Lesson #23 Digestion

And with certain only very certain rocks that contain carbonate minerals, specifically limestone, chalk, and marble, can be dissolved by weak acids. So this is mostly for comedic purposes.

First Lesson Previous lesson

As always thank you to my phenomenal beta readers!

@xushibeetle

@the-asexual-winter

humans are the moms

compared to other species on earth, humans have a really outsized "protect baby" instinct. you give a human a thing and tell them it's actually a baby thing and many humans will suddenly develop a complete and total aversion to harming it, even if it's like, a writhing mass of slimy tentacles in no way reminiscent of human infants

cats domesticated us by figuring out that they could leave their kittens with us when they went out hunting and come back and probably still have the same number as before they left. there is a decent chance that wolves did the same thing

word gets around the less parenting-inclined species and they're just like, are you doing a long haul space voyage? going to have to lay some eggs in the course of the trip? take a few humans with you. yeah they'll just start training the young and keeping from them climbing into the machinery themselves you don't even have to find specialists. I know a guy who budded unexpectedly on a freight hauler halfway through a four year trip, and not only did the humans not eat his spawn, they set up this thing called "babysitting" where they'd take turns monitoring its survival and helping to teach it basic skills

Thanks, Anon!

Then Maomao returns a box labeled "rather large frog" and its a little bitty one, like a poison dart size.

Jinshi returns with "a rather small and underwhelming frog" that is a wooden frog statue large enough for Maomao to sit on.

what shippish fic does, according to the thesis, is deliberately mis-read, and re-interpret a text as romance. in a basic sense, it subverts that text. but fic also often goes another level up, to subvert the structure of romantic stories as well (the thesis mentions pamela regis’s “eight essential elements” that make up the structure of a romance). fic can be deeply dense with plot. it can reproduce the entire canonical work, just with a different romantic focus. but by labeling their plot-dense work “a character a/character b story”, a writer is announcing that on some level the point of it is the character a/character b part. that’s why we have the distinguishing concept of “gen” fic, for fic where pairings are not the point, even if it depicts romantic relationships. so there is something arguably, basically subversive (or at least distinct) about the fanfiction project of “i can eat my story cake and have my romance too and i can make them work together even and i’ll prove it.” instead of telling a story or telling a romance, fanfiction will tell a story that is also unabashedly a romance.

so the thing abut farscape is that if you try to read it as a serial plot show like bablyon 5 or episodic philosophy/adventure like star trek, it’s not going to work. but if you try to approach it like friends and other sitcoms or soaps, where the characters and relationships are the point but there’s no coherent story about them, it also won’t work. it won’t even work if you try to approach it like outlander and its ilk, which although they’re also fanfic-y (if not my taste) and story-like, they unambiguously center the romance.

farscape, instead, you have to read as something subverting the structure of its meta-text of adventure science fiction by “misreading” its white-male-hero tv series as a romance. it’s built to be a love story the same way a 100k slow-burn rewrite of a show is built to be a love story. (a) there is lots of non-relationship stuff happening, but (b) even when the pairing in question isn’t together, the status of their relationship is of high, even utmost importance to the story. farscape gives john and aeryn very little in the way of happiness or resolution for most of the show, but it doesn’t really string the viewer along either. all of john and aeryn’s interactions, even from the pilot episode, are moving them along a single romantic arc. the question is not whether they will, but when and how and why. but what truly marks the john-and-aeryn romance as central is the fact that you couldn’t remove it without completely upsetting the show’s entire symbolic and thematic level. without crichton coming to grips with loving, choosing and becoming that which is alien to him (in both wonderful and horrible ways), what the hell would farscape be about? john and aeryn struggling to come together is the symbolic gravity around which the show revolves, even though it is about many things besides them. 

Unlike many other shows of the time that insistently kept their leads at arm’s length, the relationship between Crichton and ex-Peacekeeper Aeryn Sun was the beating heart of the show—which is what creator Rockne S O’Bannon always intended. “I wanted it to be the ultimate romance, the logline for the 1950s paperback novel that never will be: To find each other they had to traverse the entire galaxy”

And on the anti-Star Trek front:

In an era when sci-fi was grounded and emotionally reserved (think the stoic authority of The Next Generation or Stargate: SG-1), Henson and creator O’Bannon wanted to “dial the emotion up to 11” and defy convention. With the Creature Shop at their disposal, the production team meticulously crafted an alien environment that looked genuinely alien, making for what Henson called a “wilder vision of space opera with a more primal energy.”