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[yvannairie]

So I have my materials and notes for a longer post about EM fields and I'm wondering just where I should start, what level of basic knowledge would make it the most enjoyable reading experience.

I could actually start with the science of it, but is there anyone so tech-illiterate among the TF fans who'd actually need that? Or would it just be patronising?

Comments

[yvannairie]

Yeah, lol, my agonising over this is not doing favours to my writer's block. I honestly feel like there's a whole 'nother post I could write about the methods of sociology as they apply to Cybertron, because the social theory gets way complicated when you realise that there are no true binaries anywhere, and categories like heavy vs light, labour vs management, even low-caste vs high-caste are often defined in relationship to each other, which means what the actual demographics you're talking about come down to how much you wanna anthropomorphise :'DD

I think the biggest generalisation you can make is that you can't attribute the qualities of a group to an individual, even while you can use an individual to read a group, and that values are communal rather than categorical, but these are also true for humans |D And similarly, I think I could theoretically define a set of physical qualities and be like "100% of mecha have 90% of these qualities" and have it be kinda-sorta in the ballpark of not being horribly offensive.

[autobotscoutriella]

And everybody anthropomorphizes a little bit differently, especially when you get into different continuities and the (problems with the) ways canon deals with that, and...

Yep, there's a lot of reasons it's a post I'd rather read than write :D Just having the complications laid out like that is enough to make me want to go back to fiction. It's a good topic, though. Social Theory is fascinating to me, from a distance.

[yvannairie]

Yeah! Honestly, the parts where they're not working Exactly Like Humans are the hardest, because that's where I just have to cross my fingers and pray that whatever I come up with is compelling because I guarantee I have not looked at a single external source for either the physiology post or the social psychology post, I've just been writing them in the blind hope that my fanfic pleases a fickle audience of people I don't know 8'D

At least when I'm writing fic with characters, I can always just be like "you don't have to agree with my characterisation but my reasoning stands in the text for you to see". Here I'm kinda just throwing worldbuilding together and praying.

[autobotscoutriella]

The "Alien, But Still Makes Sense To A Human Audience" parts are usually where I get tripped up with my fanfic worldbuilding. It's a PAIN to try to establish how they're different from humans but still keep them understandable. (Which is why, at the moment, the extent of my worldbuilding for one big AU is "a handful of notes on robot superpowers" and "a document of Cybertronian slang that amuses me".)