FAULT: an SCP SBI AU

This is an au that has consumed me. This blog will just be a terrible mess of whatever I’m stuck on for the week, likely with little explanation and heavy spoilers. Anyway, the general vibe + anomalous properties are below cut:

Commissions: Writing and Art. Starts at 5$

All Nom commissions are prompt gifts for donations to charitable causes, such as the environment, social justice rights, or victims of wars. I will not cover topics of romance, sex, or write about George, Dream, or Wilbur.

Writing: Base 5$ gets a minimum of 300 words. 10$ 1,000 word minimum, 20$ 3,000. I also have no self-control, and there is no additional payment if the prompt is amazing and I break the world limit.

Drawing: Base 5$ gets a drawing in full color. 'Animatics' start at 40$ for a verse, and the price increases for color.

Project Guide

The tag 'crumbs to tide you over' is how I organize ficlets, wip sippets, and fic announcements. Personal tag is something to nom on. Wilbur tags are noms Wilbur or scp Wilbur if you want to block tags, and my PR response to that is here.

Ao3 fics:

Fault. The titular SBI SCP AU. SBI trapped in the Foundation. Lots of angst, large exploration of trauma, dehumanization, moral philosophies, and messed up found family. Tags are fault au, fault memes pog, sbi scp au, fault analysis, etc. This is a whole series and has many associated works. Long Fic.

>Also Where, then, do your loyalties lie? for AU where human Phil works for the Foundation and tries to free kid SCP Tommy. Complete.

Mandatory Family Reunion. Techno kidnapped by criminal dark SBI and handles it very poorly AU. Heavy dark em duo. Explores different types of abuse, motivations, delusions, and how love causes harm. Tag is Mandatory Family Reunion, sometimes mfr. Long Fic.

The Lambs Wolves Wear (Ficlet is here; starts at the Reveal and currently goes further than the ao3) Fully dark SBI where Philza's children were replaced by monsters. Demon "Tommy", changeling "Wilbur", and ghost army "Technoblade" are violent and traumatized, their tensely conflicting infiltration motives jeopardizing the lives of everyone in a twenty mile radius. As they experience love for the first time, will the wolves in sheeps clothing be tamed? Tw for abuse and horror. Long Fic.

Way more below, those are just my main projects ^-^

ok so chapter five very very intentionally draws parallels between Ralsei and the flowers, particularly Flowery. All of the abilities Ralsei has that normal darkners don’t have are answered for: secret knowledge, immense powers, ability to mimic (imperfectly) light-world creatures. The explanation given is that the flowers correspond to lightner living flowers.

Thus we can come to the conclusion that Ralsei is some sort of organic thing in the light world that is not a person. And combined with the fact when Flowery dies his flower is broken, Ralsei must be a living organic thing. Which is a shame for corpse Dess knight theory.

Furthermore: The flowers cannot get to other dark worlds. Otherwise the entire stakes wouldn’t work! Ergo Ralsei as a similar being shouldn’t be able to get to different dark worlds to show up for the adventure. Ralsei then HAS to be an organic thing that is with Kris or Susie. Which can only mean-

Ralsei is mites and fleas living in Kris and Susie’s hair

living? Yes. Always with them? Yes. Small enough to go unnoticed? Yes. And what do we see Susie checking Kris’ hair for this chapter???

My fic based on the Eleonora's falcon's whumpy hunting strategies is here! Summary:

For generations, a certain population of Eleonora’s Falcons have been observed learning to capture smaller birds by shredding their wings and trapping them in rocky crevices to have fresh food available later. In the Avian tongue, Eleonora translates to Elytrian. In the Avian brain, Elytrian translates to nightmare. But while Avian Techno is dreading the moment he’s turned into lunch, Elytrian Philza hasn’t slept in three days trying to take care of his newborn. When the line between chick and chick food starts to blur, how will predator and prey handle it?

Design details below cut :) featuring lots of speculative biology and culture based on real birds.

Just. A fun thought idea.

Techno: uhh. Because they have a surprise party at the end. But im not supposed to tell you. So youre gonna have to pretend to not know that

Wilbur: oh!! i can keep a secret 🤐 shhh

Exile Tommy: time to throw all of my belongings in a pit. But it’s okay my friend asked me to and it gets worse when I don’t comply

Phil heard ‘bark’ and immediately went ‘welp if it means you won’t kill me—“

This is an essay detailing my thoughts on gendered horror in my fic The Lambs Wolves Wear, wherein Philza’s children are replaced by monsters and he’s forced to maintain the mask of a family to survive. And I’d just like to put a disclaimer for tumblr “reading comprehension” dot com that I’m not a raging misogynist that believes men and women are separate species with no experience overlap, but instead observing societal expectations.

Gendered horror is about who is allowed to experience fear. The archetypical example being a final girl, as women are allowed to be emotional and scared and crying when being murdered, but men are often not afforded that. Because of societal pressure to repress their emotions, men are allowed fear but not allowed to show it. Furthermore, gendered horror is about what types of fears are narratively allowed to be done to different genders. This is blatant in topics like sexual violence, but it goes far deeper into the themes horror explored through different genders. Thus, I see merit in examining the types of horror Philza experiences in The Lambs Wolves Wear through a gendered lens, particularly as it pertains to his role as a father. This essay is going to be centered on the traditional Western paradigm of fathers as bread winners/protectors and mothers as nurturers/homekeepers, and how that pertains to gendered horror.

At the start of the story, Philza does not fall cleanly into the false societal dichotomy of father/mother roles. He can’t, given his status as a single parent, forced to provide both physically and emotionally, and excelling at both. Thus, he is in a position to explore horror from both the roles of father and mother within their societal archetypes.

Philza’s story is about the horror of failing to be a father.

Imbedded within the very premise of The Lambs Wolves Wear is Philza’s failure as a father to protect his family from external threats. He has already lost. He could not prevent his children from being taken, either through violence or threat thereof. Finding himself within the archetype of a vengeance hero with a classic slaughtered family, Philza naturally seeks violent retribution as is expected of him. However, it is not something he can deliver. Every second is a constant pounding reminder that he’s both too weak to protect his family and too weak to avenge them. Even worse, as time goes on he finds it increasingly difficult to even want to fulfill this expected violence in a deep betrayal of his missive to protect. Not only is he physically weak, but morally so as well. It’s an incredibly emasculating experience for him.

Second, as the damage the monsters inflict mounts, Philza loses the ability to provide sustenance to his family due to the razed cropland and slaughtered livestock. He is cut off from his work and left without a way to fulfill his family’s needs. This represents a second failure in protecting his family, albeit from a non physical threat. This aspect of fatherhood he weaponizes against the monsters, admitting his insecurities to manipulate them. It is the only grief that Philza is actually allowed to express, becoming an outlet for some of his fear. But not much, because men are expected to be unwavering and shoulder the responsibility without appearing weak. As a father he is not meant to be scared. But Philza spends the entire story so deeply, harrowingly afraid. This is the only place he succeeds as a father, in suppressing his emotions so others don’t know how badly he’s doing.

Still, Philza ultimately fails his duties as a father, unable to provide safety, physical needs, or vengeance.

Philza’s story is about the horror of being a mother.

First, establishing he fills an archetypal female role. While Philza outwardly suppresses emotional displays of fear as is expected from him, as the reader we’re privy to his harrowing terror and imposing sense of helplessness, which means from a narrative standpoint he’s still failing to hide his emotions. This emotional vulnerability is more permitted with women. Next put a check mark next to physical weakness compared to giant hellbeasts and undead armies. While male weakness compared to a foe is often explored given the aforementioned duties of protection, as a man Philza is still expected to try to fight back. He doesn’t. This emphasizes his powerlessness. And lastly, he is expected to preform massive amounts of emotional labor and other duties associated with motherhood. So, he is well positioned to explore certain (societal) aspects of female horror (though obviously not all).

The sole thing Philza can provide is emotional comfort, which falls within the traditional motherly role of nurturer. It becomes his only use, stripped of independence from the loss of his livelihood and the strict expectation that he will be a good parent (or else). He is put on a pedestal, expected to have no flaws, to never get angry or frustrated or overwhelmed, to have desires or ambitions outside of a motherly role. The wants of his “children” always comes first, even when it’s destroying him by violating what he needs. His only use is as a mother, and so he must be a perfect one or die. This aligns heavily with classic females roles in fiction (Being thus: Mother, damsel, whore, witch). Mothers in fiction are typically defined exclusively by what they provide for their far more important children, or what they fail to provide through their death. They are not people outside of their defined role. Philza is allowed no identity outside of nurturer.

Where once Philza had a role as a breadwinner, he is quickly stripped of that work, his domain becoming the household. He cannot leave, because why would he need to? That would get in the way of always being present and emotionally available to help his “children”. This cuts Philza off both from his community and from independence, as he is now reliant on the “children” to bring in food and water. Furthermore, the “children” are questionable providers yet Philza doesn’t have any other means of securing resources. This reflects the financial dependence that many women have been trapped in due to societal constraints limiting/forbidding jobs, bank accounts, being single/familyless. With no other option of survival, Philza has to pretend to be in love or be destitute (or murdered). The domestic abuse he experiences is endured because he is utterly dependent on the “people” abusing him, much like many, many, many women. And even should he escape, Philza was a subsistence farmer dependent upon his land, now the territory of the “children”. Razed as it is, it’s still the only means of survival he knew before he was forced to become a stay at home dad. So he stays. Home is a prison, but it is the only way he can survive.

Philza is forced to be responsible for the emotional state of others at the cost of his own mental health, and is expected to be perfect and exclusively dedicated to nurturing. He is controlled through dependence, isolation, the thin veneer of a family unit, and physical intimidation/abuse, which are themes deeply related to the horror of motherhood.

Closing thoughts:

In general media, there is a trend I’ve noticed in one gender adopting the role of another, specifically not in a trans context. A woman adopting a man’s role is empowerment. This is the marvel action girl heroes, the girlbosses, the ‘I learned to fight from my brothers’. But a man adopting a woman’s role is horror. It is the fear of the oppressor that they could be oppressed. Male horror is becoming dependent, the assumption dependence is inherently horrific because it can be abused so readily. And so in male horror, being a final girl is not just the horror of the experience, but of physical and EMOTIONAL weakness. Becoming a final girl -becoming a girl- is an unimaginable horror. If and only if you define womanhood as weak, crying, fragile, dependent, and identity-less outside their singular archetypal role.

The Lambs the Wolves Wear concerns itself with exploring those power inversions, a parent being abused by children, a father discovering the horror of motherhood. And. Well obviously I’m trans, so the message isn’t preventing said gender role transitions (well perhaps dismantling the roles into something healthy each individual decides but! Not the essay for that!). Similarly, children become caretakers for their elderly parents, or become parents themselves. It is a hierarchy that already naturally subverts itself. The horror is not from change, it is from power and lack thereof.

Crucially, as Philza desperately reaches for the vengeance hero archetype, we will likewise explore the horror of trying to maintain the man>woman and parent>child power hierarchy/expectations. The question becomes not forbidding these dynamic shifts, but how to facilitate them. How to REMOVE the horror, remove the abuse of said power dynamics both in their status quo and in their subversions.

Trick or treat <33

- ehe

Philza: *standing at the door where he was handing out treats. Just kinda. Staring.* hmmm. How much will the kids hate me if I just kill this problem. Uhh mates, looks like we have a problem. The kind we need to vote on...

Tommy: *screams and hides*

Tubbo: GUYS! We seriously don't think the Foundation is hiring minors???

Wilbur: Better safe than sorry!!

What if therapy with mumbo (cutout) got a little sad?

We also a not inconsiderable number of examples of people who absolutely should NOT have reproduced (like most of the Vorrutyers!)

I do think Cordelia's choice is quite in character, as is the fact that Aral made it clear he didn't feel he could honorably start more kids he wasn't sure of seeing grow to adulthood. But then left her a way to have more when he was gone. *sniff* (dusty in here. ) Six seems... excessive. I personally always subscribed to the "never have more kids than you have hands" philosophy, but then I ended up with an only so I may not be the best person to give advice on this. Heh.

@thelatemelancholy just for clarification: are you surprised Miles wanted to have kids? Or side-eying the fact he had them because who the hell would trust Miles with kids? Because I totally get the latter - I also wonder this about myself and I have a kid! - but I am baffled by the former. Miles never made any secret of wanting to have a family.

I know a lot of folks don't like GJ&tRQ - and I get some of the criticism - but this is honest to gods one of my faves. I love the symmetry of Cordelia finding love again on the same planet she found it forty+ years before. I love her finally fulfilling her long term desire to have more children. I love her being in charge of a whole damned planet. I love that she can just lay that down. I love that she gets a scientific partner after her decades with a military/political animal. Heh. I love Jole to itty bitty pieces. I wish we got more of him and Aral (and Cordelia) together so badly it hurts. Which is why the vast majority of my fanfic is about some combination of the three of them.

Alright, enough rambling about my obsession.

I was partially just piecing together her desire to start a new family, far away from Barrayar. (Technically an extension of her family, but given the age gaps, Miles will be more like an uncle to his own siblings, and he's planets away.)

And thinking about how the people in the Vorkosigan's District say Ekaterin belongs to them and Miles belongs to the Imperium. Because he does! Wholeheartedly!

Cordelia gave 40 years of her life and her first-born child to Barrayar, a planet that's been only recently scraping itself together to be a good place for its citizens to live. I'm not surprised that she wants more children or that she wants them far away from Barrayar, on the planet she helped discover and that started her life with Aral, for all its, uh, unique qualities.

My struggle has more to do with the current political environment and state of maternal health care in my country than with anything wrong with the writing. Normally I keep my fiction and reality pretty separate. This one snuck in.

And on a less "real life is depressing" note, I also love that Cordelia is giving them all "Kosigan" as a middle name.

I once asked Bujold on Goodreads whether Cordelia would really go through with her intention to have all 6 kids. Granted, one was already born by the end of GJ&tRQ, and another one on the way, but surely she would rethink her plans once she had around 2-3 of them? Bujold replied, somewhat obliquely, that people shouldn't let their 21st century biases colour their view of what reproductive decisions people living in a world with very different demographics, ecology, and healthcare would make. In one sense, she's absolutely right. Cordelia (and the other characters in the Vorkosiverse) live in a universe with a functional uterine replicator, which is a complete game changer in itself; not to mention, an overall higher level of medicine/healthcare, contraception, and genetic technology. Moreover, they (at least, the Barrayarans/Sergyarans) live on planets that are - unlike 21st century Earth - underpopulated, severely so in case of Sergyar. Far from needing to reduce the human burden on the planet, they need more people - lots more in case of Sergyar, to build a self-sustaining society. In such a situation, it's not hard to imagine that people would choose to have as many children as they want and can afford.

On the other hand, I do think Bujold missed part of the implication of my question. My point was, wouldn't the shine of wanting more children in theory kind of start to wear off once the children started becoming a practical reality? That is, once Cordelia had more children than she had hands (as @maykendehoutman puts it above), maybe she would rethink whether she really wanted all those potential kids? Ok, granted, I'm a happily child-free woman who's never particularly wanted kids, so my viewpoint is undeniably biased. After all, there are people even in the present world who willingly have 6 (or more) kids, even without the benefit of a uterine replicator.

That said, the demographic trend of the past 100-150 years has been people overwhelmingly having fewer children in the face of growing prosperity and better healthcare. (Yes, I'm once again falling into the trap of the 21st century bias. But my point here is regarding human nature, not the demographics per se.) This may not be obvious, considering that the world population has increased exponentially in the same amount of time, but it's clear enough once you start breaking down how/why that increase has occurred. Put simply, the world population is currently increasing because people are dying much later in life than they used to, meaning that fewer people are dying at any one point in time than are being born. The awful reality is that in the past, a horrifyingly large proportion (around a half, though numbers vary depending on how you count them) of all children who were born died before they were old enough to have children of their own. Major healthcare improvements in the 20th century, like vaccines and antibiotics, as well as massive improvements in public sanitation and diet changed all that. Today, the vast majority of people who are born live to grow up - and a large proportion of them have kids. The population increases, because there's more people having kids in general. But the number of kids each person has has actually decreased. The main reason for that is that when people know that their kids will live to grow up, they tend not to have so many of them in the first place. This trend has been seen almost without exception throughout the world, in pretty much all cultures. There's also a direct correlation between increasing prosperity and better healthcare on the one hand and fewer kids per person on the other.

So the idea in the Vorkosigan Saga that people would choose to have more kids if they were free from the burden of bearing the kids themselves doesn't quite gel with the trends seen in the real world. Granted, we don't actually have a uterine replicator, but the fact remains that childbirth is far easier and safer in the present day than it has ever been for our ancestors. But even so, even in prosperous nations with great healthcare and highly progressive laws regarding reproduction, the trend is in the opposite direction - i.e. these countries (e.g. Japan, South Korea, several Nordic and East European countries) have a shrinking population. Even in countries where the government benignly encourages reproduction (e.g. by giving young couples incentives to have more kids or just have kids in the first place), they have a hard time getting most people to oblige.

What none of these (mostly) male science fiction writers were able to imagine was that, once women had easy access to reliable birth control starting around 1970 (10 years after the Pill was introduced), they would decide en masse for themselves that they wanted fewer children, and the birthrate in “first world” countries dropped sharply because of it. We’re at a point now in the West where white supremacists are freaked out about the numbers and keep trying to get white women to have more children, by hook or by crook.

I’m willing to accept that upper-class people in the Vorkosiverse might have big families. Miles in particular has something to prove about his genes and not being a “mutie,” so it makes sense to me that he would choose to have that many children. Cordelia also clearly wanted a big family and specifically was hoping to have at least two girls who would be sisters. She’s super close to the Koudelka girls, who call her “Tante” (Aunt), so that’s another indication she wanted more children but could not.

We don’t hear a lot about the other characters having more than one or two. It sounds like Gregor and Laisa had an heir and a spare and stopped with that. I feel reasonably comfortable thinking that Miles and Cordelia are outliers even on Barrayar who decide to have the huge families they thought they could never have.

One last piece of evidence: in Komarr, Miles thinks about how Ekaterin’s birth family follows a very common pattern of having two boys followed by a girl, so it sounds like three to four children is closer to the Barrayaran average than what Miles and Cordelia decide to do.

Forgive me the details escape me, but I don’t think the people in the mountain districts have access to uterine replicators. So on the other extreme there’s probably the familiar economic barrier to technology that leads to the longer term cost of raising a lot of kids (well the non muttie ones…). Perhaps the number of children per family has a bit of a U curve on the economic axis? Depending on how large the Barrayaran middle class is (and class mobility too) this could over all still result in a general trend of fewer kids per family compared to the time of isolation, just with different trends in different classes.

Also I can quite reasonably imagine some Musk esque high class Vor nut jobs who elect to have as many children as possible to avoid the tragedy of the Vor Replacement Theory…

Alternatively to all that: “Average Barrayaran has six children per family” factoid actualy just statistical error. Average Barrayaran has 3-4 according to Alexa-Santi-author. Vorkosigan Georgs (not to be confused with Gregor), who live in a Vorkosigan Surleau and has six babies per family, are an outlier adn should not have been counted.

Outside the Watsonian speculation, I think it’s an escapist fantasy biased by when it’s made, about having as many kids as you want and no more OR less. VK saga tends to emphasize the ‘or less’ portion. And particularly with current politics in certain areas attacking the right to have ‘no more’ children than desired, or 21 century biases like crowding or a large population, I definitely understand why it doesn’t hit the same. Reproductive rights have taken some hits.

But at least for me, as another Texan, I know my family is going to have less kids than I want because of money, and American healthcare, and Republicans chokehold on reproductive rights and the support, resources, education, gun laws, everything involved in raising a human being. A uterine replicated could solve about two of those, and being Vor (or equivalent social economic class thereof) could take out a swath of the remaining problems. I think class plays a decent chunk in how the Vorkosigans are planning their families but distinctly in terms of an absent limiting factor, much in the same way the uterine replicator escapes the worries of many reproductive health problems. And with reproductive and economic fears looming large, the fantasy part of an escapist fantasy is glaringly obvious, to the degree the more utopic wish fulfillment elements are felt to be unrealistic.

And I also want to be clear that these are “Yes, And” responses on my part. I agree with you, and I’m a nerd who likes diving into these worldbuilding details.

The other thing to remember about Cordelia is that she comes from a world where reproduction is severely restricted. Not only do the girls (but not the boys? Author blind spot alert) on Beta all get their first contraceptive implant at puberty, getting a license to have a child is a lengthy and difficult process. Unlicensed children are so rare they get dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and Cordelia drops some dark hints in A Civil Campaign that Beta Colony’s obsession with restricting reproduction can be very coercive.

So Cordelia moves from a planet that severely restricts her reproduction in one way to one that promises at least some relative freedom of choice, only to have that freedom taken away again by the soltoxin attack. No wonder she has a pent-up urge to have more children even if it’s 40 years later. We never do find out if she goes through with all six embryos, or if she decides to stop after two or three.

And you’re absolutely right that there’s a class issue with Barrayaran reproduction that gets mentioned throughout the later books. In Memory, which takes place around Miles’s 30th birthday, he visits Silvy Vale and re-meets Harra and her family, who were at the center of a murder case he decided a decade before. He notes that Harra has two children now, which he says must have been body births, because replicator technology hasn’t made its way to this remote mountain village.

In Komarr, Ekaterin tells Miles that her son Nikki was a body birth, because she and her husband didn’t want to have to wait and save up for a replicator birth. They’re Vor, but they’re minor Vor, more like gentry, and live on his salary as a bureaucrat. So, again, there’s both a class and money divide in who gets to use a replicator and who doesn’t.

I haven’t read it in a while and don’t remember it very well, but Diplomatic Immunity revolves around the theft of a huge number of replicators from Cetaganda and Miles trying to figure out who’s responsible and recover them before all of the babies in them need to “hatch.” So that one really dives into the different attitudes that Barrayar and Cetaganda have about reproduction.

If anyone reading this far hasn’t listened to the “My Word as Vorkosigan” podcast series from Plot Trysts, I highly recommend it. Not only is each episode a full hour discussion of each book, they spend a lot of time talking about the themes and connections between the books, with reproduction being a major, ongoing theme.