dancinkatie

Gate and ship travel to the Pegasus galaxy was suspended for six months to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In that time Atlantis had to move again and also drained its ZPM, and now the SGC simply cannot fucking find it.

Due to an unfortunate series of procurement request errors which lead to a run where the Daedalus cargo consisted entirely of several tons of Teyla’s popcorn, Atlantis now believes Earth has been conquered by the Lucian Alliance and refuses any contact.

Somebody (Rodney) fucked up by setting off an EM pulse before all the earth computers could be shut down, frying absolutely everything that ran on microchips instead of crystals. They’re perfectly capable of dialing Earth, but they can’t send any of the requisite computer codes to prove who they are.

Another replicator faux-Atlantis had been limping towards the Milky Way on a low powered hyperdrive for years. SG1 found it and blew it up, thinking it was the real Atlantis. The whole expedition was declared heroically dead. Meanwhile back in Pegasus everyone’s upset because Earth ghosted them after their last call.

The Wraith finally figured out that there are actually a lot of inhabited worlds in the Milky Way and they don’t actually need earth’s exact coordinates to find one. What they’re not smart enough to do is vary the route they take to the Milky Way. Atlantis has been parked in the middle of the intergalactic void for a year blowing ships up as they go by. (“Shooting fish in a barrel”) Since there’s no coordinates to dial out there Earth thinks they finally went fully feral and just fucked off somewhere.

Due to a hyperdrive malfunction, Atlantis slid into an alternate reality and nobody noticed because everything was exactly the same except that reality’s Atlantis got vaporized about ten minutes before. Meanwhile main reality Earth thinks their Atlantis got vaporized. This mix up will never be corrected.

Zelenka had to hide the intergalactic dialing crystal from another wraith intruder. By the time the crisis was over he’d forgotten where he stashed it. Being too embarrassed to admit this, he instead told everyone the Wraith must have found and took it. AR-1 has now been trying to hunt this single random Wraith to get it back for two years. (From the wraith’s perspective he is in a horror movie where the galaxy’s best wraith killers have for some reason focused on only him to hunt.)

The finally found the real Weir. Knowing that Earth would never let them put someone who was in Replicator hands for so long back in charge of the expedition like they wanted, they hatched a plan: they woke Woolsey up in the middle of the night, told him they were under attack and the self destruct was going off in seconds, and then chucked him through the wormhole. Faking their deaths worked with the wraith, it’ll work with earth too.

All the episodes of Galavant are on the Internet Archive!

I have known you a long time. And right now you need help. With my claymaish? With your life.

trick question. this is an intervention. even if you’ve never wanted that, you do now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmfbQRclFf8

this is a video of Chris Morganroth, a Quileute elder, canoe-builder, language teacher, and a fantastic storyteller. he is wearing a shirt covered in pictures of wolves: his cousin made it for him! this is a recording of a 2012 speech at the Smithsonian. it is about an hour long. it is so worth it.

Simultaneously, I’m an adult who, in my spare time, enjoys engaging in adult fiction spaces. As a result of that, I have, unfortunately, been shouted at a decent number of times by young adults (18-25 seems to be the common range) about children, and their well being, and how what happens in adult fiction spaces causes harm to children, and themselves by proxy. (I’ve also been yelled at by actual children, but I’m happy to ignore them, given many of them have been influenced by the previously mentioned young adults to behave that way.)

“Grooming” isn’t truly a technical term, though my industry uses it as one often. It doesn’t have a precise definition or pattern of behavior beyond “inappropriate conduct with a child.” It’s had other uses, of course, like saying someone was “groomed to inherit a title” or similar. But generally what we mean online is “this has to do with child abuse.”

Children are, no joke, one of the most uniquely oppressed classes of human being in the world. Most of the time, they simply have no recourse, no legal right to self-advocate, no ability to retain counsel, choose their own living environment, what they do, how they dress, what they eat. To even report their own abuse — which I assure you, most children are perfectly aware is abuse — they must first be believed by an adult, who may then choose to do something on the child’s behalf, or not. Any option a child has for safety or freedom of choice is entirely dependent on an adult deigning to humor them in the first place.

When you turn the age of majority in your country, you are automatically given a new set of legal and social rights. Even a severely disabled adult, in most places, may advocate for their rights on the basis of their legal adulthood. (There are constant failures here by the legal system, of course, but the point is that you are allowed to advocate in the first place.) You become a different class of person, who can do and ask for things that children are simply not allowed to.

When you try to say that “adults can be groomed,” by bringing up all kinds of random possibilities like “well what about cults” “what about age gaps and different levels of life experience” “what about this or that,” you’re still ignoring the idea that the exploited adult has recourse, in those situations (again, leaving out that there are many failings with the system that allows that recourse does not eliminate the fact that recourse is an option.) Restraining orders. Moving away. Going no contact, with no parent to force you to continue to see that person on holidays. Even if you are young, you are not helpless. You have an agency allowed to you that children simply are not given.

Of course, an 18 year old can be abused and exploited. And I absolutely am wary of a 19 year old dating a 40 year old — personally, I question the shit out of that. I’d even suspect that that 19 year old was previously groomed in some way. But the distinction is important to me, here, not to diminish the abuse that young adults can face, but to ensure that the plight of children is properly understood.

So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said "Death Star".