Captain Arctic Wolf

well i’d love to show u guys the full image of this but tumblr shot me down.  So here’s a smaller version of  what I created for my patreon last november! (full pic is up on twitter for now, here)

click here to check out my patreon! 😘

1967 - “A Taste of Armageddon”: Captain Kirk introduces the technocratic elites of rival worlds to the full horrors of warfare. Totally apolitical.

1968 - “A Private Little War”: Superpowers fight a destructive proxy war on a jungle planet; aired during the Tet Offensive. No politics here.

1969 - “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield”: White-and-black guys oppress black-and-white guys until their planet is destroyed in a race war. Aired 9 months after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Politics-free.

1986 - “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”: In this apolitical adventure, the crew of the Enterprise travels back in time to the 20th century to rescue humpbacked whales from extinction at the hands of industrial over-fishing.

1987 - 1994 - “Star Trek: The Next Generation”: Set in a post-scarcity communist utopia in which profit motive is looked upon as barbarous. Debuted during the Reagan Administration. Just a mindless adventure series.

1991 - “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country”: Two superpowers negotiate an end to their decades-long Cold War over the objections of reactionary factions in both countries. Aired 4 months after the attempted coup against Gorbachev and two weeks before the dissolution of the USSR. No politics here.

1992 - “The Outcast”: The Enterprise visits a planet with only one biological sex, where a character who nevertheless identifies as a woman is forced to undergo conversion therapy. Released at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Mercifully free of politics.

1993 - 1999 - “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”: This politics-devoid series, which coincidentally aired during the Balkan Wars, follows a group of Federation observers who are assigned to guide the recovery of a war-torn planet.

1995 - “Past Tense, Parts 1 and 2″: Sisko, Bashir, and Dax take an apolitical trip back in time to an austerity- and inequality-ravaged early-twenty-first-century America on the cusp of revolutionary class violence, where despairing poor people are locked in ghettos whilst they “look for work”.

1996 - “Bar Association”: The employees of Quark’s Bar strike against exploitation by their employer; Rom literally quotes Karl Marx to his brother (in a wholly apolitical fashion).

2000 - “Critical Care”: The Doctor is abducted and forced to work in a horrifying, dystopian hospital where quality care and competent medics are reserved for the rich and well-to-do whilst the poor are left to bleed in an over-crowded, septic, dingy little room. Any resemblance to the American healthcare system is purely coincidental.

2001 - “Repentence”: Voyager finds itself needing to escort a bunch of alien deathrow prisoners to their execution, but finds that there is an entirely apolitical racial bias in who gets sentences in this fashion, and also that many of the murderers are not beyond reform.

2001: “Broken Bow”: Airing three weeks after 9/11, this apolitical episode finds Starfleet in conflict with a cabal of terrorists known as the Taliban Suliban.

2004: “The Forge”, “Awakening”, and “Kir’Shara”: A corrupt Vulcan government cracks down on pacifist dissidents and tries to instigate a war against with Andoria through bogus accusations that they are developing weapons of mass destruction. Aired in that lovely, politics-free aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq.

I’d had notes scribbled about this concept for months and months, and then this post was going around recently and reminded me how firmly I had intended to actually post something about it.  xD  So here we go.

The motifs of order/law & chaos, whether explicitly cast in the D&D alignment sense or otherwise, are all over Hannigram and their portrayals in fandom.  And there’s a very particular symmetry in their characters that really delights me to think about if you consider the application of these motifs on more than one level.

First, there’s the obvious level: Will being associated with chaos in the sense that, most importantly, he is highly capricious in both his behaviors and his net internal reaction to scenarios, Hannibal being associated with order in the sense of superhuman planning and time-management skills and control freak-ness.

But then let’s flip it around and consider the overarching foci of each of their intentions and goals.

Will pursues order.  He earnestly works in law enforcement, harnesses his highly intuitive, only semi-controlled ability to go bobbing for eurekas in the service of what he considers to be the Correct Way of Things.  Even when it’s clear his ability to apply his usual principles to Hannibal is slipping (or nonexistent), Hannibal is 100% an anomaly in that way.  Otherwise, Will’s righteous sense of that Correct Way of Things (not always necessarily quite in alignment with the Legal Way of Things!) entirely guides how he interacts with both his own and other people’s chaos.  (How this does or doesn’t change post-finale is of course very up for discussion, but I subscribe to what I think is the majority view that Hannibal maintains complete anomaly status and otherwise Will more or less sticks to a less obfuscated version of “doing bad things to bad people is right feels good.”)

Hannibal, meanwhile, as I have explicitly called him more than once before, is a total chaos sprite!  Oh, sure, he’s organized to the ninth circle of hell and back - but in any given potentially-interesting game board, he is the intrusive influence that incites change, or to use the more technical term, stirs up shit.  What change?  Oh, he might have opinions on the possible outcomes (especially if Will’s involved), but he wouldn’t be so boring as to totally fix those results except in extreme circumstances (e.g. late s1, when he needs to neutralize Will as a threat but doesn’t want to kill him).  His major value judgments are centered on a deep aversion to the banal and a corresponding appreciation for novelty - he is an orderly creature who loves to incite chaos.  

Now, finally, let’s consider what Will and Hannibal intrinsically seek in each other, other than the “you’re the only one who understands me” Romance angle.  Will, even before he Knows, instinctively reaches for Hannibal as a pillar of stability, because of course the man embodies it.  After he Knows, he (with wildly varying degrees of internal conflict and self-hatred) is still or arguably even more drawn in, because he can see the reason to Hannibal’s rhyme, can comprehend a certainty and singularity of intent that makes way too much sense to him even when he’s still mostly in “all serial killers should be killed/locked up” camp.  Meanwhile…. really, do I need to do more than quote Hannibal himself: “I could never entirely predict you.”  Spoken in the softest, most bemusedly delighted fucking voice.  

Over the last couple of nights, I’ve been skimming my copy of Good Omens again, because so many people in the comments of my other post were somehow surprised by the suggestion that Aziraphale might be a garbage angel. But like… He is. He really is.

So here, an itemized list of Aziraphale being absolutely Extra (capital E) with evidence:

1) That time he chose his CD player over Heaven.

“That’s it, then,” said Crowley, with a gleam of triumph. He knew Aziraphale’s weak spot all right. “No more compact discs.”

2) That time he lit a traffic cop’s ticket book on fire because he didn’t want to pay a fine.

As they drove past an astonished traffic warden his notebook spontaneously combusted, to Crowley’s amazement. 

“I’m pretty certain I didn’t mean to do that,” he said.

Aziraphale blushed. “That was me.”

3) That time he collected Bibles, but all of them were evil.

And he had a complete set of the Infamous Bibles… These Bibles included the Unrighteous Bible… the Wicked Bible… the Discharge Bible… the Buggre Alle This Bible…

4) That time even the apocalypse couldn’t dent his manicure or his obsession with occult prophecies.

No one knows what happened to the legions of unsold copies of Agnes Nutter’s book. Certainly none remain in any museums or private collections. Even Aziraphale does not possess a copy, but would go weak in the knees a the thought of actually getting his exquisitely manicured hands on one.

5) That time he may or may not have done… something ominous to the mafia.

Or sometimes, while they were talking, other men in dark glasses would wander around the shop shaking their heads and saying how inflammable paper was, and what a firetrap he had here.

Aziraphale would nod and smile and say that he’d think about it. And they’d go away. And they’d never come back.

Just because you’re an angel doesn’t mean you have to be a fool.

6) That time he was just an absolute mannerless heathen.

“You said it was him!” moaned Aziraphale, abstractedly picking the final lump of cream cake from his lapel. He licked his fingers clean.

7) That time that he actually considered moving to Hell with Crowley.

“I suppose–get off the road you clown–” Crowley said, “your people wouldn’t consider–and the scooter you rode in on!–giving me asylum?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

8) The raw confidence it took to deliver THIS:

“Some Southern pansy,” Shadwell said, “I heard him. He was in here, suggestin’ things to yer. I heard him.”

Madame Tracy’s mouth opened, and a voice said, “Not just A Southern Pansy, Sergeant Shadwell. THE Southern Pansy.”

9) That time the line “You go too fast for me Crowley” was amusing to any book reader who remembers book!Aziraphale beating Crowley’s top speed by over 90mph while driving a scooter:

Look at Crowley, doing 110mph on the M40… …This was exactly like that, except that instead of a gleaming twelve-mile-long spaceship, it was an off-white twenty-year-old motor scooter. And it probably wasn’t going at more than two hundred miles per hour.

10) That time his sass game was so strong even Crowley had no answer.

“We seem to have survived,” Aziraphale said. “Just imagine how terrible it might have been if we’d been at all competent.”

“Um,” said Crowley.

And this isn’t even mentioning the time he left a loaded gun in the hands of a sugar-high 11-year-old, was the only main character responsible for actually killing an animal, dropped the book’s one (1) F-bomb, manipulated a human into agreeing to murder a child, performed what looked exactly like a demon summoning ritual, lied to God, and broke the first commandment…