Chapter 1: Xeno Machinations / Xeno Machinations

Elvira’s meets her captor and reflects on her past. When faced with abduction and total powerlessness, what's the difference between a refugee and a rebel?

Synopsis:

The story opens with our protagonist, Elvira, loosely restrained and lucid, protesting her freedom and superiority. She meets her captor, Akash Nele, Third Bloom, and learns of the fate of her compatriots (including Mara, who seems to have adjusted very quickly). The Affini’s physical power and pharmacological prowess are established along with the legal grounds for Elvira’s abduction. In a drugged haze, she reflects on the one-sided conflict between the Terran Accord and the Affini Compact, her pursuit and capture, and thinks about what awaits her.

Changes:

“'Fuck! You can’t do this, xeno!'”

Elvira (orignal version)

“'Fuck! You can’t do this, you fucking weed!'”

Elvira (revised version)

This change to the opening line of the story isn't very significant just yet. However, if you’re reading along with us, we’d encourage you to take note of the language Elvira uses to describe the Affini and how it changes between the two versions.

This next section is what inspired us to do a comparative read-through in the first place; some of these changes are very revealing. First, the original:

"As the pilot of a small-medium gunship, she rarely left the interface tank that allowed her to see and feel from the ship’s sensors, and not rely solely on her biological senses. In the past several months it’d been even rarer than before the official end of the war.

The strikegroup she’d been a part of refused to accept the terms of humanity’s surrender, and had been on the run since. “Peacekeeper” forces pulled from now collaborating human governments and affini capture fleets had been on their tail for weeks. They wouldn’t have been able to last half as long if it hadn’t been for her navigator, Mara. But now she and Elvira are both trapped."

And now, the revised version:

"As the pilot of a frigate-gunship, she rarely left the interface tank that allowed her to see and feel from the ship’s sensors and not rely solely on her biological senses. In the past several months, it’d been even rarer than before the official end of the war.

When the Affini Compact, treacherous xenos that they are, somehow managed to reach and overpower the Cosmic Navy’s greatest fleets guarding Sol and Terra itself (surely only due to traitors within the military, she told herself), they quickly forced the Terran Accord’s government to sign a blatantly one-sided settlement, the Human Domestication Treaty, the greatest possible affront to Terran sovereignty in history.

Domestication, what a disgusting euphemism for making good, patriotic Terrans into little more than lap pets of some monstrous shrubbery. That it banned all forms of capitalism and “exploitation” was just adding insult to injury. The Accord wasn’t exploiting anyone! If anything, the Accord was protecting the common person from the damn unions who just wanted to leech off of people who worked for a living!

It filled Elvira with righteous fury, and had led her to spearhead the push for her ship to refuse armistice and join a Free Terran rebellion.

The Humboldt group had been on the run since. Affini capture fleets had been on their tail for months, picking off stragglers one by one. They wouldn’t have been able to last half as long if it hadn’t been for her navigator, Mara.

But now she and Elvira are both trapped."

That's pretty different!

In both versions of the passage, these are thoughts Elvira is having while sedated, being carried to bed, and under the effect of drugs that change her perception of touch. She thinks about the sensory isolation of her interface tank, her mind drifts to the time spent in her ship, and further back to remember how she got here. The original story doesn’t dwell on the past – the Terran Accord was conquered, her strike group tried to escape both the Affini and the Terran collaborators, and now both her and her crewmate Mara have been captured.

The revised passage changes some key details and brings in new ones. The Affini Compact now has so thoroughly overpowered the Cosmic Navy that Elvira assumes traitors must be responsible. The force pursuing Elvira’s strike group is now solely comprised of Affini capture fleets - either the Compact doesn't need the help, or the potential colaborators have nothing of value to offer to the search. The Collective’s fate has been upgraded from a “surrender” to a “settlement”, and instead of Elvira refusing to surrender and choosing to flee, she is now the spearhead of a rebellion refusing an armistice, making her somewhat responsible for her own suffering in the continuing conflict. The weeks of pursuit have stretched out to months, magnifying the continued stress of potential danger of her refusal to submit to the Affini.

There’s also an interesting bit of characterization right in the middle. Instead of the Terran Collective being just a stand-in for whatever Earth-run spacefaring civilization the reader may imagine, it is now explicitly an exploitative, Capitalist regime. On top of that, Elvira herself is shown to be a proud patriot – the original text had her show some human-supremacist views, but didn’t dip into the Terran nationalism this hard.

A final point to keep an eye out for is the way in which the Affini's treatment of humans has softened - it's not as prevalent here as in later chapters, but it will become a bigger theme as we proceed. For now, think about why the author adjusted the wording from "humanity's surrender" to "settlement with the Terran Accord."

The remaining changes in this chapter are mostly insignificant – some formatting, readability, or changes to pacing. Aside from pointing out when a now-standard HDG word or phrase is used, I won’t be bringing up minor changes like this in future chapters. Holo-displays in the original are swapped for tablets, “rebel ships” are adjusted to “feralist ships” in the wording of the treaty. A paragraph is added to emphasize the size and physical prowess of the Affini in comparison to our main character.

Discussion:

As discussed in Chapter 0, the part of this analysis that is interesting to me is using the changes between the old text and the new to see what was required to make this story more "canon-friendly". Some changes, like adjusting language to use more fandom-accepted terms, don't have a large impact on the work. Changes that emphasize the strength of the Affini are easy to understand - an accepted axiom of the setting that the Affini Always Win, and rewriting the backstory to make the defeat all the more crushing is in line with that idea. Making the Affini a touch gentler is a strange choice for an erohorror story - after all, this is a HORROR story, I'm not sure why there would be a need to tone down how awful things are.

To us, the most thought-provoking changes are the changes to the characterization of Elvira and the Accord.

What is the purpose of making sure the reader knows the Terran Accord was a fascist regime, specifically? Why do we need to know that Elvira is a proud patriot? Why is she no longer a refugee, and instead a rebel that pushed for her ship to refuse a ceasefire? She's just as powerless as a captive in both versions of the story - the Affini are truly holding all the cards. Why would the author go back and try to convince us that Elvira is kind of a bad person?

Does the author want us to think that, maybe, she kind of deserves this?