doctor who coming back in the year of 2023 when terfism and biological essentialism and transphobia are on the rise and making one of THE most hyped up episodes by bringing back fan favorites david tennant and catherine tate. all about being trans
showing rose being bullied and her grandma struggling to get it right but still being supportive. and shaun and donna being the greatest parents by being ready to burn the world down to protect their daughter. the doctor asking for the meep's pronouns AND IT'S NORMAL???
and all of that is brilliant to see rose as a trans character and it is important to the narrative. BUT THEN. ROSE BEING TRANS SAVES DONNA'S LIFE BY TAKING HALF OF THE METACRISIS. BECAUSE THE DOCTOR IS MALE AND FEMALE AND NEITHER AND MORE. AND THAT IS INTEGRAL TO DOCTOR WHO AS A WHOLE. and it saved donna's life
to see doctor who be so BLATANTLY trans and nonbinary at the core of the series. the multiple references to the fact that before fourteen, thirteen was a woman. so to see this? trans people stay winning. thank you doctor who for doubling down on the importance of the doctor being trans because oh my god I am so emotional about this
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The Mandlorian decided that droids needed a bar, because every Star Wars writer has made the moral black pit of droid sentience and servitude ever more incoherent, absurd, and irreconcilable.
(The short version is that droids in Star Wars can fundamentally not be sentient for the ironclad non-diegetic reason in that its moral framework cannot handle the weight that every organic character in Star Wars is at-best totally indifferent to slavery and has casually and comfortably bought slaves, sold slaves, murdered slaves, ripped bits out of some slaves to improve other slaves, left slaves to die, ordered slaves to their death to save their own skins, and watched other people murder slaves without any reaction either personally or within any kind of larger narrative awareness. Stupid writers keep dancing towards the issue because they think it adds 'depth' or some kind of 'edginess' but no, it just breaks Star Wars. Seriously, if droids are fully people Star Wars just... breaks. In a way that's really obnoxious, too, like that one asshole who corners you at a party to tell you that the Jedi are the REAL villains if you think about it. No, dipshit, they're not: even Andor understands that the moral line in Star Wars is really obvious and solid. Star Wars morality can encompass people doing bad things in pursuit of a noble goal, but it never goes 'fascists and anti-fascists are a mirror image' because that's authoritarian-friendly centrist bullshit.
[sidebar: Andor understands that's there's nuance to freedom fighting, that terror can be a tool to fight oppression but, equally, that an anti-fascist who turns to fascism to fight fascism is just a fascist. The tension in Andor is not that fighting fascism will turn you fascist, but that the choices you make might free others but leave you forever chained. You might bring your people to the promised land, but there's no guarantee you'll be able to join them because a moral person who holds themselves to their own moral standard values himself too much to live comfortably with what he's done. Luthen Rael doesn't think the things he are does are justified because of the greater good: he thinks that he couldn't see a better option and he will live every day until he dies questioning, re-litigating, and self-flagellating himself that he wasn't good enough to figure that better option out, and nothing or no-one will ever free him from that guilt and shame. A fascist and an anti-fascist can both do terrible things but its the fascist who can sleep well at night, and that's all the difference in the world.
Andor's a pretty good show, y'all.]
Thus, as the Empire is explicitly pro-slavery, you can't have the Good Guys also be pro-[droid] slavery as some kind of 'both sides' tu quoque rhetorical flourish. It doesn't work—not in Star Wars. Not even in mildly more amture, grown-up Star Wars/ Droids cannot be sentient in Star Wars because literally the entire moral underpinning that is the narrative raison d'etre of the entire series falls completely apart. (This is, incidentally, the non-mechanical reason I don't like droid PCs in my SW campaigns.)
And yes, this is the short version of this argument. The long version involves me whacking you with a pool noodle while reading long passages of Uberto Eco and CLR James until you stop trying to make Star Wars 'edgy' like someone writing an 'evil Santa' movie.)
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another difference is that brennan gives much more leeway to his players than matt did. like it feels like he'll let them do anything as long as it's not explicitly against the rules. like emily asked if sofia's burning hair could result in a cute bob and he was like yes, absolutely, sure, and I guarantee matt would have made her roll like, a percentage die or something. but his strictness meant the stakes for the characters and story were higher, so I miss it a bit
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A particularly long feathered chocobo trots up and stares and Roche. It has matching head feathers!
Unprompted Anon's - ALWAYS ACCEPTING
He's not entirely certain what to make of this giant foul attempting to invade his space, with it's beady soulless eyes and that enormous beak. Of course Roche can appreciate the amount of grooming which must have taken place for such a fetching crest atop its head, but that didn't mean to say that he wasn’t careful about keeping a healthy distance between them.
"Yes, you're very pretty, but please don't peck me... please...?"
And here we learn that Roche, the reckless, arrogant son-of a-gun who has no qualms in using a motorbike with a giant obnoxious chassis as a weapon, is a little bit afraid of chocobo's :)
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