

What If Various Canons Were Actually In-Universe Fiction? (Spoilers)

Eric the .5b

It's all so esoteric
Validated User
I was kind of taking inspiration from the rather monochromatic demographics of the "fight clubs" prominent/speaking part members.
Who are white, but otherwise of very distinct backgrounds from members of those groups. It just didn't work for me.

I don't want to make a big thing; I enjoyed the rest of it, though.


New member
Let's be clear about this:

The "Miranda Incident" did, technically, happen, but it's nothing like the Cortex drama series Serenity depicts. 'Versal Productions has a clear anti-Alliance bias, as evidenced by their whitewashing of the real-life Malcolm Reynolds.

Here are the facts:

The Crew
Firstly, Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds, disgruntled former Independent turned transport captain, did exist. He did have in his employ former squadmate Zoë Alleyne, her common-law husband Hoban "Wash" Washburne, the mercenary Jayne Cobb, and Kaywinnit Lee "Kaylee" Frye. There is, however, no indication that he ever rented his shuttle to a registered Companion, the character of Inara Serra having been invented as a legitimate love interest- Reynolds' alleged sexual relationship with the underage Miss Frye having long been a matter of debate amongst historians. Certainly, her father reported her missing shortly after she ran away to join Serenity's crew, though there's no evidence that she was forcibly abducted.

Furthermore, the placement of the fugitives River and Simon Tam aboard Serenity is, at best, speculative. They were sighted at the Eavesdown Docks on Persephone around the time Serenity departed for Whitefall, but there are no confirmed reports of the Tams aboard Reynolds' ship.

Finally, Derrial Book was an Operative of Parliament who was assigned to the Anti-Organized Crime Bureau, as slyly alluded to in the series, but the Bureau lost contact with him while he was in deep cover within the Niska crime family.

In 2506, an unknown employee or employees of the Blue Sun Corporation, a pharmaceutical company based out of the Burnham quadrant (not the cluster-spanning megaconglomerate hinted at in the series,) was responsible for the accidental leakage into the local water supply on the planet Miranda, of massive quantities of the experimental drug the company planned to market under the moniker Pax. The drug, which was intended for use as an anti-anxiety medication with possible applications as an anti-psychotic, was not intended to make the population docile, nor is there any truth to the idea that it was responsible for the existence of the Reavers, who, if they existed at all, were actually a band of pirates based out of the Athens sector.

The drug, which is colorless and odorless, contaminated the drinking water of the single small city on Miranda that sprang up after it was terraformed. Tragically, the massive concentration ingested by the locals was fatal, and the entire settlement was lost practically overnight. The Alliance Medical Service sent an Emergency Response Team to Miranda after contact was lost. The ERT discovered the cause of the incident and filed a report, but several key members of Parliament's Health Committee were taking kickbacks from Blue Sun, who blackmailed them into covering up the true cause of the loss of the settlement. The official story was that an unknown plague had broken out on Miranda, killing over 90% of the planet's meager population (only 3,000, not 30,000,000 as claimed by the series) and leaving the few survivors as carriers. Miranda was therefore quarantined, and those with loved ones on Miranda were instructed to contact the AMS to determine if said loved ones were among the survivors. If they were, arrangements would be made to schedule a Telefonix call via the settlement's only Cortex hub once a week. However, for obvious reasons, everyone who made such a request was told that the person(s) to whom they wished to speak were dead.

The Brodcast
Reynolds, whose penchant for "get-rich-quick" schemes was remarkable even within the smuggling community, decided to break quarantine and loot Miranda after hearing about the Blue Sun research center located there. After landing at Prospero Spaceport, his crew, sealed inside vac suits, emerged and made their way towards the research center, but found nothing more than a charred hole in the ground- the sudden die-off had left laboratory equipment unattended, and multiple volatile chemical compounds had interacted explosively.

Not wanting to leave empty-handed, Reynolds ordered his crew to spread out and take whatever valuables they could find from residences. While looting, Cobb discovered the holodiary of George Jensen, the manager of the Blue Sun research center, who confessed in the last entry to having been ordered to "cut corners wherever possible", resulting in salvaged holding tanks from the terraforming 'bots being used to store the various formulations of Pax. When Reynolds saw the diary, he brought it to his associate, the Cortex hacker calling himself "Mr. Universe", who uploaded it to cortex:news:breaking[clusterwide], and the rest is history.


Global Village Grouch
Validated User
...It was a difficult thing for the space program to recover from Kubrick's fictionalized account of the Jovian mission. While the story of a malfunctioning, prevaricating and murderous artificial intelligence system makes for great fiction, the malfunctions with the antenna telemetry and pod bay doors were actually mechanical and quite mundane in nature.

A number of influential policymakers took the film's depiction as factual, and a joint US-Soviet venture slated for 2005 was delayed nearly five years due to the resulting investigations and needless reworking of safety guidelines for shipboard AI's. A more factual account might have laid the blame accurately at the feet of [Astronaut Dave] Bowman, who's psychological break from the stresses of isolation and probable cerebral hypoxia based damage from a brief unprotected EVA lead to a complete paranoid breakdown that caused him to disable the mission-essential HAL system.

The flight recordings of his final words quite clearly point to a delusional, even hallucinatory state.
RPG.net needs a "Like" button. Because of stuff like this. I have no comment to make, other than "I like it!"


New member
Star Trek: Voyager

The Star Trek Voyager series was released by a civilian agency based on the Federation's desire to recover its exploratory reputation post-Dominion War. While all of the personnel involved had gag orders regarding the events in the Delta Quadrant, declassified documents have revealed a very different picture of the starship's travels.

The U.S.S Voyager was, for example, held together by spit and bailing wire by the time it reached the Alpha Quadrant. Whole portions of the ship had been replaced by local materials and over a quarter of the ship was cordoned off. Frequent battles with the Kayzon, Hirogen, and other hostile races left the ship almost uninhabitable.

Casualties on board the ship were also tremendous, dozens of members having been slain and many more MIA due to encounters with the Borg. Kathryn Janeway ended up executing two, having been forced to resort to the death penalty despite said action not being permissible by the Starfleet Code. This, combined with her flagrant violation of the Temporal Prime Directive, would have lead to her forced retirement after the events of the series but a need for experienced officers after the events of the Dominion War lead to her controversial promotion to Rear Admiral.

Records of the crew's interaction indicate that disputes between the Marquis and Starfleet crews was not uncommon. Indeed, violence was not unheard of, especially as the mission dragged on. Indeed, a full-blown mutiny against the Captain occurred at one point, the series downplaying it as a holodeck program and placing the blame entirely on Bajoran national Seska (to avoid controversy - she was changed into a Cardassian in the series).

The character of Chakotay, based on Sioux Robert Chakotay, is a considerably sanitized version of the actual Marquis terrorist/pirate. A highly charismatic figure, records indicate he held a position closer to co-Captain than XO. Rumors of a romance between Kathryn Janeway and Chakotay have been squelched by Starfleet but may have been based in fact. This relationship certainly didn't last, however, since Robert is well-known as a ladies man (a fact virtually removed from the series' depiction of him).

Robert Chakotay escaped custody of the Federation soon after returning to the Alpha Quadrant. Since then, he's taken refuge on Bajor, saying the Federation is once more trying to pain themselves as the hero in the story. "Voyager did what it had to do, nothing more, nothing less."

Chakotay has also stated his distinct distaste for the Federation's stereotyping of his religious beliefs.

Cadet Nicholas Locarno was replaced with the fictional Tom Paris due to the fact Locarno's actions were still controversial more than a decade later. The recognition of him as a war-hero and member of Starfleet is something that many Captains complained about it. Despite this, Locarno was allowed to maintain his Starfleet rank and medals despite extreme hostility from many quarters.

Obviously removed from the series was the fact the character of Neelix was actually a thief, smuggler, and arms dealer on the run for numerous crimes committed against his home government. Neelix served as a useful foil against the Marquis crew members as his loyalty ultimately remained with Captain Janeway.

Neelix later committed suicide for reasons related to Depression and his own traumatic Near-Death experience. The Federation felt an alien committing suicide in part because of his loss of religious faith would be incomprehensible to viewers. Also, too depressing.

Chakotay, in his memoirs, argues they butchered Neelix's character to the point it didn't matter. "They made him annoying comic relief."

Removed from the series was the Voyager's constant struggles with many of the locals. Kathryn Janeway frequently broke
the Prime Directive in order to gain the resources to keep the ship going and often found herself making morally questionable decisions. Despite this, many of her defenders maintain she kept to her moral lines and broke the Prime Directive only as many times as Captain Kirk (which is damning with faint praise). The loss of the U.S.S Equinox, which traveled with the U.S.S Voyager for the first two years of its journey, shows just where her limits lay.

The biggest issue of the series is the Voyager's encounter with the Borg. While they DID discover Borg space, the fact is that Kathryn Janeway made the correct decision of going around it. Any of her supposed victories against it were more a matter of slim survival and there was never any bargained alliance with the Collective. The crew of the Voyager did encounter a species from so-called fluidic space but never were able to identify their motives or impact their on-going war in any real way.

The character of Seven of Nine is also wholly fictitious, instead being a composite of the Ocampa character Kess' own experience with the Collective and an attempt to bring in more viewers (particularly those attracted to human females).
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Eric the .5b

It's all so esoteric
Validated User
This one suddenly came to me and ended up a bit long.

Spoiler: Show


My family on both sides, my friends, this is the letter of explanation I promised in my email. I used to tease Dad about writing letters to family and putting them in the mailbox, but the weird thing is that they're still a lot more private than email or Facebook. And not to be dramatic, but please keep this letter safe - and destroy it if you think you're being investigated or followed.

There's also another function snail-mail serves - as a delay. By the time you've read this, I've already gotten to where I'm going, and while I trust all of you, some of you have very kind hearts and enough imagination to want to warn the person I'm going to see.

Most of you probably heard about the unauthorized biography, and I appreciate that none of you have read it. The third book came out this week, and curiosity got the better of me, finally; I'm sorry. In any case, I picked up all three and started reading through them. Eddie wanted no part of them, but I inflicted some of the highlights on him up until what he heard started upsetting him. I was just starting the second book when he had to go out of town. An old high-school friend of his is dying, and Eddie wanted to see him.

I tried calling Eddie, but the reception was bad; I think he understood the code words we use for "There's a problem, but I'm looking into it."

Before I get to the point, let me vent about the damn books. The writer knows nothing about me or any of you. Any research done for the books was limited to checking the spelling of our names on Wikipedia. Years get compressed, I marry Eddie right out of high school, all sorts of silliness. I mean, we know the score on "based on actual events", and our mixture of going public and being unfindable most of the time is a recipe for creative misunderstanding. But, you'd think someone could write a pretty riveting story based on what we've actually been through over the last ten years. I mean, before I started writing this letter, I left my husband a coded message in the placement of certain items in our house, because one of our enemies might break in and read a note. This is how we live.

There's no way a first-person account written from my point of view wouldn't be weird to read, but it was actively uncomfortable that this writer's take on me was a self-absorbed, mindless, clumsy little girl. Sure, I could be as stupid as any other teenager is, but this version of me was written like an ambulatory goldfish, with only room for one thought in her head at the time. "Oh, I miss the big city. Oh, hi, classmates. OH MY GOD - HANDSOME BOY!" You might laugh, but she can't make or keep friends once she discovers BOY. Half of you getting this letter - and at the risk of being mawkish, there's not a one of you I'm sending this to whom I don't love - are treated as people she hangs out with once or twice and never, ever sees again. I kept looking, but the characters vanish. Yes, seriously, some of you just get cameos in this whole three-book series, after all we've been through together and how much all of you helped us those first two years, even when we couldn't tell you everything that was going on. There's even a point in which you drift out of my life, Dad.

And naturally, this character doesn't care. She just goes with the flow, except complaining all the while. I was creeped out after I realized that the only things this girl ever actively does fall under the heading of IN LOVE WITH THAT BOY, OH WOW! And Eddie isn't treated any better, here. Yes, we were a couple of weirdos in high school, and yes, Eddie has had to work through some major issues, but in these books, he's this pretentious, incredibly disturbing...predator, really, literally lusting for my blood.

And yet, the writer actually seems turned on by this idea of Eddie. She takes a real low moment in Eddie's life - the time he broke into my house - and twists it in both those directions. First, instead of him obsessively looking out the window, irrationally convinced that someone was going to come to the house that night and hurt me, she portrays him standing there silently...just staring at me. Brr. And when her version of me wakes up and notices the uninvited guest, she doesn't mind, where if I'd actually recognized Eddie, I probably would have still taken the baseball bat to the back of his head.

I could have understood a straight hit-piece, but the fact that the writer seems to fetishize this creepy, domineering (!) version of Eddie is another thing entirely. She goes on about his perfection at the drop of a hat...and as wonderful as my husband is, he's not perfect by far. She keeps dwelling on the idea that he could just accidentally hurt me - or kill me - with his strength, all the while wanting to taste my blood. One of those passages was the last I could bear to read to Eddie; the look on his face was fit to break my heart.

I'm sorry to say, but again, most of you just make cameos in this story. Eddie's family gets attention, Dad gets glossed over as weirdly passive, and then there's Jay.

So much wrongness there. The treatment of Jay's people is painful, and then she turns Jay himself into a big, dumb hunk. Yes, Jay, who's smaller than me. About the most she gets right is that he's Quillayute and can sprout fur. Everything else is just a mess, really. You know how close friends Jay and I are, and you know he's been friends with Eddie since Jay got into high school early. The writer makes this all into a love triangle, where they're rivals, and Jay's pining for me, but I'm leading him on while keeping him in the friend zone and playing him off against Eddie. Yes, seriously.

And some of you are probably twigging to the same thing that started nagging at me. Yes, this could be just a bad writer introducing drama. But, well, I'll be straight with those of you who might not have known. (Dad.) During that summer Eddie and I had broken up, there was a few-week stretch where Jay and I were friends-with-benefits. We decided that wasn't what we were looking for, and what we were looking for, we wouldn't find in each other. That was all, and we didn't make a big thing about it. (Eddie knows, of course.) But this book making him into a romantic rival who runs away from town because I'm going to marry Eddie...I was starting to get alert.

(And that breakup in these books...It's this ridiculous thing Eddie does to protect me from him and his family after this incident that would never happen in a million years. And the way the writer portrays my reaction, you won't even believe and I won't waste time trying to convince you.)

Of course, that's not the worst thing the books do to Jay. There's this assinine and racist bit about how he and other guys in the tribe who've shifted "imprint" on their One True Love, unlike the way Normal White People work. (And, Mike, you're probably ranting out loud about how imprinting does not work that way - sorry about that.) But it gets worse - the writer teases all three books about how Jay's apparently imprinted on me...and then reveals that the whole time, this Jay has been imprinted on Elisabeth. That he's been imprinted on her since she was an egg in one of my ovaries years before Eddie and I conceived her. At the end of the story, he's creepily fixated on my baby daughter. Maybe if there's a fourth book, the writer will have him stare at her while she sleeps.

But this all takes us to my point.

The public knows we have a young daughter. They don't know what Elisabeth looks like or even what we named her. We went into the hospital under assumed names, and her birth certificate probably has enough wrong with it to cause us all sorts of legal trouble, but it couldn't be helped. (And as an aside, the birthing scene in the book is weird and nightmarish. No hospital, and there's this whole bit with, and I'm not joking, Eddie having to give me a C-section and ripping open the amniotic sac with his teeth. And Elisabeth, somehow super-strong, tears me apart from the inside! It's insane, maybe especially after all the scheming we did just to have medical professionals around at the birth, avoid attack during the birth, and how normally most of it went. And even when I started crashing, Eddie did what he did in accordance to plans we'd worked out together.)

The writer made up some strange things about my daughter, like Elisabeth developing unnaturally fast and aging quickly after being born. But among all this other silliness and her complete misunderstanding of the situation with the Volturi, there was one thing she made up that made me drop the book and then pick it back up with shaking hands.

She had to make up a name for my daughter, Elisabeth Renee Esme Cullen. The name she came up with was Renesmee, and she even spelled out that she was merging "Renee" and "Esme" to come up with that absurd name.

I don't have time to go over all the other details that stuck out as strangely informed among this morass of invention and weird fantasy. But they're scattered through the books enough that I can't believe this was an accident. That name is as if someone had anonymously sent me a picture of my daughter sitting in my living room, but scribbled a mustache on her face.

All the rest of the inanity just vanished when I read that. That the writer can't use Eddie and Jay's names right, or that she imagines that anyone but Dad has called me "Bella" since I was ten? That vampire skin is not faintly irridescent in sunlight, but that it "sparkles" like diamond? That our honeymoon was when I, much less Eddie, lost our virginities? It's all harmless nothing in comparison.

Is someone in the Volturi feeding this writer information, or even a script? Is it meant to make us hunker down, or make us run? Well, I'll do neither. I'm going to case the area, then I'm going to pay this writer a visit.

Elisabeth is safe with Jay and his friends and family. Eddie will know where Elisabeth is once he gets home, and that I've gone somewhere. I wish I could tell him myself, but Jay will fill him in, and they'll wait for me to get back.

Wish me luck, and wish Mrs. Meyer far more restraint on my part than I feel that I have, right now.


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