This is it. This is what Star Trek is about.

bbu community days #7: details

so life extremely happened and I haven't managed to do any of these up to now, but this is one of the ones I actually have an answer for, so I guess it's a place to start as any

adding a cut because it turns out I really, really have an answer for this one. lol

{Day 7: Details} What's a detail of BBU worldbuilding you always wanted to dive into?

The reason this one's interesting for me is I that I think what tipped me into feeling like the story I was thinking up was actually worth writing was coming up with a BBU worldbuilding detail of my own. It's kinda strange that that of all things did it, considering that 1) the idea itself is kinda silly, 2) I wouldn't be surprised if other BBU writers have come up with it before and I just haven't read their stories yet, and 3) I have approximately zero knowledge of the real-life thing it's based on. But it made me realize that I had in fact created a unique BBU 'verse in my head, and nobody was going to write it if I didn't.

That detail is rescuetok.

In Vanessa and Juniper's universe, deconditioning pets is straight up illegal, at least in the US. But there's a large percentage of people who still don't believe humans should be pets at all. The opposition takes many forms, from polite disagreements over dinner to armed guerrilla raids on training facilities. Rescuetok is one of those forms.

It's pretty much what it says on the tin. There are people making PSA-type videos to spread awareness of pet issues. There are rescuers passing information to each other in code. There's even the occasional deconditioning update disguised as a training video or pet influencer post. The whole movement pretty much operates on a "hidden in plain sight" strategem. Since anti-pet content is technically banned from the platform, they use a battery of replacement words to get past the filters, the way gay tiktok does in real life—and like gay tiktok, over time those replacements start becoming a code and even a language of their own.

And in a way, the plot hinges on this, because rescuetok is how Vanessa learns about kill shelters in the first place.

A few hours into her morning scroll one day she stumbles over a PSA and falls into a tiktok rabbit hole that lasts for days. When she finally emerges, it's with a deep and abiding rage for the entire pet industry and everyone who supports it, and a burning need to feel like she's doing something about it.

Watching shelter sites is pure clicktivism. The anti-pet movement offers it up as a harm reduction strategy, a way, if nothing else, to keep people from getting straight up murdered in the name of the system. The idea is, if any pet comes too close to running out the clock: shine a spotlight, get the word out, find somebody to take them. The problem is, even shelter adoption fees aren't cheap, to say nothing of what it costs to have a dependent, and the anti-pet demographic doesn't tend toward the wealthy. Most people give up the first time they try to find someone a home and fail.

Vanessa... doesn't.

Who are the Gracefield kids FATHERS? TPN Theory

I have promised @jinxthinks that I would write a post on my thoughts on the topic, so here we go.

There are a couple mild manga spoilers ahead for anime only fans, but nothing major I think.

Right, so first off, I will make a couple observations. The most important out of this is just how EXTREMLY DIVERSE the Gracefield kids look.

It's not even just hair and skin colour, you can see that they have vastly different head shapes, eye sizes & shapes, nose shapes, body builds. And it's NOT just the main cast, it's also done for ALL of the background characters. It's very carefully honoured all throughout the manga, also when introducing new premium farm children.

This is highly unusual by manga standards, where often the only way you can tell characters apart is by their style of hair and clothes. I don't think that the care Posuka Demizu takes to go above and beyond the standard is accidental. I think it highlights a plotpoint.

The other facts that feels like a breath of fresh air in manga is the number of POC (people of colour) among the cattlechildren. Japan has an extremly low number of foreigners living there, among whom a darker skin colour is even rarer, so unsurprisingly you don't have them feature all that much in manga and anime.

I think the high percentage of POC is also a plot point, to highlight diversity again. As soon as we look at a low grade farm, the contrast is striking. The cattlechildren there are EXTREMLY similar.

So what do we know about diversity in biology? Diversity makes healthier, more resilient populations. Whereas a lack of diversity often causes the spread of genetic disease, many of which can have a negative effect on intelligence.

To maintain a high degree of diversity, you require a lot of genetically different parents. We know that kids don't get transported from the human world, and that Gracefield mothers are cattle children, born in the demon world. That means that the only source of genetic diversity can be the fathers.

Looking at low grade farms' lack of diversity, it seems like a valid strategy for them to keep select one or two exceptional males who are used to inseminate their mostly female cattle. But for a place like Gracefield, any such scheme would NOT work.

Even if all the premium farms (there is only 5 of them) worked together, they would have to keep a large number of male cattle alive, which would take a lot of resources, and wouldn't be very cost effective. So what is the most cost-effective solution?

To source the fathers from the HUMAN WORLD.

Another observation that we can't ignore is that in every Krone and Isabella flashback that is past their 12-year-age, you only see female adult cattle. You never see male adult cattle.

This is a significant hint as well. Yes, they could be kept elsewhere, but if they had to be kept alive anyway, why wouldn't they at least do some of the work, like the female adult cattle does when not pregnant? It would make no sense, and would be a waste of resources.

On the other hand, it is fairly cheap to only pay for insemination by men living in the human world, rather than for all the living costs. We know that now they use IVF, so it's even cheaper and easier to just buy sperm, but IVF hasn't been around that long, and in the past they must have just paid human world men to have sex with their female cattle. It's pretty gruesome to think about, but it is the most logical, and cost effective solution.

We know that the human world has been supplying the demons with various resources, like clothes, books, medicine etc, so it isn't a far stretch to think they would be willing to inseminate their female cattle. They would never give them actual children, and I doubt that they would give them eggs for IVF either, but there has always been less of a taboo on the male side of things, since it's the mother who gives birth, and if a child is born in the human world, it won't go against the promise...

With the advent of IVF, buying sperm can be done incredbly easily, without anyone in the human world knowing.

Even before that, they could have brought the female cattle to the human world, and pretended that they are prostitutes to avoid the men involved ever knowing what happened. So it's not necessarily common knowledge in the human world.

The only people who MUST have always known (and condoned it) are the Ratri clan. I wonder if part of the reason why James Ratri has chosen to go against his family's indoctrination (and trust me, he MUST have received very thorough indoctrination from birth) is this fact. That some of those children were genetically related... perhaps even to him. It could have been even stronger of a thought if he had his own, real child in the human world, and wondered about what really is the difference?

So that's it, and I think this will actually be explored in the main plot. Most likely once the cast goes back to Gracefield, and when they go to the human world. I think it will become very relevant and important then to discuss it, and it will be revealed then. Until now, there haven't been much plot reason to reveal it.

If this theory is true, I think it also implies that apart from cattle brought for experiments at lambda, no males were kept alive for adulthood, and all the scientists at lambda are from the human world (the scientists we see are ALL treated as if equal standing with the demon, never as cattle, or slaves).

It would also makes sense, since training scientists is difficult and expensive, it's much cheaper to just hire trained scientists... and we know there are human world people ready to cooperate with the demons.

So that's my take on the topic.

also if you look at tr*mps twitter it's all misinformation corrected by twitter itself and blatant support of voter suppression. like literally he shared an article that was like "trump would have won wisconsin if the mail in ballots weren't counted" as if that wouldn't have been a literal crime to do considering they fucking counted. like it's a fucking pandemic dude. people literally cant leave their houses. i'd get all the support for that mindset if it was something the dems just randomly decided to do this year specifically for this election with no prior reasons relating to a plague that forces a large percentage of americans either indoors or working like dogs to make up for lost time and money, like if it weren't for the conditions i would assume it was a plot to get trump out of office. i'd support it cause i and many others work too much and have no way to make it out 11 miles from our house even on a day off to vote and that's not fair to us. it isn't our fault we have jobs or can't afford cars or have the ability to get out there between the hours of like 8am and 6pm to stand in line while you hope to god this is the right poll so you don't have to go stand in another line. and even on a good year people will be waitin for like an hour sometimes. it's the fuckin worst man. like the fact that republicans are so against something that could have helped them because they didn't want to lose this specific president shows how corrupt they are and how much they hate poor and marginalized people. deadass it's all benefiting the exact people they're literally tryina cull rn and that's why they mad n finna suppress that shit. and it's so funny to me seeing them scramble and expose themselves like that while they lose so dramatically. his votes haven't gone up in like 24hrs bro. this is wild and it wouldn't have happened if they didn't give us a voice when we otherwise wouldn't have had one.