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I'll move on if I sit tight
Tonight in a move of true insult to injury, our dishwasher which we never use tried to flood the kitchen. Many towels were sacrificed. Many floorboards were mopped. We shut off the water under the sink, pulled the plug for good measure, and bailed out the inside of the dishwasher, but suspect we will need to call for a plumber no matter what. For consolation, we watched the first four episodes of Apple TV+'s Foundation (2021–). I wish Patricia McKillip were alive so I could tell her how formatively she imprinted me for millennially long games.
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I am legitimately surprised I've heard so little about this show, in awards or in fandom. It's flown completely under the radar. I think I might vaguely have heard of it, but unlike - say - Expanse, which I definitely knew about even if it took me a while to try it, I might never have watched it or thought about it, if not for Orion starting it.
But it's such fun! It doesn't even quite feel like a throwback to the sci-fi shows of the early 2000s so much as it feels like its own thing, a Golden Age sci-fi tropefest with a modern updated sensibility. Actually I'd say the thing it feels most like to me is SF anime, in that general mix of wildly OTT SF tropes combined with epic scope and a modern feel, as well as willingness to commit to even the wildest premise and go as far as it needs to go. It also feels a bit like the one-off space movies that we don't really get much anymore because everything is tied to a franchise now. But mostly it's just its own thing, an affectionate but strongly worded love letter to the SF I grew up on.
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There's a lot less of it on AO3 than I would have expected, and while I understand there are a lot of Cleons to go around, I would not have expected them to dominate the writing scene over the rest of the main cast, especially Gaal or Hari! There's a lot of time in the first season already. No one's writing the interstitial stuff?
But mostly it's just its own thing, an affectionate but strongly worded love letter to the SF I grew up on.
It's the passion project of its showrunner:
"The Foundation books were given to me by my father on my thirteenth birthday. My mother
was also a fan. As I gained a foothold as a screenwriter, my father started pestering me to one day adapt Foundation. And although both my parents passed away before the show was realized, it's a special thing to know that I get to work on a series that was held in such high regard by my family."
It doesn't feel like anime to me; it feels like science fiction I have read. It's just that the last science fiction I saw that felt closest was Jupiter Ascending (2015), and that got commercially slammed.
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I know, it's truly astonishing to me that there's so little fic and the vast majority of it is focused on the Cleons. (And not just that, it's mostly Cleon/OFC from what I saw when I was poking around.) People gonna like what they like! But it is really surprising to me that this show seems to have very little toehold in fanfic-writing fandom at all. As you say, there's so much scope for interstitial fic that it's really a shame no one seems to be writing it.
That being said, there are definitely a few things I want to write! Whether I'll get around to them, who knows, but I've had a few thoughts.
It's the passion project of its showrunner:
I am delighted to know this. ♥
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I can't believe no one has even poked at the sheer fucking space horror that so obviously took out the Invictus. It's bad enough when it just looks like the drive fritzed on its own and jaunted its crew around known space until they died effectively marooned on their own ship. Then we get the barricaded bridge and the interpretation of a mutiny and the captain who killed herself after writing in her own blood an ominous last message of EXO—"Outside the galaxy? You think they encountered something out there?"—and we are in full bore Event Horizon, last voyage of the Demeter territory. The who-knows-why-he-was-shot navigator still strapped into his cradle, the AI still jacked into his dead brain rifling it for coordinates as it jumps from nowhere to nowhere on its own. The reminder that the conscious and unaugmented human mind cannot bear very much exposure to folded space, so who knows what kind of number it did on the crew to survive inside the ship as long as they did. Every single part of this scenario is freaky af! Entire sci-fi horror movie's worth of a very bad place to be! And unless the show ever revisits the ship's past (at the moment we're cliffhanging on its present, although I am banking on the show not actually warping Salvor into the heart of a sun; dammit, Lewis, you did not actually have to resemble favorite minor characters from sf I grew up on, especially not when you were just starting to be less of a twerp), here it's just casually part of the long chain of history of which there's so much already that the calendar's into the 12,000's and that's just in Imperial years. It's a big universe. Lots of weirdness. Keep moving.
I don't think I understand why readerfic exists when second person has been a viable narrative voice for millennia.
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Edit:
dammit, Lewis, you did not actually have to resemble favorite minor characters from sf I grew up on, especially not when you were just starting to be less of a twerp
I know. :(((( He went out a hero, at least, but I didn't want him to go out at all!
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"You wished us home."
brb augh forever
Otherwise
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I was already expecting some kind of timeskip due to the nature of the show, but having everything jump forward 100 years was certainly a surprise!
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We were speculating that it might work as a kind of linked anthology following the structure of the original stories—a different crisis each season—but I had no expectation of most of the developments in the intervening decades, including the quite impressive latest nonsense from the Cleons. The continuity of Poly made both of us happy. Meanwhile I don't know whose id is driving the minor casting, but we are now two for two on dillweed Foundation Directors I would die for; this season is slightly cheating since I did have a prior liking for Oliver Chris ever since One Man, Two Guvnors, but I didn't know he was in the cast and therefore spent the entire first board meeting staring really hard at Sef Sermak. The pace of the second season is a lot more breakneck so far, but it has correctly recognized that there's almost no point in casting Jared Harris if you aren't going to emotionally rough him up.
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Jared Harris as a scruffy disaster this season pleased me enormously. Watching him diverge from both his previous self and Vault Hari is fascinating. I also thoroughly enjoyed the Hari-Gaal-Salvor Road Trip From Hell.
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I fully support this plan.
(I haven't seen as much of her other dad yet, but I love Constant and her riding bishop's claw and her relationship with Poly and I will be extremely unhappy if anything happens to any of them.)
Disaster Hari is a treasure. [edit]
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I can only agree with this. <3