#xb discussion

[correct-hermitcraft-quotes]

xB: Like I said I am not quotable, you shouldn't quote the things I say. You've been warned.

[whereonhermitcraftisjoel]

xB and Beef briefly discuss Joel's severed head

(Would I like to upload 13 second clips directly to tumblr? Yes. Does it never work? Also yes.)

(Anyway my yt is amethyst now, enjoy.)

[redstonedust]

i will never get over how often xb decided he NEEDS to be horizontal during meetings and group discussions. the chillest guy ever.

[blackbat09]

hey how come in all the "season 3's ocean monument megabase makes xB guardian-coded" stuff i've seen almost nobody mention that it was apparently

checks notes

a temple to a two-headed guardian god that demanded sacrifice for better drop rates which xB encouraged fellow hermits to partake of when they came out to visit. why has that not been discussed more.

[hermitcraftheadcanons]

Skizzekai Au Masterpost

Teaser Intro Post

Intro, Rules, and Premise

Clarification on Skizz and Joel

Character and Group Summary

Second Masterpost with later headcanons because we hit the link limit

A compilation of all asks from the Skizzekai Community AU. Asks below the cut.

AU END DATE: JUNE 1ST

More discussion available on the discord!

Canon Asks:

Tango fire magic

Undead ruler Cleo and half-ghost Joe

Formerly-evil demon Impulse

Drowned Gem

Joe used to be human

Death's apprentice Zedaph

Bard Wels

Ice kingdom Iskall

Fae Queen Stress and bodyguard Iskall

Travelling merchants Cub, Scar, and False

Helpful miner TFC

Vampire (?) Mumbo

Cub and Scar are fae

Not-short plant magic Bdubs

Moth fae Pearl

Skizz got his Name taken

Pearl as a former corrupt queen

Skizz might not stay human

Pre-isekai Skizz characterization

Ogre Joel

Former king of Undead Republic, Ren

Formerly human Gem puts a bounty out on Skizz

Pirate False

Grian is weird

Skizz is a magic sponge

Jungle guardian Bdubs

Scar took Skizz's name, Familiar Jellie

7 foot tall Etho, same species as Bdubs

Skizz's magic necklace

Selkie pirate Wels

Construct Etho

Elaboration on Etho and Bdubs

Xisuma and bones

Joel's multiple transformations

Skizz connecting to the world

Xisuma was formerly a puddle of nothing

God of the night Mumbo

Skizz grows wings

Skizz has dragonfly wings

Joe Hills from Nashville, Tennessee

Joel's kingdom

Tango magic cards

NHO jungle guardians

Skizz necklace mechanics

Kaiju size Doc

Cleo's kingdom has underground tunnels

Unicorn Keralis

Impulse's change of sides

Skizz's sleeveless suit

xB is not the lake princess

Grian is like a bug

Nobody knows how Skizz is meant to save the world

Cleo's kingdom has sculk

Skizz keeps a journal

False is hunting Skizz because of Gem's bounty

Changeling-deal Hypno with an artifact to stay human

More Unicorn Keralis details

we have enough humans already!

Skizz embraces his change

Magic system details

Slime guy Jevin

Doc constantly changes

Etho and Bdubs auras

Xisuma shares his bones

Evil in the Ice Kingdom, and Iskall as an energy source

Grian is REALLY weird

The great evil is draining magic

How magic Feels

Details on Hypno's anti-magic artifact

Skizz is fine with being summoned

Skizz wing details

Scar keeps letting Skizz go

Gem backstory and motivations

More Gem details

Gem used to have wings

Skizz's life before summoning

Jevin is made out of magic

Hypno backstory

War of the Watchers book came with Skizz

Alternates:

Goddess Pearl

Juppet

Powerless fae Jellie

Tango was Skizz's best friend in the other world

Hermits have versions in both worlds

Zookeeper Scar

Skizz as an experiment

Joe is the only remaining hero of many

Skizz's summoner is a bone guy

A clearer prophecy

Wels stole False's reflection

xB actually IS the lake princess (joke)

Explosive Etho

Merchant Mumbo

Pearl and Skizz pen pals

[leopardmask-ao3]

Day 8 - xBCrafted

Drabble for @hermitadaymay.

“A’ight, people. So there's been a bit of a discussion lately on which hermit is the oldest. Etho, maybe? Stress? 

No. It's me. Good ol’ xB- I mean, what’d you think? The guardian bits are for show? They keep me alive. I've been around since the Before Times. I remember when there were six sentient races, instead of, like... three and a half. I had... I protected one of them. For as long as I could...

...Sorry. I just... It would never have been enough...

...I just gotta make sure... I take extra good care of my hermits now. Yeah.”

[trillscienceofficer]

I saw you said in the tags that you don't agree with Seven being about 13 etc, and I could not agree more because it irks me so much when people say how Seven was mentally 6 when they freed her from the Borg, or something to that effect. She was abused by the Borg to the point of not having her own thoughts but she still aged. Maybe she struggled socially after she was freed from that but it didn't take away the years she spent in the collective. It's basically infantilizing and paired with Seven being perceived as autistic by some, or just the fact that she went though the trauma of being Borg, is ableism to me. End of rant.

I apologize for not replying sooner to this ask but I wanted to grab a couple of links before replying because yes, I think you're totally right that saying anything to that effect (that Seven is actually a child, or that 'she doesn't actually know what's best for her') is infantilization of a character who is canonically a physically disabled adult, as well as having a very strong subtext for neurodivergence, and that it plays into ableist stereotypes that contribute to making the lives of real disabled people tangibly worse.

First, I want to make clear that no matter how muddled the metaphors get when it comes to Seven (and oh boy do they, between the cyborg technobabble and the completely absurd way Seven was "dressed" and made up on Voyager, talking about her is always a struggle), she is disabled. She makes use of many prosthetics and she has to regenerate (ie she has to make use of an external device) regularly or there are unpredictable consequences to her health. I realize this is maybe not super clear from the text, which sometimes conveniently forgets about Seven's limitations re: regeneration (see this post) and turns her prosthetics into a sort of superpower; I'm not saying it's an accurate depiction of disability by any means, but it's not something that can be completely ignored when discussing Seven either. In all honesty I've downplayed this aspect of Seven's character in the past and I really regret it because after it was pointed out to me, it's indeed pretty obvious. The trauma of Borg assimilation was disabling, and it's embodied in Seven even more than it is in other xBs, since it happened to her so young. She can never 'get rid' of it and she doesn't exactly want to, either*, even with all her very understandable ambivalence about it ("I am human, but I am also Borg").

(*I think Picard S2 makes this argument more complicated but recent live-action shows have been truly fucking awful at dealing with disability and metaphors thereof so I won't try to make sense of it. What matters is that Seven ultimately couldn't be 'magically cured' there either.)

ETA: I forgot to add, Seven is absolutely an adult. To me there's no question about it; she's played by an adult and none of her storylines, none of her struggles about figuring out how to be an individual in a group, about how to live with the terrible guilt and responsibility about her actions as Borg drone make sense if she isn't an adult. The whole character of Seven of Nine falls apart if she isn't an adult who is struggling with the terrible consequences of trauma.

Second, infantilization is a very real manifestation of ableism. This article defines infantilization as "a nondisabled person having more power than a disabled person and using that power against them to invalidate their thoughts, opinions or experiences. This can show up in numerous ways, such as indirectly speaking to a disabled person or assuming that the individual can't advocate or speak for themselves." In short, treating a disabled person like a child who needs to be directed at all times and who is assumed to not fully understand the ramifications of any independent decisions. It's not a matter of just language, either: the same article points out that 1.3 million disabled adults in the US were under conservatorship in 2018, and that forced sterilization of disabled adults is still legal in at least 31 US states plus Washington D.C. So let me make this super clear: disabled adults having their autonomy revoked, especially their bodily autonomy, is absolutely an issue in our current world. And it all stems from this ableist conceptualization of disabled adults as being like children, incapable of making the right decisions by themselves and for themselves, especially about their own bodies.

Now it's maybe clearer how this relates to Seven's whole deal, both in the show and in fandom. On the show, so many things about her prosthetics and about her looks were decided by the Doctor without consulting her at all, and how ironic it is that the one taking the decisions is a hologram coded with the biases of so many medical professionals, and it's one of those cases when no one, no one challenges the EMH! Sure, the Doctor pretty much saved her by making the reclamation process very smooth, but of course the idea that he can 'shape her' and ultimately 'cure her' of her disabilities (subtextual neurodivergence included) keeps popping up in the show pretty frequently, and she almost never gets a word in edgewise. Seven and the Doctor end up striking up a friendship, and things get a little less eyebrow-raising, but still it's pretty horrifying how the sexism of the production translates into ableism diegetically, though to be fair to Voyager it's definitely not the only Trek show where this happens. It's just that being about Seven, it's a very sustained theme on Voyager, and one I really wish wasn't there.

Off the show, in fandom, I think it would behoove us to at least try to do better than Voyager. Ultimately Seven of Nine is a fictional character that has no real feelings to hurt etc, but again what message does it send to real people when (part of) the fandom insists that Seven is 'mentally a child' or 'doesn't know what's best for her' and can't take her own decisions about her own future, even her own name? Again I'm not saying this to be a scold, and I can recognize that I haven't always been fair in my approach of Seven's disability. There's a lot of work I still need to do, and language is just a very tiny start. But it is a start nonetheless; I'd like it if people could see it as well.

[hmshermitcraft]

another idea for that one with the countries and the political polymarriage: xb, grian, and doc's countries work together to secure some of stress and false's icebergs in place so they can be built into! stress's country already knew how to build into icebergs, but usually they just had to deal with the iceberg drifting around - but doc's got good metals, xb's people are amphibious, and grian's people are experienced in lashing together moving floating objects

xb, false, stress, grian and doc spending the night in the first carved-out, wood-and-furs-inlaid set of rooms is totally political. absolutely. totally not an excuse to spend the night together (sarcasm)

related ask!

Stress is over the moon about it, and they can tell False is pleased as well (they've learned to spot those small smiles she gives them.) The possibilities this opens up are incredible!

Whilst they do spend some time discussing how the techniques and technology they've used here could help other kingdoms, most of the night is spent simply doing nothing. It never feels like they have enough time to spend together, so they can steal this moment away. Stress is already talking about using it as a reason to invite other rulers over.

Of course, excuses to invite your lovers over breeds innovation.

[cactusringed]

Bdubs is also a fat bear (which is repetitious because all bears are fat in case anyone needed reminding) Obviously. Honestly? Etho should also be a bear. And xB. And beef. And grian. And scar. And mumbo. And REN. But no one is ready for this discussion

[dreamingthroughwords]

feeling mushy but also just wanted to say a thank to anyone who has reached out to me, commented or yapped in the tags or quietly liked or even lurking etc etc etc etc like i appreciate it so much. i’m re learning how to navigate fandom again after a while after a rough year and figuring out the best way that works for me and it just makes me so warm seeing so much love and discussion and support it makes me feel all warm 🥹 still a little shy and finding my footing again but idk just wanted to say you’re all very cool and sweet to my new tgcf moots and also i will never forget all my old lovely xb friends that are still here too, i’m looking forward to making new friends here and chatting with my old friends again - but yeah you’re all so cool i appreciate you all 🥹💖

[m-pennanti]

I have not been in this active fandom long but I have noticed a weird pattern (or flavor I guess?) in the discourse

A few imaginary examples:

- Everyone was hoping Joel got in s10 and then Joel went “actually I don’t *want* to join hermitcraft” and suddenly people started attacking everyone who previously said they hoped Joel was in s10 because they were “pressuring him”

- Pearl hid a few spider heads in xB’s base for him to find randomly and everyone hounded on her for griefing but when Etho burned down Gem’s house and didn’t help rebuild it it was a-ok

- Something big happened to Cleo and they made a video explaining she was taking a break for a while and people constantly bothered her about coming back sooner to the point they had to leave social media only two weeks into the break

- False made an amazing mini game with only one real flaw and everyone called it “ok at best and lazily made and could’ve done with a few more tweaks” and then Joe made a very flawed low-effort mini game off the top of his head and people started calling it “the best game on the server that so much effort was put into”

- Xizuma retired from Hermitcraft and the Hermits agreed that Cub would now host the server and some people were very upset that they didn’t choose Iskall and others bullied Xizuma about it despite it being a decision made by everybody

- Wels became active again on his own accord and had a lot of interactions with other Hermits and took a slightly different approach to his builds and people started saying they “hoped Wels would stop playing Hermitcraft and leave”

Again, these are not actual things that happened

But you can see it can’t you, you can see these things happening

These aren’t targeted at any ccs I kinda just threw names in randomly, maybe I am a bit biased but the only thing I did intentionally was people getting mad at the female ccs over the male ccs in the second example because I’ve noticed a raging amount of sexism in the mcyt community which obviously sucks

Just thought it was weird how this community has a weird set of themes that bother them and starts conflict while other things get shut down immediately like homophobia and misgendering, at least as far as I’ve seen

I wonder if it’s like that for other fandoms too? This is the only big fandom I’ve taken a deep dive into in my life so I wouldn’t know if certain fandoms having reoccurring discourse themes is a common occurrence. If they do it either isn’t very visible on the surface or it just flew right over my head (which happens a lot with me it seems)

Ofc as well these are all entirely my opinions and observations and this is my first time discussing them so I won’t have considered other sides and perspectives, especially if I’ve missed something and just never came across it due to how fresh into the fandom I am

Thoughts? I realize this type of post is very dangerous to share because it feels like the type people would get upset about. If I’m entirely and completely wrong I’d be genuinely interested in hearing about why

[hermitcraftguesstheauthorevent]

By DaisyBugs.

Summary:

Vaguely poetic discussion of xB as a perfectly normal guy :)

[startreklasirena]

What is Star Trek: La Sirena?

Most fans and more-than-casual viewers of Star Trek: Picard would probably agree that the three seasons of the show form something of an anthology. It was never officially called that, and some of the characters appear in (almost) every episode. Even some events and backstories do get referenced across season boundaries. But at the end of the day, each season is very self-contained, and many themes, storylines, and characters are limited in scope to one or two of them at the most.

Even the characterization of recurring characters can differ between seasons, from more superficial details (Agnes Jurati going by "Agnes" in S1 and "Jurati" in S2) to some deeper shifts (Elnor seeming more concerned with honour than candour in his brief season 2 cameos).

As such, some of us fans were thinking it would be helpful to have a shorthand with which to differentiate between seasons. Say you're interested in reading Saffi stories that centre the characters, themes, and characterization from season 1. It might be difficult to filter for that, since the "Star Trek: Picard" fandom tag on AO3 will contain fic that is set throughout all three seasons, and it won't always be clear where in the anthology it fits.

Or you might be writing stories about season 1 Agnes that you know won't sit right with people who expect season 2 Jurati when they filter for "Agnes Jurati", and you want to make it clear which version of the character you're writing about without using convoluted tags.

Enter Star Trek: La Sirena (suggested abbreviation: LAS). In essence, this is a shorthand to describe the first part of the Star Trek: Picard anthology. ST: LAS stories, art, gifs, meta, memes, etc centre around the characters, events, relationships, and themes from PIC season 1. They can be prequels, set during season 1, or take the end of season 1 as a jumping-off point to spin new stories from there (think: the sort of art/meta/fic/... you would have made before season 2 came out or if the show had been cancelled after season 1).

A Few Examples (or: is it Star Trek: La Sirena?)

A fic about the crew of La Sirena going on wild adventures after the end of season 1? That is basically what this tag was invented for! A gifset of Elnor and Soji's outfits throughout season 1? Absolutely! The story of how Seven came to join the Fenris Rangers, exploring her relationship to the work and what it means for her characterization post-Voyager? Yes please! Meta about how Hugh would have survived the crash of the Borg Cube and what the protected status of Coppelius and the defeat of Oh's armada mean for his work with the xBs? We'd be lucky to have it! A fic about how Raffi and Rios met that involves six OC's and a bunch of semi-sentient holograms? Sure! A Victorian AU, where Jean-Luc Picard, Duke of La Barre, has to navigate the uncertainties of (near) fatherhood when he suddenly finds himself with a young ward, Dahj Asha, after the mysterious disappearance of her parents overseas? Hell yes! (Also: Zhaban is his butler and Laris his housekeeper. Just saying.)

On the other hand: A discussion of how season 2's evil!La Sirena compares to her prime-universe counterpart? Doesn't really fit. A fic about Agnes and Shaw meeting at the academy and becoming fast friends? Also not really, since Shaw is very firmly a season 3 addition. Meta about Seven's changing hairstyles from VOY to season 1 to seasons 2 & 3? That is more general PIC territory, rather than LAS specifically. A gifset comparing the Troi-Rikers from TNG with their appearance in Season 3? Probably not. Not even if it also includes season 1.

All of these things are wonderful and we're lucky to have them in the Picard fandom! But they don't necessarily fit the brief of "Star Trek: Picard, if it had been cancelled after season 1."

Of course, none of this is an exact science! Say you wrote a post-canon story back in 2020, before we got any details about season 2. And say, by sheer coincidence, it includes Agnes breaking up with Rios and going off on a diplomatic mission with Soji, while Rios and/or Raffi join Starfleet. Does that fall under the LAS umbrella or not? At that point (and many, many similar ones), I'd say it's up to your own best judgement.

Where do I find/post Star Trek: La Sirena Stuff?

A bunch of people have started tagging their tumblr posts with "star trek la sirena" (or "star trek: la sirena". I'm afraid the variability is a cornerstone of the Trek-tumblr tagging experience 😅). It's not much yet, and a lot of things are reblogs, so they won't show up in the regular tag search. But hopefully, we can get this tag into more wide-spread use to make it easier for season 1 enthusiasts to find stuff they're interested in. (If you tag this blog in the replies to a post you think fits the brief, I will reblog it!)

Some writers have also added "Star Trek: La Sirena" to the fandom tags of their relevant fics on AO3. It's usually in addition to "Star Trek: Picard", since it falls into both categories, so it's more an additional filtering option/sub-fandom.

I'm not entirely certain this tagging is going to be permitted by the AO3 tag wranglers. I have written to AO3 support about this and am currently still waiting to hear back. I think there are precedents for similar sub-fandom distinctions, but I'm not sure what the logistical considerations might be behind canonizing a new fandom tag. If AO3 comes back asking people to re-tag their fic or deciding they won't be able to canonize the "Star Trek: La Sirena" fandom tag, we'll decide on a different tagging convention. I'll post here if and when I get a reply to my email.

Speaking of:

A Quick Note on the Role of this Blog

I'm not the fandom police. At the end of the day, this is an entirely made-up category, and how you interpret its boundaries is up to you. My goal here is not to exclude anyone or tell people they're doing fandom wrong, it's to make it easier for fans of one specific part of a very heterogeneous show to find art and stories and discussions they're interested in.

I want to really emphasise this: I'm not the high priestess of this fandom tag. I'm not the authority on what does and doesn't count. If you have a story or post that you think might be well-suited to be tagged as "Star Trek: La Sirena", but you're unsure, I'm happy to chat about it and give you my take, and/or to reblog it here and hopefully open the floor to others' opinions. If you think something I posted or reblogged doesn't really fit, please let me know, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts!

Mostly, I just want this blog to get the ball rolling for people in this corner of the Picard fandom to find each other and have an easier time sharing their work and their passion with each other.

So, that's what I'm doing here. If you have any ideas for events we might get up to as a community (I still dream of one day having a fanfic book club :D), posts you'd like me to reblog, meta you'd like to share, or anything else that might bring your fellow fans joy, I'm always eager to hear about it!

Thank you for coming along on this ride on our little speed freighter! I hope we'll all find community and a lot of fun with Star Trek: La Sirena!

[regionalpancake]

Character ask game!

For Seven:

What’s the lie your character says most often? What’s something that makes them laugh every single time? Be specific!

For Soji: What phrases, pronunciations, or mannerisms did they pick up from someone / somewhere else?

If invited to a TED Talk, what topic would they present on? What would the title of their presentation be?

For Seven:   What’s the lie your character says most often?

Any shade of “I’m ok / I’ll be fine / I don’t need help / I can do it by myself”, which makes sense not only in light of her past in the Collective, but also because of the people on Voyager who model that behaviour for her (cough Janeway cough)

What’s something that makes them laugh every single time? Be specific!

Had an amazing chat with @curator-on-ao3 and @procrastinatorproject about this one, and I reckon there must be some pretty dark xB humour. Something about humour making a shared trauma lighter, easier to process or less taboo to openly discuss. I (hopefully) looked at that in my Hugh fic Crow’s Feet :

“Hugh laughed.  // He laughed at the smell of barbecue from a dead man. He laughed at the bed he couldn’t sleep in it. He laughed at himself holding his face together in the shower and the fact that an arm that he didn’t even have anymore still hurt every day. // He laughed at the absurdity of the pain. // At the banality of the suffering. // And the laughing didn’t stop any of it hurting, but it did suddenly hurt less.”

One of the bits of (problematic sci-fi fav) Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein that always stuck with me, was when the biologically-human-but-raised-by-aliens character laughs for the first time.

“I’ve found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much … because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting”

The whole section is here, and feels very 'Seven' to me. Seven and the other xB’s have been through so much, a lot of which would be just unspeakable levels of suffering to the average Federation citizen. Having a community of people to share and process that traumatic history with, to know that you’re not alone, must help. 

Please imagine an post-reclimation xB with a Starfleet doctor in Lower Decks animation style:

Doctor: Have you taken in any of the sights since you arrived? I recommend the Klingon opera - those costumes? I couldn’t tear my eyes away! xBs: Bet I could. Doctor: … Doctor: … Doctor: Well I Think We’re All Done Here For Today

For Soji: What phrases, pronunciations, or mannerisms did they pick up from someone / somewhere else?

Of course there’s the Data-head-tilt™️ but the more interesting and horrifying answer to think about for this one is MADDOX (*muffled screaming*). What it must be like for Soji knowing that her personality was handmade? Did Maddox programme everything or was there algorithms involved that he just sort of tweaked as he went? Poor Soji. I love this narratively, and I loathe that they threw it all out the window in Season 2.

If invited to a TED Talk, what topic would they present on? What would the title of their presentation be?

I think she might be invited to do a talk with the hope that she’d speak on Synth Experience, or the implications of the lifting of the Synth ban. But really Agnes would be a better candidate for that, and Soji’s only very new to her understanding of Synths anyway. I think instead she’d speak on her specialism/ her research from the Borg Reclamation Project:

“Reclaimed Identity - An Exploration of Emerging Romulan Folkways in the BRP” And I would have a front row seat 🤓😎

✨Send me a Picard character and I'll answer some of these WEIRDLY SPECIFIC BUT HELPFUL CHARACTER BUILDING QUESTIONS ✨

[biblioflyer]

Evolving beyond your core conceits: risks and rewards.

Allowing a setting to grow while remaining recognizable and accessible to the audience is difficult. Too much of the wrong kind of changes can make a setting unusable for the themes and storytelling devices it started off with. It is, however, possible to grow without cheating the heroes of earned victories and without wholly divesting from core themes.

This is part 4 in a series of discussions about the pessimism of the X-Men setting, its origins, its consequences, and whether that’s even a fair assessment.

Part 1 laid out some of the core conceits of the setting.

Part 2 discusses theories of historical change.

Part 3 is about the messiness of allegories.

It's difficult to evolve beyond a setting’s original conceit without having to become something radically different, even unrecognizable.

I’m one of the people who started to lose interest when Stargate SG-1 moved beyond Earth as scrappy underdogs and essentially became a superpower, while still somehow being able to hide the entire program. Also it turns out that SG-1, regardless of the roster, always seemed to be exactly the right people in exactly the right place.

Committing to the bit has risks too.

The X-Files solved and then had to unsolve its core mystery multiple times, becoming ever more convoluted in an effort to ensure its gnostic pursuit of ever deeper mysteries did indeed have even more arcane conspiracies hiding behind the busted ones.

Core characters evolved in Supernatural, but after a few repetitions of the Winchester brothers gaining and then losing access to resources and networks of allies, it almost became a bit of a joke that everything always led back to the two living out of motels. Yet while the situation of the Winchesters wasn’t allowed to change much, the threat of each season had to be ever more cosmic. This ultimately resulted in a direct and extremely meta confrontation with the very force that ensured their lives always defaulted back to misery and watching any progress they made fall through their fingers.

The conceit of Star Trek’s Federation is that our contemporary flaws can be resolved, but to model solving its allegories for contemporary societal issues it has to periodically discover new -isms that have emerged within it that the Federation has rationalized away. 

Augment proscriptions are rationalized as protecting the egalitarian nature of the Federation and preventing the rise of superior beings with superior ambition, fully sentient artificial intelligence had a rocky road to recognition, people struggle with fully recognizing XBs as fellow victims of the Borg Collective rather than conflating them with the destruction and horror the Borg have perpetuated. 

There have been enough repetitions of the storyline that there is something rotten in the Federation that needs to be confronted and opposed that many (not I) feel like the Federation has undergone a very cynical deconstruction in the streaming era (although it would probably be more correct to say it started with DS9.) Which is part of why the “Magneto was right” discourse began to alarm me, because I associate it with the increased sense in the Trek fandom that the Federation is both rotten at its core and too naive to survive without the rot.

Kudos to Star Trek Discovery though for reliably shifting away from the “edgier” darker tone it began with and embracing the idealism of the TNG era. I realize there are those who look at a dark and fearful world full of war and revanchism and find it childish for fiction to be aggressively sunny, but I enjoy having a few things to watch here and there that stimulate my mind but don’t leave me drained and morose when the credits roll. I don’t mind good pessimism, but I never felt like Discovery was doing more than gesturing at more mature, emotionally and ethically complex themes in its early seasons. It's still not doing more than gesturing, but in my opinion it's no longer pretending to be more than thoughtful camp.

The Expanse novel-verse is one of the rare examples I can think of a setting that resolved one of its core conflicts, but still managed to be an effective vehicle for storytelling about many of the same themes. By the end of the original six book series, Earth and Mars are on the path to reconciliation and the Belters have won statehood and the means to prosperity. 

The sequel trilogy introduces a new nemesis that partly resets the setting, but critically the reset doesn’t put the Belters back under the boot of the Inners or restart the original cycle of violence. In many ways, Earth and Mars get a dose of what it’s like on the receiving end of imperialism.

In this way, the writers could still speak about war, cycles of violence, paranoia, various forms of oppression, and the difficult moral dilemmas of gray zone conflict but without victims becoming oppressors or having all of their gains rolled back.

Did you forget this was an article about X-Men, bub?

Which brings us back to X-Men.

Because X-Men is a setting dedicated to storytelling about oppression, a critical thing to remember is that things are not going to get better in any lasting way. 

Not because the message you are supposed to take away is that nothing can ever be better and trying to disrupt violence and humanize oppressed people is self defeating, but because showcasing oppression and the fight against it without it ever actually being resolved is its raison d’etre. 

Unlike the Expanse novels, the X-Men is not a closed storyline with a limited number of authors tightly controlling it. While specific iterations of X-Men could, in theory, make progress against the core human vs mutant conflict without rolling it back in a devastating way, there is an expectation that X-Men more broadly is a bit like Coke or Pepsi: consistency and recognition across all “products” is a baked in assumption. X-Men without the mutant vs human conflict could drift away from the otherwise very low barrier to entry for the audience.

The last installment will discuss how X-Men '97 does leave the door open to some things getting better even though the general state of affairs seems poised to get pretty bad.

[thefireintheshadow]

“Well, you’re locked in now,” xB said, sending a thrill up Gem’s spine.

She hadn’t spent a lot of time with him, but she’d been hoping to change that. He was a shyer hermit, and that made it intimidating to break the ice because she was afraid of making him uncomfortable with how outgoing she was. It was easier interacting with the more extroverted hermits because they could just bounce around and be bubbly together and she knew they were all having fun.

So thus far, she’d simply admired xB from the sidelines. She loved the sound of his voice, how calm and collected he was. She loved his little chuckle, the way his eyes twinkled, like he had a secret. He was quietly mischievous and that excited her.

And now he was joking about locking her in his house. Excited was an understatement.

“I guess I am,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as breathy as she felt as her stomach fluttered.

“You can’t leave until you answer three questions,” he said, grinning, and oh his smile was so addictive.

“Okay,” she agreed, nodding emphatically. She looked around for somewhere to sit, but he hadn’t done much with the interior yet, other than the beautiful flooring. “Um, no chairs.”

“Yeah I just have my bed,” he said with one of those chuckles that she felt deep in her belly. He plonked himself down on one side, and Gem made the snap decision to be confident, striding over and perching next to his pillow.

Their knees were less than an inch apart and she forced herself not to look, not to wonder what it would feel like to brush up against him.

“Okay, first question, who inspires you the most on Hermitcraft?” he asked, and he didn’t sound awkward or shy, and maybe she’d misjudged him. Maybe he just didn’t easily reach out to new people and she’d just needed to take the initiative all along.

“Bdubs,” she said easily, smiling. “How about you?”

“Oh definitely Etho,” xB replied, and Gem couldn’t help the light blush on her cheeks at the mention of him. Yeah, Etho inspired her, too, just in ways that couldn’t be discussed in polite conversation.

“Question number two,” he said, and there was that twinkle, that little mischievousness that drove her crazy. “How does it feel to be locked in my bedroom right now?”

[finish on ao3]