#sapphicscience

Answering Fandom Alphabet for @sapphicscience. Prompts here x. Chosen Fandom: General/Yellowjackets

ok so some context since you dont destiny. i tried to keep this as brief as possible but. theres a lot happening here and it got kinda long sorry:

destiny world is broadly a pretty standard far-future scifi world, there was a Golden Age, then a Collapse, and the game takes place post-post-apocalypse.

elsie bray is the grandchild of clovis bray, the head of a massive megacorp from the golden age who was obsessed with legacy&immortality, to the point he modified his descendants's genetics and created exos, immortal robots with human consciousnesses uploaded.

(sidenote: theres some very very cool body horror lore pieces about that process i can link you if youre interested, destiny lore has some of the best short scifi/horror writing ive Ever read, but its trapped in an fps looter-shooter mmo)

elsie was deeply complicit in this process and was clovis's "test drive" for the exo project before he was willing to upload his own consciousness, including a custom frame. oh she can also time-travel and got stuck for hundreds-to-thousands of repetitions in a multi-year loop that always ends with everyone she cares about dying including her sister at her own hands, and also the death of all of humanity <3 she feels responsible for all of this.

amanda holliday is was (in my heart shes still alive) the city's shipwright, and was close friends with one of the main exo characters in the game.

oh also they are both trans women. to me.

okay. context out of the way. amanda is the horsegirl and elsie is the flighty and traumatized and stand-offish horse who Only She Can Tame. premise for the fic is elsie needs to do repairs on herself in a hard to reach spot and has to a) ask amanda to use her tools and b) then ask for HELP, which she Does Not Do, due to the aforementioned hundreds of years of betrayal and timeloops. it will feature elsie being deeply touch-starved and weird about it, amanda being appreciative and impressed by her custom frame in a way that elsie isn't sure what to do with bc of how much she hates it as a reminder of her involvement in the exo project, but loves it as its something she got to choose, and the intimacy of trusting someone you barely know to put their hands inside your body and mess around in there bc you dont really have any other choice.

snippet:

aahh thank you!!! 🫶

i'm doing fav yellowjackets fics because. that's what's mostly in my mind lately lol

1. God's very simple and love shouldn't burn - this one i called my lottielee manifesto. my pride and joy. fun fact i could be wrong but i think this was the first lottielee smut (just lottielee and just smut) posted on ao3

2. Who would I be without you, without them? - my most popular yj fic. (mostly) everyone lived roommates au my beloved!

3. Sanctify me when I'm dead - my current wip and the love of my life. Laura Lee Lived AU

4. Lover to lover - i'm embracing being proud of the milf orgy. lesbian sex is the only cure to the wilderness curse confirmed

ansjdjkdjcjdk lmaooooo okay i know you for sure know what my #1 is so thank u for this charlotte. this is gonna be long you already know it’s gonna be long

bly manor literally THE piece of media i am probably talking about if i say "this could have been good if literally everything about it were different" but instead it made me want to stomp m*ke fl*nagan to death with my hooves. there are so many little glimmers of potential and esp aspects of dani's character and viola as a Concept, so many moments of potential for good themes to explore about ghosts and storytelling and even about illness and trauma and queerness that have good bones, but literally every good idea he could have had, he saw that potential and just went the exact opposite direction with it every single time. genuinely like.. reparations when. gonna rewrite this as an actual intentional compassionate allegory about the aids crisis but one that doesn’t hate sick people.

also obviously hill house deserves a good adaptation by someone who actually understands or cares about the queer themes in the book lol but i never watched that so my feelings about it get subsumed into my overwhelming fury about bly manor. everyone knows my thoughts on hill house the book. the fact that fl*nagan made nell and theo sisters and made the story about a biological nuclear family genuinely is a homophobic hate crime and the fact that this is what hooked people into thinking he was writing good queer stories For queer audiences or whatever is fucking wild and everyone needs to apologize to shirley jackson right now immediately

HONESTLY house of the dragon. not bad for adaptational reasons bc i did not read the book and do not care to but i KNOW grrm is just as guilty of everything i am about to say. anyways. buried in there i DO think there is potential for a truly powerful and thoughtful and challenging allegory about fascism and aryanism and divine right to rule and cultural mythmaking and about individuals who are born into that narrative being doomed by it and by the lies of their own superiority that they've been fed since birth and about many of the common people being swept up by a mix of propaganda and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. but that is not the story that is being told lol.

god i want a tv show about museums and scientists and archivists that is not police and/or colonialism propaganda. please scientists are so fun and cool and museums are so so interesting and the site of complex intersections of so many different people and ideas and stories and there is SO much potential for really interesting and different and even reparative stories that could be told based on that premise. so WHY was bones Like That!!!!! (i mean obviously i know why, it was 9/11)

black sails if it like. did not insist on having flint explain to madi how the british empire's power works and why we need to fight it and then having her imprisoned or whatever during the literal climax of the series so that silver could once again take her agency away from her and unilaterally decide the entire future of her people and tell her about it during a fucking voiceover like ajdjdkdkfkdljf. actually if uh everything about all of the storylines of the female characters & the characters of color were different. basically if i got to watch whatever show people who cared about flint and silver were watching lol

honorable mention to the expanse. i have talked too much about the expanse i don’t want to talk about it anymore but the expanse is pretty emblematic of the problems i have with a lot of science fiction as a whole only it hurts more because there was a GLIMMER of hope at the beginning that like these guys actually Understood that any story like this that they might want to tell necessarily HAS to be a story about labor and capitalism but then like. phew. esp s4 onward.. absolute nightmare for me unfortunately.

basically imagine if any of these stories in the “two white dudes try to write an allegory about colonialism and/or capitalism” genre was actually capable of handling any level of intersectional analysis with any level of nuance or compassion and did not focus so hard on being “colorblind” and #girlboss feminist that they end up having their Good Guys do a highly militarized fascism (for the good of the people) but audiences slurp that shit up because of the aforementioned colorblind girlboss feminism. wild thought huh.