certainly no longer an active threat. Instead of claiming the kill, Stigler reacted to the condition of the plane and crew (visibly injured and fleeing) and chose instead to escort the crippled plane out of German-occupied territory.

I'd never heard of this little moment and I was sure that S would be interested in it (and perhaps already knew about it).

So I sent him the pic at the top of this piece - which was the first in a X thread by Disappointed Optimist.

It's a heart-warming story, made extra heart-warming because somehow all those members of the crew still alive when Stigler encountered them survived the journey home (I think - all of them except for the rear gunner who had been killed in an earlier part of the action). This despite all being wounded, in one case, very seriously - crew's reason for not ditching the plane in the first place was that this member of the crew couldn't survive doing that.

For super extra heart-warming bonus points, the two men eventually met and became friends. Pilot Charlie Brown, then 21, completed his bomber tour, went home, went to college and then post-war, joined the Airforce professionally for another ?15-20 years? In retirement he told the story of this German plane that had escorted them to the Channel - and after a few years of trying, he was contacted by Franz Stigler, now living in Canada. They stayed in touch until the latter's death in March 2008 (in his 90s - good work!). They worked together to tell the story of this incident out of a desire to prevent their grandchildren's generation experiencing war as they did.

Final bonus - FS had lost a brother earlier in the war, also a fighter pilot and died considering Charlie Brown as precious to him as his biological brother had been. [A letter from FS to CB refers to this.]

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3

So - it's very unsurprising to me that in one of the later interviews with Charlie Brown, he choked up when asked what this moment had meant to him - what Frank Stigler's act of compassion had meant.

Naturally - the guy saved his life. Even when he wasn't "meant" to. Showed human to human compassion. The best side of humanity.

I also choked up, trying to describe the incident to S - despite of course having no personal skin in the game. What's that about? It was pretty inconvenient in the moment because we were sitting with another friend and I was trying not to sound stupidly sentimental.

(Imagining her thinking - Seriously, how this this making YOU cry? What's your angle here?)

Inconvenient. Sort of out of nowhere. A sudden, brief emotion flood. I've done it before (for this exact kind of thing - should have been able to predict it would/might happen). My otherwise unsentimental mother also does it - and generally with things that are admirable, moving, but unrelated to either of our actual lives.

I don't precisely have an answer for why this flash flood outpouring occurs. Best current guess is that one factor is probably that we're living with pent-up RL emotion - or, at least, speaking only for myself, it makes sense to me that *I am*. Unbeknownst to my conscious brain, there's a deep reservoir of unspent emotion slopping about somewhere in my subconscious, looking for a crack in the wall of my reserve so that it can come gushing to the surface.

I was still thinking about this a day or so later when we came across a post from Sampson Boat Co, from their summer trip in newly restored 1927 schooner (?), Tally Ho. This was a goodbye trip for some of the build crew and I felt a moment of recognition/ identification during their farewell speeches montage at the end.

[Even though - they are having real, occasionally intense, occasionally suddenly-asserting-themselves emotions about a real thing they've experiencing in their real lives while I'm trying to figure out what's going to cause me to feel a real, sudden, intense emotion about a real thing that happened to someone else, ages ago.]

Despite the very real, let's not get confused about this, differences, I left a sense of identification with the experience and behaviour of Nick, near the end of this video, where it's his turn to say goodbye to the project he's been working on fulltime for the past 18 months. Before he does his interview he says - flat, as an aside - I'm trying not to cry. And, on camera, he gets through his piece. Guessing he might not have made it much further, as the camera feed swings round to point at the deck, which I guess means Leo put it down. Probably in reaction to wanting to go across and give N a hug (?).

[I'm also not quite talking here about the parasocial thing that's definitely also happening with the Tally Ho videos, where lots and lots of us, having watched the videos, feel a sense that we are involved in these relationships and know these people even though we are clearly not and clearly don't. The 101 social media brain-melt. Certainly, I've had some of that for this project but I wasn't feeling identification with the pain of parting - rather with the social awkwardness of wanting/trying to be calm but feeling the signs that a surge of emotions might be about to become uncontainable.]