and now, the funny dystopia
Mar. 23rd, 2020 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI've started listening to Stellar Firma, a Rusty Quill sf/comedy-ish series starring Ben Meredith (the voice of Elias on The Magnus Archives, and Zolf and Grizzop and the archaeologist guy on RQG) and his brother Tim Meredith. I wasn't expecting to like it, because I didn't find the trailer funny at all, but I like it a lot.
A little background for those who haven't listened to it: the titular Stellar Firma is a custom planet-making company serving the galactic .01%. Some hundreds of years before our story begins, it happened to rescue the human survivors of environmental disaster on earth, and their descendants are its "citizen employees." One of them is Trexel Geistman (Tim), who designs planets. Badly. Trexel has a clone assistant, David 7 (Ben). Rounding out the cast, at least thus far, are Imogen Harris as I.M.O.G.E.N. the supercomputer and Jenny Haufek as Trexel's line manager, Hartro Piltz.
The show is semi-improvised: listeners submit prompts for planets and each episode Trexel and David design one, more or less, and hope to avoid the wrath of Hartro Piltz.
So far, it's like the darker bits of Red Dwarf crossed with the darker bits of Blackadder crossed with the workplace-dark-comedy bits of The Magnus Archives. It is, you might have guessed, dark, and it is generally very funny.
Content warnings: (ALMOST) ALL THE CONTENT WARNINGS. Seriously. A list for the first thirteen episodes under the first cut : slavery and imprisonment, alcoholism, emotional abuse (of adults in the present, of a child referred to frequently--and possibly in the present as well if you count David as a child, which perhaps you should), physical abuse and violence towards adults (and David), past neglect of a child, massively abusive workplace, gaslighting, probably things I'm forgetting. So far there has been no reference to sexual violence or sexual abuse, and that sort of thing is generally absent from Rusty Quill productions; it hasn't happened in Rusty Quill Gaming and there's an explicit promise that it will never happen in The Magnus Archives.
Pretty much all of this awful stuff is, in context, funny and very much not funny at the same time.
Not every joke works, and I'm already getting a bit tired of the planetary design stream-of-nonsense stuff, but the characters and their relationships are strong enough to keep me interested. Trexel--the abused and neglected child who has become an abuser himself--fascinates me, by which I mean he needs a good slap and a few months in rehab and a different job and lots of ongoing therapy and then a hug.
And David . . . *cries*. I'm already in mourning for David's innocence. He couldn't possibly have kept it and survived, but it hurts to see him, under the influence of Trexel and Hartro and Stellar Firma, starting to become as ruthless and selfish as his environment requires him to be. I'm haunted by the last performance review, when Hartro told David to hit Trexel, twice, and he did it. Apologetically, reluctantly, but he did it. And wasn't ultimately sorry at all, because Trexel is constantly making him suffer and he wants to make Trexel suffer right back. David needs to be freed and taken far far away and allowed to grow up and given all the hugs. Also showers, and normal clothes, and all the moisturizer.
(And, may the good dog forgive me, I kind of ship Trexel and David a lot. It would be awful, and I'm just as pleased that it probably* won't happen textually, but I do have the kind of mind that craves master/servant or employer/employee pairings between male characters. Sometimes I like them relatively innocent and about subverting/reworking power differentials. Sometimes I like them as creepy and inappropriate as possible (see also: Jon/Elias, Martin/Peter Lukas). (*I say "probably won't happen textually" because I feel like Trexel has made a couple of vaguely inappropriate comments? It's not hard to imagine Trexel's insatiable need for approval and self-esteem and power and whatever he imagines love to be affecting his treatment of David. But OTOH, as I mentioned, Rusty Quill does avoid sexual violence and sexual abuse in its content, and also the characters are played by brothers and I would imagine they do not want the characters to go there.)
Speaking of David, Ben's David voice (especially early on) sometimes reminds me a lot of his Grizzop voice. So part of me keeps imagining Stellar Firma as a RQG sidequest in which Artemis wasn't very pleased with Grizzop after all, and instead of a nice afterlife he's had a series of not-at-all-nice reincarnations.
Moving on to The Magnus Archives: the S5 trailer is supposed to drop today, and the first episode of S5 will still release on April 2 (April 1st if you're a Patreon supporter, as I am). *bounces with excitement and terror*
I keep thinking about the meetings where Jonny and Alex talked about Jon and Martin's character arcs. They've said in Q&As that the original plan was not to have any romance arc, and that the choice to make Jon asexual tied into that. And then, I imagine, there followed a series of "oh, by the way"s: "oh, by the way, Martin has a crush on Jon"; "oh, by the way, all the other characters have noticed Martin's crush on Jon"; "oh, by the way, it's not really a crush anymore; Martin's genuinely in love with Jon and everyone but Jon knows it"; "oh, by the way, Jon has fallen in love with Martin in return and they're going to become a couple at the end of S4."
I have mentioned that I have started shipping Jonny and Alex, right? (With all the necessary caveats about knowing the difference between real people and fictional characters, and also reality and fantasy.) I'm sure someone--probably several someones--has already written the fic where they fall in love in parallel with their characters.
If I were a terrible person, I'd send in a question about whether they ever found it just a teensy bit strange, choosing to have the characters they act/write/direct/produce/showrun fall desperately in love. But I am not a terrible person, so I won't. I will just quietly speculate on it, over here on DW where I don't even need a "Do Not Archive" tag.
A little background for those who haven't listened to it: the titular Stellar Firma is a custom planet-making company serving the galactic .01%. Some hundreds of years before our story begins, it happened to rescue the human survivors of environmental disaster on earth, and their descendants are its "citizen employees." One of them is Trexel Geistman (Tim), who designs planets. Badly. Trexel has a clone assistant, David 7 (Ben). Rounding out the cast, at least thus far, are Imogen Harris as I.M.O.G.E.N. the supercomputer and Jenny Haufek as Trexel's line manager, Hartro Piltz.
The show is semi-improvised: listeners submit prompts for planets and each episode Trexel and David design one, more or less, and hope to avoid the wrath of Hartro Piltz.
So far, it's like the darker bits of Red Dwarf crossed with the darker bits of Blackadder crossed with the workplace-dark-comedy bits of The Magnus Archives. It is, you might have guessed, dark, and it is generally very funny.
Content warnings: (ALMOST) ALL THE CONTENT WARNINGS. Seriously. A list for the first thirteen episodes under the first cut : slavery and imprisonment, alcoholism, emotional abuse (of adults in the present, of a child referred to frequently--and possibly in the present as well if you count David as a child, which perhaps you should), physical abuse and violence towards adults (and David), past neglect of a child, massively abusive workplace, gaslighting, probably things I'm forgetting. So far there has been no reference to sexual violence or sexual abuse, and that sort of thing is generally absent from Rusty Quill productions; it hasn't happened in Rusty Quill Gaming and there's an explicit promise that it will never happen in The Magnus Archives.
Pretty much all of this awful stuff is, in context, funny and very much not funny at the same time.
Not every joke works, and I'm already getting a bit tired of the planetary design stream-of-nonsense stuff, but the characters and their relationships are strong enough to keep me interested. Trexel--the abused and neglected child who has become an abuser himself--fascinates me, by which I mean he needs a good slap and a few months in rehab and a different job and lots of ongoing therapy and then a hug.
And David . . . *cries*. I'm already in mourning for David's innocence. He couldn't possibly have kept it and survived, but it hurts to see him, under the influence of Trexel and Hartro and Stellar Firma, starting to become as ruthless and selfish as his environment requires him to be. I'm haunted by the last performance review, when Hartro told David to hit Trexel, twice, and he did it. Apologetically, reluctantly, but he did it. And wasn't ultimately sorry at all, because Trexel is constantly making him suffer and he wants to make Trexel suffer right back. David needs to be freed and taken far far away and allowed to grow up and given all the hugs. Also showers, and normal clothes, and all the moisturizer.
(And, may the good dog forgive me, I kind of ship Trexel and David a lot. It would be awful, and I'm just as pleased that it probably* won't happen textually, but I do have the kind of mind that craves master/servant or employer/employee pairings between male characters. Sometimes I like them relatively innocent and about subverting/reworking power differentials. Sometimes I like them as creepy and inappropriate as possible (see also: Jon/Elias, Martin/Peter Lukas). (*I say "probably won't happen textually" because I feel like Trexel has made a couple of vaguely inappropriate comments? It's not hard to imagine Trexel's insatiable need for approval and self-esteem and power and whatever he imagines love to be affecting his treatment of David. But OTOH, as I mentioned, Rusty Quill does avoid sexual violence and sexual abuse in its content, and also the characters are played by brothers and I would imagine they do not want the characters to go there.)
Speaking of David, Ben's David voice (especially early on) sometimes reminds me a lot of his Grizzop voice. So part of me keeps imagining Stellar Firma as a RQG sidequest in which Artemis wasn't very pleased with Grizzop after all, and instead of a nice afterlife he's had a series of not-at-all-nice reincarnations.
Moving on to The Magnus Archives: the S5 trailer is supposed to drop today, and the first episode of S5 will still release on April 2 (April 1st if you're a Patreon supporter, as I am). *bounces with excitement and terror*
I keep thinking about the meetings where Jonny and Alex talked about Jon and Martin's character arcs. They've said in Q&As that the original plan was not to have any romance arc, and that the choice to make Jon asexual tied into that. And then, I imagine, there followed a series of "oh, by the way"s: "oh, by the way, Martin has a crush on Jon"; "oh, by the way, all the other characters have noticed Martin's crush on Jon"; "oh, by the way, it's not really a crush anymore; Martin's genuinely in love with Jon and everyone but Jon knows it"; "oh, by the way, Jon has fallen in love with Martin in return and they're going to become a couple at the end of S4."
I have mentioned that I have started shipping Jonny and Alex, right? (With all the necessary caveats about knowing the difference between real people and fictional characters, and also reality and fantasy.) I'm sure someone--probably several someones--has already written the fic where they fall in love in parallel with their characters.
If I were a terrible person, I'd send in a question about whether they ever found it just a teensy bit strange, choosing to have the characters they act/write/direct/produce/showrun fall desperately in love. But I am not a terrible person, so I won't. I will just quietly speculate on it, over here on DW where I don't even need a "Do Not Archive" tag.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-25 09:19 am (UTC)