Hey. This is the beginning of the DVD where it says the opinions expressed in the commentary (submission) do not reflect those of the distributer (Space Mom).

I cannot stress enough how little of a reylo shipper or a keylo stan I am, but for G-d’s sake some of you people need to learn how to consume media critically. Like, actually critically, not “if this character was real and did the things they did in real life he would be an irredeemable bastard and so he shouldn’t get a redemption arc.” What the fuck, guys? Yes, the motherfucker tortured people and killed his dad and was complicit in literal genocide, but that’s just bad writing. We’re meant to consider him a villain in the same way we considered Vader a villain, but one of the ways they tried to convince us was destroying planets. But no one in the entire series ever actually ACTS like a planet has been destroyed, least of all Leia, who in IV seems super cool about the whole thing immediately. It’s a characterizing flourish that is as clumsy and as miscalculated as it is common to the series. If you read this and think I’m saying anything close to “genocide and depictions of genocide are okay,” that’s exactly the problem I’m talking about. The sequel trilogy mirrored (and magnified) the original trilogy not just because they learned after the prequels that audiences wanted less new stuff, but because the sequels leaned heavily on the idea of inheritance. Kylo Ren tortured Rey and blew up planets because Vader tortured Leia and blew up planet(s?). What we want for villains in fiction should not necessarily be what we want for villains in reality and the fact that this distinction is so rarely made is deeply troubling to me. If Avatar: The Last Airbender wasn’t a show for kids (or, at least, on a network for kids), Zuko probably would’ve killed people and you guys would say he shouldn’t have a redemption arc. Let me be clear: the bad writing is not that a villain gets redeemed, but that a villain meant for redemption is characterized poorly. Make the distinction, please, I’m begging you. All the discourse typed about characters not meeting the standards of perfect moral rectitude necessary to be liked creates genuine moral failure when people who like the story are forced to defend evil actions as if they were committed in reality. It would be, without hyperbole, exhausting to bridge over from the previous point to this next and perfectly expand on it, so let me just briefly say: in the same way that characterization descends into caricature because broad narrative strokes are often necessary to illustrate fine points (he’s a villain, so he must act cruelly even if he is to be redeemed, so let’s have him DESTROY PLANETS), it is often necessary for writers of fiction to use tropes to convey something fresh. The redemption arc of a mildly sympathetic villain is a trope, a narrative caricature, used as a vehicle for the author’s unique story. To simply say that villain redemption is old and overdone is to fundamentally misunderstand how fiction is created and structured.

I had this really weird dream again for like the second time??

It starts off I’m in my dorm with my roommates and we’re watching this PBS creepy paranormal thing where this guy kept observing in photos he was taking with this modified camera, there was this short, humanoid figure standing near him in all the photos. It was a brownish color with gold lines all over its body and it was vaguely ‘baby shaped’ so he was calling them baby demons or whatever. It wasn’t only him that had those creatures around. He took pictures of people that were experiencing paranormal phenomena, and more often than not, those creatures would show up. Almost everyone that had those creatures around them died shortly after. Then, shortly after the guy that was observing this phenomena disappeared.

The next thing I remember was that my roommates and I were taking a road trip somewhere along the eastern seaboard and we were making notes of how crazy exaggerated the tides have been for the past few months. They were, like, record breaking tides.

When we get back to the room after this trip, there’s a photograph shoved under our door of that guy. That guy from the PBS show that disappeared. The photo is 3 separate photos stitched together and in all of them you can see that ‘baby demon’ whatever it is. We got freaked out and we threw the photo out into the hallway, and seconds after I shut the door, I look through the peephole and the photo is taped over the peephole. We tried throwing it away, burning it, everything, but the photo would come back. 

A few days later in the mail we got this camera, one that looked like this guys.

We got to thinking about why we kept getting the photo and why we got this camera, and then it kinda dawned on us all at once that maybe now one of us were being followed by those creatures in the photo. So, we take the camera, and we take a bunch of pictures of ourselves, both in groups and not. We all sat down in the main room again and kinda have this moment of “which one of us is being haunted by this?” and we looked at the pictures. 

Every. Single. One of us. Had those creatures around us. We all did. 

We tried to figure out why they would show up in pictures but not to our eyes, and we kinda hypothesized that it was because these creatures were some sort of high energy beings that existed not in visible light, but in the infrared, and that the camera was just sensitive enough to pick up the creatures.

Then I looked out my window, which was overlooking a courtyard, and took a few photos where groups of people were standing. I look at the pictures. 

Everyone had those creatures around them. Hundreds of them were in those photos. 

Once my roommates and I calm down, we tried to figure out what that all meant. Other people before us that had these creatures around them were killed somehow. The guy that was observing these photos disappeared.

I was the only one in the room to wake up the next morning. Everyone else was, just, dead. As if their heart stopped beating in the middle of the night. I leave my room to go to the front desk and as I walk out, there’s no one in the halls. No one at the desk. The entire place was empty. I run outside and, thankfully, see a few people. They run up to me and ask what the fuck was going on and had I heard the news.

Apparently, those tides that have been really extreme, washed out pretty much anywhere within a 50km distance of the ocean overnight, and people, billions of people, had died in the night.

I explain to them the pictures I was taking, of the creatures and how I had somehow lived, and they asked to take me to take pictures now, so I ran and got that camera and started taking pictures. There were ships, hundreds of them in the air, and on the ground were hundreds of creatures, taller and much lankier than the ‘demon babies’ but with the same basic anatomy. They were all standing in some sort of military pattern and completely silent. They take no notice of us. To the east is a much larger ship with a ramp to the ground. We run over to the ship that we can’t see with the naked eye, but when we go to step foot on it, the ramp ripples below and becomes briefly visible before disappearing again. The 4 of us wander onto the ship and it’s chaotic at best. The interior is visible, suggesting some sort of cloaking device, and people are running and screaming as most of them are being slaughtered. 

Again, no one takes notice of us 4. We wander through the ship and soon find a ‘meeting room’ type area where these aliens, now visible, are sitting at a table. Some humans are there too. The aliens have translators on so the humans can understand what’s happening, and the 4 of us go and sit down in the 4 empty seats at the table, that are side to side of each other.

The aliens talk about what happened, that they wiped out the ‘unnecessary’ humans, and kept the useful ones, gesturing broadly to the 7 of us humans at the table. They talked about how they caused the tides because their mother ship was so massive, that once it got in sync with the moon, it could just completely destroy coastal areas. 

The last thing I remember before waking up was the aliens talking about their secondary breed of themselves, those ‘demon’ things that were surrounding everyone, as the ones who got to choose who lived and who died.

Listen to this while you read | Prologue | Support me on Patreon

Something had to change. 

Captain Reed had just received the Monthly Summary. It included food production rates, areas of concern around the ship, general gripes from the populace and the thing she dreaded most to look at.The crime statistics. 

For the past 8 months, crime rates had steadily risen. Suicide rates, however, had risen exponentially. 21 individuals, 19 of which being second generation inhabitants, had ended their lives this month. 

Something had to change. 

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