Yeehaw, I Guess

Grace going “oh!! But!” and teaching them about starfish, to their absolute delight

Ryland wearing a white shirt hidden under his yellow raincoat as he tells Stratt no. Stratt wearing white only once, as she forces him to go.

Ryland wearing a white flight suit as he is carted onto the mission against his will. Ryland wearing that same white flight suit when he willingly turns around for Rocky.

Ryland, still in his coward’s yellow in the don’t go crazy room, catching a glimpse of his future self on Erid in all-white.

you can never get a clear listen to him. his primary sense node is covered in "hair" and the part that isn't is hidden by two crystals that refract sound waves in a pleasing but disorienting way. he covers his body in billowy cloth at all times. not snug and sensible and unobstructive like eridian coverings, but loose and layered, draped and flowing.

the most clear part of him are his internal organs. because yes, the alien's carapace isn't sound-proof. his single heart beats insistingly in his core, his lungs exchanging gas constantly, his long digestive tract always bubbling and contracting. his thorax is packed impossibly tight and it's all moving and singing.

and it shouldn't be possible, with how fragile he is, for that internal pressure to maintain. how does the thin membrane of his external organ (another horror that sends eridians reeling) keep it all contained? his "skin" is so easily pierced, cut, bruised, burnt, how does he not split open under his own mass?

when savior rocky first arrived home and described the environmental needs of his alien, the scientists thought he'd made a mistake in his frantic panic to get everything out. it isn't possible this being lives at such low atmospheric pressure, at half the gravity, and in a gas that's nearly double the weight of ammonia. in a gas so dangerous, so caustic. and if it does then how is it obligately terrestrial like rocky claims? shouldn't it fly or float instead? (and then to see it in the water, learning that it can float or sink at will.)

and this alien has come bearing gifts that will not only save your species but launch it into impossible heights of technological and intellectual advancement. he has discovered the solution to astrophage and bred it to thrive on threeworld and translated his instructions into eridian. he has given your people the complete sum of his people's knowledge, advanced in ways the eridians can't believe and behind in ways that seem ludicrous. and he has given his life for your people to have these things.

he knows how your solar system was formed. he knows how the universe started.

his name means beautiful and generous and relieving.

the eridians experiencing cosmic bliss.

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.