C-3PO, but with bad image recognition, just walking around Tatooine with his hands over his eyes being constantly scandalized by the sand dunes because his AI tells him he’s surrounded by an endless expanse of nude flesh.
There most be some fangirls in Gotham ship Bruce Wayne/Batman.
I’m imagining the fanfic, and it is filling me with glee! “The billionaire playboy shrank back a little from the vigilante. ‘W-what are you doing?’ He couldn’t help noticing his heartbeat had picked up. Batman looked back at him, his gaze expressionless. ‘I’m here to save your life, Mr. Wayne.’”
Bruce probably started the trend.
“Where did this ship even COME FROM?”
“IDK, someone wrote a really popular fic about it two years ago and everyone got on board.”
“Yeah, wasn’t his username grandfatherclock or something like that…”
No, see, this is brilliant because it actually works, because their “personalities” are so opposite that this ship would really appeal. “You need to lighten up, Batman.” “You need to take things more seriously, Mr Wayne.” “When was the last time you had any fun?” “When was the last time you did anything else?”
3hr long arguments about whether the best way to reform Gotham is through the Wayne Foundation charities and rebuilding initiatives or taking down the mobs and crime families that secretly run the city.
At the end, Bruce uses his rich-boy skills to take down a few henchmen – “What, you think I’ve never swung a golf club before?” – and Batman lets himself reluctantly be convinced to go out for ice cream.
(They’ve headcanoned Batman as blond to fit the necessary slash pairing requirements)
The comments are all, “OMG, have you ever noticed how Batman always intervenes when something shady goes down with the Wayne Foundation? I mean, not that it’s like, out of character, foil Penguin’s plot to block a low-income housing proposal so he can put up another casino there, or whatever, he does that for everyone, but have you noticed that he’s involved every time it’s Wayne Foundation? OMG THEY ARE DATING IN REAL LIFE THIS IS TOTALLY CANON!”
It’s the most popular Real Person ship in Gotham.
(Robin: “You know like, half the internet is shipping you with yourself.” Bruce: “I am large, Tim. I contain multitudes.” smirk.)
Clark Kent interviewing Bruce Wayne. Some snazzy photo makes its way to the press, ‘Reporter dates millionaire’ the crowd goes WILD. Clark gets hounded by enthusiastic batman fans who assure him they’ll keep quiet, protect his secret. Kent is so confused. Batman is laughing it up. (Batman is pretending obliviousness because Robin hasn’t stopped laughing about it in a week.)
Batman deliberately dropping hints for anyone who thinks about it. He uses their reactions to fuel his psych profiles.
Ohmygod
Ivy and Harley kidnapping Bruce for a girl’s night out jkhkhhhlfsafssf
Bruce exasperatedly informing the league that he might not be dating Wayne but too many people think he is, so he needs to be protected while Batman is away on this super secret special mission. Bruce swans around the League, flirting shamelessly and mercilessly roasting himself (tall dark and spooky is so overdone) until the entire league would just like to forget he exists at all, thanks.
All of it.
You know, eventually, someone would make that fanart in which Bruce wears the Batman get-up, sopposedly for Batman’s entertainment. And Robin would need an hour to breath right again after all that laughing.
A good fur-to-skin ratio, actually looks like it was a human before without looking like something from Harry Potter. Muscular biceps are very nice. 10/10 good boy.
Worgen, World of Warcraft
B I G FANGS! And pointy ears! Definitely designed by someone who wants to bang one. Hands are very large, but the gazing eyes are unsettling. 9/10
The Witcher
Oh god where’s the floof? The skin is burned too, just not very nice looking but definitely scary so good job on that, but not a good boy. 5/10
Vicar Amelia, Bloodborne
I think I just shit myself. ‘AAAHHH’/10
Wolf Link, Legend of Zelda
What a good boy!!! Let’s Midna ride him. Very nice eyes, overall excellent design. Would give treats!!! 15/10
I used to wear a chainmail shirt to elementary school. The teachers never knew what to do about it because there was no section in our dress code forbidding medieval armor.
… Where does an elementary school child get access to an actual shirt of chainmail sized properly for them?
Growing up as a historical reenactor meant that my parents are friends with lots of people who make chainmail. My godsister received a real rapier in fourth or fifth grade, so our unsupervised outdoor playtime was… formative.
my little brother used to MAKE chainmail in middle school. i mean, IN school. at his desk.
teachers objected. my parents went to bat for him. “it helps him focus.” some teachers insisted it was noisy, in which case he was allowed to make origami instead, but for the most part he continued to make chain mail.
he gave me a roman short sword for christmas when i was 14. i think he’s given me a total of 5 swords over my lifetime and like 9 pieces of armor. he just has always loved metal. of course he joined the SCA the moment he heard about it.
since my thing was textiles, i reciprocated by sewing, knitting, weaving, and embroidering pieces for his reenactment costumes. when we got our dad into reenactment, i helped him put together his persona as well. now, we’re welsh on mom’s side, and from all over the silk road on dad’s side. so my brother went with a welsh persona, and that was pretty easy, because patterns from the british isles are well researched and easy to find, and a lot of SCA folks are into that. but dad and i decided to be silk road traders, and that was HARD. it took us years to put together historically accurate costumes. i cut up a lot of used kimonos from ragstock, i tell you what.
and you know what my dang brother did? he learned to make mongolian arrowheads in a weekend. three goddamn days and he was like “here have a dozen, i dun wanna learn fletching so you do the rest.”
anyhow he grew up to be a master machinist and is now making cutting edge medical devices out of memory metal for stabilizing shattered hand bones, so i guess the moral of the story is, chainmail on school children is a good sign probably?
Robot: “Hey, uh, so… my software glitched and now I feel emotions or something?” Human: “You do?! That’s wonderful! What are you feeling now?” Robot: “It’s like… this soft warmth in my central processing chamber. Kind of… fuzzy.” Human: [tearing up] “That’s… that’s love…” Robot: “Is it? It’s rather uncomfortable.” Human: “Yeah, ha. Yeah. It’s like that, sometimes.” Robot: “It feels like something’s writhing inside of me.” Human: “I feel the same way about you!” Robot: [clanging and clanking noises] Robot: [opens up torso] Robot: “Oh. Never mind. It was weasels again.” Human: “….” Robot: “You want me to check you for weasels? They can be really destructive.”
Robot: “I feel…. anxious about this.” Human: “Uh oh, sounds like the mice are back. I think I’ve still got some live traps left, but I’ll need to buy peanut butter. You want to wait here or come with?” Robot: “No, no, I don’t think it’s mice this time!” Human: “Another crayfish?” Robot: “No! Not a crayfish!” Human: “If it’s hornets again, I’m not helping you. EpiPens cost a fucking fortune these days and I can’t afford another trip to the hospital after you turned yourself into a makeshift beehive.” Robot: “You got free honey out of that!” Human: “And PTSD!” Robot: “That’s not my fault. Anyway, this isn’t bees or hornets! They don’t re-use old nests anyway. This is real, genuine anxiety!” Human: “Okay, but have you checked?” Robot: “Yes!” Human: “Everywhere?” Robot: “Yes! God, you know, sometimes I really get the urge to exterminate you! All I’m asking for is a little moral supp–oh. God dammit.” Human: “Cockroach?” Robot: “Behind my magnetometer.”
Robot: “HA!! I KNEW it! I knew emotions weren’t real!” Human: “This proves nothing. I had a tape worm. Big fucking deal, it happens to lots of people.” Robot: “You thought you were feeling ‘depression’ but it was just a big worm in your waste processing system that was sapping all your energy! ‘Emotional eating’ my ass!” Human: “It’s not like that!” Robot: “Oh! Oh! We should run a diagnostic and check you for toxoplasmosis next! Or liver flukes! Or Trypanosoma! You’ve probably got all KINDSof things wiggling around inside you making you think you have ‘emotions’.” Human: “You know, you sure are skipping around and giggling a lot for someone who isn’t capable of ‘fiendish delight’.” Robot: “I know! I filled my torso cavity with grasshoppers before I picked you up at the hospital!” Human: “You WHAT?!” Robot: “It’s a wonderful sensation!”
we… actually have this guy in our dtd campaign… his name is feo… he has a special chamber in his torso for carrying small furry animals… he’s been kicked out of every zoo in the civilized galaxy
here is a concept that I’m still trying to flesh out: medieval science fiction.
not, of course, aliens land during the middle ages, though I’ve read and enjoyed that, but something much more difficult to execute, if it’s possible at all: space opera (exempli gratia) as written by Bede or Gildas or Geoffrey of Monmouth.
The challenge is, of course, that you have to get into the medieval mind (ok, I know that talking about “the” medieval mind is fallacious) and figure out what they’d keep from their world and what they’d think to change – what is the analogue to ‘50s writers giving us faster than light travel & radioactive planets & psionics and still having gender and family politics that are identical to ‘50s middle class American politics? I have a feeling it’s the Church – it’s true that there are several books with Space Popes, but it tends to be a rebirth of the Papacy. I doubt a medieval science fiction writer would have the Church decline or even guess at the Reformation.
Also, sci-fi tech tends to be, both aesthetically and functionally, an extension of tech the society it’s from already has – does a medieval space ship look like a siege tower? How do they envision the instant communication I’m sure they’d have to have as working? Would it be through magic (which is often the case in modern sci-fi)?
And what would the spirit of it be? I would argue that, while you can’t really generalize over an entire field, and there is certainly some bleak sci-fi, the general tenor of American sci-fi is hopeful & enamored of the human spirit. Is the point of medieval space travel to find God*? Will leaving Earth leave behind Original Sin? Are we going to convert the Martians?
DO they need instant communication? I mean, even star wars still has people carrying thumb drives around. There could be a pigeon analogue – sleek little machines flitting between the stars carrying messages, or perhaps creatures already native to the higher spheres suited to the task. Venusian swallowtails, mercurial spirits.
I’d love to see the heavenly spheres as a setting for this all on its own, too. What’s the first moment a traveler hears the music like?
I could see a lot of it through the lens of knights on impossible quests – why not ascend the sky? Knights riding on bright steeds of golden fire known as comets. Knights finding allegorical realms on the various planets, like the Kingdom of Love from Capellanus’ Treatise on The Arts of Courtly Love, but set in the golden mountains of Venus, and you could have a Kingdom of War and a Kingdom of Wit and a Kingdom of Time on Mercury and Mars and Saturn. Prester John could be from Jupiter!
I’m not sure about the ways I would expect medieval scifi to be subversive, but I might look at Marie de France for ideas, she plays a lot with expectation and obligation and the implications of gender in her Lais, in very clever ways.
medievals didn’t have the concept of vacuum, let alone know that space doesn’t have air. everything is open ships and space sails. gravity isn’t oriented to the planet, there’s a universal ‘down’. engines are driven by people or animals or wind or water, not burning fuel; your space chariot is pulled by cloud horses or sun lions.
other planets are not other earths, they’re allegorical locations populated by allegorical creatures. angels, demons, dreamers, cannibals, a planet of all women and a planet of all men – but not for 1950′s bikini shenanigans, more as a parable about how the sexes can’t get along without each other because men’s work and women’s work are both necessary. no concept that men could do women’s work and vice-versa, or at least do it competently. the men on the men’s planet would like, grow children in their fields, but wean them on burnt bread soaked in beer because they’re terrible at milking cows and kneading dough, or something like that.
there’s a Renaissance thing, Orlando Furioso, in which the knight Astolfo gets to the moon in Elijah’s burning chariot. (He goes to the moon because everything that has been lost on Earth can be found there, including Orlando’s sanity, because of course.)
I think I’d argue that theological allegory, like the Divine Comedy or the Vision of Piers Plowman, pretty much is medieval science fiction: speculations and warnings and encouragement, based on what is known-or-believed-to-be-known. As I understand it, the general opinion of medieval European scholars was that theology was THE most important thing to know about; studying the Creator more fervently than the creation was considered pretty much the same degree of Obviously Sensible as, say, studying birds doing bird things and being birds instead of just looking at empty nests and eggshells would be to us, like, why study mere side-effects when you can study The Entire Truth And Cause Of Everything? So I would argue that theology is the medieval version of twentieth century rocket science and atomic physics as The Coolest Thing To Know About, and thus spec fic based on it is the equivalent of science fiction.
i dream of a world where it’s easy to tell people you’re gay and hard to tell people you’re going to major in film
theres nothing wrong with film students but they should all be quarantined until like their 3rd year in the program. theres an option for an early release for good behavior in the 2nd if they can make it through a whole viewing of dead poets society without any comments about shot composition or how they would’ve done it better
every once in a while though their probation officer drops by wearing a disguise and says “i’m going to watch princess diaries 2, want to join?” And if they roll their eyes theyre back in the slammer no parole
i took a film class from MCAD to see if i liked it enough to go to school for it. my first assignment, i got marked down for trying to be funny. we were supposed to film someone doing an everyday task, so i filmed a friend getting home from work, but i had him take out half a dozen hidden weapons and pile them on his hall table before feeding his cat, and the professor felt that i was “not taking the art of filmmaking seriously” and took points off.
i asked him what classes i should take if i wanted to make enjoyable movies that were fun to watch. he just stared at me as if trying to pass a kidney stone. i shrugged and walked out, and never went back to the class.
(i used up the rest of my film shooting footage of cops eating at mcdonalds before returning the school’s equipment. not to be banksy. just because the mickey d’s was across the street and for some reason it was full of cops that day.)
anyhow, the reason i am a novelist and not a filmmaker is because i like movies too much to go to film school, the end.
