primeideal | Entries tagged with blade runner

Happy 6-10-21! This is a big day in Blade Runner: 2049 lore, so obviously I had to rewatch it.

( things you notice on repeat watching )

Publish and/or Perish (5460 words)
Fandom: FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion Of Your Thesis Defense (McSweeney's Post) - Luke Burns
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Additional Tags: Academia, Mathematics, Snake Portmanteaus or Snortmanteaus
Summary:

In order to prevent “frivolous disputations unbefitting the history of our institution” (read: “some kid getting way in over their head, dying, and us getting sued,”) you couldn’t just walk in and demand to fight a snake.
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So I offered this McSweeney's post because it's the kind of thing that's quintessentially Yuletide. There were 8 requests and 27 (non-bucket) offers, so I didn't really expect to match on it, I figured I'd get picked for something rarer. And then I matched on it. And it was like..."deadpan humor about how grad school is an absurd and surreal experience (and also by the way there are snakes)"? I can do that, I do not need to do any "canon review" for that one.

A couple of the author's notes pretty much speak for themselves:

-The snake people or sneople meme dates from Steven Universe and Tumblr on 2015. (The things you learn researching.)

-This is very loosely based on a true story, not only in the sense in which every artist puts a little of themselves in their work, but in the sense that some of the personalities and archetypes are drawn from RL with identifying details obscured. If any of my academic friends see themselves in this, I hope they are not too offended. No snakes were harmed in the making of this story nor my higher education.

My working title was "snek" (another meme) until I wrote a line about "publish or perish," blinked, and was like, "there's the title."

This being Yuletide, there are 14 other stories in the same fandom, and they are all great. (Turns out there are a whole lot of Yuletide people who are current or recovering academics, who knew?!) One of the things I noticed was how different subjects are treated slightly differently; one of the Madness stories pointed out that math students probably get tiny snakes because everyone assumes their thesis is correct but nobody out of their subfield can read it, and, too real. Whereas I think the old-school McSweeney's humor was more targeted at humanities students who often have longer PhD time and/or smaller stipends, so they need to play up the angst and woe.

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Momomme (5465 words)
Fandom: Quatrevingt-treize | Ninety-three - Victor Hugo
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Characters: Michelle Fléchard, Housarde, Tellmarch
Additional Tags: Ghosts
Summary:

The dead do have power to protect.
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Okay, so what if Quatrevingt-treize, but with ghosts? Actually, if you're willing to accept "everyone talks in paragraphs because Victor Hugo" conceit, a lot of this stayed pretty close to canon. Like, these are lines from the original that fit almost perfectly, except I wanted to rewrite them to not completely plagiarize!

"In the language of Georgette a "momomme" was anything that looked like a man without really being one. Living beings are strangely confused with ghosts in the minds of children."

"I am angry with you for saving me; you did wrong. I would rather have died, for then I should surely see them and know where they are. They would not see me, but I should be near them. The dead must have power to protect." (Michelle to Tellmarch)

"While the district was in a state of combustion and conflagration, when warfare, devastation, and carnage were the sole occupations of life, when every man was doing his best to burn houses, murder families, massacre outposts, and plunder villages, thinking of nothing but setting ambushes and traps and killing one another, here was this hermit absorbed in nature, enjoying absolute peace of mind, gathering plants and herbs, interested only in flowers, birds, and stars,—of course he was a dangerous character! He must be insane. He never hid behind a bush to fire at his fellow-men. "The man is mad!" said the passers-by." (Tellmarch)

Anyway, it's only at the end that the changes to canon have ripple effects for the other characters. I'm not sure what happens to Gauvain and Cimourdain in this timeline, hopefully good things. But it's Hugo so who knows.

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Dreamt Music (1909 words)
Fandom: Blade Runner (Movies)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: K | Joe (Blade Runner), Ana Stelline, Rick Deckard
Additional Tags: Character Death Fix, Hurt/Comfort, Headaches & Migraines
Summary:

Ana gives K a place to hide and recuperate. K returns the favor.
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So the prompts were for hurt/comfort and family feelings. Which is a little smaller-scale than the "hunt down and kill the treacherous robot" plotlines of canon. But, along the lines of the snake fight fic, it was like..."what if this very smart but isolated scientist lady also had migraines...haha...don't need to research that one either /o\" Title is of course from Deckard and Rachael's conversation in the original.

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World Enough And Time (5836 words)
Fandom: 三体 - 刘慈欣 | Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy - Liú Cíxīn
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Chéng Xīn/Yún Tiānmíng
Characters: Yún Tiānmíng, Ài AA, Chéng Xīn
Additional Tags: Fix-It, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

The universe is grand, but love is grander.
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Spoilers for canon, but I really thought we were going to get the Cheng Xin/Tianming reunion at the star. And then Cixin Liu decides to run over our feelings with a bus. :( I do think the end of "Prince Deep-Water" is supposed to provide a hopeful context for Cheng Xin and Guan's life/the pocket universe/the future, but I wanted to write this AU as well.

I'm also not sure if the stuff about "Galactic humans" is meant to be taken as authoritative, there's a lot of commentary suggesting that "Death's End" in particular has some unreliable narrators/PoV in Cheng Xin. But either way, I wanted to push back against it.

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Twice Dawns the Day (5593 words)
Fandom: Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Nynaeve al'Meara, Rand al'Thor, Elayne Trakand
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, background canon relationships, Fate & Destiny, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Rand slays the Dark One, and the world is set free. With one exception.
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I never did get around to writing up all my "Memory of Light" thoughts, did I? Well, one of the prompts here was "the whole 'evil is necessary for free will so really you can't live without it' was kind of a cop-out, let's have a better reason why Rand needed to seal up the Dark One instead of just killing it." And...I agree. The whole "a world without of nations, without weapons, without war, where Andor and the Aiel are peacemakers and happy about it...WOULD BE TERRIBLE!" scene didn't stick the landing for me. So this happened. (By which I mean, I was brainstorming ideas almost as soon as I saw the prompt, and wrote the vast majority of it very close to the deadline. As one does.)

I recognize it's not exactly traditional comfort viewing and some of the violence squicks me, but man, it's so well-made. The visuals! The opening scene with Leon is really really well done. It's leaving US Netflix on May 1 so if you're interested and/or have lots of downtime, maybe binge it again like I did. (I was also in a bad mood with morons on another site and needed something "relaxing.")

Also, I don't think I caught this last time, but the photograph of Rachael and her "mother" trying to establish her memories is called back to in 2049 by the photograph of Freysa holding Rachael's newborn. :(

-yeah, I saw it originally after visiting the Bradbury Building in LA (where Sebastian's apartment is), but I did not expect to recognize the police HQ as Los Angeles' Union Station! #trainlife
-I know people talk about "Deckard needs to meet Han Solo so they can commiserate about their parenting skills and also the fact that they are the same person," but also, Deckard's bluffing skills are almost as bad as Han's "boring conversation anyway."
--investigating Zhora and ad-libbing about "how did you get this job? Did your employer coerce you to do anything, uh, lewd, or untoward to your person? Let me just inspect these walls to make sure there's no, um, voyeurism."
--video-chatting Pris after he gets Sebastian's address. "Hello? Um, I'm Eddie, I'm an old friend of Sebastian's..." (Pris hangs up on him.) "...That's no way to treat a friend."
-Roy doesn't mention Leon when he breaks Deckard's fingers ("this is for Pris, and this is for Zhora,") but Leon is kind of a longer-term presence in the story from Deckard's point of view, since the recording of him failing the VK test is always there. (I've seen some good takes on that as a metaphor for empathy, and the limits thereof.)
-Deckard interrogating the restaurant guy "are your licenses up-to-date? hmm?" is the same gambit K tries on the orphanage owner in 2049.

Moments in Time (1894 words) by primeideal
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: Blade Runner (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Rick Deckard/Rachael
Characters: J.F. Sebastian, Original Characters, Roy Batty, Rachael (Blade Runner), Rick Deckard
Additional Tags: Speculation about Deckard's Species, Spinners, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, (by chapter)
Summary:

Ficlets in honor of "Blade Runner Month" (November 2019).

Hey, something other than the chapters: 1/1 I pretty much auto-delete!

Current Mood: determined

I wanted to like the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy.

Okay, there are parts that I definitely like! Finn's backstory is great, so is Rose's, put 'em together, awesome. But as a part of the Star Wars series, it overall falls flat for me, and these feelings have only deepened with time.

Obviously, if you like the ST, that's great! You're still just as much a Star Wars fan as me and I don't want to dissuade you from enthusing about or creating fanworks about your favorite characters, etc. But there have been some fans I've run across who don't seem to get why I've in part bounced off these, and I've been turning over thoughts in my mind for a while about how to express this better, why do some parts of it work for me and not others. Knowing me, I can either do a one-sentence summary, or a bunch of wall-of-text posts, there is no other way. So we're stuck with the latter.

This (tag: sequelitis) is going to be an ongoing series posted...whenever I feel like...about what makes sequels/prequels etc work/not work for me. Take as subjective, yada yada. But I had to get it out there. Spoilers all over the place, for obvious reasons. Sometimes I'll try to be vague but sometimes that's not gonna work.

Sequels that Work

What makes a good sequel? For me, it has to build on the original. If there are shared characters (and there usually are, but that's not guaranteed), the recurring characters should be recognizable as "themselves at a later date"--maybe they don't have the exact same outlook on life, but there should be strong similarities between them.

The sequel also has to have a plot that takes the events of the original into account. If the original conflict was resolved and everyone's just sitting around chilling and flirting with absolutely no complications, that might be a fine fanfic, but it doesn't really work as a standalone work. However, and this is going to be a big sticking point for me, the plot also has to recognize the events of the original, or at least not negate them!

A lot of episodic series don't really live up to this, because they're mostly designed to be read/watched in any order. So for something like Animorphs, there are occasional time dependencies with the minor characters, but for stretches like books 14-19, you could switch them around in almost any order and be fine. Similarly, I really enjoyed the Redwall books, but they're pretty formulaic in a "a villainous army rises to threaten the Abbey; they are defeated" way. Especially by the end, they don't have much dependence on each other/characters. (The first few might actually be better as prequels, which I might get to in a later installment...maybe.)

So what are some sequels I've liked?

Blade Runner 2049

At the end of the original Blade Runner (set in 2019), Rick Deckard and Rachael escape together. The focus of 2049 is on a new character, officer K. However, we later learn that Rick is alive and on the run from the law. He's succeeded in his goal of getting out of LA and the system and won't be drafted into being a Blade Runner again. The accomplishment of the original is intact.

But there's still conflict. K has a mystery to solve at work, with lots of pressure from Joshi, Luv, and later Freysa's gang. And as we see, the events of 2019 were very important in setting this mystery in motion.

I think it's also well done that the sequel doesn't take sides on whether Rick is a replicant. The different versions of the original have different implications, but all we get from 2049 is the conversation between Gaff and K that can deliberately be read either way.

City of Blades (Divine Cities trilogy)

I have some issues with this series, but for the purposes of sequel analysis, this is a good one. In the first book of the trilogy, City of Stairs, Shara Komayd is the main character and Turyin Mulaghesh is a supporting character. In "Blades," Mulaghesh takes center stage.

The worldbuilding of these books centers around two countries, one of which has gods that have been killed off over the years, the other doesn't. In "Stairs," we found that two of the gods were only sort of dead, and Shara had to kill them off fully. In "Blades," we focus on a different god, Voortya, who was really "dead" decades before the events of Stairs. So Shara's accomplishments are still intact, but the characters have to puzzle out "well if Voortya's gone, how is she influencing the living world."

Shara has changed in the intervening time; instead of being a semi-disgraced spy, she's now risen to prominence and become a reformist politician. Mulaghesh lost one of her arms in the end of Blades, and is mostly adjusted to using a prosthesis. And we learn more about Sigrud's past as a (mostly absent) family man. So the characters are different, but still recognizably themselves. Additionally, as we learn later on, one of the climactic events of "Stairs" set one of the main villains of "Blades" down the path to darkness.

Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains (Children of the Star)

Tiny fandom, but it's been on my mind since I wrote for it for "Be the First," so: "Children of the Star" (book 1) ends with Noren trying to accept his new role and the fallout of being a heretic. In Mountains, which picks up less than a year later, he's still not committed to all the implications of his position. But he has to serve as a mentor and friend to Brek, the Technician who becomes a heretic and finds himself in a similar place to Noren. Brek wasn't named in the first book, and he wasn't on trial yet, just "a questioning Technician who helps Noren out"--but his experiences with and watching Noren push him over the edge to outright heresy. Meanwhile, the Scholars are starting work on a new settlement, which requires them to go against long-established tradition and leave the City to work elsewhere.

Are there issues, sure. I mentioned in my other post on them that this one can get kind of anvil-y in a "science and faith, they are both good!!" kind of way. But I don't think that stems from being a sequel.

Ultimately, the main characters are saved from being stranded in the wilderness by stumbling across an alien artifact and activating it to send out a signal. Is this a deus ex machina? Not necessarily--"Children" had already established that there were other sentient Visitors to the planet (who stripped the metal), so for me, that felt like a believable resolution. (I know Engdahl has gone back and forth on whether the twists of book 3 are plausible, but to me, there's enough groundwork laid in 1 and 2 that "and now, aliens" isn't too jarring.)

So, sequels! They can be done. Well. Sometimes.