Some Desperate Glory redux
Jan. 2nd, 2024 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnAs usual I have a more conventional reveal post up, but mostly I am DYING to talk about Some Desperate Glory backstory in general and Corporal Lin in particular, especially with cenozoicsynapsid and hamsterwoman but everyone else too please!!
(My other post about it was here (massive spoilers) and of course feel free to comment there too... there is clearly a straight line from there to the fics to this post.)
-Canon review made me so in love with how much Tesh has thought about what was going on in the background. It's actually much deeper than it first seemed to me. At one point I made a timeline and she really has laid it all out neatly with dates and allalmost like she knew someone writing fic might need it There's also a lot of non-direct character work where she just has the characters react without comment, like Avi reacting to Kyr giving everyone on Gaea the choice, or Avi reacting to Lin's body on the bridge.
-Also, when I made the timeline I realized that... Sergeant Sif is probably at most in her late 30s in canon, right? Given that she's actively having kids for the cause? Destruction of Earth was ~22 years before canon. That means that when she came to Gaea... she was a teenager at best. Argh!
-Speaking of things that were in the background: we know that a) Corporal Lin is head of Systems in Gaea, which seems to imply she's had some experience with doing Systems work; b) Lin was Hagenen Wing, but then talks about having got a field promotion from Elora Marston; c) Admiral Marston says in her distress message that the Victrix' head of Systems was "suborned."
I totally didn't see this when I was first reading, but now I think we're meant to come to the conclusion that Yingli Lin was that head of Systems for Marston's ship for at least a little while (presumably after her Hagenen Wing stint) before the mutiny, which would track with how she got that field promotion... which adds a whole other layer of "oof" to the whole thing!
-Something that didn't make it into the fic is that Ursa says that the co-conspirator leader of the mutiny with Jole (whom Jole later kills) was also Kyr's genetic father, and also Kyr thinks at one point about how she and Ursa are full siblings. So... assuming neither of them is mistaken (which could very well be the case), what's going on there?? This just occurred to me, but is this related to how Admiral Marston says her second-in-command was suborned?? Was her 2IC Ursa's/Kyr's father and Jole's co-conspirator?? (Though wouldn't that be, like, fraternization and against the rules?) Is this why Ursa knows about all this?? There is a whole story here that I SUPER want to know!!
-Bothhamsterwoman and ase pointed out to me that it would be perfectly normal to feel incredibly angry after your entire world has just been destroyed, and also it occurred to me that B5, for instance, has a space mutiny against the existing government, and the whole idea of (original) Star Wars is rebellion against a government that has taken over partially by force, and so... there are lots of reasons why, in the beginning, it seems very plausible that the people involved in a mutiny against surrender to the conquering overlords thought of themselves as the heroes and it's just too bad for them that, unlike B5 or SW, they happened to be in a story where the narrative didn't support everything they did er, until subsequent events proved that their mutiny and the people who came to power were horrible.
-But of course once things started getting bad, Lin should have known better, and part of her does, but I do think that she isn't necessarily the most self-reflective in certain kinds of ways. Canonically, for example, Harriman seems more upset about the way Gaea is than she does.
-The problem I kept ramming my head against is that Lin is clearly meant to be, and written as, the archetype of a super badass character, which is at odds with what she actually did and continued to do right up until Kyr called her on it. Now, she's also written as physically disabled in a culture that has evolved to extol and exalt physical prowess, and a woman in a culture that has grown to be extremely sexist, so that's definitely a huge part of it. And of course even badass characters can be subject to abusive situations, and subject to sunk cost fallacy and the fear of failure, especially when they've burnt a lot of bridges and killed a lot of people on their way to it. (Andase also pointed out to me that she's probably got in the back of head that if she did leave, it's not like the rest of human space will be real happy about her being a mutineer.) And given that she's staying, she has to work around all the ways in which Gaea is warped -- that is, fic!Avi is not wrong that her thinking gets more and more warped.
-I was talking toase about Avi & Lin and she pointed out that Lin probably felt grudgingly fond of Avi. I feel like there's room for a wide range of interpretations, from "cares deeply for him but won't ever let him know" to "is annoyed with him in a different way than she is with most (incompetent) people" (I mean... he can be deeply awful, and I imagine that Lin got a lot of that) and I would love to know everyone else's headcanons. (Regardless, I think Lin chooses to have no kids of her own in any universe and is relieved she doesn't have them.) (In my headcanon, Harriman sometimes wistfully thinks about having kids and would have been a great dad, but he'd also rather have Lin than kids, and he also knows that Gaea would be a crap place to have kids.)
-Either way, it occurred to me that Lin may have had the choice to tell Command that Avi was of no use and that he could be exiled from Gaea, but she didn't; instead everyone knows he knows too much. Honestly, this is a might-have-been crafted specifically for the fic rather than my actual headcanon (as I wanted to tie Lin's actions in to Avi making a personal connection) ; Avi didn't seem to think she had anything to do with it in canon. But I also think that, if she is indeed Command's source for the information that Avi knows too much, her primary motivation here, which she may not even have admitted to herself (and she's definitely not going to admit it to Avi because she can see how terrible it sounds and she's too proud to), is that she's not sure she can keep up with Systems by herself with Avi gone (because everyone else is pretty much useless).
-I also think there's a wide range of possibilities for how Avi feels about Lin, and it depends a lot on how much he knows about her and how much he thinks about how much he knows about her. (Does he know that she was one of the architects of Gaea? He has access to all this contraband info, he must have known, right? But possibly never thought deeply about?) I think it's inevitable that he's imprinted on her a bit, as she's probably the only adult (possibly only person) in his life who actually is competent in a way he respects (even if he underestimates her), and who has any respect for him. He's careless with her too, but I think it's in the same way that teenagers often are with adults they like (or even love). I do think he cares for her, possibly a lot, but can't or won't admit that even to himself (which I guess practically speaking looks the same to the two of them?).
-I now want ALLLLL the Avi & Lin (and Harriman) headcanons and speculation. Did she ever manage to teach him opsec?? He obviously does respect her intelligence, and she respects his, even if they both have caveats; what was their time in Systems like, they must have worked together to avert various catastrophes? has she been trying to teach him opsec this whole time and he's just been really bad at it? (I lovedhamsterwoman's prompt of her trying to teach him opsec through code docs/comments, and I wish someone had written that :D ) What does Avi think about her sacrificing herself for them? (This is something I entirely sidestepped in the fic, but which he is going to have to come to terms with -- or refuse to -- at some point!) Is she able to help him/Kyr/Mags/whoever once they're out of Gaea, given that she's one of the people who probably actually knows something about what society outside of a brainwashing enclave is like? I also now want ALLLLLL the Avi & Lin fic :D
cenozoicsynapsid and hamsterwoman but everyone else too please!!(My other post about it was here (massive spoilers) and of course feel free to comment there too... there is clearly a straight line from there to the fics to this post.)
-Canon review made me so in love with how much Tesh has thought about what was going on in the background. It's actually much deeper than it first seemed to me. At one point I made a timeline and she really has laid it all out neatly with dates and all
-Also, when I made the timeline I realized that... Sergeant Sif is probably at most in her late 30s in canon, right? Given that she's actively having kids for the cause? Destruction of Earth was ~22 years before canon. That means that when she came to Gaea... she was a teenager at best. Argh!
-Speaking of things that were in the background: we know that a) Corporal Lin is head of Systems in Gaea, which seems to imply she's had some experience with doing Systems work; b) Lin was Hagenen Wing, but then talks about having got a field promotion from Elora Marston; c) Admiral Marston says in her distress message that the Victrix' head of Systems was "suborned."
I totally didn't see this when I was first reading, but now I think we're meant to come to the conclusion that Yingli Lin was that head of Systems for Marston's ship for at least a little while (presumably after her Hagenen Wing stint) before the mutiny, which would track with how she got that field promotion... which adds a whole other layer of "oof" to the whole thing!
-Something that didn't make it into the fic is that Ursa says that the co-conspirator leader of the mutiny with Jole (whom Jole later kills) was also Kyr's genetic father, and also Kyr thinks at one point about how she and Ursa are full siblings. So... assuming neither of them is mistaken (which could very well be the case), what's going on there?? This just occurred to me, but is this related to how Admiral Marston says her second-in-command was suborned?? Was her 2IC Ursa's/Kyr's father and Jole's co-conspirator?? (Though wouldn't that be, like, fraternization and against the rules?) Is this why Ursa knows about all this?? There is a whole story here that I SUPER want to know!!
-Both
hamsterwoman and ase pointed out to me that it would be perfectly normal to feel incredibly angry after your entire world has just been destroyed, and also it occurred to me that B5, for instance, has a space mutiny against the existing government, and the whole idea of (original) Star Wars is rebellion against a government that has taken over partially by force, and so... there are lots of reasons why, in the beginning, it seems very plausible that the people involved in a mutiny against surrender to the conquering overlords thought of themselves as the heroes -But of course once things started getting bad, Lin should have known better, and part of her does, but I do think that she isn't necessarily the most self-reflective in certain kinds of ways. Canonically, for example, Harriman seems more upset about the way Gaea is than she does.
-The problem I kept ramming my head against is that Lin is clearly meant to be, and written as, the archetype of a super badass character, which is at odds with what she actually did and continued to do right up until Kyr called her on it. Now, she's also written as physically disabled in a culture that has evolved to extol and exalt physical prowess, and a woman in a culture that has grown to be extremely sexist, so that's definitely a huge part of it. And of course even badass characters can be subject to abusive situations, and subject to sunk cost fallacy and the fear of failure, especially when they've burnt a lot of bridges and killed a lot of people on their way to it. (And
ase also pointed out to me that she's probably got in the back of head that if she did leave, it's not like the rest of human space will be real happy about her being a mutineer.) And given that she's staying, she has to work around all the ways in which Gaea is warped -- that is, fic!Avi is not wrong that her thinking gets more and more warped.-I was talking to
ase about Avi & Lin and she pointed out that Lin probably felt grudgingly fond of Avi. I feel like there's room for a wide range of interpretations, from "cares deeply for him but won't ever let him know" to "is annoyed with him in a different way than she is with most (incompetent) people" (I mean... he can be deeply awful, and I imagine that Lin got a lot of that) and I would love to know everyone else's headcanons. (Regardless, I think Lin chooses to have no kids of her own in any universe and is relieved she doesn't have them.) (In my headcanon, Harriman sometimes wistfully thinks about having kids and would have been a great dad, but he'd also rather have Lin than kids, and he also knows that Gaea would be a crap place to have kids.)-Either way, it occurred to me that Lin may have had the choice to tell Command that Avi was of no use and that he could be exiled from Gaea, but she didn't; instead everyone knows he knows too much. Honestly, this is a might-have-been crafted specifically for the fic rather than my actual headcanon (as I wanted to tie Lin's actions in to Avi making a personal connection) ; Avi didn't seem to think she had anything to do with it in canon. But I also think that, if she is indeed Command's source for the information that Avi knows too much, her primary motivation here, which she may not even have admitted to herself (and she's definitely not going to admit it to Avi because she can see how terrible it sounds and she's too proud to), is that she's not sure she can keep up with Systems by herself with Avi gone (because everyone else is pretty much useless).
-I also think there's a wide range of possibilities for how Avi feels about Lin, and it depends a lot on how much he knows about her and how much he thinks about how much he knows about her. (Does he know that she was one of the architects of Gaea? He has access to all this contraband info, he must have known, right? But possibly never thought deeply about?) I think it's inevitable that he's imprinted on her a bit, as she's probably the only adult (possibly only person) in his life who actually is competent in a way he respects (even if he underestimates her), and who has any respect for him. He's careless with her too, but I think it's in the same way that teenagers often are with adults they like (or even love). I do think he cares for her, possibly a lot, but can't or won't admit that even to himself (which I guess practically speaking looks the same to the two of them?).
-I now want ALLLLL the Avi & Lin (and Harriman) headcanons and speculation. Did she ever manage to teach him opsec?? He obviously does respect her intelligence, and she respects his, even if they both have caveats; what was their time in Systems like, they must have worked together to avert various catastrophes? has she been trying to teach him opsec this whole time and he's just been really bad at it? (I loved
hamsterwoman's prompt of her trying to teach him opsec through code docs/comments, and I wish someone had written that :D ) What does Avi think about her sacrificing herself for them? (This is something I entirely sidestepped in the fic, but which he is going to have to come to terms with -- or refuse to -- at some point!) Is she able to help him/Kyr/Mags/whoever once they're out of Gaea, given that she's one of the people who probably actually knows something about what society outside of a brainwashing enclave is like? I also now want ALLLLLL the Avi & Lin fic :D
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Date: 2024-01-03 12:16 am (UTC)Anyway, I'm going to read these posts in more depth when I can brain but I wanted to say again you did a phenomenal job.
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Date: 2024-01-03 04:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-03 04:53 am (UTC)I honestly don't remember the book that well but the Yuletide stories reminded me how much I liked it and I own a copy so I'm probably due for a reread.
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Date: 2024-01-03 05:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-03 05:29 am (UTC)Oh that's cool! I just mean I probably don't have that much to say because I don't remember the book all that well.