Lord of the Midnight Sun

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

The Cosmic Bat Nebula (LDN 43)

A bit of young starlight peeks through the dense clouds of gas and dust that make up the Cosmic Bat’s 12 lightyear wingspan. The ultraviolet light from the young stars energizes the nebula’s hydrogen gas, causing it to glow an ominous red. The jet of glowing hydrogen gas emerging from the bat’s head hints at the star formation hidden within.

Like when people argue whether warhammer 40k is fascist propaganda that says that fascism is good, or if it's actually a satire of fascist propaganda saying that fascism is bad. When it isn't really either of those things. That's not what it's going for and that's not what it's doing. It's got satirical elements floating around in there in varying degrees depending on era and author, but the point of them isn't to instruct the audience whether fascism is bad - it's for drama, and mood, and weird interestingness, and humour, and all the other reasons why things are in art other than political and moral instruction. It portrays a bunch of fucked up stuff connected by in-setting circumstance and lets you make your own mind about it, or just let yourself think "damn that's fucked up" and leave it at that.

It's not even, like, complex, by almost any literary standard. It's the same thing with them being unable to understand marvel movies, literally the most accessible movies ever made, when they crack out the most basic #101 nuance for teenagers where a villain has a sympathetic motive or a hero makes a mistake, and they can't really understand it, thinking that because the villain has a sympathetic quality then the movie is trying to demonise that sympathetic quality, because they assume that the film is operating at the level of basic propaganda, when it's, like, even slightly above that.