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I Am Going To Ruin Everything
Sep. 23rd, 2015 05:30 pmThe gems' plan for earth is the Oankali's plan for earth, Rose Quartz is an Ooloi, Steven is the first successful half-human Ooloi.
THE OANKALI: hello yes, we are the alien invaders and we represent colonialism.
LILITH: Oh fuck THAT shit.
OANKALI: lilith, lilith, we need you to help us seduce the tattered remnants of post-apocalyptic humanity to our cause.
LILITH: What exactly is your cause?
OANKALI: literal seduction, you will have our babies.
LILITH: Did you guys really have to go straight for the woman named "Lilith" for help with your monsterbaby plan. Did you guys think this through.
OANKALI: not guys. our dominant gender is tentacle-rape, preferred pronoun is tentacle-rapist.
LILITH: Did you alter my brain chemistry to make me attracted to tentacle-rapists?
OANKALI: are you even familiar with human sexuality. why would we need to alter your brain chemistry for that.
(yes though, yes we totally did. also everyone else's.)
LILITH: Okay, well, now I am space-married to a tentacle-rapist and pregnant with a monsterbaby and the man I loved is dead and I am permanently alienated from my own species. So, thanks. Thanks for that.
OANKALI: you're welcome, we still represent colonialism.
but also it is biologically impossible for people to be gay now, did you notice that lilith, because that is a thing we did.
LILITH: The next book's gonna have to be from my monsterbaby's POV, because I am so done.
LILITH: Oh fuck THAT shit.
OANKALI: lilith, lilith, we need you to help us seduce the tattered remnants of post-apocalyptic humanity to our cause.
LILITH: What exactly is your cause?
OANKALI: literal seduction, you will have our babies.
LILITH: Did you guys really have to go straight for the woman named "Lilith" for help with your monsterbaby plan. Did you guys think this through.
OANKALI: not guys. our dominant gender is tentacle-rape, preferred pronoun is tentacle-rapist.
LILITH: Did you alter my brain chemistry to make me attracted to tentacle-rapists?
OANKALI: are you even familiar with human sexuality. why would we need to alter your brain chemistry for that.
(yes though, yes we totally did. also everyone else's.)
LILITH: Okay, well, now I am space-married to a tentacle-rapist and pregnant with a monsterbaby and the man I loved is dead and I am permanently alienated from my own species. So, thanks. Thanks for that.
OANKALI: you're welcome, we still represent colonialism.
but also it is biologically impossible for people to be gay now, did you notice that lilith, because that is a thing we did.
LILITH: The next book's gonna have to be from my monsterbaby's POV, because I am so done.
Lengthy Attack on Titan dream in which I got killed by fucking titans like eight fucking times. I got an exciting plot twist after all that, though: some casual dialog between Armin and Mikasa reveals that people in Titanland don't know where babies come from. They just kind of show up, at the base of the Pale Towers.
The Pale Towers themselves are structures that appear occasionally near human settlements, always just at the border of a forest. They are always either windowless and made of thick slabs of sandstone, carved with strange blurred images, or unfinished-looking frameworks of fresh-cut birchwood. They are always eventually destroyed by titans.
Each year some young unmarried people are rounded up and brought to the towers by singing flying saucers made of sandstone, where they have to... have sex, I guess? This is implied, I guess, because Mikasa thinks whatever it is is upsetting and kind of boring, and Eren is terrified of it. But Armin came away bleeding and with a broken arm the time he did it, so maybe not? Or maybe he's just like, particularly bad at it? I don't know, my subconscious thinks it's Andrew Hussie, it was all coy about this.
The point is that sometimes titans come and destroy the towers and eat the people in them while this is taking place, and that's considered normal. People go along with this because the titans will show up en masse and destroy your city if the kids don't go to the tower and do whatever.
No one seems to be drawing a connection between this shit and the babies showing up because everyone is really stupid. What's going on, Mikasa figures out when she infiltrates an evil lab somewhere or other, is this: the titans are how humans reproduce. They somehow psychically feed on (or physically participate in?) the activity taking place at the towers, and occasionally literally feed on the people doing it, and use whatever genetic stuff they gathered up there to make babies, which they leave for the humans to raise because they don't know what these are. (Or maybe they eat some of them, I don't know, the dream didn't go into this.)
So the titans are Mother Grubs and/or Ooloi. Way to go, brain, you totally figured that one out.
Another section of the dream had velociraptors surrounding my high school, which was fine, and T-rexes which had mastered wizardry, which struck me as deeply unfair. They're already T-rexes, they do not need to be wizards as well.
The Pale Towers themselves are structures that appear occasionally near human settlements, always just at the border of a forest. They are always either windowless and made of thick slabs of sandstone, carved with strange blurred images, or unfinished-looking frameworks of fresh-cut birchwood. They are always eventually destroyed by titans.
Each year some young unmarried people are rounded up and brought to the towers by singing flying saucers made of sandstone, where they have to... have sex, I guess? This is implied, I guess, because Mikasa thinks whatever it is is upsetting and kind of boring, and Eren is terrified of it. But Armin came away bleeding and with a broken arm the time he did it, so maybe not? Or maybe he's just like, particularly bad at it? I don't know, my subconscious thinks it's Andrew Hussie, it was all coy about this.
The point is that sometimes titans come and destroy the towers and eat the people in them while this is taking place, and that's considered normal. People go along with this because the titans will show up en masse and destroy your city if the kids don't go to the tower and do whatever.
No one seems to be drawing a connection between this shit and the babies showing up because everyone is really stupid. What's going on, Mikasa figures out when she infiltrates an evil lab somewhere or other, is this: the titans are how humans reproduce. They somehow psychically feed on (or physically participate in?) the activity taking place at the towers, and occasionally literally feed on the people doing it, and use whatever genetic stuff they gathered up there to make babies, which they leave for the humans to raise because they don't know what these are. (Or maybe they eat some of them, I don't know, the dream didn't go into this.)
So the titans are Mother Grubs and/or Ooloi. Way to go, brain, you totally figured that one out.
Another section of the dream had velociraptors surrounding my high school, which was fine, and T-rexes which had mastered wizardry, which struck me as deeply unfair. They're already T-rexes, they do not need to be wizards as well.
and Octavia Butler was completely insane.
I mean, the Xenogenesis series made this fairly clear, but this book contains every questionable decision Xenogenesis made multiplied by a factor of eight.
I mean, the Xenogenesis series made this fairly clear, but this book contains every questionable decision Xenogenesis made multiplied by a factor of eight.
- There should totally be a Chrono Trigger/Lilith's Brood crossover where Lavos is (spoilers for CT) an Oankali ship.
- There should totally be a Chrono Trigger/Hundred Thousand Kingdoms crossover where Zeal is Sky and Magus is (spoilers for both) amnesiac incarnate Itempas.
Well, actually, no. There should not. - If the new cupcake shop right next to the station at Friendship Heights manages to go out of business, I don't think I'm going to feel very bad for the proprietors. It is a cupcake shop right next to the station at Friendship Heights. It has no excuse.
I bring this up only because I've noticed that, 1) there never seems to be anyone in there, 2) their selection seems to be pretty small and the cupcakes are all nearly identical, unless I just came at a bad time, and 3) it's really hard to see exactly what they're selling from outside, because they're poorly lit, the counter's way back against the back wall and partly blocked by a partition, and they have no window display.
(A place selling sweets with no window display? Japan deports people for that.)
I've also got a list of criticisms regarding the design of a sandwich place near Farragut North. I worry that my habit of thinking about these things is the mark of a degenerate character. - Which should be more alarming: seeing a copy of a book by Newt Gingrich prominently displayed in a law school library, or seeing it prominently displayed in a med school library?
It seems like the former should be worse, since lawyers are in a better position to put the book's presumed ideas into practice - but in fact, when I ran into the latter yesterday, I think I found it much more disturbing. For some reason my worldview is shaken by the idea of a doctor who doesn't want people Mirandized.
HeLa cells
Feb. 3rd, 2010 10:45 pmThere’s an interesting interview here (via Ta-Nehisi Coates) about an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks whose cervical cancer cells were taken as samples in 1951, shortly before her death, and were found to reproduce in a culture so quickly and efficiently that they revolutionized research on human tissue. They called them HeLa cells, and her family knew nothing about it until twenty-five years later, when her daughter Deborah was contacted by researchers who were interested in getting a sample of her own cells.
There is no earthly way that Octavia Butler didn’t know about this when she was writing Dawn. The heroine with whom the frightening, inexplicable alien falls in love/lust mainly due to her body’s fascinating ability to develop tumors? I think that is what a metaphor looks like.
(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)
One-to-two sentence reviews again
Jan. 15th, 2010 02:52 pmNeither Darkover Nor Manga
- Fool Moon (Dresden Files 1), Jim Butcher
I heard somewhere that Jim Butcher and the Ah! My Goddess guy can combine to form a bigger misogynist.
- Dawn (Xenogenesis 1), Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler punches you repeatedly in the stomach.
- Adulthood Rites and Imago (Xenogenesis 2, 3), Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler punches you in the stomach more lightly, provides gender-bendy but oddly heteronormative tentacle sex utopia, repeats.
Darkover
- The Spell Sword, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Guy from earth lands on the planet of the red-haired sorceresses and goes native (he doesn’t turn into a red-haired sorceress, ’cause that would be, like, weird). Disney could make the movie of this without changing it too much.
- The Forbidden Tower, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Guy from earth’s adjustment to his new psychic family life is hampered by his wife’s psychic powers accidentally zapping his testicles and his attraction to his sister- and brother-in-law. Maybe orgies will solve these problems?
- Heritage of Hastur, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Being gay is wrong and bad, but Regis Hastur thinks he might be gay! Betraying the Comyn is wrong and bad, but Lew Alton thinks he might betray the Comyn! OH NOES
(I would argue that “OH NOES” does not constitute a sentence.)
- Stormqueen!, Marion Zimmer Bradley
People have terrifying uncontrollable psychic powers that may destroy them and EVERYONE THEY LOVE, and pregnancy is TERRIFYING, and everyone’s family is trying to KILL THEM, and so is the WEATHER.
Manga
- Yotsuba&!, volumes 1-3, Kiyohiko Azuma
cannot form sentence dying of cute
- Crimson Spell, volume 1, Ayano Yamane
Ridiculous high fantasy comedy/porn. Why is it that transforming into your demon form always seems to involve stripes these days?
(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)
Goddamnit, Octavia Butler *can't* die, I only found her stuff *this month*. That is just fucking not fair.
