Funny / Overheaven

• Twitter exists in this timeline, under the name of Chirp, and whenever it's mentioned in lore, odds are it'll be because something ridiculous is happening on there.
  • Despite their condemnation of nearly all 21st-century technology, the government of the Emirate of Nejd has an official Chirp account, which they use for propaganda purposes. Evidently their rejection of modernity has not brought them self-awareness.
• As unpleasant as the Red-Blue War gets, it also manages to be pretty funny sometimes:
  • At one point during the war, an official CivCom social media account randomly makes a post that says nothing but "the worms are increasing." The post is soon deleted, and no context is ever provided for what it meant. Conspiracy theories about it (both serious and not) immediately spring up like weeds, and circulate for years, even after the war is over. It basically undergoes Memetic Mutation in-universe.
  • Ryzov's choice of medium to illustrate how the Red-Blue War is viewed in the popular consciousness is, of all things, a Wojak political compass meme. Not only is it hilarious, it's actually also very well-drawn and makes for a pretty good summary of the myriad players in the conflict.
  • Everything involving the Red Katipuneros is a mix of funny and weirdly heartwarming. A Red-aligned militia of "radicalized theater kids," led by musical-obsessed Cloudcuckoolander of a Rebel Leader Karen Bondoc, the RKs spend less time actually fighting against the Blue authorities in their home colony (the Filipino-descended Rizalia) and more time organizing elaborate "revolutionary" musical theater numbers. They're such a Joke Character amongst the Reds that the Blue-run government of Rizalia doesn't even bother cracking down on them, instead letting them draw prospective Reds away from more dangerous groups. UniFor generally ignores them, and most Reds scorn them as "LARPers." And yet in spite of all this, when Falco gets shot at Petra-3, it's Karen Bondoc and the RKs who spring into action, cutting off the perpetrators' escape route and thus ensuring their capture. In helping to save the peace treaty, the Red Katipuneros win over their former detractors, and they're welcomed home as heroes.
• It's something of a Running Gag for characters that need to be out of the narrative to be killed off by having them fall down the stairs to their death. Perhaps the funniest example is that of Ruhollah Khomeini, the man who in OTL led the Iranian Revolution and turned Iran into The Theocracy it is today. ITTL, he died before ever getting the chance:
  "No Revolution in 1978, Khomeini fell down the stairs in 1974 while pondering the impiety of colonizing the moon."
• A Running Gag that appears in both E!22 and E!2150 concerns Arewa, a theocratic state comprising northern Nigeria, and its preoccupation with a particular bit of Sharia law: the severing of a hand as a punishment for theft. Traditionally, this was done with a sword, but come the 21st century, international outcry has motivated the government to modernize - not by abolishing the practice, mind you. Now, it's done by a trained surgeon, they give you a cheap prosthetic (imported from Eurofed) afterwards, and you're fined according to the weight of the severed hand, going by the price per kilogram for beef in Arewa at the moment.
  • In E!2150, this is elaborated upon. Over the decades, Arewa gradually liberalizes further, first going from imported prosthetics to locally sourced 3D-printed ones, then gradually upgrading their prosthetics in accordance with advances in the technology, and finally switching to stem cell cultures in the 2040s. However, they never actually repeal the original punishment, and it stays on the books until Arewa itself, for unrelated reasons, is finally annexed back into Nigeria.
• E!22 explored the fall from grace of the House of Saud, which left them as puppet kings of Neom, but E!2150 explains what eventually became of them. Their particular brand of Islamic fundamentalism wound up acquiring an emphasized He-Man Woman Hater aspect, which, after several decades, finally reached its logical conclusion: the House of Saud removing the need for women altogether by adopting Manly Gay as the norm and perpetuating the bloodline via... creative application of modern technology. By that point, even the rest of Neom stops paying much attention to their ex-overlords.
• There's a number of funny bits in the Port Dread lore document, but perhaps the funniest is the description of the neighborhood of Sir Anthony. What is Sir Anthony known for? Maid cafes. Maid cafes that are incredibly Serious Business, to the point where the Dreadite Yakuza stay out of Sir Tony, because, as Ryzov puts it, "some of these maids are much more gangster than they are." One could be forgiven for mistaking it for an Akiba Maid War reference, were it not for the fact that a) the maid cafes are less Japanese-styled and more The Theme Park Version of old-timey England, and b) The Terror Moon was posted in December 2020, and Ryzov thus beat P. A. Works to the punch by a solid year and a half.
• In the comments to one recent post, someone asked Ryzov what Chead tastes like. The response? "Chead."
• Thanks to the way in which they went about Terraforming the place, Ganymede's atmosphere is 1.5% sulfur hexafluoride, a gas which works a bit like helium, but in the opposite direction - that is, it makes your voice sound deeper. The small proportion in the air is enough to have an effect, but not an immediately noticeable one...
  "This is why when Ganymedeans go offworld, they tend to be oddly tight-lipped, because they’re not used to their voice sounding so…squeaky."
• There's a strange sort of Black Comedy in the reason why the revolvers that the MarsCom Disciplinary Court use as gavels are now required to be fully non-functional. Once, an old judge delivered his verdict a little too firmly and accidentally caused a round from the Red-Blue War, which was still in his gun after all those years, to be fired straight into his own chest. That's not the funny part. The funny part is that he was commuting a death sentence.

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