multi-fandom blog

Guyssss this movie is in my bloodstream!

So like, with the stars dying, I'm thinking Eridian media might have gone on a whole "aliens are bad bad bad out there killing stars and wanting to eat Erid" and etc trend for their sci-fi. Long ballads about what are essentially evil Eridians with the equivalent of prosthetics doing terrible things to the galaxy and brave heroes like Rocky going off to stop them. Because y'know that's probably how you'd conceptualize a huge scary conflict like total cosmic annihilation in a way that makes it seem beatable: designate a bad guy you can just defeat in order to stop it.

But then Grace and Rocky get to Erid and that trend gets immediately flipped. Turns out that there were kind of bad aliens, the astrophage and all, but that's more like a natural disaster, and hero Rocky has returned with the weirdest, nicest alien ever. Erid media suddenly rockets back to a prior era of optimistic sci-fi previously considered intolerably twee and cringe after the solar disaster kicked off, where the aliens are always nice nice nice, incredibly weird and sometimes goofy as fuck but friendly and not the bad guys.

Of course you never get full consensus on these things, so there are also creative Eridians who are like. But what if evil humans question? Evil humans posing as saviors infiltrate Erid and replace Eridians with pods that hatch into creepy non-Erid rock monsters question? Evil human comes to Erid under guise of niceness and KILLS Eridians question???

Which is broadly considered like. Holy shit dude stop being gauche the nice alien saved the planet stop fucking writing stories where his skeleton cracks open like a nest of evil eggs and turns into a bunch of monsters! Rude, statement! Aliens very nice statement!

And like at first all the Eridian scientists are very sure to keep this sort of stuff away from Grace, they don't want to insult him or imply that he's being slandered in their media or anything. And again overall the popular trend turns a lot more to aliens-as-friendly, especially if they're expressly humans, and the sci-fi writers of Erid are having a total BLAST speculating about Earth and writing stories about it and etc, Grace seems to very much enjoy answering questions for the ones who want to keep things accurate and chuckling and enthusing over the creativity of the ones who don't. He's like, oh yeah they are definitely also doing this back on Earth, don't worry.

Researchers laughing and nervously just being like, yes of course, this is the full extent of it, not to worry! Normal thing which humans are also doing!

Until one day Rocky just brings Grace a recording of a full-blown Eridian horror sci-fi where Grace HIMSELF is EXPLICITLY a horrible monster that goes on a killing spree and tries to destroy Erid.

The other researchers are losing their shit. RoCKY?!?! WHY QUESTION??? Oh fuck Grace is going to be so upset! He's such a sensitive soul he doesn't even like it when one of his students gets distressed!

1. They think that only stupid people are faithful, anyone who's 'enlightened' won't be religious

2. Religions are some sort of centuries long con/conspiracy used to manipulate people (therefore no religion is real ever)

3. Are trying to make pantheon ala Greek/Roman mythology, but their knowledge is exclusively from Percy Jackson and the Tumblr-ified/woobified versions online

4. Legitimately believe that religion is just an accessory, (ie. A person is a Christian if they wear a cross, a person is Muslim if they wear a head covering)

5. They have an inability to engage with or write from the perspective of someone who's different from them

And certain pantheons emphasized different things, like a sea faring people relied on storms to leave their ships alone, so Zeus was important. Storm gods are also important in farming cultures. But in other cultures that didn't use boats as much, storm gods are less important.

Ancestor worship in different worlds can be really interesting, especially when you get into sci-fi where you have holograms of your ancestors. Or if it's a fantasy realm and you can actually summon ghosts.

YES!!!! YOU UNDERSTAND!!!! last night while sketching this out i was also looking up which materials would resonate the best (it was smooth materials like steel) because i was thinking of what would the eridian equivalent of hearing aids be and what they could do to make places much more accessible for eridians who are hard of hearing or deaf.

also reminds me of a scene in a fic i read before which had rocky naming him "grace" because he's clumsy which also adds on to the whole, eridian!grace not being able to hear as well :-)

Your picture just gave me another idea - if Eridian!Grace is clumsy and has trouble with echolocation, maybe his ball isn't as well-constructed as canon!Rocky's. Like he'd be the molecular biologist, not the engineer.

I can imagine it's as lopsided as you're drawing here and Rocky has to push him around with a foot Miette-style every now and then to get him where he wants to go.

Or maybe it was Human!Rocky who had to build it ? Maybe Grace just gives him the xenonite and its fabricators cause again, he's not the Blip-A's Engineer. And the ball, while airtight and keeps Grace safe, is only Rocky's first rodeo with the stuff.

i can definitely see rocky being interested in working with xenonite and if they decide to use the hail mary's lab instead of the blip-a, he might also have to make a couple other things to make the lab equipment accessible for grace. (aka grace had to watch his poor attempt at using the lab equipment per his instructions till he snaps and pushes rocky aside to do it himself)

I've been thinking a bit about this swap, and I can see another thing that's the same and yet changes. If you flip Grace and Rocky, it had to be Rocky with the initial first contact. I could see him gently chasing Blip-A and wondering "Jeeze, this alien doesn't fly too well. I can keep up no problem. Wait. I gotta get a message to them! What if they're here for the same thing?"

I figure Rocky's logical-minded enough to work out the atmosphere onboard the Blip-A once he studies what's coming through the tunnel, but I don't think he'd have the resources to replicate that much methane or crank it to that temperature for Grace. So I think it'd be half canon, half swapped to still make it work.

That's a genius way to flip that around for the swap!

Grace could be young and a fairly unproven scientist so the skepticism of him in a more practical-minded society like the Eridians' has to come from a slightly less Human angle. "Just another of them kids" would make sense for reasoning there.

Additionally it makes sense that they'd have a bias for their own planet when searching for other life: 2x gravity, super-close to their star, and certainly not water-based. We seek for what we know, and the unexpected and unknown throws us for a loop. Why not give the Eridians a similar bias? It'd explain why nobody in their society realized Earth had life until Rocky met Grace.

I liked that Grace was technically right and wrong about the Eridians too. The steam-powered muscles are such a cool idea. I also loved the 5 hearts, 5 vocal chords, 5 legs symmetry too.

But yeah, the Eridians for the most part aren't water-based save for just a few things. I'd imagine their bias would be towards life developing like them, but they'd have enough imagination to recognize the possibility of other life and speculate on it. (Like how we can imagine aliens floating in gas giant atmospheres like Clarke did, or Weir did with constructing Astrophage.)

For one thing, Rocky has to have had enough of that speculative knowledge for him to interact with Grace. Like, how would you interact if you didn't know aliens existed at all - and didn't believe in the possibility?

I came across this Tumblr post and here's why people blaming the fans for the writers fatal flaw is just wrong.

And now I'll get to the most unpopular opinion I've ever shared online - fully aware that what I've already said very few people on here would agree with: I don't think it's Rob Thomas who killed the show with his ill-adviced decision, it's the fans who did that. Not that they are not aware of it, but they still refuse to take the blame for it, as if there could not have been any other reaction. And clearly they don't regret it. After they paid to bring Veronica Mars back once before. They collectively decided that season 4 was a crime against the fandom and that it never happened. Therefore making it impossible for anyone who did not feel the same way to get more content and have some closure. I know I don't get to be mad about that, but it is sad. And I've been on the other side of this a few times and stopped watching a show after a certain point, but that never triggered a cancellation. I've seen favorite characters killed off many times without it ever leading to a fandom turning hostile like that, sometimes even ripping everything else apart about the show. And it's not even like Veronica Mars was a cosy show where people didn't die. It was neo noir. It started out with her solving the murder of her best friend ffs. So, how did this happen? How did one character's death kill the show? Was it because he was the main love interest over more than a decade? Why does it now feel like he was more important than the protagonist? Or was it maybe because the fans campaigned for it's return and even funded the movie? Was it because they felt more invested in a way and later betrayed although they did not pay for the last season to get made?

I know this take circulates a lot: “The fans killed Veronica Mars. If they hadn’t reacted so strongly to Season 4, we’d have gotten more.”

But after watching this happen over and over, across shows I love, shows that shaped me, shows that built entirely new corners of fandom culture. I just don’t buy it.

Fans aren’t killing shows. Writers are breaking the emotional contract, torching the narrative spine, and then blaming the audience for the smoke.

And if Veronica Mars were the only example, maybe we could write it off. But this specific heartbreak, this implosion of trust, has now happened on too many shows, in too many fandoms, with too similar a pattern to chalk up to “one overreacting audience.”

It didn’t start with Season 4. It didn’t start with Logan Echolls. And it didn’t end there.

It’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s Game of Thrones. It’s The 100. And on and on.

This is a cultural pattern. A breaking point between audiences and creators, and VM is just the case study where people still argue about who struck the match.

The pattern is the same every time: the writers kill the relationship they spent years telling us mattered most.

This is the part critics pretend not to understand.

Fandom doesn’t melt down because a character dies. Characters die constantly in television, and people grieve them, yell about them, move on. They melt down when a character dies in a way that breaks the story’s thesis. Let's take a deeper look:

Veronica Mars: Logan Echolls

Years of storytelling, marketing, PR, revival hype, and arc-building told us:

Logan is Veronica’s person. He’s the love story that grows with her. This relationship is the heart of the show.

Season 4 then kills him in the last 90 seconds as a plot device. Not a turning point, not a thematic evolution, just a twist that contradicts everything the show told us about her healing.

The Handmaid’s Tale: Nick Blaine

Four seasons of narrative work (and two books) told us:

Nick is June’s equal, mirror, moral counterweight, and match. Their love is radical, raw, complicated, feminist, and central.

Then Seasons 5 and 6 decide:

Actually, punish him. Actually, flatten him. Actually, the story is about motherhood, not womanhood or desire. Actually, June belongs with the safe man.

That isn’t a character arc. That’s an ideological pivot.

Game of Thrones: Daenerys Targaryen

Eight seasons told us:

Daenerys is the heart of the myth. She breaks chains. She frees people. She’s the emotional and moral center of the show’s grand design.

The final three episodes say:

Forget that. She snaps because… trauma? lineage? vibes? The woman who liberated millions is actually a tyrant.

A series that built itself on emotional logic ends on plot logic. The single most disorienting pivot a story can make.

When the ending contradicts what the story was, fans don’t feel shocked. They feel gaslit.

Killing the love interest isn’t the issue. Killing the thesis is.

This is the part nobody wants to talk about, because it forces a reckoning with the power and legitimacy of fandom interpretation.

Logan wasn’t just Veronica’s boyfriend. Nick wasn’t just June’s romantic partner. Daenerys wasn’t just another lead.

These characters were:

thematic mirrors

emotional anchors

narrative engines

symbolic structures

the emotional grammar of the show

and the embodiment of the protagonist’s arc

You don’t just rip those out. Not without re-breaking everything around them. It’s like pulling the keystone from a bridge and then blaming drivers for falling into the river.

Why does this keep happening? Because TV writers mistake cynicism for prestige.

This is the actual disease that keeps killing fan-beloved shows:

Prestige = tragedy

Prestige = subversion

Prestige = women alone

Prestige = punishing love

Prestige = nihilism masquerading as maturity

It’s a worldview that sees romance arcs, emotional continuity, loyal love interests, or morally gray partners as “cheap,” “fan service,” or “too soapy.” And because of that mindset, writers keep doing one of two things:

1. They kill the love interest to seem edgy or surprising.

2. They rewrite the protagonist or their partner beyond recognition.

And sometimes both. Either way, the show loses the very thing that made it groundbreaking. The fans didn’t kill Veronica Mars. They mourned what the creator killed first. If a fandom was powerful enough to:

campaign for a return

fund a movie

keep the discourse alive for a decade

pull the show into the 2010s streaming era

…then maybe, just maybe, they had a point about the story’s emotional core.

People didn’t walk away because Logan died. They walked away because his death dismantled the show’s moral vocabulary.

Just like:

People walked away from The Handmaid’s Tale, especially 6x10, because they dismantled the show’s feminist thesis and punished the very arc they built around love, agency, and liberation. (Ahem Hulu's TT because I will be shocked if it's not heading for a similar exit.)

People walked away from Game of Thrones because the finale dismantled eight years of character logic and replaced it with plot convenience.

This isn’t “toxicity.” This is narrative literacy.

Fans understood the assignment better than the people writing the final chapters. The truth is this: fans don’t kill shows. Shows kill themselves when they decide the audience was wrong about what mattered.

And here's the irony that never gets talked about: Writers taught us what mattered.

They built these love stories. They crafted these arcs. They centered these relationships. They marketed these dynamics. They put these characters in promos, posters, finales, interviews, season-long narratives. They told us these bonds mattered.

So when they then turn around and say:

Actually, wrong. Actually, silly of you to care. Actually, this was never the point.

Of course people walk.

It’s not immaturity. It’s not entitlement. It’s not “fandom killing the show.”

But you freely admit the system is bad. That it values the wrong things.

Wukong was kicked out of the group first in the White Bone Demon Arc, I would say that this was about a year or so into their journey together, and at this point, they have had only three adventures. The burning of the Abbey, the Yellow Wind Demon, and the Ginseng Fruit Arc. To me, it's important to know which arc has led up to the telling arc so that we can have a better understanding of where people might be with trust.

Wukong can tell White Bone Spirit is a demon right away and while he was going to kill her Sanzang tried to give her the benefit of the doubt as she hasn't actually harmed them in any way. Wukong accused him of just wanting to sleep with her.

So already not off to a good start.

This leads to the three killings and both of them butting heads over who is right and wrong. Is it right for Wukong to kill someone that has yet to harm them only because he knows she is a demon but his journeymates cannot tell or is it right for them to have to wait for a wrong to be committed to retaliate in the first place?

Also, I think that since neither Wujing nor Bajie has seen the Fillet Tighening Spell at this point they were not aware of its effects since they were only away of what it could do in the Ginseng Fruit arc, and even then I don't think Bajie believed it until now, similar to how he didn't really believe Bailong was a dragon under his horse disguise until the Yellow Robe arc when he first spoke.

That isn't to excuse their actions but the main reason I believe that Bajie was trying to get back at Wukong for the perverse uncounted where he was strung up in a tree by Guanyin at the start of the Ginseng Fruit arc and other deities due to Wukong's pushing for him to get married. At least I believe he thought this was a sting-for-a-strong kind of revenge.

Bajie was the one to tell Sanzang that Wukong might be lying for the sake to kill humans which sadly at this point isn't too far out there due to his persistence to kill humans at the Burning of the Abbey. Wukong doesn't kill humans because he has to, he has shown that when he killed those seven bandits that attacked him and Sanzang at the start of the book as well. He kills humans because he believes they deserve to die and he is the one to do it. It is not out of need, he wants to kill them if they get in his way.

Again I think that because of these past actions have clouded Sanzang's judgment to believe Wukong because he is 100% in the right that she was a demon trying to kidnap him. But he has seen Wukong treat humans and demons the same way, and with no help of Bajie, is making choices out of anger rather than logic. Needless to say, there hasn't been a lot of good blood so far, I really think that Sanzang would believe him if Bajie didn't keep making excuses.

This all came to a head when Sanzang really thinks that Wukong isn't going to change his stance on killing people, whether it be his own lack of ability to teach or that Wukong finds human life of little value he sends Wukong away. He doesn't even bother with the spell on the third killing just for him to go.

After that is it the Yellow Robe arc where Wujing is captured, Sanzang gets turned into a tiger and almost hunted to death, Bailong is out of commission and only Bajie is left standing.

And he has to be the one to get Wukong back. Which he does leading to Sanzang being very grateful and they move on to the journey.

From there about seven years pass or so, and they are about 8 or 9 years into the journey when the Six-Eared Macaque Arc begins, so a little over halfway with about 6 or 5 years to go. I think he has used the spell only once when the Hundred-Eyed Demon was pretending to be Sanzang as well and Wukong told him to recite it so he knows which one to kill.

From there it is a little bit more direct why he got banished it's more to do with how he treated both the living and the dead.

I think what people again miss is that when it comes to humans, Wukong isn't facing other demons that can fight with him toe-to-toe in magic. Wukong has so many abilities to subdue that he has don't with other deities and demons, putting them to sleep, making them immovable, tying them up, he can stop humans and scare them off without killing the for the sake of protecting Sanzang. But he wants to kill them because he thinks they deserve to die anyway, which goes against their whole thing about showing mercy.

Instead, Wukong explains how it's actually Sanzang's fault that he has to kill so many humans. That if it wasn't for him and this mission that there would be so many people alive, and who cares about some petty thieves or scum bandits, they would have died anyway so he was just speeding up the process. This is ironic to me because Wukong who was also sent to be executed was giving mercy to have a second chance as well but he wavers in some cases when he thinks others deserve a chance at redemption as well.

From there it is a little bit more direct why he got banished it's more to do with how he treated both the living and the dead.

They were staying at a family's house and they claim that their son has done great evil as a bandit, a bandit that the pilgrims have already met and Wukong killed their leader. When the bandit came home and saw them he wanted to get revenge and kill them in their sleep. His family let the pilgrim get away so that no one would get hurt but they were still chased after.

Wukong makes the choice of killing the rest of the bandits and I think that maybe, perhaps he wouldn't have been banished this time if he didn't go to the trouble of cutting off the head of the family's son and presenting it as a trophy. But Sanzang let his anger get the best of him and sent him away without trying to talk it out.

He goes to Guanyin because he didn't want to face the shame of going home but she tells him to wait until Sanzang has cooled off his anger to see reasons again and rather asked him with his powers why he couldn't have shown mercy to the bandits (like a good teacher does).

I think that is why the Six-Eared Macaque arc shows the real turning point with how not only Wukong behaves but Sanzang as well. Wukong is fighting his inner demons over here but Sanzang has to learn not to let his anger and emotions not to get the best of him. He is too quick to judge and needs to find out more about the whys in how people act rather than taking it at face value.

These are defiantly the worst point for either character as it highlights their worst traits and I hate to think of them as the most common examples whenever people think of Journey to the West when there are nearly 15 other arcs showing how they both change and grow throughout their journey.

There is a lot more to be said with how Sanzang is seen in more of a Confucianism mindset in later interactions to give Wukong more good qualities in comparison as the story of Xuanzang changes more and more throughout time. But also Wukong's representation of both control and freedom and the balance of the two to make a cohesive narrative within the story.

…This picture basically sums up a lot of the in-story explanation for "Why a plot thing happens".

Understandably, most modern readers tend to call it bullshit, and suggest that it's nothing but a self-serving lie used to justify Ancient China's Bloodiest Bureaucracy Recruitment Program.

When it comes to adaptations, I, too, feel like it's a case of "Just because it made sense to the writers back then and they believed in this stuff, doesn't mean you, as a modern reader or adaptation maker, have to buy into the same ideas."

However, there aren't a lot of writings on the "Whys" behind the ubiquity of Fate Says So. As such, I'd like to offer my own amateur explanation.

Basically, it's because the novel's two conflicting themes and the author-compiler being really insecure about them.

Mencius

See, FSYY's view on rebellion is very much in line with Mencius, who suggested that if your ruler treated his lieges and subjects like shit, you, as a liege, were perfectly justified to respond in kind.

He also famously said in his own work, Mengzi, that "I only know King Wu's slaying of Zhou the Tyrant, not a vassal's murder of his lord."

Or, to heavily rephrase and simplify it:

"I only know the death of a tyrant, not the murder of a king."

Well, Zhu Yuanzhang, Ming dynasty's founding emperor, really didn't like these parts of Mengzi.

It was said that he tried to take away Mencius's officially sanctioned sacrifice, and he was behind the creation of a heavily censored version of Mengzi called 孟子节文, minus all the "rebellious sentiments", that were used as textbook for 17 years.

It didn't suceed at taking Mencius out of circulation, but combined with the elevation of Zhu Xi by the state, there is a turn towards conservatism and strengthening of imperial legitimacy in early Ming Neo-Confucianism.

Fate

By the late Ming times, there is a notable relaxation in the strength of the ol' Confucian orthodoxy. That doesn't mean its influence on cultural norms weren't still significant, though.

And FSYY, being a typical Ming work, also loves to get on the Neo-Confucian soapbox from time to time.

Which was not too uncommon for vernacular novels written by literati, who saw novels as another opportunity to moralize and educate the uncouth masses.

Like, even friggin' erotic novels like to defend themselves with "I'm writing all the explicit sex scenes to show you the detrimental effect of lust and how everyone involved get their karmic justice, not because it's hot!"

Which naturally poses a dilemma: How can you subscribe to Mencius's view on justified rebellion, while also being 100% sincere about your Neo-Confucian morality tracts where rebelling against your ruler is a no-no?

Apparently, FSYY's answer is 1) Fate Says So, and 2) Being really insistent that They Are Only Rebelling Because King Zhou Is the Worst, It Should Be Your Last Resort, Do Not Try This At Home.

Because Fate is connected to the Mandate of Heaven (a word I don't like to use, because I feel like non-Chinese audiences have some strange ideas about what it means), it essentially functions as a higher authority that can override standard Neo-Confucian morality.

"Normally, you aren't supposed to rebel against your lord, but Fate Says You Can because this ain't normal times."

And the idea of Fate is still based on that very morality, because human affairs and Heavenly Order are intricately connected.

A ruler gains the throne by being the exemplar of a set of moral virtues and guiding his subjects towards those virtues, and when people, especially rulers, Do Bad Things, it will create ripples in the natural world in the form of disasters, birth of mutated animals, yaoguai sightings, and unusual celestial phenomena.

Like, Heaven doesn't exactly pick a ruler and forms a personal connection with said ruler and his lineage.

It's more of a "If you Do X, Y will happen" scenario, where X is Immorality and Bad Statecraft and Y is Disasters, Rebellions, and Weird Shit (that may lead to the ruler's deposition and dynastic transistion).

And on the folk level, people might not know that much about the Mandate in the classical literature sense, but they did take Fate seriously, whether in the form of divination and taboos, or belief in karmic retribution.

Like, if you already believed that the time of your birth could determine your personality and future, that doing good stuff would beget you good things in this life and the next, and bad shit happening to good people was the result of karmic debts from past lives carrying over?

"Fate Says So" might be far less outlandish to you than it would be to a modern audience. And even then, one could interpret it in ways that subverted social order instead of reinforcing it.

You can see this in IRL sectarian cult rebellions, where they often portrayed their leaders as incarnations of celestial deities and appealed to the same "Fate/Mandate Override" rhetorics to legitimize themselves.

Back to FSYY

Which may be why, even while using the Fate Says So argument, the author-compiler is still afraid of coming off across as "Rebelling against the emperor is okay, actually!"

Well, the intended message is closer to "Rebelling against the emperor is okay only if 1) Fate Says So, and 2) the emperor is the Worst of the Worst, and even if the loyalty is misguided, it is still good and commendable."

(Technically, this is pretty close to Mencius's thought too: he's also of the opinion that you can only overthrow your ruler if he's a piece of shit who's dangerously bad at his job, and it shouldn't be a regular solution.)

Which is why you see Shang officials being loyal to King Zhou and hoping he'd see reason even after multiple gruesome executions, and Novel King Wen & King Wu being giant pushovers.

If King Zhou needs to be the Worst Guy Ever in order to justify rebellion, then the ones leading the rebellion also need to be the perfect Sage Kings and Neo-Confucian morality paragons who'd never rebel against their king out of their own volition.

"We would never rebel against our lord, honest, we just wanna knock on the palace doors politely and make him see reason with a long, boring speech, I don't know why JZY and the other vassals interpreted it as 'Topple the Shang and Make the Zhou lineage the new emperor'!"

Which is extremely annoying, even when you kinda get why the author-compiler is doing it.

Final Thoughts

I feel like FSYY is less of a morality tract when you compare it to other obscure Ming Shenmo novels that actually are morality tracts wearing a fake mustache.

In fact, its alignment with Mencius's view on rebellion, as well as the usage of Fate as a Deus Ex Machina override to conventional values like filial piety or loyalty, arguably makes it less stringently Neo-Confucian.

But the author-compiler's attempt to justify the rebellion with repetitive in-story speeches and stress that They Want to Be Loyal/Filial, Actually, They Just Have No Other Choices...does make parts of the book quite a chore to modern readers.

I do feel like you can take Fate seriously in a FSYY adaptation, both as an actual cosmological force and something characters genuinely believe in, and still create an engaging story.

Maybe look into the historical Shang-Zhou transistion's effect on the view of Heaven, and the early accounts of the fall of Shang that weren't as Confucianized, and make it an actual epic war story with the characterization and worldbuilding that are missing from the Ming novel.

Or, better, take "Fate Says So" to its most ridiculous extremes and make it funny.