Star Trek + Social Commentary (context In The Captions)

God, but the entire “Watch House Riots” sequence in Night Watch is such an excellent lesson in not just how to de-escalate but the importance of de-escalation. The way Vimes insists upon members of the “mob” coming in and watching the surgeon care for the injured man, the insistence on two copies of Lawn’s statement about what happened, the way he made sure to humanize the officers and made good and damn sure that none of them had a weapon – that he did not have a weapon, nobody could say he had a weapon.

Because this was a delicate situation, and it was up to him – the present person of authority – to ensure that the situation did not turn into a riot. It wasn’t up to the untrained civilians, it wasn’t up to the green newbies who didn’t know what they were doing, it wasn’t up to anyone above him. It was on him, to look at the crowd and prevent a riot from breaking out.

Everywhere else, you got people reacting, people panicking, people acting in fear and making things worse and getting people killed – but at Treacle Mine Road, the doors were open and the lights were on and nobody was armed and everything was above-board and the only person who got hurt was a self-inflicted injury he made a full recovery from.

I just… I think that’s such an important sequence, and it – almost more than any of Vimes’s other Moments of Awesome – really shows just why Sam Vimes is such a good policeman, even more than just a good man.

Sorry for being absent for so long. Again. I faced with some health difficultis and they take all my time. Anyway This was an answer for our wh40k ask on vk. QUESTION TO HORUS: What did you feel when Malcador got you on your knees and started to strangle for saying your lost brother’s name? Humiliation? Did you like it or just wanted to kill the old man?

Hi there I adore your wriding on Dracula and especially how wonderful and sinister/sweet (is there a word for that? There should be a word for that.) Your Jonathan/Mina is. Is your plan for the novel/sequel to be published? Or will you be putting it up online either behind a pay wall or for free? If it's to be published formally I hope and wish you all the success with finding a publisher that you deserve because once again your writing is terrific.

if you have already answered this my apologies.

First, thank you, my ego is always happy for the confidence boost

Second, hopefully it gets finished and published! Something about Dracula Daily really hammered home how disappointed I've been with the bulk of Dracula-based media and how shoddy the pop culture understanding of it is. I want Barking Harker (and maybe some other Dracula-adjacent projects I'm poking at right now (🤐) ) to get out on the bookshelves.

Likewise for SO MANY COOL IDEAS that other folks have come up with since this book club started. Everyone should take a crack at writing and publication for their plots too! Don't just leave it in fan fiction where only a few of us will see it! We have to get our stuff out in the wider world so the characters and ideas we love get the limelight they deserve.

if biden wins the nomination it is not the end of the world. we just focus on getting him in office and getting more progressive senators and reps in office so the things we want done will still get done. we need to up the energy instead of letting it slide away. we CANNOT give up!!!! the lack of enthusiasm for hillary is how we lost last time. we may not be happy about biden but fake it til u make it u know?

You know that Ada Limón poem where she’s like “i can’t help it i love the way men love”? my dad recently confessed to me that he became a shoemaker because they buried my grandma shoeless

oh…………………………………

so the rule in my previous workplace of longest employment duration was (and probably still is)

no personal internet use while on the clock.

employee handbook said so. every so often bosses said so. that was The Rule. no personal internet use while on the clock.

except it wasn’t. it couldn’t have been the real rule.

because most people were faffing around on the internet in between bits of work. some were even doing it on the work computers, not on their personal tablets or phones.

the real rule couldn’t even have been don’t get caught using the internet for personal stuff on the clock. because zero people got in trouble over the Harry Potter Myers-Briggs quiz and related links that took up two hours of my section’s time one day. the section manager was playing as happily as anyone.

and there was not going to be any way to get anyone to explain the real rule. because the employee handbook said no personal internet use while on the clock, and that was The Rule.

anyway one of the reasons I left that job was I was sick of being autistic in that allistic hellscape.

Oh Billy, you look so small right there…

For the love of…

Look. Let’s address the obvious first off: Fandom has problems with women. We all know this. We also know that “has problems” is putting matters rather mildly.

That is a fine premise. Plenty to go on from there.

What is NOT a fine follow up is defending the idea that “fandom hates women” by pointing to the reaction to R*ylow. Because that entire ship? That is a dumpster fire in its own right even before getting to the whole dust up where, because of him making a harmless joke about sex, specifically his character in Star Wars and Rey, another fictional character in Star Wars, having sex, there’s a movement within that group to discredit and tear down John Boyega. 

Like, we’ll get to that business in a bit. But let’s address the fact that the majority of R*ylows are shipping CHARACTERS THAT ARE NOT SHOWN. 

The whole business of this ship is to use Rey to “redeem” “Ben Solo,” a character who metaphorically killed himself in TFA through the literal killing of his father. The two meetings of Rey and Kylo Ren in TFA were first him rendering her unconscious and kidnapping her, and then her attempting to kill him for his murder of Han Solo and attack of Finn - killing her mentor and attacking her friend.

But those who ship this transplant the characteristics that defined Finn onto Kylo Ren, who they refer to as Ben Solo, a name he rejects until about the last hour of the most recent movie. They make him into a tortured character who is tragically torn between the light and the dark, has not made a decision on where he stands and needs to be pulled back. EXCEPT Kylo Ren was introduced ordering the slaughter of an innocent village - a slaughter that Finn refused to participate in. 

All of this is, let’s not mince words, based off the fact that Kylo Ren is a white man and Finn is a black man. Because we saw, back before TFA released, a heaping TON of abuse hurled towards him purely for BEING a black man - I remember vividly all the anti-blackness going around when we had no more than a trailer for the sequel trilogy. 

I am not - let me repeat this NOT - shaming anyone, male, woman, enby, whatever you identify as, for wanting the narrative of “saving the monster.” As a queer person, yeah, I get that, considering that a lot of my narratives growing up that I can identify with have all kinds of queercoding throughout them, even when involving straight pairings. But the defining difference has always been that in those stories, the monster wanted to be accepted as a person. TFA gave us a monster who chose to be monstrous.

And TLJ only added into this narrative - Rey refused to join Kylo. ONCE AGAIN, he spurned her offers of coming back to the light, choosing to take the leadership of the First Order. We also saw in flashback that he chose to respond to Luke briefly flirting with the idea of killing him by BURNING THE ACADEMY TO THE GROUND. Whatever you want to say about Luke’s moment of weakness, that is definitely overreacting, that is taking out your pain on innocent others.

TRoS even brings this to a conclusion, a similar one to the redemption of Anakin Skywalker, being unable to live in the world that he saved, that no act he could do could balance the scales to allow him to be a part of that world, considering the deaths and pain at his hands in specific.

So that - THAT - is who Kylo Ren was on screen.

The R*ylow version of him, however, is some scared teenager/young adult, who has been ignored, emotionally neglected by his parents, nearly murdered by his uncle, and drowning in the darkness, in need of a rope.

The canon version of him, to sum up, is a roughly thirty-ish adult man, raised by loving parents who had a galaxy to rebuild and couldn’t devote every second to him, his uncle had a moment of weakness where he pointed a weapon at who he perceived as a threat (I can give this, or I would, had Kylo stayed and even TRIED to get answers, but the indications are that he ran and proceeded to destroy the academy), and at every turn gave in to the darkness until his mother gives her life to drag him back to the light side.

I don’t care what your fantasy is, what bothers me is the ignoring and VERY HIGHLY SELECTIVE reinterpreting of the on screen material to justify this idea of Kylo Ren being a broken and abused bird in need of kindness. Because on screen, he spurns all the kindness he gets until Leia sacrifices herself. And THAT I only accept because of the filming limitations of Carrie Fisher’s last content.

And then we return to the issue of this backlash to John Boyega’s tweets. All of this is because he made a joke about sex, implicitly his character and Rey - the character that R*ylows have designated “belongs” to Kylo - having sex. And this has led to him being harassed (and not for the first time, because TFA did seem to be building to something between Rey and Finn), and by these same people.

We led with “fandom has problems with women.” This? This is “fandom hates black people.” And “fandom REALLY hates interracial couples.”

Like, take a stroll through AO3. How often do you see interracial M/F couples in the top of the listing of pairings? About the only serious example I can come up with off the top of my head is Sleepy Hollow and Ichabod/Abbie, which ended up never being canon. Because of the white showrunners and producers getting cold feet about it and deciding to repeatedly throw white women at Ichabod while continually sidelining Abbie until her actress finally decided to leave - given that she hadn’t even been invited to be part of the special features for the season two DVDs, and the fact that she’d already gotten reduced to the sidekick on a show where she should have been the lead.

Or even on a show where a non-white man is the lead - let’s look at Teen Wolf for another fine example. The show’s lead was a Latino teenager. The favored fandom pairing involves two white guys who, the initial episodes featuring them interacting showed, didn’t particularly care for one another. This led to the fandom turning that dynamic into “they secretly want to fuck,” and, as we see with Finn and Kylo, transplanted characterization and dynamics onto the other characters to prop up their ship.

I repeat myself above. I am not judging fantasy. Hell, I’m not even against writing alternate universe variations where the good guys are bad guys and vice versa. The problem I am seeing here, the reason that I cannot abide R*ylow, the reason that I see that specifically as a toxic fandom element, is because it actively diminishes the black man involved in matters - MANY fics will either downplay or completely trash Finn’s canon character in the name of making him the villain who Kylo must defeat to claim Rey.

These people claim to love “Kylo and Rey,” but frequently they are treating her as his redemptive sexy lamp, her purpose is to be his reward for reaching the bar that is basic human decency, having no interest in her beyond her being there to reward him for finally rejecting the darkness, when she has no canonical romantic interest in Kylo and only knows Ben as an idea. Even when the canon has her trying to reach to him, she is NOT doing it because of her intense love - love is not a switch, it is not some snap decision. It comes about because of knowing a person. Lust is instant. Attraction is instant. Love? That requires time. The ideal of Ben as a person could be attractive. But Kylo is not who Rey is or would be attracted to. 

All of this is still secondary to the fact that, because of an actor making a joke about his character and another character - a character who repeatedly has an inherently far kinder dynamic with his - having sex, there is a group of this fandom who has decided that this was an attack on them, and they must respond in kind. 

Whether or not you agree with ANY of what I have said of the interactions of Kylo and Rey, PLEASE tell me that you agree that THAT behavior is unacceptable. And THAT is the group that people are referring to when they speak so derisively about R*ylows. 

Because that is the group that speaks loudest. They’re who come to mind when the topic turns to this ship. You may not be part of it, but guilt by association comes into effect, because this group is hostile to anyone who doesn’t implicitly agree with them. And when you get this hostility from what comes across - whether it’s fact or perception - as a massive wing of total strangers, strangers who decide that, because you disagree with them, you are The Enemy, and you must be destroyed… Yeah, your reflex becomes “That group is trash, do not listen to them, do not engage with them, and god, aren’t they pathetic for devoting themselves to this ridiculous thing of made up characters.”

You want to go after the issue here? Root out the bad behavior that is the cause. Not the symptom. The symptom might be hating on women. But the cause is still the racism that started all of this.

You want to talk about how fandom hates women? Fine. Go right ahead. But don’t use a topic that came about because of racism to do it.

Where do you get your modern war and foreign policy news? Trying to figure out what's happening in with Turkey and Russia from a a strategic point of view but I can only find pieces from the big news outlets bogged down with unrelated politics and iffy knowledge on the subject.

In no particular order:

Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Defense One, The Cipher Brief, Brookings, RAND, Center for New American Security, Brookings, War on the Rocks, The Strategy Bridge, The Diplomat, School of Advanced International Studies, The Soufan Center, Divergent Opinions podcast, among others. Some of those require subscriptions, some do not. You might also want to look for the experts that are employed in places like RAND or Brookings for the AOR you’re interested in.

Thanks for the question, Luke.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King