A fridge thought about 7 Soldiers
Jan. 9th, 2026 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSo in the 7 Soldiers comic there are invaders from a billion years into the future who overturn civilisation about every ten thousand years and then eat almost everyone.
Which is obviously a problem for the people they're eating.
They say they need the resources to survive, their world is parched and bare, they need to suck up every bit of tech and art and culture and civilisation they can get their hands on, or their near immortal civilisation is going to run out.
The princess says if she takes over she'll still have to do the same thing so her people can survive.
... except, only if she's the same kind of idiot.
The tech and art and civilisation is fine, priate the lot of it, that's a perfectly respectable use of time travel, salvage and archaeology.
But every time they decide to scrape out all that *organic life* ... they're digging themselves one hell of a topsoil problem.
If you, without time travel, go around doing a whole bunch of slaughter and harvest all other life, it still all goes around again. There might be an age of filth after but it is filth with all the same carbon compounds and complex chemistry and tiny teeming life that there ever was. If ordinary organic life is doing it anyway.
If you go around harvesting every little bit of life you can get hold of *and take it to the future* then you are actually eroding your resource base.
It's worse than salt and burning.
Like they said they were going to turn the water into weapons and then they complained their world was dry. Maybe that's a result of a billion years of reasonable changes, sure, but maybe they just made it so the water cannot be water if anything else wants to survive, and that's the kind of thing that leads to needing to terraform their own world.
The kind of raiding they were doing has Consequences with a capital Con.
And sure, they aren't going to asset strip the past beyond the point it can stand back up again
on purpose
but give it a billion years of this idiocy being repeated
and it seems pretty obvious what they get.
Also if they go a raiding just before space flight every single time?
Well guess who just trapped themselves in.
It's clever, setting up cyclical villains like that.
One giant time travel problem, with the same immortal idiots driving every time.
I am sort of angry and grumpy today and would play a video game about it but that seems like too much input.
Daydreaming about visiting all my favourite fictions to yell at people who are being idiots isn't notably helpful but is a tiny bit satisfying.
The other time travel thing I was thinking about today, because the comic mentioned one billion, is that Jack Harkness probably will have been around for five times as long as that by the first time we see him. And he's a time traveller so he could have skipped the middle or ducked back from the end more than the twice in TV and audio. So we don't know if he personally will be that old. But that character is agreed to be very, very, old.
And if you take it as serious that Jack is the Face of Boe then we know what he wanted right at the end, because he called on the psychic paper. He wanted to see the Doctor again. The people who were there at the beginning, the ones he has cared about ever since. His oldest friends.
And that kind of constancy is what we see of him over and over.
But, also, quite a lot of shagging around.
It is currently irritating me that people both imaginary and otherwise tend to focus on the part where there are a lot of different people, rather than the part where some of them are cared about for as close to forever as an immortal surrounded by mortals can manage.
Lots of things are irritating me, some of them at 'make up a guy to get mad about' levels.
I feel like there is Story brewing from all the magic user stuff I've been reading lately, but it hasn't clicked yet.
And I feel like finding something for them to be fighting is the bit I'm worst at. I keep picking up adventure modules and seeing if I could retask bits because
I just don't feel like there are many problems that can be hit *or* fireballed until they fall down
that would really leave the world a better place.
So then I try turning the problems around and possibly making a metaphor demon of them
but
the demons get real big and numerous real fast.
Magic would just turn things up to dramatic elevens, not solve anything.
So then I turn the story pieces around and around, and click they do not.
Still thinking on it though.
Hope everyone else's days go better.
Which is obviously a problem for the people they're eating.
They say they need the resources to survive, their world is parched and bare, they need to suck up every bit of tech and art and culture and civilisation they can get their hands on, or their near immortal civilisation is going to run out.
The princess says if she takes over she'll still have to do the same thing so her people can survive.
... except, only if she's the same kind of idiot.
The tech and art and civilisation is fine, priate the lot of it, that's a perfectly respectable use of time travel, salvage and archaeology.
But every time they decide to scrape out all that *organic life* ... they're digging themselves one hell of a topsoil problem.
If you, without time travel, go around doing a whole bunch of slaughter and harvest all other life, it still all goes around again. There might be an age of filth after but it is filth with all the same carbon compounds and complex chemistry and tiny teeming life that there ever was. If ordinary organic life is doing it anyway.
If you go around harvesting every little bit of life you can get hold of *and take it to the future* then you are actually eroding your resource base.
It's worse than salt and burning.
Like they said they were going to turn the water into weapons and then they complained their world was dry. Maybe that's a result of a billion years of reasonable changes, sure, but maybe they just made it so the water cannot be water if anything else wants to survive, and that's the kind of thing that leads to needing to terraform their own world.
The kind of raiding they were doing has Consequences with a capital Con.
And sure, they aren't going to asset strip the past beyond the point it can stand back up again
on purpose
but give it a billion years of this idiocy being repeated
and it seems pretty obvious what they get.
Also if they go a raiding just before space flight every single time?
Well guess who just trapped themselves in.
It's clever, setting up cyclical villains like that.
One giant time travel problem, with the same immortal idiots driving every time.
I am sort of angry and grumpy today and would play a video game about it but that seems like too much input.
Daydreaming about visiting all my favourite fictions to yell at people who are being idiots isn't notably helpful but is a tiny bit satisfying.
The other time travel thing I was thinking about today, because the comic mentioned one billion, is that Jack Harkness probably will have been around for five times as long as that by the first time we see him. And he's a time traveller so he could have skipped the middle or ducked back from the end more than the twice in TV and audio. So we don't know if he personally will be that old. But that character is agreed to be very, very, old.
And if you take it as serious that Jack is the Face of Boe then we know what he wanted right at the end, because he called on the psychic paper. He wanted to see the Doctor again. The people who were there at the beginning, the ones he has cared about ever since. His oldest friends.
And that kind of constancy is what we see of him over and over.
But, also, quite a lot of shagging around.
It is currently irritating me that people both imaginary and otherwise tend to focus on the part where there are a lot of different people, rather than the part where some of them are cared about for as close to forever as an immortal surrounded by mortals can manage.
Lots of things are irritating me, some of them at 'make up a guy to get mad about' levels.
I feel like there is Story brewing from all the magic user stuff I've been reading lately, but it hasn't clicked yet.
And I feel like finding something for them to be fighting is the bit I'm worst at. I keep picking up adventure modules and seeing if I could retask bits because
I just don't feel like there are many problems that can be hit *or* fireballed until they fall down
that would really leave the world a better place.
So then I try turning the problems around and possibly making a metaphor demon of them
but
the demons get real big and numerous real fast.
Magic would just turn things up to dramatic elevens, not solve anything.
So then I turn the story pieces around and around, and click they do not.
Still thinking on it though.
Hope everyone else's days go better.