maniraptorans

Happy November! The enduring march of winter and the shortening of the days comes for us all! Aaaaaah! Thank technology for the sunlight lamp! Can you tell I’ve been getting annoyed at how early it’s been getting dark lately?

Art Updates:

Biggest news: MOONSAULT, the pro wrestling charity art fanzine I’ve been moderating, has finally released after months of work! The final book is packed full of amazing art and it’s been so special to work on, and it’s fully worth the price for all 20 pages.

Another zine I participated in was TrafficZine 4, the Life Series fanzine! It’s a free art and writing collection basically retelling the whole latest season, and I posted my piece on social media shortly after, and did have a bit of a moment when two of my favourite players in the series liked it.

University is a lot. I’m enjoying what I’m doing, but it’s demanding a lot of energy I’m hoping will be less when I settle in. I’d like to have some more time and juice for my own solo projects. We don’t get a half-term break like I’m used to so I’m beginning to flag a bit in energy and I’m taking it as easy as I can—I do have this habit of overworking myself because of overambition and stressing out that I’m not doing enough.

Our first group project had the extra task of organising and coordinating things between us, but I’m happy with how we handled that. The group presentation at the end was a little nerve-wracking (I talk way too much!) but it was totally fine and we got great feedback. I kept with the layered papercut idea, went through a little mockup on the lasercutter before I put the piece together using stacked foamcore and card. G. F. Smith is a paper company in the UK that does free samples for students and it’s been a game-changer for cheap good quality art paper, if anyone else finds that useful.

I posted the essay that accompanied the magazine double spread I made in my last blog post! It and the whole project is themed around science fiction, illustration and immersion, which was a theme I settled on pretty easily because I know what I like. Indesign is a deeply unintuitive program for someone like me who’s best in Photoshop and okay in Illustrator, and putting the layout together was a hassle for me being pretty verbose and also forgetting to even think about the text at the beginning, but it did come out great!

We’ve since started our next project, a visual exploration of the area around our university building through primary research and observation. I was ticked off by this project at first, because we did a similar project on Foundation and I was very out of my comfort zone then, but I think that helped me feel more comfortable with this brief. Projects for me are always a matter of weaselling the brief into something I feel invested in making. One of the key ideas of this project is psychogeography, the name for mapping and exploring the experience of or emotions attached to a place: a theme I’ve been interested in for a while without really knowing the name for it.

Observational sketches done on the London Underground, trying to focus on documenting and understanding the experience of the Tube. I find the Tube network kind of…absurdist, in a way? That’s really the feeling I’m trying to latch onto, that weird fear I get when I think about how deep underground I am or looking out the windows and not being able to see anything.

We’re also doing rotations in workshops for this project! I’m going to learn bookbinding. Got plans to sort of turn this project into a weird collaged image comic-y thing? It’s a ‘body of work’ kind of project where we’re just continuously making things and then curating them, instead of building to one final submission.

The papercut project & following Sarah Capon’s work on Instagram inspired me to do my own papercut work outside of school as a weird way to calm down. Sometimes calming down from an approaching deadline is making cut paper figures of Minecraft youtubers, I guess? Unsure what paper Grian and paper GoodTimesWithScar ward me against by their presences but I love them now.

Haven’t been keeping up much with the sketchbook recently, but I've been practising bodies in perspective (still working away at that: it’s hard! I have to keep fighting my brain’s instincts on ‘this isn’t proportional’ and just accept the foreshortening. It’s paying off, though.)

Also, this more comic-y inking page (I actually mixed some drawing ink for this one, I don’t actually own a purple) was a great exercise. I haven’t done a proper detailed ink in a while and it’s still something I’m getting better at (particularly directional and real-feeling hatching, I have this habit of, whenever I add texture, interspersing it pretty evenly which ends up looking a little off.) I then shaded it with marker, liked that a lot but I want to start paying more attention to the textures of things I shade for added realism. I’m being very critical about this page but I actually really like it, I’m just also noticing a lot of things that aren’t quite perfect. ‘Almost there’ has always been more noticeable and interesting to me than ‘still not there yet.’

Oh and before anything else, related to absolutely nothing, here's a recipe for 3 ingredient easy as hell flatbreads. They're so quick and good it legitimately feels like some kind of wizard trick and I feel like I have to share this wisdom with others:

400g self raising flour, 300ml milk, 1 teaspoon of salt. Put it all in a big bowl and mix fully (I usually do this with a fork because it's very sticky), and then turn out onto a floured surface and knead it for a couple of minutes until it's smooth and all together. Split them up and roll them out into whatever shape you want with a floured rolling pin (you'll probably have to reflour your surface every so often, they get sticky), I usually go for around 3-5mm thick. Get a frying pan on medium heat, don't grease it or anything, just put it on medium heat and throw your flatbreads in. They should start bubbling up and browning at the bottom, and when they're sufficiently bubbly and browned, flip them over and cook them on the other side. Done! Takes like 20 minutes! (The recipe is from Anna Jones in the Guardian, but I don't think it's online anywhere.)
 

What I Love:

Reading:

• Finished Kraken by China Mieville. I think one of Mieville’s real skills is his genre- and tone-bending: Kraken in structure and prose feels very different to Embassytown or City & The City, and that change in tone is very evocative, but there’s always a certain touch of whimsy to his work. His work is playful, it’s all about taking a concept to its ridiculous conclusions, establishing something and then playing in that space. Most of the book is a fun magic-y action romp, but there’s some fascinating details dropped in: the ‘embassy to the sea’, a London terrace house that’s been entirely filled with just, The Ocean, and a scene where a character summons these police officer spirits through burning old police drama tapes to create something that’s almost a ghost of an idea of police officers. Towards the end, there’s a handful of really fascinating concepts, even though I found the twist villain at the end unexpected but not in the most satisfying way, I didn’t feel like there was all that much build-up for it. I also liked Dane. I really recommend this one.
  • Sidenote: I keep bringing up China Mieville because I’ve been reading a lot of his work and getting kind of peeved when the response is, ‘oh yeah, The City and the City, right?’ The City and the City isn’t bad by any means, just for me it didn’t land as hard as his other books, and it kind of put me off his writing for a while because I didn’t get the hype at first. It’s just not the peak of what I like in Mieville’s writing, but I imagine it’s got a lot of appeal that I didn’t vibe with, for whatever reason: plus, it’s probably more accessible in terms of weirdness than like, Embassytown or Perdido Street Station (which I need to read.)
• Ghost in the Shell is a weird one! I still finished the book feeling kind of baffled, although that might be the intention? It felt kind of disconnected and confusing, but I liked the character writing and the concepts.
• I was gifted by a long-time friend My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante and I’ve gotten round to reading it. It’s definitely something I wouldn’t’ve picked up on my own, which is quite fun, actually. It definitely has an immersive, captivating quality, it’s almost… unsettling, in a way? Reading it feels like I’m just waiting for the next thing to go wrong, it’s very atmospheric and I’m having a good time with it.

Watching

• I saw New Japan Pro Wrestling Royal Quest live in the UK with my best friend this month! Awesome show, incredible time. I felt like some of the undercard deserved longer matches. There’s a certain inherent joy to seeing some of your favourites live, and there were some amazing matches towards the end of the card. Will Ospreay vs. Zack Sabre Jr, I mean, what is there to say? It was brilliant and I had no other expectations. I wanted a Zack win, partly because I think he really deserves the UK heavyweight belt and also, with the run Ospreay is on right now, he felt surprisingly like a bit of an underdog. There were some crazy spots in that match, Zack superplexing Ospreay into a submission in mid-air is going to stick in my brain. The final segment was Shota Umino challenging Ospreay for the US title: Shota is clearly still green and although he has good presentation, he’s still learning the extra things that make a match good on top of solid moves, but Ospreay can pull something engaging out of almost anybody. That match literally just happened, so I’ll have to watch it and report back.
• Youtube time! a normal creepypasta retrospective by hazel and mae got recommended to me on a whim and it’s such a well-pulled off bit that I was genuinely blown away. I knew the conceit going into it (which I won’t spoil, even though it’s very easy to find) and that didn’t take away at all from how delightful it was to watch. If you’re interested in online horror, I’d really recommend it because it’s just such a love letter and perfect capturing of how horror has evolved on the internet.
• The Cursed Judge makes these entertaining bite-sized explorations of how games use a specific idea. His video on Video games that don’t exist was a small exploration of online horror and how the way games are played and explained can tell us things about the game and things about the greater story. And it also made me want to revisit Petscop, a series which I fell off towards the end of, but is considered like, one of the masterworks of that style of online ‘creepy game I found’ horror.
• I, of course, like a dutiful Minecraft-raised child, followed the finale of Stampy’s Lovely World, because I felt like I owed it to 10 year old Ellis. What I found more interesting is actually the wrap-up video Stampy made and posted: I always like seeing people’s creative thoughts and processes, especially on something I have a lot of fondness for, and I think there’s real strength in knowing when something should end and understanding the kind of work you want to create. I have a lot of respect for that. Reminds me a little of CJ the X’s 7 Deadly Art Sins video, an exploration of ‘making art wrong’ but focused on the process of making art and your relationship to it, and attempting to cultivate a healthy and enriching relationship with what you make and why you make it.
• Secret Life, the new instalment in the Life Series, my favourite weird Minecraft roleplay experiment, just started. I feel weird about it. I think since the previous season there’s been a slow tone change away from the ‘ridiculous in a deeply engaging way’ drama that made me love the series, and I think if the series did commit to switching tone away from that, I would be really upset. I have a habit of being pessimistic about media I like becoming ‘bad now’, it’s just the logo change and the potential acknowledgement of wider ‘lore’ is making me worry that the series as a whole is shifting away from my tastes. The Life Series as a whole is an experiment, and not every experiment is for everyone, you know?

Playing

• Got back into Caves of Qud again, using a mod that allows me to regularly set checkpoints, and playing in Wander mode where combat is basically optional and you’re incentivised to talk to people and do quests instead. I’m having an amazing time with it, I know it kind of eliminates the whole punishing roguelike element but what I really like about Qud is the exploration and the writing and the systems and this allows me to experience that without feeling constantly set back or frustrated. I’ve been having a great time just stumbling across things and gaining new skills and feeling the game evolve and open out around me. Some little moments I liked:
  • It’s definitely been an easy experience, but I have died a couple of times, mainly at Grit Gate, the dungeon you have to go through to reach the Barathrumites. The actual creatures inside weren’t a big deal (apart from the horrible electric bugs), the real killer was gun turrets. I kept encountering rooms full of like, 6 gun turrets and 6 chests, and I’m such a loot hoarder that I was dead set on getting to those chests and most of the time my hubris got me obliterated. One time I did successfully disable all of the turrets, mainly using an ability I have called Burgeoning that lets me spawn plants in an area to destroy things—however one of the plants I spawn is the one that explodes and constantly fucks me over, so on clearing this room, I was instantly blown up by my own plant minions. That’s Qud, I guess.
  • I really like the ‘getting lost’ mechanic in Qud, where on wandering on the minimised world map you can sometimes be forced down to the actual ground and have to walk around a bit before you can use the world map again. Sometimes it’s frustrating, but sometimes I end up having these fun little encounters that make the game feel really special. One time I stumbled across a screen where a bear leader and a Barathrumite robot leader had both spawned and immediately started fighting. One time I found a village of anarchist horses who deposed their robot overlords for trying to outlaw napping.

Keen-eyed readers will notice there wasn’t a mid-month blog post last month, because there wasn’t. I was busy as hell. I continue to be busy as hell. Will this change, ever? We may never know.

I spent September cramming to get work finished before I started university, and have since started university & am still finishing some stuff up! It’s been kind of crazy but also great.

Site Updates:

:P none.

Art Updates:

I mentioned my new badge press last blog, and I’ve since been working steadily away on creating badges that strike a good balance between marketable and enjoyable to me. I used a local print shop, which was chaotic and cheap but did have the downside of sometimes just absolutely destroying whatever turquoise colours in my prints? I know CMYK can play badly with certain teal shades, but it looked fine on my laptop. Now I’m in uni, I’ll have access to uni printers and be able to control the outcomes a little more.

I also used plastic-back and metal-back badges, since I somehow went through the starter set of 200 badges in a month. The metal-back ones are objectively better quality, but they have a flatter look and tend to dent if I press down too hard with the press. The holographic overlays I also got for my birthday held up super well and added some sparkles to them. I wanted to make stickers, originally, but just didn’t have the time with everyone else going on and I wanted to get the update out for my shop ASAP since I set myself the deadline of ‘the end of September’, and guess what, I made the deadline on the first of October!

You can buy everything in my online shop HERE. All orders I’ve received so far have been so appreciated and will be shipped as soon as possible! The support has been awesome. Also, I’m very proud of the product photography I did.

Speaking of deadlines, MOONSAULT, the pro wrestling art fanzine finally has a release date! 1st of November, baby! 19 awesome pieces of art from awesome people, all in one handy digital PDF. We’re going to be doing promo posts later in the month, so keep up with our Tumblr & Twitter!

Making Moonsault has been stressful but also super rewarding. It’s mostly been a lot of wrangling people and getting things together on time, something I kind of enjoy. Mostly also spreadsheets. We’ve talked about running another one next year, and I am absolutely down, whether it’s another edition with the same theme, or a whole new theme (a fashion magazine idea has been thrown around!) I’m also now way more comfortable with possibly running zines in other fandoms, and hope to do that soon.

When I wasn’t working on badges or my zine, I’ve been participating in other people’s zines! Expect some cool teasers soon. I’ve also been filling out my new, fancy sketchbook. I like keeping a sketchbook, but I find I just tend to draw fun and lighthearted things in it a lot of the time, which is good, but I’m trying to strike a balance with learning and studying in this sketchbook. I’ve been doing perspective and anatomy studies in this, and trying out new materials. That also includes making that kind of routine studying fun, so I’ve mostly been doing that by drawing characters I like in cool poses or in environments. I brought some coloured mechanical pencils (Pilot Eno and Uni NanoDia brands) and have been trying those out—I really liked having a lot of colour and different mediums in my sketchbook after doing Artfight, so I want to carry that forward in a less intensive way.

Now time for the big news: at the end of September, I started University! I’m officially a full-time illustration student again. The start was kind of crazy, but I thankfully didn’t find it actually too overwhelming—I think I’ve been desensitised by the start of Foundation. It’s also a slower course than Foundation, so less crazy and easier to adjust. Having access to all of the resources we have here is really stirring my mind, even though so many of the inductions are booked up :P

Our first brief is a group project, where we’re in small groups making double spreads for a magazine, including an essay and an image, about a topic related to illustration. I was nervous at first about group work, but I got put into a group where we’re all on similar wavelengths and good at communicating with each other. I know in groups I’m organised and like to coordinate things, but I can be a little overbearing sometimes and speak over other people, so that’s something I’m trying to take conscious note of, to sit back a little bit and just chill out in general.

Our topic is about the immersive qualities of Illustration and how it creates and allows us to access other worlds. I’m personally focusing on science fiction and illustration, their similarities, and how they allow us to explore the unreal and think about the world differently, and how this plays into encouraging social change. I’m trying to do something with cutting and layering paper (inspired by Sarah Capon, but with very different vibes) and inspired by the works of Moebius and Kilian Eng (featured below) to create science fiction landscapes, but I haven’t got to that stage yet, just been playing around with thumbnails and compositions, as well as reading long essays about science fiction and marxism. It’s going great!





I also went to the London Anarchist Bookfair, which was a really joyful experience, seeing and chatting to people who are doing incredible things and working together to make a better world. I also read some wonderful zines & collected some awesome postcards and posters :D
 

What I Love

Reading!

• I finished Babel by R. F. Kuang. It’s a book I’ve seen a lot of criticism as well as a lot of hype, and my feelings are sort of a smooth middle between those. It’s a good book, it’s well-written and matches the style it’s trying to emulate very well, and the characters are interesting. The magic system is a cool concept, and I hear people criticising it saying that despite having all this magic, history ends up exactly the same: I get the crit but it kind of didn’t bother me. The one criticism I think is baseless and annoying is people saying the book ‘hates white people’, I think it’s just a bit silly to say that about a book where the main focus is complicity in the crimes of the British Empire? It feels like a flat reading of it, and I found Letty, the only White main character, to have an interesting arc that made sense in the context of the rest of the story.
• ‘Enjoyable’ doesn’t feel like the right word for Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It was a rough read, but an immersive and thought-provoking one. I knew this book was coming out at some point from a Jacob Geller video where he mentions getting an advanced reader copy (thank u for all of my taste in media jacob), and then I saw it had actually come out and rushed to take it out of the library. I don’t know if the sheer amount of different POVs, sometimes one-off POV chapters, works in its favour in terms of structure, but it definitely helps create a fleshed-out world and the characters are great. It’s a thoughtful and thorough book. I wish I’d had more time to think over and reread the ending (I tend to reread the endings of books at least twice to sort of, process it and say goodbye), but I did have to return the book to the library the next day. The ending is shocking and abrupt, but it feels like the only one that makes sense, and I felt like that was in keeping with the rest of the book. A lot of books about rebellion and protest and hope tend to end on this ambiguous note—Babel did too—and I see why it’s done, because something like ‘the revolution’ and actually making meaningful change feels very difficult and almost impossible to imagine right now. However, I’d like to see more books tackle that, because as much as I like critiques and explorations of society in the past and the present, I think being guided into the future is just as important.
• The Seep by Chana Porter was a weird one, in good and bad ways. It felt slightly like a first draft or something that had significant parts chopped out. There was clearly a lot going on, so I imagine the author was aiming for ‘immersive in a confusing way,’ but with how I felt like character development and big emotional beats happened very quickly and elements seemed to disappear and appear, it was just a weird and slightly flattened experience. This is a shame, because I think it’s full of good ideas under the surface, and definitely got me thinking, I just wish it had more time and space to stretch out and bring me into that world more.
• After how much I enjoyed Embassytown, I started Kraken by China Mieville, and although I’m only a bit in, it’s just so rich stylistically that I’m liking it a lot. Mieville changes his prose between books to create a really individual and immersive experience for each one, and also it’s about giant squids and niche cults which is very up my alley. It helps that it’s also set in the Natural History Museum, somewhere I’ve spent a lot of time.
• I’m also, ostensibly for uni but also for fun, reading Ghost in the Shell by Shirow Matsume. I’m having a weird time with it. I’m not sure if the copy I have is badly translated, missing sections, it’s just hard to follow, or I’m missing something, because I’m finding it weirdly hard to follow? I’m not quite following how the elements intersect and why anyone is doing anything, really. Apart from that, I am enjoying it: the characters are great (especially Kusanagi, her dialogue is very fun) and I love the Fuchikoma robot-suit-things and their designs, and the visual style.

Watching!

• I’ve been really into, uh, documentaries about competitive Smash Bros Melee recently? Documentaries covering competitive video games is always something I’ve liked, but it’s mostly been speedrunning before this (SummoningSalt’s videos are classic) but recently a bunch of documentaries about competitive Melee have come up on my youtube page, and they’re weirdly good. I’ve always kind of loved stuff about the evolution of strategies and metagaming, and also, I don’t know, there’s something really engaging about all these weird strategies and stories of success! The first one I watched was a more popular one, There will Never Ever be another Melee player like HungryBox, but I watched that a couple of months ago, and then aMSa: The Only Yoshi (who could do it) also got shown to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It has some great explanations and recreations for stuff people not might know if you’re not into Melee, which I am not. The Donkey Kong Renaissance is another one that’s a bit more technical but also great background listening.
• Ro Ramdin makes video essays that are ostensibly about current events on social media but also very well written and composed and always bring in something philosophical that sticks with me. Her video on Dream, niche fandoms and allegations against creators is something that really stuck with me: all her work manages to be topical as well as detailed and fascinating.
• Sometimes what you kind of need from youtube is silly drama videos. emma in the moment is a new channel doing exactly this for crafting communities on social media, and it’s very just, grab the popcorn and good background noise kind of video.
• Oh god I don’t really watch much TV at all. The new Taskmaster is good because all of the contestants are completely insane. Bake Off is… good now? Again? The vibes feel way less mean and I like the bakers. Glow Up is a view into a world I have never had much affection for (makeup) and is sort of fascinating for it. I watch Strictly Come Dancing like I’m observing some kind of insect except the insect is ‘the British psyche.’
• You thought you missed the Minecraft Youtube Minute? No you didn’t. I finished Last Life: verdict is… good but didn’t play to what I liked most about the series. Because people’s alliances kept imploding due to the rule change about people not being able to stay together on one remaining life, I felt like there was less of a narrative throughline and the ending segments felt more chaotic than impactful. I started Double Life. Verdict is: I know this is going to make me feel craaazy and I can’t wait. Partially because I have spoilers but it also already is and I’ve only just started. It’s just so drama-filled and delightful and also everyone is awful and hilarious. I love it.

Listening

• Once Around the Block by Badly Drawn Boy is probably one of my favourite songs ever, but I’ve been listening to some more of their discography recently. I like You Were Right and Silent Sigh—their music has lots of interesting rhythms, and as someone who’s tone deaf I like that a lot.
• Matt and Kim are a band similar to Badly Drawn Boy, however with every song I’ve listened to of theirs, there’s always part of the song I like and part of the song I don’t? I dislike the chorus in Daylight but the verse is really good.
• Doctor Worm by They Might Be Giants certified banger. i’m not a real doctor but i AM a real worm!!

September will probably be uni work & continuing personal projects—I’ve been doing a lot of zine stuff, I’m not sure what I’m feeling like doing next! I have some risograph poster fanart ideas, designing my OCs… but honestly, I’ve been working a lot and I might just sit back and play more Caves of Qud and eat chocolate covered rice cakes. I’m going into winter mode like a sort of mid bear.

Ellis xoxo

I think almost everyone who enjoys worldbuilding or storytelling has one project, world or character they just keep returning to, never quite continuously, but every so often, it has a resurgence in their mind and gets slowly torn down and rebuilt until it’s almost totally changed shape. ROT, now known as EXPULSION ZONE, is my one of these.

I’ve had it in my brain in some form for, probably approaching 5 or more years? It’s remained a sci-fi setting with a junky spaceship and some core characters trying to transport a person across the galaxy to hunt down their past. The rough outlines of some characters and some worldbuilding has remained the same, but almost all of the specifics have been played with in some way. After making Cast Off, My Darling a more concrete pitch for a story as opposed to a vague floating blob of concepts, I realised that it and the previous incarnation of ROT were incredibly similar thematically, and Cast Off, My Darling taking up that thematic space leaves me to, once again, play around with ROT and solidify it more into its own beast.

Cast Off, My Darling is a more whimsical adventure story, and while it’s not childish, it deals heavily with themes of growing up and I consider it, despite having violent content sometimes, to be all ages in whatever its final execution turns out to be. The new EXPULSION ZONE is adult-oriented and more graphic (violent and sexual) and is a bit more psychedelic and psychological in its storytelling and intended visuals. (as such, trigger warnings for cults, sexual assault mentions and drug mentions for the Pitch section.)

In this post, I’ll detail the setup for the story & some rough plot threads, the themes I want to address, the setting & worldbuilding, and the questions I still need to answer!

The Pitch:

Before she became assimilated into the ranks of the Company, ROT13 lives on a backwater exoplanet at one end of the Orion Arm, isolated and subjugated by the Company, a cult-like weapons manufacturer bankrolling a war it never sees. Struggling with her hopeless life, she has no choice but to sign up with the company and take on a new, powerful robot body. After spending an unknown amount of years doing god knows what, an EMP attack causes her programming to glitch and ROT13 gains consciousness. On waking, she resolves to escape, and through epic transgender robo-sex and pulling her own heart out, she makes a run for it—before the Company blows her to pieces.

On the other side of this arm of the galaxy, reborn as a skeleton and a memory drive named Marceline (it isn’t her real name, but she feels an odd attachment to it), she gets to see a world she’s only ever heard of, the world of Free Space, an expansive and lawless network of space stations away from planet-bound society. Two easily bribeable cargo couriers, Oeya and Ganymede, are instructed with taking her to the right roboticists, but after a sexual assault attempt ends in the three of them carrying out a grisly murder, they’re on the run. 

Journeying across Free Space and hiding out on bustling planets and desolate moons, ROT13, or Marceline, or Chayok, or any other number of aliases, has to find a way to rebuild herself into who she truly is, but first she has to figure that out. And these two assholes on this nasty junk spaceship aren’t really helping—but they have companionship, weed, and a gun stash, so it could be worse. Much worse.

The Themes:

This is going to be a story about identity and belonging, explored through transhumanism, robots, and aliens. It’s about ingrained ideas and programming, and how to imagine a life without them. It’s about dead ends and people with nowhere else to go, and about confronting the choices you’ve made or been made to make.

I want to use robots as a method to explore how social constructs and propaganda affect us. I’ve always been fascinated by the way robots are used in fiction—as malleable minds, as people who aren’t quite real, as the ignorable masses, and I want to play around with what robots mean to humans in EXPULSION ZONE. There’s still a lot that I’m working on around this, as I’ve only been reworking this for a while and I need to do way more research and reading to build up the themes I want to explore.

The Setting:

EXPULSION ZONE is set in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, in a future where humanity and alien species have settled somewhat comfortably in space, living on planets or the sprawl of Free Space.

Free Space is composed of space stations that don’t directly orbit/communicate with a planet, and the bustling culture of spaceships that fly between them. Certain stations or groups of stations might be consolidated under one authority, but there is no wide-reaching authority in Free Space, although not for lack of trying. Stations in Free Space try to look after their own amidst constant disputes between stations or the groups who run them. Due to not wanting to waste resources, there is an uneasy peace across Free Space, for now.

Individual stations in Free Space might be oriented around a specific common interest or job, such as laboratories, artist colonies or churches, or settlements. There’s a huge breadth of people you can find in Free Space, but it tends to harbour spaceborn people who have never touched ground, people working on niche or dangerous projects, and those who don’t want to be found easily.

Ganymede and Oeya work as cargo carriers on their scrappy little spaceship in Free Space, a vital part of the ecosystem for making sure stations can operate and trade. They’ve had many run-ins with the groups that vye for power in Free Space and keep their networks of stations running with elaborate weapon smuggling (including the creations of the Company), but nobody wants to down a cargo carrier, except one that’s as willing to take bribes as they are. Ganymede's ex-partner, Aryele, operates as a weapons smuggler in Free Space.

Three major alien species reside in the Orion Arm. Most of the population of each lives in planets on their own solar system, but there are still large populations on other species-habitant solar systems, other habitable planets, or various other settlements including Free Space.

Ganymede is Thele, a species of sapient beings composed of hundreds of smaller organisms working in hive intelligence, similar to coral polyps. They communicate with chemical signatures emitted by their polyps and transferred through touch, and have somewhat of an immunity and affinity to radiation. They reproduce through continually emitting spores, and if there are enough thele in one place, the spores will clump together and grow into polyps, creating a new organism with enough Thele around to step in and raise it. Ganymede isn’t strictly her name, as her thele name is a complex chemical signature, it’s the place where her first polyps were from: a thele-human scientific base on the Jovian moon Ganymede. They have a complex relationship with death and don’t quite die in the way other animals do. I don’t have a polished idea for the thele design yet, but it’s very frilly and frond-y, like a sea dragon or jellyfish, due to the complex webs and trailing polyps, and stands upright but has limbs that can reform into any configuration.

Oeya is Yao’oocha, a species of methane/ethane based sapient beings, adapted to live on gas giants. They have an appearance similar to sea slugs, but with 3-5 pairs of limbs (6-10 in total) that they can use to interact with their environment. Yao’aecha (plural version) use incredibly low frequencies and long sounds to communicate, so human-speakable versions of their language, such as the name Oeya, are cut down from about 5 minutes to an easier length. Yao’oocha families are typically big units and community is celebrated, as a child can be created with any number of parents and infants are often born in litters, but when they reach maturity, yao’oocha children are expected to leave their family and go to find their own community.

Humans in EXPULSION ZONE have adapted somewhat to new environments—many of the humans living in Free Space have never touched a planet and are able to adapt more easily to different gravity levels, and technology has helped all species interface together. Almost all humans will never see Earth—like many other habitable planets, it’s damaged but still liveable, however, mass exoduses and the planet being largely closed except to those who can be trusted to care for it means it’s a fairy-tale like land in most humans’ eyes. ROT13 used to be human, but this has changed. One of the most famous human stations in Free Space, the Tau Ceti Human Orchestra, which houses a colony of musicians and giant archives tracing human movements and communities across the Orion Arm, has been missing for over 10 years, and the search continues.

There are many other forms of sapience in Free Space and other settlements, such as mouldminds, large fungal organisms from many different planets that have huge intelligence and the ability to process many systems at once comparable to the largest AIs. They mostly work to keep whole facilities or communities going and have their own clear personalities.

Robots and artificial intelligences are present almost everywhere, with varying levels of population density and varying jobs and purposes. I’m still working on worldbuilding for exactly how robots exist in this world and how they’re treated by society—that’ll probably come with research too.

The Stuff I Still Need To Get To:

This project is very much a work in progress, and I don’t know when or how it would ever become a finished thing, but I’m enjoying working on it and intend to keep working on it as long as I do. I think the main thing I’d like to work on is doing some research and thinking about how I want robots to exist in this society and the various ideas surrounding that, and then build a more concrete idea of ROT13’s journey up from there. I’d also like to figure out the background of previous wars that the Company helped facilitate, and their actions, and what ROT13’s life was like when she wasn’t ‘awake.’ I tend to start something from an interesting hook and then build outwards, which is useful in some ways and annoying in others, oh, she has a mysterious past, I just don’t know what it is yet.

I’d still like to follow through on the plan of building a wiki for my worldbuilding and characters at some point, but I’m currently doing kind of a lot, as well as the start of University approaching (just under 2 months! woo!), so I don’t want to start on it and leave it unfinished for long amounts of time, especially when I’m still working on the actual worldbuilding & plot stuff.

I’m going to be on holiday for the end of June, but I’ll try and get an update blog out after I come back in early August with an Artfight recap (still going strong & enjoying it!) and some of the projects I’d like to work on going forward, because I have a lot of plans.

Thanks so much for reading! If you’re interested in EXPULSION ZONE as a project, please feel free to comment on this post on Dreamwidth or on my main comment section and perhaps that’ll push me to make more stuff and work on the wiki. Ellis :)

Recently, I’ve been rereading a lot of the Discworld books, particularly the City Watch books—I have some of my grandma’s old copies of them, but I realised, a bit ago, I was missing two, and was able to borrow them from the library. Libraries are awesome and you should use your library. Let’s start off like this: I’m incredibly fond of Pratchett’s writing. The City Watch books are very interesting to me, in what they do and what they don’t, and I want to write about them because I enjoy them. You might disagree with me—this is very much a biased reading based on my own far-left politics, that focuses around abolishing power held in society, such as the monarchy and the police. If that hasn’t turned you away from this, uh, gay portfolio blog, then let’s keep going.

Pratchett has a complicated legacy. You might say he was progressive for his time, or, more accurately, you might say he was progressive for White male fantasy authors writing in the 80s & 90s, but I think it’s accurate to say, at least in my experience, that there’s still a vision of him as a progressive but privileged fantasy writer in a time where that wasn’t in the mainstream. There are writers who were working around the same time or earlier who were making far more interesting art about leftism and bigotry (I adore Ursula K Le Guin and will point to her at any moment I can), but Pratchett combined that with what was mainstream, which was fantasy shlock with eye-catching ugly-charming cover art. 

It’s A Bit More Complicated Than That - Misogyny, Sexism and the failures of subverting stereotypes

The core of Discworld is a deeply affectionate parody. I think it’s clear to see that Pratchett harbours a deep love for the fantasy he’s mocking, and the reason why Discworld works is that he has so much knowledge to subvert. But this is pulp fantasy of the 70s and 80s, and in playing with it you’re going to butt up against a series of constant, upsetting stereotypes, and Pratchett’s response to these is to play with them, turn them around and over and, sometimes, create something new out of them. 

Pratchett is especially known for how he wrote female characters, which, in my opinion, stands up incredibly well to this day—but I’d argue that’s unrelated to what he did with the stereotypes of the genre. If you’ve spent any time in circles that discuss feminism in writing, I’d bet you’ve seen this excerpt before, from The Light Fantastic, the second ever Discworld book:

Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one's shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, thighboots and naked blades. Words like 'full', 'round', and even 'pert' creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and lie down. Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn't about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialized buyer. Oh well, all right. The point that must be made is that although Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure, and the pick of the leather racks in Woo Hun Ling's Oriential Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, she was currently quite sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots, and a short sword. All right, maybe the boots were leather. But not black.

This is a funny segment! I like it! (It’s also ironic, contrasted with the original Josh Kirby cover art, which is… well…) (Note: this is from the second ever Discworld book, and I think the way Pratchett writes female characters improves over time. It’s not representative of all of Discworld, but I thought it was good to represent how Pratchett is perceived.)

But it gets passed around as an example of how Pratchett is good at writing women, when it doesn’t represent the fullness of what he does with his female characters, it represents his sense for comedy and self-awareness. The strength of Pratchett’s writing of female characters is when it goes beyond the stereotypes it plays with, when it takes them out of that realm into fully formed people. That’s the fundamental ur-stereotype of any marginalised group in fiction, that they are paper cutouts that can exist in a limited variety of forms and do limited things. It also is how you write a good fictional character.

Take Sybil Ramkin. Pratchett, throughout Discworld, pokes and prods at the idea of the archetypical fantasy hero, who needs an archetypical fantasy love interest, and this is where Sybil comes in, and she is not the archetypical fantasy love interest. She is a spinster (older than about 25), fat, and has hobbies, specifically dangerous and involved ones. This is how we first see Sybil, as our ‘hero’ Sam Vimes’s unlikely love interest, and she fills that role wonderfully, but where Sybil shines is where she acts of her own accord, outside of those stereotypes.

Although she sometimes gets reduced to a fretting/nagging wife character in the later books in a way I dislike, she still acts with agency and feeling—one of my favourite Sybil moments is in The Fifth Elephant, where, in order to plead with the dwarves to side with them, she bursts out into dwarf opera. Other female characters like Angua and Cheery continue in this stead, of starting from concepts & subversions and progressing into fully formed characters as the series continues.

But this is a strategy that isn’t always perfect. These characters are still fundamentally based in those stereotypes, even how far Discworld goes to subvert them. When we look at Sybil, the thing that’s taken away, first and foremost, is ‘this isn’t what a conventionally desirable woman is’, which functions as a kind of cage that Sybil can’t quite escape from. Despite the initial subversion, it still centres those stereotypes.

Although Pratchett’s female characters still stand out as well-written, I would argue his non-white characters largely fail. Many of Discworld’s non-white characters, distinct from his fantasy ‘races’, don’t receive the same kind of fleshing-out that allows them to function as characters and not as props, regardless of how subverted the stereotypes might be.

Take 71-Hour Ahmed, the antagonist for the most part of Jingo, who is eventually revealed to actually be only pretending to play into all of the Orientalist tropes he’s simply been framed in for large parts of the story—this is hinted at, and is a fairly predictable twist, and I think the idea of having to play into stereotypes as a tool is an interesting one, it’s just, as I said earlier, Ahmed never quite gets out of the cage. It makes him & the other Klatchian characters in Discworld feel distinctly uncomfortable. When you set out to write work that’s representative of often erased experiences, you’re juggling reflecting a culture or situation that you don’t experience, but at the core, you still have to write a character, not a prop.

But I also think there’s deeper aspects to that in the way Discworld handles racism and misogyny. Let’s look at Monstrous Regiment. Monstrous Regiment is a book all about misogyny, and at every turn I was surprised by how it handled gender performance and expression in  a way I didn’t expect it to with such grace and cleverness. It also reveals something crucial—I think it shows awareness of misogyny as a system as opposed to actions by individuals, and that’s why it comes off so tactfully.

On the contrary, in Discworld, racism is largely portrayed as an act of individual stupidity or personal failing, a lack of logic. Vimes is casually racist (Men At Arms being the book with the most of this I can think of), but this is placed as a character flaw, and in Jingo, Nobby and Colon’s racism towards Klatchians is idiocy played for comedy. 

The occlusion of systems, of racism in Discworld and, as I’ll discuss later, policing and power, are dangerous. It’s important to remember that racism and misogyny aren’t just products of individual or even widespread stupidity, they are crafted tools of subjugation. Framing these systems in this way obscures the power and spread of bigotry, and gets in the way of fully comprehending bigotry and thus being able to tackle it.

Why is this? I think it’s as simple as, Pratchett was, well, a white man writing in the late 20th and early 21st century. There’s a kind of perception I’ve seen among many Discworld fans that Pratchett, as a person, is progressive, and if not progressive, he possesses an inherent kindness and empathy that led so much of his writing. As much as I love Pratchett and have found immense comfort in how he writes, I think it does a disservice to deny that significant parts of his work were led by bias and prejudice, from Jingo to Small Gods to Interesting Times.

Policing & Power in Ankh-Morpork

The City Watch books, on their journey to dismantle the idea of the typical fantasy hero, develop a complicated relationship with the idea of power. They take a lot of inspiration from the noir/detective tradition, and with that comes the dangerous ground of a police setting, and a shifty but morally righteous hero.

In Ankh-Morpork, power is a necessary evil. Vetinari, for all of his scheming and manipulation, is one of its least tyrannical leaders. In Night Watch, when Lord Winder is deposed in favour of Lord Snapcase, Vimes looks back on people celebrating a new ruler who will eventually turn out to be just the same as the old ruler. Vimes’s ongoing battle with his desire to turn to violence to do the right thing is a key topic of Men At Arms and Night Watch. Ultimately, he decides against it at the conclusion of Night Watch:

When we break down, it all breaks down. That's just how it works. You can bend it, and if you make it hot enough you can bend it in a circle, but you can't break it. When you break it, it all breaks down until there's nothing unbroken. It starts here and now. He lowered the sword.

This quote frames policing as something utterly necessary for a functioning society, that there needs to be a crime for which laws can be made. And although Vimes can act within the spirit and not the letter of the law to advance righteousness and order, as he does in Jingo, there’s still a central construct of order that needs to be enforced.

Something interesting about Vimes gets revealed here, and over the course of the City Watch arc—as much as Vimes has his heritage as a kingslayer, he functions as a kind of unappointed arbiter of what is right. He has his character flaws, but ultimately he remains framed as righteous, even when he strays slightly from his own path. Vimes is often above the conflicts of the City Watch books, in that he acts as an unbiased observer who makes decisions on what he judges to be right, (especially in Night Watch) and doesn’t pick a political side, beyond the rule of law and basic human decency. 

Pratchett can’t help but tie Vimes to the role of the hero. Particularly interestingly, his casual racism isn’t redeemed, but there’s no true exploration of the consequences of it, just as there aren’t explorations of the consequences of wider police corruption in Ankh-Morpork that we only really are told, not shown.

There’s a reading of Vimes that brands this as copaganda: Vimes is a good apple in a barrel of rotten ones, who successfully breaks through and changes the system, and since his actions outside of the law lead to the right outcomes, he is right and by extension his position in the police is just and correct. (Many people have written about copaganda in much better ways than I have, but in summary, ‘copaganda’, cop propaganda, is media that pushes the idea that the police are indispensable, heroic, and their actions outside of the law are correct and they should be allowed to continue in that fashion.)

And again, this occlusion of the system comes up. Ankh-Morpork is fairly transparently London, something I realised embarrassingly late given it’s my city of residence. There’s  a historical reputation of crime and police presence, a city that absorbed together various smaller towns and continues to be a site of multiculturalism, and gained power from being a port on an incredibly stinky river. There’s a quote from Night Watch, again, that stuck with me:

Against the dark screen of night, Vimes had a vision of Ankh-Morpork. It wasn’t a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who’d never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent that life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed… …and gave back the dung from its pens, and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions, and ideas, and interesting vices, songs, and knowledge, and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That was what civilization meant. It meant the city.

While colonialism, as suggested by this quote, exists in Discworld, like policing, we never are shown, not told, the underbelly of it and the people who it only hurts. Colonialism is just another cog in the machine of Ankh-Morpork, just as many people would like you to feel about the history of London, colonialism is a one-way system where the dark side is hidden from view.

I think Pratchett is very aware of the harm unjust use of power causes. There are moments where Discworld feels as if just the right person, someone who can be trusted to make the right decisions that are best for the world, gets placed in power, then things will turn out fine. With Vimes leading the watch, finally, we have someone who can be trusted to make the right decisions. But I don’t think it’s that simple—Carrot, after all, never becomes king. Vetinari remains a tyrant, no-one is truly, truly, incorruptible, even by their own feelings. There are times when Discworld feels pessimistic, unable to imagine a better world, whether that’s by the trappings of fantasy convention, or by the conventional organisation of society. Discworld is hopeful for a better world, but following the lines of fantasy and detective stories that rely on the hierarchy of royalty and police respectively, perhaps it’s unable to imagine it.

Conclusion

There’s an ongoing pattern in online fandom and general appreciation of the sci-fi/fantasy genre to want things we’re comfortable with and already integrated into the status quo to represent our own beliefs & be kind and compassionate pieces of art, when maybe they’re not. The Colour of Magic was released in 1983, which is considered the official year of birth for the internet, and the landscape of fantasy literature was a very different place. Now, it’s never been easier to find something to read that might just surprise you. Discworld won’t ever be something it’s not, which is what made it so special in some ways, but it’s unfair to make Pratchett out as a paragon of inclusivity when there’s thousands, millions of other voices saying what you wish Discworld would say.

Thanks for reading my silly little essays! More things like this coming soon.

GNU Terry Pratchett.

• forbidden door absolutely ruled from beginning to end. incredible!!!! so much good stuff!!!!! orange cassidy vs. will ospreay, toni storm vs. thunder rosa, swerve strickland & keith lee vs. el desperado & yoshinobu kanemaru, all absolutely class matches
• r.e. orange cassidy—LOVE what they're doing with his gimmick as more irritating and mind-games-y. it creates a great story in a match and works really well in terms of 'comedy wrestler vs. serious opponent.'
• get well soon cm punk <3 im sad we didn't get summer of punk 2 yet. maybe in the future... maybe winter of punk... i believe in him
• the jericho appreciation society can get hit in the face with large amounts of barbed wire and i will cheer always. FUCK those guys!
• if anyone says eddie kingston isn't one of AEW's best at the moment i will attack them. he's brought it every single match and the current feud between eddie and co & the blackpool combat club vs. the jericho appreciation society has ruled. shame bryan couldn't make it (again due to an injury. what is in the WATER!!)
• thunder rosa and toni storm forming tag team thunderstorm is very cool. i wonder if we're leading up to women's tag team title belts? i'd love to see that. maybe we'll get mens trios belts first, cos AEW love a slow burn.
• was randomly talking about this today—i really like how AEW is less strict with 'heel' and 'face' characterisation, not that it flip-flops, but that you can read a lot of their big guys as either way. that's pretty unconventional for wrestling, but i really really like it. the faces usually do bad things as well, and the heels usually have a point. it's interesting in terms of dynamic + fun storytelling.
• man, i need to watch some Stardom. my womens' wrestling needs arent fulfilled atm! i'd have more time to watch if AEW wasn't so damn good at the moment...