character being all “you expect me to do X?” Gilligan Cut to character doing X
the squad gets captured and interrogated separately, and they’re all telling equally terrible, completely contradictory lies
people completely missing the completely unsubtle, very visible dangerous thing in the room with them
alternatively, people absolutely seeing the completely unsubtle, very visible dangerous thing in the room with them and just not giving a shit
bonus points if it’s a beleaguered minimum wage employee who just goes about their business like “yep same shit as always”
someone pretending they don’t know another character is eavesdropping, only to casually reveal at the end of the scene that they know (*leaving* “tell tom that he can come out now” *tom drops from the ceiling in spy gear, irritated*)
choosing to deal with the villain by just leaving them alone in a room with another character
the “hands go down” trope
example: “any questions?” *everyone’s hands go up* “…that AREN’T sarcastic?” *everyone’s hands go down*
it’s interesting learning which homophobic ideas are confusing and unfamiliar to the next generation. for example, every once in a while i’ll see a post going around expressing tittering surprise at someone’s claim that gay men have hundreds of sexual partners in their lifetimes. while these posts often have a snappy comeback attached, they send a shiver down my spine because i remember when those claims were common, when you’d see them on the news or read them in your study bible. and they were deployed with a specific purpose — to convince you not just that gay men were disgusting and pathological, but that they deserved to die from AIDS. i saw another post laughing at the outlandish idea that gay men eroticize and worship death, but that too was a standard line, part and parcel of this propaganda with the goal of dehumanizing gay men as they died by the thousands with little intervention from mainstream society.
which is not to say that not knowing this is your fault, or that i don’t understand. i’ll never forget sitting in a classroom with my high school gsa, all five of us, watching a documentary on depictions of gay and bi people in media (off the straight and narrow [pdf transcript] — a worthwhile watch if your school library has it) when the narrator mentioned “the stereotype of the gay psycho killer.” we burst into giggles — how ridiculous! — then turned to our gay faculty advisors and saw their pale, pained faces as they told us “no, really. that was real” and we realized that what we’d been laughing at was the stuff of their lives.
it’s moving and inspiring to see a new generation of kids growing up without encountering these ideas. it’s a good thing. but at the same time, we have to pass on the knowledge of this pain, so we’re not caught unawares when those who hate us come back with the oldest tricks in the book.
I had two weird dreams last night, which I suppose were technically all part of the same dream, wherein I was visited by dead people. I mean they weren’t dead Dead in the dream, but my brain was self aware enough to be like, “you know these people don’t belong here in your house…they’re dead…also they’re Terry Pratchett and Robin Williams, this is a dream”.
I first knew something was off kilter because when I walked into my kitchen, Terry Pratchett was sitting there drinking a mug of tea. The dragon under the stove was also a give away, but famous authors, even dead ones, are not often found in my kitchen (contrary to what you’ve heard about my baking). He was reading something, and to my absolute horror I realized it was one of my manuscripts. I started to stutter and sat down in front of him, and because I am British offered him a slice of cake to go with his tea, so I might slide my work out from under his fingers. Not to be distracted by the prospect of a Victoria Sponge however, Terry looked up at me and said
“It’s a shame really, I was rather enjoying it until the words just stopped…why did you stop? Did you lose your words too?”
At which point I rocketed upright in bed and tried to rationalize why Terry Pratchett would be in my dream and giving me a mild telling off for not writing anything…and then because it was Terry and I miss him, had a bit of a cry and went back to sleep.
Which was when I “woke up” in my bed because I was being prodded in the side. Assuming it was my husband trying to wake me I rolled over and told him to go away, at which point the voice of Robin Williams bounced around the room at full volume as he yelled, “Rise and shine funny-girl, it’s time to climb the walls!”
Ah yes, thought I, I am still asleep and dreaming…or I am in a coma and someone is playing Robin Williams to try and wake me up…which was the point when I heard Terry Pratchett ask, “Is she up yet?”
“No.”
“Tip her out the bed.”
So because Terry Pratchett told him to, Robin Williams tipped me out of my dream bed, and laughed at me when I swore.
“Ach aye, there’s your accent lassie, none of that Amerrrrrican inflection, eh? Just had to get you good and mad.” said Mr Williams, in his own Scottish imitation, hauling me upright and carrying me over his shoulder out the door while I squawked and flailed at the indignity of it all.
The next few images where a blur of motion and sound, but after that we were in a castle which I recognized to be one of my own ideas. My own characters stood stock still like cutout cardboard mannequins, frozen in time, the last action I had written them into.
Terry was walking between them, pausing every now and then to peer at them through his spectacles like they were an exhibit in a wax museum and giving a little nod every so often, like he had just seen the eyelashes in the wax and was mildly impressed.
Robin at this point, had his arm around my shoulders and was giving me the grand tour of my own work, yelling out jokes about my characters and making me laugh at them.
“And here we have underdeveloped character number three! Half baked and still gooey at the center, it’s salmonella for everybody but at least it tastes good!”
When I looked round again, Terry was sitting at the foot of the dais to the empty throne, sheets of paper between his hands again as he read from the script.
“It says here “exeunt pursued by man in bear suit”…” he said.
“I thought it was funny…” I replied sheepishly…looking at the world which had sparkled mere moments before and watching the color seep away until it was turning grey and cold at the edges… “I thought…well it doesn’t matter. I scrapped it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you lose your words?”
“No…”
“Then why aren’t you writing?”
“I don’t…”—by now the world was starting to fall apart and crumble to dust, falling upwards into the pitch black sky as though it was being pulled away by a black hole.
Robin came in front of me then, placing both giant hands on my shoulders and leaning in until we were butting heads.
“I know it’s hard,” he said, smiling right into my soul, “I know it’s hard when all you want to do it stop. And sometimes you have to, sometimes you can’t chase the demons out. But what you can do, and no one ever tells you this, funny-girl, what you can do…is make ‘em laugh. You can’t burn ‘em out, you can’t chase ‘em out, and you can’t leave without them because it’s your head, but you can make ‘em laugh. You can shake hands with the devil and make him laugh. The world is your clam chowder, and if you’re really lucky, you’ll still find the pearl. Does that make sense? No? Good, nothing makes sense, nothing in this whole existence we like to pretend is reality makes sense, nothing but doing your best and trying to make yourself happy, and if you can’t do that do it for others. You can, you know you can…otherwise your mother wouldn’t be so angry when you tell jokes and there wouldn’t be a man over there dressed in a bear suit waiting to follow us out.”
Laughing and crying, I looked over to where he had pointed, and there was indeed a man in a bear suit. He waved, and I waved back.
By now the world had dissolved, the walls melting away until only the cut out people remained, illuminated by starlight where previously there had only been black. I turned round when I felt a hand on my shoulder and found Terry standing behind me, his eyes crinkling up under bushy eyebrows as he smiled, handing me back my manuscript.
“I have to go now,” he said, “we both do, because this isn’t real and you’re dreaming. But I’ll have that cake before I go.”
So the three of us turned together to walk out over the stars, pursued by a man in a bear suit.
I woke up sometime before four am, with a heavy ache in my throat, feeling rung out and completely exhausted, but ultimately feeling as though somehow everything is going to be okay. I’ve got walls to paint and chores to do, but later on I’m going to bake a cake and then I’m going to write. And I’m keeping the bear suit joke.
Some days, when things are bad, and bleak inside my head, and it feels like everything I do is garbage and has no value, I am reminded of this dream. Whether it’s by someone tagging me, or commenting on something, or sending me a message thanking me for making them laugh when things were bad.
And I am reminded that at my worst, my brain conjured up a pep talk from Robin Williams and Terry Pratchett, to make me laugh.
I used to joke I use comedy as a deflection method, but I’m 99% sure it’s a survival trait at this point.
This was in my psychology book. I thought it might be useful to those who can’t think if gender-neutral terms.
Finally I see something going against the implied language that suggests the male gender is the default gender, illustrated by “man-made, mankind” etc,
About twelve years ago, a man died in high orbit over Tau Ceti V.
His name was Drake McDougal, and aside from a few snapshots and vague anecdotes from his drinking buddies, that’s probably all we’ll ever know about him. Another colony-born man with little records and little documentation, working whatever asteroid field the Dracs deigned to allow them. Every now and then a Drac gunship would strut on through the system, Pax Draconia and all that. But that was it.
One fine day, one of those gunships had a misjump. A bad one. It arrived only ninety clicks above atmo, with all its impellers blown out by the gravatic feedback of Tau Ceti V’s gravity well. The Dracs scraped enough power together for a good system-wide broadbeam and were already beginning the Death Chant when they hit atmo.
People laughed at the recording of sixty Dracs going from mysterious chanting to “’what-the-fuck’ing” for years after they forgot the name Drake McDougal. The deafening “CLANG” and split second of stunned silence afterwards never failed to entertain. Drake had performed a hasty re-entry seconds after the gunship and partially slagged his heatshield diving after it. Experts later calculated he suffered 11Gs when he leaned on the retro to match velocities with the Dracs long enough to engage the mag-grapples on his little mining tug.
Even the massively overpowered drive of a tug has its limits, and Drake’s little ship hit hers about one and a half minutes later. Pushed too far, the tug’s fusion plant lost containment just as he finished slingshotting the gunship into low orbit. (It was unharmed, of course; the Drac opinion of fusion power best translated as “quaint,” kind of how we view butter churns.)
It was on the local news within hours, on newsnets across human space within days. It was discussed, memorialized, marveled upon, chewed over by daytime talk-show hosts, and I think somebody even bought a plaque or some shit like that. Then there was a freighter accident, and a mass-shooting on Orbital 5, and of course, the first Vandal attacks in the periphery.
The galaxy moved on.
Twelve years is a long time, especially during war, so twelve years later, as the Vandal’s main fleet was jumping in near Jupiter and we were strapping into the crash couches of what wee enthusiastically called “warships,” I guaran-fucking-tee you not one man in the entire Defense Force could remember who Drake McDougal was.
Well, the Dracs sure as hell did.
Dracs do not fuck around. Dozens of two-kilometer long Drac supercaps jumped in barely 90K klicks away, and then we just stood around staring at our displays like the slack-jawed apes we were as we watched what a real can of galactic whoop-ass looked like. You could actually see the atmosphere of Jupiter roil occasionally when a Vandal ship happened to cross between it and the Drac fleet. There’s still lightning storms on Jupiter now, something about residual heavy ions and massive static charges or something.
Fifty-eight hours later, with every Vandal ship reduced to slagged debris and nine wounded Drac ships spinning about as they vented atmosphere, they started with the broad-band chanting again. And then the communiqué that confused the hell out of us all.
“Do you hold out debt fulfilled?”
After the sixth or seventh comms officer told them “we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about” as politely as possible, the Drac fleet commander got on the horn and asked to speak to a human Admiral in roughly the same tone as a telemarketer telling a kid to give the phone to Daddy. When the Admiral didn’t know either, the Drac went silent for a minute, and when he came back on his translator was using much smaller words, and talking slower.
“Is our blood debt to Drake McDougal’s clan now satisfied?”
The Admiral said “Who?”
What the Drac commander said next would’ve caused a major diplomatic incident had he remembered to revert to the more complex translation protocols. He thought the Admiral must be an idiot, a coward, or both. Eventually, the diplomats were called out, and we were asked why the human race has largely forgotten the sacrifice of Drake McDougal.
Humans, we explained, sacrifice themselves all the time.
We trotted out every news clip from the space-wide Nets from the last twelve years. Some freighter cook that fell on a grenade during a pirate raid on Outreach. A ship engineer who locked himself into the reactor room and kept containment until the crew evacuated. Firefighter who died shielding a child from falling debris with his body, during an earthquake. Stuff like that.
That Dracs were utterly stunned. Their diplomats wandered out of the conference room in a daze. We’d just told them that the rarest, most selfless and honorable of acts – acts that incurred generations-long blood-debts and moved entire fleets – was so routine for our species that they were bumped off the news by the latest celebrity scandal.
Everything changed for humanity after that. And it was all thanks to a single tug pilot who taught the galaxy what truly defines Man.
This makes me cry
It had been so many cycles since the Drac incident, and even more since the Drake McDougal event, and the the galaxy had sort of come to the conclusion that humans were, well, human about things, and that they regarded their lives in completely incomprehensible ways.
Yet for all of the witnessed sacrifices, few warriors had ever been taught to recognise the most terrifying of human deeds. In a forgettable corner of the galaxy, in an unremarked planet with a previously less than recorded history, a party of six human security escorts bringing their rescued survivors to a hive ship became a party of five,
A lone human, holding one of their handheld ‘melee’ weapons wordlessly tilted their head to their commander, and stopped, standing in plain sight in the middle of a field.
Waiting.
When asked, the lower ranked humans simply said “She knows what’s she’s doing”. The human captain’s inexplicable statement “She’s buying us some time” made it as if their companion had stepped into some form of marketplace.
Katherine of Rescue Group’s fate was never confirmed, but no pursuit came that night. On the next dawn, when the hive ship was able to leave, the humans insisted we departed immediately, and did not go back for their companion.
We do not know for sure what became of Katherine of Rescue Group. All we know is that when pressed, the human captain explained to our own that the one who stayed had communicated an ancient human tradition, the rite of self sacrifice. In words, the captain explained, the look and the nod would mean “Go on. I’ll hold them off. It was not, as we thought, that this one warrior had sought victory over many enemies, but that they had calculated a trade off of the minutes or hours it could take to defeat a human, against the time needed by their companions.
Humans, as humans say, do not go gentle into that good night.
Worse, they do not go gentle into bad nights, worse days, or terrifying sunsets. Dawn seems to fill them with potency and rage, as if to call upon the solar gods and tell the deities to come down here and say that to their human faces. We do not know how long she bought us, but we, the hive now called K’thrn, understand what it means to have someone expend their existence for the survival of others.
just moving along like everyone else 