Whumpster Fire

Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt

The crowd roared in confused enthusiasm as Tenna gave a gracious flurry of low-FPS bows, pausing only for the occasional stink-nose at his audience plants who weren’t throwing enough 3D roses.

Eventually, the room fell silent. It was Senshi’s turn to speak.

He puffed out his chest, took a long, sweeping look over the audience… and shook his head.

“I can see not all of you are eating properly.”

The crowd murmured with embarrassment.

“I don’t know who needs to hear this, but it’s time to take the turkey out of your icebox. I have seen the ingenious technology with which your people store food... and I have also seen the waste which results from such convenience.

“The food you take had a life. Beasts grew fat on the grass of the field, plants grew from the sun’s rays, and mushrooms grew from minerals in the cracks of caves. And yet, it sits in your iceboxes, collecting moisture until it perishes.

“Eat what is given to you. Because its life will make you stronger, too.”

Without another word, Senshi left his podium and stepped away from the stage. The crowd murmured in confusion. “Is he really like that?” somebody said. “I only remember reblogging the photosets of him tripping and showing ass.”

--

Back in the Green Room, Tenna wrung his antennas nervously.

“Y-y-you think they liked me!? They HAD to!! I mean, I don’t know what Asgore was thinking, getting that weird haircut and running that food waste campaign, but… YOU thought I did good, didn’t you, Kris?”

Laios nodded aggressively, a streak of blue face paint peeling from his forehead.

“You did AMAZING, Tenna! By the way, now that we’ve seen all your insider campaign secrets, do you have any more videos of Susie? Especially her tail... If I could get a look at that, I could finally tell if she’s a dinosaur or --”

THWACK. Fake antlers butted Laios’s head.

“LAIOS?? Weren’t we dressed up to help SENSHI???” Marcille hissed, gesturing awkwardly with her hooves.

Suddenly, Tenna turned to the two adventurers.

“Hey, WAIT a second. SOMETHING’s not right here...”

Laios and Marcille held their breath.

“Where the heck are my POINTS!?”

Just then, the door opened. Chilchuck took one step into the room, whistling and holding a large bag.

Everyone turned to him.

Chilchuck paused, took a step backwards, and closed the door.

“CHILCHUCK!!!” yelled Tenna.

“How come Chilchuck got to stay Chilchuck!?” yelled Marcille at the same time.

--

It's gotta be some big turning point in humanity to differentiate between a before era and a now era. My initial thought was the fall of Rome but that still feels like it centers a certain perspective, when ideally point 0 would be a universal point 0

If you're wondering, that would make the current year 5226, which is kind of astonishing because it's only 550 years off from Year One of the Hebrew calendar. That suggests it is actually pretty close to the true beginning of writing--the closest we can get with any certainty, at least--because both are from the same relatively small geographical area, and no writings are found outside that tiny Levant/Egypt/Babylon area for 2000 years (at which point they turn up close by in India).

I'd also suggest keeping the twelve months because we're used to it and a lot of cultures have holidays pegged to specific dates, but adjusting them so 1 January falls the day after the winter/summer solstice.

PROS FOR THE YEAR:

--date is objective. No matter where you are in the world, the Kish tablet is still oldest. It doesn't matter what your personal belief system is because it's tied to a real physical thing.

--it's far enough in the past that finding another, even older fragment is unlikely. The proximity of this piece to the date of Torah suggests it really is about as far back as we can go.

--it's from a culture that died out millennia ago. No living culture has a claim to it, and modern state borders do not match up with the borders of the culture we think it's from. This reduces the possibility of people claiming any one modern culture or country is favored.

--it would create a very neat delineation between history and prehistory that matches the scientific description (prehistory is anything before writing).

--makes "1999" by Prince extremely funny.

CONS FOR THE YEAR:

--prioritizes a specific kind of civilization (one with writing). Aboriginal culture dates back 60,000 years, with art-based communication, but the vast majority of it would still fall before Year One because their tangible communication isn't writing.

--we'd have to deal with Iraq bragging about owning the starting point of the calendar and that could absolutely lead to more geopolitical instability.

--Christian extremists would be insufferable and probably insist on continuing the current calendar.

--while minuscule verging on impossible, we could theoretically find an older written fragment.

--translating document ages would be a MESS, especially for digital records, which are pegged to a specific date in 1969.

PROS FOR THE MONTH:

--objective. No matter where you are in the world, 1 January would be either the day the days start getting longer or the day the days start getting shorter. (Equator people shut up, we know you're special.)

--not too far off from where we are now. Won't cause terrible confusion when Christmas is suddenly in summer or Golden Week doesn't fall during cherry blossom season.

--a lot of cultures and religions have holidays tied to the solstices and equinoxes and this would move them off some random date.

--nobody can agree on what 1 January was supposed to commemorate. Useful for future historians.

--those of us who aren't Christian wouldn't have to deal with the week after Christmas still being Christmas.

CONS FOR THE MONTH:

--many religious arguments over stuff like "so does this mean Christmas is 25 December and pushed back, or 4 January and stays on the same heliocentric date" that could bubble into instability.

--objective for now, but will shift as we move through the galaxy. If we're around for another couple thousand years the solstices and equinoxes would once again be on some random date.

Suggestions:

185 CE: date of the earliest definitively recorded supernova observation. This is better than the 79 CE Mt. Vesuvius eruption because that was kind of a region-specific thing.

1246 CE: last time Earth's perihelion fell on a solstice (northern winter / southern summer)

people who get what I mean:

people who have found a way to have fun in the corn maze but who I'm a little worried about:

person who we are going to put in the corn:

Since corn is an annual grass these are more of a seasonal attraction mostly associated with autumn, and the design can change from year to year.

And hes gonna push them all into a fan.

Like, the man is canonically straight, there's just no romance in the book/movie. There are scenes in both for the purpose of letting us know he's straight (I say "for the purpose of" because neither does this well unless the audience is romance poisoned and looking for it). And that is actually important because his core character trait is that he's a coward who is too scared of potential emotional pain to be in a romantic relationship. That's supposed to be the point. He doesn't have any immediate family because he can't commit to a romantic partner, even though multiple are available. He doesn't even have a dog because he will outlive it and that will hurt. He is a teacher because being surrounded by children and teachers, he avoids the pain and humiliation that he got from his scientific peers.

Representation wasn't taken from us. Andy Weir is not as good a writer as a lot of people think he is. He's got a ton of blind spots and tends to fail at anything character related. (Like, Book Stratt is literally a caricature of three specific stereotypes and ill thought out writing decisions in a trench coat, and no one else seems to notice.) But he's so good at writing engaging plots and making the audience feel smart for following along with the science that people think he's better than he actually is. Like, he is good, that's an amazing skill to have. But that's where the break between my reading and everyone else's is coming from.

I don't actually believe that there are so many of us who looked at this self-isolating loser, who has to character develop out of being self-isolating, and decided that "yeah, he's one of us". I think we all just saw a huge blockbuster movie that didn't have a romantic subplot and latched onto it. But ignoring the core themes of the movie to make it fit this headcanon feels bad. The whole thing feels bad. It's making me feel like not liking that Grace's flaw of self-isolation is being turned into "representation" is me being aphobic. It's making me feel like being asexual is self harm that I need to character develop out of. So it just, feels bad seeing people being upset that Grace is being shipped with anyone, that the headcanon isn't universal, that some people seemed to understand the character the way I did.

I don't actually believe that there are so many of us who looked at this self-isolating loser, who has to character develop out of being self-isolating, and decided that "yeah, he's one of us".

You don't believe that there are a large number of ace Tumblr users who find a "self-isolating loser" relatable? /s

I'm aroace, and while I'm personally ambivalent about whether Grace is or isn't asexual, the most common reason I have seen cited for why people find an aroace interpretation of Grace is compelling is because the way it plays out in the film can easily be read as others making the assumption that his not having a romantic partner means his life is lonely and unfulfilling, and literally devaluing his life as a result.

I'm sure there is a decent percentage of people who do interpret it that way, I've seen it once or twice in the six months since the movie's come out, but most ace people I know are not self-isolating. They often have felt isolated, but it's not self inflicted. I'm not saying it's an invalid interpretation, but that, like, a little too often it feels a little too much like blaming the self-isolation on being ace. (and there's always the chance that both of us are "well in My experience"-ing this, where you and I are just in two different circles and therefore are seeing two different prevailing types of ace interpretations of Grace)

And I can admit, I should have made it clearer that the "not so many of us [aces]" is in response to, like: every other day there's some post getting thousands of notes about how sad and miserable all the aces must be that "their headcanon" isn't shared by everyone in the fandom. Like, it feels like one out of every 10 of those actually seems come from an exasperated ace person, but man does the wording of a lot of them feel like they're allos trying to get brownie points. (again, this could also be "well in My experience" discrepancy)

This I agree with; I'm not saying most ace people are self-isolating, I'm saying people with self-isolating tendencies, of any demographic, are likely to be overrepresented among active Tumblr users.

People are using the self-isolation to justify why he's ace. Doing it this way makes it feel like the self-isolation is what makes him ace, not the other way around. He's not an ace person who self-isolates as a maladaptive defense from being hurt by others; he self-isolates and therefore must be ace.

The takes I've seen aren't that he must be ace because he self-isolates, they're speculating that some (not all, but some) of what's treated as self-isolation could be misinterpreted as such by characters who aren't Grace as self-isolation, but is actually either not maladaptive, or is the "feeling isolated, but it's not self-inflicted" phenomenon you described above, because being perceived as more isolated than you actually are by people judging your life by amatonormative standards is a common ace experience. Obviously some of it, e.g. the retreating from everyone in his field because he acted like a jackass at a conference, is legit though.

probably mainly because discussions that acknowledge Grace's flaws like that come with the understanding that Grace's abduction was him Refusing the Call, i.e. he's the antagonist getting in his own way in that scene, while most of the people making posts about him being ace approach the abduction scene as Stratt violating his autonomy, i.e. she's the antagonist murdering the protagonist as a further devaluing of Grace's place in the world. It's an interesting interplay of interpretations but I digress

My take on this is that yes, Grace was refusing the call, and Stratt didn't really have a choice about pulling the lever on that trolley problem. However, that doesn't mean that the things she said to try to convince him to do it and to make herself feel better about the decision she had to make weren't treating Grace as disposable and devaluing his place in the world. Like, if Grace was happily married and had 2.3 kids and a golden retriever Stratt would still have had to force him onto that ship, but as it is she did bring up his relationship and family status in that argument, and it's not uncommon for aro/ace people to have very similar arguments used against us, so I think that makes people project their experiences onto him.