sakura_no_miko

Fandom: Alien

Rating: R (for violence)

Pairing: gen fic

Warnings: discussion of taxidermy, dissection, experimentation on a living creature, canon-typical violence

Other notes: original characters, dark comedy, epistolary fic, social media, inter-office politics, incredibly tense fics

Length: 8k

Summary:
Dr. Liu,

Got your final report yesterday on Project LV-426. I'm amazed. Great work all around. It's been forwarded to the Chair, our friends at the Pentagon, the Defense Appropriations Committee, and DARPA. The acid-resistant armor is something that should really catch their eye.

We're expecting some big grant money from this.

Burke

Burke,

Did you read even the executive summary of my report? There are some interesting biomaterials that we could work with, but I stressed, multiple times, that this creature is far too dangerous to even consider using in military research projects. It's aggressive, stupid, vicious, aggressive, impossible to train, and did I mention aggressive?

. . .their limbs work on hydraulic principles and operate under pressure, which is why they splurt like a popped water balloon when they get hit in those Marine camera feeds we saw. A slight wound to a limb takes them right the hell out of commission, and now your troops have to deal with an insanely aggressive and stupid xenomorphic K-9 unit that oh by the way IS BLEEDING ACID.

My thoughts:

Aw, man, and I had just posted my “incredibly tense fics” list. I’d been putting it off until I could write proper recs for all of them. Then I saw this one in The Rec Center. This is a perfect fic to add.

On the bright side — now I can do an epistolary fics rec list, lolol. I love fics that are pieced together from letters and documents. Never wrote one myself, but I’ve read so many good ones. (I’ve archived a bunch over on dreamwidth if it interests you. The AO3 tag is pretty packed too.)

This fic is just a perfect little black comedy, because I was laughing, a lot, despite the subject matter being animal dissections.

(Then again, I’ve gotten into trouble a couple of times because, ah, I actually did a large animal dissection in high school, and, to me, it was pretty cool, but…ah, yeah, a lot of people look at me like WTF. It was an advanced biology class. And it was cool. Like, seriously — you basically dissect animals when you cook, don’t you? Actually, another funny story, we also dissected a chicken foot to look at the bones, and that made going to dim sum kind of awkward, even though most of my family doesn’t eat chicken foot to being with…

…oddly enough I’m still too squeamish to watch stuff like CSI. I couldn’t cut it even as a basic nurse. But the dissection was fine. Hmm.)

Most of the black comedy comes from, well, inter-office politics. Inter-office politics meeting a Xenomorph. Like this bit in the middle:

I know you read my email; are you pretending you didn't see it was set up to notify me when you opened it? Do I need to remind you that this is not just a Company thing? There are national security issues involved here. We're talking about potential bioweapons, for God's sake. I'm not going to sit on this. I will call Senator Barnett again if I have to.

Like, we are talking about bioweapons, about Xenomorphs that can easily destroy the entire human race, and this dick forgets that he has his e-mails on read. I might be laughing more because, at the moment, I have someone at my own workplace who has a tendency to not reply to e-mails. Usually it’s less worrisome than aggressive, acid-blooded alien life forms possibly escaping, but it’s just as bloody annoying.

And the transition from black comedy to horror is just perfect. The threat is there all along — we know the Xenomorph is alive, the scientists are aware of how they’re born (“I was here when Elvis was -- "born" really isn't the right word for it, I guess; that poor Marine”), and the acid blood, and the 147 threat postures. And yet, for the moment, the bigger threat is them losing their jobs because they got assigned a somewhat impossible task by a vindictive high-up.

And then…the Xenomorph is suddenly not there and you know shit is going to go down.

This author takes 3 lines, just 3, to summarize the proceedings:

QWIKFEED @ecarter: ....that's a great mount. I swear, it looked like it moved
QWIKFEED @ecarter: ...
QWIKFEED @ecarter: oh fuck.

(…wait, this fic is from 2009. Was Twitter a thing back then? I never got into RSS feeds so this looks like Twitter to me…)

And then, later, just one simple line:

NEWSTICKER: //new form of alien life announced, shot//

I mean, ah, yeah, a bunch of people probably just got mutilated by a Xenomorph — innocent people at a press conference — and yet it’s so funny. Man. You know that scene right at the beginning of Robocop with the machine going berserk? That scene scared the life out of me as a kid, big claymation robot and all. Yet here I am now, laughing at the same scene. To be fair, I think it was meant to be comedic/satirical in Robocop too…

This fic really fits in just perfectly with the Alien universe (um, barring the Prometheus and later films, which I don’t know much about). The only thing that surprised me was the ending, which suggests the company might actually do the moral thing and expose corruption? That doesn’t sound like Weyland-Yutani to me.

Actually, you know something interesting? I keep seeing that spot on Adult Swim where they say, “comedy is tragedy + time, so doesn’t it work in reverse? That the things you’re laughing at were once horrific?” That’s what this fic illustrates — it starts as a comedy and ends as a tragedy. We laugh at the captured beast who can’t harm us, until it escapes. We assume we’re in control until we aren’t. Yeah. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much the underlying trope of a lot of horrors and comedies. I suppose the difference is just how many people end up dead at the end.

(Looking for more fic recs?)

Crossposted to pillowfort