pocky !

okay so idk how many of u aurora cycle fans have also watched aphmau’s mystreet but just recently i rewatched aphmau’s love love paradise season of mystreet and figured they’d make a fun crossover. anyway here’s a drawing of kawaii chan freaking tf out because kal and auri just told her what the pull is. i spent way too much time on this

from @auroracycle-enjoyer

summary.txt

“Well, go, on, old man, ‘tell ‘em the surprise!” Peter B. Parker nudged his Chum O’Hara with his shoulder. O’Hara dropped a heavy sigh. “LYLA and I wanted to commemorate you four for keeping the anomalies at bay. It’s safe to say you are on your way to becoming masters of the arachno-humanoid-poly-multiverse—” “Just say Spider-Verse, for Pete’s sake—haha, get it? Pete, Peter…hah…” Peter B. realized, pointing at himself. Mr.O’Hara considered it for a beat. “Hm…That’s…stupid. It’s called the arachno-humanoid-poly-multiverse, which sounds… stupid too, I guess. As I was saying, I am … glad to announce that LYLA and I have summed up enough money for the four of you to go to Dave and Buster’s.” Miles, Gwen, Hobie, and Pav erupted into cheers. A day at the good old arcade after months of hardcore training at HQ? Who could ask for more? After the cheers wash away, plain brute competition started to brew in the silence, riding into the room on the death of their hollers.

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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Another promise of the morning sun dawned upon the modern city of Nueva York. Trains filled with busy passengers ascended into the sky, their neighbors launching in no more time than the next pump in a still-beating heart. Flying cars soared through the air, shiny and gleaming, growling like two dogs chasing after one another in a puppy game of tag. Buildings, tall and small, stood like stalks next to their neighbor in a garden, almost as if they were conspiring with one another. Did you see her dress? Building A might say to Building B, or, rather, Why, isn’t that funny. He was just demolished a week ago, but he’s back up on the block now! But, my dear reader, while these buildings have mounds of gossip to develop and renovate, here is not where our story begins. Instead, I’d like to focus your attention on one of the many buildings of this restless city, one rather hexagonal in its exterior. Her shape is slit along one of her sides to make way for a type of elevator, it seems, and on this elevator are what appears to be four children … Ah! Of course! The very leads of our story.

Miles Morales, Hobie Brown, Gwen Stacy, and Pavitr Prahabkar are their names, yes, that’s right. Oh! Yes, what is it? … The ‘Spider-Squad’ is what they have temporarily appointed themselves as until further consideration? Very well then. … And what else? … Is that so?

I have been informed by my sources, dear reader, that you are indeed already familiar with these four members of Spider-Society. So, with the preconceived notion that this is in fact true, I’d like to welcome you back, officially, into Spider-Society. They have missed you as much as I have.

Tyler Jones is a human who graduated at the top of his class at the Aurora Academy. He is the squad’s “Alpha,” or commander. He was supposed to get first pick in terms of the other people on his team, but because he went to save Aurora, he ended up with those who remained after everyone else made their pick. He is a White-passing heterosexual cisgendered male. We find out later he is also half-Syldrathi, an alien race that is presumably based on BIPOC ethnicities and practices. 

Scarlett Jones is a diplomat who knows many languages, handles foreign affairs, and negotiation, otherwise known as the squad’s “Face.” Tyler Jones is her twin brother. She has a long history of exes and is ever longingly sarcastic. She is a white heterosexual cisgendered woman. We find out later she is half-Syldrathi as well. 

Kaliis Idraban Gilwraeth is Syldrathi (an alien race in the book) who was born to be a warrior. He is the squad’s “Tank,” whose primary purpose is to fight if need be. Since the age of six, he was trained to defeat his enemies and not tolerate anything less. He is a heterosexual cisgendered male.

Aurora Jie-Lin O’Malley is a human girl out of time who was awoken by the squad after centuries frozen in a colony ship, and found herself gifted with dangerous psychic powers. She is Asian-American (Chinese and Irish,) and a heterosexual cisgendered woman. 

Finian de Karran de Seel is a Betraskan (another alien race in the book) who has a heart for all things mechanics. He is the squad’s “Gearhead,” and has a crude sense of humor. He is a disabled bisexual cisgendered male who has pale white skin. 

Zila Madran is the “Brain” of the squad, a medic who knows the body inside and out and is stellar at all things STEM. In the third book, her work allows her to statistically calculate the probabilities of every ideal event occurring and she is eventually the one (with her wife Nari Kim) who saves the entire galaxy from destruction. She is a Black queer cisgendered woman. 

This media analysis will focus on Zila Madran’s role in Aurora’s End, which becomes crucial in the third book and the mechanics of the plot. It will analyze the message that Amie Kaufman, a white woman, and Jay Kristoff, a white man, have delivered to its readers by having Zila, a Black queer woman, be the one who saves the entire galaxy from its demise.

Zila’s character description, thankfully, is one that is not offensive. Unlike the common tendency for white authors to compare Black skin to food, her description in Aurora Rising that we get when we first meet her is simply “dark brown skin and long, tight black curls.”And in Aurora Burning on page 45, there is a conversation between Scarlett and Zila where readers first learn about Zila’s queer identity:

Scarlett: “Yeah. But don't fall in love with me, Zila. I'll just break your heart.” 

Zila: “That does seem consistent with your romantic modus operandi. You are also too tall for me.”

Scarlett: “Wait… you like girls?”

Zila shrugs, scanning the crowd: “Not tall ones.”

However, a closer look at one scene in the book will reveal that Zila’s identifiers are taken into account in the overall plot of the story. In terms of sexuality, Zila is the last one to enter a relationship. The readers have watched every other squadmate enter a romantic entanglement in Aurora Rising and Aurora Burning.  Their relationships grow to become a large, important part of the plot, with multiple chapters dedicated to their development. In the beginning of Aurora’s End, Zila, Scarlett, and Finian get sent back in time to the year 2177 in a time loop. In other words, they are stuck in a segment of 2177 where, after a certain amount of minutes, they meet some sort of untimely death. Most of the time it’s a quantum pulse hitting the station or angry lieutenants deciding to shoot at them. Once they die, the segment of time resets. Each time the segment resets, it gets shorter, and the squad has to figure out how to escape the time loop before they die in it again. In the time segment, they successfully reach out to Nari Kim, a legionnaire of the academy who they find at the station they are attempting to come into contact with. After Scarlett successfully works her diplomat magic before she can get blasted to pieces, Zila gets to work detonating the pulsar with Nari. Meanwhile, Scarlett and Finian decide to start messing around. Prior to this time loop, Scarlett and Finian agreed to enter a romantic relationship, so when they decide to start messing around, their lack of focus makes Zila a bit irritated, so she shouts: “are you two spending precious minutes in the middle of a heretofore unheard-of temporal paradox engaging in frivolous presexual activity?” To which Scarlett replies, “You’re such a hopeless romantic, Z” (Kaufman and Kristoff 185). In the scene, Zila is angry with their lack of consideration for the task at hand. However, it can be argued that she is somewhat romantically/sexually frustrated with the fact that everyone has found love but her. This argument can be supported as she ends up realizing Nari is “not tall” (Kaufman and Kristoff 98), and “as [Nari] keeps speaking, I let myself sink into her voice” (Kaufman and Kristoff 201) Later on, after many romantic events have occurred like this one, she realizes that Nari Kim is the one that future, probability-calculating Zila assigned herself to fall in love with by giving her past self hawk earrings that match the animal insignia on Nari’s vest (it’s quite complicated—I hope that is clear enough. I’d be happy to explain more if it’s unclear.) Her frustrations are then relieved when she learns that Nari feels the same way. At that point, Zila learns that she is supposed to stay in the year 2177 with Nari in order to calculate the events that make up the most optimal timeline: a timeline where her squadmates save the galaxy. 

Arguably, there are a lot of identifiers that shape the scene described above, the one that ultimately is the start of Zila’s romantic journey. The fact that she is the last one to enter a relationship could possibly be due to three identifiers. To start, the eurocentric beauty standard is against her, as she is African American. In 2014, an OkCupid study found that black women were rated the “least desirable” amongst all other races. Second, mainstream society encircles the idea of white queerness being the only queerness to exist. In a paper by the National Library of Medicine, Carmen Logie states that “by representing queerness as white…women of color were rendered invisible in both queer and racialized communities…” and that, as mentioned later on, “women of color were further marginalized by constructions of "real" women as passive, feminine and white, and conversely perceptions of women of color as aggressive, emotional, and hypersexualized.” Due to all of these factors, the ‘dating pool’ shrinks for Black queer women in terms of future partners. Applying this logic, it is quite sensible it would take her a longer time to find the right partner, and luckily, she did. Therefore, the scenes quoted and described above could encompass Zila’s Black, queer, and female identifiers with both their overt statements and what is unsaid by the timing.

Kaufman and Kristoff have successfully established Zila Madran as a strong, self-sufficient, beautiful, bright Black woman who, simply by existing, redacts harmful stereotypes and creates a new image for Black women in the world of science fiction. One stereotype that the Aurora Cycle Trilogy combats with the character Zila Madran is the ‘weird girl’ stereotype. One could argue that the reason Zila is the last one to find a relationship is because she is naturally quiet and not very emotionally available until her character arc near the end of the book. A counterargument is that this is a stereotype which has been romanticized in the media quite often, only that the stereotype requires the quiet stoic girl to be white and heterosexual, and that if she is any other race/sexuality, she’s seen as even weirder. White heterosexual women who fill this stereotype and find romantic interests are Raven from Teen Titans, Detective Jet Slootmaekers in Law and Order, and April Ludgate-Dwyer from Parks and Recreation. Like Zila, they are quiet and stoic, so physical appearance and romantic preference must be the only thing that sets Zila apart from the common narrative. Fortunately, Zila and Nari marry and grow old together once they fall in love. So, Kaufman and Kristoff challenge the ‘weird white girl’ single story stereotype by changing the race of the ‘weird girl’ and writing Zila with a fulfilling queer relationship. 

In addition, another stereotype that Kaufman and Kristoff combat is the stereotype that Black women are unintelligent. Black people, women, and especially Black women have been stereotyped as unintelligent for centuries. As Zora Neale Hurston puts it in Their Eyes Were Watching God, “De n----- woman is de mule uh de world,” meant only to sit and do meaningless tasks that don’t let them build any type of real intelligence or skill. Of course, this stereotype dates back to slavery, where most Black people—especially Black women—were unable to pursue any sort of formal education because they were enslaved. A very small percentage were taught to read and write while they were enslaved. Kaufman and Kristoff combat this by designing Madran’s character with astute intelligence, which is evident throughout the story as she is deemed the military squadron position “Brain.”